If only Isabella had lived…
In a fruitless effort to rid himself of the rancid taste of childhood memories, he spat into the sink. He opened the cabinet doors beneath the sink and stowed his scrubs, hat and mask for later use. Exiting the bathroom, he returned the way he came and rode the elevator to the fifth floor. The bitter taste in his mouth turned sweet, and his heart pumped with renewed purpose as he made his way down yet another narrow hallway, pressed the chrome entry plate and passed through the doors into the Med-Surg unit.
There, with her elbows resting on the nurse’s station desk, sat Rachel Heineke—the horniest bitch in all of Flagstaff. If it’d been anyone else at that post, he would’ve had to ride back down to the lobby and return another time. But today, it seemed, luck was with him. Not dumb luck of course, smart luck—the kind he worked hard to cultivate.
He’d made a point of befriending Rachel. He knew on Saturdays she usually worked Med-Surg. He also knew, from first-hand experience, that Rachel liked risky sex, and she liked it a whole lot better than she liked her dead-end job as a unit clerk. He knew Rachel’s only true hope of improving her lot in life was to sink her hooks into a rich doctor, and that given her acne-scarred cheeks and mediocre IQ, her only chance of hooking such a prized fish was to keep her body in amazing shape and grab every opportunity that came her way to use it.
Well, an opportunity was about to come her way. There were several easier, less dangerous, ways to carry out his plan, but he hadn’t had a piece of ass in weeks, and his frustration was beginning to distract him. Besides, taking the safest route was beneath him, and like Rachel, he enjoyed thrills. At least in that way, they were alike. Her thrill seeking nature improved her otherwise dull company immensely.
So, now, armed with nothing other than his keen ability to predict and manipulate his inferiors, Garth laid his Rachel trap. “Awfully quiet around here, isn’t it?”
“Oh, crap. How many times do I have to tell you not to use the Q-word? If all hell breaks loose it’s going to be your fault.”
“Sorry. I forgot.” Of course he hadn’t forgotten at all. He knew Rachel subscribed to every hospital superstition, and she not only believed in those superstitions, she allowed them to dictate much of her behavior. Everything from never saying “quiet”, to refusing to work around interns who carried “black clouds” over their heads. He didn’t plan to pass up this plum opportunity to toy with her. From this day forward, any reasoned strategies for coping with her environment that Rachel might’ve owned would be repossessed, and she would forever remain convinced that somehow uttering the word “quiet” would indeed lead to unmitigated disaster.
“But it is quiet. So very very quiet. Where is everybody?” Congratulating himself on his perfect timing, he looked around. Save the metronomic clicks of monitors and the buzz of lights, the unit was silent as a morgue.
“Carmen and Dr. V. are on break. Suzie and Tamara are in the procedure room with a new admit.”
Taking a step closer, he reached out his hand to curl a lock of the unit clerk’s fried-platinum hair around his index finger. “It’s just you and me, then?”
“And the phones, and the patients,” Rachel groused.
“Are Dr. V. and Carmen having an affair?” he asked mildly.
“Dr. V.’s a happily married man.”
“Still…Carmen’s a beautiful girl.”
Rachel’s mouth twisted into a pout as she leaned over the desk to better display her breasts. She was wearing a V-neck cashmere sweater and a push-up bra. Totally inappropriate for her job as a unit clerk, but outstanding bait for trolling for interns. Shiny skin stretched tautly over implants too large for her small-framed body, making her tits look like irradiated dinosaur eggs. When she wriggled her chest, her bra cleaved away from her flesh, revealing two soft-pink nipples.
Blood rushed to his penis.
“What about me?” she asked.
“You’re beautiful, too. Let’s go into the med room.”
Her lower lip trembled. “Who’s more beautiful? Me or Carmen?”
“It’s no contest.” Carmen was a milk-skinned Spaniard with large, natural breasts, above average intelligence, and an unflagging dedication to her chosen profession as a nurse. Her compassion for her patients reminded him of Sky. He would’ve greatly preferred to fuck Carmen.
“You really mean that?” Rachel lifted one shoulder and her breasts nearly spilled out of her sweater onto the counter.
“I do. Let’s go.”
“You’re bad.” She leaned close again and purred in his ear. “But we can’t. It’s too dangerous.”
“That’s the whole point,” he purred back.
She shook her head coyly, but her hand crept toward him, gripped his collar and tugged him around to her side of the desk. Sliding her fingers down his abdomen, and then lower, Rachel said, “The call room was one thing…but we can’t do it on the unit. We might get caught.”
“Tamara, Suzie and Carmen. Are they your only nurses this morning?”
She nodded.
“What are Tamara and Suzie doing in the procedure room?”
“They’re putting in a PICC line. It might take fifteen more minutes, or it might take an hour.”
“Fifteen minutes is plenty of time.”
Heat from her palm seeped through his trousers. She fisted her hand and rolled it over him, and the friction took him from half-mast to a full rise. Clamping one hand over hers, he tugged her fist open and shaped her fingers around his erection. Maybe they should just do it right here on the desk. The patients on the unit were probably sedated, and there wasn’t a visitor in sight. Dipping his free hand into her sweater he thumbed a nipple to attention.
Panting, she squeezed his penis. “Okay,” she said, her eyelids fluttering open and shut as he continued to tease her. “But we have to leave the door cracked so I can hear if a patient buzzes or the phone rings or something.”
Her meager interest in her duties amused him. Then her grip on his erection tightened, increasing both his arousal and his determination to see this thing through. “Sure. I’m not asking you to neglect your responsibilities. I just want to have a little fun.” Remembering her weakness, he raked his fingernails across her nipple before pinching it hard.
Rachel whimpered her approval, and then dragged him into the medication room and slammed the door behind them. So much for devotion to duty.
Without further preliminary, he swiveled Rachel around, bent her face-down over a metal crash cart and hiked up her skirt. She was wearing black pantyhose, no underwear. Perhaps she’d been expecting him. Most of the hair had been removed from her labia and the view of her swollen flesh bisected by a black seam almost made him spurt in his pants. Planting one hand firmly on her thoracic spine, he forced her abdomen against the industrial metal drawers and kicked her feet apart. As he lowered his face to her bottom, he thought about her tits, imagined slamming them against the cart so they’d pop like water balloons. But that image brought him too close to the edge, so he shifted his attention to her hose.
Deftly working the transparent black fabric with both his fingers and teeth, he ripped a hole in her tights, jerked his zipper open and lowered his trousers. Rachel moaned and bounced on her toes.
“My, my, such an impatient little bitch.”
“Just hurry, please…” More toe bouncing.
Beneath her sweater, he slid one hand up her back and worked open her bra clasp. His other hand trailed over her shoulder and wrapped around her fragile neck. Using his thumb, he mashed her carotid artery. “Who’s in charge here?”
“You, baby. You’re the boss,” she moaned—a hint of fear vibrating through her voice.
Good. She should be afraid. “All right then, I’ll let you have a little taste,” he said. Crouching forward he guided the engorged head of his penis through the hole in her pantyhose and into the introitus of her vagina. Gritting his teeth for control, he circled his tip inside her tight wet opening and held it the
re.
Reaching back, she grabbed his buttocks and urged him forward. “Please, baby, please,” she begged.
He loved the sound of a woman begging. Time to give the whore what she wanted. With one quick motion he thrust into her and began pounding her relentlessly.
“Oh. God. Oh. God. Oh. God.”
Suspecting her loud groaning resulted more from the pain of being rammed against the crash cart than from pleasure, he decided to deny her even the small relief those grunts provided. One hand was needed to hold her hips steady, and he didn’t want to stop squeezing her neck with the other.
“Cover your mouth,” he ordered.
She obeyed, stifling the noises gurgling from her throat with her own hand. Caressing the cartilaginous rings of her trachea, he found her delicate cricoid bone and let his thumb rest against it. How easy it would be to snap her neck back and crush that little bone. The first time he’d snapped a neck, he’d still had the capacity for fear. He’d been nervous and afraid and afterwards, when he’d felt the wetness seeping through his underwear, he’d assumed he’d lost control of his bladder. Only later, when he was disposing of his clothing, had he realized he’d ejaculated. He was about to ejaculate now.
He pulled out of her. Rachel uncovered her mouth and let out a cry of frustration. Ignoring it, he sheathed himself with her little black skirt and jerked himself the rest of the way. He came with a vengeance, spewing semen all over her skirt and sweater and hose. No porn star could’ve done a better job of dousing her with come.
Rubbing tears from her eyes, she whipped around and faced him, her lips vibrating like a child who hadn’t received an invitation to the party. “What the fuck did you do that for?”
Shrugging, he pulled up his trousers.
Rachel’s shoulders were shaking. Black mascara was streaking down her cheeks and pooling in her acne pits. “Aren’t you going to answer me? Don’t you care that you’re hurting my feelings?”
Dear, God. Why would Rachel think he cared about her feelings? A sudden insight jarred him. Perhaps it was because the insipid little fool cared for his. “You better go get cleaned up. Change into some scrubs. And Rachel, take your time. Do a good job about it—you’re a god-awful mess. I’ll man the phones and cover for you if Dr. V. or anyone asks where you are.”
“But I didn’t even…I didn’t even get to finish.”
“I’ll make it up to you next time. Now go, baby, go.”
“What am I going to say if Dr. V. asks me why I’m in scrubs?”
“Tell him you got a bad case of diarrhea and soiled yourself.”
“I can’t tell him that. That’s humiliating.”
“Not as humiliating as getting fired. Now hurry up before anyone sees you.”
She shot him a look filled with hurt and confusion and sprinted out of the medication room. With Rachel safely out of the way, Garth zipped up and shut the door behind her. He estimated he had at least seven minutes remaining before Suzie and Tamara finished up the PICC line, and Rachel would likely be sulking in the bathroom until someone summoned her.
A laminated card dangled from the code cart. He lifted the card and checked the location of the medication he sought. It was in the fourth drawer, back left compartment.
Of course he could break the plastic lock on the crash cart and remove the vial right here and now, but that would trigger an investigation. Or he could simply order the medication through his laboratory, but he didn’t need it for his research, and the order might later lead the police to his door. What he was about to do next would lead them nowhere. The authorities were always looking for the simplest explanation, and Garth need only add a small twist here and there to escape detection. Occam and his razor were a mastermind’s best friend. He recited the location of the vial in order to lock it in his memory.
Fourth drawer. Back left corner.
He exited the med room and surveyed the unit. Still no one at the nurse’s station. Peering through the observation windows as he circled the unit, Garth noted that only a few rooms were occupied, and those by sleeping patients. He entered the corner room—the one nearest the stairwell.
Inside, he found a slumbering man wearing a non-re-breather mask. Judging by the shallow movements of his chest, the man was heavily sedated. Garth opened the bedside chart and checked the medication list. Morphine drip. Excellent. Unlikely this guy would wake up and cry out for help.
Closing the chart, he moved to the head of the bed and read the oxygen meter. It was set at ten liters. The pulse oximeter was blipping along at ninety percent, and the man’s heart rate varied between fifty-eight and sixty-five. With minimally acceptable saturations and a low heart rate, death could be easily induced—in short order. All conditions seemed favorable.
With no hesitation whatsoever, Garth pulled the latex gloves from his pocket and slipped them on. Then he pushed the oxygen mask off the man’s face and let it drop onto his chest. He waited a beat, expecting the poor fellow’s saturations to drop rapidly from the lack of oxygen. They didn’t. Another thirty seconds and the pulse-oximeter had dropped only to eighty-eight percent. When an alarm beeped, Garth pushed a button marked Silence Alarm. He should’ve done that to begin with. It irritated him that he hadn’t, but he was comforted by the fact that the man’s lips had at long last turned blue. Too bad the heart rate held steady at sixty.
Beginning to feel a shadow of a hint of anxiety, Garth decided to implement a more aggressive course of action. He pinched the man’s nose closed with one hand and covered the mouth with the other. The patient was sedated, but not comatose. His hands flopped back and forth like landed fish.
“It’s easier if you don’t fight it,” Garth said kindly. As an afterthought he added, “This isn’t personal. It’s only that you’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
The hands ceased their flopping. Impatiently, Garth tapped his oxfords and waited. Glancing down he saw a flicker of brown scamper across one calfskin toe. A cockroach. A good omen. He smiled and looked back at the bed. The oximeter precipitously dropped its reading, and the patient’s heart bradyed down to a rate of fifty, and then, after a few more stubborn beats, gave up the fight. The monitor flat-lined.
The alarm beeped again, and Garth silenced it swiftly. He noted the man’s face had gone from blue to ashen, and the chest was frozen. Garth checked for a pulse, but didn’t find one. He replaced the non-re-breather mask over the man’s mouth. Then Garth removed his gloves, stuffed them back in his pocket and ducked his head around the doorframe. The nurse’s station was still vacant when he crept out of the room and made his escape down the stairwell.
Garth calculated he had no more than two minutes from the time he fled the Med-Surg floor until the monitor alarms sounded again, a nurse discovered the lifeless body of the patient in the corner room, and a code was called. If he was going to make it to the elevators in time, he’d better hustle. And hustle he did, down the stairs to the third floor. Exiting the stairwell into the back of the ICU, he strode through the unit and entered the restroom where he’d stashed his scrubs. Hastily bending to retrieve his costume, he banged a knee against the toilet. Goddamnit.
Not pausing to rub his sore knee, he yanked the scrubs over his street clothes, secured the surgical mask over his face and pulled the paper hat over his hair and eyebrows. Just as the code bells sounded, he pushed out the door of the restroom. Pleased with his alacrity, he planted himself in front of the elevators and waited for someone with a code card to arrive.
Less than a minute later, an agitated group of doctors burst out of the ICU and into the lobby. One of them swiped a card through an electronic reader, and the elevator doors, which had been locked down as soon as the code was called, opened. Garth elbowed his way into the car, joining the crush of hospital personnel already on board. He rode up to the fifth floor and streamed off the elevator, an anonymous member of the mass of mint-clad rescuers rushing to the scene. No real danger in that. When a code was called, anyone with skills wh
o was nearby was expected to respond. No one would be taking names or checking I.D.
By the time he entered his victim’s room again, the code was in full swing. Outside, the morning pulchritude gave way to an impromptu thunderstorm, the type that came and went so impetuously in this mountain town. Blue skies turned gray and rain mixed with hail. Icy droplets fired against the window of the small hospital room like bursts of artillery fire. Dr. V.’s face was a somber mask, running the code, barking out orders and calling for ammo against an enemy he couldn’t defeat.
Laryngoscope.
ET tube.
Epinephrine.
The luscious Carmen was kneeling on the bed, straddling the patient, her plump bottom jousting up and down while she compressed the chest. The crash cart drawers had been flung open, and clear wrappers and empty vials littered the floor. More uniformed personnel arrived, and crammed into every corner of the room.
Dr. V.’s eyes were fixed on the monitors, but Garth’s were fixed on Carmen’s plump ass working up and down as she rode the patient. There was something obscene about a code, and Garth’s penis was growing hotter and harder by the minute.
“How you doing?” Dr. V. addressed Carmen.
“Good. I can keep going.” Her breathlessness contradicted her words, and Dr. V. gestured at a fellow who looked to be in his early twenties to take over for her.
A medical student. Dr. V. wasn’t holding out any hope for the patient or he wouldn’t have called for the switch. He was allowing a medical student to gain experience without risking anything. The kid couldn’t do any harm to a dead man. His face nearly as white as his short lab coat, the student approached the bed and placed his crossed palms on the patient’s sternum.
“Straighten your elbows, and you won’t get as tired,” Carmen offered as she dismounted.
Without Carmen’s bouncing ass to entertain him, Garth’s mind began to wander to mundane topics—such as the wet weather. His beamer was parked in an outdoor lot, and damned if he hadn’t just washed it. Letting loose a frustrated sigh, he made his way closer to the crash cart. His foot tapped impatiently while the code swirled around him like a hurricane. He was the eye of that hurricane. Calm. Waiting for the perfect moment to make his move. Soaring above the howl of voices, came Dr. V.’s last-ditch commands:
First Do No Evil: Blood Secrets, Book 1 Page 13