First Do No Evil: Blood Secrets, Book 1 (17 page)

“You’re welcome.” Working her drawn face into a pleasant smile, the woman sighed and twisted a gold band on her left hand. Her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy. Deep wrinkles marred her cardigan. Garth pictured the woman balling up the sweater for use as a pillow while she dozed, waiting for a loved one, her husband maybe, to get out of surgery.

The elevator boomeranged to a stop, and the doors opened. Stepping off onto the third floor, he turned right. Midway down the surgical department corridor, he paused and butted the heel of his hand against a chrome circle fixed to the wall. When a set of double doors opened, he walked through them and encountered a second set of doors, stamped with the words
No Street Clothes Beyond This Point
.

From portable shelving, rolled haphazardly against the wall, he selected a size extra-large mint green scrub set and a blue paper hair net. He’d have preferred a close-fitting cap that would’ve made him look more like a surgeon and less like a cafeteria worker, but none were available. He did have a choice of masks, however. An orange one with a plastic eye shield and string ties, or an unshielded blue one that hooked over the ears. He chose the unshielded blue one because orange clashed with mint. He passed on the paper booties. They wouldn’t be necessary. But there was something else he did need. Digging his hand into a cardboard box, he latched onto a couple of green fingers and tugged out two latex gloves. Crammed them in his pocket.

A few yards down the hallway, he ducked into a single-toilet restroom and locked the door. His gaze fell on a handful of cards stacked on the counter below the liquid soap dispenser. The cards were from a local women’s shelter and offered haven to anyone who didn’t feel safe at home. Garth pitched the lot of them into the trash. Social service agencies deluded the public into thinking they did good works, but in reality they did nothing but fuck people over, and the more vulnerable a person was, the harder the fuck.

No one knew that better than he did. If Isabella Novak hadn’t come into his life, the troubled teen known as Garth Yoblanski would’ve lived out his youth as another unwanted, unseen victim of the malevolent system ironically referred to as
Protective Services
.

But unlike the whores in brown skirts who came before her, lovely Isabella, his angel, was no ordinary social worker. Despite an overburdened caseload, she refused to turn a blind eye to the horrors being inflicted upon him. Instantly comprehending the gravity of his plight, she’d brought his abusive foster family up on charges…and she hadn’t stopped there. Because she recognized his innate potential, his beautiful, tender angel had lifted him up. Delivering him from a corrupt system that had all but digested him into a heap of excrement waiting to be spewed out of its rotten bowels, she adopted him into her own family, and Garth Novak was born.

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 there.

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.”