Free Primacy of Darkness by Brock E. Deskins Page A

attacker was Asian. I’m sure of that. Even if I hadn’t made out the shape of her eyes and skin tone, I could smell her diet of mostly East Asian cuisine. There was something vaguely familiar about her scent as well, but I can’t place it. It is the wispy shadow of a fragment of a memory. It bugs the hell out of me, but I don’t have time to chase it around.
    The van full of people is yet another mystery. Were they working with the two women? It surely wasn’t coincidence, and they must have known what I was, or they would not have been in such a hurry to get out of there after mowing me down.
    I have to put my investigation on hold as I pull up to the back door of the MEO. Making myself whole is now my top priority. Raj opens the door and waves me inside. I set my bike on its kickstand and hustle over.
    “What’s going on?” Raj asks as I approach.
    I reach into my pocket and pass him my severed appendage. “I need a hand with something.”
    “Oh shit! Is this yours?”
    “It ain’t Captain Hook’s.”
    “Leo, I am not a surgeon.”
    “No, you’re a medical examiner, which is kind of a doctor, and since I’m only kind of alive, I’m sure we’ll both do fine.”
    Raj stares at my hand as he leads me back into the exam room and nods. “Yeah, okay. What do I need to do? Do you need anesthetic or anything?”
    “No. Just sew everything together as best you can. I can do the rest.”
    “You can do that?”
    “It’s a theory.”
    “Okay, but I’ve never reattached an amputation before.”
    “I’ve never amputated any of my limbs before, so I guess we’re both getting our cherries popped tonight.”
    Raj has me lay on an examination table as he retrieves a surgical kit. He unrolls the sterile towel containing his tools onto a small table and examines my injury.
    “Holy shit,” he exclaims as he studies the deep abrasion on my stump. “This looks just like the injuries on our other guy.”
    “Yeah, I think someone is going all Van Helsing on us. You let me worry about these hunters. You just get my hand back on so I can give them the bird with both barrels when I hunt them down and kill them.”
    Raj has to cut me open a bit to get to the tendons. “There’s almost no blood. Are you doing that?”
    “Yeah, it’s a neat trick to have when people are always trying to poke holes in you.”
    “I bet. I can’t reattach any of the nerves or blood vessels.”
    “Don’t worry about it. My body should be able to handle that as long as you can align the bones and tendons.”
    Raj nods and starts suturing. I’ve been blocking out the pain since I lost my hand, but I can still feel the tug of the needle as Raj sews me up, especially as he reattaches the tendons. I know this is a laborious process, so I spend the time replaying everything about the attack in my head.
    The ambush was straightforward, but it felt improvised, almost hasty. Why use such an obscure method of unseating me when she had a sniper presumably on the roof? A bullet, especially to the head, would have been far more effective and harder to recover from. She lost a lot of her element of surprise by lassoing me.
    Granted, she was able to keep me off-balance by yanking my chain, but it was also a hindrance since she had to use one hand to keep control of it. She was an exceptional fighter. Her martial arts skills coupled with being a bloodling had put her, not on equal ground, but pretty close. She was a great minor league player squaring off with a mediocre pro, one who had been out drinking the night before and skipped breakfast.
    Trinh, her partner had called her. I search my brain for a face to put with the name, but I come up blank. The name sounds Vietnamese or Cambodian. I haven’t made any enemies down there since ’68. Maybe a granddaughter carrying out her grandparents’ vengeance? Seems an awfully long way to go for a nearly fifty-year-old grudge.
    She had an entire team. Or did she? I replay the sniper’s face in my mind