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There’ssomething sketchy about Kovak’s clinic.

No kidding, right? I knew it from the start, before I signed up to work here. But now I have started to wonder if it’s even worse than what I thought.

For starters, why do so many of his patients pay in cash? I get that insurance is a pain in the ass, but medical care is expensive. And yet at least half of all his patients slip me a pile of bills on their way out.

And then there’s the large number of students who come by the clinic. There’s nothing specifically suspicious about that, given that we are so close to both a large college and the medical school, but a lot of them also pay in cash. Which seems pretty strange for a 20-year-old college student.

Plus, every single one of them says the same thing when they make an appointment. I’ve got a cough that won’t go away. Those exact words. It’s not even cold and flu season yet!

Today, I’m sitting at the tiny desk in the waiting area when a student from my class named Victor comes in through the heavy wooden door that protects the clinic from the questionable neighborhood that surrounds us. Victor is nearly as tall as I am but skinny as a string bean and always struck me as the kind of guy who never stops moving. When he sees me, he stops short, but then a knowing smile lights his face.

“Abe,” he says. “Hey.”

“Hey.” I look down at the intake form in front of me. “You’re here for… a cough that won’t go away?”

He winks at me. “You know it.”

Okay…

After I send Victor into the examining room, he is in there for roughly five seconds, which I guess is long enough for Kovak to examine his throat and do whatever is apparently worth the stack of cash he hands me on the way out. Also, I didn”t hear him cough once.

When Victor is gone, I lock the cash in the desk drawer, like Kovak instructed me to do. The desk has two locked drawers—one contains the cash, and the other has only been opened once. I don’t have the key, but I know that there’s a gun in that drawer—loaded.

There’s nobody here at the moment, so I leave my desk and head to the examining room that Victor just vacated. Kovak is inside the room, washing his hands. He has good hygiene, at least. Although I know for a fact that the sheets on the stretcher haven’t been washed since I’ve been working here.

“Dr. Kovak?” I say tentatively.

He wipes his hands on the pants of his scrubs and turns to me with a smile. “Yes, Abe?”

I don”t know what to say next. There’s a question running through my head, but I”m not sure how to say it. Are you dealing drugs to students? How can I ask that of my boss?

“Are you…” I clench my hands into fists and then release them. It would be almost ridiculously easy to pick Kovak up by his shirt collar and shake the answers out of him, but I’m not that kind of person. “What was Victor here for?”

“Just a cough,” he says. And then he winks at me.

What the hell is up with all the winking?

“Right.” I look behind me at the waiting room to make sure it’s empty. “But he wasn’t actually coughing.”

Kovak keeps the smile plastered on his face as he looks up at me. “Abe,” he says, “you’re happy at this job, aren’t you?”

“Uh, yeah…”

“And I pay you very well, right?”

That’s an understatement. In addition to my salary, he will often slip me a cut of the cash that comes in every day. “Yes, sir.”

He has to reach up to put a hand on my shoulder. “I want you to know how much I value your help here. I hope you’ll continue to work with me. Honestly, I’m not sure what I’d do if you ever left.”

His dark-brown eyes are trained on my face. Despite the fact that he’s nearly a head shorter than me, a shiver of fear goes down my spine as I think about the gun in that desk drawer.

“I’ll stay,” I say softly.

He claps my shoulder. “That’s m’boy.”

DeWitt medical school has a drug problem. Everybody knows it. So many students have died that people refer to the school as Dead Med. But I never knew where the drugs came from until now.

And not just that, but somebody is feeding the students to this clinic. They are being sent here in droves. And if the rumors are true, that person is one of our professors—not just that, but a professor with access to the newest class of students.

There’s only one name that comes to mind. Only one professor who works extensively with first-year medical students. Who knows which ones are struggling. Who does one-on-one tutoring because he is just so nice.

And that’s Dr. Conlon, our anatomy professor.