Finishing her sit-ups, Jazz got to her feet and looked at herself in the mirror. She straightened to the full extent of her lean, muscled, five-foot-ten stature. She liked what she saw, particularly the definition of her arms and legs. She was in better shape than she was after naval boot camp, when the idea of exercise had first been introduced to her.
With her towel in one hand, she stooped down to pick up her water bottle. There was only a little left, and she polished it off. Then she started for the locker room. As she walked, she could see most of the men's eyes slyly following her. She was careful to avoid any eye contact and kept an expression of disdain on her face, which was easy, considering that was how she felt. She also caught a glimpse of Mr. Ivy League talking to the birdbrain who'd processed her paperwork when she joined the club a month earlier. Blond Mr. Polo now had his hands on his hips and a sad, hangdog expression on his face. Jazz had to suppress a smile when she thought about him bragging to her that he was a doctor, as if it was going to impress her! Jazz knew too many doctors, and they were all jerks.
She tossed the empty water bottle in the container by the door before heading out of the weight room. When she passed the main reception desk, she saw that it was almost nine-forty, meaning she'd better fire her afterburners and get a move on, since she liked to have the option of getting to work early if she lucked out and got another assignment. There had been a bit of a lull before the previous night's mission, which she was hoping would be the start of a whole new series. But she couldn't complain about the lull because, overall, she was lucky indeed. Sometimes she wondered how they had found her, but she didn't dwell on it. It was about time that things were starting to work out, considering all her effort, especially her so-called formal schooling after she got out of the military. Having to go to that community college with all those retards in order to go from corpsman to RN had been the biggest trial of her life.
Just inside the locker-room door was a table with a large tub of iced soft drinks. Jazz helped herself to a Coke, popped the tab, and took a satisfying swig. Next to the tub was a clipboard with a little sign requesting that she write her name and indicate what she'd taken so that her account could be charged. As she took another pull from the can and headed off to the VIP section, where she had her own assigned locker, she wondered what kind of fool would actually write their name down, but then again, she knew that a fool was born every minute.
A shower was a quick affair for Jazz. After lathering up, including a shampoo, she liked to stand for a few minutes with her eyes closed and allow the water to drum on her head and run down the crevices of her well-tuned body. Closing her eyes had the added benefit of shielding her from having to look at the other women, some of whom had butts the size of small countries, with skin that resembled the surface of the moon. Jazz couldn't believe they had such little self-respect to allow themselves to get to such a pathetic state.
After the shower, her cropped coif needed only a short stint with the hairdryer. When she'd been young, she'd agonized over her hair, but being in the military had cured her. It had also cured her of a long-standing hang-up about cosmetics. Now all she used was a little lipstick, and that was more to keep her lips from drying out than anything else.
Next came the green scrubs, over which she pulled on a medium-length white coat with a stethoscope crammed in the side pocket. The breast pocket boasted a collection of pens, pencils, and other nursing paraphernalia.
"Are you an ER nurse?" a voice asked.
Jazz looked around. One of the large-ass women was sitting on the bench in front of her locker, swaddled in her towel like a sausage. Jazz debated whether or not to ignore her. Generally, Jazz stayed above the usual locker-room drivel, preferring to be expeditious about showering. Yet the stereotyping, which the comment implied, begged for a retort.
"No, I'm a neurosurgeon," Jazz said. She took her oversized, olive-drab military coat from her locker and pulled it on. It had pockets as deep as gold mines. The contents of the pockets bumped up against her thighs, particularly on the right.
"A neurosurgeon!" the woman marveled with a look of disbelief. "No kidding!"
"No kidding," Jazz echoed with a tone that did not invite any more conversation. She stuck her sweaty bodysuit in her gym bag, then closed and locked her locker. Although she did not look at the woman who'd spoken to her, she sensed that the woman was watching her. Jazz didn't care if the woman believed her or not. It didn't matter.
Without the exchange of another word, Jazz struck off through the locker room and out into the main corridor. After she pushed the down button of the elevator, she stuck her hand into the overcoat's right pocket and fondled her favorite possession, a subcompact nine-millimeter Glock. Its molded composite handgrip gave her a reassuring feeling of power, while awakening recurrent fantasies of being accosted by lowlifes like Mr. Ivy League in the parking garage. It would all happen so fast that the guy's head would spin. One minute he'd be making some inane comment, the next he'd be looking down the barrel of the gun's suppressor. Jazz had made the effort to outfit the gun with a silencer because another ongoing fantasy was to take out one of her nursing supervisors.
Jazz sighed. For her whole life, she'd been saddled with the albatross of incompetent authority personnel. It had started in high school. She could remember as if it were yesterday the time she'd been called into the guidance counselor's office. The dork had said he was mystified because she'd tested off the charts for intelligence but was doing so poorly. What was the cause?
"Duhhh!" Jazz voiced out loud as she recalled the incident. The guy was so slow mentally that he couldn't comprehend that nine-tenths of all the teachers were from the same shallow end of the gene pool that he was from. It was a waste of time going to high school. He'd warned her that she wouldn't get to go to college if she kept doing what she was doing. Well, she didn't care. She knew that the only real way out of the cesspool of her life was the military.
The trouble was that the military wasn't a whole lot better. It was okay at first, because she had a lot of ground to make up, getting into shape and all. Aptitude tests had supposedly pointed her in the direction of becoming a hospital corpsman, which was a joke, since she always lied on those stupid tests. But she played along; becoming a corpsman sounded fine, especially the idea of being on her own. Eventually, she opted for being an independent duty corpsman with the marines. But when she eventually got assigned, things started to go downhill. Some of the officers she had to deal with were half-wits, especially over in Kuwait, when her squadron infiltrated the Kuwait salient in February 1991. She had gotten a kick out of shooting Iraqis until her commanding officer took her rifle away as if she was not supposed to have any fun. He told her to restrict her activities to the health needs of the real men. It had been embarrassing.
Things came to a head in San Diego almost a year later. The same cretin of an officer came into a bar where she and some of the regular grunts were tossing back a few beers. He got sloshed and grabbed a feel when Jazz wasn't looking. As if that wasn't bad enough, he called her "a freaking dyke" when she spurned an offer to drive out to the tip of Point Loma with him to get laid. That had been the last straw, and Jazz had shot him in the leg with her sidearm. She hadn't been aiming for the leg, but he still got the appropriate message. Of course, that had been the end of her military career, but by then she didn't care. She'd had enough.