Okay, maybe he didn’t know anything about field medicine.
When he put the flashlight on, I watched as he shone that in her face, then he lifted her eyelids. Her pupils puckered, retreating into tight circles.
"I think that’s a good sign."
He turned the phone around then tapped the screen. When I heard a ringing sound, I folded my arms, waiting to find out who he’d called.
"Conor, there’d better be a good reason you’re waking me up at two AM."
"You wake up early, don’t you?"
"Not this fucking early. Each moment is precious, dick, and the first voice I want to hear when I wake up isn’t yours." Eoghan yawned. "What do you want?"
"Someone just fell down the stairs. Face-planted." I cleared my throat. "She knocked herself out."
Eoghan grunted. "Sounds like a dipshit move to me." He paused. "Wait.She?Hang on, where are you? I thought you were at Conor’s? There aren’t any steps there."
Ignoring his other questions, I replied, "There are from the helipad."
"Oh, yeah. I forgot you had one of those on your building. Conor, you weren’t trying to throw someone over the side, were you? Finn told me you asked about that."
Hell, this wasn’t the first time he’d verbalized it?
"Conor, we need to get you to a shrink," I muttered.
"It’s only for enemies. Jesus. You’d think you hadn’t killed anyone before." He huffed and folded his arms across his chest.
Ignoring his petulance, I told Eoghan, "She tripped, has some cuts and scrapes, but she’s unconscious."
"You don’t want her to be? "
"No."
"You’re not torturing her?"
"No." Torturing women was Da’s thing anyway. "She’s just unconscious from the fall."
"I’d hope she is, considering Conor just threw you under the ‘Murder One’ bus," he said wryly.
"I’m not worried about that."
Silence fell at my declaration.
Until they both decided to speak at the same time.
"Why the hell not?" Eoghan burst out.
"Did you want to kill her anyway?" Conor queried, calmer but no less confused.
"No," I groused, "I don’t want her dead. But she knows how things work in this world. She was well aware she flew too close to the sun last time. No way she’d throw us under the bus now."
Maybe that was wishful thinking, naïveté or stupidity, but I knew she wouldn’t.
Back in the day, she’d had every reason, every goddamn right to be scared of me, to go to the cops to try to evade the Firm’s reach, but she hadn’t.
She was too smart for that.
"There's a hell of a lot of information to unravel there, Aidan. How do you know her?" Eoghan demanded. "It sounds like you fucked her or something."