The nurse turned off the vacuum pump and walked around to the instrument stand at the foot of the bed. Off the tray, she lifted a pair of scissors and began clipping through the bandage that completely covered Lucy’s right leg.
Lucy watched as Winslow cut all the way up to her thigh, and then returned the scissors to the tray.
“You might want to give your morphine a little squeeze,” Winslow said.
Lucy hit the pump.
Winslow started at the bottom, peeling back a patch of black foam, and then unwinding the bandage around Lucy’s leg.
“You tell me if you start to feel sick,” Winslow said.
“I have a strong stomach…are those scabs?” Lucy asked.
“No,” Winslow said. “You have to have skin to make scabs.”
For the most part, her foot was intact, though when she wiggled her toes she could see three of the five metatarsals twitching.
It was above the ankle that the real damage began.
Portions of her tibia were exposed, along with half of her patella.
She’d seen raw muscle on many occasions, but always after dragging someone at eighty miles per hour for five miles, and by that time, the muscle had been reduced to bloody, dripping strings.
Her tibialis anterior and gastrocnemius were largely intact, and she could even move them, finding the interplay between ligament, muscle, and bone simply gorgeous.
“You doing okay there, hon?” Winslow asked.
“I don’t know.”
“I know it looks bad, but they can work wonders with skin grafts.”
Lucy watched Winslow remove the bandage from her left leg.
Even worse.
Less skin coverage, and it looked as though portions of the muscle in her thigh had sustained damage-when she flexed her left quadriceps, the muscle quivered differently than her right. She could barely make it move.
This was bad-and not because she was anything approaching vain-but because her beauty, her body, had always served as her most effective camouflage. In the summertime, standing on the side of the road in a skirt that stopped two inches above her knees was almost guaranteed to lure someone into pulling over.
Even assuming she recovered from this, her legs would never look the same.
They’d be horribly disfigured.
And Donaldson had done this.
He was responsible.
Lucy had never hurt anyone out of anger or rage. Up until this moment, her only drive had been curiosity and lust and something else she’d never been able to name.
That was all going to change.
Tonight.
She wondered what time it was. The blinds in her room had been drawn all day, but she could tell that the light coming through had weakened into the pale, orange glow of evening.
“Do you have a watch?” Lucy asked.
Winslow was swabbing her right leg with an icky-smelling antibiotic ointment, Lucy wondering how intense the pain would be right now if she wasn’t on morphine.
Winslow checked her wrist. “It’s six-fifteen.”
“It really burns,” Lucy said.
“The ointment? It has a topical anesthetic in it.”
“My peehole.”
“You can feel the burn?”
Lucy nodded.
“I’ll talk with Dr. Lanz, see what he says.”
Lucy screwed her face up and let out a moan. “I really need the catheter out…now.”
Her heart rate monitor displayed a pulse rate at nearly 100 bpm, and if she could only get a moment alone, Lucy knew she could drive it higher.
“Okay, settle down, sweetie. I’ll go get the doctor.”
Winslow scurried out of the room, and Lucy shut her eyes and held her breath, summoning all the anxiety she could muster.
By the time Winslow had returned with Lanz, Lucy’s heart was pounding away at 120 bpm and she was sure her face was flushed and beginning to break out with sweat.
“You’re experiencing a lot of discomfort?” Lanz asked, grazing the back of his hand across Lucy’s forehead.
She nodded. “My peehole is on fire.”
“She could have a ureter infection,” Winslow offered.
“Thank you for the diagnosis, Dr. Winslow,” Lanz said. “Oh, hold on. You’re just a nurse, and unqualified to make a diagnosis.”
Lucy watched Winslow’s face go scarlet.
“Lucy, is the pain also up in your bowels or only close to your vagina?”
“It’s everywhere.”