Marker

"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 fa

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 co

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 Wi

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 di

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 begi

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.

The night before, as she sat in her apartment feeling sorry for herself about the previous night's revelations, she had had a mini-epiphany. For the first time, she had acknowledged to herself that she actively and deliberately suppressed issues she didn't want to talk about or even think about. She'd recognized this trait in her parents, particularly her mother, from as far back as Laurie could remember, and her mother's way of dealing with her recent bout with breast cancer was a case in point. Laurie had always despised the trait. Yet she had never looked at herself in the mirror as her parents' child. What made her come to the realization was that Roger's marital status hadn't been the surprise she liked to pretend. There had been hints, but Laurie had assiduously kept herself from acknowledging any of them. She simply did not want to believe that he was married.