Page 103 of The Heart We Guard
“Take good care of her, Lucy. She’s taking my baby in there with her, and I want ‘em both back in one unfrazzled piece.”
“I always do,” she says confidently.
As we walk, she holds her head high, but something tells me she’s struggling to not look back at Grudge.
“Trust me,” she says. “I know you’re dying to ask me, and I’m dying to ask you. But let’s not, yes?”
I laugh at that. “Agreed.”
Lucy looks at me and smiles. “So, quickly, before we step inside, tell me what’s going on here.”
I fill her in as we walk, and she offers me guidance on the approach.
In the station, I find Detective Atkins is a blur of every TV show detective I’ve ever seen. Jaded. A little gnarly. Is just on the tilting edge of not wanting to do this job, but too close to retirement to quit. With gray hair, and jowled features, he’s like an exhausted bulldog.
He takes us into an interrogation room and gestures for us to sit, before he takes his chair.
“What is this about, Detective Atkins?” Lucy asks.
He places his elbows on the table and leans towards us. “Nicholas Gray is dead.”
My heart beats double time. Another young man. Gone.
Something deep in my chest aches for his father.
“That’s terrible,” I say. “How?”
“That’s what we’re investigating. I need you to tell me what was said that night.”
I think about what it felt like the last time I faced the Midtown Rebels in court. I think about how it will affect Butcher, as the president of the Iron Outlaws. And I think about the baby I’m carrying. How the stress of being involved might affect them.
“He had questions about his surgery. The usual things,” I say. My palms sweat, and I resist the urge to wipe them on my jeans.
Atkins clearly doesn’t believe me. “The patient didn’t know you. Didn’t ask for you. But he told you something, didn’t he?”
“He thought he was dying,” I say. “People say all kinds of things when they think they’re dying. Doesn’t mean that any of it makes sense or is true.”
“I understand, but I’m going to have to ask you again. What did he say?”
Lucy leans forward, tapping her pen on her notepaper. “Dr. Hansen is not required to answer that. You know the law. Physician-patient privilege applied the moment she started treating him, which, as she explained, was when she was called down to the ER.”
Detective Atkins leans back in his chair and folds his arms. “This isn’t about a trivial appendix removal, Ms. De Bose. It’s about a gangland-style execution, we believe his club was involved in.” Atkins looks to me. “You’re not a priest in a confessional. You’re a doctor trained to save lives. If you tell me what you know, you might be able to save even more.”
It’s good logic, and I understand why he’s switching up his approach.
Lucy folds her arms, matching Atkins’s body language. “Unless you have a signed waiver from the patient, or a court order, Dr. Hansen is prohibited from disclosing any information he shared in a medical context.”
“So, we’re all gonna sit on our hands while his shooter walks.”
“Here’s the thing,” I say, suddenly untethered, “I don’t ask for the kind of people who end up on my table. I handle each one of them as a body to be put back together, much like a broken clock. I opened his chest to stop him from dying. That’s where all this ends for me.”
Atkins huffs. “You want it to end there. But it won’t. People will keep on being hurt and killed.”
“The dead I can’t fix. The injured I’ll keep putting back together.”
Atkins smirks. “From my understanding, you were fired because of that night. So, that won’t be possible. Do you want to tell me why you were fired? Was it because of that case?”
Lucy puts a hand on my arm to calm me, and I realize I’ve slammed both palms on the metal table and leaned forward. “Because I stuck up for a shooting victim who?—”
