Free HOWLERS by Kent Harrington Page B

below. It was almost empty.

            *   *   *

    A siren wailed in the distance when Dr. Poole came back from lunch at the Copper Penny across the street. The doctor knew his waiting room would be full of one-o’clock appointments, and he felt oddly bored with the predictable afternoon. Looking at schoolboy tonsils and twisted ankles , he thought. You know you love them. If it was predictable sometimes, it was always gratifying to be respected and needed. Coming here to live was your idea, he reminded himself. He had quit the Center for Disease Control to bring up his kids in the mountains, as far away from big cities as he could get them. He and his wife joked that they would be the first black couple in America with children on the U.S. Olympic ski team.
       Marvin heard the siren again and realized that it was coming into town and getting louder. Must be a fire. He stepped into his office through a side door and buzzed his receptionist.
      “Okay. I’m back, Lisa. Is it full out there?”
    “Is this the flu season?” his receptionist asked.
    “Let the games begin,” Marvin said.

    Two sheriff’s deputies dragged Willis Good by the arms through the waiting room and into Poole’s office. Good’s thigh was bleeding horribly from a laceration that was hemorrhaging badly; the bleeding had soaked his jeans so that the bottom of his right pant leg was saturated. Willis was screaming at the men who were dragging him.
    “Let me go, they’re on the way. Let me go!”
    The officers were fighting with Good, who was acting like a man possessed by the devil. He kicked out with both feet. He caught Marvin’s receptionist dead in the nose with the heel of his right dress shoe, knocking her into the wall and splattering her face with blood from his leg wound. She screamed in pain as blood began pouring from her nose; she sagged to the floor. Patients in the waiting room were trying to dodge Willis’ feet as he lashed out at them too, like a mechanical devil. A mother holding her toddler tried to run by Willis but he caught her with a vicious kick, sending her and the child into a table, knocking it over and sending magazines spilling across the floor as children and mothers screamed. The two sheriffs, trying desperately to control Good, were losing the battle.
    “What the hell is going on here?” Poole shouted over the bedlam. He’d rushed out of one of the two examining rooms and into the chaotic waiting room. He immediately ran to his receptionist, holding her bleeding nose, and tried to lift her up.
    “Just get his ass sedated, Doc,” yelled one of the deputies, battling Willis. The cop managed to smack Willis in the temple with the butt of his Maglite, but it seemed only to stun him. In a moment Willis was at it again, kicking out with both his feet like a wild animal. The deputy struck Good a second time, much harder. Willis went limp, knocked unconscious by the blow. Poole broke for the drug cabinet in the hallway and began rifling the drawers, frantically looking for something he could knock Willis out with.

    Willis’ eyes were bloodshot and frightened when he regained consciousness two hours later.
    “Willis, are you all right, son?” Dr. Poole asked. It was quiet. The two sheriff’s deputies had stayed behind until they too were called away by another emergency—some kind of riot at the Target on Highway 50. Marvin had assured them he could handle Willis. It seemed as if Timberline had been turned upside down in the matter of a few hours.
    Marvin closed the door to the examination room. He’d had to send his receptionist home after bandaging her broken nose. The waiting room was a mess, his patients long gone. The chairs and tables all turned over. The men had struggled with Good a second time, until Poole had finally jabbed Willis with a 25-milligram dose of Haloperidol that had knocked him out almost immediately.
    “Are they here yet?” Willis asked, looking up at the doctor.
    “Who?”