The Doctor And The Don

The Meet

There was blood on the marble floor, and nobody in the house seemed bothered by it.

I stood in the doorway of a mansion bigger than my entire apartment complex back in Chicago, holding my medical bag like a shield, while two men in tailored suits looked me over the way security looks over a stranger at an airport. Neither of them said a word. Neither of them smiled either.

“Dr. Hayes.” A tall woman appeared from a hallway, her heels clicking sharp against the floor.

“You are late.”

“I got the call twenty minutes ago and I don’t even know the address I’m standing at right now, so I would call that pretty fast, actually.”

She did not appreciate the joke. She turned and walked, clearly expecting me to follow, so I did, past a curved staircase, past a room full of paintings that probably cost more than my student loans, and into a bedroom where a man sat on the edge of a bed with a shirt soaked through with blood.

He looked up at me like I was late for a dinner reservation instead of a gunshot wound.

“Finally,” he said.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me.”

I set my bag down slowly, taking him in. Dark hair, sharp jaw, the kind of face that belonged on the cover of a magazine about watches nobody could afford. He also had the calm of a man who was never told no, which told me exactly what kind of night this was going to be.

“Let’s see the wound,” I said, snapping on gloves.

He did not move his hand from his side. “Who exactly sent you?”

“The hospital sent me. Why, were you expecting someone else?”

Something flickered in his eyes, gone before I could name it.

“Most doctors do not talk to me this way.”

“Most doctors probably are not treating a gunshot wound in a house that looks like it needs its own zip code. Now move your hand before I move it for you.”

A few of the men near the door shifted, and for a second, the room went very still, the kind of quiet that makes the hair on your arms stand up. I ignored it. I had a job to do.

He finally lifted his hand, and I got my first real look at the wound. Clean entry. No exit. Moderate bleeding, nothing that told me an artery was involved, which meant he was going to be extremely lucky and extremely difficult, probably in that order.

“You need a hospital,” I told him.

“No.”

“That was not a request.”

“Neither was this,” he said, and something about the way he said it made it clear that arguing further was not going to change anything.

I looked at the wound. I looked at him. I thought about how three weeks ago I had been packing boxes in Chicago, excited about a fresh start in Miami, and wondered exactly how I had ended up here instead.

“Fine,”

I said, reaching for my kit. “But you owe me an explanation.”

For the briefest second, something like a smile crossed his face. “Get in line, Doctor.”