XAVIER
I’m elbow-deep in Italian mafia blood and internal sutures when my cellphone vibrates in my pocket.
“Bro,” I hiss, catching my brother’s attention as he monitors the levels of anesthesia being pumped into the criminal on the table between us, the guy whose intestines I’m currently digging in for stray pieces of shrapnel. Liam raises his eyebrows. “My phone. Can you get it?”
Liam rolls his eyes, but he circles the table and our unconscious patient, Anthony No-Last-Name, never once taking his eyes off the vital signs his portable monitor is blinking out in red and green Technicolor. “You expecting a call?” he asks, reaching in to my jeans pocket and pulling out my iPhone.
“Holy shit,” he says, his expression grave. I never thought I’d describe a black man as pale, but I can see the blood disappear from my brother’s dark brown skin as he looks at the phone screen.
“What?” I ask, peering over. “I can’t read upside down, you know.”
“It’s The Florist,” Liam says. He’s seemingly forgotten all about the guy who he’s meant to be keeping sedated while I finish my treasure hunt inside his stomach.
“THE Florist?” I ask, glancing at the patient monitor. “Liam, Jesus, your guy’s blood pressure is—”
“Falling down into hell,” he finishes, rushing around to his spot at the head of the industrial kitchen table we’re using as a makeshift surgical bed. I’ve operated in some pretty crazy places, but I’ve never before had the aroma of frying oil stuck to the inside of my nostrils as I try to dig pieces of a special-issue 9mm bullet out of somebody.
“Fuck, I’ve got a bleeder here,” I snap, grabbing a pair of clamps from my tray of sterile instruments and fishing around in this guy’s fatty stomach cavity for the source of the blood loss. I find the artery and clamp it off, sweat beading on my forehead as a hulkishly tall dude in a custom-made Armani suit strolls into my sterile area, a string of red licorice hanging from between his teeth.
“Hey, Kanye, Jay-Z,” Sal Barbieri says to Liam and I, loosening his tie as he bites a chunk of the blood-red licorice. “Let’s get this shit tied up. We’ve got dinner service starting in an hour.”
As if on cue, his slightly shorter, equally annoying brother appears beside him, sporting the same cut of Armani suit, a plastic butcher’s apron over the top. He’s holding a stack of raw rib eye fillets in his arms, and out of the corner of my eye, I watch Liam’s face twitch.
“What part of sterile do you idiots not understand?” I say, gently suctioning the excess blood from my patient’s abdomen and spotting another piece of bullet. Jesus, this shot is so messy. “What kind of bullets do you guys use?” I ask, holding the latest piece of shrapnel up to show them. “This bullet is in a thousand tiny fucking fragments.”
Sal, the taller one, chews on his candy thoughtfully. “They’re homemade,” he replies, glancing at his brother.
“Awesome,” I mutter under my breath.
“What’d you say?” Sal asks, his tone pissed.
I grind my teeth in my jaw and try not to lose my shit; I literally have this guy’s life in my hands, and I don’t have time to argue with this mafia sociopath. “I said, how did you accidentally shoot your associate here?”
“Oh,” he replies. “We were playing Italian Roulette.”
Theo, whose arms must be getting tired holding all that beef, clears his throat pointedly. “That’s not Italian Roulette. Look it up on Urban Dictionary.”
Sal totally ignores his brother’s correction.
“Dude, don’t bring food into a fucking operating room,” Theo adds.
Sal’s mouth drops open as he stares at the ribeye fillets stacked ten tall in Theo’s arms. “Dude,” he replies, raising his eyebrows as he stares pointedly at the steaks. Theo just glares up at his brother, crossing the kitchen to the giant refrigerator unit and opening it with his foot.
My phone starts to vibrate again in Liam’s hand, but he’s too busy making sure our patient’s blood pressure comes back up. The Florist only calls when something is seriously wrong; I haven’t heard from him in what, nine, ten years? And it’s been a good nine or ten years without that crazy fucker in my business. Then again, I am standing in an Italian restaurant in the middle of Hell’s Kitchen, New York City, pulling bullet fragments out of a dude who was playing roulette with his fucking handgun.
“Hey, Sal,” I say to the tall one. He flicks his hair out of his eyes, a new piece of liquorice in his mouth. “Yeah?”
“I need you to answer that phone and hold it up to my ear,” I say, finding a fresh bleeder in my patient’s stomach and sealing it off; this guy is cut to ribbons inside. He’ll probably be shitting into a bag for the rest of his life, assuming he survives the teeming bacteria of the Barbieri kitchen and this casual operation that nobody seems particularly worried about.
“Oh, sure, man,” Sal says, chewing loudly as he reaches over the patient and grabs the phone from Liam’s palm. Liam and I both open our mouths to say something as the phone starts to slide from Sal’s hand, right into the bloody gape of Anthony’s open stomach. In slow motion, he catches it, grinning like a fucking psycho as he studies the screen.
“I meant to do that,” he muses, reading the iPhone screen. “The Florist, huh? You must’ve really fucked up if you need to order flowers for your girlfriend while you’re finger-fucking my buddy’s bullet wound here.”
“THE Florist?” Theo interrupts.
“THE Florist,” I confirm. “And he’s onto his third call. So unless you fuckers want him to come here and kill all of us, please, for the love of God, answer the fucking phone for me, will you, Sal?”
Sal rolls his eyes, but slaps the green “answer” icon and holds the phone to my ear. It’s really fucking hard to focus on two things at once, when those two things are performing surgery and trying to play nice with the most brutal man in all of Mexico.
“Is this The Doctor?” A Spanish accent comes down the line.
“This is The Doctor,” I reply. “How can I help?”
I’m at the suturing stage now. I replace my blood-soaked gloves with a fresh pair and start stitching Anthony’s skin back together, at the same time trying to listen to The Florist and not to the sound of Sal’s massive jaw moving back and forth as he grinds licorice like a fucking cow grinds grass.
“Patient is eighteen years old, female, unconscious,” The Florist says, totally emotionless. “Pain radiating from the right side of her stomach.”
“Probably fucking period pain,” Sal deadpans in a voice barely above a whisper. I fix him with a pointed stare. “Nausea? Fever?”
“Both,” The Florist confirms.
“Appendicitis is my guess,” I say, checking Anthony’s sutures are straight and in line. “If you can take her to the ER, they’ll confirm with some tests.” I shouldn’t fucking care about whether Anthony has a straight scar or not, but I’m a perfectionist when it comes to my work. Really, I should have just let him bleed out and rid the world of one more moronic person.
“An ER is out of the question, Mr. Bishop,” The Florist says, dispensing with formality. “As is guessing. I will arrange a jet for you. You are presently in New York operating on one Anthony Barbieri, yes?”
He’s a Barbieri? Jesus. I assumed he was just an associate, not a family member. I’m suddenly very fucking happy that I didn’t let him bleed out in the kitchen prep section of Cucina Diavolo. The Barbieris would have my balls sliced off and served as entree before the end of the night, and I’ve heard what they use that fucking deep fryer for.
“How do you know where I am?” I ask slowly, looking around the kitchen.
“I always know where you are, Xavier,” The Florist says.
“Is that right, Ignacio?” Fuck pleasantries. Fuck code. This asshole knows I don’t want anything to do with the sick shit he orchestrates in Mexico, and he’s just made damn sure to put me somewhere where the only weapon I have is the surgical scalpel at my side.
I look at Sal, at Theo. “Please don’t tell me you shot a member of your family just to get me here,” I say solemnly. Theo looks away. Sal blinks several times. “Well, we could tell you we didn’t, but that would be a lie.”
I grab the scalpel before anyone can go for their gun. “You people are fucking crazy,” I hiss, rage pumping in my veins, Liam looking like he’s going to kill everyone in the room just with the force of his hateful glare.
Sal looks down at Anthony, giving him an affectionate slap on the cheek. “We hear that a lot.”
Ignacio The Florist Hernandez is talking again; I rip one of my surgical gloves off and snatch the phone from Sal’s giant palm. “I couldn’t risk you disappearing into the belly of Chicago with your friends,” Ignacio says. “I decided to get you to a place where I have more associates of my own. It’s just business. You understand?”
“Why can’t you take her to the ER?” I ask, wiping sweat from my head with my arm. “Answer me properly.”
“That’s simple,” Ignacio says. “I cannot take her to the ER because on paper, this girl does not exist.”
“You’re trafficking her,” I concede grimly.
“If I were trafficking her, do you think I would spend fifty thousand dollars on a private fucking flight for you? Another fifty thousand for your services? Have you ever met a woman that Ignacio Garcia Hernandez would spend one hundred thousand dollars on for a fucking appendectomy?”
“You love her,” I realize. “I didn’t know you had a heart, Ignacio.”
“Get your black ass to that airstrip, boy, or you’ll be dead and hanging from a hook in the Barbieris’ industrial freezer by the time Anthony wakes up from his little surgery.”
He ends the call abruptly. I pocket my phone and stare at the collective faces around me: Liam, Sal, Theo. “You two are fucking assholes,” I say to the Barbieri brothers.
Theo shrugs. “We get that a lot, too.”