"Lucky," I murmured, more to myself than to them.
Boris groaned through the dish towel they'd stuffed in his mouth. No anesthesia except the vodka they'd poured down his throat before arriving. I'd offered lidocaine, but they couldn't afford it. The $800 they'd scraped together covered the surgery, antibiotics, and enough tramadol to get him through the next few days. Everything else was a luxury.
My hands moved on autopilot—muscle memory from a thousand procedures in proper operating rooms with proper equipment. Debride the wound. Check for arterial damage. Begin suturing the muscle layer with 3-0 absorbable sutures that Frank had lifted from Brooklyn College's teaching supplies. Each stitch precise, measured, the spacing exactly four millimeters apart because that's how Dr. Morrison had taught me during my residency. Back when I had a residency, back when I was someone who mattered.
The needle slipped once when the flashlight shifted again, and I had to pause, breathe, recalibrate. In the OR, I'd had overhead surgical lights that turned night into noon. Here, I worked like a seamstress in a power outage, squinting through shadows and the steam of our collective breathing in the November cold.
"How much longer?" the younger friend asked. A kid, maybe nineteen, with the kind of nervous energy that came from being new to violence.
"Twenty minutes for the internal sutures. Ten more for the external. Then antibiotics and bandaging."
"He's going to be okay though, right?"
I didn't look up from my work. "If he keeps the wound clean, takes all the antibiotics, and doesn't do anything stupid for the next two weeks, yes."
The kid relaxed slightly. The older one just grunted. He'd been through this before—you could tell by the way he held Boris down without flinching, the way he didn't ask questions he didn't want answers to.
I finished the muscle layer and started on the subcutaneous tissue. My back ached from hunching over the table, and my eyes burned from the poor lighting, but my hands stayed steady. They always stayed steady. It was the only part of me I still trusted.
Forty-three minutes after I'd started, Boris had a neat line of sutures holding him together, covered by surgical tape and gauze I'd wrapped tight enough to provide compression but not so tight it would restrict blood flow. I loaded a syringe with antibiotics—ceftriaxone, broad spectrum, should handle most of what might try to take hold in that wound.
"Intramuscular injection," I said, pushing the needle into his deltoid. Boris barely flinched. After what he'd just been through, a shot was nothing. "He needs to take these pills twice a day for seven days." I handed them a bottle of amoxicillin. "All of them. Even if he feels better. If he stops early, the infection could come back resistant."
The older friend nodded, pocketing the pills. The younger one pulled out a roll of bills, started counting out hundreds. Eight of them, crisp and new like they'd just come from an ATM. Then he added another hundred, sliding it across the table toward me.
"Extra," he said. "You need anything, Doc, you call us. We look out for people who look out for us."
I stared at him with eyes that felt like they belonged to someone else—someone who'd died six months ago in an interrogation room while Dr. Richard Brand explained how trustwas just another word for leverage, how caring was just another word for weakness.
"I don't need looking after." I pushed the extra hundred back across the table. "I need payment for services rendered. That's all."
The kid's face fell, that eager puppy look crumbling into confusion. He wanted to argue, I could see it in the way his mouth opened and closed, but the older one put a hand on his shoulder.
"Come on," he said. "We need to get him home."
They lifted Boris between them, careful not to jostle the wound. He was conscious enough to walk, sort of, his feet dragging as they guided him toward the door. The kid looked back at me once, like he wanted to say something else, but I'd already turned away, stripping off my gloves and dropping them into the biohazard bag.
The door clicked shut behind them. Three locks engaged—deadbolt, chain, security bar. The sound echoed in the sudden silence.
Thesmellofbleachburned my sinuses as I scrubbed Boris's blood from the table, but I welcomed it. Clean meant safe. Clean meant no evidence. Clean meant another night when I might not end up in a jail cell.
I worked systematically, the way I'd been taught in surgical rotation—start at the point of contamination and work outward in expanding circles. The industrial-strength disinfectant I'd stolen from a hospital loading dock could kill everything from MRSA to HIV. It could probably kill me too, if I breathed it in long enough, but that was a problem for future Maya. Current Maya had bigger concerns.
Every surface Boris or his friends had touched got the treatment. The table, the floor where they'd stood, the doorknob, the wall where the younger one had leaned while watching. I even wiped down the ceiling where blood might have splattered during the initial irrigation. Paranoid? Maybe. But paranoia kept me alive and in business.
The bloody gauze, used gloves, and empty medication vials went into a black garbage bag—the thick kind, contractor grade. I'd learned the hard way that thin bags leaked, left trails, told stories. This bag would go in my backpack, and tomorrow I'd distribute its contents across three different dumpsters in three different neighborhoods. Never the same pattern twice. Never close to where I lived.
I carried the paper towels outside to the metal drum behind the building. The alley reeked of piss and rotting garbage, but at least it was empty. The harsh wind cut through my scrubs like they were made of paper. I dumped the towels in the drum, added lighter fluid, and dropped a match. The flame caught instantly, eating through the evidence of tonight's work.
While it burned, I scanned the alley. North exit clear. South exit had a homeless man sleeping against a dumpster, but he'd been there for three days—not a threat, just background. The fire escape on the building across from mine was empty. No faces in windows. No cars idling with their engines running.
Back inside, I went through my security ritual. First lock—deadbolt, solid, would take them maybe thirty seconds with the right tools. Second lock—chain, mostly psychological, would snap with one good kick. Third—security bar wedged under the doorknob, the only one that might actually slow someone down.
I peered through the gap in the boarded-up window. Brighton 6th Street was its usual disaster—broken streetlight, overflow from the corner bodega's dumpster, a cat investigating something dead in the gutter. No one watching. No one waiting.
The cash came next. I spread the bills on the table, smoothing each one flat. Eight hundred from Boris. Plus the five hundred from yesterday's suburban kid who'd needed his stomach pumped after trying to impress his dealer by swallowing a bag of pills. Plus the thousand from last week that I hadn't deposited yet because banks meant cameras and cameras meant facial recognition and facial recognition meant dead or prison.
Two thousand three hundred and forty dollars. Enough for next week's bribe to Mr. Carlotti—not his real name either—who owned this condemned building and pretended not to notice I'd turned his basement into a clinic. He was probably in deep with the mafia. The cash was enough for the burner phone. Enough for food, if you could call protein bars and instant ramen food.
