Needy Greedy Love (Part 2)

Earlier, Gunn had been racing to catch an F-16 Fighting Falcon at the Roanoke Regional Airport for a secret CIA mission to the Middle East to stamp out thought, kick up sand, let certain companies formerly run by Republican vice presidents get rich, and assassinate Scorpion, leader of the international terrorist ground, Al-a-mode. Scorpion had bad breath and looked through eyes the color of swamp water. Scorpion also had a hot sister who looked like Angelina Jolie, liked to punt defenseless kittens, and enjoyed selling orphaned children to the circus.

The ambulance took the romantic pair three blocks down Main Street to First Street, two blocks east on Magnolia Avenue, and a hard right next to the post office and a seriously obese Dachshund at Randolph Street before waiting briefly for a gas-guzzling Hummer to get the heck out of the way, learn to drive, ya idiot!!--same to you, ya planet polluter!--and screeched to a halt in front of the emergency room entrance at Graves Memorial, named for Podunk's first settlers, who came running not from religious persecution but from an angry mob outside a privy that they had set on fire as a prank in Camden, New Jersey.

Once inside the ER, doctors and nurses, all of them wearing makeup and generally looking young, hot, and foreign, rolled Cat and Gunn side-by-side on gurneys into the same trauma room since they had similar, non-life-threatening wounds. Tubes snaked from their veins in all directions, and their bill was going to be a whopper.

After stitching them up, all the doctors and nurses walked out to talk, flirt, do Sudoku puzzles, fill out malpractice reports, steal Oxycontin, and eat donuts and pizza, thereby leaving Gunn and Cat completely alone.

Their smoke-ravaged eyes met, her eyes matching her still smoking red hair. Gunn burned for her, and Cat burned for him. They burned for each other.

She had been on fire, after all, only an hour ago.

"Where are the doctors and nurses?" Cat asked wonderingly.

"Nowhere," Gunn said warily. "And that's why we need national health care in this country. They bring you in, they make you sign papers, you sit in the waiting area with a thousand other sick and disease-infested people including people who aren't really sick and just have the blahs or like to hang out watching other people in pain, and the nurses might call you back before next month or whenever they good and well please. Then all they do is take your blood pressure and pulse, declare you alive, and send you on your way with a huge bill you have to take out a second mortgage to pay. It's a disgrace, I tell you!"

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