Tom had hated to ask Drew to put himself at risk by offering help, but he’d had no alternative. To his credit, Tom’s young partner had not only offered his lake house as a sanctuary but also insisted on driving over immediately to treat Tom’s wound.

“There!” Tom cried, wincing as he raised his hand to point at a giant shed a couple of hundred yards up the road on the right-hand side.

“I see it.”

Walt eased the Roadtrek back to forty miles per hour, then thirty. The turn was forty yards ahead now. He braked steadily, then swung out to the left so that he could fit the van between the mailbox and a post on the other side of the asphalt drive.

Thirty yards ahead, a gravel offshoot led to the tall storage shed. Walt drove straight up to the overhead door and stopped with a squeal. Tom read the code off his hand, and Walt climbed out and entered it in the keypad on the wall.

The overhead door began to rise, and white light flooded the ground.

Walt scrambled back into the driver’s seat, then pulled into the garage as soon as he had sufficient clearance. Then he jumped out and hit a button on the interior wall. Thirty seconds later, the door rattled down to the ground and they were enveloped in darkness.

“Not bad,” Walt said in a grudging tone. “About the best we could have hoped for. How’s your shoulder?”

“Bad enough. I could use another Lorcet.”

“Should you take it, with your ticker weak as it is?”

“No. But if Drew has some Maker’s Mark in there, I’ll sure drink it.”

“Let’s find out.”

Tom felt dizzy as he sought the van’s running board with his foot.

HALF AN HOUR LATER, Walt leaned over Tom’s bloody shoulder and studied Drew Elliott’s handiwork by the light of the reading lamp Drew had used to see while suturing the wound.

“You sewed a drain into it,” Walt observed, “just like we used to do in Korea.”

Drew stripped off his gloves as Melba Price sponged the skin around the rubber hose protruding from Tom’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t have used a drain if we were in a hospital. But if Tom insists on staying out here, I want it in there.”