Chapter 2 - The Scalpel and the Secret
Dr. Vance Miller looked out of place in the basement medical suite beneath Solace. A retired trauma surgeon who had lost his license thirty years ago after taking cash to fix a bullet wound for a made man, Miller now operated out of a reinforced bunker filled with stainless steel counters and humming refrigeration units.
The mastiff—now christened Goliath by Tommy, though Alio hadn't officially accepted the name—lay heavily sedated on the central operating table.
"He shouldn't be alive, Mr. Valente," Miller said, shining a high-intensity penlight into the dog's left ear. "Severe systemic sepsis. His white blood cell count is through the roof. Kidney function is shot. And this leg..." The doctor gestured to the swollen, purple limb. "That's not an ordinary bite or a car accident. That's a gunshot wound that was crudely stitched shut with heavy nylon thread, then left to fester for at least three weeks."
Alio stood in the corner of the room, smoking a cigarette he hadn't lit, staring through the glass partition. "Can you save him?"
"Surgery will take four hours," Miller replied, picking up a surgical scalpel and testing the edge with his thumb. "I have to dig out whatever lead or foreign object is lodged in that shoulder joint, flush the infection with saline and antibiotics, and pray his heart doesn't give out under anesthesia. To be entirely honest with you? The odds are about twenty to one against."
"Make it ten to one," Alio said flatly.
Miller gave a dry, humorless chuckle. "I'll do my best, Alio. But money and threats don't hold a scalpel steady when a dog's heart rate drops to thirty beats a minute."
Before Alio could respond, the heavy steel door at the top of the basement stairs banged open. Tommy Keen rushed down, his overcoat damp with sleet, holding a heavy manila folder and a cracked, mud-caked electronic tablet.
"Boss," Tommy panted, catching his breath as he reached the bottom of the stairs. "We ran the serial number on the remnants of the tracking harness we cut off his neck. It wasn't registered to a civilian pet registry."
Alio turned his gaze slowly from the operating table to his lieutenant. "Whose was it?"
"A private security contractor out in Cicero. Apex Bio-Defense Solutions," Tommy said, flipping open the folder. "They run black-site security testing for pharmaceutical corporations and private defense labs. But here's the kicker—Apex is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vane Logistics."
The room seemed to drop ten degrees.
Vane Logistics was not a low-level street gang or a rival mafia family. It was a multi-billion-dollar shipping and logistics conglomerate controlled by Marcus Vane—a man who sat on the city’s municipal oversight board, dined with senators, and laundered money for half the international syndicates on the East Coast.
"Marcus Vane," Alio muttered, the name tasting like ash on his tongue. "What would Vane’s security firm want with a mastiff?"
"I checked deeper," Tommy said, lowering his voice. "Three weeks ago, an anonymous tip came into the city health department about an illegal underground testing facility operating out of an abandoned slaughterhouse in the Stockyards. The raid happened at midnight. The feds cleared out the paperwork, but local witnesses reported seeing three heavy-duty transport vans leaving the loading dock ten minutes before the police arrived. One of them had its rear doors smashed open."
Alio looked back through the glass at the massive, scarred body of the dog lying under the harsh surgical lights. "They were using him for something."
"Or testing something on him," Tommy corrected grimly. "If Vane’s people realize the dog didn't die in that alley—if they find out he crawled all the way to Solace and ended up in your hands—they're going to come looking. They can't afford to have whatever happened in that slaughterhouse leak to the press."
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Alio reached into his pocket, pulled out a gold lighter, and flipped the cap open and shut. Clack. Clack.
"Let them come," Alio said. "For five years, nobody in this city has given me a reason to tear down Marcus Vane's empire. It looks like the dog just handed me one."
