Page 1 of Dying for the Doctor

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UNLV MEDICAL CENTER.

LAS VEGAS, NEVADA.

DRAKE

Doctor Drake to the Emergency Room!

Doctor Drake to the Emergency Room!

Doctor Drake to the Emergency Room!

Said no one, not anymore, not for at least the past ten years, dating back to when I was a fresh-faced intern from the University of Nevada’s Medical School, pulling sixteen-hour shifts at this very hospital. Nah, nobody calls my name these days, but damn, my heart still skips a beat and then goes off to the races every time I hear that hospital PA system crackle with energy, calling a doctor to the ER to save a life.

What a rush.

Stalking past the bustling ER on my way to the hospital’s rear exit, I suck in a heavy breath. Yeah, what a rush it is to save a life.

But that rush of exhilaration is just a memory in my calloused heart now. Sure, I run a private practice, so I’m still helping people, maybe even saving a life or two by catching someone’s cholesterol buildup before they die clutching their chest while shopping for Cheetos. And I do my best to warn patients about the dangers of too much sugar before their bodies get ravaged by full-blown diabetes. But in the end it’s all a farce.

Because none of that makes up for what I really do.

What I’ve just done today.

Kill.

Instead of saving lives, I’m ending them.

Sure, most of the guys I put down are killers themselves, and all of them are bad motherfuckers who deserve to rot in hell. But that doesn’t wash the blood off my latex-covered hands, isn’t going to keep me from burning in that very same hell when it’s my time to be wheeled out on a gurney.

But nobody knows when it’s their time, I think as I peer through the glass-windowed ER door at the heroic doctors and nurses and technicians doing everything humanly possible to save at least some of the never-ending stream of trauma patients who get wheeled and carried through these doors every night of every year. Las Vegas is called American’s Playground, which is just marketing-speak for unlimited sex, booze, drugs, and gambling.

And the inevitable side-effect of that potent mix of sex, booze, drugs, and gambling is . . . violence.

Violence, both accidental and intentional.

Fist-fights. Car-crashes. Assaults.

Hotel-room invasions. Car-jackings. Drug-deals gone bad.

And a good chunk of those events have their finales in this very Emergency Room.

You name it, we see it.

Well, I don’t see it anymore, I think wistfully while watching a nurse expertly stop a gunshot victim from bleeding out on a gurney by clamping a burst artery like it’s no big deal, just another day at work.

“You still work here, Drake?” comes a man’s voice from behind me now, and I curse silently for lingering outside the ER to reminisce about the good old days, those heady days of my early twenties, when I was full of heroic fire, burning with a mission to heal.

Those happy days before I understood that although Dad allowed me to follow my heart and go to Medical School instead of directly joining the Family Business, there was no escapingthe Family, no escaping my legacy, no running from the blood that poisons my veins, the curse of being born under these circumstances, to this mother and this father, this ancestral line of crime and violence.

Maybe there is such a thing as fate.

Maybe destiny really does exist.

How else to explain running into one of the few doctors who would still remember me from when I interned here after getting my MD?

This creepy old asshole, Doctor Lenworth.

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