Chapter 1: Rule One: Leave the Guns at the Door
The sign on the clinic door has three rules on it, and you wrote them yourself, in marker, the week Dr. Thompkins handed you the keys.
LEAVE THE GUNS AT THE DOOR.
NO NAMES.
DON'T COME BACK.
The first one is obvious. The second one is a kindness: the people who come to a free clinic on Park Row at two in the morning, after the ERs have stopped picking up and the bars have stopped serving, usually have reasons not to be written down. The third one is the closest thing you have to a prayer. Get stitched, get antibiotics, get out, and don't come back, because people who come back to a place like this twice in one week are people who aren't going to make it to a third.
Leslie Thompkins read the sign the morning you put it up, her reading glasses low on her nose, her coffee in a mug that says WORLD'S OKAYEST DOCTOR. She was quiet for a while. Then she said, "That last one's going to break your heart," and went back to her crossword.
It hasn't yet. You've been running the night shift for fourteen months. You're twenty-seven, you quit a surgical residency at Gotham General to do this, and your heart is a tough little organ that you keep in a lockbox behind your sternum, next to your student loans.
At 2:20 on a Tuesday in October, you're mopping the floor of Exam Two and thinking about bed when somebody bangs on the front door hard enough to rattle the glass.
You know that knock. It's the knock of somebody who's holding their insides in with the other hand.
You buzz the door without looking at the camera, which Leslie has told you a hundred times not to do. It opens. Somebody comes in, and the door swings shut behind him, and you look up from the mop.
There's a man standing in your waiting room in a red helmet.
He's big. That's the first thing. He fills the door frame of the little waiting room with its plastic chairs and its rack of pamphlets about blood pressure. Leather jacket, dark tactical pants, heavy boots, a gray body armor vest with a red bat stenciled across the chest like a slap in somebody's face. The helmet is smooth and red and has no face at all, just a curved blank surface that catches the fluorescent light and gives your own reflection back to you, small and holding a mop.
His left hand is pressed against his side, under the ribs. Blood is coming out between the fingers of the glove.
"Evening," says the helmet. The voice comes through a modulator, flattened and deep. "You open?"
You've watched the news. Everybody in Gotham has watched the news. You know exactly who this is.
You lean the mop against the wall.
"Rule one," you say, and point at the sign on the door behind him.
The helmet turns to look at it. There's a long pause. Somewhere in that blank face you can feel someone deciding whether you're serious.
"You're joking."
"I'm not. Guns go in the bin." You point at the blue plastic recycling bin by the door, which says PAPER ONLY and has, at present, two paperback romances and a takeout menu in it. "You'll get them back when you leave. If you'd rather keep them, there's a hospital nine blocks north, and you can bleed all over their waiting room for four hours instead."
He stands there, dripping on your clean floor. Then, slowly, with his free hand, he pulls a pistol from the holster on his right thigh and drops it into the paper bin. It lands on the romance novels with a heavy plastic clunk. Another from the left thigh. Then, after a pause where you just look at him, a knife from his boot. Then, after a longer pause, a second, smaller knife from somewhere in his jacket.
"That's all of them?"
"That's all of them you need to know about."
"That's not how rules work."
"It's how mine work." But he shrugs out of the jacket, gingerly, and drops it on a plastic chair, and you can see the outline of his shoulders under the black thermal shirt and the vest, and you file that away somewhere you're not going to look at until later.
"Exam One," you say. "Through there. Up on the table."
The stab wound is about four centimeters, angled under the ribs on the left side, and it's clean, which tells you somebody knew what they were doing with the blade and so did he, because he turned into it. It hasn't gone deep. It's bleeding like it's personally offended.
You get him out of the vest. It takes both of you; the straps are stiff with old blood, some of which is clearly his. You cut the thermal shirt off him with trauma shears because he can't lift his arm, and when it falls away you stop, just for a moment, with the shears in your hand.
You've seen bodies. You did eighteen months of trauma rotations at Gotham General, and you've seen what this city does to people. But you've never seen anything like this one.
He's built like a wall somebody took a lot of care with, heavy through the chest and shoulders and narrow at the waist, and every inch of it is marked. Old bullet scars, puckered and white, three of them. Long knife scars that have healed thin and silver. A burn scar like a splash of paint across his left shoulder. And low on his chest, over the sternum, a strange, faint pattern of old fractures you can see in the shape of the bone itself, like something hit him there very hard, a long time ago, and he put himself back together a little crooked.
He watches you look. You can feel it, even through the helmet.
"Not a lot of room left," he says. "Try to find a fresh spot."
You put on gloves. "Lie back."
He lies back on the exam table. The paper crackles under him. The table isn't built for somebody his size; his boots hang off the end.
You clean the wound. You numb it, and he doesn't flinch at the needle, which most people do, even the ones who walk in with knives in them. You irrigate it and check it and decide you don't need to send him anywhere, which is good, because you don't think he'd go. Then you pull the light down and thread a suture and start to close.
For a while it's quiet. Just the buzz of the fluorescents and the tiny tug of thread through skin and his breathing, slow and even through the vents of the helmet. You work close. You have to. Your forearm rests on his stomach for leverage, and his skin is very warm under the glove, and every time he breathes you feel it.
"You've done this before," he says.
"Couple thousand times."
"Not on people like me."
"There are no people like you," you say, without looking up. "There are just people with holes in them. You're one of those."
There's a sound from inside the helmet that might be a laugh. It comes out of the modulator as a burst of static.
"I need to check you for a concussion," you say. "You took a hit to the head tonight. There's blood on the back of your collar."
"Not taking the helmet off, Doc."
"Then I can't check your pupils."
"My pupils are great. Best pupils in Gotham."
"You could have a brain bleed."
"I'm a quick healer."
"Nobody's that quick."
"Don't bet on it," he says, and something about the way he says it, very dry, like a joke only one person in the room is in on, makes you look up at the helmet. Just a curved red surface, showing you your own face. You look tired. You look like somebody holding a needle a little too long.
You tie off the last stitch. Eleven. Neat as a seam. You put a dressing over it and tape it down, and you smooth the tape flat with your fingers, once, along his ribs, and you feel him go very still under your hand.
You take your hand away.
"Keep it dry for two days," you say, and your voice comes out exactly normal, which you're proud of. "Watch for redness, heat, pus, fever. If you get any of those, come back. Otherwise—"
"Rule three," he says.
"Rule three."
He sits up. He does it slowly, testing, and the muscles in his stomach shift under the tape, and you go and look very hard at the supply cabinet for a while. When you turn around, he's standing. He looms over you. In a room this small, he looms over everything.
"How much?" he says.
"It's a free clinic."
"Didn't ask what it's called."
He doesn't wait for an answer. He goes out to the waiting room, picks his jacket up off the chair and shrugs into it, hissing a little at the stretch. He fishes in an inside pocket and drops something on the reception desk. Then he collects his guns and his knives out of the paper bin, one by one, unhurried, sliding them back into place.
At the door he stops. The helmet turns toward you.
"Thanks, Doc," he says. "Good hands."
The door swings shut behind him. You stand there in the waiting room for a long time after that, listening to the fluorescents buzz.
On the desk there's a roll of hundred-dollar bills thick enough to keep the clinic's lights on until spring.
You don't sleep much. You keep thinking about eleven stitches, and the heat of his skin through your glove, and the old fracture pattern on his sternum. You've only ever seen that once before, in a textbook, on a man who'd been beaten with something metal. The textbook had called it a perimortem injury. Perimortem means at the time of death. The man in the textbook didn't get up.
You keep thinking about best pupils in Gotham, and you laugh into your pillow at four in the morning like an idiot.
The next night is quiet. A sprained wrist, two blood pressure checks, a woman with a cough you don't like the sound of. You're restocking the gauze at 1:50 a.m. when you realize you've dropped your penlight somewhere and spend ten minutes looking for it, swearing, before you remember the last place you had it was Exam One. On the tray. Next to a man in a red helmet.
At 2:15, somebody knocks on the clinic door.
Not hard. Not the bleeding knock. Three easy taps, like someone who expects you to answer.
You look at the camera this time. Leslie would be proud.
There's a man on your doorstep. He's in a brown leather jacket and a gray hoodie with the hood down, and he's holding two coffees in a cardboard tray, and he's standing a little stiffly, favoring his left side. His hair is black and a little too long, and there's a streak of white in the front of it like a brushstroke. There's a bruise coming up yellow at his temple. He's not wearing a helmet.
He's looking straight up into the camera, like he knows exactly where it is.
You buzz the door. You don't know why. You stand in your waiting room with your arms crossed while he comes in and lets the door close behind him, and then he's just there, in your fluorescent light, in a face you've never seen and somehow already know: a strong jaw with a thin scar along it, a nose that's been broken at least once, a mouth that looks like it's never once done what it was told. And eyes. You weren't ready for the eyes. They're blue, and then when he turns his head they catch the light and go a strange, clear green, like sea glass, like something lit from underneath.
He holds out your penlight.
"You left this," he says. No modulator. His real voice is lower than you expected, and rougher, and very slightly amused.
You take it. Your fingers don't touch his. You make sure of that.
"Rule three," you say. Your voice comes out a little thin. "Don't come back."
"Yeah." He sets the coffee down on the reception desk, between the hand sanitizer and the clipboard. "I read it. I've been thinking about it all day, actually. It says don't come back."
He pulls one of the coffees out of the tray and holds it out to you, and when you don't take it, he just keeps holding it out, patient, like he's got all night.
"Thing is," he says, "it doesn't say anything about him. And I'm not him."
He tilts his head toward Exam One. Toward the tray where the penlight was. Toward the place where you spent forty minutes with your hands on his body, both of you pretending that was all it was.
"I'm just a guy," he says, "who wants to know when you get off."