“Got ’em!” Ville finally burst out of the office, keys in hand and a tarp thrown over his shoulder. He gave the greasy-pale Grant a dubious look. “Will he be okay?”
“I fucked a doctor. It doesn’t make me one,” Bass said. He shifted Grant’s weight onto Ville’s shoulder. “Get him in the car. I’ll go see what’s keeping the fingers.”
The answer to that was that everyone in the bar had wanted a look at them before they went in the ice. Bass fished one out of Mick’s beer, tossed it with the other into the pint glass of ice like a macabre shrimp cocktail, and took it out to the car.
By the time they got to the hospital, the ice had melted and the fingers had started to look wizened. The exposed meat was pale, and the skin had started to curl back from the bone. The nurse raised her eyebrows as she lifted the pint and watched the fingers spin.
“Don’t worry,” Bass said. “They’re not mine.”
He was treated to a dry look from Nurse—based on her name tag—Beattie. “That’s a relief,” she said. “Seeing as you aren’t freckled or redheaded. Who do they—”
The answer stumbled in through the sliding doors, slung over Ville’s shoulder.
“Asked and answered,” Beattie said. She handed the glass to a passing nurse with a barked order to get it on ice. Then she called for Dr. Ennis.
The short woman in wrinkled scrubs who answered was unflappable in the face of bloody stumps, and, probably, based on her confidence that she could reattach Grant’s fingers, good at her job. Definitely not Tag, though.
It shouldn’t have mattered. The off chance that Tag would be on duty and open to apologies in the form of a hookup in the on-call room was as much a fantasy as anything they’d sexted. Bass knew that. He was cocky, not an idiot.
But as fantasies went, it was a good one. Bass was surprised at how hard it was to let it go. He helped himself to a handful of mints from the nurses’ station and watched a junkie handcuffed to a wheelchair try to convince his nurse he’d been attacked by a bear.
“Don’t worry, your… friend?” Beattie said as she came back.
Bass shrugged and tossed another mint in his mouth. “Coworker at a new job.”
“Good,” she said dryly as she picked up a chart. “I’d hate to see you off your food.”
He grinned at her and crunched the mint between his back teeth. The candy cracked into peppermint shrapnel.
“He’ll be going into surgery soon,” she said. “If you want to wait, there’s—”
“Actually,” Bass said. “I have a friend who works here, and I thought he’d be here tonight, but I can’t get him to answer his phone.”
Beattie scrawled something on the chart. “Sucks to be you.”
“Tag,” Bass said. “Taggart. He asked me to get him a quote to fix up that Mustang of his, but… I didn’t have a chance this week.”
That made Beattie roll her eyes. “Ugh, that car,” she said as she initialed another chart. “My husband got one like that when he had a midlife crisis. I told him to take it back and find a waitress instead, because divorce would be cheaper than keeping that thing on the road.”
It wasn’t hard to grin at that. She was not wrong.
“So.” Bass leaned on the counter and gave her his best smile. The one that didn’t fool anyone about him being bad news but was wicked enough they didn’t care. “Is he here tonight?”
Beattie finished with the charts and capped her pen with a sharp click. “Hopefully not. He’s on a blind date with my nephew, and if they end the night here, something has gone very wrong.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket and checked the screen. The corners of her mouth turned up in a smug little smirk. “Apparently it’s going well so far, so I doubt we’ll see Tag before his shift tomorrow. But if you want to leave the quote here, I can pass it on.”
The mint wasn’t strong enough to mask the sudden sour taste in the back of Bass’s throat, but he ignored it.
“Don’t bother,” Bass said. He pushed himself off the station with a shrug. “I want to talk him through it so he gets how much work that thing needs. I’ll catch him again.”
“Start with whatever is wrong with the exhaust,” Beattie suggested. She stepped out from behind the station, her rubber soles loud on the floor. “You did a good job today with those fingers. With any luck you’ll have saved Mr. Molloy the use of his hand.”
At least, Bass supposed, someone would get some good news today. He stepped away from the station at the same time Beattie did, and they nearly tripped each other up.
“Sorry,” she said.
“My fault,” Bass said as he tucked her phone into the back of his jeans. “Don’t know where my own feet are.”
