"I think we have plenty to talk about. You've been giving me the evil eye all night. I want to know why."
"Well, you are an odd duck."
Jazz laughed with derision. "That's funny, coming from you."
"That's the kind of comment that underlines my impressions," Susan spat. "To be honest, I've never felt confident in you. I don't know why you are a nurse. You don't get along with anyone. You have no compassion. Every night, I have to give you the easiest cases."
"Oh, bull!" Jazz sputtered. "You give me all the junk cases."
For a second, Susan stared at Jazz just the way she had been doing all evening. "I'm not going to argue with you. In fact, if you don't get out of my car, I'm going to go get security and let them deal with you."
"You still haven't told me why you have been gawking at me. I want to know if it has anything to do with Rowena Sobczyk."
"Of course it has something to do with Rowena Sobczyk. It's too much of a coincidence with you coming out of her room when she wasn't your patient. And I happen to remember you were seen coming out of Sean McGillin's room, and he wasn't your patient, either. But talking to you about all this is not my job. It's the nursing supervisor's job, so you'll be talking with her I'm sure."
"Oh, yeah?" Jazz sneered. "I don't think you should be so sure, you freaking loser." With a little effort, Jazz got the Glock out of her pocket.
Susan saw the gun coming and was only able to raise her right hand when Jazz shot her twice in the side of the chest. Susan slumped laterally against the door, with her cheek pressed up against the glass.
Despite the suppressor, the noise within the car was more than Jazz expected. So was the smell of the cordite. With her free hand, she fanned the fumes. Twisting around, she looked out the back of the SUV. Multiple cars were coming into the garage, but all were going by and up the ramp, since all the second-tier slots were taken. A few cars were going out. With all the noise and commotion, Jazz was confident that no one would have heard the double thump of the Glock. Jazz worked the gun back into her pocket.
Reaching over, she grabbed Susan by her bun and righted her, letting her head fall against her chest but keeping her upright. What a loser, she thought as she positioned the woman's lifeless arms to rest on the steering wheel. And losers deserve to lose. She switched off the car's ignition.
Next, Jazz opened Susan's purse and rifled through it to find her wallet. Opening the wallet, she took out the cash and the credit cards. Then she tossed the wallet and the cards on the floor, hoping for the appearance of a fatal mugging. Twisting around again, Jazz looked through the back window at the door to the connecting bridge. As she did so, a group of nurses emerged and waved to each other as they split up to go to their respective vehicles. Jazz hunkered down until they were out of sight.
Sitting back up, she eyed her Hummer. It was only two cars away. After a quick check to make sure the coast was clear, Jazz got out of Susan's vehicle and away from it by going around the front of the immediately adjacent car.
Inside her own SUV, she stripped off the latex gloves and pocketed them. She started the engine, backed out, and headed for the exit. As she passed behind Susan's car, she glanced inside. It looked as though Susan was taking a catnap after a hard night. It was perfect.
Out in the morning traffic, Jazz allowed herself to take a deep breath. She hadn't realized how tense she'd been. It had been a hard night, but she was confident she'd handled it well. She was ten thousand dollars richer, and she'd managed to eliminate a potential problem. Operation Winnow was alive and kicking. Life was good.
nine
Laurie's ancient windup alarm jangled in the morning's half-light, and she reached out to turn it off without even opening her eyes. As she settled back into the warmth of her bed, she shivered, not from cold but from nausea. Her eyes blinked open. She'd experienced a touch of nausea the previous morning as well, but she had ascribed it to the scallops she'd had the night before with Roger. She loved scallops, but there had been a few times in the past when they had made her feel queasy the following day. Luckily, yesterday's nausea had not lasted. By the time she had walked around a bit, it had all but disappeared. Laurie sat up. She shivered again. After taking a sip of the water she had at her bedside, she felt a bit better. The problem was that this time, she hadn't had scallops for dinner. In fact, she'd had some reasonably bland chicken, the memory of the nausea in the back of her mind.
As she clutched her sheets around her, she noticed a new symptom along with the nausea: mild right lower quadrant discomfort. It wasn't strong enough to call pain. Using her fingers, she gingerly pushed in her abdomen in the general area over the crest of her hip. She couldn't tell if it made the discomfort any worse, since pushing in her stomach mostly reminded her of her full bladder.
Throwing back the bedcovers, she pulled on her robe and slipped her toes into her slippers. As she walked into the bathroom she could feel the discomfort more distinctly. Now it was more like pain, but still quite mild.
As a doctor considering these two symptoms, Laurie's first concern was early appendicitis. She knew there were a lot of things that could go wrong in the right lower quadrant, and that the diagnosis could be challenging at times. But she knew she was jumping the gun. It was the kind of hypochondriasis she had indulged when she was a medical student. She smiled as she remembered a simple headache in her first year that made her worry that she was coming down with malignant hypertension simply because she'd studied the syndrome the night before. Of course, she didn't have malignant hypertension, and in a similar fashion, her discomfort and nausea were almost completely gone when she got out of the shower.
Laurie wasn't hungry, but she forced herself to eat a piece of toast. When that went down okay, she had some fruit. She was convinced that having something in her stomach would help, and it did. By the time she was ready to leave for the OCME, she felt pretty much like her old self.
She waved to Mrs. Engler when the woman's door cracked open. This time, the bleary-eyed harpy actually spoke, advising Laurie to get her umbrella, since it was supposed to rain.
It was a mild morning, and although overcast, it wasn't yet raining. Laurie walked north along First Avenue, oblivious to the crush of traffic, wondering if her nausea could be psychosomatic due to stress. What else is new? she thought dejectedly, since she'd never seemed to be able to get her social life to run as smoothly as her professional life.
Laurie's whirlwind five-week relationship with Roger had recently hit an unexpected bump. They had been seeing each other two or three times a week, as well as every weekend. Laurie didn't consider the current bump an insurmountable obstacle, but it had been jarring to a degree and made her remember that back in the beginning of their acquaintance, she'd warned herself that adolescent infatuations often did not withstand the test of time. The case in point was Laurie learning only two nights earlier that Roger was married. There had been plenty of opportunities for him to have told her this important fact, but he had chosen not to, for reasons Laurie couldn't fathom. It was only after Laurie had forced herself to ask him directly that he'd owned up to the truth. He had married a Thai woman some ten years ago when he was stationed in Thailand, and had never gotten a divorce, although he was supposedly now seeking one. Even more upsetting for Laurie was that he'd had several children.
The story became somewhat less damning as it unfolded. The woman was from a wealthy, privileged family, to which she had selfishly returned, according to Roger, essentially abducting the children when Roger was transferred to Africa. Yet his withholding such information set a bad precedent and made Laurie wonder if Roger was not quite the person she had envisioned. It also underscored a growing uneasiness that Laurie felt about the speed of the relationship, coupled with Roger's pressure for physical intimacy. On top of everything were her unresolved feelings for Jack.