Page 49 of Patch

“It can.” Dread didn’t look up. “You want to do it, or you want to watch me do it?”

“I want to watch you do it and then tell you what I’d have done differently.”

“That’s the right answer.”

“Huh.” Freak looked at his own shoulder like it had made the decision without consulting him. “That’s eight days of my life I’m not getting back.”

“You’d have had eight days regardless. You’d just have had them with a tube in you.”

“That’s cold, Doc.”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Somebody’s got to.” He shifted on the couch and she put two fingers on his collarbone and put him back. “That right there. That’s a war crime.”

“That’s a hand.”

“It’s a war crime with a hand on it. I want a lawyer.”

She didn’t laugh. She never laughed at him, which had become the entire foundation of Freak’s interest in her.

She laid it out on a towel on the coffee table. Gauze, tape, a pair of hemostats. Everything in the order she uses, which I’d watched her do twice now and could have set out myself.

Dread peeled the dressing and looked at the site for maybe two seconds.

“Clean,” she said, before he could. “No tracking, no odor, margins are soft.”

“Margins are soft,” he agreed, and held his hand out, and she put the hemostats in it without being asked.

“Deep breath in,” Dread said. “Let it out slow.”

He pulled on the exhale. Steady, unhurried, one continuous motion. The Penrose Drain tube came out of Freak’s shoulder in a long clear length that looked considerably more like plumbing than medicine, and Freak said a word about somebody’s mother.

Dread laid it in her open hand without looking, the way you do with somebody you’ve decided about.

Then she held it out. Not at Freak. Not toward a trash can. At me.

Second time she’d done it. Sixty-forty she wasn’t even thinking about it.

I crossed the room, took it out of her hand, and put it in the biohazard bag under the sink.

“Pressure,” Dread said. “Somebody. Three minutes.”

I was already reaching for the gauze.

I got two fingers on it before I realized what I was doing. When it registered, something in my chest went sideways, and I kept my hand exactly where it was because taking it off would have been worse.

“Right there,” she said. “Three minutes. Don’t lift to check.”

“I know not to lift to check.”

“Most people lift to check.”

“I’m not most people.”

“No,” she said. “You’re not.”

She said it the way she said everything, which was clinical and without one ounce of ceremony, and she went on taping the edges of a dressing over my hand while I held a man’s shoulder closed on a Saturday afternoon with the television going.