The firefight ended as quickly as it began, and I never reached a fraction of the distance compared to the others. My AK-47 held a full clip. I didn’t let off a single shot. This was my first foray into the world of crime, and I’d botched it.
Denton came strolling back through with a duffel bag full of cash, two packages of grade-A heroin the size of cement blocks, and a small tear in his shoulder. Blood gushed down the sleeve of his jacket, but he acted as if he hadn’t noticed he’d been shot.
Crim got it the worst. He’d taken a high calibre round to the stomach. Rolly and I carried him out to the van as he screamed in agony, and Denton got behind the wheel and sped away.
‘Where are we going?’ I asked.
‘Gotta get him to the doc,’ Rolly said, sounding about as worried as Denton had been concerned for his own wound, which was little to none.
These guys were careless idiots. Not only had they run straight into gunfire with an utter lack of caution, but now they presumed a doctor could fix this man’s gut-shot? I didn’t know who this Doc was, but if he was working for this gang, I doubted he had a medical license or was skilled enough to fix a man who got plugged in the stomach. As far as I could tell, Crim’s insides were likely eviscerated, with no hope for even a professional to patch up. He’d be dead before we reached our destination.
Ten minutes later, we steered into a small cul-de-sac, and, despite the blood dumping out of Crim’s midsection like water through a burlap sack, he was still hanging on. His face was pale, and between his convulsing howls of torment, he shivered as if he were already lying in a cold morgue.
We three gangsters lifted our blood-riddled brother out of the van and carried him to the front of a one-storey ranch-style house, each of us holding him up at shoulder height as if we were bearing a casket to a gravesite. Denton got the door, and we shuffled inside. The house was dark, quiet, and appeared empty; if the doctor was in, he must have still been out like all the lights.
Denton got a key out and unlocked a door at the end of a long, tiled hallway, and we proceeded down a wooden staircase into the cool air of a lighted basement. The space was clean and pristine and looked like a woodworking shop, except there were no tables or tools, only a cot draped with a plastic tarp, and at the farthest side of the room, a steel cage. It was a homemade jail cell made of wrought iron bars erected from the concrete floor to the exposed ceiling beams above. Inside was a prison-style bunk bed, and lying on it, an old, grey-haired man in pyjamas, his fingers interlocked behind his head and gazing up at the ceiling.
‘Got two for you, Doc,’ Denton said, and we set Crim on the cot.
Doc sat upright, swinging his legs off the bed and planting his slipper-covered feet on the floor. He didn’t appear to be in any wild discomfort. His expression held the serene look of a man who’d been doing life in the state pen for many years and had long ago accepted his fate.
Denton approached the cell door with a pair of police-issue handcuffs, slipped them through the bars, and tossed them at Doc’s feet. The old man tiredly picked them up and shackled his wrists together. As far as defiance went, he only groaned when he bent to pick up the cuffs (he’d likely done this routine dozens of times—whatever this was).
I gazed at my compatriots’ faces, trying to find the answers to the questions I hadn’t asked. My guess was this doctor was Denton’s prisoner, forced to live in a cell and await the occasion when someone required medical attention but, due to the illegal nature of the injuries, couldn’t go to a hospital. That had to be it—only I didn’t see any first aid station or surgical tools. The only sign that this old man was a doctor was the fact that everyone called him Doc.
Denton opened the cell door, and Doc stepped out in a slow, trance-like gait and approached Crim, who lay clutching his belly as though he were keeping his guts from falling out. From the looks of it, he very well was. Lowering himself to his knees, Doc raised his shackled hands and pressed his palms together, resembling a man in prayer.
‘What’s he doing?’ I asked.
‘Shut up,’ Rolly said, ‘and watch him work his magic.’
Magic? Like hell.
Doc closed his eyes, spread his open palms, and lay them an inch above Crim’s bloody wound, which now appeared even more like he was praying. The flat of his hands lay still as they floated over Crim’s riddled guts.
Everybody remained silent and watched. And as I watched, a chill crept up my body, the hairs on my arms and neck standing on end like static electricity. The refreshing basement air dropped cold enough to refrigerate a produce department. Crim’s laboured breaths of anguish slowed to deep, wheezy inhalations.
Suddenly, as if he’d been asleep and jolted out of a scary dream, Crim sat up with an intense gasp. His eyes snapped wide open, peering around like he was lost. He focused on Doc kneeling beside him, and as he gulped and caught his breath, he rubbed his tummy as though he only had an itch that needed scratching. ‘Thanks, Doc,’ he said, and hopped to his feet with the jest of a man ready to take on the world instead of one who just a moment ago had been minutes away from leaving it. Even the icy-cold shade of imminent death on his face had returned to its natural complexion. The only remaining evidence that he’d been shot was the hole in his shirt and the bloodstains on his attire and footwear.
‘What the hell just happened?’ I said, more to myself than anyone else.
Doc rose from his crouched position and approached Denton, placing his hands on Denton’s injured shoulder with the same open-palmed gesture. Denton closed his eyes and inhaled sharply through his nose like a man taking a strong lungful of good dope. When he opened his eyes, he exhaled and released a euphoric grin while shaking his arm and flexing his hand.
The doctor lumbered back to his cell without being told, and when Denton shut the door and locked it, he stuck his hands through the bars, and Denton uncuffed him. He lay on his bed, resuming his lounging position, and shut his eyes. He never uttered a word.
I said, louder this time, ‘What the hell just happened?’
‘We got one more place to hit before word of the warehouse gets out,’ Denton said. ‘Tell you on the way.’
Behind the wheel, Denton raised his eyes to the rearview mirror and said, ‘Show him.’
Me, Rolly, and Crim were sitting in the back with our knees tucked to our chests to keep our shoes out of the blood on the floor. Crim sat up straight, shifted toward me, and spread his jacket and lifted his shirt. There was an obvious scar on his abdomen from where the bullet had struck him but, despite the near-mortal injury happening only an hour prior, the scar tissue held the faded appearance of a wound that had healed months ago.
Rolly pulled his shirt up next, yanking it off completely and rotating his bare frame for me to see all the pink and red blotches and blemishes scattered along his chest and midsection. He had to have been shot, stabbed, and sliced over a dozen times. His body resembled that of a battle-hardened warrior, an ancient barbarian. There were more lines etched on his skin than a goddamn topographical map.
‘Doc’s a healer,’ Denton said up front. ‘He’s got some kind of gift.’
‘He’s done it hundreds of times,’ Rolly said, pulling his shirt back over his head. He stuck his chin out at Crim and said, ‘That was Crim’s first.’
‘What did it feel like?’ I asked.
Grinning, Crim said, ‘Like being reborn.’
And just like that—healer—gift—my questions were answered. The doctor possessed a supernatural ability to fix wounds with his hands (or was it his mind?). It all made sense to me now why these guys had charged into the warehouse like a bunch of senseless morons, sprinting straight into a firefight. They couldn’t be killed. Because with the doctor on their side—albeit unwillingly—they were immortal.
That meant I was too.
As we arrived at the next warehouse for another raid, a surge of confidence unlike anything I had ever experienced swept over me. I could feel the energy vibrating and bursting out of my pores. Under normal circumstances, I’d have been jittering with anxiety, fearful of harm—shitting-my-pants terrified—but now I felt what these men had felt during the first gunfight. I was more alive than ever. A shot of B-12 couldn’t match the vibrant jolt of vigour coursing through my veins.
I was psyched.
I was fearless.
I was bulletproof.
Denton stopped the van, threw it in park, and hefted his machine gun. ‘Same layout, same plan,’ he said.
Rolly and Crim checked their weapons, extracting the magazines and swapping them out for full magazines. I was the only one who didn’t need to inspect my ammo. I clutched my AK-47, kicked open the back doors, and leaped outside, charging toward the warehouse identical to the previous raid.
Amped full of courage, I rammed my way through the main door shoulder-first and galloped inside. There were six goons loitering around in a semi-circle. I raised my rifle and squeezed the trigger, swinging in a wide, fluid arc, and dropped four of them before anyone could react.
With two men remaining, and my eyes behind the iron sights, I targeted the one on my left, shot him in the face, and swung my aim at the last thug standing. His pistol was out, directed straight at my rifle, straight at my head.
We fired at the same time—a flash, a bang, a burning sensation, and then my legs gave out.
I lay on the floor, gargling, with a painful throbbing lump in my neck. Whenever I tried to breathe, I tasted copper. Every desperate attempt to gasp for air filled my throat and lungs with warm liquid. I was drowning inside myself. Drowning in my own blood.
This was fine, I told myself. The guys will bring me to the doctor. I was invincible. I was bulletproof.
My three compadres crouched over me. My vision was blurry and fading; I couldn’t see their faces, but I recognized their voices.
‘Aw, man, the new guy’s hit bad,’ Rolly groaned.
‘We’ll never get him out in time to fix that,’ Crim screeched.
Denton’s voice came in the clearest. It sounded stern, deliberate, and a bit irritated. ‘Shit,’ he said. ‘Did we forget to tell him the doc can’t work his magic if he’s dead?’
And then I choked on my last wet, gurgling effort to breathe.
Magic?
Like hell.
