Chapter 23
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Hugo
The doorbell chime on Tuesday afternoon has me bolting off the couch more quickly than I probably should, but I don’t care.
It could be a delivery driver. It could be Mormon missionaries.
It could be someone here to repossess my car.
I’m so fucking bored after days of no screens, no reading, and no appointments that I’ll carry on a conversation with a fire hydrant.
No work and no play make Hugo an even duller boy.
I’m already in my khakis and cardigan, desperate to feel something approaching normal, so all I need to do is grab my new replacement glasses to complete my costume.
But they’re not necessary; my front door cam shows Quinn on my porch in a floor-length granny square afghan coat, holding a mason jar.
“This is a surprise,” I say as I open the door and toss my glasses back onto the entry table.
Understatement. I can count on one hand the number of times my oldest friend in the world has shown up at my house without a set schedule involving a major holiday.
“Just making sure Pell’s doctor didn’t kill you.” Even in her oxblood high-top Doc Martens, she has to crane her neck to study my face. “Pupils look good. Bruising looks like shit. That’s stew.”
It’s maybe the warmest greeting I’ve ever gotten from her, although it takes me a beat to realize that last bit is referring to whatever’s in the jar she’s just handed me and not my injury.
“Nice to see you too.” I step back. “Come on in.”
She follows me inside, her boots clomping over my hardwood, and takes over once we’re in the kitchen, pointing me toward the stools at my kitchen island.
Quinn’s the most outdoor-cat person I’ve ever met, needing space and independence, demanding everyone approach her on her own terms, and scratching the shit out of anybody who tries to break those rules.
Maybe it’s the head wound, but the fact that she’s here at all is making me emotional.
She slings her colorful coat aside and gets to work locating what she needs.
After she’s poured the contents of her jar into a pot on the stove and given it a stir to get things heating, she turns back to me, sets her hands on her sturdy hips, and looks me up and down.
“Any headache today?”
“Not too bad,” I reply. “And I don’t need the nausea meds anymore.”
She wrinkles her nose. “I don’t want to know what kind of swamp-folk medicine you got from someone Pell recommended.”
I raise my brow, then wince at the pain it sends through my still-healing face. “Dr. Khan went to Harvard, thank you very much. She just has some gambling debts she’s working off by moonlighting for your nemesis.”
“Pell wishes he was my nemesis.” She tosses her head in agitation, and her thick, straight hair swirls around her face before obediently falling back in line at the base of her neck. Fifteen years. Same haircut. It’s both comforting and a little scary.
I texted Quinn after dragging myself home on Thursday.
Only afterward did I piece together the sequence of events that followed: she reluctantly reached out to Pell, who probably annoyed the shit out of her while he arranged for a doctor to come check on me without involving a paper trail or law enforcement.
“And?” she asks testily without turning around.
“And she showed up on Thursday, ran a bunch of tests I barely remember, and left me with meds and written instructions.”
“Then vanished into the night, no doubt,” Quinn grumbles as she puts down the spoon and picks up the folded sheet of paper on the island. Her brows lift when she sees the list of pupillometer readings in feminine script, but she doesn’t ask.
“Vanishing into the night is the general MO for doctors doing illicit house calls for the scariest guy we know.” I shrug. “She came back on Saturday to check on me. Called me her star patient. I even got a lollipop.”
Quinn turns to face me, her expression even stonier than usual. “Did you tell her anything incriminating while you were out of it?”
“No.” Probably not, anyway. I don’t completely remember. “But even if I did, it’ll stay with Dr. Khan until she dies.”
“And if it doesn’t?”
“Then Pell will feed her to his pet alligator.”
She snorts. “That man doesn’t have a pet alligator. He’s not responsible enough.”
“Yes, Pell not remembering to walk and feed his pet gator is what makes that rumor unreliable,” I say. “Anyway, Dr. Khan kept me alive, and I’m grateful. What do I owe you?”
She’s turned back to the stove and is stirring the stew with such vigor that I know she’s feeling an emotion she doesn’t want me to see.
Since she lets me witness her disdain for Pell on a regular basis, my guess is she’s relieved I’m okay, annoyed about that level of relief, and working overtime to snuff out both of those sentiments.
Sure enough, when she turns around, her face is as round, pale, and serious as ever.
“Nothing,” she says. “Call it an early birthday gift.”
My birthday was in March, but I don’t remind her of that. Instead, I say, “You’re the best friend I have. You know that, right?”
This earns me an eye roll. Quinn Brady must have the strongest ocular muscles known to man.
“The roses still look great.” It’s a blatant attempt to change the subject, but I relish the compliment anyway, especially when a smile touches her usually severe lips as she takes in the blooms visible through the kitchen window.
“Yep.” I nod, partly to show her that I can do that and keep my head on my neck. “It’s amazing what good rain and a little sunlight can do.”
Her lips twitch into a smirk. “Yes. Rain, sunlight, and our felonious bone meal. The unsung heroes of out-of-season roses.” Then she turns and starts ransacking my drawers.
“How’s your semester wrapping up?” I ask over the racket.
“You need to reorganize.” She brandishes the ladle she was looking for. “This is incredibly inefficient.”
The words be my guest are on the tip of my tongue when I realize she’d enjoy transforming my already orderly kitchen way too much.
The chemistry lab she oversees as part of a research grant at her university is organized to a psychotic degree, and I’m scared if I give her an inch, she’ll bust out the label maker.
“I’ve never had any complaints,” I say instead.
This pulls an almost-smile from her. “Complaints from whom, hermit?”
She grabs two bowls, fills them, and slides one across the island to me like an old-timey bartender, sending a spoon gliding over the granite top right after it.
Apparently she’s forgotten that a concussion patient’s reflexes can be a little slow because I barely stop the bowl from sliding off the edge, and I miss the spoon entirely.
It clatters to the floor, and she wordlessly plucks another one out of the drawer and walks around the island to set it carefully next to me.
“Please tell me you don’t have any murders planned for anytime soon,” she says as she retrieves the floor spoon.
I flash her my gooniest Dr. Mohr grin when she straightens. “Aww, you really do love me. Quinn and Hugo sitting in a tree, S-T-A-B-I-N-G.”
She huffs. “You can’t spell.”
“I was respecting the poetic meter.”
“Respect the food, please. It’s Grandma Erzsébet’s chicken paprikash stew. Improved, obviously.”
That’s Quinn-speak for, Yes, my dear friend, I would be devastated if you were killed in pursuit of our shared hobby.
Please eat this food I prepared with my own hands, as it is the only way I know how to show love.
I dip my spoon into the bowl, raise the first bite to my lips, and nearly slide off my stool in ecstasy. It’s the best thing I’ve eaten in days.
“This is going to cure the rest of me,” I tell her around another mouthful. “I can feel my synapses reweaving.”
She actually chuckles as she scoops up a spoonful from her bowl and nods in satisfaction. “Good batch. I adjusted the fat ratio and optimized the paprika bloom.” She extracts a little leather notebook from a pocket in her colorful skirt and starts to scrawl. “This one’s a keeper.”
Quinn once let me peek at her recipe file, and what I saw chilled me to the bone.
The scratches and scrawls in her indecipherable handwriting on those yellowed, torn, grease-stained pages could pass for a mass murderer’s manifesto instead of a recipe for Dobos torte, which she’s been trying to master for fifteen years.
The only sign of my otherwise hyper-organized best friend is in the back, where every attempt at the goddamn torte is numbered, dated, and logged in tiny, precise handwriting I barely recognize as hers. Each one is marked “failure.”
“My semester is fine,” she says, picking up the question I asked several minutes ago. “My dean remains a hideous human, but not hideous enough to kill.”
“Unfortunate.”
“Very,” she agrees. “My students are either brilliant, lazy, or absent, and I despair of all of them. All but two of my colleagues are hopeless dolts, and the instant I get tenure, I’m going to tell every last one of them exactly what I think and liquefy the insides of anyone who has a problem with it. ”
This diatribe should be jarring coming from a short, round, freckle-faced woman wearing a 1968 Mexico City Olympics T-shirt and a floaty patchwork skirt, but it’s those contradictions that drew me to her in the first place.
I’d cheerfully murder everyone in her department if she needed me to—not that she’d ever admit to needing anyone.
When my phone lights up with an incoming call from the West Side Women’s Shelter, I give Quinn the one-minute finger as I scoop it up. But the conversation’s even shorter than that, and I growl as I end the call.
“Trouble?”
“No.” I sigh. “Yes. The woman married to the guy who did this to me”—I point at my head—“left the shelter last night. No word to anyone, no contact information, nothing.”
“And?” Quinn asks.
“And,” I say patiently, “I talked to the police this morning about the incident with her husband—”
“Incident,” Quinn snorts.