Final Justice (Badge of Honor 8)

“Then go to an emergency room and I’ll see you at work. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“And we won’t look in each other’s eyes. Agreed?”

“With great reluctance.”

“Oh, God!” she said, and then there was the hiss that told him she had pressed the End key on her cell

ular.

Matt pulled the Porsche into the Emergency Trauma Center of Hahnemann Hospital on North Broad Street and parked beside a Sixth District wagon in the area with the sign POLICE AND EMERGENCY VEHICLES ONLY.

A man of about his age, wearing hospital greens and what looked like twenty-four hours of beard growth, stopped him as he was walking toward the hospital entrance.

He pointed wordlessly at the sign.

“I’m on the job,” Matt said, and pushed his jacket away from the badge on his belt with his sore hand.

“What did you do to the hand?”

“Fell over a fence,” Matt said.

The man waved his hand in a signal for Matt to follow him inside.

“You’re a doctor?” Matt asked.

“No, I wear this stuff because I like pastel colors.”

The paperwork didn’t take long.

The doctor was waiting for him in a treatment room.

“That’s nasty,” the doctor said. “Puncture wounds can be bad news. How’d you do it?”

“Going over a fence,” Matt said. “The top of the fence- the twisted ends of the wire?”

The doctor nodded. “Your tetanus up to date?”

“I suppose so.”

“Suppose doesn’t count,” the doctor said, as he opened a glass door in a white cabinet.

“This is going to hurt,” the doctor said.

It did.

And so did the injection of an antibiotic “as a precaution” in the other buttock.

“I hope you can shoot right-handed, Sherlock,” the doctor said. “For the next three, four days, that paw is going to be tender.”

“I’m right-handed. You going to put a bandage on it?”

“You want a bandage?”

“What I don’t want is people asking, ‘What did you do to your hand, it looks ghastly?’ ”

“I could paint the area with some lovely lavender antiseptic.”