Chapter 58: The Doctor's Bag

Two hours can be a lifetime when you spend it listening to the person you love, try not to make a sound while they bleed.

The Stardust Inn wasn't built for lifetimes. It was built for quick, sweaty transactions and people on the run. The walls were thin enough to hear the guy in the next room cough up a lung, and the ice machine down the walkway had a death rattle that sounded like a skeleton jerking off in a tin bucket. Every sound, every shadow, was a threat.

Maddie was sitting on the edge of the bed, her face pale and slick with a sheen of cold sweat. She hadn't complained once. Not a goddamn word. She just held the blood-soaked towels to her arm with a grim resolve that was more terrifying than any scream would have been. We'd cleaned the wound as best we could with bottled water and the motel's dinky first-aid kit, but it was a deep, ugly gash, and it needed a professional hand.

My hand. My hand kept going to the butt of the Sig Sauer tucked into my jeans. My brain, meanwhile, was stuck on a goddamn carousel of memories, spinning round and round on one single, impossible face. Dr. Alistair Croft. A man whose office had smelled of old books and lemon tea. A man who had told me, in that calm, measured voice, that grief wasn't a hole to be filled but a landscape to be navigated.

Now he was navigating his way to a shit-kicker motel in the middle of the goddamn Mojave to stitch up a gunshot wound for a couple of ghosts. The two pictures didn't just fail to line up; one of them set the other on fire.

When the knock came, it wasn't the heavy-fisted thump of a cop or a thug. It was two soft, precise taps. Rap. Rap. The knock of a man who is used to being invited in.

I moved to the door, my body a coiled spring, the Sig now in my hand, held low against my leg. I looked through the peephole, and the fish-eye lens showed me the same man from my memories, just a little more worn, a little more tired, standing there in the buzzing yellow light of the motel walkway. He wore a tweed jacket, for Christ's sake, and carried a scuffed leather doctor's bag that looked like it had been in his family since the Civil War. He looked like he'd taken a wrong turn on his way to a university lecture.

I opened the door.

He didn't flinch at the sight of me, or the gun I didn't bother to hide anymore. His eyes, the same kind, intelligent eyes that had once watched me weep, simply took in the scene: me, the weapon, the blood, and Maddie on the bed. He gave a small, clinical nod, as if he'd just confirmed a diagnosis.

"Jackson," he said, his voice exactly as I remembered it—like polished river stones. "May I come in?"

I stepped back and let him pass. He brought the smell of the desert night and something else with him—a faint, clean scent of antiseptic that was already part of his atmosphere. He set his bag on the small, scarred table and opened it. The inside was a marvel of organization: gleaming steel instruments, vials of clear liquid, sterile packets of sutures and gauze. It was the toolkit of a man who brought the emergency room with him.

He didn't waste time on pleasantries. He moved to the bed and looked at Maddie, his face softening with a practiced bedside manner that was deeply, horribly unsettling in this context.

"Let's see what we have here," he murmured, gently taking her arm. Maddie flinched but let him. He examined the wound with an expert's touch, his expression unreadable. "Nasty. The shrapnel tore the muscle, but you were lucky. It missed the artery."