Page 20 of Outsider

Rising, I step away to give Joe better light and room to work. I watch as he swabs the entire shoulder, front and back, with a sterile gauze saturated with the Betadine solution. He uses a fresh gauze to pat it dry. Once the area is clean, the full impact of the wound looms large.

“Are you able to remove the slug?” I ask.

“There is no slug,” he tells me. “The bullet passed through.” The Amish man indicates the hole I noticed initially. “It entered here. Exited in the back.”

I hadn’t noticed the second wound. Craning my neck, I spot the quarter-size, slightly jagged cavity on the back side of her shoulder. “The bullet passed through cleanly,” I say. “That’s good, right?”

“Passed through, yes.” He makes a sound with his tongue. “Cleanly … probably not. You see, the bullet picks up bits of clothing and other debris as it enters, and forces it into the wound.”

“She’ll need antibiotics?” I ask.

“And I’ll need to flush the wound,” he tells me.

“I’d appreciate it if you two would stop talking about me as if I’m not here,” Gina grumbles.

Joe reaches into his bag and produces a sealed sandwich baggie filled with a couple of dozen large oval-shaped pills. “One tablet every twelve hours until they’re gone.”

“They look like horse pills,” Gina says.

“They are,” Joe says. “But they are good for people, too, I think. Eight hundred milligrams of sulfamethoxazole and trimethoprim.”

I take the bag and set it on the sewing table.

“I need to flush the wound now.” He looks at Gina and frowns. “Going to hurt, probably.”

“Of course it is,” she mutters.

“I’ll make it quick.” He picks up the syringe. “The good news is that the bullet didn’t hit bone or the joint. You are very lucky.”

Paper rattles as he unwraps the syringe and attaches a length of clear irrigation tubing to the needle hub.

Gina eyes the device with suspicion. “Please tell me you’re not going to stick that thing in my shoulder.”

“I’m going to fill the syringe with sterile saline solution, insert the irrigation tube into the wound, and flush away any foreign particles.”

“For God’s sake.” Raising her uninjured arm, she lowers her head and presses her fingers against the bridge of her nose.

“That same God was watching over you when this happened,” Joe says as he eases the plunger from the syringe, filling the barrel with the clear solution. He looks at me. “I think she’d be wise to remember that.”

I’ve got to hand it to Gina; she handles the procedure well. Over the next half hour, Joe flushes both wounds, front and back. It’s a messy, painful procedure. He then stitches the larger exit wound, leaving a drain tube in place. Finally, both wounds are bandaged. Throughout, Gina doesn’t utter a sound. Her expression remains impassive. If it weren’t for the sheen of sweat on her forehead, the damp hair at the back of her neck, I wouldn’t have been able to tell she was in pain. By the time Joe fashions the makeshift sling for her, she’s begun to shiver.

“Any special instructions?” I ask.

“Start those antibiotics now. Stay warm. Get some extra sleep. Drink a lot of water.”

“Drink a lot of something,” she says on a sigh.

I go to Gina and help her ease the turtleneck over her shoulder. “You did good,” I say.

Shrugging, the Amish man tilts his head to make eye contact with Gina and smiles. “She was nearly as good a patient as that horse.”

CHAPTER 6

They met in the parking lot of the diner in Franklinton. The food was an atrocity for the most part, made edible only by the concentration of fat and a generous amount of salt. The clientele was dodgy—par for the course in this part of Columbus—but mostly kept to themselves. The owner, a Ukrainian guy who had several aliases and could never quite explain where he came from or how long he’d been here, appreciated it when the cops came by for lunch or dinner or stopped in for coffee. Their presence, he said, kept the riffraff away. The waitresses felt safer walking to their cars or the bus stop at closing time. The sight of a city-issue Crown Vic with all the trimmings warded off even the most determined homeless who liked to sleep out by the dumpster at the back of the building. According to the owner’s wife, Mila, thanks to Columbus’s finest, the place hadn’t been robbed for going on two years now.

Damon Bertrand had been coming to this little hole in the wall the entirety of his career, which would span thirty years this month. During that time, the ownership of the diner had changed hands eight times. The name had changed at least six times. Once, the place had closed for two weeks without explanation and without so much as a sign on the door. In the course of a welfare check, the police discovered the owner’s body in the kitchen. He’d hanged himself with an electrical cord attached to the deep fryer.

Despite the seediness of the neighborhood and the dubious nature of the establishment and its patrons—or maybe because of those things—Bertrand would continue to frequent the diner. A bottomless cup of coffee was hot and bitter and free of charge if you had a badge. The pancake-and-scrambled-eggs breakfast was decent enough—mainly because even the most inept cook couldn’t screw up bacon. He thought maybe it was the one thing he’d miss when he retired.