She needed help.
“Don’t kill me!” she shrieked when my hand moved out, trying to press her hand harder into the wound on her shoulder.
“I’m not going to kill you. I’m trying to help you,” I told her as I heard Cesare’s car pull up a few feet away.
“We have to fuckinggo, man,” he called as he rushed out of the driver’s seat to open the back door. “Pick her up and let’s go.”
There was no other choice.
That was exactly what I had to do.
“No!” she shrieked as my hands went under her back and legs, gathering her, and holding her against my chest as I ran toward the car, awkwardly ducking down to fall into the backseat.
Cesare wasted not a second, throwing the car into drive, and pulling off.
“Let me go. I won’t say anything. Let me go. I can’t die like this,” the woman pleaded, her eyes still pinned shut. Like if she didn’t look again, maybe she would be set free.
“Where are we going, man?” Cesare asked, looking at me in the rearview after taking a turn off the road we were on, wanting to put some distance between us and the cops that were closing in on the shootout scene.
“The only place we can go to deal with this,” I told him.
To that, he gave me a nod.
Because since I got back, there was only one place to go when you were hurt, when you were in need of medical attention.
And that was the old doctor’s office the Family had bought to let me use as an office when shit needed some serious mending.
It was just an old, defunct family doctor, but we’d done some work to turn one of the rooms into a makeshift surgery room for when the situation called for it.
Stabbings and shootings weren’t exactly rare in our profession. And when you went to the hospital with those sorts of wounds, they had to report that shit to the cops. Which meant if we wanted care, we had to do it ourselves for the most part.
I didn’t have the nickname Surgeon for no reason.
I was who you wanted if you got hit.
And, apparently, if you got hit during a shootout of ours.
“She okay?” Cesare asked as I pushed my hand down hard against hers that was on her thigh, making a wail escape her.
“Gotta get her on a table and look,” I said, gritting my teeth before pressing my other hand into the one on her shoulder. “I know. I know it hurts,” I said as her shrieks of pain turned to sobs.
“Got anything there you can give her for this?” Cesare asked.
In the rearview, I nodded at him.
Because I didn’t want to say the truth out loud and upset the woman any more than she already was.
I had enough shit to knock her out cold so I could work on her without her making the job harder.
“Next right,” I said, getting a nod out of Cesare before looking down at the woman.
Whitney, if her name tag was accurate.
“Everything is going to be okay,” I told her.
Though, yeah, that was probably not entirely true.
CHAPTER THREE