My Bad- Lani Lynn Vale

by Vale, Lani Lynn

  The waitress batted her eyes at me.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’d love to.”

  I waited until she was walking away to turn back to Brielle, who’d asked me a question before the waitress had come up, offering us the check.

  “I’m sorry, what did you ask?” I wondered.

  Her face was mutinous. “Before you so rudely interrupted me to order food for her, I was saying that I have an art exhibit on Thursday. You should come.”

  I was already shaking my head. “I can’t. I’m leaving Friday morning, and I want to spend the night with Pru before I leave. I’m sorry.”

  I’d been to countless shows of Brielle’s, and honestly, I hated them. They were stuffy exhibits that really did nothing for me. I was always supportive of her work, but there were only so many art shows I could go to and pretend that I cared.

  And I’d much rather spend that night alone with Pru, and I thought she’d like that, too.

  She’d already mentioned to me that she was going to reschedule their usual family dinner that they had that day so that she could spend it with me. Why would I want to ruin her free night with an art exhibit that we wouldn’t like? Not to mention, I couldn’t afford half the shit in that place.

  I always felt like a piece of trash when I walked through those doors.

  “You’re saying you’d rather spend your time with someone you just met rather than your cousin?” Brielle asked for clarification.

  I shrugged. “You don’t talk to me at your art shows anyway.”

  I hadn’t missed that part.

  I didn’t know if it was because she was embarrassed of Bayou and me, or because she was honestly just working the room and knew that we wouldn’t care if she talked to us or not.

  Whatever the reason, I didn’t like going to them, and she wouldn’t even have noticed if I was there or not anyway.

  “You’ve gone to every one of them,” she pouted.

  “Actually,” Bayou pointed out. “He’s gone to everyone that he could. I, on the other hand, have gone to every one of them. Except for this week. I have a meeting at the prison with someone from the state. I also have an interview for a new nurse. She couldn’t do it any other time, so I’m going to have to miss also.”

  Brie’s eyes filled with tears, but they no longer affected me.

  Brie’s tears might’ve affected me when we were in high school, but she used them as a weapon in her carefully concealed arsenal. Lying, manipulation—especially the tears—were all a part of her weapons base, and she knew how to use them.

  Those weapons worked on most people. They didn’t work on Bayou and me any longer. Though, Bayou pretended that they did because it amused him to do so.

  Brielle started to get mad when the tears didn’t affect either one of us, but that anger slid right off her face the moment the two guys walked in the door.

  Ezekiel and Castiel, two of our club brothers, spotted us and headed our way.

  I watched Brielle’s face.

  She was a master manipulator, and honestly, it was funny to see her try to work the brothers over.

  She never accomplished her goals, but she tried.

  Castiel didn’t spare her a glance as he turned to look at Bayou and me.

  “Glad we caught y’all,” he said softly. “We were headed to breakfast, and then to y’all. Did you hear about all that business at the hospital?”

  I frowned, my heart starting to pick up speed.

  “What business?” I asked, alarm starting to thread through me like poisonous tendrils.

  “Apparently there was a big to-do at the hospital last night. A man with a knife got through security, killed the security guard, Mr. Montgomery, and almost took out a nurse,” Castiel expounded.

  I felt my stomach drop. Mr. ‘M’ as Pru called him and I had gotten to know each other over the time I’d been wooing Pru. He was a good man, loved his wife, and loved his job. It made him feel important.

  He was a Vietnam Vet who worked because he didn’t like ‘sitting on his hands doing nothing’ all day long. His words and visits had come to be a highlight in my life over the last couple of weeks. I’d thoroughly enjoyed learning about him and hearing his war stories.

  “How are you involved?” Bayou frowned, looking at Ezekiel.

  Ezekiel, also known as Zee, lifted his shirt and showed off a rather impressive slice to his side with stitches all up and down the length of the cut.

  “I was there to get stitched up when the man came in,” Zee explained. “I was halfway stitched up when that man came in wielding the knife. Luckily, he came in with his back to me. Used that door at the side of the room? He walked right in and didn’t look around to assess for threats. I came up from behind him and disarmed him right as he was bringing the knife down to stab a nurse in the chest.”

  We let that sink in for a few long seconds.

  “If you weren’t there, things would’ve been a lot different,” Bayou murmured. “Holy shit.”

  “How’d you get the cut?” Brielle asked Zee.

  Zee looked at Brielle then looked away. “Work-related accident.”

  I wondered idly which profession he was utilizing the night before.

  He was a pilot for Angel Flight, he worked as a part-time sheriff’s deputy, and he also filled the rest of his time tattooing and painting.

  There wasn’t a single canvas—human or other—that he didn’t make look like a masterpiece once he was through with it.

  Zee, who was clearly uncomfortable with Brielle and always had been, switched his attention to the table that was next to us, then sat down, as far away from her as he could get but still be within range to talk to us.

  I felt my lips twitch.

  Sometimes she affected me that way, too.

  But since she was technically family, I wasn’t allowed to ignore her the way Zee did.

  Not and live with the guilt.

  “I’m honestly surprised that I didn’t hear about it already,” Bayou stated. “Everyone normally keeps me up to date on the happenings of the city. Not to mention they’ll likely take him to temporary lock-up at my prison.”

  The city didn’t have a jail. They used the prison’s temporary lock-up to house their common criminals. And, as with everything that went on at the prison, even though he didn’t run that part of the place, he knew everything that went on. A good warden knew everything, down to the most minute details.

  At least, that’s what he told me anyway.

  The prison was sometimes a soap opera, at least to me. Things happened there that you wouldn’t quite think should happen there. Such as Bayou knowing every single thing that happened, when it happened, where it happened, and why it happened. Not to mention who did it.

  “It happened about three hours ago,” Zee said. “I don’t think anybody’s had any time to do anything but react just yet.”

  “I was first on scene,” Castiel explained. “Kid that did it was a druggie. One that gets pretty desperate for his next fix. I’m fairly sure that he was paid to do what he did.”

  “Who would want to kill the night security guard at the hospital or take out a nurse, and why?” Bayou gestured to the waitress, who hurried over. “Can you take their orders, please?”

  The waitress turned to Castiel, who was still standing, and took his order, followed shortly by Zee’s.

  “And please bring mine out,” he said. “I need to leave, and don’t have time to wait for them.”

  I snorted. Bayou and his timelines.

  I couldn’t wait for the day to come for a woman to show up in his life and throw his careful plans completely out of whack.

  “Pru’s been telling me for a while that security was too lax,” I murmured, leaning back in the chair so that Bayou could see past me to Zee. “They said something about the code to get into the ER—that back door you were talking about, Zee—hasn’t been changed in a really long time. They’ve brought
up the security protocols with the board, and they haven’t done a thing about it.”

  “Well, they’re going to do something about it now,” Castiel muttered. “Or they’re going to have a lot of pissed off nurses, doctors, and other hospital personnel on their hands.”

  Oh, I had no doubt that my woman would be one of them.

  ***

  Pru

  I was angry.

  So fucking angry.

  I’d walked into work today with a smile on my face—and even my dead cell phone hadn’t put a damper on my mood. I’d taken two steps inside, turning to offer my smile to Mr. M on the way in, only to be confronted with crime scene tape and a bloody body print where Mr. M usually stood.

  My mother, who’d come in right behind me, had immediately gone into action, ignoring my horror and confusion.

  What happened? A knife-wielding psych patient came in and tried to stab his previous nurse.

  Why wasn’t I called? Your phone was dead.

  How is Mr. M? Dead.

  My mother had smiled at me sadly once she’d gotten a few minutes to herself, and had given me a quick hug, then we’d gone our separate ways. That was until I’d gotten wind of the emergency board meeting going on that was in the professional office hallway just down from the ER.

  We—Conleigh, Phoebe, and I—had gone to stand outside while they talked. Only when I heard what I heard next, I hadn’t been able to keep myself standing outside like a good little girl.

  “No, but it wouldn’t surprise me if you hired him just to prove a point on how unsafe it was,” Kelley pointed out.

  I felt my mouth drop open in affront.

  “I know that you’re not accusing my mother of hiring a knife-wielding psycho to kill someone just to hammer her safety protocol suggestions home,” I said, no longer controlling the anger or snarl in my voice.

  Kelley’s eyes turned to me. “I’m sorry, but this is a private board meeting. Since you’re not on the board, I’d like to ask you to leave.”

  “No,” I refused. “I’m not leaving. In fact, I think it’s high time someone around here listened to what we have to say.”

  “I agree,” Phoebe said softly.

  “As do I,” Conleigh approved. “We’ve been trying to share the problems this ER is facing for months. It’s unsafe.”

  Kelley’s eyes narrowed on me. “Leave or lose your job.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “Why would I want to work anywhere that’s unsafe?”

  Kelley’s eyes snapped fire.

  “Mrs. Mackenzie…”

  I turned to the other rude old man that knew about our problems and corrected him. “Miss.”

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair, his sizeable bulk making the chair creak as he did.

  “Fine, Ms. Mackenzie, we do understand that y’all are upset. Understandably so, but please give us time to dissect the problem…”

  “You’ve had plenty of time to dissect the problem,” my mother supplied. “And it’s more than obvious, even with what happened to Mr. M as well as what almost happened to the night charge nurse, that you don’t care about our safety. And, like I said when I came in here, making these farces you call meetings private do y’all no good. Y’all don’t realize that there is something rather awful going on out there, and y’all aren’t the ones putting your lives at risk. In the last month alone, we’ve had two drug dealers try to shoot the place up over a turf war. We’ve had a nurse nearly maimed because y’all refuse to give us sitters. And now, someone has lost their life. Yet y’all still don’t care.”

  “We care,” a woman, older and in her late fifties, early sixties, said. “Mr. M was a valuable asset to us. We will make the ER safer.”

  “Start by hiring a professional that can look into the workings of the ER,” I suggested.

  “As I’ve already told your mother, we’re not hiring your father’s company to do any work for us. That’s bias,” Kelley all but snarled.

  I wanted to stab him in the face with the pen he kept pointing at me each time he spoke.

  “Then don’t hire anyone local,” I suggested. “Hire someone that’s from out of the city. Out of the state. Hell, I don’t care if he’s from out of the country. But you need to do it, or I’m not working in your ER any longer.”

  Kelley narrowed his eyes, then turned to my mother.

  “Are you going to allow this insubordination?” he asked, eerily calm.

  “Yes,” she said. “Because until further action is taken, I’m on strike as well.”

  Kelley’s mouth thinned. “We have the choice to fire you as well. You’re all easily replaceable. We’ll just get other nurses to work double shifts.”

  “Um, no.” Conleigh butted in now. “I will not work double shifts. I’m busy as it is and health wise, I choose not to work extra. I’m also in agreement. I will not work in an unsafe environment. I don’t have to for one reason and secondly, I’m fairly sure that my husband won’t allow me to after hearing what happened today.”

  Yeah, I had no doubt in my mind that Linc would be pissed off.

  Hoax would be, too.

  “Then you know where the door is,” Kelley suggested.

  “Kelley…” the older man said hesitantly.

  “No.” Kelley held up his hand for silence. “You may all go.”

  My mother grabbed my arm, and then my sister’s, and guided us out the door, Conleigh hot on her heels.

  “I’m staying,” Phoebe said. “This is my last clinical. I’m done after today. But I want to know what’s going on, too. So as soon as I get home, I’ll give you the dirty details.”

  My mother’s eyes were hot. “Do that. But honey, be careful. Keep your eyes peeled, and if anything seems suspicious, leave.”

  “That’s okay,” another nurse and also Phoebe’s teacher said. “We’re done. Today will count toward your graduation. Until things have been figured out here safety-wise, my students will no longer be attending.”

  That was when I saw the halls lined with doctors and nurses. Hundreds of them.

  Nurses, doctors, patient care technicians, a couple of paramedics, orderlies. Jesus. All colors of the rainbow hospital scrub-wise were standing in the hallway, and none of them looked happy.

  And, based on the number of people that were here, we also had night shift as well as day shift’s people. We’d also likely gotten some of the floor nurses as well. The ones that were forced to rotate down here when we were shorthanded.

  Another thing, if everyone was in the hallway with us, then nobody was out on the floor.

  My eyes widened even more.

  “We’re on divert.” Cheyenne clapped her hands. “Kelley, you might want to figure this out before you have to hire ninety-seven new people. Also, each day you’re on divert is a day that this hospital doesn’t get paid. FYI.”

  “I’ll get the floor staff to replace you, don’t worry,” Kelley hissed, not liking what he’d heard.

  He followed us out into the hallway and saw everyone standing there for himself. His eyes narrowed even further.

  “Actually,” another nurse, this one at the end of the hallway, spoke up. “We will not be allowing our nurses to come down. If you force us, we’ll go on strike as well.”

  Kelley looked irate.

  The other five people on the board with him looked tentative as if they were just now realizing the repercussions of not keeping their staff safe.

  The hospital would bleed thousands and thousands of dollars a day—because fuck yes, we had a nurses union and we would be getting paid regardless, thank God—until they could figure out which way was up.

  In the meantime, I’d be looking for another job, just in case.

  “That’s super,” my sister said excitedly. “I have an interview at the prison to fill a nursing position.”

  “You what?” my mother asked, slightly too loud for the crowded hallway.

  Meaning ev
eryone looked our way.

  “Shhh,” I hissed. “We’re not doing this here.”

  I grabbed hold of my sister’s hand and started to pull her outside, leading us first to the break room to grab all of our crap, and then to the ambulance entrance so my mom didn’t explode for everyone to see.

  My mother wasn’t usually the type of person to get upset over where a person worked, but my sister was five foot two, got picked on for her strawberry blonde hair that had developed when she was a little over a year old all through school, and mom started to become overprotective of her littlest girl.

  Then again, so did Dad.

  The day that we heard that she’d been beat up because some kid had called her a hobbit and had fought the group of girls, my mom had started to become that overprotective person.

  That’s when my dad had taught us all how to fight. Well, we were always in training for those worst case scenarios of abduction and then we were taught self-defense against our peers.

  “This is bullshit,” I said under my breath.

  Mom followed behind us, fuming, and glaring holes in anyone that looked at her—i.e., two men from the board who were lingering outside, looking worried.

  I felt my lips twitch as I rounded the corner and came to a sudden halt when I saw all the news vans and reporters interviewing people.

  There were too many for them to just be local, too.

  Someone must’ve heard about the murder and the strike.

  My eyes lit on the motorcycles in the back of the lot, and that’s when I saw my dad…as well as Hoax.

  Hoax had on a hat that shielded most of his face, but I didn’t need to see his face to know that body.

  I’d had my hands all over it this morning as I’d made love to him before going to work.

  Unfortunately, before I could head in their direction, we were spotted by the media.

  Luckily, my sister, who was a nervous puker, chose that second to let go.

  She spewed vomit everywhere and the reporters halted only two steps into their progression.

  I pulled Phoebe with an excited tug and led her across the parking lot and into the shadows provided by the large trees that covered the back of the lot, which was rather convenient depending on how you looked at it, directly across from a cemetery.