I didn't know why Sam's words of affirmation filled me with dread. On the surface, it seemed as though he spoke with confidence that I would save Lien's life. Underneath it all, he seemed almost resigned to the fact that Lien was indestructible, like some annoying fact of life similar to taxes, inflation, or microplastics.

Perhaps it was my paranoia speaking, but I wondered if it would make Sam happier if Lien didn't make it through the night. Who was Lien's successor? Was it someone Sam would have considered less of a snake?

There wasn't time to embark on a complete psychological analysis of Sam's intentions. I entered the last room down the basement corridor and found myself in a makeshift hospital room. Lien was lying on a stretcher. Whoever brought him here had stripped off his bloody jacket and shirt. Yes, fortunately, as I saw now, Ashlen had been wearing a bulletproof vest.

I wasn't sure if I felt relieved or insulted.

Despite our past together, Ashlen hadn't trusted me enough to come without some basic form of protection.

Good for you, Ashlen. You may even live to see the sunrise.

The bullets hadn't penetrated the vest, but they had done enough damage to leave bruises on his torso. The wound that I had stuck my fingers in earlier that night was on his right shoulder, just lateral to his pectoralis muscle. There was a gap in the bulletproof vest there. Ashlen had taken a bullet in his chest, but it probably hadn't hit anything vital.

I had seen patients who had taken stab wounds to the chest in that area arrive full-conscious and joking about their bad luck.

So, why was I brought here to intervene? They didn't need me. Just a bandage would have sufficed while they assessed the damage.

Nope, they needed me.

Because Ashlen wasn't conscious. Because he was slowly dying. Because the bullet had done more than simply passed through him.

"Who are you?" a little bald guy with round glasses exclaimed before I could finish my thoughts. I said no one was to come in here until he was stabilized—no family, no girlfriends, no one."

"I'm none of those," I replied. "And who are you? What are you doing here?"

"I'm treating him!" the little man yelled. "There's nothing you can do to help, Miss. Go back to bed. I have my hands full trying to keep him breathing here."

My eyes drifted to a jacket discarded on a nearby chair. There was a Medical ID attached to it. This man was a physical therapist. His name was Albert Roz. It looked as though he worked at a nursing home. What did he do to anger these bastards that they dragged him here in the middle of the night?

Also, Lien's problem now wasn't that he couldn't catch his breath. It was the fact that his lungs were filling with blood, and his chest cavity now had air in all the places where it shouldn't.

"She's his wife," Sam said and then offered with a shrug — "and she's a trauma surgeon."

Albert's face turned from anger to sheepish relief. He almost cried tears of happiness to see me. I wondered if I should be grateful to have arrived at this very minute. If I had been delayed a few minutes more, Ashlen would be dead. Perhaps the world would have been a safer place. Then again, with a glimpse at Sinister Sam's dangerous smirk, perhaps there were worse mob bosses waiting in the wings.

I grabbed a scalpel from the nearby tray and went to work. Albert had already performed a cursory sterilization before I arrived. I saw that he had already dug the bullet out of Ashlen's shoulder, but he had been baffled as to why Ashlen's condition continued to deteriorate. It was understandable. Most people when they saw a lodged foreign object would seek to remove it immediately, even if it was keeping the victim alive.

Now, Ashlen's chest wall was sucking in air with every breath.

He was slowly dying with every breath. He couldn't get air into his lungs as long as the air was trapped between the pleural space and the chest wall. His right lung must have collapsed to the size of a deflated balloon by now. His chest trachea was shifting to the left. He was going to die.

Not unless I deflated the air with my scalpel.

If I had an ounce of moral integrity in me, I would have allowed him to die.

If any of the articles that I had read about him had in fact happened, then I would have been doing humanity a favor to let nature take its course.

Yet, I couldn't.

Perhaps it was because I had never killed a man, neither by my actions nor by failing to act.

I couldn't do it right there and then.

So, I lowered my scalpel and cut into that space in his mid-axillary line as the my training had taught me. It was funny, I recalled lying in that very spot under his armpit on lazy Sunday morning as we argued about who would get up and pick up our coffee from the bodega a block away. A gust of air escaped as I did so, and suddenly Ashlen's breathing deepened. He wasn't gasping in agony anymore.

I had saved his life.

But at what cost? 

For my one act of kindness, he would live to murder so many more. 

Did I do it out of fear for my own life?

 Or was there another reason?