Dr. Knox Read Online Free

surgical stapler, a blood pressure cuff, a portable EKG, a portable sonogram, a laptop, and more gauze and gloves. Next to that was a small cooler filled with ice packs and three bags of O-negative blood. I opened them both and scanned their contents.
    Sutter was watching me. “This makes four times you’ve taken inventory.”
    “I’m a nervous guy.”
    He snorted. “If only.”
    “Meaning what?”
    “Meaning I served with nervous guys and with eager guys, and I know the difference. I’d feel better if you got less of a charge out of walking into a room full of guns.”
    I sighed. We’d had this conversation before over the years. “I didn’t think tonight was that kind of gig.”
    “Any gig can turn into that kind of gig.”
    “Some rich-kid slacker in the Hollywood Hills—seriously?”
    “
Any
gig.”
    “Usually, the patients don’t shoot at me, because they need me.”
    “Until they don’t.”
    “Isn’t that where you come in—making sure I don’t get shot, and that I get paid?”
    “It’s easier when you’re less eager.”
    I shrugged.
    I’d been working these night jobs with Sutter for more than three years, since I took over the clinic from the ancient Dr. Carmody and discovered after the first month that I could make payroll or make rent, but not both. Sutter, ever the entrepreneur, had an answer. The arrangement was simple: house calls for cash, paid up front, and no questions asked beyond the medical ones. No paper filed—with cops or anyone else—about gunshot wounds or drug overdoses or STDs or patients who might be persons-of-interest in connection with…whatever. And no names exchanged—not theirs, not ours, not ever.
    Of course, for some people in the market for undocumented medical care, anonymity was impossible: their faces stared out from TV and movie screens, from magazine covers and billboards, from every corner of the Internet. What those patients wanted above all was silence, complete and absolute. After three years we had established a reputation for it among the lawyers, agents, PR flacks, crisis consultants, and the other breeds of handlers and fixers who rang in the middle of the night. Or Sutter had established a reputation for it. It was my fervent hope that I had established no reputation at all—that I was entirely unknown. With every one of these night calls, I bet my license on it.
    “This lawyer didn’t say anything about the wounds?” I asked.
    “You got what I got: multiple GSWs. End of message.”
    My knee bounced up and down in four-four time. “But you actually know this guy—the patient?”
    “Turns out I knew his pops. He’s a director. He makes these crappy, basic-cable action flicks—commandos versus monsters or aliens or some shit. I was his tech adviser on a few of ’em. Wanted me to show his starlets how elite special operators would grease zombies.”
    “SEALs learn that?”
    “Whole chapter on it in the counter-insurgency manual.”
    There were still cars in the dusty lot at the top of Runyon Canyon when we passed, and a couple of runners cooling down in the gathering dark. Five minutes later, Sutter turned the truck onto a brick drive that climbed around a hillside for fifty yards and then was interrupted by brick pillars, a wrought-iron gate, security cameras, and an intercom. We rolled to a stop by the metal box.
    “You order the Korean fried chicken?” Sutter said to the speaker. There was no answer, but the gates swept open.
    The drive curved upward some more, and ended in a brick plaza and a low-slung house of glass, red stone, and sharp edges. There were desert plantings around the house, and lights among them, and they cast jagged shadows over Sutter’s truck, and on the yellow Turbo Carrera, the black Lexus, and the battered green Accord parked out front.
    Sutter checked the load in his Sig Sauer, slipped it in a holster, and mostly covered it with his Ozomatli tee shirt. I hoisted the duffels from the truck, and he picked up