I looked up. Miss Clavish was standing there, in her prim navy blue dress, wearing white gloves and holding a large shotgun. That was the thunderclap—she had fired over our heads and into the wall.

“Get out of here, before I blow your brains out,” she continued. I liked the blow your brains out part.

They took the hint. Men that big don’t scamper, but number one and two did the best approximation that they could, down the stairs and out of the building. Probably nothing in their contract called for them to deal with shotgun-toting old ladies. Contract, because this wasn’t just some random robbery that I had interrupted. Those men had been waiting for me. What a welcome home. First Danny had been right, now Ranson. It was galling to have such perfect friends.

“Here, dear, I think we’d better bind that arm,” said Miss Clavish, arriving at my side, armed now with a first aid kit. She pushed back the torn sweater sleeve to expose my cut. I maneuvered myself to a sitting position, then slumped against the wall when I saw all the blood coming out of my body. Miss Clavish had me hold my cut arm up, to help slow the bleeding while she bandaged it. With my other arm, I rummaged in her first aid kit, got out a gauze pad, and held it against my nose, in an attempt to staunch the blood.

Now, the police arrived. They tried to ask a few questions, but every time I took the gauze pad off my nose to answer, blood gushed out. I gave up and clamped the bloody pad back over my nose. Miss Clavish suggested that these nice young policemen speed me to the nearest emergency room. Since Miss Clavish sounded like the fifth-grade teacher whom you always obeyed, they did so.

So for the second time today, I found myself at Aunt Greta’s favorite hospital. The only thing I like less than visiting hospitals is being a patient there. I didn’t have to wait in the four-hour emergency line. They let me inside very quickly. That’s the nice thing about blood, it gets attention.

I heard a couple of voices confer outside my cubicle. The only thing I caught was a, “Yes, Doctor James.” I gathered that a Doctor James was going to have the privilege of binding my wounds. I didn’t care who, I just wanted them to hurry.

Dr. James entered. Of course, I should have known. I had assumed that Cordelia was a Holloway. She wasn’t. Somehow she had ended up being a James. She didn’t look too thrilled to see me, but whether it was the mess I was making or me personally, I couldn’t tell. She started working on my arm.

“What happened?” she asked, as she finished taking Miss Clavish’s bandage off my arm.

“The big brother of that first doorway I ran into.”

“This is a knife wound,” she pointed out.

“So it is.” Blood started running out of my nose.

“We have to report this to the police,” she said.

I did the best shrug I could from flat on my back. The police already knew.

“Hold still,” she said as I flinched at something she was cleaning my arm with. She finished cleaning and started stitching the wound. I did my best to hold still and not make my nose bleed any more than it had to. I closed my eyes so I didn’t have to watch the needle going in and out. But that started to make me feel queasy and light-headed. So I settled for staring fixedly at the ceiling, trying to find patterns in the water stains, until she was finished.

Then she started on my nose, taking my hand, with its bloody gauze pad, away. She poked and prodded for a moment, then said, “It’s not broken.”

Good, I’d hate to have my beauty ruined. She tilted my head back and told me to breathe through my mouth. She started cleaning the blood off my face. We were very close and I found myself looking into her eyes. They were a deep blue, flecked with gray. There was a depth and intensity in them that I hadn’t noticed before. If her eyes were any true indication, then I had underestimated Cordelia James. For a moment, we were both aware of it, then we broke off, she by looking off to the side for something. I stared up at the ceiling.

“You need to find some new friends,” she said as she started packing cotton up my nose. I grabbed her hand and held it, so I could reply.

“There was nothing friendly about this,” I said, then let her hand go. “My friends don’t beat people up.”

“An everyday mugging?”

“Not quite,” I answered, between pieces of cotton.

“Couldn’t use your loaded gun?”

I shook my head no, which started it throbbing.

“Sorry,” she said. “It’s not fair of me to ask questions when you’re like this.”

Someone else appeared on my other side.

“Can she talk yet?” Sergeant Ranson on the scene.

“Let me finish packing her nose,” Cordelia answered. She worked quickly. “You can talk, but try to keep your head tilted back.” She started attending to a cut on my thigh that I didn’t know I had. Shit, that meant Danny’s pants were torn.

“Did you recognize those men from the old Riven place?” was Ranson’s first question.

I gingerly shook my head no. I had never seen those two before and I didn’t want to see them again.

“The Riven place?” Cordelia said. “That’s next to Granddad’s estate. That’s where that woman up in ICU was shot.”

“Right,” Ranson replied. “Our hero here would have been shot, too, if that basement she was tied up in didn’t have an old coal drop for her to climb out of.”

“The rope burn on your wrist,” Cordelia said, putting two and two together.

“Yeah,” Ranson replied for me. “And it looks like the mob sent you a message.” She put a hand on my side for what she intended to be a comforting gesture. It wasn’t, it was too close to where I had been kicked. I jerked up and rolled away from the pain. I hadn’t paid much attention to my side while my arm had been bleeding. Now I was paying attention. Cordelia pulled my arm away from my side.

“Take it easy,” she said. “Breathe in…out…in,” and she paced me until I had stopped gasping and the pain was down to a dull throb. Then she cut away the sweater. Sorry, Danny.

“You got kicked,” Ranson said on seeing my bruises.

“Yeah,” I replied.

Cordelia was gently feeling my side. She stopped and said, “Damn it, it’s horrible enough to treat people with cancer and heart disease, the things that have no fault or blame. Then there are the car accidents and gun accidents and any other kind of accident stupidity can come up with. I don’t like those either. But how can someone deliberately come at another person with a knife and break a couple of ribs just for good measure?” She was very angry. “We don’t need people like you clogging up our hospitals.”

“Sorry, Dr. James,” I said in my now small and very nasal voice, “New Orleans’s finest wouldn’t let me bleed to death on the stairs.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. She bent over until her eyes were looking into mine and she held my gaze, deliberately this time. “I’m not angry at you. I’m furious at the men who put you here.” She paused and took a deep breath. “Okay, enough soap-boxing for today.” She went back to caring for my bruised ribs.

Ranson asked me some more questions about who, what, how, and why. Unfortunately my answers weighed heavily on the I-don’t-know side.

“I’ve got to head back to the station,” she said, finishing her questioning. “While I’m there, I’m going to talk loudly, and at length, about how you want nothing more to do with any of this and that you have no intention of testifying.”