Congratulations on Finding the Bullet!

Before you decided that you really needed a Prius and went to Vinny to get a loan you were a paramedic. When you couldn’t pay because of your addiction to alcohol and prostitutes, Vinny didn’t really listen to you while you told him about how you really didn’t have any medical training beyond basic first aid and a little triage and that, honestly, a fitness instructor would actually be more qualified to help people with life threatening injuries than you. He just told you you were the doc for his boys and that if you didn’t like it he could cut off the hand you jerk off with and shoot you in both kneecaps so that people would know what happens to losers who can’t pay.

Eventually you accepted his job offer, after he started oiling the cleaver and whistling to himself like a sociopath and ever since then you’ve been acquiring job skills such as overdosing dying men on morphine and sewing people up with dental floss and telling them to follow the directions for stolen antibiotics you’ve taken from various homes and medical shipments.

But tomorrow you’re going to face the biggest professional challenge you’ve had to deal with since you accidentally killed that millionaire’s prostitute after his 9-11 call when Vinny drags his brother Big Tommy into your office. Tommy will be bleeding out of his flat little stomach (Big is an ironic nickname as applied to Tommy, who weighs one-hundred and twenty pounds and stands just under five feet tall).

He’ll clear all the shit off your desk and send it clattering to the floor and plop Tommy’s shivering body on the table without a word.

“Fuck,” you’ll say.

Tommy is too important for you to mercy kill and probably too far gone for you to save, but you’ll have to make a good show of trying if you don’t want to be shot in the dick for letting him die.

So you’ll get out your instruments, mostly tools taken from your garage and a sewing kit your mother bought for you when you went to college, and you’ll cut Tommy’s shirt off and investigate the area around the wound.

It’ll be clean for the most part, but the bullet will have entered just below his sternum. That means it probably hit his stomach and that caustic fluids are probably leaking into the area around his internal organs while he lies on your very nice Ikea desk, moaning.

You’ll look to Vinny and say “He needs a real doctor, man.”

Vinny will shake his head. “Do what you can.”

You’ll nod and pull out a pair of tweezers and some needle-nose pliers. Then you’ll probe the wound as gently as you can until you find a piece of the police nin-mil stuck in Tommy. You’ll apply pressure delicately with the tweezers to make sure the wound stays open enough for you to get the pliers in there. Then you’ll grab the bullet with what feels like a cruel degree of pressure and pull it out. grimacing for Tommy who at this point has gone too far into shock to notice the pain.

He’ll be smiling while you say “Shit, shit, shit,” delicately withdrawing an entire round, thankfully, from Tommy’s paling body.

He’ll be breathing quick when you remove a tampon from your case and ram it into the bullet hole, pulling on the applicator and ensuring that it is clearly visible to anyone else who tries to patch Tommy up.

“He’s not going to make it,” you’ll say to Vinny. Vinny will shrug in response.

“You did your best,” he’ll say, patting you on your back while the two of you sit and watch Tommy, waiting for a real doctor who was recently kidnapped from his home to arrive. You’ll feel at peace. All Vinny ever wanted from you was your best, and now that he’s got that he seems pretty satisfied.

Maybe one day he’ll let you get back to your old life, but for now it’s just okay that the mobster who took over your life half a decade ago is giving you the tentative approval you never recieved from your father. Sometimes that’s enough.

Congratulations on Finding the Bullet!