Chapter 6 - The Needle and the Steel
By 4:30 a.m., the back office of the dry-dock shed had been transformed into an underground trauma clinic.
A cast-iron stove roared in the corner, radiating dry, blistering heat that finally drove the deep, damp chill from our bones. The room smelled of hot kerosene, gun oil, and the sterile sting of iodine.
Owen sat on a reinforced wooden workbench, stripped to the waist. His ribs showed prominent beneath his pale skin, but his posture was straightening by the hour, his spine finding its old, unyielding alignment.
I stood beside him, using a veterinary suture kit and sterile saline from Silas’s emergency cabinet to clean the torn IV sites on his forearms and administer a concentrated intramuscular dose of thiamine and B-complex vitamins to stabilize his nervous system.
"You have good hands, Nora," Silas remarked from the corner, where he was methodically disassembling three Colt .45 automatics across an oily rag. "Soft, but they don't jump when the blood comes."
"She's an emergency nurse, Silas," Owen said, wincing slightly as my needle passed through his skin. "Not a society girl. She works the night shift at St. Anne's."
"A saint, then," the old man chuckled, sliding a loaded magazine into a pistol with a sharp clack. "Because you're going to need an army of saints before noon, Owen. Julian called a full council of the five families for ten o'clock this morning at the Harvard Club."
Owen’s head snapped up. "The Harvard Club? That's neutral ground."
"Not anymore," Silas spat, wiping grease from his thumb. "Julian claims he has an uncontested medical conservatorship signed by the surrogate judge, declaring you permanently incapacitated. He's transferring forty percent of the Red Hook maritime leases to the Moretti family to pay off his gambling debts in Atlantic City. Once the signatures are dry on those deeds, the Hartley name doesn't mean a bag of salt in this harbor."
Owen looked down at his hands—his fingers curling into tight, white-knuckled fists, testing the return of his grip strength.
"He's giving away our grandfather's berths," Owen whispered, his voice dropping into that dark, lethal register that made the hair on my arms stand up. "To the Morettis."
"He doesn't have the stomach for the docks, Owen," Silas said, setting two loaded pistols on the workbench beside the bandages. "He wants the cash so he can run to Palm Beach before the federal grand jury unseals the tax fraud indictments."
Owen looked up at me. His gray eyes were intense, searching, holding me captive in the dim light of the lantern.
"Nora," he said softly.
"Yes?"
"You saved my life twice tonight," he murmured, his hand reaching out to touch my fingers where they rested on the suture tray. His touch was warm now, alive, sending an electric shock straight through my chest. "You have no business in this room. You have no business in this war. Silas has twenty thousand dollars in cash in the floor safe. Take the keys to the truck, take the money, and get on a train to Chicago before the sun comes up."
I stared down at him.
I thought of my tiny, roach-infested apartment in Queens. I thought of the twenty-eight dollars an hour, the double shifts, the hospital administrators who looked through me like I was made of glass, and the arrogant doctor who had spent two years poisoning a helpless man while the world looked away.
Then I looked at the two Colt automatics lying on the table, and at the man who had held my wrist in the dark and asked me not to leave him.
"I have three shifts left on my schedule this week, Mr. Hartley," I said, tying off the final suture with a sharp, decisive tug. "And I don't abandon my patients before their treatment is finished."
May you like
Silas let out a booming, gravelly laugh that rattled the coffee mugs on the stove.
"I like her, Owen," the old armorer grinned, sliding a leather shoulder holster across the table toward me. "Keep her. She’s cheaper than bodyguards and she hits harder than Julian’s lawyers."
