Page 3 of Absinthe Dreams
“Chainsaw,” I said. “The name’s Chainsaw.”
“Chainsaw…” She said my road name, as though tasting it for the first time, and I liked the sound of it on her lips.
“Thanks, Doc,” Saint muttered, and he pushed me past her and the other doctor, who was lookin’ at us both gobsmacked, and out the ambulance bay’s automatic doors.
CHAPTER ONE
A FEW YEARS LATER…
Genesis…
“We’ve got a GSW to the upper right chest with good breath sounds bilaterally!” I loved Amelia. She was a medic who didn’t mince words and got right to the meat of what I was dealing with. Her partner, Jabari, wasn’t the same.
“Man, eight years old, about to blow the candles out on his birthday cake when these cats just opened up on the whole party.”
I hated pedes cases, but they weren’t uncommon in this city.
I’d cut my teeth at New Orleans Mass General’s Emergency Medicine Department as a resident and had unexpectedly fallen in love with emergency medicine. I’d expected to complete my residency and go into private practice back in the town I’d come from to make some kind of a difference, but I’d realized quickly that I could be of much more useherefor the time being. A private practice could wait until closer to retirement, and when my body had begun to slow down.
At the ripe age of thirty-one, I had time for that yet. Although some days, like today… I felt every step I’d taken. My feetachedwith the need to get out of these shoes and to stand on my cold kitchen tile or the cool bare hardwoods at home.
I’d definitely been on my toes a hell of a lot more than I wanted to be today. I dropped onto the stool at the charting computer reserved for doctors and sighed.
That’d been intense, but the kid was stable and on his way to surgery. I wasn’t done with the adrenaline. I needed to finish riding it out and getting all the necessary info of what we’d given him and how much, the measures we’d taken, etc., into his chart before he’d even finished his elevator ride to the surgical floor.
I clacked away at the keyboard keys and kept a laser focus on the screen, despite someone standing on the opposite side of the nurses’ station wrap in front of me, quite obviously waiting for my attention.
“Be with you in just a second,” I said absently as they shifted from foot to foot, growing impatient with me.
I knew it didn’t look like much to an outsider who didn’t know what I was doing. That it just looked like I was typing up this or that – but in this case, getting the information into the portal in front of me could be literal life and death for the patient on his way and being prepped for anesthesia.
I punched theenterkey, and the orders were in, swept through the hospital’s system in the blink of an eye, and likely already appearing on a multitude of screens up in the surgical suite.
I sighed and looked up at the guy waiting on the other side of the nurses’ station counter.
He was in a dark blue uniform shirt with his name stitched on the front, like something a mechanic or delivery person would wear. He had a clipboard in one hand and a heavy-looking vase with white roses next to him.
“They said you were Genesis Bordelon,” he said.
“Yes, I’m Doctor Bordelon,” I said hesitantly.
“These are for you,” he said. “Can you sign here?” He held out the clipboard and pen, and I took both. I skimmed the purchase order, but didn’t recognize the name on it at all. I scribbled my swift doctor’s signature at the bottom where it was indicated by a swipe of highlighter and handed the board back to the delivery guy.
“Enjoy your flowers,” he said with a smile. I swallowed hard, plastered on a smile, and nodded, but dread was already coiling in my belly like a venomous snake about to strike.
I took a deep breath and walked around the station to the outside to free up the charting station. There were a lot more patients and only a couple available outside of the one in each patient room, but this was the ER.
You didn’t always want to be in a patient room, not with things like homeless men with a sock full of disco rice from their unchecked and rampant diabetes. The smell alone was enough to want to knock you out – unfortunate, sad, but true.
Our nurses didnotget paid nearly enough for some of the things that walked through that door.
While the flowers now sitting on the counter in front of me seemed like one of the more pleasant and innocuous things to land in the ER, I had a feeling they weren’t.
There were thirteen flowers in the vase, I counted, but I probably didn’t need to. I knew what was there the moment I spotted the red bloom standing out among all the white.
A dozen white roses, with a thirteenth red one sitting as their heart.
I stared at the expensive arrangement in the heavy, cut crystal vase. That snake of dread in my belly began to uncoil, rasping like sandpaper on the inside of my gut as it twisted and unraveled, perking up and paying attention.
