“Now,” he said as he braced both hands against Sonny’s thigh. The skin felt hot under his fingers again.
Bass gave the screwdriver a sharp yank, and it slid wetly out of Sonny’s leg. Fresh dark blood welled like syrup out of the hole. Tag took a second to rub the back of his wrist over his eyebrow, the sharp, metallic scent of blood thick on his fingers, and then he grabbed the bottle of iodine he’d saved to rinse the wound with.
With luck it wouldn’t get infected.
“I need to reiterate this,” Tag said as traded his scalpel for a needle and surgical thread. His hands were still steady, and he made neat little stitches in black rows that his old teachers couldn’t have taken issue with. “He needs to go to the hospital. I’ve done my best, but this is a serious trauma. He’s lost a lot of blood, and there’s a significant chance of infection. He needs supervision, rehab, antibiotics, and painkillers—”
Sonny’s head lolled to the side, his parted mouth dry and the sliver of eye visible under his lids wet and shiny. His breathing was unsteady, but it was hard to tell if that was from the surgery or the depressive influence of liquor.
“You need to shut up and get on with patching Sonny up,” Shepherd said. He picked up a shot glass of whiskey and smiled thinly at Tag from behind it. “I bet you’ll do the best job of your life, Doc. Because if this doesn’t go well for Sonny, it won’t go well for you.”
Tag grimaced. “I’m not saying threats aren’t effective,” he said without looking up from his work. “But a top-of-the-line surgical suite, staplers, and an anesthesiologist would make for a better job.”
He used Kessler stitches on the muscle, black lines against the dense fibers, and sopped up the blood when it got in his way. Sweat itched on the side of his face, and he paused to wipe it on his shoulder before he started to pull the skin back together over the raw meat of Sonny’s leg.
It was a mess. Even if it healed well, Sonny was going to end up with a nasty scar, and the situation still offended Tag on a professional level. He’d tear apart a resident who did work like this, not that anyone who would pass judgment was going to see this… hopefully.
He tied off the last stitch and straightened up. The small of his back ached dully with the movement, and his neck popped like knuckles as he craned his head from one side to the other. He grabbed the whiskey and soaked a gauze pad to wipe most of the blood off Sonny’s leg. His hand started to shake midwipe as the habitual steadiness of surgery was no longer needed.
“He’ll need to change the dressing regularly and clean the wound each time,” Tag said. “The stitches will dissolve on their own, but if he sees any swelling, redness, or the pain gets worse, he needs to go to a hospital. Toss him in a car and head down to a clinic over the border if you have to, but I mean it. If he gets an infection, he could lose his leg, and that’s the best-case scenario. He could lose mobility, his eyesight. The infection could spread to his—”
“What do you care, Doc?” one of the bikers, the one with the weak stomach and Van Dyke beard, said with a sneer. “You ain’t doing this out of the goodness of your heart.”
Bass gave him a shove. “Shut up, Ville.” He got a snarl and a shove back, a stiff-armed blow to the shoulder that made him stagger. The quick, vicious look Bass gave the other man caught Tag off guard.
“I’ve killed people,” Tag admitted. “I didn’t work fast enough, I missed something, things just didn’t come together in time. They’re all on me. If Sonny dies, it won’t be because of anything I did or because I didn’t give you all the information you needed to keep him alive.”
He stripped the bloody gloves off his hands and balled them up to toss them on the table with the rest of the bloody refuse from the operation. Then he grabbed the whiskey and took a slug straight from the bottle.
It was cheap whiskey in a good bottle, harsh smoke and turpentine notes that made his sinuses sting. But the burn of it—the “two more of me and we won’t care” reassurance—as it caught on the back of his throat and ran down into his stomach was just right. Tag wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and looked at Shepherd.
“I’ve done what I can for him,” he said harshly. Then he took another swig since a DUI seemed like the least of his worries tonight. “Can I go? Or not.”
“You can go,” Bass said in a quiet, edged voice. He gave Shepherd a hard look. “Can’t he?”
