Among thieves

Just then a loud bang sounded as the kitchen side door opened and hit the wall, accompanied by grunts and voices.

From back in the kitchen, Ma

Alex yelled back. “All clear.”

Ciro and Ma

Blood covered Ma

The left side of Ciro’s face was streaked with blood. But the strain of holding up Joey B seemed to be more cause for discomfort than their injuries.

Brandon stepped forward calmly. “Has he been shot?”

“No,” said Ciro. “The poor bastard slipped on the ice and went down hard on his ass. He broke something. Can’t walk.”

Joey B added, “Fucking can’t even stand. Hurts like hell. Fuck.”

“Should we lay him down?”

Brandon put up both hands, “No. No. Don’t put him on the floor. It’ll be too hard to get him up. We have to get him on a table so I can examine him.”

Ciro asked, “How about the bar?”

Brandon looked at Joey B and at the bar top. “No, not wide enough.” He looked around and then said, “Okay, come on. Let’s put four of these tables together.”

While Alex and Phineas slid the tables together, Brandon fished around in his medical bag and came out with a syringe and a vial. He filled the syringe, plunged it into Joey B’s huge thigh, right through his pants, and emptied the contents into him.

“You won’t feel much in a few minutes.” He turned to the others and directed Phineas to take Ma

Phineas, Alex, and Ciro maneuvered Joey B onto the tables. The shot already taking effect, Joey B laid his head back and said, “Jesus, give me some more of that shit, doc.”

“Let me get a little better idea of what happened to you first.”

Ciro asked Alex and Phineas, “You heard from James and Demarco?”

“No. How’d you get Joey in here?”

“Guys from the market let us borrow a panel truck. We drove it right in the warehouse. I wasn’t sure we were going to make it the rest of the way. Ma

Alex said, “You okay? You got blood all over your face.”

Ciro peered into the cloudy mirror over the back bar.

“Shit.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know. I think something tore off that SUV out back and it zinged across my face.”

Alex had already wet down half a bar towel and handed it to Ciro, who wiped away the obvious blood and held the dry end against his wounds.

Brandon continued to gently examine Joey B, moving his legs, asking questions.

Ciro asked, “Many cops around?”

“No. They opened up the streets about an hour ago. I took a walk around. All I saw were Crime Scene people in the back lot. And that one patrol car out front.”

Phineas said, “Best we get upstairs anyhow. Let’s go.”

“What about Joey?”

Brandon had finished his examination. “He’ll be okay. He broke part of his hip, but nothing serious. It’s just going to hurt like hell for a while.”

“That’s good,” said Beck.

Everybody turned. Beck and Demarco had come in u

74

By 9 a.m. the second floor in Beck’s building looked like a combination hospital emergency room, computer hacker’s headquarters, and law office. With a kitchen.

The dining room table area served as Doctor Wright’s emergency room. The wrappers from surgical dressings and suture kits and bloodstained gauze littered the floor around him. The smell of isopropyl alcohol and Betadine mixed with the aroma of ham and eggs.

Phineas Dunleavy had taken over a space near the coffee table seating area, making phone calls to track down the court that had issued the warrants for Beck and Ciro.

Alex Liebowitz sat glued to his computer screens.

From the moment Ciro and Ma

Joey B had been made as comfortable as possible downstairs, covered in blankets and dozing under a large dose of painkiller. Brandon was ninety percent sure that Joey had cracked the ischium, a part of his hip. It was painful, but didn’t require surgery. They would get him to a hospital to confirm the diagnosis when the cops cleared out of the neighborhood.

After Joey, he’d come upstairs. His nurse had prepped Ma

Ma

“Ma

Perched on the edge of the dining table, his legs dangling, Ma

“Promise to let me know if something looks bad or starts to hurt too much.”

“I will.”

“Or if you start ru

“I will.”

Brandon looked carefully at Ma

Ma

Wright determined that Ciro’s wound could wait, and turned his attention to Beck. Beck had been hit by two bullets as he fell to the ground to avoid the shots from Kolenka’s bodyguard, both causing fairly superficial wounds. One ran across the side of his left thigh, four inches above his knife wound. The second had slashed across the side of his left arm, just below the shoulder.

Branded injected the wounded areas with enough anesthetics that Beck actually fell asleep during the hour it took to examine, clean, disinfect, and stitch everything. The bullets had torn through clothes, skin, and muscles. They weren’t deep, but they had left ragged trails that had to be fixed before they could be sutured shut. As for the long knife wound on his back, it had been open too long to stitch. The doctor used a substance akin to Krazy Glue to hold the skin together, disinfected the area, and expertly bandaged the wounds.

By the time Wright turned to Ciro, he had been working nearly two-and-a-half hours without a break.

Whatever piece of the SUV that hit Ciro had ripped past his left eye and taken a narrow slice out of his eyebrow as it passed across his forehead and temple. Bandon cleaned the wound, pinched it closed, and used butterfly bandages to seal it.

“You’ll have a nice line through your eyebrow once this heals.”

“Good. Chicks dig scars.”

Brandon Wright pictured the end result and decided Mr. Baldassare’s scar would most likely make him look even more intimidating than he already did.

Brandon sat and drank coffee with his surgical nurse while Demarco, who had emerged completely unscathed from his battles, cleaned up the bloody cotton, gauze, used syringe tops, and packaging that littered the floor around the dining room table.

Beck stood next to Wright putting on new clothes that Demarco had brought down when Brandon started working on him.

Wright said nothing, watching Beck gingerly step into fresh jeans and slip on a well-worn fla

Wright nodded toward the bloody clothes he had cut off Beck, and his sliced-up bloody shearling coat on the floor and said, “Do me a favor and burn those clothes in case the cops show up and notice that bullets made those tears.”