Page 6 of Saint of the Shadows

“Yeah. The bastard sucker-punched me after I untied him.”

“Would you let me look at it?” She reached toward his right side.

He stepped away. “I’m fine. Took up boxing in order to take punches.” The detective smiled. Charming crow’s feet surrounded his eyes colored with flecks of amber, floating in a sea of blue. No, his name was Qu… Qui…

Blue. Marisol thought of the blue eyes of the Patron Saint. She studied the detective longer. Towering height. Square jaw. Side injury. A build that could pack a punch. Suddenly the images of naked, well-defined muscles and a taped wound entered Marisol’s mind. She must be making a stupid face again because the detective raised an eyebrow and grinned.

The grin flexed into a grimace when he strained to reach into his back pocket. He drew out a beat-up business card. “If anyone comes looking for our crazed crime boss. You can leave a message at my desk.”

Marisol toyed with the card in her fingers. Detective Tobias Quinlan. Quinlan, that was his name! His wallet had dulled its corners. They started to walk to the main entrance of the ER. Marisol said, “You know, if you need to work onyour boxing rhythm, you should stop by my dad’s boxing club. I usually work out there before heading here.”

“I haven’t spoken to ole Pete since… since…”

Marisol braced for the awkward mention of Caz’s sentencing, the orange jumpsuit-sporting elephant in the room.

“Since I arrested him for public intox back when I worked a beat.”

Oh. The other elephant in the room. As a cop, he probably had so many run-ins with Dad and her brother that the wide hospital hallway suddenly became a clown car of the unmentionable Novotny elephants. She was too much work, indeed. She held out the business card to return it. “Actually, I don’t know anything useful.”

“You could call about something else.” He pushed her hand carrying the card back. The moment his fingers bristled against hers, he jerked his touch away and scrubbed his hand through his salt and pepper hair. “God, I don’t know why I said that. If it helps, we dropped the charges.”

Marisol laughed at that shot of comfort. Life dropped nothing when it came to her family.

“Well, I’m gonna cut out before I mess this up anymore, Nurse Novotny.”

“Marisol,” she reminded him.

He repeated her name, and his face lit up. The dopey grin didn’t last long as Tobias gripped his side and hobbled out of the ER.

“Wait!” Marisol ran to the nurse’s station and reached into the mini refrigerator. She drew out an ice pack and wrapped it in paper towels before running it back to Tobias. “For your side.” She offered him the ice.

Tobias unbuttoned the bottom half of his dress shirt and tucked the cold pack through the opening. He backed out of the ER, his gaze never leaving Marisol’s direction until the automatic doors opened.

Heat rose to her cheeks. The Florence Nightingale effect gave her lots of luck tonight. She watched Tobias until he walked out of her sight down the sidewalk.

After she tucked the business card into her front pocket, Marisol headed to the old shopkeeper fresh from an orthopedic technician’s visit. He rested with his new cast up in a sling.

Marisol squeezed his hand, which prodded her bandaged knuckle, burning with her own memory of the Patron Saint. “Tell me about the Patron Saint again.”

“I thought no one heard me. I thought I was going to die. He was an angel.”

“He is,” she answered.

But as much as Hallmark moments like these kept her in the job, optimism was a foreign body attacked by an unexpected dread. Goodness sprang from luck, and luck should always be treated with suspicion, the dread warned, because the bad always accompanies the good.

Because if the Patron Saint was real, the Bloodsucker could be real as well.

3

Rich, Radioactive, Or Alien?

Marisol clasped the silver chain around her neck and shifted the cross pendant forward. She had lost the greater meaning of the cross, but because it was Abuelita’s, she ached a bit every time she had to take it off. Her latest shift was a case-in-point that looping things around one’s throat was not recommended at the ER. She ran her thumb over the pendant and let go. The pendant hung right under the V of her clavicle, shining against her own brown skin the way it shined against Abuelita’s.

Rossi collapsed on the bench in front of the lockers. “What’re you up to this weekend?” She shoved one foot into a wool-lined boot.

Marisol slid into her shabby overcoat. The pilled fabric turned the herringbone pattern into disarrayed zigzags. A pull of an oncoming smile threatened to give her surprise away. “Have a hot date to the children’s hospital ball Saturday.”

“I didn’t know you were seeing anyone.” Rossi’s hazel eyes widened. “Do I know him?” she asked before she grunted, jamming her other foot into its respective boot.

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