"Regardless, I'm going to have my partner check you out while I have a talk with Mr. Remo."
"I don't need to be checked out," Mrs. Butler insisted mildly.
"Now, Mrs. Butler, you listen to Shorley. She's the professional," Remo said.
"Whatever you say, Remo."
"My name is Shirley!"
"Oh, no, it's not, dear, just look at your embroidery," Mrs. Butler pointed out.
Shirley grabbed Remo's arm and dragged him into the tidy kitchen off the sunporch.
"Let's talk," Remo said.
"No, you listen! You cannot and will not interfere with me or my job, understand?"
"I fixed her back spasm," Remo protested. "You would have had her in a neck brace on a stretcher by now. Poor lady would have wasted the next week in a hospital bed."
"I don't believe for an instant that you actually helped that old woman."
"Remo! Look!" Mrs. Butler cried through the screen door. "I can touch my toes!" Keith Ostrowski was dancing around in a panic as the elderly woman bent at the waist and touched her toes. Remo applauded.
Keith managed to coerce her back to the chair, and Shirley glared at Remo.
"Your head is gonna explode, isn't it?" he asked.
"Listen to me," Shirley pronounced slowly. "I do not like people interfering with what I do."
"I can tell. You've got real control issues."
She belted him. He took it and smiled. "Feel better now?"
She backhanded him.
"Now?" he asked.
He took a third blow to the face. Shirley knew how to throw a punch.
"This helping you out?" he asked. "Uh-oh."
Too late he sensed the change. His assailant had suddenly stopped being mad, and she started being something else entirely. It had to have been all the hitting. She threw herself into the air and landed her pelvis on the front of his beige Chinos, wrapping her legs around his posterior and encircling his neck with her strong arms. She latched her mouth on to his.
She pulled away briefly. "You're an asshole."
"Your punches hurt less than your kissing."
"Brace yourself." She hurt him again.
On the porch, Mrs. Butler watched and sighed with envy. "Lucky little tramp."
"Yeah," Keith Ostrowski said.
"You," said the naked paramedic, "are the worst person I ever met."
"Have you met a lot of people?" Remo asked.
"If I meet a hundred thousand people, I'll never meet anybody worse than you."
"Ha! I can prove you wrong within the hour—-just come to my hotel."
Shirley's sour glare became baleful. "Your wife?"
"Naw. My trainer. You want unpleasant, he can deliver it in truckloads. He's mean, he's nasty and he's so old he makes Mrs. Butler look as fresh as butter."
Shirley considered that, then shook her head. "You're still worse. Look what you made me do—no old man could use me like you did."
"I think you're actually warming up to me."
"Remo, look around you!"
Remo looked around. "So?"
"We just did it in an ambulance! My ambulance!"
"It was your idea," he reminded her.
"I'm a professional paramedic! My behavior's been appalling! I let myself be coerced and manipulated."
"Listen, everybody makes mistakes. You had a little too much to drink, I was complimenting you all evening, sometimes those things lower your defenses."
She rose on her elbows and blinked at him. He was sitting on the gurney, trapped by her legs. "What are you talking about?" she asked. "We only started mashing lips a half hour ago."
"You'll feel better if you go with my version."
She considered it, then shook her head. "I'm ruined. Keith's the biggest gossip in the city. He'll have my reputation smeared before the shift ends."
"I'll talk to him." Remo wasn't sure how to handle this young lady, and he didn't want to push the wrong button, but he finally got to the point. "You know, I actually came here to talk to you about your patient yesterday."
Her mean face turned sad. "Died."
"Murdered."
"By you, if the story I heard is true. Lord knows I tried to stabilize him."
"All I did was get him away from the bomb the fastest way I knew how. And you did stabilize him. He was murdered in the hospital." She got up on her elbows again, which made her trim stomach wrinkle in a way Remo found quite cute. Her breasts had just enough heft to sway with the movement. That was nice, too. In fact, Shirley was an incredibly attractive young lady when she didn't scowl, which wasn't often. There were also flashes of niceness that leaked out during the rare moments she forgot to be horrid.
"How?" she demanded.
"Somebody put rubbing alcohol into his IV," Remo said.
She shuddered. "Jesus. That would have burned his circulatory system from the inside out."
"He never felt a thing," he assured her. "He was on so many pain meds I guarantee he never regained consciousness."
"Not many people you could kill that way," she said conversationally. "Most patients would feel the intoxicating effects or the pain and alert somebody. Actually, though, isopropyl alcohol's a pretty good murder weapon. It's clear and mixes with water, so it'll mix just as easily with whatever hydration solution they had in the IV. It's common enough, it's untraceable. Even the smell wouldn't be a big problem if it was inside a sealed IV bag, and who'd pay attention to a little alcohol smell in a hospital anyway? It's a wonder there are not a lot more hospital murders like this."
"This an area of interest?" Remo asked.
"Yeah, forensics. I wanna be a coroner. I've got two more years before I can start my internship."
"Congratulations."
She gave him an interested look. "Now, you I'd like to autopsy."
"I'm flattered."
"I mean, what's going on with your physiology, anyway? You chased this ambulance for miles, you give the old woman a massage that cures a crick in her back that's older than I am, and you use some sort of magic musk power to force me to have sex with you. I don't know what kind of sex that was, but it wasn't human sex. There's also yesterday's troublemaking. If half of what I heard really happened, then you must be some sort of freak of nature."
"I've been called—"
"Like, a missing link."
"Maybe just the opposite, like the next step in human evolution."
She sneered as she gave him a head-to-toe examination. Remo modestly covered himself with a tiny paper pillow.
"Missing link," she concluded definitively. "But fascinating."
"You're not autopsying me."
"Maybe just a little look-see? I can do it with just one cut, eight inches long. Here to here." She poked his stomach twice.
"That's more than eight inches, and anyway I'm not letting you. You would just be disappointed."
"Figures. You're such an asshole."
"Yeah."
She burned him with her evil eye for a half minute, then fidgeted. "Well?"
"Huh?"
"Aren't you going to take advantage of me again?"
"Not until you talk about your patient yesterday."
"Never! You'll have to beat it out of me."
Remo grimaced. "Nice try, Shorley, but I've reached my kink threshold."
"My name is not Shorley, you asshole!" She viciously slapped his face and shoulders until he yawned. "Oh, all right, dammit, I'll tell you what the burned guy said."
She told him everything she knew. It didn't take long. "Help you out?" she asked.
"Maybe," Remo said, thinking over what she had told him.
"Good enough for a little something extra this time?" she asked.
"No."
She sighed and fell back on the gurney. "Vanilla sex
sucks," she complained, although, in fact, she had just had the best sex of her life.
"Hey,we don't have to do it again."
"Don't even think of weaseling out now," Shirley snarled, her legs clamping around his waist. "You are such an arrogant shit."