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One
The Temple was unusually quiet for a Friday night. Normally, I’d be sewing up gunshot wounds, stitching up gashes, and if I was lucky, bringing someone back to life after they died on my table. Tonight was excruciatingly boring by contrast. The only people there besides me was Rob, my right-hand RN, Dice, head of security, and Chica, the older woman who helped us clean up and dispose.
“Yo, you think something is going on in the streets?” Rob asked me before I could ask him. We’d been tight since high school. He was my boy, and besides my brothers, the only other man I trusted. It was like he could read my mind.
“I was just about to say the same thing,” I mused, stretching my arms above my head. “Maybe since the temperature is dropping, motherfuckers are falling back with all the gang shit.”
“Yeah right. When the fuck have you known gang shit to calm down in Bellmore? It could be twenty below and they’d still find someone to rob or kill.” He shrugged his shoulders like the words he said meant nothing. Unfortunately, in Bellmore, Illinois, those words were empty because robbing and killing were common occurrences.
“Sadly, you’re right.” I passed a hand over my face and then checked my watch, noting the time.1:57 AM.“Alright,” I huffed, standing to my feet. “I’m about to hit up Maasai and let him know it’s dead in here and I’m closing up.”
Rob’s face wrinkled with a heavy frown. “You know we’re supposed to stay until the shift changes over. You never know what might happen, Breeze. Shit is crazy out there.”
He was right, but I was hoping to hit up a bar and see what ladies were still out. The plethora of possibilities sped through my mind as I considered Rob’s warning.
My brothers Hakim, Maasai, and I ran an underground hospital servicing all the people that Bellmore General Hospital wouldn’t touch. All the gangsters, the monsters, the bad guys. When motherfuckers like that would have normally died or got some shitty patchwork job, we stepped in to fill a need. Our city was teeming with crime and that meant the ones committing the crimes were getting banged up. They needed service, too.
When I took the Hippocratic oath, I vowed to save all lives. Not just the ones who were deemed to be upstanding citizens. I saved everyone.
I was ripped from my thoughts when the lights fixed to the vaulted ceilings started to flash yellow, signaling an incoming patient. Like clockwork, the watch fixed to my wrist came to life with Dice’s gravelly voice. “Got a patient. I’m going to check him and escort him in,” he told me.
“Cool,” I sighed in response. My plans to have any sliver of fun tonight had been dashed. It was cool, though. The person Dice rolled up in here had better be damn near dead. It was the only fair compensation.
The check-in station was on the floor below me. Nobody made it to the second floor without being properly checked in. We required a Temple ID that only Dice could scan along with a black light tattoo of a cross somewhere on the left side of the body. The security measures were necessary because we didn’t treat everyone.
Not just any motherfucker that got hit on the street could come to the Temple leaking and get taken care of. We only dealt with loyal patients who didn’t mind signing lengthy paperwork, including NDAs, and they also didn’t mind forking over monthly fees. We had to keep the lights on somehow.
While I scrubbed in to get ready for the OR, I stared at the video footage of Dice loading the slumped over patient onto a stretcher. A row of three flat-screen monitors above my head gave me a view of the security feeds. One glance told me I’d need to do surgery. The amount of blood I saw was insane. I was about to say something to Rob over my shoulder when his watch jumped to life with Dice’s voice.
“Rob, need you down here at check-in. This one is bleeding bad.” Dice didn’t sound concerned but he never did. If anything, his voice was disturbingly monotone at all times.
“Yup. On my way,” Rob responded, standing and pulling on a pair of blue nitrile gloves. I listened to him snap the stretchy material against his skin, then grab a bag before the elevator chimed.
I moved quickly into the OR and got out my tools before I’d even laid an eye on the patient. Blood pumped through my veins, making me buzz with excitement. Not the kind of excitement I was hoping for tonight, but it was better than nothing.
The heavy rolling sound of the stretcher making its way to my OR was like music to my ears. “He’s been scanned,” Rob told me as we moved him to the stainless-steel table. It took two of us to do what Dice did with one arm. “We gotta stop all this fucking bleeding or he’s not going to make it, Breeze.”
“Were you able to see where the blood loss is coming from?” I scanned the patient quickly, not taking long to note the leaking hole in the space between his shoulder and his neck. Rob gestured to the spot as I noticed it.
We both jumped right into work. It was going to be a bitch trying to save his life when I could see it draining from him rapidly.
I was able to slow the bleeding and sedate the patient, who Rob informed me was Illinois kingpin, Junior Baptiste, before starting surgery to remove the bullet and the fragments that had splintered. One came dangerously close to nicking the carotid artery, and had that happened, Junior would have been dead.
The precision of the shot and the deadliness of the placement told me right away that only a professional could have gotten so lucky. Not to mention gotten close enough to a man like him to pull it off. The minute that thought began building in my head, the lights flashed yellow overhead.
“Again?” Rob huffed while I focused on the small metal fragments dotting the space along the pulsing artery I had exposed. He was in and out of the room without another word while I worked on Baptiste. One wrong move, one little nick, and this man’s life would be over. I refused to have that shit happen on my watch.
I saved lives.
I didn’t miss.
Three small fragments plinked into the metal bowl at my right hand when Rob pushed through the doors, breathing heavily. “Another gunshot wound. This one is up and talking and she’s requesting you.”
“Requesting?” I muttered as my eyes narrowed, honing in on a fragment I probably wouldn’t have seen if I wasn’t concentrating so hard. I plucked it out and exhaled heavily. “We don’t do requests. If you can remove the bullet and she doesn’t need surgery, then tell her I’m busy.”
“She’s being insistent.”
“I don’t give a fuck,” I growled, still not lifting my eyes from the patient.
