Read the opening below to get a real feel for the characters, voice, and pacing before choosing an edition.
Big Bad Beast
by Grace Goodwin
Chapter 2
Vivian Davis
I sat in the back of the private ambulance Snook provided and dealt out the cards for yet another round of solitaire. As usual, he’d offered to let me sit next to him and watch the fights. I declined. Again. Politely. I sat in the rig. I waited. I patched up the fighters who needed stitches or fluids. Sometimes antibiotics. On the rare occasion, we would actually take them to a nearby hospital, where I would describe picking up the wounded man after a bar brawl or street fight.
In this neighborhood the doctors and nurses didn’t even bat an eye. No one asked questions because no one wanted to know. Gunshot wounds were much more common in the emergency room on a Friday night. Someone who had a concussion, a few lacerations, or an internal bleed from a fistfight was generally low priority.
Judging by the screaming roar of the crowd coming from inside, tonight was going to be a hospital night.
With a sigh, I laid out my cards on top of the empty stretcher. I could play the game on my phone app, but I liked the tactile feeling of shuffling the deck, placing the cards. Counting them in my hands. Touching the phone screen lacked a certain satisfaction. I liked to feel things. Real things. Which meant I was old, or old-school. Maybe both.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.” Snook’s driver, Wayne, cursed as he hopped up into the driver’s seat. He’d gone inside to take a look around. He liked to assess the fighters, guess what kind of injuries we’d be dealing with.
“That bad?”
“That bad. They’re like animals tonight. Screaming for blood.” He and I both knew he wasn’t talking about the fighters.
“Maybe it’s just too much tequila.” I tried to laugh, but his warning made me anxious. There was something different about tonight, something that had me on edge. Nervous. I had no logical reason, just gut instinct. But when I felt like this, I paid attention.
Wayne gave a non-committal grunt from the driver’s seat of the ambulance.
I was working tonight because Snook paid well, in cash. I needed the money to pay for my girls’ school. Besides, I’d done worse jobs for far less money. I had no intention of looking a gift horse in the mouth.
“Viv, it’s bad tonight. You stay the hell out of there.” Wayne’s intense stare was focused on the large metal door that divided the two large sections of the old parking garage. Fights on one side, spectator parking and this ambulance on the other.
“No problem. I don’t want to see it.” I counted three cards and flipped the small collection face up. Damn. Nothing to play. “It’s bad enough cleaning up the mess afterward.”
Wayne lit a cigarette. He knew I hated the smoke, but we had all the doors open and he exhaled out the driver’s side window, away from where I sat in the back.
“One of these days, one of them boys is going to end up dead.”
“No.”
“It’s inevitable. You know that.”
“Not while I’m here.” But I knew he was right. The fights seemed to be growing more and more violent, as did the crowd Snook’s club seemed to attract. “I don’t do corpses.”
“We’ll see. Tonight may be our lucky night.”
“Shut-up, Wayne.” I’d been thinking the exact same thing the last few weeks. What would I do when the first dead body was carried out that door?
My paramedic’s uniform pants were suddenly too tight, my belt digging into my stomach until I fought down vomit. The button-up shirt’s starched collar circled my neck like a noose. I wouldn’t do dead. No matter how much Snook offered to pay me. Stitching up a cut was one thing. Carting corpses was completely different. No. Hell no.
I gathered up the cards and tossed them aside, no longer interested in the game.
Wayne took a deep drag on his cigarette, watching me the entire time with those wise, old eyes.
I’d been born in this shithole. I’d survived this long. I knew everyone and everyone knew me. If Snook really did start allowing the boys to fight to the death—
The central door to the parking garage slammed open, the heavy metal banging on the concrete wall. A bare-chested giant walked toward me. He had to be close to seven feet tall. Maybe taller. His lips were full, jaw cut like a marble statue. And his eyes. Whoa, his eyes. They were so pale a blue they looked like they were glowing at me out of the shadows.
He bled from multiple cuts on his body—his magnificent, muscular, holy-mother-of-God body. Normally I could look and dismiss a man’s physique. Not right now. So much for professional detachment.
God! I could not stop staring. More like drooling.
