Free Cure by Belinda Frisch

from the old Kelvinator fridge that barely kept things cold. The motion of pulling the vintage handle set fire to the lower right side of his rib cage. At least two, he figured, were broken.
    “I quit, remember?”
    “I do.” But his longing was obvious. “You bring your kit?”
    Frank, a paramedic in his younger days, now served as unofficial emergency care for local hunters and men too dumb to avoid bar brawls. He held up a black medic pouch and went to the sink to wash his hands. “You went up there alone, didn’t you?”
    Billy sat at the old farmhouse table and took a long sip from the bottle hoping to numb up and avoid a lecture. He raised a hand to the right side of his brow and wiped the fresh blood spilling from the worst of his visible wounds. “Shit, that smarts.” Frank put on a pair of rubber gloves and turned Billy’s face to the light. He pressed the swollen area north of Billy’s eye and Billy yanked away. “Cut it out, would ya?”
    A knowing grin spread across Frank’s aged face. “Not until you tell me how this happened. You went back there, didn’t you?”
    “So what if I did? You want Holly back and I want Amy. Nixon has ‘em up there, I know it.”
    Frank sniffed. “Is that Bourbon I smell? You went to the Nixon Center alone and drunk ?”
    Billy forgot the spill and regretted not having changed his shirt. “Not drunk, buzzed.”
    “I can only guess, then, that your condition is courtesy of Max Reid.” Frank opened a package of suture material and cleaned the split over Billy’s eye.
    Billy clenched his teeth to get through the pain. “Hang on.” He held his hand up and finished the beer. Bourbon was more effective. “All right, go.”
     Frank pulled the jagged edges of the wound together and a trickle of blood ran from between them. Billy closed his eye when the moisture tickled his lid.
    The first stick sent a shock wave through Billy and he struggled to hold perfectly still while Frank secured the first suture. He’d never been at the mercy of Frank’s geriatric pace before—a slowness that, when someone else was the patient, had more than once sent him into hysterics—and decided he never wanted to be on this side again. The second suture was easily as painful.
    “How much longer?”
    “It’s a nasty, jagged thing you have here. Probably another ten or so stitches.”
    “Ten or so stitches is not a time frame.”
    Frank pulled the next one a little harder and made his point. “It’ll take as long as it takes. Why don’t you tell me why you went up there while I work?”
    Billy sighed. He owed him at least that much. “Another girl is missin’. Name’s Penny Hammond. Her parents came into the shop a couple o’ times. Turns out the last place anyone had seen her was the Nixon clinic. I took her poster and Amy’s up there to see if anyone recognized ‘em. I just thought…” He paused. “I dunno what I thought, but I wasn’t expectin’ Reid.”
    Max Reid was the prime suspect in an unsolved serial murder case and secrets like that couldn’t be kept in a town as small as Strandville. After three margaritas one night at the local watering hole, Missy, the Court Reporter blabbed that it was Nixon pulling the strings on a certain Public Defender and judge.
    Reid was a local legend.
    Frank dabbed at the fresh bleeding with a square of gauze. “How did you get out of there?”
    “I almost didn’t. A woman guard distracted him and I ran.”
    Frank tilted his head. “A woman working for Nixon? Something’s not right there.”
    Billy could see Frank calculating. He blinked and the tight wound tugged from the swelling. “What are you thinking?”
    Frank snipped the last thread. “That she might be another way in.”
     
     
     
     

 
     
     
    15 .
     
    Nixon waited for the lab results to confirm that the timeline Michael, his former employee and Miranda’s physician, had given him was correct. That her eggs were ready to be harvested. Nothing about her hire