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    Clinic
    Clinic
    Clinic
    Ebook32 pages27 minutes

    Clinic

    By Kris Nelscott

    ()

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    About this ebook

    The party on Haight-Ashbury Street in San Francisco ended two years before and now only a handful of people remain to clean up the mess. One of them, the receptionist at the Free Clinic, studies medicine with the hope of becoming a doctor, but everyone—from her professors to the staff at San Francisco General—tell her she can’t because of her gender. She’s not sure she can because of the choices a doctor must make on the front lines. Choices brought to the clinic that night in the form of a crazy, drug-addicted woman and a street kid named Klepto. Choices that mean the difference between life and death.

    “Nelscott recalls the era with vivid accuracy.”
    —St. Petersburg Times

    “Somebody needs to say that Kris Nelscott is engaged in an ongoing fictional study of a thorny era in American political and racial history. If that’s not enough to get ‘serious’ critics and readers to pay attention to her, it’s their loss.”
    —Charles Taylor
    Salon.com

    Kris Nelscott is an open pen name used by USA Today bestselling author Kristine Kathryn Rusch.
    The first Smokey Dalton novel, A Dangerous Road, won the Herodotus Award for Best Historical Mystery and was short-listed for the Edgar Award for Best Novel; the second, Smoke-Filled Rooms, was a PNBA Book Award finalist; and the third, Thin Walls, was one of the Chicago Tribune’s best mysteries of the year. Kirkus chose Days of Rage as one of the top ten mysteries of the year and it was also nominated for a Shamus award for The Best Private Eye Hardcover Novel of the Year.
    Entertainment Weekly says her equals are Walter Mosley and Raymond Chandler. Booklist calls the Smokey Dalton books “a high-class crime series” and Salon says “Kris Nelscott can lay claim to the strongest series of detective novels now being written by an American author.”
    For more information about Kris Nelscott, or author Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s other works, please go to KrisNelscott.com or KristineKathrynRusch.com.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWMG Publishing
    Release dateJul 2, 2012
    ISBN9781476297378
    Clinic

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      Book preview

      Clinic - Kris Nelscott

      COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

      CLINIC

      Copyright © 2012 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

      First published in Subterranean Online Magazine, Winter, 2009.

      Published by WMG Publishing

      Cover and Layout copyright © 2012 by WMG Publishing

      Cover design by Allyson Longueira/WMG Publishing

      Cover art copyright © 2012 Nicola Zanichelli/Dreamstime

      Smashwords Edition

      This book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental. This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.

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      Table of Contents

      About the Author

      Copyright Information

      THE CLINIC always has an eerie silence right around midnight. It’s not empty—Lord knows, the place is almost never empty—but at midnight, everything seems to stop: even the speed freaks slow down for thirty seconds, maybe a minute, an eternity to them.

      Me, I look up from whatever I’m doing, and take note. Usually I’m filling out paperwork, or settling someone into the calm center, or cleaning out the bathroom for yet the thousandth time. It’s not glamorous work here—hell, it’s not even good-paying work—but it’s gotta-be-done work, if you know what I mean.

      I’ve been doing the midnight-to-three shift six days a week since January. I’m not a doctor, not yet, and I’m barely a nurse. Kinda like one of those paramedical personnel that the papers talk about, although technically I do mostly secretarial work. All the girls do more secretarial than anything, although sometimes we get to assist on the more difficult stuff.

      I want to do hands-on, especially the tough stuff, but I’m not really trained for it. Although Doc Clahorn, he says that we’re better trained than half the surgeons who leave for Vietnam. We know triage and overcrowding and poor conditions. We see junkies by the dozens and starving kids and more barely living teenagers than I want to think about.

      And we see a lot of them at night, because people get scared at night, and they come floating in—the

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