3 TERRIFYING THRILLERS

by Jude Hardin

  Straight back into the rattlesnake pit.

  Martha might have been unconscious when she first hit the floor, but the pain from the first few bites brought her back to a high state of alertness. She started whooping and hollering and thrashing from side to side, trying to roll over and gather some traction and pull herself out. But she couldn’t. Her enormous posterior was at her center of gravity now, and she didn’t have the strength to defeat it. She was helpless, like a turtle flipped onto its back.

  Some of the snakes had been crushed to death, but there were still plenty of live ones and they were having a field day. Slithering and biting and hissing and rattling. After thirty seconds or so of the venomous assault, Martha started begging me to put her out of her misery.

  “Please kill me,” she cried. “Please.”

  I had no intentions of killing her. I would have helped her, if I could have. Despite the macabre theater of pain and death she and her husband had constructed, despite the untold number of lives that had been wasted at the expense of their perverse pleasures, I would have found some way to get her out of that pit while trying to avoid being bitten myself.

  Unfortunately, I still hadn’t managed to get loose from the chair.

  I started rocking back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, until I finally tilted and toppled to the side. The impact sent white-hot daggers of nauseating pain through my damaged collarbone. Sweating, grunting, straining, I scooted around awkwardly until I was able to reach into Lloyd’s pocket with my free hand. I pulled out his knife, a folding lock blade with a vented stainless steel grip and a thumb stud that allowed it to be opened with one hand. It was a thug’s knife, just what I would have expected Lloyd to be carrying. I opened the blade and locked it into place and sawed through the tape securing my left hand and my ankles.

  I could still move my left arm, so I knew my collarbone wasn’t broken. Maybe a hairline fracture, or maybe just a bad bruise.

  I gazed into the pit. Martha wasn’t stirring, or saying anything now, because Martha was dead. Her face had taken on the pale and listless sheen of a plastic mannequin, and her arms and legs were covered with purple welts. The snakes had lost interest in her. They slithered over top of her like a bump in the road.

  I looked up at Linda. She was sitting there twitching, staring into space. She appeared to be in some kind of shock, unable to process what had transpired over the past couple of minutes.

  I stood and staggered over to her side of the table, cupping my right hand under my left elbow for support.

  “Do you think you can walk?” I said.

  She didn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything. I thought about cutting her loose, then decided it might be better not to. I couldn’t carry her out of there, and in her current condition I was afraid she might lose her balance and join Martha in the pit.

  I grabbed my .38 and carefully made my way to the curtain. I exited the so-called funhouse, staggered to the singlewide, found the phone and dialed 911. I waited for an answer and then set the receiver on the table, leaving the line open. The call would instantly generate an address in the emergency network computer system. Help would be on the way in a matter of minutes.

  For Linda. Not for me. I’d decided there was no reason for me to stick around. The county cops didn’t like me very much. They would give me crap about my priors, maybe even detain me on some sort of bogus charge pending an investigation. It was my birthday, and I wasn’t in the mood. At the very least, I would be required to make multiple court appearances, and I just didn’t see the point. Everyone who needed to be dead was dead, and the innocents couldn’t be brought back.

  I climbed into my Jimmy and started the engine and hightailed it out of there.

  It was almost nine o’clock, over three hours since I’d left home. On the way back, I stopped at Walmart and bought a sling for my arm and a change of clothes. I took a quick bath at the sink in the restroom, dressed myself painfully and threw my old things in the trash.

  I drove home and parked in the driveway, killed the engine and got out and walked inside. A dozen or so drunken friends shouted Surprise! in unison, and of course I gave them an Oscar-winning performance, pretending to be overwhelmed with astonishment.

  I was late to my own party. I had some catching up to do.

  Juliet handed me a drink. “What took you so long?” she said. “And what happened to your arm?”

  “I’ll tell you all about it later,” I said.

  She gave me a sideways glance and made a question mark with her eyebrows.

  “And what happened to the grapefruits I asked you to get?” she said.

  Damn. I knew I’d forgotten something.

  BAD NURSE

  Copyright © 2014 by Jude Hardin

  Lisa

  Thursday Morning, Hallows Cove

  Lisa Webber, RN. Twenty-nine years old, long blond hair, attractive. A little too attractive, she thought, based on the way some of her male patients flirted with her sometimes. Most of them were courteous and polite, but every now and then she would catch a live wire, a would-be stud who was overly proud of the pup tent in the middle of his bed. Those encounters had embarrassed Lisa when she first started nursing, but now she mostly ignored them. She took pride in maintaining a professional demeanor from the beginning of each shift to its conclusion.

  In an effort to downplay her good looks and focus more on her skills as a medical professional, Lisa tied her hair back in a bun and went without makeup most of the time. She sported wire-rimmed eyeglasses instead of contacts, and oversize scrub shirts instead of the cute low-neck form-fitting tops some of the other girls wore. Lisa Webber wanted to be more than just another pretty face. She wanted respect. She wanted to be the best nurse on the unit.

  On April 4, at 3:37 a.m., Lisa opened the door to room 614, turned the overhead light on and walked inside. Like all the rooms on the telemetry unit, there was only one bed in 614. The patient, a seventy-two-year-old woman named Elsie Shaw, had been admitted with high blood pressure and persistent tachycardia. Elsie wasn’t having any of those problems at the moment, however, because Elsie was dead.

  Lisa walked over and pressed the Code Blue button on the wall behind Elsie’s nightstand. She lowered the head of the bed so that the patient was lying flat, and then she lowered the side rails and started performing chest compressions. Thirty seconds later, Mona Walsh, another one of the full time registered nurses on the unit—and the designated charge nurse for the night—called over the intercom.

  “You have a code?” Mona said.

  It was a reasonable question. Sometimes a staff member or a patient would push the button by mistake. It was usually an elderly patient who had become confused and disoriented, and it usually happened at night. In fact, the alarm had sounded from Elsie Shaw’s room for the past three nights in a row.

  “She’s not breathing,” Lisa said. “Call the team and get the crash cart down here stat.”

  “I’m on the way.”

  Lisa continued compressions. When Mona got there with the crash cart, Lisa stopped long enough to slap a set of defibrillator pads on Elsie’s chest while Mona connected the ambu bag to the oxygen outlet on the wall. By the time the emergency room doctor and the ICU nurse and the respiratory therapist arrived, Lisa and Mona had been performing cardiopulmonary resuscitation for several minutes. In the meantime, a patient care technician named Stephanie had wrapped a blood pressure cuff around Elsie’s arm and had stuck her finger to get a glucose level.

  The ER doc was a young guy named Michael Collins. He was a regular at Hallows Cove Memorial, and Lisa had worked with him several times when she’d been forced to float downstairs. There was a severe nursing shortage in the state of Florida, and the emergency room always seemed to be short-staffed—especially at night. Lisa didn’t care much for floating, but Dr. Collins had always treated her with respect and professional courtesy. He was one of the nicer physicians on staff at HCM.

  “What’s going on,
Lisa?” he said, taking his position at the head of the bed alongside the respiratory therapist.

  “I don’t know,” Lisa said. “I walked into the room and she wasn’t breathing. No BP, flat-line on the monitor. We’ve been doing CPR for about three minutes.”

  “Can you tell me a little bit about the patient? What was her admitting diagnosis?”

  “I’m not really sure, sir. She’s not my patient.”

  “Who’s patient is she?”

  “Her nurse is on lunch break,” Mona said. “His name is Jason. He left the unit to go get something to eat.”

  “All right. Can somebody get this lady’s chart for me? Did anyone take a glucose level yet?”

  “Her sugar was one thirty-two,” Stephanie said. She darted out of the room and ran toward the nurses’ station to get the chart.

  “Hold CPR,” Dr. Collins said.

  Lisa and Mona stepped aside.

  The RT opened the intubation kit and assisted Dr. Collins in guiding an endotracheal tube down Elsie’s throat. Once an airway had been established, the RT resumed artificial respirations with the ambu bag. Mona grabbed the pre-printed code sheet from the crash cart and started writing everything down as it happened.

  “Still no BP,” Lisa said. “Still asystole.”

  “Give her the epi,” Dr. Collins said.

  The ICU nurse, who had already opened the medication drawer on the crash cart and had filled several syringes with several different types of drugs, pierced the port on Elsie’s IV line and administered an amp of epinephrine as ordered.

  “Still asystole,” Lisa said.

  “Continue CPR,” Dr. Collins said.

  Stephanie returned with the patient record and, per Dr. Collins’ request, read off Elsie’s admitting diagnoses and her current list of medications.

  “My arms are giving out,” Lisa said.

  Stephanie stepped around to the other side of the bed and took over chest compressions. Lisa’s triceps and shoulder muscles were on fire. She couldn’t have gone on much longer.

  Mona handed her the code sheet. “I need to go check on the other patients,” she said.

  “All right,” Lisa said. She took the sheet and started recording the minutes where Mona had left off.

  “I’m getting some coarse V-fib on the monitor,” the ICU nurse said. “Still no pulse.”

  “Go ahead and shock her,” Dr. Collins said.

  The ICU nurse changed the mode on the defibrillator, waited for the device to charge, and then shouted, “Clear!” Once everyone had backed away from the bed, she pushed the button and delivered 360 joules of electrical current directly to Elsie Shaw’s heart. Every muscle in the patient’s body contracted with a quick jerk, as if she’d been startled, as if someone had walked up behind her and said boo!

  Lisa knew that it was a long shot, that most patients didn’t respond to the medications or to shocks from the defibrillator, that most codes ended with the patient in a body bag.

  This time, however, the team—and the patient—got lucky.

  “Sinus tach,” the ICU nurse said. “And I’m getting a pulse.”

  “BP seventy over forty,” Stephanie said.

  “All right, let’s get her to the ICU,” Dr. Collins said. “I’ll be down there in a minute to write some orders.”

  The doctor grabbed the chart and walked out of the room. Lisa followed. She needed him to sign the code sheet, and she wanted to ask him a couple of questions. As she approached the nurses’ station, she saw Jason Powers rounding the corner from the elevator bank.

  “What’s going on?” Jason said.

  “We just saved your patient’s life,” Lisa said. “That’s what’s going on.”

  Jason

  Thursday Morning, Hallows Cove

  Originally from Nashville, Tennessee, Jason Powers had lived in north Florida for a little over ten years. He liked Florida, and he liked working at Hallows Cove Memorial. He was a good nurse. Everyone said so, and he always received positive evaluations from his manager.

  Jason had made a huge mistake a few months ago, though. He’d broken his own rule about dating fellow employees. Never again, he thought, as Lisa snarled at him and sat down beside the ER doctor in front of the chart rack.

  Lisa Webber had started working on the unit last October, right before Halloween. Lisa was good looking, and she’d seemed so nice at first. Jason had asked her if she wanted to go to the movies sometime, and he was pleasantly surprised when she said yes. One thing led to another, as it always does, and before long they were spending nearly every day off work together.

  Life was grand for a while, but after a few weeks it became apparent to Jason that the two of them just weren’t right for each other. Lisa was too clingy, for one thing, texting every five minutes whenever they were apart, and Jason was the kind of guy who needed some space. She was suffocating him, and it got to the point where he dreaded spending time with her. He broke it off over the phone one night, hoping that he and Lisa could remain friends.

  Lisa immediately made it clear that they could not.

  “I hate you,” she’d said. “And I’m going to keep hating you until the day you die.”

  Now it was awkward every time he and Lisa worked together. Not only awkward, but downright uncomfortable. Jason tried to schedule his shifts opposite hers, but that wasn’t always possible. Every time her name showed up on the staffing roster next to his, Jason got a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. Regardless of how everything else went, he knew it was going to be a stressful twelve hours.

  Dr. Collins glanced up from the chart he was writing on.

  “Are you Ms. Shaw’s nurse?” he said.

  “Yes, sir,” Jason said.

  “Any complaints since you’ve been here?”

  “No, she was fine. I checked on her right before I went to lunch. I can’t imagine—”

  “Did you give her any medications?”

  “Nothing since nine o’clock,” Jason said. “I gave her what was scheduled, the Lipitor and the diltiazem she has ordered, and she asked for a sleeping pill so I gave her that.”

  “Nothing else?”

  “Nothing.”

  “All right. She’s on her way to ICU now. You should probably call down there and give them report.”

  “Will do,” Jason said.

  Dr. Collins rose from his seat, grabbed the chart he’d been writing on, and headed toward the elevator. Jason picked up the phone on the counter, but before he could punch in the number for the intensive care unit, Lisa swiveled her chair around and glared at him through those granny glasses she always wore to work.

  “Aren’t you even going to say thanks?” she said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “I checked on your patient for you while you were at lunch. I was the one who found her. If it hadn’t been for me, she would have died for sure.”

  “You’re a good nurse,” Jason said. “I appreciate your help. And I’m sure Ms. Shaw appreciates your help.”

  Lisa got up and walked over to the counter where Jason was standing.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean I’m willing to give you another chance. I thought we had a nice relationship going. It could be nice again, you know?”

  Jason shook his head. He couldn’t believe what he was hearing.

  “We’ve been through all this before,” he said. “Why do you have to make it so hard? Why can’t we just be friends?”

  “You think I’m making it hard now, Jason? Is that what you think? You ain’t seen nothing yet.”

  She turned and walked away.

  Jason called ICU and gave the nurse down there report on Elsie Shaw, and then he went and checked on his other patients. Just three more hours, he told himself, and the shift would be over.

  Jason

  Thursday Morning, St. Augustine

  Jason left the hospital at 7:26. Lisa had stared at him the en
tire time he was giving report to the oncoming shift, and he could feel her eyes boring a hole through his back as he walked toward the elevator. His nerves were fried, and he didn’t feel like going home and going to bed.

  He felt like going to the beach.

  He was off tonight, so he didn’t have to worry about getting enough sleep to come back in for another twelve-hour shift. He drove home and got Buddy, his three-year-old yellow Labrador, and headed for St. Augustine.

  And that’s where he saw her for the first time.

  She was so beautiful, standing there with her surfboard, staring southward down St. Augustine beach, staring at nothing in particular, apparently deep in thought. Perfect body. Perfect face. Long brown hair swept back by the breeze. She was perhaps the most beautiful woman Jason Powers had ever seen.

  The sun rose lazily over the ocean to her left, her skin tanned and glowing against the orange morning brightness. Jason supposed that Buddy could smell the lotion on those arms and shoulders and legs, and he supposed the scent was heavenly.

  Normally, this part of the beach was deserted at this time of the morning, a haven of quiet, blissful solitude. That’s why Jason liked it. No boom boxes, no volleyball, no kids running around with plastic buckets and shovels. Just Jason and Buddy and an endless expanse of sand and sea.

  But today there was her.

  An intrusion, to be sure, but at least a lovely one. Maybe she was new to the area. Maybe she could use someone to show her around. But no, she was out of Jason’s league. There was no point in trying to strike up a conversation with a woman so gorgeous. Lisa was good looking, but this girl…

  Another league altogether.

  Anyway, she probably had a boyfriend. How could someone who looked like her not have a boyfriend? Or maybe even a husband.

  That was it. She was probably on vacation with her husband. There were several hotels half a mile north, and Jason thought maybe she had flown down to the sunshine state from someplace where it was still cold this time of year. Michigan, or some other uninhabitable region. The tan was probably store-bought, the surfboard a rental.