The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(40)

“Your lucky day,” I told the mercenary. “Your boss likes you after all. Eric, get this guy walking and cover him.”

Eric pointed to the zombies sitting in the cell, watching us with listless, blank eyes.

“What about the others?” he said.

“They can wait for the FBI to show up,” I said. “Until the drugs wear off, they’re safer here than they would be out on the streets, wandering into traffic.”

I helped Leroy all the way to the front door. That was where I left them. I ran for my car in a dead sprint. By the time I reached the lot, my shirt was soaked through with sweat and my throat burned like I’d gotten a second dose of tear gas, but I didn’t have time to catch my breath. The Barracuda’s chassis jolted as I swung into the office park and over a curb, tires squealing to a stop outside the New Life building. We hustled Leroy into the backseat, making him as comfortable as we could. Eric got in beside him, keeping his rifle trained on the mercenary in the passenger seat.

We went four blocks before I stomped on the brakes again. The car squealed to a stop outside a run-down gas station.

“Out,” I said.

The merc stared at me blankly.

“Eric,” I said, “if he doesn’t get out of this car in the next five seconds, shoot him in the head, and I’ll kick his body to the curb.”

That got him moving. The second the door shut we took off again, leaving him in our dust.

“This isn’t the way to the hospital,” Eric said. “Take a left up here, it’s faster.”

“We’re not going to the hospital,” I told him.

Hospitals were messy. Hospitals meant questions. If you showed up in the ER with a bullet wound, they were legally obligated to call the cops. Leroy’s story led back to a hallway filled with corpses, and that wasn’t weight he needed to carry. Even if the cops called it self-defense, that’d be enough to put his and Eric’s names on Angus Caine’s hit list right next to mine.

I leaned over and grabbed my phone out of the glove compartment, driving with one eye on the road while I pulled up the entry labeled Doc on my contact list.

“It’s Faust,” I said. “You working today? Good. Got one patient, coming in hot. Gunshot, and he’s lost a lot of blood. No, I think it came out the other side. All right. Yeah, I’m vouching for him and a guest. Seven minutes.”

“Who was that?” Eric asked as I hung up the phone.

“My family physician,” I said.

We rumbled into the parking lot of the Rosewood Funeral Home. It sat on a lonely corner in East Vegas across the street from a boarded-up strip mall and right next door to a lonely discount furniture outlet that had been advertising the same “two days only, everything must go” sale since 1998. Doc Savoy appeared in the front door, mopping sweat from his dusky liver-spotted scalp, and waved for me to drive around back. He wore an old pair of wire-framed glasses and a faded linen butcher’s smock. All ready for surgery.

I pulled the Barracuda around the building, parking behind the shelter of a vinyl fence, and the old man came jogging out to meet us. He fiddled with his glasses and squinted at Leroy as we helped him out of the backseat.

“Oh, that’s not good, that’s not good at all,” the doc rasped. I didn’t pay it any mind—he’d say the same thing if you came in with a broken fingernail. He ushered us through the service entrance and into the morgue. The steel embalming table glowed under hot lights, all hosed down and ready for the patient.

“Go and scrub up,” he said, pointing Eric and me toward the big steel sink next to a row of refrigeration lockers. “Marjoline’s out getting her hair done, so you two are honorary nurses today. You’re all puffy looking. What’d you get into?”

“Tear gas,” I said.

“Cold water, then. Faces and hands, cold as you can stand it. Hot water’ll just bring the sting back.” He looked to Leroy. “Do you know your blood type, son?”

Leroy winced as Doc Savoy helped him onto the table. “Type B? I think.”

“That’s just fine, then. Don’t you worry about a thing. We’ll fix you up right as rain.”

Doc Savoy was good people, and just like Jennifer, he was one of the dozens of little reasons I hadn’t thrown Nicky Agnelli under the federal bus. He wasn’t one of Nicky’s guys, not exactly, but every serious heister and professional villain in town had his number on their speed dial. Like most of his patients, he’d go down in Nicky’s wake.

He’d been running his off-the-books fix-up service for longer than most of his clients had been alive. Rumor said that he was old-school Vegas, that he’d cut his teeth with the last of the original mobsters before the feds and the corporations ran them out of town. He had the old-school values down, anyway: he did his job, he did it well, and he’d take a twenty-year stretch before he’d ever whisper a client’s name in a cop’s ear.

That said, the closest he’d ever come to a medical degree was a bachelor’s in veterinary science, but I figured he’d had so much practice over the years that he was basically as good as the real thing.

He pumped Leroy full of enough morphine to knock out an elephant while I used a pair of shears to cut away his shirt around the wound. The fabric was stiff with dried blood, and Leroy’s skin clung to it as I gently peeled it back. Clotted black blood rimmed the bullet hole, and it quivered when he breathed, spitting out a sad scarlet trickle that rolled down his hip. Doc Savoy had Eric hold a steel water bowl and put me on instrument duty. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeves and got to work.