BAD NURSE: A THRILLER by Hardin Jude

Author:Hardin, Jude [Hardin, Jude]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2013-12-09T16:00:00+00:00

Mark

Sunday Night, Key West

Mark Taylor drove back to Jake’s Key West Saloon. He felt stone cold sober now, and stone cold sober wasn’t what he wanted to be. He wanted to be plastered. He wanted to drink until he couldn’t see straight.

The place was loud. The band had started, and the main room was congested with people dancing or gathered in clusters talking or sitting at tables tapping their feet. Mark shuffled his way through all that and out the back door to the beer garden. It was quieter back there, and there was a full bar where you sit and have a drink and a smoke and enjoy the breeze coming off the ocean.

“Hey, Mark,” the bartender said. It was a chick named Wendy. Mark had gone out with her a few times, before he’d met Alison. Gorgeous redhead with a nice ass.

“Hey,” Mark said. “I already started a tab up front.”

“That’s no problem. I’ll just transfer it back here. What can I get for you?”

“Let me get a Corona. And a shot of Cuervo.”

Wendy opened the beer and poured the shot. “Pretty good band tonight, huh?”

“Yeah, pretty good. From Jacksonville, right?”

“I think so. You all right, Mark?”

Mark lifted the lime wedge from the lip of the beer bottle, sucked the juice out of it, drained the shot of tequila in a single gulp. “I’m OK. Why?”

“You just look kind of tired or something. A little pale maybe.”

Mark tapped a cigarette out from a pack of Marlboros. Wendy lit it for him. “Gee, thanks. A little pale, huh? Maybe I better start going to the tanning bed again.”

“Or the beach. You’re not surfing anymore?”

“Not much.”

“What happened to the hot babe you used to bring in here all the time?”

“I don’t want to talk about it,” Mark said.

“You’re not seeing her anymore?”

“No.”

Wendy walked to the other side of the bar and tended to another customer. She’d asked if Mark was OK, then said he looked tired and pale. He felt tired and pale, so no wonder he looked the part. He felt absolutely sick. You can’t just put a gun to a man’s head and accidentally blow his brains out without feeling absolutely sick about it.

Mark got up and walked to the bathroom. He locked himself in one of the stalls and leaned over the toilet. He thought he was going to puke. He wanted to. He wanted to vomit out everything that had happened since he got up that morning. He thought he was going to puke, and he wanted to, but he couldn’t. He stood there and heaved, his mind reeling and his chest burning and sweat trickling down his back in streams. Fuck it. Maybe some more alcohol would help. It was worth a try.

He went back out to the beer garden and ordered another Corona and another shot. It was almost ten o’clock, six more hours until closing time. He tapped out another cigarette, and Wendy lit it for him again.

“What time you get off?” he asked her.

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