The Riptide Ultra-Glide Read Free Page B

a series of individual examination rooms that ran the length of a hall. A single doctor emerged from the last door, came down the hallway and started again at the first. The loop took twenty minutes, even if someone was chatty. Because most of the patients spoke Spanish, and the doc had no idea what they were saying.
    â€œWhat seems to be the problem?”
    â€œÂ¿Qué?”
    â€œSounds like gout. Take this and see the nurse out front.”
    Patients stacked up again at the checkout window. But not to settle accounts. This was exclusively prepay. And one size fits all. Each person picked up an identical single small square of paper that the doctor had filled out ahead of time and stacked in a tall pile. The only chore left was for the nurses to fill in the names. Back pain, knee pain, migraine, toothache, general blahs, didn’t matter: The nurse handed over a script for ninety tablets, eighty-milligram oxycodone, the greenish-blue ones.
    â€œAnd here’s the address of the pharmacy. Make sure you go to that one . . . Next, please! . . .”
    Palm Shore Pain Associates, Inc.
    The back door opened and the men from the school bus filed in. They had an express-line arrangement; nurses took them directly to the doctor’s personal office in groups of fifteen. And they didn’t look too good. Missing front teeth and that sallow, ruddy complexion that says no permanent address . As the men filed past the reception desk, the driver forked over four hundred dollars a head, which was a hundred more than everyone else waiting behind them.
    An hour later, the sixth and last group of fifteen left the office and climbed back on the bus. The driver collected a prescription from each, just as he had done on all of their last eight vacations to Florida. Of course, they would get them back at the pharmacy, but then they’d have to turn over their pill bottle upon rejoining the bus, or it would be a long walk back to Kentucky, and no three hundred bucks for their trouble.
    The driver started up the bus and pulled out of the alley behind the pain clinic.
    Suddenly: “What the hell?”
    A single whoop of a siren. Before anyone knew it, the SWAT team was everywhere, black helmets and Kevlar vests, M16 rifles pointed at the windshield, storming aboard.
    Patients waiting on the patio in front scattered across the shopping-center parking lot and were tackled under running sprinklers.
    The shrill yelling outside brought nurses running into the waiting room, just in time for more officers to crash through the doors. Someone in the bathroom stopped up the toilet trying to flush prescriptions.
    More M16s. “On the ground! Now!”
    Every chair emptied in the waiting areas. Officers pulled others from examination rooms. Another member of the tactical unit came in the back door, pushing the doctor ahead of him. “Tried to climb out his window.”
    Another pulled a nurse with wet arms out of the bathroom. The crackdown required several bags of those plastic wrist cuffs. Finally, everyone was lying stomach down and heard their Miranda rights in two languages.
    â€œSecure,” said the officer in charge. “Let ’em in.”
    Lights! Cameras! . . . The TV gang from all the local affiliates poured through the door.
    â€œCan you hold up the money and those prescription pads again? . . .”
    One of the stations went live from the parking lot as officers paraded suspects toward corrections vans.
    â€œIn a highly coordinated and dangerous operation, authorities have just raided one of the largest South Florida pill mills illegally dispensing oxycodone, which has contributed to record numbers of overdoses not only in Broward County, but as far away as West Virginia. Officials report they even seized a bus that out-of-state traffickers were using to transport homeless people from Kentucky, and today’s arrests should seriously disrupt the Interstate 95 pipeline of