Phantom Prey

not pumping, it’s not pumping, it’s through-and-through.” She shouted over her shoulder, “Ask Jerry if he’s got a first-aid kit.” And to Lucas: “We gotta get some pressure on it. Get some pressure on it.”
    Jerry shouted, “Cops are on the way, ambulance on the way.”
    The cops were there in one minute: a red-faced blond and his black partner, who looked down and said, “Holy shit, Davenport, man, what happened?”
    “Motherfucker mustache guy shot me,” Lucas said.
    The Goth nurse was pressing an antique gauze pad, from a thirty-year -old first-aid kit, against the hole in his thigh. “I’m working the Austin case, ahhh . . . and the Dick Ford case, with Harry Anson,” Lucas told the cop. The leg was on fire, was burning up. He grunted to the nurse, “Goddamn, that hurts. That hurts.” And to the cop again, “Call Anson. Guy ambushed me. Middle height, black hair, mustache, black leather jacket, had a car parked around the corner. Might have a limp. Jesus, that hurts.”
    The ambulance was there a minute later and they put him on a gurney and ran him out, and the EMT started running down his list, asking about aspirin and street drugs and heart medications, and Lucas answered and then got his cell phone out and the EMT said, “You can’t use that here,” and Lucas said, “Bullshit. I’m gonna call my wife before anybody else does.”
    He did and it was confusing, but she was coming. Because his mind was still operating in some cold not-quite-shocked mode, he made one more call, almost fumbling the phone as he worked down through his call list. But he got it, finally, and Alyssa Austin answered the phone. He hung up without saying anything: but Austin was at home. If the woman he saw running away was the fairy, and it could have been, then Austin was not her.
    The ambulance made a swooping move and one of the EMTs said something he didn’t understand, and then the doors were popping open: the hospital. He’d been there before, rolling down a hallway looking up at the passing lights, talking to the docs in their scrubs. One of the docs said, “Sir, you understand me? Sir? It’s more than a couple of stitches, you’ve got a hole there and I’m going to have to clean it out? Do you understand that, sir?”
    They were pulling his pants off as they talked and Lucas asked, “What’d it hit?”
    “Your leg; I’m going to have to clean it out, okay? We have your permission to clean it out?”
    “Yeah, yeah, go ahead.”
    “Do you take a heart aspirin or Plavix or Coumadin, any drugs that you think might affect . . .”
    Some time passed; he didn’t know exactly how much, and then he was moving again. He was out of his clothing and there was something cold and wet on his leg and belly and nurses were pushing and pulling on him, transferring him to an operating table, and a masked man looked down at him and then he went away for a while. . . .
    Weather was sitting white-faced in a chair next to the bed when he came back. He was in a recovery room, and she must’ve gotten in on her physician’s ID. He groaned, “Ah, man,” and she stood up clutching a purse to her chest and she began to weep and said, “Oh, God you scared me, goddamn, you scared me. . . .”
    Lucas said, “I’m gonna kill that motherfucker.”

9
    At the surgeon’s insistence —backed up by a brook-no-argument Weather—Lucas stayed in the hospital overnight, all the next day and the next night, forced to sleep on his back, which he never did. By the end of it, he had a crippling ache at the juncture of his back and butt.
    Before that, though, he’d been heavily fussed over.
    The morning after the shooting, at first light, the surgeon showed up. End of his shift. He looked at the wound and said, “I do good work.”
    “Everybody keeps saying, ‘It wasn’t much,’” Lucas said.
    “It really wasn’t,” the surgeon agreed. He was a small, compact, swarthy man in good shape; looked like a handball player. “But man, it should have been. One inch to the left, it would have taken out your femoral artery. You’d have been forty-sixty getting to the hospital before you bled out. Two inches to the right, and we have massive genital involvement. You’d still be on the table, with the microsurgeons trying to sort out the pieces.”
    “Ah, jeez.”
    “Yeah. Anyway, we’re gonna keep you here today at least, overnight, and maybe tomorrow, depending,” the doc said. “There was some crap in the wound,