Chapter 2
BONES
Since the door opened, I've splinted fingers, drained one abscess, and stitched a man's scalp back to his head.
I will never say this to Angel but I'm having fun.
This reminds me of younger days when my job was to patch up people and not jump through administrative hoops to get more credits or nurses to my service.
I'm being unfair to the Smith-Wolfe Foundation. The wing they built for the veterans runs with state-of-the-art equipment and a magnificent staff. Still, running a service means I have to climb out of a shit ton of paperwork before I can go play in the operating room.
Here, everything is simpler. People come in, they get patched by a nurse or a doctor no questions asked. But helping those people is not the real reason why I'm here. I'm here for Riley Bennett.
Of all the people who work at the Wellness Center in Brightmoor, she's our best bet.
According to the goons we caught last week, this girl took care of Darling before they shipped her out.
Angel said I needed to flip her and turn her into a source.
You can take a man out of military intelligence but you can't change the way he looks at the world.
Around nine, just as I'm done with a patient, a side door bangs open with a hip, and she comes through it carrying three boxes stacked to her chin.
Something in me comes to attention. I tell it to stand down.
She gets the boxes onto the counter and blows a piece of hair off her face.
Brown hair coming loose from an elastic.
She hasn't slept at all or not enough. She hasn't eaten properly either in a while.
The tell? The shadows under the eyes and the skin tight across the cheekbones.
Her scrubs that must have been washed a hundred times tell me she's struggling.
And she's here anyway, shortly after we open, with her arms full of boxes she carried in herself.
She's pretty. Not the polished kind that knows it.
But pretty isn't what snags on me. It's that she's worn down to the wire and still showing up.
No one should be that tired at twenty-one.
Yeah, Angel told me her age too.
I'm thirty-seven and came here for information but my body has decided the information can wait. It's annoying. I do not have time to be annoyed.
"Door's open," I say. "You didn't have to break in."
She startles, then squares up fast, boxes between us like a counter will save her. "Who are you?"
"Volunteer. Monday mornings." I tip my head at the trays. I'm about to say more when I'm called up front again to set a fractured wrist for a roofer who can't afford to stop roofing.
Half an hour later, I watch her kneel in front of an old man who's waved off every nurse who came near his shoes, and coax him into letting her untie the laces herself. She talks to him the whole time, low, like the shoes are the least interesting thing about him.
The noise drops out of me.
It's the thing that happens in the trauma bay when the room is screaming and I find the one bleed that matters. Angel's instructions, the reason I drove out here, gone. There's only her on the floor, getting a stubborn old man to hand over his bare feet.
And one word lands where it has no business being.
Mine.
I'm a grown man who knows better than to trust the first thing his chest does. I don't move.
When she's done with his socks, I look at a diabetic foot that should've been taken care of months ago. He's a vet. Marine. I clock it in the tattoo and the way he sits. I take the time and he leaves with a real plan and a follow-up program that won't cost him.
She looks at me like she's revising something.
"What," I say.
"Nothing." She turns back to her boxes. "You're just not what I expected."
An hour later, I go to the supply room for a wound kit and find her in there on her knees, unpacking.
She's filling the half-bare shelves with what she's pulling out of the cardboard boxes she arrived with. Gauze, saline, suture packs. It's good stuff, the kind this place can't afford. She's quick about it, shelving with both hands, and she doesn't hear me until I'm right behind her.
I pick up a kit off the top of her stack and pull my glasses down out of my hair to read the label and the inscription stamped across the front in block letters:
brIGHTMOOR WELLNESS INSTITUTE.
"What's this?"
She's up off the floor in one motion, planted between me and the boxes. "Why?"
"Curious." I turn the kit so the label faces her. "Brightmoor doesn't strike me as a place that donates."
"They throw it out." Color comes up her neck. Not shame, though. I've sat across enough liars to know shame from temper, and this is temper.
"They throw out sealed kits?"
"They throw out everything." It comes fast now, like she's argued it in her head a hundred times and finally gets to say it out loud.
"Unopened. Expiration's one week off or the box got squished.
It goes in the dumpster. Pallets of it. And these people…
" She throws her hand in the air toward the waiting room.
"They'll reuse needles if you let them. So yeah.
I fish all this shit out before they throw it in the dumpster and I bring it here. "
I look at her and frown.
"I'm not a thief," she protests. "I'm reallocating resources."
It's so spontaneous, I have a hard time not to smile. Most people who lift supplies make up excuses. She doesn't apologize.
"You're a regular Robin Hood," I say, setting the kit down. "A real bandit."
"Don't call me that!"
"Why not?"
"Because I have a name."
"I'm sure you do," I say, taking the wound kit I actually came for. "But Bandit fits."
"It doesn't."
"If you say so, Bandit."
"It's Riley." She crosses her arms. "And you can stop looking at me like that."
I laugh and leave her there, because no matter how much I want to keep talking, I have a patient waiting for me.
At the end of my shift, I run into her as I'm walking out the door.
"See you next Monday, Bandit."
She turns in the doorway and points a finger at me like a teacher. "Do not."
"Drive safe."
"I take the bus."
Of course she does. Her wages don't buy anyone a ride.
The door swings shut behind me and as I start my bike it hits me.
I'm leaving with a problem.
The problem is twenty-one years old, takes the bus, goes dumpster diving to keep strangers alive, and has no idea the men she just got tangled up with don't let go of what they decide is theirs.
She also has no idea I just decided.
Monday can't come fast enough. And that, right there, is another problem.