Blood Debt (27 page)

Awareness narrowed to the life she held and the life she searched for, Vicki heard Henry's voice as part of the clinic's ambient noise, a noise all but drowned out by the cry of the Hunt ringing within her head. “Last night,” she said with quiet menace, “there was a man being held in the hidden room. Where is he now?”

Confusion battled fear. “What hidden room?”

“The room at the back of the building.”

“You mean the old laundry? There was no one in there.”

The menace grew. “He was there.”

Caught between what she knew to be true and the truth she saw in the silver eyes, the nurse whimpered low in her throat.

“He was there!” Vicki repeated. The Hunger rose. Her fingers closed around a white-clad shoulder and soft flesh compacted under her grip. “Where is he now?”

“I don't know.” Tears trickled down cheeks blanched of color, and the words barely made it past trembling lips.

“Tell me!”

“I don't . . .” A strangled sob broke the protest in half. “. . . want to die.”

The staccato pounding of the nurse's heart, the panicked racing of her blood, made it difficult to think. The Hunger, barely held in check, urged Vicki to take the fear and make it hers. To rend. To tear. To feed. She took a half step forward, head slightly back, nostrils flared to drink in the warm, meaty scent of life seasoned with terror. After the exhilarating experience in the warehouse, it would be so easy to let go.

“
Do what you have to do quickly
 . . .”

Yes.

“Those of our kind who learn to control the Hunger, have eternity before them. Those the Hunger controls are quickly hunted down and put to death.”

Henry's words again, but a deeper memory, an older lesson.

Nothing controls me.

If “Victory” Nelson lived by any maxim, that was it.

She released the nurse so quickly the woman swayed and would have fallen had she not taken another, less threatening hold. “You have not seen us and you will not see us while we are here.”

“I will not see you,” the nurse repeated almost prayerfully. “I will not see you.” This time when Vicki let her go, she staggered sideways and collapsed into a chair. A heartbeat later, she was alone in the room, certain she'd always been alone, staring at the brown glass bottle in her hand and wondering if it was possible to dream, to nightmare, while awake.

“I almost killed her.” The Hunger raged against its restraints and Vicki determinedly ignored the almost painful feeling that she'd left something important unfinished.

“I know.”

“Then why didn't you try to stop me?”

“I didn't need to, did I?” Henry glanced over her shoulder as she flipped through the communication book she'd taken from the nurse's station. They were standing in the hall next to the operating room; safely far enough away from everyone else in the building. “I had to trust what I'd taught you, or there wasn't much point in teaching it.”

She twisted around far enough to see his face, “You ought to lay off the reruns of
Kung Fu
, Henry. You're sounding like a pompous ass—and I'm telling you this for your own good because we're friends.” Before he could respond, before he'd figured out
what
to respond, she added, “Maybe you should've trusted your teaching all along.”

“All along?”

Her lip curled. “All along—from the moment I arrived in Vancouver.”

“If you remember, I taught you we couldn't share a territory.”

“Which just proves what you know,” she announced triumphantly and turned her attention back to the communication book. “Ah. Here it is.” She tapped an entry with one finger. “5:09 A.M., two cops show up, so does a Dr. Mui—apparently one of her patients was dying—she shows the cops around, they leave. They must've moved him before the cops arrived. Son of a bitch.”

“I don't see how . . .”

“Does it matter? Come on.” She tossed the book into the operating room—let them wonder—and started down the hall. “I doubt there's a forwarding address, but they might've left something in that room we can use.”

Nothing, except the lingering scent of three men and a woman.

Vicki stood by the empty bed, forcing herself to recognize other lives but Mike Celluci's. “Dr. Mui.”

Henry frowned, recognizing Death beneath the recent patina of life. “What about her?”

“She's in on it. This . . .” Vicki waved a hand in the air, scooping it toward her nose. “This is the woman who gave Celluci that shot.”

“Are you sure?”

“Trust me. I make it a point to remember the other women he smells like.”

I suspect I owe the detective an apology
, Henry mused as he stepped back out of Vicki's way.
He was definitely better acquainted with territorial imperatives than I assumed.
“Now where?”

“Dr. Mui's office.”

“. . . and he's safe at second! Can you believe that speed. From anyone else in this game that would've been a single!”

His attention on the television in the other room, Sullivan crumpled the empty saline bag and shoved the IV stand aside. It hung, suspended for an instant at forty-five degrees and then crashed to the floor, the noise all but drowning out the enthusiasm of the sportscaster.

Kicking the stainless steel pieces out of his way, Sullivan stomped out of the room and cranked up the volume until the sound began to distort.

“What are you looking so happy about,” he snarled as he returned to the bed. “You an Oakland fan?”

“Not likely.” Unaware that he'd been looking anything but pained—the needle had been roughly yanked from the back of his hand and the bandage applied with bruising pressure—Celluci winced as the crowd at the Kingdome responded to a double play and the television speakers squealed.

“Then what?” Sullivan's eyes narrowed as a second of silence led into a commercial, the sales pitch almost deafening in comparison. Grumbling under his breath, he went back to the TV and turned the volume down. “You thought someone'd notice that, didn't you? Maybe complain about the noise.” Callused fingers closed on the end of Celluci's nose and twisted. Cartilage cracked. “Don't ever think I'm stupid.”

Blinking away involuntary tears, Celluci snorted, “Hadn't occurred to me.” If truth be told, nothing much had occurred to him for most of the evening. It might've been the blood loss, it might've been the residual effect of the sedatives but coherent thought took more effort than he seemed capable of.

“So why're you smilin', shit for brains?”

Except that he had to make the effort and he only had one source of information. If nothing else, he needed to find out more about his jailer. Celluci jerked his head toward the bowl of broth on the bedside table. “The doctor says you've got to feed me.”

Deceptively gentle eyes narrowed. “Yeah, so?”

“You're either going to have to turn up the TV and risk attracting attention, or miss the game. Either way, I win.”

“Maybe I just won't feed you.”

“And make the doctor angry?”

That was clearly not going to happen. The bowl all but dwarfed in the curve of a huge hand, Sullivan grinned unpleasantly. “Open your mouth or I'll open it for you.”

Confronted with violent death day after day, police officers coped by either ignoring the inevitability of their own death or by thinking about it so constantly it lost its mystery and became a part of life, like breathing. Choking on broth, Celluci realized he'd never considered drowning in consomme as a serious possibility.

He was still coughing and gasping for breath when Sullivan left the room, snarling, “You can piss later,” as he slammed the door.

Struggling to keep from vomiting—if he didn't choke on it and die, he'd have to lie in it, and the second option thrilled him as little as the first—he gradually regained control of his body. Panting, each breath a little deeper than the last, he swallowed hard to discourage one last spasm of gagging.

When it was all over, he lay limp and exhausted, feeling like he'd just gone ten rounds with Mike Tyson. But he had a better idea of Sullivan's temperament.

And he had a plan.

Of sorts.

“Find anything?”

“Vicki, I'm a writer. I turn on my computer, I play a few games of solitaire, I answer my E-mail, and I write. Anything more complicated, I don't worry about.” Frowning at the screen, Henry tapped his nails gently against the edge of the keyboard. “This is more complicated.”

Vicki glanced up from an aggressive search of the filing cabinet and peered across the room at the monitor. “Looks like point and click to me,” she growled.

“The whole thing's encrypted. I can't access anything without Dr. Mui's password.”

“I don't see why the paranoid bitch can't keep a rolodex like everyone else,” Vicki snarled, slamming shut one drawer and opening another. All she wanted were a couple of addresses, preferably one marked
this is where we're keeping Michael Celluci
, but failing that she'd settle for
this is where the people in charge live and you can rip the location of Michael Celluci out of them
.

With Vicki's anger beating against him in heated waves, Henry decided it would be safest not to respond—besides, she had a point, a rolodex would've been much simpler.
I can't believe we're doing this.
But it wasn't breaking into Dr. Mui's office that he was having difficulty with.

As much as he shared Vicki's concern over the detective's safety, he found himself continually distracted by the circumstances. They were working together. Not, certainly, as they had before the change, but cooperating in close contact nevertheless. It was such an amazing experience that he desperately wanted to tell someone about it. Unfortunately, only two people could fully appreciate the ramifications—Vicki wasn't interested, and there wasn't much satisfaction in talking to himself.

“There's nothing in this thing but patients' records. You getting anywhere?”

He dragged his attention back to the task at hand. “Dr. Mui has a modem—could she get into those other systems from here?”

“Back in Toronto, I could make six phone calls and get half a dozen people who could do it in their sleep. So the short answer is yes, but that doesn't help us . . . Ha!” Straightening, Vicki lifted a file folder out of the bottom drawer. “At least the government's still supporting the pulp and paper industry. According to the BC Department of Motor Vehicles, the good doctor just bought a new car. Must be nice.” Her voice trailed off as she flipped through the legal documents. A few moments later, she shook her head and glanced up at Henry. “Did you know you two are neighbors?”

She jerked toward him as he snatched the file from her hands but kept herself from snatching it back.

“No, she's in the other tower, phase two. It just went on the market this spring, and it's pricey.” Although it twisted muscles into knots, he managed to stop himself from grabbing Vicki's arm as she started toward the door. This wasn't the time to test the limits of their new boundaries. “Where are you going?”

“We know where Dr. Mui is. Dr. Mui knows where Celluci is.” There were now three points of light in the office, the monitor and Vicki's eyes. “He might even be in that condo. We might've spent the day a hundred feet from him.”

“I doubt it. The selling point for these units is the security system. They've got
full
video coverage. It would be far too dangerous for her to take him there.”

Her fingers dimpled the back of the chair. Metal creaked. “She's still going to know where he is!”

“She's probably with him.” He didn't need to say why. Glancing back down at the paperwork, Henry frowned. “She bought the unit from Swanson Realty.”

“Swanson? His name just keeps coming up,” Vicki snarled. “On that cable show, regarding transplants, donated computers to street clinics, here . . .”

They got the idea at the same time, but Vicki made it to the keyboard first.

His name did, indeed, keep coming up, and it got them into Dr. Mui's system.

“What are you looking for?”

“Swanson's home address.” It came out sounding like a threat. “He's not going to be at the scene; he's no doctor, there's no need. The puppet master stays in the background pulling the strings.” The need to rescue Celluci fought with curiosity as she raced deeper into the files; this would be her only chance to gather information, and she couldn't just walk away from it.

Dr. Mui had extensive E-mail archives, neatly categorized and most of them going to financial institutions.

“Swiss bank accounts,” Henry hazarded.

“Among other things not quite so old-fashioned. The doctor appears to be sending a great deal of money into off-shore tax shelters.”

“Doctors make a great deal of money.”

“Yeah, well this is considerably more than you can explain by extra-billing even in BC—and there's still the car and the condo. I'd say we can safely assume Swanson's bought her and that she didn't go cheap. He must be charging a fucking fortune for those kidneys in order to make a profit on it.”

“What price life?” Henry asked her quietly.

Vicki turned and met his gaze. After a heartbeat, after the slow, languorous beat of an immortal heart within a body that would never see the day again, she nodded. “Good point.”

For a moment, Henry thought they might be able to touch, without blood, without passion, in friendship. The moment passed, but the feeling lingered. “Let's not forget that Swanson can reinvest the money he offers to his donors.”

“Another good point.” Lips pressed into a thin, white line, Vicki shut down the system. “Now we know where he is, let's go. . . .”