looked at the cute, gangly girl standing over him, still pretty with her ponytailed hair messy from her bed and no makeup on her face and sweat forming above her lip from the work she was doing to keep some scary stranger alive, he conceded he was in absolutely no position to argue.
Justine helped Court back to his feet, and the two of them staggered together slowly out of the treatment room and down the hall towards the back of the clinic. Gentry winced with each step. Once his head bobbed low as if he would pass out.
Justine propped him against the wall in the courtyard while she fumbled with her keys.
“What the hell is this?” Gentry asked.
“It’s my car.”
“That’s a car?”
“What’s wrong with it?”
“It’s small.”
“When I bought it, I didn’t know I would be transporting patients in the passenger seat.”
“Fair enough. It’s fine. It sure as hell won’t draw much attention.”
They both smiled a little, but the smiles drifted away as she tried to help lower him into the seat. Court cried out in pain, a cry that culminated with shallow panting.
It took her nearly a minute to fire the little engine. By then Court was asleep. She’d dropped his seat to where he could lie almost flat. With considerable effort, she was able to get his legs up on the dashboard to help keep him from going into shock. As she turned north on Rue Monge, she saw helicopters in the air in the distance over the river.
Justine parked her car a few doors down from the clinic off the Rue des Ecoles. At half past three, there was not a soul around. Court stirred, looked around for a moment, and then asked her for a pen and a piece of paper. She dug through her purse a moment and then passed him an envelope and a pencil.
“There’s another med I need you to find. Should be with the pediatric drugs.”
“One of the twins needs medicine?”
“No. It’s for me.” He jotted something down and handed the envelope back to Justine. She looked at it.
“DextroStat? What does it do?”
“It will help. It’s very important. Find it.”
She shrugged, promised to look for it. Without another word to Court, she climbed out of her tiny Uno and went back to the trunk. Gentry did not, could not, turn around to see what she was doing. A few seconds later she walked to the glass door of the building and looked quickly in both directions. A tire iron in her right hand crashed through the glass, and she reached through the sharp shards to open the door from the inside. As Court watched, completely helpless, she disappeared into the dark clinic as a piercing alarm filled the street.
Even with the impending danger, Court fell asleep again in the car. He awoke with the jolt of the tiny two- door as it lurched forward. In the glow from the streetlamps flickering above them as they moved away from the alarm bells, he caught a glimpse of the young woman’s face: intensity and determination.
“What did you get?” he asked.
“Three units of O positive, two bags of dextrose, morphine, Vicodin, transfusion equipment, antiseptics, and a suture kit.”
“And?”
“And the medicine you asked about.”
“Well done.”
“Yes,” she said with a little smile. “That was fun.”
In the parking garage below the Gare Saint-Lazare, Justine and Court climbed into the big Mercedes. Gentry took the wheel and sat there, woozy and grimacing from agony. Justine began the transfusion of blood and a bag of nutrients as they sat together in the dark and empty garage. She hooked the bags on the dome light above them to keep the drip going and the supple black leather interior gave way to the French girl’s movements as she knelt over Court, poured antiseptic freely on his waist to let it soak into his bandages and his wounds.
Justine instructed Court to just lie there and relax, and she left the car. She disappeared from his view while he sat alone and tried to think about the task still at hand. He knew these delays meant he would not make it to the chateau before six in the morning. He would have virtually no time to lay up and get a feel for the territory. No, as it now stood, he’d only have time to drive up to the front door and begin his attack if he wanted to do so under cover of darkness. Shit. Court realized his chances for success were never good, but after the stabbing in Paris, they had now become incal culably small.
Just then Justine returned with a bag of pastries and two large servings of coffee. Court pulled one foam cup from her hand and swigged it until his mouth burned.
Court took a croissant and ripped into it with abandon. She tried to butter it for him while he ate, but he just took the little pat of butter from her hands and gobbled it down, too.
Justine lectured him. “Your mother would not be proud. Relax. You are getting the fluids and nutrition you need from the IV. Too much food with the morphine, and you will throw up. Drink the coffee slowly. Can you drive?”
“We’re about to find out,” Court said with a look of grim determination, and he backed the Mercedes out of the space, exited the underground garage slowly, and rolled out into the night.
They took the A15 north out of the city, and just as Justine had promised, there was virtually no traffic at four on a Sunday morning. She cursed loudly when she noticed the blood bag empty just a few minutes out of town; she switched it out with a second full liter bag and switched out the dextrose just to keep the fluids dripping into the IV at the fastest rate possible.
The A13 was the most direct route to Bayeux, but Court avoided it. He knew surveillance could easily be set up on the main route to the chateau. Instead, Court took a series of back roads that would add a half hour or so to his journey.
For an hour they delayed the inevitable. Justine talked about her family and friends and her six cats. Her nervousness was evident to Court from her random conversation. With less than an hour to go till the chateau, Justine grew quiet, carefully injected a tiny dose of morphine into Gentry’s IV. If his blood pressure was too low, as it surely had been back at the vet clinic, the morphine could have stopped his heart. But after two and a half units of blood, she determined a small shot of the strong painkiller was worth the risk, considering what he was about to endure.
As they drove through the dark, Court began feeling better, the pain medicine and the blood and the sugar water boosting his strength and spirits. They discussed the procedure, and Justine took several minutes to ready her sutures and bandages on the dashboard in front of her. She cringed as she threaded the razor-sharp hooked needle and dipped it in a bottle of antiseptic, laid it down on sterile gauze. She opened his shirt and cut off his bandages and poured half the contents of the bottle on his stomach, and he recoiled from the sting.
They both unfastened their seat belts, and she rose to her knees in the passenger seat. Gentry put his hands high on the wheel to allow her access to his belly. He gulped down the last few swigs of cold coffee and tossed the cup over his shoulder into the back. Justine then used adhesive tape to fasten Court’s small flashlight to the bottom of the steering wheel, lighting the area of her focus perfectly as long she was careful to keep her hands from casting shadows over the stab wound.
“I have never done this before on a human, even in the correct conditions, but I have sutured cats before.”
“You will do fine,” Court said. He realized they were both trying to steady the nerves of the other.
But Justine’s resolve faltered first. She looked up at the American and asked, “Are you sure? I will have to go deep into the muscle to close the wound. If I just pierce the skin it will tear as soon as you move.”
Court nodded, his eyes already watering in anticipation of the agony. “Justine,” he said, softly. “Whatever I say or do . . . do
She nodded, steeled herself. “Are you ready?”
He nodded shortly, pulled his seatbelt off his chest and placed it in his mouth. He bit down hard.
The roadway ran flat and straight, and the headlamps showed the way.
Justine pierced her patient’s flesh a half inch from the bloody knife wound. The hooked needle found its own path deep through his abdominal muscle. It passed through the slit, and fresh blood bubbled into the flashlight’s
