Where There's Smoke

“A little accident.”

As she slipped his shirt from his shoulders, she noticed that his belt was unbuckled and only half the buttons of his fly were fastened. She prized his bloody hand away from the wound on his left side, about waist level.

“That’s a gunshot!”

“Naw. Like I told you, I had a little accident.”

Clearly, he was lying, something he seemed accustomed to doing frequently and without repentance. “What kind of ‘accident’?”

“I fell on a pitchfork.” He motioned down at the wound. “Just clean it out, put a Band-Aid on it, and tomorrow I’ll be fine.”

She straightened up and unsmilingly met his grinning face. “Cut the crap, all right? I know a bullet wound when I see one,” she said. “I can’t take care of this here. You belong in the county hospital.”

Turning her back on him, she moved to the phone and began punching out numbers. “I’ll make you as comfortable as I can until the ambulance arrives. Please lie down. As soon as I’ve completed the call, I’ll do what I can to stop the bleeding. Yes, hello,” she said into the receiver when her call was answered. “This is Dr. Mallory in Eden Pass. I have an emer—”

His hand came from behind her and broke the connection. Alarmed, she looked at him over her shoulder.

“I’m not going to any damn hospital,” he said succinctly. “No ambulance. This is nothing. Nothing, understand? Just stop the bleeding and slap a bandage on it. Easy as pie. Have you got any whiskey?” he asked for the third time.

Stubbornly, Lara began redialing. Before she completed the sequence of numbers, he plucked the receiver from her hand and angrily yanked it out of the phone, leaving the cord dangling from his fist.

She turned and confronted him, but, for the first time since opening the door, she was afraid. Even in this small East Texas town, drug abuse was a problem. Shortly after moving into the clinic, she had installed a burglar alarm system to prevent thefts of prescription drugs and narcotic painkillers.

He must have sensed her apprehension. With a clatter, he dropped the telephone receiver onto a cabinet and smiled grimly. “Look, Doc, if I’d come here to hurt you, I’d have already done it and gotten the hell out. I just don’t want to involve a bunch of people in this. No hospital, okay? Take care of me here, and I’ll be on my merry way.” Even as he spoke, his lips became taut and colorless. He drew an audible breath through clenched teeth.

“Are you about to pass out?”

“Not if I can help it.”

“You’re in a lot of pain.”

“Yeah,” he conceded, slowly nodding his head. “It hurts like a son of a bitch. Are you going to let me bleed t

o death while we argue about it?”

She studied his resolute face for a moment longer and reached the conclusion that she either had to do it his way or he’d leave. The former was preferable to the latter, in which case she would be risking the patient’s health and possibly his life. She ordered him to lie down and lower his jeans.

“I’ve used that same line a dozen times myself,” he drawled as he eased himself onto the table.

“That doesn’t surprise me.” Unimpressed by his boast, she moved to a basin and washed her hands with disinfectant soap. “If you know Doc Patton well enough to know where he stashed his Jack Daniel’s, you must live here.”

“Born and raised.”

“Then why didn’t you know he’d retired?”

“I’ve been away for a while.”

“Were you a regular patient of his?”

“All my life. He got me through chicken pox, tonsillitis, two broken ribs, a broken collarbone, a broken arm, and an altercation with a rusty tin can that was serving as second base. Still got the scar on my thigh where I landed when I slid in.”

“Were you called out?”

“Hell no,” he replied, as though that were beyond the realm of possibility. “More than once I’ve come through that back door in the middle of the night, needing Doc to patch me up for one reason or another. He wasn’t as stingy with the medicinal whiskey as you are. What’s that you’re fixing there?”

“A sedative.” She calmly depressed the plunger of a syringe and sent a spurt of medication into the air.

She then set it down and swabbed his upper arm with a cotton ball soaked in alcohol. Before she knew what he was about to do, he picked up the syringe, pushed the plunger with his thumb and squirted the fluid onto the floor.