Free Down Don't Bother Me (9780062362209) by Jason Miller

violating some kind of doctor-patient thing?”
    â€œUsually, but this thing was in all the papers later anyway. I was pulling a shift at the ER. Woman comes in with her arm all cut up. Ugly stuff. Torn to strings. Looked like she’d run it through a thresher.”
    â€œDid she?”
    â€œDid she what?”
    â€œRun it through a thresher? Because that’s a common thing around here.”
    He said, “I know. No. Shut up. Anyway, I take her back and start looking at the arm, and it’s cut up good by these little fragments embedded in the skin. Oddly shaped fragments. Like bits of china, but rough, not smooth. I start tweezing them out. Know what they were?”
    â€œHow much can I give you not to tell me?”
    â€œBone. Skull bone, to be precise. Few bits of scalp, too. Some with these little hairs still attached.”
    â€œI’m maybe not liking this story so much,” I said. “Anyway, my stomach isn’t.”
    â€œUh-huh. Anyway, this woman, she’d been schemingwith her sister to kill her husband. He was an abuser. Wife-beater, I mean. Was beating her like a men’s group drum for twenty years or so. Finally, she has enough. One night he comes through the door, three sheets to the wind as usual, ready to treat his wife like a speed bag, only this time her sister’s there, too, with a shotgun. Crouched behind the dining room table, waiting to do the deed. You understand? She got her sister to pull the trigger. Couldn’t do it herself.”
    â€œI get it.”
    â€œThing is, though, it’s a twenty-eight gauge.”
    â€œOh, shit.”
    He shrugged and said, “Yeah. You know how it is, though. You inflate terrible things in your brain, make them out to be more than they are. Stronger, I mean. Twenty years of hitting and kicking and biting and worse, this sonofabitch must have seemed like a Godzilla to these two. So they choose too much weapon, thinking they’d need it to put him down. Damn thing is practically a cannon. Bastard’s head explodes like a piñata, only there wasn’t any candy inside.”
    â€œDoc . . .”
    â€œSo these bone fragments hit the wife in the arm and tear her up like she’d gone a round or two with a woodchipper.”
    â€œThat’s a pretty story.”
    â€œThought you’d like that.”
    â€œIt’s not a domestic,” I said. “I had a run-in with someone, but not with Peggy. Or any other woman, for that matter. And there weren’t any shotguns involved.”
    He shook his head and grunted. The nurse finished what he was doing and hustled out without looking at either of us.
    Dr. Cooper said, “Reckon we shouldn’t be talking likethis in front of him. He’s young and unwise as yet in the ways of the world. Something like this, a fight or an assault, I’m supposed to call the law.”
    â€œI was kinda hoping I could talk you out of that.”
    â€œI was kinda thinking that’s what you were kinda hoping. I’ll try one more time. This something happened at the mine?”
    â€œWhy do you ask?”
    He hefted his shoulders and said, “’Count of I get about as many of you guys in here for fighting as I do for work-related injuries. I tell you, Slim, think I’ve about seen it all. Had a guy in here couple weeks back had part of a rock-bolt stabilizer stuck in him.”
    â€œOuch.”
    â€œThat’s what he said. Repeatedly. And that’s just the violence cases. You guys are always doing stupid stuff down there, too. You happen to remember a guy went by the name of Bug Nuts?”
    â€œSure. Crazy little asshole, works that Gateway mine up near Red Bud.”
    â€œNot anymore. He’s gone.”
    â€œDead?”
    â€œNo, dummy. He went on vacation to hooker Disneyland. Yes, he’s dead.”
    â€œHooker Disneyland?”
    Cooper ignored me. “Kid was, what, twenty-eight, twenty-nine? It