Page 6 of Absinthe Dreams
“Kind of figured,” I said.
“Alright now,” my boss said. “Have a good time doin’ what you do.”
He hung up, and that was that.
“Saved in the nick of time,” Axe said with a wink, and I snorted.
“Now pour my ass the good stuff,” I ordered, and he grinned at me.
“Always chasin’ the Green Fairy,” he said, and I winked.
Absinthe was my drink of choice. I had a thing for its deep anise flavor. Loved me some black licorice. Couldn’t get enough of the stuff. Didn’t understand why people didn’t like it.
“We got church?” I asked, sliding up onto one of the barstools while he prepped a glass for my Absinthe, setting the absinthe spoon atop the glass, the sugar cube atop that, and all that jazz. We didn’t have the fancy dispensers you found in the Quarter,making a neat production out of the pour – but then again, I was really the only one who drank the stuff in here. I suppose I could have found one or built one if I’d wanted to, but honestly, there was no need.
Axe finished my drink before moving on to finish his, and I sipped joyously out of my glass.
“Yeah,” he acknowledged my question finally. “Just waiting for Bennie to get here.”
“He’s gonna be soaked,” I said, casually looking to the rectangle of light coming through the club’s new front door.
It was steel-plated and had one of those thick-ass windows that was meant to be bulletproof. It was cracked down a few layers from the beatings it had taken, but it let us get an idea of who was on the other side before we opened up if we needed to.
It was only a week or two old, and a salvage from some old prison that was being decommissioned.
We had a big, thick window from the same prison that was once used by the guards to watch the cafeteria. We’d be putting it in to one side to bring in some natural light during the day.
We’d already bricked over the two windows that’d been present before the drive-by that’d taken Louie from us, but it was gonna be a chore to get the window into one side. The side thatdidn’thave the bar on it.
We needed to get it done in one weekend max, and we were still in the thick of it with the Bayou Brethren and Ruth, so it wasn’t exactly a priority right now.
There were entirely too many old ghosts needing to be laid to rest right now, and now that we had an inkling of what was happening, we could come up with some kind of a game plan.
Who the fuck knew what that was going to look like, though…
CHAPTER THREE
Genesis…
I’d dropped the roses off, albeit somewhat out of my way, at the Katrina memorial just outside downtown.
I didn’t want the beautiful flowers going to waste, but I also didn’t want them anywhere near me enough to want to take them home, or even in the same building as me, to want to take them to a different ward of the hospital.
Not after what the sender had done…
One thing I had to hand to NOLA’s Mass General was that the hospital had been through the thick of it with declining patient care, staff shortages, and putting staff through the wringer to the point that too many of them had burned completely the fuck out.
It had gottenso badthat just beforemyarrival, federal overwatch committees had been sent in, the entire hospital board had been fired, and the whole system had been overhauled. Just more quiet work handled by the presidency that shall not be named – and thank God for it.
The hospital closing would have been a disaster for New Orleans, but even worse, for the entire state of Louisiana,because even as broken as it was, it wasstillthe top trauma center for the area.
So, it’d undergone a federally overseen overhaul to its betterment, a lot of staff were fired, and a lot of staff were hired – myself included – after my residency.
I was grateful for getting in at the time that I did to make it possible, even if I was slightly disappointed at some of the hoops that were put into place, even if said hoops were for my own good.
One of the main changes implemented was a rotation requirement. If you weren’t a surgeon or in some kind of highly specialized field of medicine, you were on rotation through departments so that no one was given even one iota of opportunity to burn out.
This applied especially to the Department of Emergency Medicine. Meaning I was in the midst of my three-month rotation in the ER, but quarterly, we got moved, and we were only allowed to return to the Emergency Department after three months in another department. Sometimes, that department was general medicine. Sometimes, pediatrics, which I had a hard time with. Sometimes Obstetrics, sometimes Ortho, and so on. You get the picture.
