Notorious D.O.C. (Hope Sze medical mystery) Read Online Free PDF Page A

spill past my
shoulders, but I'd tried a chin-length bob and liked it.
    He smiled. I smiled back. Then, suddenly
shy. I glanced back at the café I'd just left. We were a few blocks away, so I
could barely make out our table, let alone Tucker.
    Ryan nodded at me. "You look
good,"
    He said it first, thank goodness, which
let me admit, "You too."
    Ryan sticks to the truth. He was brutally
honest, annoyingly Christian sometimes, but not a liar. Such a tonic after
Alex, the first Montreal bad boy I got mixed up with.
    I wanted to eyeball every detail of
Ryan's body. Part of me wanted to make sure he was really here and now, within
licking distance. The other part of me wanted to sprint far away from him.
    I exhaled. "So what are you doing
here?   I mean, I didn't know you were in
town."
    His smile hitched up at the corner and he
glanced over his shoulder. A girl in a miniskirt marched toward us on coltish
little legs, black hair swinging with every step. She was pretty and she was
pissed. I'd never met her, but her expression told me exactly who she was with
respect to Ryan.
    "Sorry, Lisa," he said. "I
didn't want Hope to get away."
    "No, we wouldn't want that,"
she agreed in a high-pitched voice. I looked down at her. She wasn't just
short, she was made miniature all over. In other words, the stereotypical Asian
doll-like build that made even me feel like a tank, even though I was just as
Chinese as she was.
    "Hi, Lisa, I'm Hope Sze." I
tried to smile. I hadn't so much as glimpsed Ryan in over a year and a half, so
why did I feel so bereft, meeting his girlfriend?
    To my surprise, she held out her hand and
pumped mine. She had a good grip for someone sparrow-sized. She said,
"Pleased to meet you. I was just taking Ryan on a tour of Montreal."
    He smiled. "I'm here with some
buddies. I gave Lisa a call."
    Well, that didn't sound too lovey-dovey.
Neither did their stance, side by side but not touching. Not to mention him
racing after me. My heart lifted, even as I scolded it. No men. Not even ex-boyfriends. Especially not ex-boyfriends.
    "We're having a great time,"
she said.
    He smiled. "Yeah, Lisa's an awesome
tour guide. Listen, Hope, I'm here two more days. Maybe we could catch up
sometime?"
    I knew the mature, responsible,
Lisa-friendly thing to do. Instead, I gave him my phone numbers, home and
pager, with my best smile. "Definitely. Call me."

 
 
 
    Chapter 4

 
    Once I decided to kill her, I got pretty
excited about it. There are so many ways to off someone. Think about it.
    You could do it with your hands, like
strangling, beating, or a karate   chop.
That one would be pretty funny, unless she knows karate too.
    You could go totally hands-free and not
be in the same room if you did poison or a fire.
    I kinda like weapons like guns and
knives. I even heard of using an ice pick.
    Man, so many choices. It's like losing
your virginity. You only get to do it for the first time once.
    ***
    The phone rang twice that night, but both
times, the caller hung up without leaving a message. I was too cheap to get
caller ID, so all I could do was cross my fingers that Ryan would contact me
before he left.
    The next morning, I swung into the emerg
nursing station and found a plain brown envelope propped against the printer.
    DR. HOPE SZE. CONFIDENTIAL.
    Mrs. Lee had written my name in indelible
black marker. She'd printed her return address just as clearly in the upper
left hand corner.
    I lifted the envelope. She'd chosen the
padded kind, as if she needed to insulate the documents within. It felt
surprisingly heavy for a bunch of paper.
    "Mrs. Lee dropped that off last
night," said Nancy, the psych emerg nurse. Psych patients need a lot of
one-on-one that the regular emerg nurses are too busy to provide, so they get
their own nurse. I'd vaguely noticed Nancy sitting next to the printer when I
rotated through emerg last month, but I'd never registered what service she
belonged to until I sat in her chair one day and a doctor