“I saw a lot of gunshot wounds in the Pacific,” Knox explained. “Even patched a couple myself. But I’d feel a hell of a lot better with a trained pair of hands on this.”
Tom bent and pretended to examine the wound by porch light, but he knew full well he was looking at Luther Davis’s handiwork. “How did this happen?”
“You don’t want to know, Doc,” Thornfield grunted.
“How ’bout we get off this porch?” Frank suggested. “Where you can take a better look?”
Before Tom could protest, all three men were inside the clinic, the door closed behind them. “Where you want us?” Frank asked.
Knox knew where the surgery was. Most of the Triton Battery men had been to the clinic for physicals, if nothing else. Tom was afraid that if they even went close to the surgery, Luther Davis would charge out and finish the work he’d started across the river.
“There’s an examining table in the room next to my private office,” Tom said, pointing. “Down there, to your right. Room one. Go on in there.”
While the men carried their comrade through the waiting room like exhausted soldiers, Tom walked back toward the surgery. “I’ll be right there,” he assured them. “I need some of Dr. Lucas’s instruments.”
“Go help him, Glenn,” Frank ordered.
“No, I’ve got it!” Tom called with a pounding heart, looking back to make sure he wasn’t being followed.
He hurried back to the surgery, flicked on the light, and held his finger to his lips. Luther was crouched in a fighting stance with his pistol, while Jimmy sat on the examining table, motionless as an ebony Buddha.
“It’s your Klan friends,” Tom whispered. He looked at Luther. “The one you shot’s bleeding like a hog.”
“Good,” Luther whispered, rising and pacing in the little room. “I’m gon’ have to kill them goddamn sons of bitches yet.”
“Stop taking the Lord’s name in vain,” Jimmy said mildly.
“You’re not killing anybody,” Tom said, blocking the big man’s path. “There’s three of them, and they’ve certainly armed themselves by now. You sit here and don’t move a muscle. If you make any noise, you’ll have klukkers all over you. And nobody wins a gunfight in a twelve-by-twelve room. I can tell you that from experience. Understood?”
After Luther nodded, Tom grabbed some instruments and went back to the room where he’d sent the Klansmen.
The next forty-five minutes were the tensest of his civilian life. All three Klansmen were accustomed to dealing with wounds, but their residual anger was palpable. Most alarming, they knew the identities of “both them niggers” who’d tried to “personally integrate the Flyway” that night. As Tom probed Sonny Thornfield’s leg for the .25 slug, Frank said, “What you doing up here at this hour, Doc? Your wife said you was on a house call.”
Tom shook his head and kept working. “To tell you the truth, I was banging one of my nurses till you assholes showed up.”
After a moment of stunned silence, all three men burst out laughing.
“I thought you guys were my wife come to catch me,” Tom added. “That’s what took me so long to answer the door. I had to get the girl out with her clothes on.”
“We definitely owe you one, then,” Frank said. “Any time you need a favor, you let us know.”
“Count on it,” Tom said, finally extracting the slug to the accompaniment of Thornfield’s screams.
“Which nurse you bangin’?” Sonny asked, breathing hard. “You ain’t bangin’ that colored girl, are you?”
Tom’s face heated instantly. “Why?”
“Sonny’s jealous,” Frank said, laughing. “He’s got the hots for that one.”
“Bullshit,” Sonny growled. “It was her brother who—”
“Quit your bitchin’,” Frank snapped. “When the time comes, I’ll let you skin the buck who done this. Till then, take it like a man.”
“I’ll make that nigger squeal, all right,” Sonny vowed. Then he went white and vomited over the edge of the table.
“Aw, hell,” Frank groaned, backing away. He picked the bloody and deformed slug out of the kidney-shaped metal tray. “Messing up Doc’s floor for a little pimp bullet like this. Clean that puke up, Glenn. Doc ain’t got no nurse on duty.” Frank punched Tom on the arm and laughed. “Least not no more, he don’t!”
While Morehouse obediently cleaned up the vomitus, Tom finished working in silence. Twenty minutes was all it took to deal with the superficial injuries, but as he worked, he wondered whether Luther Davis had obeyed his order to remain in the surgery. More than anything, he worried how Viola was holding up in the darkness of Exam Three. He prayed she wouldn’t snap and try to check on her brother. Surely she wasn’t that crazy—
“Like we said, Doc,” Frank said expansively. “Anything you ever need, you let us know.”
“Just don’t let this happen again. You’re cutting into my sex life.”
The three men laughed heartily as Tom led them out, Thornfield limping along with Morehouse’s support.
“Get home and rest that leg,” Tom advised. “You can get your revenge next month. Come to the office tomorrow and let me check it. You all need rest, by the way. Head injuries are nothing to fool with.”
Frank laughed. “We’ll rest when we’re dead, Doc. Take it easy, okay? And sorry ’bout your *.”
Tom shook his head and shut the door, sweat suffusing his skin in a sudden wave. He’d felt fear like this during the war, but something was different now. In Korea he’d mostly worried about himself. Now he had a wife and two children to protect. And tonight he’d stepped between two warring armies—small ones, perhaps, but as vicious in their hatreds as any on earth.
He shut off the light and went back to get Viola. He found her shivering in the dark exam room, her shirt unbuttoned to the waist. A white bra showed through, cradling her breasts as though for a Playboy spread.