His Outlaw Omega

The rumor this week was that Holly Bishop had punched a surgeon.

“Broke his nose in two places,” Demi said. She had the golden retriever’s back leg tucked against her hip and the tone of someone reading a horoscope aloud. “Blood up the wall. They had to repaint OR three.”

“OR walls are tile.” Holly squeezed the clippers. A curl of nail dropped onto the steel. “You’d hose it.”

“That’s the part you’re disputing?”

“I’m disputing the paint job.” She moved to the next toe. Bucky, ninety pounds of blond panic, jammed his whole face into Demi’s scrub top and shook. “You’re so brave. You’re the bravest boy in the county. Nobody in history has been this brave about a pedicure.”

“Last week you were stealing fentanyl,” Demi went on.

“I remember.”

“Before that you slept with a patient.”

“Busy spring.”

“And Tammy at the post office says you killed a man on the table and the hospital covered it up. She knows it’s true because her sister’s husband’s cousin was an orderly at St. Stephen’s.”

“Orderlies do see everything.” Holly clipped the last nail and set the clippers down. “Tell Tammy I said hi.”

Demi let go. Bucky scrambled off the table like it had betrayed him personally and went to hide behind the scale.

Two years in Cutter’s Ford, and the town still hadn’t agreed on why the new vet used to be a surgeon. Holly had stopped counting versions around the time somebody suggested she’d lost her license for performing an appendectomy on a horse. Everyone had a theory. Nobody had asked her, and she’d have lied if they had.

She stripped her gloves and scrubbed to the wrist, then kept going to the elbow out of a habit ten years deep. Her hair was attempting a jailbreak from its clip. She shoved one copper strand behind her ear and felt three more drop free in protest.

“Mrs. Figler’s Persian at three thirty,” Demi said. “Then nothing. Then you go home and eat a meal that isn’t a granola bar.”

“I eat vegetables.”

“Coffee isn’t a vegetable.”

“It’s a bean.”

The front door slammed open hard enough to knock the bell off its hook.

Holly knew that sound. Some part of her that had never stopped working night shifts sat up before the rest of her caught on. Nobody opened a door like that for a nail trim.

She walked out into the waiting room.

A man stood in the middle of it, holding a dog.

The dog was a Cane Corso, black brindle, easily a hundred and forty pounds, slung across his arms like a sack of wet cement. The man carried all of it as if it were a mild inconvenience. He was big enough to make her waiting room look like dollhouse furniture—six four at a guess, shoulders taking up most of the doorframe, ink running down both arms to the knuckles and up the side of his neck beneath a black T-shirt. Leather vest over the top. She didn’t need to see the back to know what it said. Everyone in Cutter’s Ford knew the Blackwater Saints on sight, in the same sense they knew which bend of the river flooded in spring.

Mrs. Pilch, in the corner chair with a hamster carrier on her knees, had gone the color of skim milk.

Holly looked at the dog.

Panting too fast. Drooling in ropes. Belly held tight and high under the man’s forearm. Gums a decent pink from here, which was one good thing.

“My idiot ate something,” the man said.

His voice sat low and rough at the edges. It didn’t bother getting loud. She suspected it had never needed to.

“What?”

He paused. He looked down at the dog as though the dog ought to explain himself.

“…A glove.”

“A whole glove?”

“Apparently.”

Behind the front desk, Demi made a sound into her fist.

“When?”

“Three hours ago. Maybe four. He’s been trying to puke since. Nothing’s coming up.”

“Bring him through.” Holly held the swing door open. “Mrs. Pilch, I’m so sorry, Demi will do Nibbles’ mites in room one. Demi—”

“On it.”

The man had to turn sideways to get the dog through the door. He laid him on the big treatment table with a gentleness that didn’t fit the rest of him, and one palm stayed on the dog’s ribs after he’d let go.

Holly put her hands on the abdomen.

The dog lifted his massive head, looked her dead in the eye, and licked her wrist.

“He bites people,” the man said.

“He’s not biting me.” She palpated. Distended. Firm on the left and tender, and the dog groaned and leaned his weight into her hands, which dogs in pain almost never did. “What’s his name?”

“Porkchop.”

She looked up.

He looked back. Dark brown eyes, deep-set under heavy brows, entirely unamused. A scar split his left eyebrow. He had grease under one thumbnail, and his hair looked like it had gone ten rounds with a motorcycle helmet and won on points.

“I didn’t name him,” he said.

“I didn’t ask.”

“Your face did.”

Her face. Her stupid, freckled, treacherous face. The flush went from her collar to her hairline in about a second and a half, and there was nothing to be done about it. There never had been. It would presumably still be happening at her funeral.

“X-ray,” she said, and turned to fetch the plate.

The glove didn’t show on the film. Leather wouldn’t. What did show was a small metal snap glowing white in the stomach, ringed by a bubble of gas.

And beside it, tucked where the fingers of a glove would be, a second shape. A short, bright cylinder. Hollow down the middle.

Holly had read a thousand trauma films in her old life. She knew what a bullet looked like on one. She also knew what got left behind on the ground after the gun went off.

She glanced sideways. He was looking at the screen too. His face did nothing at all.

“There,” she said, and tapped the snap and nothing else. “That’s your glove. Or the cuff of it.”

He leaned in to look, close enough that she caught him properly for the first time. Leather, motor oil, cedar soap. Beneath that, warm and unmistakable, alpha. Her suppressants, eight years strong and responsible for getting her through med school, a residency and more night shifts than she could count, had apparently decided to sit this one out.

She took half a step to the left and pretended it was to see the screen better.

“Can you get it out?”

“I’ll try with a scope first. If it won’t come back up the esophagus, I open him.”

“Open him.”

“Surgery. I cut into the stomach and take it out by hand.”

He didn’t blink. “How long?”

“An hour, if it goes well.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Longer.” She pulled a consent form off the clipboard and held it out with a pen. “Owner’s signature.”

The pen looked like a toothpick in his fist. He wrote C. Nixon in letters that seemed carved into the paper with a knife.

Colt Nixon.

Of course. The president of the Blackwater Saints, standing in her treatment room at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday with dog drool down his forearm, handing back her clipboard. He asked, without looking up, “You done this before?”

“On dogs?”

It was out before she could stop it. His eyes came up.

“Dozens of times,” Holly said, and took the form. “I need an IV line in him before anything else. Can you hold him?”

“He won’t like it.”

“He doesn’t have to like it. He has to hold still.”

Colt got an arm around the dog’s chest and the other over his neck, and leaned in until his cheek was against Porkchop’s ear. Holly clipped a patch of fur on the foreleg and swabbed it. The second the needle touched skin, a hundred and forty pounds of dog decided he had somewhere else to be.

Porkchop bucked. The table shook. Colt’s arms locked and his boots slid half an inch on the linoleum.

Holly didn’t chase the leg. She waited for the half second when it stopped moving, slid the catheter in, and felt the flash of blood fill the hub. First try. She had it taped before the dog finished complaining.

She looked up to say good and found Colt Nixon’s eyes on her hands. They stayed there after the dog went still.

“Done,” she said, and the word came out rougher than she meant it to. “You can let go. Waiting room’s through there. I’ll come and find you.”

♥♥♥

The scope failed at twenty minutes. The glove had balled itself into a leather fist and wedged fingers-first against the outlet of the stomach, and no amount of coaxing with the graspers would drag that up a throat without tearing something.

So she opened him.

She liked this part. She had never said so to a living soul, because it sounded monstrous out loud. But the world went quiet under a surgical lamp in a manner nothing else had ever matched. The room shrank to a field the width of her two hands and every voice she’d ever heard in her head went and stood outside in the hall.

Demi ran anesthesia. The monitor chirped along, steady. Holly went through the midline, packed off the stomach with sponges, and made her cut.

The glove came out whole with a wet, reluctant slide. She laid it on a steel tray.

Four hours in a dog’s stomach had done what stomachs do. The leather was slimy and bleached in patches, shrunk and gone the dull brown-green of old pond weed, and it smelled like a crime. Whatever it had been before, it was dog food now.

But it was small. Even shrunken, she could tell that. A man’s glove, but a man with ordinary hands. It would have fit about three of Colt Nixon’s fingers.

She pressed the thumb. Something hard slid under the leather.

She worked it down to the cuff and out onto the tray, and it rang against the steel.

A brass shell casing. Nine millimeter. Its mouth was dented flat on one side, as though someone had stepped on it, and the acid had turned it a patchy green.

Holly looked at it and didn’t touch it.

“Demi,” she said. “Did you see that?”

“See what?” said Demi, who had very clearly seen it.

“Closing,” Holly said, very evenly, and did.

♥♥♥

Porkchop came to slowly, drunk and outraged, and attempted to lick the bars of the recovery kennel.

Holly peeled off her gown, washed, and picked up the steel tray on her way out. The glove sat on it under a square of gauze. The casing sat beside it, rinsed off, gleaming dully under the lights.

He was in the waiting room. Mrs. Pilch had fled. Demi, who could clear a building faster than a fire alarm when she wanted to, had apparently moved everybody else along too.

He was standing in exactly the spot where she’d left him, facing the swing door.

“He hasn’t sat down,” Demi said from the front desk, not bothering to lower her voice. “An hour and ten minutes. I offered him a chair twice.”

He turned when Holly came in. The first thing he looked at was her face, reading it for the verdict. The second was the swing door behind her.

“He’s fine,” she said. “He’s waking up. He’ll stay overnight, maybe two, and he’s going to be sore and furious and on boiled chicken and rice for two weeks. I want him back in ten days to check the incision.”

His shoulders came down half an inch. That was the whole reaction. On a man his size it was like watching a building settle on its foundations.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” She held out the tray and lifted the gauze. “I found this in your dog.”

He looked at the casing.

He didn’t reach for it.

“Why,” Holly asked, “was there a shell casing in your dog?”

The waiting room went silent. Behind the desk, Demi had stopped typing.

Colt Nixon considered the casing for a long moment. Then he considered her. Then he reached into his back pocket, took out a battered leather wallet, and slid out a card.

“Bill me,” he said.