Critical Condition (23 page)

Which way? All she’d accomplish by going to the auditorium would be to get herself killed, and maybe the others as well if Harris was angry at her deception. Who was she kidding; he was livid. A furious sociopath armed with machine guns in a crowd of people? Recipe for disaster.

And what if Harris made good on his threat to burn the hospital down? The thought brought Gina up short. She pressed one palm against the wall. It felt cold to the touch. Helped clear her muddled thoughts. A cigarette would have done the job better.

No, the best thing she could do was try to save LaRose and Ken. They could escape through the tunnels to the research tower, find a place to hide, maybe figure out a way to find Jerry.

She turned toward the morgue, where the man on the radio had said he was holding LaRose and Ken. It felt good to have a plan, however vague it might be. She slowly moved a few steps, pressing her body against the wall so she wouldn’t get disoriented and could count the intersections. She couldn’t risk using the light.

One thing at a time. She had no clue what Harris was planning or how to stop him; her fiasco pretending to be Lydia had proved that.
Stick to what you’re good at,
she decided.
Running and hiding.

 

 

ONCE THEY HAD THE GUARD TIED UP AND LOCKED inside the pantry, Amanda had waited with Jerry while Lucas used his portable otoscope as illumination while he searched for another light source. The high-intensity beam danced around the kitchen, accompanied by the muffled sounds of cabinets and drawers opening and closing.

Jerry sat on the floor, hugging his knees to his chest, body sagged forward. He looked haggard, eyes hollowed out, but his gaze never wavered, drilling through the wall to the auditorium. After hearing Gina’s attempt to impersonate Lydia and Tillman’s betrayal of her, he was convinced she was in there with the others.

“Gina,” he said when Amanda joined him, mirroring his posture—it was the best way to stay warm on the cold linoleum. “All my fault.”

“No, Jerry. You can’t think like that.”

The more exhausted he was, the more muddled his thoughts and speech became. “Yes. My fault. Shooter was after me. And now.” Finally his gaze dropped. Defeated. He slid the Beretta from his pocket. “Useless. Worse than useless.”

Amanda gripped his arm. “Never. Gina would have died then if it weren’t for you. Think of all the lives you’ve saved.”

He dropped the gun to the floor. Amanda jumped in alarm at the clatter. She smacked her hand down over the gun and returned it to Jerry’s hand, folding it in his palm. “You keep this.”

“Not a cop.” He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his free hand. “Not anymore.” Jerry’s voice was ragged, torn with misery. “Head hurts. Everything hurts.”

“Hang on, Jerry. We’ll get Gina back, just you hang on, okay?” Tears closed in on Amanda, stinging her eyes. If Jerry, the strongest man she knew, couldn’t handle this, how the hell was she going to?

She knew he’d changed—a bullet rattling around your frontal cortex would do that; he’d never be the same again—but he’d showed such strength the last few weeks, such passion for life, as if sheer determination could help him recover . . . “Don’t give up on me, not now.”

Her words were so low she barely heard them herself—less than a whisper, a breath of prayer.

Jerry heard her, though, raising his head from where he’d laid it on his knees and turning to look at her. “I’ll try.”

What more could she ask of any of them?

“Any advice?” she asked, nodding at the pantry door behind which the guard waited. “On how to get him talking?”

Jerry rested his chin on his knees, thinking. “Stay off balance.”

Off balance? Yeah, that shouldn’t be hard—just look at her. Raggedy Ann in a ball gown; the man would laugh so hard, he’d never be able to tell them anything. Then Amanda remembered the look on their prisoner’s face when she’d tackled him and held him at knifepoint—startled, stunned, but more than surprised, he’d been scared. Of her. Of what she’d done. Of what she was capable of.

She nodded. “Good advice. I can do that.”

“Got it,” Lucas called out from the corner. He returned to them and squatted down. “Cans of fuel for chafing dishes.” He pulled the top off one of the cans, used an electric match to light it, and a blue flame crinkled across the surface of the gel.

“Perfect.” Amanda handed her gun to Jerry. No sense risking the prisoner taking it. She stood, holding her fillet knife in one hand. “Lucas, you go in, remove the tape from his mouth, and set the Sterno down on the floor. Then I’ll make my entrance.”

“Are you sure about this?” Lucas asked. “Maybe I should—”

The thought of gentle Lucas intimidating anyone made Amanda smile. She couldn’t help herself. The man literally wouldn’t hurt a fly—he’d sit and freeze in the cold, leaving a window open until a stray fly or moth made its escape.

“No,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”

The blue glow from the Sterno edged his scowl, turning it murderous. Without a word, Lucas wrenched open the door to the pantry and stalked inside. Amanda watched from the doorway. He set the light down near the door, the shadows dancing around the large room, reflecting from the rows of stainless steel shelves. Then he took two steps over to where the man sat, bound with tape to one of the vertical shelf supports.

Lucas stood there for a long moment, staring down at the man, whose eyes grew wide. Lucas abruptly scissored a hand down, ripping off the tape around the man’s mouth. The man made a small sound of pain.

“Quiet!” Lucas commanded in a low and deadly voice that made the hairs on the back of Amanda’s neck rise in alarm. She’d never seen him like this. “You will answer her questions. If not—” His pause hung in the air like a guillotine. “I can’t be held responsible for what she does.”

He pivoted on his heel and walked away, giving Amanda a wink as he passed. It took everything she had to swallow her laughter—which played in her favor since the effort twisted her face into a grimace that made the man on the floor flinch. She stood above him, light at her side, just close enough that he could easily read her expression. And see the blue flames reflected in the oh-so-shiny-and-sharp blade of her fillet knife.

“We need to talk,” she said in a low, conversational tone. “I’ll go first.”

He nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed again and again.

“You might have figured it out already,” she began, amping up her Lowcountry accent, “but I’m not from around these parts. See, I come from a little town on the coast of South Carolina. And you know how my family makes their living?”

He shook his head, his eyes never leaving her knife hand. She began to idly twirl the knife, without looking, letting its weight and balance pirouette it between her fingers. Her father had taught her the trick.

“My family lives off the water. I was using a knife, shucking oysters faster than a blink when I was four. And fish?”

Amanda paused the knife, the firelight streaming off its blade like water. With a quick flick of her wrist, she sliced the guard’s collar button off. He gagged, staring at it as it bounced down his body and fell to the floor.

“I can take a fish, gut it, and with just a—” She flashed the knife, letting its motion speak for her. “Just that fast, I could have its backbone out, the whole thing, just fall into my hands. If you know where to cut, that is.” She lowered the knife so that it touched the back of his neck. “And I do.”

His muscles bunched as he fought not to move against the scalpel-sharp blade. “We were just hired to do a job, that’s all,” he pleaded. “No one was meant to get hurt.”

“Who hired you?”

“Harris. He hired four of us, said we just had to watch over some folks while his men made the score. Ten grand each for a few hours of work—easy money. But he’s working for someone else, someone I’ve never met.”

“What are they looking for?”

“Never said. I figured it was drugs, ripping off the pharmacy here. But then they started talking about finding this Lydia person, and things started getting freaky-deaky, but what could we do? Accomplice to a felony is still a felony.” His words sped up, jumping into a self-pitying whine.

“How many are there?”

“The four of us, plus Harris and his guys: some South African dude who is serious trouble, you do not want to cross him; a guy named Marcus who seems in charge of all the tech stuff, and two more, I didn’t get their names.”

“Where are they?”

“Me and my guys, we were guarding the hostages with the South African, rotating between inside the auditorium, watching the lobby, and patrolling.”

“How many hostages, where are they in the auditorium?” She crouched down to his level, not needing the knife any longer—the guard was eager to please her now.

“There’s about a hundred hostages,” he said. “They’re on the stage and in front of it. We’re in the back by the doors. Two inside the auditorium, one outside the doors, one watching the lobby.”

“And you on patrol?”

“Yeah. Look, you gotta put in a good word for me. Tell them I helped you, get me a deal.”

“No problem.” What did he think this was? An episode of
Law & Order
? Couldn’t he see she was making it up as she went?

Of course, Lydia always said that was the secret to emergency medicine. Improvisation.

Amanda stood, accidentally kicking the can of Sterno. It skidded past the man’s feet and landed at the base of the wall between them and the auditorium. She walked over to retrieve it. There were no shelves here; the wall was bare. Instead, two gray plastic junction boxes jutted out from the wall.

That wall was the shared wall with the auditorium’s stage. And those wires—they weren’t electrical, too thick for phone lines . . .

She rushed past the man, eager to ask Lucas about her discovery.

“Hey, you’re going to help me, right?” he pleaded, sounding like a dog left out in the cold without his dinner.

“No worries,” she said. “I’ve got a plan to help everyone.”

 

 

LYDIA’S FIRST THOUGHT WAS: HAD TREY BEEN HURT? In that split second, terror that he might be hurt and need her combined with rage that anyone would harm him, and she almost reacted without worrying about consequences, without thinking, and with violence.

Before she met Trey, that was exactly what she would have done. She even knew the moves she’d need to take down the man with the gun: a quick pivot, use her cast as a club to the man’s head or face, followed by a lightning strike to his throat. She could do it. She would have done it, except the worry that Trey was at the mercy of someone else paralyzed her.

“Is Trey okay?” Somehow she managed to grit out the words between jaws clamped tight with anger and fear. He had to be okay; he was a big man, she would have heard something if he had fallen.

“He is for now,” a voice from inside the carport called out.

“What do you want?” Lydia asked.

The man behind her hadn’t moved or spoken. His gun gouged her skin but she didn’t protest—barely noticed it, her senses too focused on what was going on in the carport behind the light that blinded her.

“You have something of mine. It’s time to collect.”

AS SHE CREPT THROUGH THE DARK TUNNELS, Gina was glad for her layers of clothing. Despite the turtleneck, cardigan, and lab coat, she was shivering, and the air was growing colder by the moment.

Other than the moans of overhead pipes cooling, she saw and heard nothing. Not to say that she still didn’t jerk to a stop to listen every few steps. Her pulse was pounding so fast, it sounded like running footsteps trying to catch up with the rest of her body. But there was never anyone there.

She’d turned the radio off—couldn’t risk exposing her position—and held the Maglite in her hand pressed against the wall, her finger on the switch, ready to turn it back on if she needed it. The scalpel was in her other fist, handle hidden by her sleeve.

One last intersection to cross. The areas of open space unnerved Gina the most—dark bottomless chasms. Every direction harbored the threat of someone waiting to pounce.

She stood with her back to the cold concrete wall, trying to muster the courage for that first step into the black void. Her mouth was so dry her tongue grated against her teeth like sandpaper. And she couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching her, toying with her, like Jodie Foster in
Silence of the Lambs
. After all, Harris could have night-vision goggles. Maybe that was why they’d turned the power off? The question kept niggling at her. Even with night vision, it couldn’t make their hunt for Lydia any easier, although the darkness did put everyone else at a disadvantage.

But still . . . all those patients dependent on electricity—she tried not to imagine what it must be like in the ICUs, everyone scrambling to manually ventilate and care for patients. Thank goodness they had plenty of staff up there. It was harder not to think what would have happened if the power had gone off weeks ago when Jerry had been in a coma, or worse, while the neurosurgeons were operating, removing the blood clot and bullet from his brain.

Anger at Harris and his men, who were playing with lives so carelessly, fueled Gina’s courage. She stepped into the intersection. This was the underground corridor leading to the research tower, so it was wider than most of the tunnels. As she shuffled across, her arms outstretched in case she veered off course and hit a wall, wind whistled against the side of her face, coming from the tower.

That was their best way out. She could get LaRose, wheel her through the tunnel, get her to the far side of the tower, then wait for Janet and the SWAT team to arrive. The SWAT team that Gina hoped dearly didn’t exist only in her imagination. Everything depended on Janet tearing herself away from her duties long enough to check her voice mail. What kind of lousy plan was that?