He is not panicking. That's what scares me most.
"You need a hospital," I say.
The words come out flat. Professional. The same voice I use when someone orders the club sandwich at three in the morning and I have to explain that we're out of turkey. Del is still snoring in the back. The radio is still playing something I don't recognize. The world is still spinning, even though something in my chest has gone very, very still.
"No hospitals."
His voice is low. Rough, but not from pain—from use, from years of speaking in rooms where everyone listened. He slides onto the stool at the counter, leaving a smear of red on the vinyl, and I watch him move the way I used to watch injured animals move. Carefully. Deliberately. Conserving energy for something important.
He doesn't wince when he sits. That's impressive. That's also a little frightening.
"Do you have a first aid kit?" he asks.
"A first aid kit isn't going to fix a gunshot wound."
"You'd be surprised." His mouth twitches—not quite a smile, not quite a grimace, something in between that might be amusement or might be pain or might be both. "The kit. Please."
I should call 911. I should dial the number and let the paramedics handle this and go back to wiping down the counter like nothing happened. He's a stranger. He's a stranger with a bullet in him and a suit that costs more than my rent and eyes that have seen things I don't want to know about. I owe him nothing. I owe him less than nothing.
But he's bleeding. And I have steady hands.
And my mother taught me to lean in.
The first aid kit is under the register, a white plastic box with a red cross that's mostly rubbed off. I grab it. Then I grab the bottle of vodka from the shelf behind the counter—the good stuff, the one Del keeps for special occasions, because he's an alcoholic with expensive taste—and a pair of tweezers from the drawer where we keep the spare pens and the roll of tape that no one has used since 1987.
The tweezers are cheap. The vodka is not. I use Del's lighter to sterilize the metal, holding the flame under the tips until they glow faintly orange, and I don't think about what I'm doing. I don't think about the fact that I'm about to perform field surgery on a stranger in a diner at two in the morning. I just do the next thing. Then the next thing. Then the next.
He watches me the whole time.
His eyes track my hands—from the kit to the vodka to the lighter to the tweezers—and there's something in his gaze that I can't read. Not hunger, exactly. Not curiosity. Something older. Something that looks like recognition, though I can't imagine what he thinks he recognizes in me.
I pull the stool beside him and sit.
"I need to see the wound."
He unbuttons his shirt with his free hand—slowly, because his other hand is still pressed to his side—and I force myself not to look at his chest. The muscles. The scars. The map of a life that has clearly involved more violence than I want to think about. I look at the wound instead. That's the job. That's all this is.
The bullet is shallow. I can see that immediately—a small, dark hole just above his hip, blood welling up around it in a lazy pulse. The bullet is still inside, lodged somewhere in the meat of his side, but it hasn't hit anything vital. No major vessels. No organs. He's lucky, or he's been shot enough times to know how to take a bullet without dying.
Maybe both.
"I'm going to take it out," I say. "It's going to hurt."
"I know."
"This is going to hurt a lot."
"I know."
He's not looking at the wound. He's looking at my face. I feel the weight of his gaze like a hand on my cheek, and I don't understand why, but I don't have time to understand. I have a bullet to remove.
I pour vodka over the tweezers. I pour vodka over the wound. He doesn't flinch when the alcohol hits the raw flesh—doesn't even blink—and I feel something shift in my chest. Respect, maybe. Or recognition. The way you recognize a kindred spirit, even when you don't want to.
"Talk to me," he says.
"What?"
"Talk to me. While you work."
