Chapter 2 - The Table in Pilsen
Khloe’s apartment occupied the second floor of a brick building erected near the turn of the twentieth century. Its exterior had weathered decades of Chicago winters, leaving behind crumbling mortar, rusted window frames, and an old iron fire escape that served as an exterior staircase leading directly to her rear kitchen door.
That fire escape proved to be both a curse and a blessing.
Dragging the semi-conscious man up the narrow metal steps in the pouring rain was a grueling nightmare. His boots dragged on every iron tread, and twice Khloe almost lost her balance, nearly plunging them both into the alley below. But the staircase allowed her to avoid the main entrance and the sharp eyes of her elderly landlord, Mrs. Gable, who lived on the first floor and monitored the front hallway like a hawk.
Unlocking the heavy wooden door with one hand while holding sixty pounds of unconscious dead weight with the other, Khloe practically kicked the kitchen door open and dragged him inside.
The apartment smelled of damp wood, lemon cleaner, and lavender soap. Khloe hauled the giant across the small kitchen, cleared the wooden table with one swift sweep of her arm—sending old mail, nursing textbooks, and a bowl of apples crashing to the linoleum floor—and hoisted him onto the surface.
The man groaned loudly, his boots knocking against the wooden table legs as he spilled across the pine top. His face was chalk-white now, his lips bearing a faint blue tint that signaled hypothermia and severe shock.
Khloe rushed to the door, slammed it shut, engaged both deadbolts, and pulled down the thick canvas window shades.
"Don't die on me," she muttered frantically to herself. "Do not die on my kitchen table."
She dashed into her small bathroom and opened the bottom cabinet. Tucked away in a plastic storage crate was her personal medical collection. Over her four years in nursing school and two years on the trauma floor, Khloe had quietly amassed a professional-grade field kit. It wasn't stolen—not technically; it consisted of unopened, expired supplies that the hospital meant to discard, along with instruments she had purchased second-hand or built out over time.
She hauled the heavy plastic bin into the kitchen and dumped it onto the counter beside the sink. She had sterile gauze, alcohol wipes, rolls of medical tape, surgical scalpels, vascular clamps, several packets of synthetic sutures, local anesthetics like Lidocaine, and two bags of normal saline with IV tubing.
She washed her hands frantically under scalding water, scrubbing with antibacterial soap until her skin turned raw. She pulled on a pair of tight nitrile gloves and turned to the man on the table.
He was watching her. His amber eyes were half-lidded, glazed over with shock, but still tracking her every move.
"What's your name?" she asked sharply, slicing open his wet charcoal suit jacket with a pair of trauma shears.
"Dominic," he rasped out. The word seemed to cost him tremendous effort.
"Okay, Dominic. I’m Khloe," she said, her voice dropping into the steady, authoritative tone she used with uncooperative trauma patients. "I’m going to cut through your clothes now. You're bleeding heavily from an abdominal wound. I need to see what I’m working with."
She sheared through the fine wool, the expensive silk shirt beneath it, and his undershirt, peeling back the saturated fabrics to expose his chest and stomach.
Dominic possessed the physique of a professional fighter—broad shoulders, dense pectoral muscles, and defined abdominals. But spanning across his chest and arms were dozens of pale, silver scars, clearly left by old knife wounds and gunshot entry points. This was a man who lived and breathed extreme violence.
Right below his right ribcage was a clean, round, dark hole.
The edges of the wound were jagged and burnt—a point-blank powder burn. Blood pulsed steadily from the entry point, thick and dark, trickling down his flank onto the wooden table.
Khloe immediately pressed a heavy stack of sterile gauze against the hole, leaning her weight onto it. Dominic let out a sharp hiss through his teeth, his entire body going rigid, his hands gripping the edges of the pine table so hard the wood groaned under the pressure.
"I need to check for an exit wound," Khloe said breathlessly.
She carefully rolled him onto his left side. She ran her gloved fingers along his back, feeling through the muscle and skin along his ribs and spine. Nothing.
"No exit wound," she whispered, her heart dropping. "The bullet is still inside you."
Dominic let out a low, ragged breath. "Then... take it out."
"It's not that simple!" Khloe shot back, panic creeping back into her voice. "I don't have an X-ray! I don't know if the projectile hit your liver, severed an artery, or nicked your intestines! If I go digging around blindly in your abdomen without imaging, I could cause a massive hemorrhage that kills you in thirty seconds!"
"If you don't..." Dominic rasped, turning his head to glare at her with terrifying clarity, "...I bleed out anyway. Do it."
Khloe closed her eyes for three seconds, taking one long, shuddering breath. He was right. Without intervention, he would suffer fatal hemorrhagic shock within the hour.
"I have Lidocaine," she warned, opening a small glass vial and drawing the liquid into a syringe. "It’s a local anesthetic. It will numb the skin and the outer muscle layer, but I have no way to put you under. When I go deep with the forceps, you are going to feel every bit of it. Do you understand me?"
Dominic didn't answer with words. He reached up, grabbed the leather belt from his trousers, pulled it free, folded it double, and jammed it between his teeth. He looked at her and nodded once.
"God help us," Khloe muttered.
She injected the Lidocaine in a star pattern around the entry wound, waiting two tense minutes for the drug to take effect. She filled a pot with water, brought it to a rapid boil on her small gas stove, and dropped her steel surgical forceps, probe, and scalpel inside to sterilize them as best she could.
When she picked up the cold steel instruments, her hands were shaking. She stopped, pressed her heels into the linoleum, and forced her shoulders to drop. On the floor, she was just a nurse; at this table, she had to be a surgeon.
"Starting now," she said.
She swabbed the area with orange Betadine, filling the kitchen with its sharp, iodine scent. Using the scalpel, she made a precise, half-inch extension to the entry wound to allow better access and prevent tearing.
Dominic’s eyes opened wide, the muscles in his neck bulging like thick cables as he bit down violently onto the leather belt. Sweat poured off his face in sheets, mixing with the rain on his chest.
Khloe inserted the surgical probe, feeling her way down the bullet’s path. The room smelled sickeningly of copper, sweat, and antiseptic. Every instinct screamed at her that what she was doing was illegal, insane, and dangerous.
Feel for the resistance, she told herself, repeating the steps she had watched attending surgeons perform dozens of times in Trauma Bay 1. Avoid the hepatic vein. Stay lateral.
Deep within the tissue, near the posterior rib, her metallic probe struck something solid and unyielding. A faint, sharp clack echoed in the quiet kitchen.
"I hit it," she breathed.
She swapped the probe for long, narrow surgical forceps. She inserted them carefully, working blind, guiding the instrument purely through touch and anatomical memory. Her fingers were slick with blood.
Dominic let out a muffled, agonizing groan through the leather, his feet kicking violently against the table legs.
"Hold still!" Khloe commanded harshly. "If you move, I could nick an artery!"
She opened the forceps tips, pushed slightly deeper, and clamped down.
Metal caught metal.
Holding her breath, Khloe slowly, steadily withdrew the instrument.
With a wet, sickening sound, the forceps emerged from the bloodied wound. Grasped firmly within its stainless-steel jaws was a flattened, distorted lump of lead—a 9mm hollow-point bullet.
She dropped the metal casing into a clean glass bowl on the counter. It fell with a sharp, echoing ping.
"Got it," Khloe gasped, her chest heaving.
She didn't waste a second. She grabbed a syringe filled with sterile saline solution and flushed the deep wound repeatedly, checking for dark, pulsing arterial blood. To her immense relief, the blood flowing from the cavity was steady and dark—venous bleeding, manageable with compression and proper suturing.
She packed the cavity with sterile gauze, clamped the minor bleeding vessels, and pulled out a curved needle threaded with black nylon suture material.
With quick, practiced hands, Khloe began closing the deep tissue layers before suturing the skin. Her stitches were tight, even, and immaculate—a skill she took immense pride in. She wiped away the excess blood, applied a heavy layer of antibiotic ointment, and bound his entire chest tight with heavy elastic bandages.
By the time she tied off the last strip of tape, the kitchen clock read 5:22 a.m.
Khloe pulled off her blood-soaked gloves and dropped them into a plastic trash bag. Her legs suddenly gave out, and she collapsed into a wooden kitchen chair, resting her forehead in her hands.
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Across the table, the heavy sound of Dominic’s breathing had changed. The leather belt had fallen from his jaw. His eyes were closed, his face pale, but his breathing was deep, rhythmic, and stable. He had surrendered to absolute exhaustion.
Khloe sat in the dim light of her kitchen, staring at the mysterious, wounded criminal sleeping on her table. Outside, the rain continued to fall, washing away the evidence of a night that had changed everything.
