Chapter 2 - The Ghost Clinic on Fenwick
Marin killed the engine two blocks before she reached the intersection of Fenwick and Third Street.
She let the heavy sedan glide in neutral through the salt-air shadows until it came to a rest behind an overgrown hedge of wild bayberry.
The building before them was a squat, two-story brick structure with cracked stucco peeling from the foundation.
Five years ago, a rusted sign had hung over the iron gate reading: Harbor Free Clinic.
It had been funded by private maritime endowments until the money mysteriously vanished and the city padlocked the doors.
Marin had worked thirty-six volunteer shifts in this building during her final year of paramedic training.
She knew which floorboards groaned under a boot and which windows had broken latches.
She stepped out into the biting fog and opened the rear door of the sedan.
Ashworth was slumped against the leather, his skin glowing with the gray, waxen sheen of severe metabolic acidosis.
His breathing was a shallow, wet rattle in his chest that told her everything she needed to know about his left lung.
“Can you stand?” she asked, her voice low and stripped of sympathy.
He did not answer with words, but his right hand caught the door frame with white-knuckled intensity.
He dragged his six-foot-two frame out of the car, his height towering over her despite his shattered posture.
His entire left side was dead weight, soaked in blood that had turned black in the cold night air.
Marin tucked his uninjured arm across her shoulders and braced her core against his massive frame.
Every step up the cracked concrete steps sent a shudder of agony through his torso.
At the clinic’s rear delivery door, the rusted deadbolt was still held in place by an old steel hasp.
Marin reached into her pocket, retrieved her steel utility knife, and wedged the heavy blade into the gap between the frame and the latch.
She drove her shoulder hard against the oak panel.
With a dry, splintering pop, the corroded wood gave way.
She hauled him inside and kicked the heavy door shut behind them with her heel.
The smell inside the clinic was a familiar mixture of dry rot, old bleach, and damp plaster.
She moved him through the darkened hallway without turning on a single overhead light.
In the rear treatment room, a single vinyl examination table sat beneath a pair of drawn blackout curtains.
She pushed him onto the cold vinyl surface.
He collapsed back with a sharp, ragged gasp that ended in a cough of dark red sputum.
Marin did not hesitate for a second.
She pulled her tactical penlight from her pocket, clicked it onto its lowest amber setting, and clamped it between her teeth.
With her box cutter, she sliced his five-thousand-dollar cashmere coat down the center seam from lapel to hem.
She cut away his tailored dress shirt and undershirt in two swift strokes.
The damage exposed under the amber beam made her jaw tighten.
There was a through-and-through puncture wound beneath his left clavicle where a bullet had torn through muscle tissue.
Two of his ribs on the left side were visibly displaced, moving asynchronously with his breathing in a classic flail segment.
His skin was ice-cold, covered in a greasy layer of clammy sweat.
“You have a hemothorax building in the pleural cavity,” she said, her voice dropping into the clinical flat tone she had not used in two years.
Ashworth looked up at her through swollen, blood-crusted eyelids.
“No… hospitals,” he rasped, his voice vibrating with absolute authority even while choking on his own blood.
“I’m not taking you to a hospital,” she said, walking toward the metal supply cabinets against the far wall.
The cabinets had been looted years ago, but the bottom drawer was locked with a small padlock.
Marin struck the lock twice with the iron head of an old oxygen wrench she found on the counter.
The brass latch sheared off with a sharp metallic snap.
Inside the bottom drawer were supplies the scavengers had overlooked: three sealed rolls of wide elastic bandage, iodine scrub, surgical silk, and a sealed sterile chest tube kit.
The packaging was dusty and three years past its expiration date, but the internal plastic seals remained intact.
She carried the tray back to the table and set it on an iron rolling stool.
Ashworth watched her hands move with the sharp, effortless precision of an expert.
“You’re… not a delivery driver,” he whispered, his eyes narrowing through his agony.
“Tonight I am,” she said flatly, pulling on a pair of powdered latex gloves from the kit.
She poured the cold brown iodine directly over the bullet wound on his chest.
Ashworth did not scream, but his back arched off the vinyl table and his fists clenched until his knuckles turned purple.
“The bullet passed through the pectoralis major and nicked an intercostal vessel,” she told him, not looking at his face.
“The pressure in your chest is going to collapse your lung within fifteen minutes if I don’t decompress it.”
“Do it,” he ground out through clenched teeth.
Marin picked up an eleven-gauge scalpel from the kit and peeled back the foil wrapper.
She found the fourth intercostal space along his mid-axillary line with her left index finger.
She did not have local anesthetic.
She did not have morphine.
She looked directly into his eyes, holding his gaze with an unblinking, uncompromising stare.
“Bite on your coat sleeve,” she instructed quietly.
Ashworth ignored the fabric and stared back at her with terrifying intensity.
“Just cut,” he whispered.
Marin made a precise one-inch incision through the skin and intercostal muscle.
She heard the sharp hiss of trapped air and dark, stagnant blood immediately escaping the pleural cavity.
Ashworth’s head slammed back against the vinyl with a guttural groan that shook his entire frame.
She inserted a plastic decompression tube through the tract and anchored it with a heavy silk suture.
The relief on his respiratory system was immediate; his sternum began rising with deeper, smoother mechanics.
Marin worked without stopping, her gloved fingers flying over the wound with sterile gauze, pressure dressings, and wide adhesive tape.
She swabbed the deep lacerations along his cheekbones and temple, clearing the cannery mud from his skin.
As she washed the blood from his collarbone, her fingers brushed against an object pinned to the inside of his shredded vest.
It was a heavy brass signet ring engraved with a three-masted schooner inside an iron wheel.
The crest of the Ashworth Maritime Holding Corporation.
Marin’s hands froze for a fraction of a second.
Ashworth felt the hesitation and turned his dark eyes toward her face.
“You recognized… the name at the yard,” he said, his breathing now steadier, though still thin.
“Everyone in this county knows who owns the docks,” Marin replied coldly, resuming her bandaging.
“No,” Ashworth whispered, his gaze pinning her like an iron spike.
“You didn’t look at me like someone looking at a landlord.”
“You looked at me like someone looking at the man who murdered them.”
Marin tightened the elastic wrap around his broken ribs with enough deliberate force to make him catch his breath.
“Keep talking and your heart rate will spike,” she said without looking up.
She walked over to the rusted ceramic sink, tore off her bloody gloves, and scrubbed her hands in freezing tap water.
In the cracked mirror above the basin, she looked at her own pale, hollow reflection.
Her face was smeared with mud and dried flare smoke.
She had crossed a line tonight that could never be uncrossed.
She had stolen a car from professional assassins, saved the most dangerous man in the state, and abandoned her truck.
Her delivery truck.
She turned off the faucet and dried her hands on her jacket lining.
She walked back to the exam table and stood over Ashworth, her jaw clenched tight.
“The man who hijacked my orange van,” she said, her voice dropping into a razor-sharp whisper.
“What is his name?”
Ashworth looked up at the ceiling, his jaw muscle ticking beneath his bruised skin.
“Kroll,” he said.
“And the other one?”
“Garrick,” Ashworth answered quietly.
“They take orders from Marcus Vance.”
The name Marcus Vance sent a wave of nausea through Marin’s chest.
Vance was the head of security for the Ashworth conglomerate, the smooth-talking executive who had testified before the state medical board two years ago.
He was the man who had looked the licensing board in the eye and claimed Marin had stolen narcotics from the ambulance while an Ashworth heir died on her stretcher.
“Why were Vance’s men burying you in the cannery lot?” Marin asked, leaning over him.
Julian Ashworth turned his head toward her, his lips parting in a cold, bitter smile that showed blood on his teeth.
“Because I finally found the bank records proving Marcus Vance murdered my nephew,” he whispered.
“And because Marcus Vance has spent the last forty-eight hours buying every judge, detective, and harbor guard in this city.”
Marin felt the floor beneath her boots tilt.
“Your nephew,” she said, her voice barely audible above the hum of the old fluorescent tubes.
“Leo Ashworth,” Julian said, his dark eyes never leaving her face.
“The boy who died in the ambulance two winters ago on the turnpike.”
May you like
Marin stood frozen in the center of the dark treatment room.
The ghost she had been running from for two years had just been dragged out of the ocean mud and laid across her examination table.
