Bridge of Shadows Read online

  “Gato,” he said. It meant cat. “Move, Doctor.”

  It occurred to her that he might be here to rob the medicine cabinet. It was part of why she stocked only the very basic supplies; there was no real profit in stealing aspirin and antibiotics. She kept the syringes locked up separately, the real narcotics in a concealed cabinet in the storage room.

  “I’m not going, Gato,” she said. A calculated risk. She still had a knife scar from the one time it hadn’t quite paid off, but the odds were good if she held her ground, very poor if she didn’t. Gato—all the Gatos of the barrio—respected strength.

  He moved away from the door frame. In his right hand, which had been hidden, he held a gun. Her blood slowed in her veins; her heart ticked like a tired clock. How long until the police came by? What did it matter? If Gato wanted to shoot her, he would. Nothing could stop him.

  It took a huge effort of will to stay where she was, to keep her face politely blank. Gato gestured with the gun, impatient and baffled now. He was used to unquestioning obedience at the sight of the weapon.

  “You shoot me, I won’t be any good to you. What do you want?” She met his eyes, looking past the terrible magnetic attraction of the muzzle’s stare. “Where do you want to take me?”

  “You don’t need to know!” He sounded unnerved.

  She remembered to breathe, didn’t know when she’d stopped. The rush of fresh air in her lungs tasted like metal and made her heart beat too fast. She couldn’t afford to be weak now. Never let them see your fear.

  “Get up, bitch!”

  “I don’t think so, Gato. You tell me the problem, then I decide what to do, comprende? It won’t work this way.”

  A confused child. Fourteen years was not enough time to make these kinds of decisions. Gato blinked his doe eyes and shifted his weight, nervously looking into the shadows, out the window to the street.

  “He got cut,” he finally said. “On his leg. There’s a lot of blood. You come to help him.”

  Worst case, a severed femoral artery, she thought, even as she reached for her bag and began to fill it with the necessary supplies. If it was a severed artery, she’d just wasted precious time. She was peripherally aware of Gato putting the gun away, point made. She hoped she’d established enough respect with him to hold her through this little adventure—no way to tell.

  Her knife scar ached, like a ghost’s touch, just below her right breast.

  She threw in several pairs of sterile gloves and snapped the bag closed, rose to her feet. She was exhausted. Gravity pulled at her like an insistent child.

  “Gabe,” she said aloud, in English, and looked at the southwest corner of the office, where the hard glint of the security camera’s eye watched her. “I’m going out. If I’m not back in thirty minutes, call the police.”

  Gato looked around, eyes wide, hand diving back for the gun. She pointed up at the camera.

  “Gabe is in another room; he records everything that happens in La Clínics He’s just here for my protection, okay? So I don’t get hurt.”

  Gato understood protection. He stared at the camera for a few seconds, expressionless, then nodded once. His eyes came back to her face.

  “Down the street,” he said. “At El Tony’s.”

  El Tony’s would have been a bar if it had owned a liquor license; it was a couple of rooms, some surly patrons who brought their own liquor, some prostitutes who’d been known to rob and stab when they didn’t pass social diseases. The clinic got a lot of business from El Tony’s.

  “I’ll need someone with me,” she said. “For my back.”

  Gato smiled charmingly and spread his hands. That’s me. She returned his smile.

  “Let me tell my assistant.”

  Gato shrugged. Ana came toward him, and he backed out of her way, graceful as a cat. She called Rafael’s name as she came down the hallway.

  “Yo,” he called from a curtained treatment area. She stuck her head around to find him stitching up a superficial laceration in a teenage girl’s hand. “Trouble?”

  “Knife wound at El Tony’s. I’m going with Gato here.”

  “You think that’s a good idea?” Rafael paused, the girl’s hand in his gloved one, and he seemed completely unaware of the brilliant worship on his patient’s face. It was hard for girls not to swoon for Rafael; he was a big, handsome boy, maybe thirty, with a lithe, strong body and angelic eyes. She had a vague impression he’d been a football hero, but she was dead certain he was a gifted nurse. “Shouldn’t you call the cops first?”

  “No,” Gato said. He sounded sure about it.

  “There’s no time to debate. If I need them, I’ll call them.”

  Rafael touched the girl on the shoulder, signaling her to wait where she was, and came out to Ana’s side of the curtain. She wasn’t short—five seven—but he topped her by nearly a head.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Look, I’ll be careful.” She cocked her head slightly toward Gato, who waited impatiently behind her. “I have a guide.”

  There was something coplike in the way Rafael’s eyes took the boy in, as if he were memorizing him for a lineup. Ana shook off the feeling and gestured for the boy to go ahead.

  “Doctor.” Rafael reached out but did not quite touch her. “Be careful, eh? I don’t have time to do your job, too.”

  Gato pushed past her, teenage arrogance back in place. The gun made an unsettling bulge in the back of his pants. He was wearing the traditional vato uniform of baggy chino pants, flannel shirt buttoned at the top button and open the rest of the way. Beneath it, his T-shirt had seen better days. Ana had seen a thousand like him in the years at La Clínica.

  She tried to imagine being afraid of him, and smiled at the thought. Gato paused to stare at her, his face intense, his eyes blank and challenging.

  “What you grinning at?”

  She shook her head, still smiling, and followed him out into the dark.

  Wrong, she thought the moment she stepped into El Tony’s, into a reek of stale beer and body odor. She froze in the doorway, unreasonably panicked by the darkness, the half-seen men she knew were watching her. There was no crisis here, or if there was, it was her own.

  I walked right into it. All her clever talk was useless. Gabe and Rafael would abide by her instructions; they’d wait at least a half hour to send police, and by that time she could be anywhere, raped, mutilated, dead, her body dropped in a—

  Get hold of yourself, Ana. She took a deep breath and said, steadily as she could, “Somebody need a doctor?”

  Something cold probed her back. Gato’s gun. She obeyed it, stepping inside even though her knees were trembling and she wasn’t sure she could feel her feet. Darkness closed around her.

  “Dr. Ana,” a man said. A match flared, lighting a weatherbeaten middle-aged face as he puffed a cigarette into life. Her eyes began to adjust to the low light, and she saw that he was no vaŧo. He was a working-class man, dressed in a well-worn shirt and faded blue jeans, his work boots battered and dusty.

  “Dr. Ana Ross.”

  “Gutierrez,” she corrected, too sharply.

  “You were married to Peter Ross,” he said. He spoke excellent English, she noticed. Unusual in the barrio, where you could go your whole life without hearing it if you tried. “Married to la migra.”

  That got her temper going, like a match to a pilot light. “We’re divorced, if it’s any of your business.” Gato jabbed her in the back again, and her temper snapped. “Look, you tell him to put the gun away, or I leave right now and you bury your friend.”

  The man studied her. After a few seconds he inclined his head toward Gato. The pressure at her back retreated. She controlled the urge to check where he’d gone and kept watching the man who sat so casually on a bar stool, so obviously in charge.

  “Miguel,” he said by way of introduction. “You’ve been running La Clínica a long time, Doctor. People trust you. They know you were married to an Anglo, but they say it was a mistake, that you’re true to la raza now. Are you?”

  “I’m a doctor and I work in the barrio for my people. What do you think?” She waited for a response, didn’t get one. Miguel inhaled slowly on the cigarette, and his face flushed bright red in the glow.

  “My marriage—he didn’t become la migra until after. I never would have married him if he’d been one of them.”

  “They’re all them, Dr. Ana. I’m just trying to find out if you’re one of them, too.”

  She cursed him, fluently and comprehensively, in gutter Spanish, the language of the barrio. When she was done, the men were smiling. Look at the little girl. Miguel shrugged indulgently, poured himself a shot of tequila, and invited her to share. She didn’t.

  “Gato tells me they like you around here. MEChA tells me you are okay. I am going to trust you, Dr. Ana, but if you betray me. Gato will put a bullet in your head.”

  “I understand.” She had no doubt Miguel would order her killed, and did not doubt Gato would do it. She would be a robbery victim left in an alley. She’d have a lovely Catholic funeral.

  “Come.” He finished the tequila and stood up, walked through the silent men and through a tattered, dirty curtain into the other room. She followed.

  On the other side of the curtain, the smell of blood was strong; she blinked as Miguel turned on a low overhead light, and by the glow she saw legs sticking out of the shadows. The left leg of the dirty blue jeans was slit to the crotch, folded back, and her whole attention focused on the wound.

  Someone had gotten a rough tourniquet on him, but the laceration continued to seep steadily-judging by the pool of blood on the dirty concrete, had been seeping for far too long. Miguel froze, staring at the blood, his face suddenly anything but impassive.

&nbs
p; “He wasn’t—” he started to protest.

  “Out of the way.” She pushed by and knelt down to take a look at the wound: Deep laceration, with excised tissue in a triangular shape near the top of It’s seven-inch run. Blistering around the wound, and crusted black bums at the top. “How long ago?”

  “Twenty minutes, maybe.” Miguel’s authoritative manner was gone; he’d clearly not realized how bad the situation was. “He’s going to be okay, así?”

  “Idiota, you should have taken him directly to the hospital, not to me—I’m not a vascular surgeon. Call an ambulance, now.”

  “Fix him,” Miguel said. She looked up, incredulous. “You want to leave the same way you came, yon fix him.”

  He wasn’t kidding, and he was the kind of man who wouldn’t understand honest failure. No choice but to try, anyway; she’d have done that even without the promise of a gun behind her. She snapped on latex gloves, sponged blood away from the wound to look at the deeper damage. The muscles were sliced, and there was a long tear in the thick, rubbery covering of the femoral artery. She was vaguely shocked that the man had lasted this long, even though they’d obviously worked quickly to get the tourniquet on him. No time to worry about her limited knowledge; there was no time to wait for anyone, even if she could convince Miguel to play along. The victim was losing too much blood.

  “What are you doing?” Miguel asked. He leaned forward, and the wound disappeared into shadow.

  “Trying to save his life! Look, get me light, I can’t work in the dark. Go.”

  After a second’s hesitation, he disappeared. She didn’t follow his progress. Her overused attention was riveted on threading her smallest needle and beginning the delicate, aching work of stitching. Deep breaths. She was an eternity away from her vascular training, and it was impossible work on an unanesthetized patient. The stitches would have to be perfect, or the wound wouldn’t close properly.

  “Ana?” The shock of her patient speaking her name made her look, for the first time, at his shadowy face, and she found that she recognized him. She had known Rámon Cruz since—well, since high school. Since those wild and strange days in the Lower Valley of El Paso. Rámon had been a fighter, she remembered, always ready to take on Anglo boys in their cowboy boots and blue corduroy Future Farmers of America jackets. He had been a vato before there had been a name for what he was. She had found him dangerous and beautiful and wild, like a jungle animal. She hadn’t been surprised when he’d joined the Chicano movement. She hadn’t been surprised when she’d heard he was wanted, either. Rámon had always been destined to be art on a post office wall.

  She was surprised at how fond she was of him after all these years. They’d always been rebels together in spirit.

  “I asked them to get you especially,” he said. “Como está, Ana?”

  “I’ve had better days. So, obviously, have you. Rámon, you’ve got to go to the hospital.” So much to say, no time to say it. “This will kill you, understand? I’m not qualified to do this, and even if I was, you need a transfusion.”

  “My men will give blood for me.” His face, which she remembered as dark, was pale as old ivory, his lips delicate yellow. “They’d die for me.”

  “This is different. I can’t transfuse you here. You’ve got to call an ambulance!”

  “Ana.” Fondness in his raspy voice. “I’m a wanted man. I can’t go to the hospital.”

  Footsteps behind her. She turned and saw Miguel with four men behind him.

  “Call an ambulance!” she demanded, to Miguel, to Rámon, to anyone who would listen. Miguel ignored her. His eyes were on Rámon Cruz’s face. “Damn it, do you want to watch him die?”

  A moment of silence. Rámon’s decision, she realized, not hers. Not even Miguel’s, for all he seemed to be in charge.

  “Call the fucking ambulance,” Rámon said with a faint sigh. “Dr. Ana says I got to go to the fucking hospital.”

  Miguel nodded and left, the curtain shivering in his passing. The four men stepped forward.

  Ana flinched under a sudden assault of brightness, Four halogen flashlights aimed down at the wound. She blinked back afterimages and turned her attention back to the surgery before her.

  “Don’t you wonder?” Rámon asked her dreamily. She kept stitching, fine, even stitches like her mother had taught her. Only this time her sewing wasn’t saving an old shirt; it would save a friend’s life. The man standing behind her coughed and murmured an apology, and she thought, So much for the illusion of a sterile field. She pushed away thoughts of infection and gangrene.

  “Don’t I wonder what?”

  “How it happened?”

  “For the love of God, Rámon, I’m not blind.” She touched the edges of the wound, crusted black. “You were standing too close to something when it blew up. This is a shrapnel wound, flying metal or glass, with signs of contact burns. You’ll be lucky if you don’t lose your leg. What was it, an exploding gun?”

  “You wound me, Ana.”

  “Doesn’t look like I’m the first.”

  He snorted at the joke, but his amusement was cut short as she brushed against raw, bleeding tissue. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he almost went limp; she felt him hang on to consciousness with a grip of iron. Strong. He’d always been strong.

  This was a mess. She irrigated the wound, stared hard at the artery, the thin, delicate stitches. No seepage. She loosened the tourniquet just a bit, ignoring his sharp breath of pain, and watched as blood pumped through the tube.

  The stitches held.

  “I want you to join us,” Rámon said. She kept watching the wound, sponging away seeping blood from the tissue trauma. “Ana, listen, we need you. Where we’re going, we’ll need someone like you.”

  “Where do you think you’re going?” She packed the wound with sterile gauze. The conversation was a meaningless distraction, something to keep his mind off the pain. He wouldn’t even remember what he’d said in the morning.

  “We’re going to war,” he said. She stopped working and met his eyes.

  “You’re not serious.” He held the gaze. “War. Who the hell do you think you’re going to fight? The government? With what? You’ve got to be kidding.”

  “You are a patriot, Ana. The kind of patriot we need to win back this land for our own.” His breath was coming short, and he had to rest between sentences. She checked his pulse. Thin and weak. “People are rising to follow us. We’ll need doctors in Aztlan just as we do here. You could be the first.”

  “Aztlan,” she said slowly. “You’re talking about revolution.”

  “El Paso is a crossroads. It has close ties to Mexico.

  It has the—the largest population of Spanish-speaking people of any American city.” His voice was getting weaker. His eyelids shivered with the strain of keeping him conscious. “Aztlan—is the homeland of la raza. El Paso should be ours. Ana. We can defend it.”

  “It’s part of the United States.”

  “It was illegally taken.” A long pause now. Rámon rested his head against the wall. Sweat glistened on his face, and his skin color was ghostly. “We’ll get it back. Ana. I swear we will.”

  “Rest.” She put her hand on his forehead. His skin felt clammy and cold.

  In the distance she heard a siren. Around her the men holding the halogens shifted; she looked up as one by one they switched the beams off. The sudden darkness felt oppressive and terrifying.

  Rámon’s cool hand gripped her hard.

  “Why’d you marry the Anglo?” he asked.

  So many things to say, so many excuses to offer. Ana settled for the truth.

  “I loved him.”

  Red and blue lights strobed the curtain; something official had pulled up to El Tony’s. If it was an ambulance, she was saved. If it was the police—

  Gato slipped like a wraith around the curtain. He was carrying a flashlight in one hand and aimed it directly at her face. She could barely make out the gun in his other hand.

  “Gato,” Rámon said. He sounded very far away. “Take my good friend Dr. Ana home. Keep her safe.”

  Gato immediately holstered his gun and held out his hand to help her up. She closed her bag and looked down at Rámon, her friend, the dreamer. The criminal.

  “I have to say no,” she said. “I’m sorry. But I’ll pray for you.”