Needles & Sins Read Free Page B

“Nutcase,” I believe, is what I wrote. Then I stood up and said, “Wait here just a minute.”
    I opened the door and ducked into the hallway.
    “Wait doctor,” she began, leaping off the paper-covered examining table. “I know this sounds crazy but…”
    I was already at the receptionist’s station. “ Carrie,” I said. “I can’t operate on Ms. Phoenix. Please give her the name of someone at the Artgeld Clinic.”
    I always used to give Carrie the shit jobs. After all, she ran the desk. She was my front line protection.
    The problem was, when you’re on the way down, nobody is all that keen to protect you and help you back up. Especially when your checks bounce. And when you turn down cases when your payroll checks are bouncing…
    Well…that’s why, the next time Ms. Phoenix—“Please call me Janis”—came to my office, I was the only one there to receive her.
     
    She rang the buzzer at the front desk and I had to answer. She roused me from a reverie of worry that involved the winner of the next NCAA pool among the medical building tenants, the fleeting concern about my overdue mortgage and the thought that maybe, just maybe, I might get laid if I went down to Billy’s Tavern tonight and mentioned that I was not just a surgeon, but a doc who had given “breast lifts” to the stars. It was a weak dream, but it was better than the thoughts of the repo men coming to cart all of my furniture back to some endless, Orwellian warehouse.
    I knew the stains on my office carpet were really the visible comments on the lackluster spark that had been my brief career. I probably would have failed as a vet. I was probably best cut out as an accountant. But here I was. A skids surgeon who had gotten his degree in an offshore program because my grades weren’t quite up to par to make it into a medical school here in the states. A guy with a scalpel, a mediocre degree, and an office that cost too much, even though it shared a zip code with the slums. While at first I had charmed a few well-connected patients—and the press—I had, in the end, not done particularly well for myself.
    Nor for others really.
    The carpet of my office was as stained in blood as the legal proceedings against my name were saturated in ink. I got into this business to help people; really I had.
    Yet here I was, in an empty, beaten-down office, with a crazy woman asking me to flay her open. Filet her like a trout.
    And there wasn’t a nurse to be found to back me up. Normally, doctors always had a nurse in on a consultation, largely to make sure that if any litigation followed the surgery, there would be a) a witness, and b) another woman to refute it. Put a man in court against a woman with a spit-on-command eye faucet…and the man lost every time, regardless of the circumstance. Estrogen always triumphed over testosterone in our courts of law. Call it primordial. Call it unfair. It was what it was.
    And right now, there was a woman in my broken down office, for the second time in as many months, asking me to cut her open.
    Only this time, I was within five days and $250 of losing my lease. I had no staff salaries to pay because I had no staff. But Janis Phoenix was potentially the only patient between me and bankruptcy. And I didn’t even have a heroin habit to blame on my decline.
    “You remember me,” she said, when I came out from the back room and raised an eyebrow at her stance behind the nurse’s station. She had rung the tiny “call” bell ten times in as many seconds.
    “How could I forget?” I asked. “You want me to cut you open…but to gain what?”
    “To release the inner me,” she said.
    “What you’ve proposed will only release your blood and put you in danger of dying,” I said.
    When she smiled, I almost believed that letting out a little blood on the table would make her sing. But that wasn’t the end of it. She wanted me to trim her flesh to the bone. To cut her from stem to sternum and then