One night, a man in a black sedan pulled up. No license plate. He wore a suit that cost more than Dr. Ass’s trailer. He said his name was Mr. Cross, and he had a problem no hospital could touch.

“You’re not sick,” Dr. Ass said.

Cross didn’t yelp. He didn’t confess. He shattered —like a mirror falling off a wall. Shards of black suit and bone-white fragments clattered to the floor. And from the pile rose a thin, reedy voice: “I’m… the curse.”

In a dusty corner of the Ozarks, a disgraced surgeon with a questionable past and a gift for blunt-force diagnostics becomes the last hope for people whose ailments don’t appear in any textbook. The town of Mulberry Creek didn’t have a hospital. It had a pawn shop, three churches, and a legend.

Dr. Ass listened. Then he walked around behind Crutcher’s chair.

“She’s not sick,” he said finally.

He claimed the shock to the sciatic nerve triggered a reflexive honesty in the body’s pain pathways. The medical board called it "assault with a medical degree." They revoked his license in 2007.