Read Ill Will for Free Online Page B

together.
    “Smells good,” she said, ushering them in.
    Uncharacteristically Torbin did not comment on the food.
    Cordelia picked up on it and said to Andy, “Let me look at your hand.” She had brought what I thought of as her “doctor bag”—a roomy brown leather briefcase in which she stuck things as she needed them. She put the bag down on the kitchen table, grabbed a couple of clean dish towels, and created a makeshift hygienic space.
    Andy sat down, with Torbin standing behind him, a hand on his shoulder. Andy gingerly laid his arm on the towels, then started to undo the bandages.
    “Let me do that,” Cordelia said. “It’s easier with two hands.” She smiled to reassure him.
    People have different aspects of who they are. I’m used to Cordelia at home, as my partner, someone who has to be prompted to go through the stack of mail she’s left by the door, who favors old jeans and a T-shirt sans bra at home. But she spent a good part of her day as a highly competent doctor who had to make important, at times life-or-death decisions. As I watched her gently unwrap Andy’s bandage, she was skilled and professional.
    It was a side of her I rarely saw.
    Just as she rarely saw me as a capable and intuitive investigator. Or a freaked-out idiot madly dashing down stairs to startle innocent bicyclists in the street. There can be advantages to not knowing everything there is to know about each other.
    “It hurts, doesn’t it?” she said as she looked at his hand.
    I glanced at it just long enough to convince myself that I needed to be careful with kitchen knives, then decidedly looked away. Unlike TV detectives, I try to stay as far away from gore and blood as possible. Especially my own, but other people’s as well. He had a deeply red cut around the base of his thumb.
    “How does it feel when you move your fingers?” Cordelia asked.
    “I try not to do that,” Andy said with a rueful smile. But he obliged her and wiggled his fingers. “Hurts some, but they feel okay.”
    “Is it infected?” Torbin asked.
    Cordelia didn’t answer immediately, picking up Andy’s hand gently and examining it. “Maybe a little. There is some redness.”
    “It stings a lot,” Andy said.
    She brushed her finger lightly outside the wound. “The hand is a sensitive area, with copious blood vessels and nerves. The same cut elsewhere wouldn’t hurt as much. There is just a little red around the wound opening. That could be your immune system at work rather than an actual infection. By tomorrow it should hurt less and the redness should be receding. If the inflammation spreads, the area around the wound gets tender—more than it is now, if there is pus or oozing blood or you run a fever, these are all signs of infection.”
    “What do we do if that happens?” Torbin asked. “The best we could get for a doctor’s appointment was a week from today.”
    “If it’s really bad, you need to go back to the ER. I can look at it tomorrow if you want,” Cordelia offered. “But that shouldn’t happen. Keep it clean, change the dressing often, and you should be good. Use soap and water, not anything abrasive like hydrogen peroxide.”
    “My mother used to swear by that,” Andy said.
    “It’s okay initially when you need to clean the wound, but after that it can do more harm than good. Plain old soap and water work fine.”
    “What about those stitches?” Torbin asked. “They look like something out of a Frankenstein movie.”
    Cordelia again looked at Andy’s hand. “It does look like you got someone with less-than-stellar sewing skills.”
    “It’s going to scar, isn’t it?” Torbin said.
    “Probably,” Cordelia admitted.
    “Can’t you do something?” he asked.
    “It’s okay,” Andy cut in. “It’ll remind me to always cut away from anything living.”
    “Like take out the stitches and do it again right?” Torbin said.
    “The wound is healing. Undoing the stitches could open it up again.”
    “No