Out of Nowhere (The Immortal Vagabond Healer Book 1) by Patrick LeClerc Read Free Book Online

and toast were easy enough to do one-handed. I blanched the potatoes in water before frying them in some bacon grease from the cup I kept in the fridge. When the homefries were well under way, I placed two more slices of bacon in a second pan. Once they started to crisp up, I moved them to the side and dropped two eggs in the pan, letting them float in the fat. I put a slice of oat nut bread in the toaster. Gotta eat healthy.
    When it popped up, I put it on a plate, arranged the bacon, eggs and homefries around it, then poured the excess bacon grease from the pan back into the cup. Never waste bacon fat. I’d learned that long ago, when starvation was a bigger concern for the average person than obesity. And it makes everything taste delicious. Butter flavored cooking spray is humanity’s worst idea since racism.
    After eating, I dug out the knife I’d snagged from the scene of the assault. It wasn’t a common lock knife or even a hunting or combat knife, not any that I recognized. It was a knife-fighter’s weapon. The blade was six inches long, broad and single-edged, with a cross guard and a wire-wrapped leather grip. It wasn’t highly polished steel, but dark, with the rippled pattern of watered steel, which I hadn’t seen in a very long time. Along the back edge, near the hilt were some... symbols. Letters, maybe, but not that I recognized. I couldn’t even identify an alphabet.
    Was the attack connected to the foreign patient who was asking about me?
    I was sure it had to be. Not prove-it-in-court sure, but sure enough. A vaguely familiar accent I couldn’t place, a man looking for me, and then an attack with a knife with writing I didn’t recognize, all in the space of a week.
    We don’t get attacked very often. Even gang members don’t generally mess with us. They know we don’t really have any agenda against them, and sooner or later every gangbanger will get shot or cut or one of his buddies will, and none of them wants the ambulance to be hesitant to get to his street. Once in a while a domestic-violence call might suck us in to the chaos, and drugs or alcohol or psychosis can make patients unpredictable enough to prove a threat, but that isn’t what happened at Dugan’s.
    Those guys were stone-cold sober. That was a planned ambush.
    * * * *
    I killed the morning fairly unproductively. I didn’t have enough information to do anything more than make wild guesses.
    That afternoon, I gave up and went by the local college and stopped in on the fencing class. I was technically a part-time student, since I took a class a semester, just to keep boredom at bay, and I knew the instructor from the fencing club. He was always happy to have an extra assistant to poke with a foil. I just wanted a distraction from thinking about the attack.
    The concentration required to fence generally helped clear my head. It gave me the strategy, concentration and physical exertion, as well as the rush of competition I always enjoyed, without anybody needing to die.
    I served as a practice partner for the class, and hung around to spar with Bill, the coach, for a bit. A few other students did the same.
    ‘Not tired of being hit by now?’ asked Bill, saluting and donning his mask.
    ‘Just so long as I can hit back,’ I grinned.
    We came en garde, and after beating his blade against mine a few times, feeling me out, he lunged. I parried and threw a quick riposte at his chest, but he just managed to stop it, retreating back a step. I followed him with a strong feint, then disengaged under his parry, catching him in the shoulder.
    After that, he tightened up his guard, stopping everything I threw and flicking his point out in rapid, deceptive attacks. He quickly racked up a few points on me.
    I answered back, scoring one point through guile and another through pure luck, as he tried to beat my blade, missed and advanced, allowing me to pretty much lean forward and lay the point on his chest.
    That annoyed him, and he shifted