Free Wake for Me (Life or Death Series) by Isobel Irons Page A

but who knew of a party in the Garment District. After Brady had pissed off the actress, he’d followed a different girl and her friends to this random bar in SOHO with a very puzzling Bluegrass meets Irish pub theme.
    And thus, the New York City Saturday night mating ritual began anew.
    At midnight, Sam found himself parked at the far end of the bar, nursing a steady supply of domestic beers handed to him by the sympathetic—and kind of cute—bartender, as Brady paraded a series of likely bedtime playmates in front of him, one after the other. Each time, Sam found a reason to pass. And every twenty minutes or so, the bartender would wink and give him a countdown of how many hours she had left on her shift.
    “This is my colleague, Sam.” Brady headed toward him again, herding a short—very short—blonde with a hairdo that provided another three or four inches. With the glowing spray tan she was rocking, Sam thought she looked like the paler twin of that girl from Jersey Shore: Skanky, or whatever her name was.
    “Oh, is he a doctor, too?”
    Sam bit down on a tortured sigh. If he was being honest with himself, the bartender’s implied offer was getting more and more attractive with every vapid party girl Brady brought over. If for no other reason, it would give him a solid excuse to leave—but only to get laid, which apparently in Brady’s mind, was the only way Sam was walking out of this bar alive.
    “This guy,” Brady said loudly, draping his arm around the latest candidate, “This guy is the reason I made it through med school. Dude had the highest GPA in our class. Go ahead. Ask him to calculate your blood alcohol level. He can do that shit in his head. Go ahead, it’s awesome.”
    Sam smiled obediently, and asked the girl how much she weighed. As usual, the girl looked startled and mildly offended by the question. Then she blurted out a number that was more than likely about 15 pounds off. Then, Sam asked her what she’d been drinking, and how much.
    “Um, I don’t know…like, three Cosmopolitans?”
    Closing his eyes, Sam ran through the Widmark formula—ounces of alcohol ingested times 5.14, divided by the girl’s weight times 0.66, minus 0.015 times how many hours it had been since the girl had started drinking—to calculate the girl’s BAC, or blood alcohol content.
    When he told her the number, the busty blonde looked impressed. But not ‘I want to sleep with you’ impressed. More like, ‘I want you to take the SATs for me’ impressed.
    For some reason, though, this wildly geektastic party trick had been a huge hit during their med school years, and it remained one of Brady’s favorite segues into buying said girl another drink.
    “Your level is obviously too low,” he said, as he ushered his latest victim to the bar. “We need to remedy that, STAT.”
    Now that he thought about it, Sam heard that term most often outside of the hospital setting; usually either on TV or inside a bar. It was one of those phrases that attracted the wrong kind of attention, from all the wrong kinds of people.
    “So,” he turned back to Johanna the bartender, as Brady left the blonde in Sam’s line of sight—in case he changed his mind, or got drunk enough to settle, more likely—and waded out in search of a bigger fish. “You were saying that you’re thinking of going to law school? That’s really cool. What kind of law would you practice?”
    “I don’t know,” she said thoughtfully, as she polished a glass.“Maybe family law. Or mediation. I like the thought of bringing people together, you know? Instead of putting people away or tearing them apart.”
    Johanna’s best quality so far was that she was nothing like Viola. She had bright red hair and way too much makeup, but seemed genuine in all the ways that really counted. It wasn’t enough, though. In the back of his mind, the thought of his Sleeping Beauty lurked like a ghost.
    “I kind of know what you mean,” Sam said. That was one