Chapter 3 - The House Behind the Curtain
Roderick entered the hallway, his gun raised, his eyes scanning the peeling wallpaper. The floorboards were covered with cheap linoleum that had cracked and yellowed with age.
"Adriana," he called out, his voice low and steady, yet carrying a vibration that made the dust motes in the air dance.
No one answered.
From the room at the end of the hall, he heard a low, choked groan. It was the sound of a man in agony—the kind of sound Roderick had heard in back rooms and torture cellars, but here, it was accompanied by the soft, murmuring voice of a woman.
"Breathe," she was saying. "Just breathe through it. I have the stitches almost in. Keep your eyes on me."
Roderick moved toward the door. He kicked it open, his gun clearing the space in a fraction of a second.
The room was small, lit by three kerosene lanterns placed on wooden crates. In the center was a rusted metal examination table that had likely been stolen from an old military hospital.
Lying on the table was a young man, barely twenty, his shirt torn open to reveal a jagged, bloody tear across his abdomen. He was pale, his skin glistening with sweat, his fingers digging into the rusted edges of the table.
Adriana Voss stood over him.
She wore a stained white apron over her dark sweater, her ash-blonde hair tied back with a piece of gauze. Her hands were covered in latex gloves, bright red with the boy's blood. She held a curved needle and a length of black thread.
Beside her stood Beckett Hume, holding a bottle of antiseptic and a clean roll of bandages.
At the sound of the door opening, Beckett gasped and dropped the bottle. It shattered on the linoleum, the sharp smell of alcohol filling the room.
Adriana did not look up immediately. She finished the knot she was tying, snipped the thread with a pair of surgical scissors, and then slowly raised her gray eyes to meet Roderick's.
She did not look afraid. She looked exhausted.
"You're tracking dirt into my clinic, Roderick," she said, her voice steady but thin.
Roderick did not lower his gun. His eyes went from the wounded boy on the table to Beckett, and then to the corners of the room. Against the far wall, sitting on three old mattresses, were four other men.
One had his arm in a crude sling made of a flannel shirt. Another had a filthy bandage wrapped around his temple. The third was an old man with the yellowed skin of advanced liver failure, wheezing softly in his sleep. The fourth was a young boy, no older than Julian had been, with a gunshot wound to his thigh that had been clean-stitched and dressed.
"These are your different men, Adriana?" Roderick asked, the words feeling heavy and foreign in his mouth.
"They are," she said, pulling off her bloody gloves and throwing them into a plastic bucket. "They are the men your soldiers shoot, Roderick. They are the men the Gautiers throw into the canal when they are finished with them. They are the men who cannot go to the Charity Hospital because the police will arrest them before the doctors can patch them up."
"She’s been doing this for two years, Sabatini," Beckett said, his voice trembling but defiant as he stepped between Roderick and Adriana. "Before she ever met you. I was a resident at Tulane before they took my license for helping the union strikers. She found me. She bought this house. She paid for the medicine. Every cent you gave her for her sessions, she put into this floor."
Roderick looked at the boy on the table. The youth’s eyes were wide with terror as he looked at the silver revolver in Roderick’s hand. He recognized the Sabatini face. Everyone in the Ninth Ward did.
"He’s one of Gautier’s runners," Roderick said, pointing the gun toward the boy's chest. "He was part of the crew that intercepted my shipment at the turn last Tuesday."
"He’s nineteen," Adriana said, stepping directly into the line of fire. She placed her small, bare hand over the barrel of Roderick’s gun and pushed it down. "And if I hadn't stopped the bleeding ten minutes ago, he would be a corpse on your docks by morning. Is that what you want, Roderick? Another dead boy to prove you own the river?"
Roderick looked at her hand on his gun. It was the same hand that had massaged the pain from his shoulder, the same hand that had held his under the magnolia tree.
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"You lied to me," he said.
"I didn't lie," she whispered, her gray eyes shining with unshed tears. "I just didn't tell you. How could I? You are the king of the people who make these wounds. I loved the man in the garden, Roderick. But I could not bring the Don into this house. This house is for the people who have nowhere else to go."
