Bass made a face and drained the last of the coffee. Apparently Ville wasstillpissed off that his help hadn’t been needed to get Bass into the Chapter.
“It’s a coffee break.” Bass upended the cup and shook the last sticky drops of liquid onto the concrete floor. “Don’t read too much into it.”
“I know what you’re like,” Ville said. “It’s the same as when we were kids. You get a good thing going, and you decide to put your foot through it. Not this time. Keep your head down and your nose clean. Shepherd will let you know when he has something for you to do.”
“One way to do things,” Bass agreed blandly.
Ville made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat and pointedly turned his back to yell at one of the other mechanics to mind what he was doing. Bass left him to it. Eventually he’d get over this too.
The two of them were friends when they were kids, dragged up in one of Plenty’s half-dead blue-collar neighborhoods. Their parents had snuck in just under the bar for the dream of self-improvement, with mortgages they’d pay off one day and plans for their kids to go to college. Their kids aspired to the gutter. In Plenty, crime had more prospects than middle management.
They fell out of touch when Bass got shipped out to a juvie in Nebraska, and there wasn’t any reason to relight the connection while Bass was in New York or Denver. But now that he was back, Bass appreciated Ville’s willingness to give him a hand up in the local scene.
He just didn’t have fifteen years to waste on slow and steady until Shepherd voted him because he’d been a prospect long enough that it got awkward. The long game was for people who had patience.
“I kind of figured there’d be more to do than suck up to Fat Boone’s family,” he said to no one in particular, although he knew Ville would listen. “Especially after what happened at the junkyard.”
Ville grabbed a welder’s mask and pulled it on over his head. “You got a problem with how Shepherd does things, you bring it up to Shepherd.”
He ignited the torch with a hiss and a shower of sparks. Bass scratched the back of his neck.
“Maybe I will,” he said as he added his cup to the pile in the sink. “Shepherd always did appreciate the straightforward approach. But you should know that better than me.”
That was the thing about old friends. It didn’t matter how many years it had been; you still knew how to pull their strings. Bass left Ville to gnaw on that and headed back to the Chevy. One last try to unlock the pistons, otherwise he was going to have to rebuild the whole engine to get Fat Boone’s aunt back on the road.
Bass kicked the breaker bar out from under the car and grabbed it to get back to work. He’d just ducked back under the hood when someone shrieked behind him. The raw panic in the noise hooked Bass by the spine and jerked him like a fish. He banged his head on the hood of the car—a starburst of surprise pain that made him squint—as he bolted upright and turned around.
One of Shepherd’s mechanics, a wiry man with thin ginger hair and a sour, hound-dog loose face, writhed on the floor. Blood smeared the ground under him and drenched his gray overalls as it poured out of what was left of his hand.
“Son of a bitch,” Ville yelped as he staggered backward. Thank fuck he had enough presence of mind to switch off the torch. The flame fluttered out and left a blue afterimage scorched over Bass’s retina where he’d looked at it. Ville shoved his helmet up. His swarthy face had that grayish tinge it always did when he panicked. “Where thefuckare his fingers?”
“On the floor,” Bass said.
He shucked the top half of his overalls as he scrambled over the shop floor to the wailing mechanic. The two severed fingers lay on the floor at the side of the car. One of them had a wart on the knuckle and the other a black bruise under the thick nail. It should have been horrifying, but they looked more like cheap horror-flick props than flesh and bone. Bass pulled an oil-stained cloth out of his pocket and picked up the loose digits. They were lighter than he expected and still warm. He thrust the cloth at one of the other mechanics, who recoiled from the bundle.
“Take it,” Bass snapped. “Get some ice from the bar, and maybe they can reattach them.”
Disgust twisted the man’s face, but he did what he was told. While he ran over to the clubhouse, Bass pulled off his shirt and wrapped it roughly around the bloody remnants of—fuck, George’s? Greg’s?—hand. He had to lift the little finger, which hung by a gory thread of skin, fat, and a shred of sinew, into place before he wrapped the cotton around it.
“What are you doing?” Ville asked. He sounded like he was about to puke.
“I’m going to take George here to the ER,” Bass said. “Because I gotta tell you, Doc’s still not taking my calls. So unless you want to try and glue George’s ass-scratching finger back on—”
Ville hesitated, mouth set in a grimace, but George tried to scramble to his feet. “It’s Grant,” he corrected in a thick, ragged voice. George had been close. “And get me to the hospital. I want my fingers back.”
Bass pulled him to his feet and wedged his shoulder under Grant’s arm. His body felt cool, almost clammy as he leaned against Bass’s shoulder. Blood had already soaked through the makeshift bandage and splattered the ground with round, red drops that grew bigger each time.
“Ville, you drive,” Bass said. “I’ll sit in back with Grant.”
The prospect of something to do made Ville look relieved. He mumbled assent and dashed into the office to grab his keys from the hook. Meanwhile Bass gripped Grant’s wrist and held it up over heart level.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “They have some good doctors at Plenty Hospital.”
Probably. Bass had only met one, but Tag had been good in bed, and Sonny’s leg hadn’t fallen off.
Bass supposed there was a chance Tag might be on duty tonight. Bass supposed it would be pretty sick to see a coworker’s chopped-off fingers as an excuse for a meet cute again, but… he hadn’t cut them off, and if Tag happened to be at the hospital too, that was hardly Bass’s fault.
The whole honeytrapping Tag to a bar so he could be threatened into a possibly illegal surgery, that was on Bass. But he was in the clear on Grant’s fingers.
