Devil May Care by James Mullaney

Author:James Mullaney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: humor detective crime hardboiled satire parody demons
Publisher: James Mullaney

Chapter 8

When Albert Schweitzer, Christian Barnard and all the good little doctors die, they’re ushered straight to the up escalator, to clouds and harps and an eternity of boozing it up with Hippocrates and Florence Nightingale on the famous south patio of Heaven’s Holy Nine Holes Golf Club. Hell gets stuck with the worm-riddled husks of all the Kevorkians, Jekylls and those doctors you sometimes read about in the paper who saw off the wrong foot and then hide it in a drawer and claim the patient hopped in that way. If you could sit Haiti and the Cruel and Unusual Punishments’ infirmary side-by-side, you’d almost say Haiti came out ahead. Almost. I mean, let’s not go nuts here.

Lucky for me I knew as I hobbled in on my fake injury that I only needed fake medical attention. The place was so filthy I wouldn’t have let them put a Band-Aid on my decapitated head for fear of catching something worse than dead.

I asked for an ace bandage from the nurse in charge, a hugely fat demon dame with a white paper hat and about a gallon of Rust-Oleum lipstick smeared across her scabby mouth. She found one that was still in a wrapper, and so was still relatively clean. I told her I’d take care of my phony injury myself and she shuffled off. From the size of her, I guessed to the candy machine and not to Buffalo.

Once she was out of sight, I waited until Molokai wasn’t looking before I slipped into my pocket the cheap tin clasps that were hooked to the ace bandage.

“Be a doll and see if you can find me some of those cheap tin clasps to hold this thing on,” I said to the demon.

Molokai was standing next to the rusting examining table on which I sat. His big arms were crossed and he was staring impatiently at the ceiling. My sock and shoe were next to me on the iron slab.

“You gotta be kidding me,” Molokai grunted. But beyond that he didn’t argue. I was breaking him in good. He walked off in search of the nurse, muttering all the way.

As soon as he was gone, I hopped down from the table and hustled into the ward.

The beds were chunks of rough granite. Only one was occupied.

The demon patient was wrapped practically head to toe in grimy, blood-stained bandages. He wasn’t waking up anytime soon. Sedatives in Hell consisted of a very large mallet which sat on the nightstand with a pharmacy label on the handle instructing “administer twice daily or as necessary to control consciousness."

I snatched up the chart hanging from the rusty length of barbed wire at the foot of the bed. The slumbering demon was being administered rabies vaccinations at the base of his wings twelve times daily. If that was standard Hell hospital protocol, I was damn glad I’d only drunk from my flask since I’d arrived.

I read the doctor’s notes at the bottom of the chart.

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