Ada had my hand in hers, like a rattlesnake seizing a mouse, in a movement that was so fast I didn’t even see it. She twisted my hand backward toward my wrist and came around at me, out of her chair, suddenly closer and taller and more terrifying than I could ever have imagined. My wrist cracked and my fingers ached. She forced me down to one knee.
“Hands off, bitch,” she seethed.
“I’m a doctor,” I yelped. “Oh god. Oh, please let go. I’m a doctor. The baby is sick—”
“The baby is sick, yeah.” Ada forced me down further. “It’s none of your business.”
“She shouldn’t be here,” I managed. The pain was searing up my arm. I imagined my veins bursting. Bones splintering. A guard was watching from the end of the row, arms folded, doing nothing. “The rash. The purple rash! It’s—”
“It’s what?”
“I’m not sure, but if there’s bruising—”
“You better speak faster, bitch, before I break your arm.”
“She might have meningococcal disease. It can be deadly. She needs to get to a hospital now.”
“What is she saying?” Ada’s cousin was pounding her fist on the glass, her voice muffled from the other side. We both looked at her. The distraction caused Ada to go too far. I felt two of my fingers pop, dull heat, broken proximal phalanx bones. My mind grabbed at deep, detached thoughts to try to drag me away from the pain. I thought about my hands. About how once they’d been the fine instruments of my craft as a surgeon, and now a criminal overlord was using them as her tools of punishment in a filthy prison visiting room.
Ada reluctantly released me on her cousin’s command and I slithered pitifully to the bench, dragged myself up so that I could see the child in its mother’s arms. I took the receiver from where Ada had dropped it and held it to my ear with a trembling hand. As I asked the mother about body stiffness and the child’s reaction to food, Ada breathed in my ear, hot and menacing, the whisper of a devil.
“You better not be tellin’ me my cousin’s a bad mother, little whore,” Ada said. “You better not be sayin’ she can’t take care of her own kid.”
“Take the baby to a hospital,” I told Ada’s cousin. “Go now. Show them the rash and the bruises and tell them about the fever and the sensitivity to light. You haven’t got much time.”
Ada’s cousin disappeared with the baby. I tried to turn around but Ada slammed my head against the desk and pinned it there with a hand like a steel claw. Her thighs were against mine, trapping me in a painful, humiliating crouch in the cubicle.
“Either you’re right about that kid, or you’re dead,” she told me. “Nobody interrupts me on a visit.”
I never heard from Ada Maverick directly if I’d been right about the child. But as word of the incident spread throughout the prison, I waited hour by hour to receive a brutal punishment from the terrifying and beautiful gangster or one of her minions. None came. I made myself scarce, slept with my shank, and discouraged anyone I heard speaking about the event from spreading it further or developing it into something it was not. After a few weeks I assumed, right or wrong, that Ada had forgotten completely about me. She and her crew breezed past me in the prison halls without even a glance in my direction.
Now I stood outside Ada’s club, waiting for a break in the traffic so that Sneak and I could follow the men in the line into the darkness.
“Just follow my lead,” I said as we approached the doors.
Following my lead turned out to be impossible. As we stepped into the small foyer, I had just enough time for my eyes to adjust to the dark, to see the glossy black tiles on the walls and the velvet curtains hanging before the entrance to the club. Then an arm swept around my neck. I felt suit buttons against my back. The man yanked me into an embrace against his chest, and from the corner of my eye I caught sight of Sneak being similarly grabbed by another huge, suited man.
“This way, ladies,” the man who had me said. He shoved me through a small side door padded with leather and ornate gold studs. I was blind. The narrow hallway was pitch black. Only his guiding hand on my shoulder got me to the end of the passageway and into Ada’s office.
We arrived in a grand, windowless room lit only by huge gold candelabras and a diamond chandelier the circumference of a four-seater dining table. Ada sat behind an enormous oak desk, her elbows splayed, a bottle of what looked like whiskey at one and a huge red leather notebook at the other. She was dressed in black lace, pushing closed a small gold laptop, through which I assumed she had watched us approach the club from the road out front. The suited men shoved Sneak and me into wooden chairs before our queen.
“Just follow your lead?” Sneak sneered at me. I frowned back.
“There’s only one explanation for this,” Ada said. Her voice took me all the way back to Happy Valley. My fingers burned as though broken anew. “You two must be high as fuck.”
“I’m kinda high,” Sneak agreed, nodding. The man behind her whipped out his big hand and slapped her on the back of the head.
“This ain’t In-N-Out Burger, bitches,” Ada snapped. “You don’t just roll up here unannounced and come strolling through the doors. This is my house. Last person who decided to come barging in here without calling ahead and requesting a meeting left half a set of teeth on the floor before Fred here showed him out.”
I looked at Fred, the goon
