The Preying Doctor

BESTSELLING AUTHOR
NADIA SIDDIQUI
Nathan Doe Book 2
The Preying Doctor


Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2021 Nadia Siddiqui – All rights Reserved
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication / use of the trademarks is not authorized, associated with or sponsored by the trademark owners.


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Table of Contents
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7
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  1
“Q
uickly, in here.”
Doctor Pierre Cox rounds the corner into the surgery suite he’s been called into. He was trying to have a break but food will have to wait tonight. On-call rotations are always a hit or miss for him. Usually they are the same boring cases; occasionally they will get a person who is obviously in withdrawal coming in asking for very specific drugs and claiming to have allergies to so many other things. They are so easy to spot now that he knows what he’s doing. Although, sometimes, on nights like this one, he gets a serious injury that he is able to get to before the police arrive. It’s difficult whenever it’s a gunshot wound or a stabbing, but this one, from the number of people jogging ahead of him down the hospital hallway, this looks like a car crash, which means that likely this was the victim and not the original driver, which means it should fit his qualifications; he might be in for a very lovely treat indeed. Entering the scrub room, Cox scrubs up to his elbows hastily with soap and water as he peers into the well lit room with a sly little smile that he quickly covers with his surgical mask. He can feel it; this is going to be a good one.
One scrub nurse squirts the body on the table with betadine while the other takes her sharp surgical scissors to the man’s clothing. The first pauses in swabbing his chest long enough to help lift one half of his body and then the clothes are slid away from him and discarded in a bloody heap in the corner while they finish pushing all of the other carts into place with the tools that Cox is going to need.
There’s no denying that Doctor Cox is a brilliant surgeon, many reports and papers have called him an artist with a scalpel. They state that being double board certified in both plastics and trauma response is nearly unheard of but it makes him a dream in any emergency room that he ever sets foot in. He is brilliant and loves his job unlike he’s ever loved anything in his life. To almost all, it just seems like he’s born for this, that he has a devotion to his calling to help people and that nothing else would have ever been possible for him.
However, mostly, he just enjoys seeing people cut open. Cox has always had a fascination for blood and, fortunately for him, he had always been blessed with a brain. Therefore he was able to find a career in which cutting people open regularly, or peeling back their faces, is not only profitable but also legal.
The injuries on the man on his table are extensive. Crushed ribs puncturing a lung, shrapnel and glass embedded in his face and arms, what appears to be bruising covering a majority of his skin. He doesn’t have the telltale “seatbelt bruise” so it would indicate that some of this has been brought on by himself simply choosing not to be more careful. The nurses set to work plucking the glass from the skin and swabbing those superficial cuts with antibiotic ointment, leaving the skin a patchwork of strange colors, and then he sets to work once the monitors are all officially attached.
He never sets out to kill them, but he is always so happy when is allowed to.
This case is no exception. “Scalpel,” he commands the nurse beside him who dutifully places it in his waiting palm and he opens the already prepped chest cavity. He has to relieve the pressure on the heart and locate the source of internal bleeding to make sure that the lungs will be functional again in the future. “What happened? Do we have an identity yet?” The anesthesiologist nods in response.
“Yeah, name’s Jake, some kid from the college the next town over on his way home from whatever vacation is happening this time of year.”
“You still having trouble keeping track of the days there, buddy?”
“I work nights. I never see sunlight ever, just let me live my vampire life in peace, okay?”
Cox chuckles and goes back to his work. “Have we gotten a hold of his parents yet?”
“No. Just the roommate, says that he’s a scholarship kid, a ward of the state.”
Something inside of Doctor Cox leaps for joy at this news. “Well, keep checking, make sure there isn’t somebody we can contact to help claim his belongings.”
A silence falls over the room; they all know that tone of voice. That sickly happy, almost drugged