Chapter 15 - The Butcher’s Table
The smell of boiling bleach, rubbing alcohol, and copper filled the kitchen within ten minutes.
When the heavy service doors burst open, it looked like a field hospital from a world war. Four men hauled Vincent in on an improvised canvas stretcher, his face chalk-white, dark venous blood soaking through three layers of wool coats pressed against his stomach.
Behind him, two recruits dragged Bruno, his leg twisted at an unnatural angle, shrapnel protruding from his thigh.
“Clear the center prep island!” I screamed, shoving two fifty-pound bags of flour off the stainless surface with a crash that shook the floor. “Put Vincent here! Bruno on the butcher’s block by the window! Mercer, what do you need first?”
Dr. Mercer stumbled in, his scrubs already drenched in dark crimson, his hands trembling with sheer exhaustion. “Vessel clamps… four-gauge sutures… and someone to bag Vincent before his lungs collapse! Maggie, I can’t stop the bleeding in his liver and set Bruno’s femoral artery at the same time!”
“Then you take Vincent!” I yelled, pulling on a pair of sterile nitrile gloves and grabbing a bottle of iodine. “Marco! Get over here!”
Marco, his arm in a sling, rushed to my side. “What do I do, Ma?”
“Take this bag! Squeeze it every four seconds! One, two, three, squeeze! Keep his lungs moving or he dies!”
I turned to Bruno. The massive enforcer was fading fast, his eyes rolling back into his head, his lips white with shock.
“Look at me, Bruno!” I barked, grabbing his face with both hands, leaving bloody fingerprints on his stubble. “Look at your Ma!”
His eyelids fluttered open, his pupils pinpointed with agony. “Ma… it hurts… God, it hurts…”
“You listen to me, you big idiot,” I said, picking up a heavy pair of surgical shears from the boiling water with tongs and slicing his trouser leg open from cuff to hip. “You promised you’d paint my pantry shelves next week. You don't get to die to get out of hard labor!”
The piece of jagged shrapnel—a three-inch shard of twisted truck siding—was lodged half an inch from his femoral artery. If it shifted two millimeters to the left, he would bleed out in forty seconds.
“Mercer! Forceps!” I ordered.
“Maggie, you can’t pull that without clamping the vessel!” Mercer screamed from across the island, his hands deep in Vincent’s abdominal cavity.
“If I don't pull it, the infection will kill him before the sun comes up! Marco, hold his leg down! Dante, pin his shoulders!”
Dante threw his entire two-hundred-and-fifty-pound frame across Bruno’s chest.
I took a deep, steadying breath. In my mind, I wasn't in a mafia kitchen covered in blood. I was back in the factory, operating precision machinery where a single fraction of a millimeter meant the difference between a clean cut and a disaster.
My hands stopped shaking.
I clamped the steel forceps onto the edge of the shrapnel, locked the ratchet, and looked Bruno dead in the eye.
“Bite the towel, son.”
Bruno clenched a folded linen towel between his teeth.
*One. Two. PULL.*
With a swift, steady, agonizing upward sweep, I drew the metal free. A fountain of dark arterial spray erupted from the wound, hitting my chef’s coat and splattering across my face.
“Clamp!” I shouted.
I plunged my gloved fingers straight into the wound, feeling for the pulsating vessel through the warm, slick blood. My fingertips found the torn edge. I squeezed it shut with raw grip strength, slid the titanium vascular clamp down along my index finger, and snapped it shut with a metallic *click*.
The bleeding slowed to a trickle.
“Suture!” I barked, extending an open, bloody hand toward Dante.
For twenty minutes, while Mercer fought for Vincent’s life ten feet away, I stitched the torn muscle and subcutaneous tissue of Bruno’s leg with tight, interlocking mattress sutures, pulling the edges closed like the seams of a fine roast.
When the last knot was tied and the sterile pressure dressing was taped down, Bruno let out a long, ragged sigh.
The towel fell from his mouth. He looked up at me, his vision clearing through tears of pain.
“Ma…” he whispered, his voice cracking. “You’re… you’re covered in me.”
I wiped a streak of blood from my brow with the back of my forearm, leaving a smear of red across my white forehead.
“Shut up, Bruno,” I whispered, my voice breaking for the first time as I leaned down and kissed his damp forehead. “Just shut up and go to sleep.”
Across the table, Dr. Mercer collapsed against the stainless sink, his hands bloody, his chest heaving.
“Vincent is stable,” Mercer rasped, looking at me like I was an alien that had fallen from the stars. “The liver laceration is closed. They’re… they’re both going to live.”
A ragged, collective cheer rose from the twelve men standing watch in the service hallway. Dante fell to his knees against the wall, weeping openly into his hands.
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And that was when Roman Duca walked into the kitchen.
***