The man’s grip on my wrist releases.
I stumble back, clutching my hand to my chest. A bruise is already forming. Four distinct fingerprints. Use of force. Just like the marks on the boy.
“You killed him.” My voice trembles, but not with fear. With rage. “I saw the fingerprints. I saw the bruises on his arm. He wasn’t an addict. He was being held down.”
Mercer smiles.
It’s the most terrifying thing I’ve ever seen. A smile of polite, bureaucratic pity. The smile of a man who signs execution orders with a fountain pen.
“He was a troubled young man, Doctor. A tragedy.”?
The words hangs in the air like smoke.
“Calls have been monitored, Doctor.” Mercer adjusts his cufflink. It catches the light, gold, engraved. “Cameras have been looped. As far as the world is concerned, this young man died of cardiac arrest due to trauma. A hit-and-run. Tragic. Anonymous.”
He reaches into his pocket.
I flinch, stepping back until my spine hits the counter.
He pulls out a pristine white handkerchief. He steps forward, fast as a snake strike, and before I can turn away he gently wipes a smudge of blood from my cheek. The fabric is soft, silk against my skin, obscene against the violence of the moment.
“You have a gift, Iris.” He uses my first name. It feels like a violation, a dirty hand inside my mind. “You tried so hard. It’s a shame.”
“I’m reporting this.” I choke the words out. “I’m calling the police. I’m calling the medical examiner.”
“The medical examiner has already been briefed.” Mercer smiles, pleasant and cold. “Go home, Doctor. Get some sleep. You look terrible. And, Iris?”
I look up, meeting his gaze. Glacier blue. Dead.
“Don’t worry about the report. We’ll write it for you.”
He turns to the younger suit. “Bag him. We leave in five.”
He walks out.
I stand alone in the trauma bay. The flatline continues its singular, accusing wail.
I look at the dead boy. I look at the precise, terrified bruises on his arm that tell a story of someone held down while a needle was forced into his vein.
I’m a witness to a murder.
The realization detonates somewhere below my sternum. I’m not just a doctor anymore. I’m a loose end. A variable in an equation involving dead boys with track marks.
I look at the door where he vanished. That smile. He didn’t kill me because he didn’t have to. Not here. Too messy. Too many witnesses in the hallway.
But tonight, when I walk to my car?
I might be the next victim. A suicide from the stress of the job. An overdose, courtesy of my access to the pharmacy.
I rip off my gloves, my hands shaking so hard the nitrile tears. I hurl them into the biohazard bin. I need to get out. I need to run.
But first, instinct kicks in. The rebellion of the survivor.
I grab the chart hanging on the end of the bed. I tear off the top sheet, the trauma flow sheet where Alvarez recorded the vitals before the men came in. The blood pressure. The pupil response. The bruises noted on the diagram.
Proof.
I fold the paper into a small square and shove it deep into my scrub pocket. The paper crinkles against my hip.
