Two hours later, Harley finished making the bed with fresh linens, then closed the room off and went back to her desk to finish the necessary paperwork. Sitting at her desk, she thought about the handsome stranger who had given her his business card. She looked it over after she finished compiling the file on Luis Jimenez.

King
Exotic Animals

The card listed a cellphone number but no last name. A mystery man... Well, she loved a good mystery. She’d always been an animal lover and there was something mysterious about this guy that she found really appealing.

The smile on his face did nothing to cover up the bad boy in his eyes. The thought made her grin. And he was confident. She liked that. Somehow, she knew he wasn’t an incurable flirt, and that he’d felt the same pull she did.

It had been a long time since anything but her career had held her interest for very long. It took a certain kind of guy to get her attention. The man had secrets, she could practically smell them; probably because she had a few of her own. Deep calls to deep, dark calls to dark, and secrets call to secrets.

She knew all too well how one person’s darkness could call to another. She also knew that, no matter how long she walked the straight and narrow, it would never change her past and who she had become because of it. A nurse’s uniform would never undo what years of the biker life had done to her.

If she could go back and change her past, she wouldn’t. She was a better person because of it and certainly more intuitive. No amount of college education could ever teach her what the streets had.

Her cell phone rang so she slipped the card into her pocket and accepted the call. It was Stacy, one of her coworkers. Harley had to laugh because when she looked up, Stacy was walking toward her, grinning as she talked into her phone even though Harley could hear her just fine in person.

“Let’s get coffee, girl. I’m fucking beat.”

Harley ended the call and playfully rolled her eyes as Stacy slid her phone into her pocket. Harley just shook her head, looking at her friend who never failed to make her laugh with her off the wall antics. “Why would you bother calling when you’re ten feet away from me?”

“Come on, I’ve got some serious tea to spill.”

“Well, let me get my popcorn because we both know how entertaining you can be. I’m just about finished here anyway, so just give me a minute to pack up.”

“Well, if you consider a patient mysteriously dying entertainment, then you should be giddy with joy right about now.”

“No…I don’t consider a dead body to be entertaining, Stacy.”

“You’ve always got your nose buried in a murder mystery,” Stacy complained as they rode down in the elevator together. “I mean, this whole obsession you have with criminals and death and gore is beyond me. You’ve really got to get out more. Anyway, let’s get through the cafeteria line before we start talking. You know how nosey these hospital bitches are.”

Once inside the cafeteria, they each selected a light breakfast and coffee, then pushed their trays through the line and found a secluded spot where they could talk. The morning light streamed through the vertical blinds at the floor-to-ceiling windows, reminding Harley of what a long, strange night it had been. 

“Okay, you’ve got me curious,” Harley quipped, grimacing as she took a long draw from her coffee cup. “What’s up?”

Stacy sipped the weak hospital brew in a blatant effort to prolong her pleasure at having a captive audience. “Well, it’s just that the guy with the broken nose…died.” She didn’t give Harley a chance to say anything before she continued. “Who dies of a broken nose, Harley? I mean, seriously. The doctors think the bone in his nose somehow moved up and punctured his brain. What’s that old saying, the truth is stranger than fiction? I mean, that right there is some unbelievable shit. Poor guy comes in with a broken nose and leaves in a body bag. Go figure.”

“That’s probably what happened then. It’s possible for the bone to make its way up into the brain.”

“Well, I don’t know but it seems to me like there would need to be some force applied for it to puncture the brain.”

“The force happened when he was hit. If it was done with an uppercut, it’s plausible. Just take it for what it is, it was his time to go. Thank God, he didn’t die on the operating table or it would be a hospital scandal and we don’t need that. Trust me, you don’t want to be the doc whose patient clocks out during a nose job.”

Stacy didn’t notice her friend slipping her hand into her scrub pocket. Harley ran her finger over the embossed letters that spelled the name of the man who had made her night a hell of a lot more interesting. Yes King, you’ve got secrets and I have every intention of discovering what they are.

Her gut was telling her there was more to this story than a broken nose and she always listened to her gut. It never steered her wrong.