“Yes, that’s good,” she replied in her best calm doctor voice. After scrubbing her hands in her deep farmhouse sink, she took a pair of rubber gloves from her bag.
She snapped them on, moved a chair into position behind him with her foot, and sat. Then she dug around in her bag and placed supplies on the table. When she had everything organized, she said, “Okay, I’m going to lower your jeans and shorts as gently as I can, but you might feel some tugging if any fabric adhered to the wound.”
“Well, Doc, I’m behind on my laundry, so it’s just jeans tonight. Hopefully that simplifies things.” He twisted to look at her as he spoke, causing the jeans to sink lower. A heartbeat later she heard his quick intake of air as she pulled one side down to give her better access to the wound.
“Sorry. This could be painful. We should probably stop right here, slap a pressure compress on and call an ambulance.”
“I’m fine, Ellie,” he insisted through a clenched jaw. “Just do what you gotta do.”
“Okaaay. Face front and be still.” He turned around, and she concentrated on the matter at hand. Within a moment, she’d carefully probed the thin, fairly shallow line of the wound and located the…bullet? Pellet? She was no munitions expert. It was a small metal projectile, embedded about a quarter-inch deep in the spectacularly carved indentation of his buttock, between the gluteus medius and the gluteus minimus. But when she gently separated the margins of the wound for a better look, her patient sucked in a harsh breath.
“Son of a— Are you amputating half my ass back there?”
“Not yet. Don’t distract me.”
“Take your time.” His clenched jaw didn’t quite muffle the sarcasm.
She loaded a syringe with local anesthetic. “Can you count to three for me?”
“Sure. One, two—”
Ellie jammed the needle in and depressed the plunger.
Tyler swayed like a palm tree in a high wind. “Jesus effing Christ! What happened to three?”
Ellie pulled the needle out and placed it on the table. While waiting for the anesthesia to take effect, she explained, “Three is where you tense up and a little shot ends up feeling like a knuckleball hitting your muscle at ninety miles per hour.”
“Oh, well, thank you very much. That felt like eighty-five miles per hour, tops.”
“You’re welcome.” Using gauze, she dabbed blood away from the injury. “Let’s give it a minute to work, and then I’ll remove the bullet and you’ll be as good as new in no time.”
A skeptical grunt served as his reply.
She selected a long, slender pair of tweezers from the table and lightly touched the wound. No reaction from the patient. “Want to tell me how this happened?”
“Would you believe, self-inflicted?”
She laughed. “Not a chance. Nor will I believe your dog, cat, bird, or iguana accidently discharged your gun. Nor, at this hour, will I believe it was a hunting accident.”
“Worth a try.”
“Try the truth,” she recommended, enjoying a moment of triumph as she snagged the small metal round between the tweezers and extracted it. She flushed the wound and pressed more gauze to the site.
He sighed. “I was down at Rawley’s Pub, having a drink and, um, let’s say chatting with Lou Ann Doubletree.”
Lou Ann had been a year ahead of Ellie in school, but she remembered the tall, sandy-haired blonde well enough. The older girl boasted two particularly unforgettable features. “Lou Ann Double D?”
“For a girl who’s not fond of her own nickname, you’re awful quick to toss out someone else’s.”
“She liked hers. She was proud of the body parts inspiring it.”
“They are inspirational, you gotta admit.”
“So I’m told,” she said, doing a mental eye roll. What was it with men and mammary glands? She tied off the thread on a surgical needle and prepared to start stitching. “So, you were at Rawley’s, chatting with Lou Ann, and…”
“She’s on-again-off-again with Junior Tillman. Remember him?”
The name sounded familiar. Her memory called up a wide, burly guy with a booming voice and a proclivity for smashing empty beer cans on his forehead whenever the Buffalos scored a touchdown. She completed the first stitch. “Beefy guy. Your year. Had a voice like a bullhorn?”