Chapter 3
Gus let out a sound somewhere between a cough and a death rattle.
Luca turned his head three degrees to the left. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't snap his fingers.
“Outside,” he told his men. “Gus, stay by the elevators. The rest of you wait downstairs in the garage.”
Without a syllable of dissent, eight large men in heavy wool coats turned and moved like disciplined infantry down the corridor toward the service stairs. The corridor suddenly had oxygen again. Beth, watching wide-eyed from behind the glass of the nurses' station, looked as though she had witnessed the parting of the Red Sea by a five-foot-five blonde in compression socks.
Nina shook her head, finishing the last bite of the biscotti and dusting her fingers over the napkin. “You’re ridiculous.”
“I’m efficient,” he countered. He gestured toward room 712 with an open palm. “He asked for you. He remembers the nurse who told him he was too young and too stupid to die on a Tuesday.”
Nina paused, her hand hovering over the hand-sanitizer dispenser on the wall. A small, dry smile touched her mouth. “Did he? Good. That means his cognitive baseline is intact.”
Inside room 712, Tommy Moretti looked nineteen going on eighty.
Tubes snaked from his nose and wrists, an external cardiac monitor bleeping rhythmically above the bed. His dark curls were matted against the pillow, but the arrogant tilt of the Moretti jaw was unmistakable, even through the pale, bruised skin.
When Nina walked in with her vitals scanner, Tommy opened one bloodshot eye.
“Hey,” he rasped. “The screaming nurse.”
“That’s Nurse Kowalski to you, tough guy,” Nina said, wrapping the blood pressure cuff around his uninjured arm. “And if you yank that central line again like you tried to do in PACU, I’m going to use a pediatric needle on your next blood draw.”
Tommy winced as the cuff inflated, but a faint, reckless grin touched his cracked lips. “Uncle Luca said you were scary. He wasn’t lying.”
Nina glanced over her shoulder. Luca was standing just inside the threshold, his broad back against the closed door, watching them with an intensity that could have bored through steel. He looked less like an uncle and more like a gargoyle carved to guard a family tomb.
“Your uncle thinks half a bagel is a crime against humanity,” Nina said, checking the systolic reading. “118 over 74. Stable. Pulse ox is 98. You’re healing like a weed, Tommy. Who shot you?”