"A neurosurgeon!" the woman marveled with a look of disbelief. "No kidding!"

"No kidding," Jazz echoed with a tone that did not invite any more conversation. She stuck her sweaty bodysuit in her gym bag, then closed and locked her locker. Although she did not look at the woman who'd spoken to her, she sensed that the woman was watching her. Jazz didn't care if the woman believed her or not. It didn't matter.

Without the exchange of another word, Jazz struck off through the locker room and out into the main corridor. After she pushed the down button of the elevator, she stuck her hand into the overcoat's right pocket and fondled her favorite possession, a subcompact nine-millimeter Glock. Its molded composite handgrip gave her a reassuring feeling of power, while awakening recurrent fantasies of being accosted by lowlifes like Mr. Ivy League in the parking garage. It would all happen so fast that the guy's head would spin. One minute he'd be making some inane comment, the next he'd be looking down the barrel of the gun's suppressor. Jazz had made the effort to outfit the gun with a silencer because another ongoing fantasy was to take out one of her nursing supervisors.

Jazz sighed. For her whole life, she'd been saddled with the albatross of incompetent authority personnel. It had started in high school. She could remember as if it were yesterday the time she'd been called into the guidance counselor's office. The dork had said he was mystified because she'd tested off the charts for intelligence but was doing so poorly. What was the cause?

"Duhhh!" Jazz voiced out loud as she recalled the incident. The guy was so slow mentally that he couldn't comprehend that nine-tenths of all the teachers were from the same shallow end of the gene pool that he was from. It was a waste of time going to high school. He'd warned her that she wouldn't get to go to college if she kept doing what she was doing. Well, she didn't care. She knew that the only real way out of the cesspool of her life was the military.

The trouble was that the military wasn't a whole lot better. It was okay at first, because she had a lot of ground to make up, getting into shape and all. Aptitude tests had supposedly pointed her in the direction of becoming a hospital corpsman, which was a joke, since she always lied on those stupid tests. But she played along; becoming a corpsman sounded fine, especially the idea of being on her own. Eventually, she opted for being an independent duty corpsman with the marines. But when she eventually got assigned, things started to go downhill. Some of the officers she had to deal with were half-wits, especially over in Kuwait, when her squadron infiltrated the Kuwait salient in February 1991. She had gotten a kick out of shooting Iraqis until her commanding officer took her rifle away as if she was not supposed to have any fun. He told her to restrict her activities to the health needs of the real men. It had been embarrassing.

Things came to a head in San Diego almost a year later. The same cretin of an officer came into a bar where she and some of the regular grunts were tossing back a few beers. He got sloshed and grabbed a feel when Jazz wasn't looking. As if that wasn't bad enough, he called her "a freaking dyke" when she spurned an offer to drive out to the tip of Point Loma with him to get laid. That had been the last straw, and Jazz had shot him in the leg with her sidearm. She hadn't been aiming for the leg, but he still got the appropriate message. Of course, that had been the end of her military career, but by then she didn't care. She'd had enough.

Going from the military into the community college turned out to be like going from the frying pan into the fire. But Jazz had persevered. She'd thought that getting her RN would be her ticket, because nurses were so much in demand, and she could call the shots. Unfortunately, the eventual reality was no different from her experience in the military when it came to supervisors, forcing her to move from job to job with the vain hope that things would be better at different institutions. But they never were. Now, it didn't matter.

When the elevator stopped on the upper parking level, Jazz got off, pushed out of the glassed elevator lobby, and walked over to her second-favorite possession, a brand-spanking-new, shiny, black-as-onyx H2 Hummer. She ran her fingers appreciatively along the vehicle's side, catching a view of her reflection in the windows. Except for the windshield, all the glass was tinted to the extent that it appeared to be black mirrors. Before she opened the door, she stepped back and took in the vehicle's boxy outline and its squat, threatening stance, both of which made it look like a weapon system ready to do battle on the streets of New York City.

Jazz climbed in, tossed her gymbag onto the passenger seat, and took her Blackberry out of her coat but left it in her lap. She started the engine. The low growl issuing from the tailpipes added to the car's allure. She couldn't help but smile. Getting into the car gave her a thrill like a line of coke, only better. It also reminded her how rewarding the day had been when Mr. Bob had approached her. She still didn't know his full name, which was stupid. He'd told her it was a matter of security, which she questioned at the time, but now she felt it didn't matter. At that first meeting, she'd seen him come at her out of the corner of her eye and thought it was just going to be another typical male come-on, but it wasn't. He got her attention immediately by calling her "Doc JR," which was the nickname the jarheads in her first marine squadron had given her. She'd not heard the name for several years, so she was surprised and guessed that Mr. Bob had been a marine himself. He had been waiting for her to come out of the hospital in New Jersey, where she was working on the evening three-to-eleven shift. He said he had a business proposition for her and asked if she was interested in earning extra money-a lot of extra money.

Sensing that her ship had finally come in, Jazz accepted his invitation to join him in his H2 Hummer, which was a spitting image of her own. Before she got in the vehicle, she made sure that there wasn't anybody else inside. She also made sure that she had her hand around the Glock nestled in her pocket. Back then, the pistol didn't have the silencer, so it was easy to draw. If Mr. Bob did any- thing untoward, she would have shot him where she'd meant to shoot the marine officer. She didn't believe in threatening. If the gun came out, it would be used.

But she hadn't needed to be worried. Mr. Bob was all business. They ended up at a small, smoky bar in downtown Newark, where Mr. Bob commiserated with her about her experience in the military and even apologized about her treatment and unwarranted discharge. He said that it was precisely because of her exemplary service that she was being recruited for an important mission, for which she would be compensated accordingly. Mr. Bob went on to say that they-Jazz had yet to know who "they" were-recognized her unique qualifications to provide the service they required. He then had asked if she was interested.

Jazz laughed as she put her Hummer in reverse and backed out of the parking slot. When she thought back, it was crazy for him to be asking if she was interested before she knew exactly what she would be doing, and she told him so at the time. From then on, he stopped beating around the bush. He told her they needed people like Jazz to help eliminate doctor incompetence, which he said was rampant although hard to ferret out because of a conspiracy of silence on the part of the medical profession. That was when Jazz was convinced that she was well suited to help. She was an expert on recognizing incompetence, since there had been a wellspring of it in every institution she'd been associated with. Mr. Bob said that her job would be to communicate to him by e-mail all episodes of adverse outcomes, particularly related to anesthesia, obstetrics, and neurosurgery, but he emphasized that they weren't choosy. They wanted everything she found. For her efforts, she would be paid two hundred dollars per case, with an added bonus of a thousand dollars for each that resulted in a malpractice suit and an extra five hundred if the judgment was for the plaintiff.