Chapter 3 - Midnight at the Clinic
The storm hit Bellhaven around ten o'clock that evening, rattling the antique glass windowpanes of my father's second-floor clinic. Down below, the streetlights cast long, shivering shadows across the empty wet asphalt.
I sat at my father's old oak desk, the green banker's lamp casting a warm circle of light over the specimen vial. Under my compound laboratory microscope, the metal told a precise story. The rifling grooves were left-handed, with a polygonal twist rate unique to custom European competition handguns. My father had been an army medic before opening his practice, and the dusty forensic pathology books on his shelves confirmed what I was seeing.
A sudden, sharp scrape came from the alley fire escape outside my back operatory window.
I froze, killing the desk lamp instantly. The clinic plunged into near-total darkness, illuminated only by the intermittent flashes of distant lightning.
I slipped the glass vial into the inner pocket of my winter coat, grabbed an eight-inch stainless steel surgical elevator from my tray, and pressed my back flat against the wall beside the hallway door. Footsteps—light, deliberate, and muffled by wet rubber soles—crept along the hallway carpet toward my office.
The silhouette of a man appeared in the doorway, holding a silenced pistol low at his side.
Lightning cracked across the skyline. In the split-second flash of white light, I caught the gleam of an expensive gold wristwatch with an alligator leather strap—the exact watch Carmine Lombardi had been tapping against his knee during the surgery. But the man holding the gun wasn't Carmine; it was one of the two guards who had mocked my scrubs at the mansion gate earlier that afternoon.
"Doc," the man whispered, his voice smooth and cold. "Make this easy. Just leave the vial and your laptop on the desk, and you'll wake up tomorrow to an empty clinic instead of a chalk outline. Carmine sends his regards."
He stepped inside, sweeping the barrel toward the desk.
I didn't wait. I lunged forward with everything I had, driving the blunt steel end of the surgical elevator directly into the nerve cluster behind his left ear. He let out a strangled yelp, his knees buckling instantly, but his gun hand whipped around blindly, firing a shot. The suppressed bullet shattered the heavy glass front of my father's antique medicine cabinet, raining glass shards across the floor.
He swung an elbow into my ribs, knocking the breath from my lungs. I crashed against the wall, dropping my tool. As he raised the pistol to my chest, a deafening blast tore through the room.
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The hitman's head jerked back, and he collapsed face-first onto the linoleum tiles.
Standing in the shattered doorway, clad in a dripping black wool trench coat with smoke curling from the barrel of a heavy semi-automatic, was Salvatore Lombardi.
