Critical Condition (24 page)

It was the only one she had left. Another small problem: the whole get-LaRose part. Her mother and Ken were being watched over by at least one armed guard, maybe more.

Her foot brushed against something. A linen cart? Rows of metal shelves stacked as high as her head and covered by a drape. The morgue wasn’t far—the next door would be the pathology offices, followed by the lab, and then the morgue. But if she went through the labs, she could get access to the morgue from the back door, maybe get a better idea of where Ken and LaRose were being held and how many men she was up against.

She felt her way around the cart and found the first door, followed the wall to the next door—the lab—and felt for the handle.
Please let it be open
, she prayed as she pressed down on the lever. It opened with a soft click.
Amen.

This was the public area of the lab, cluttered with desks and office equipment, so she had to risk using a light. Swapping the Maglite for the more discreet penlight, she looked around. No signs that anyone had been in here. Good.

Gina navigated around the desks to the rear door, the one that led into the actual laboratory areas. This one had an electronic key lock; would it work with the power off? She turned the doorknob, and it opened easily.

Maybe that was why they’d shut the power off, to open locks? Gina wondered as she began down the corridor, passing hematology on one side, chemistry on the other. No, that didn’t make sense, not if all Harris was after was Lydia—unless the evidence he thought she had was hidden here at the hospital?

No more time to think about it; she’d reached the door to the tissue lab that connected to the morgue. She entered, cautiously shielding her penlight so that it wouldn’t be visible through the window in the morgue’s door. The fumes of antiseptic and tissue preservatives made her nose twitch.

The lab was pretty basic: three rows of benches with microscopes, microtomes, and bottles of stains arrayed alongside them. The larger equipment and storage cabinets lined the walls.

Once she got her bearings and was started on a path to the morgue’s door, she turned her penlight off and made her way by feel. Just as she estimated that she was close to the door, she stumbled into a metal container, about the size of a fire extinguisher, almost toppling it from its rack. The clang of metal against metal was louder than church bells.

Damn! She bent down and used both hands to steady the can and silence the noise. The can was cold, freezing in fact. Probably liquid nitrogen, used to transport specimens. She crouched beside the rack, listening hard. There was no sound coming from the morgue, no response to the clatter she’d unleashed.

Gathering her strength, she peered through the window in the door to the morgue. It was a wide-open space designed for flexibility. Storage refrigerator, decomp room, and a freezer were accessed on the wall to her left; the wall to the right was equipment storage and the staff locker rooms, which exited back into the main tunnel; and straight ahead were double doors leading out to the garage where bodies were transferred to mortuary vehicles.

The place seemed deserted. Had she misheard? The guard had said he’d be bringing LaRose and Ken here, hadn’t he?

Horror struck her as she realized that he could have easily locked them into one of the body storage areas. Would the guard have abandoned them to die?

Gina opened the door and crossed into the morgue, intent on checking the freezer and refrigerator, when she spotted light. Crossing the empty room, she peered through the double doors into the morgue’s garage. To her left, up three steps, sat the small, glass-walled cubicle that security used while waiting for body transfers.

One of Harris’s men sat there, his back to the door, feet up on the desk, drinking from a thermos flask—some poor guard’s dinner, no doubt. He had his jacket off; his breath wasn’t steaming the windows at all. A glow filled the tiny guard shack, probably from a kerosene heater.

It took her a minute to spot LaRose and Ken in the dim light. Ken stood beside LaRose’s wheelchair. Silver strips of duct tape circled their bodies, securing them—and the wheelchair—to a metal pole to the left of the cubicle’s window—directly in the guard’s sight line. Wisps of snow that had blown beneath the garage door swirled around their feet.

While the guard sat safe and snug in his office, they were freezing to death.

 

 

FIRST OFF, SHE HAD TO FIND SOMETHING TO MASK the taste, Nora thought. Water wouldn’t do—ah, the cafeteria workers had brought some single-serving plastic bottles of orange juice. Perfect.

Next, slip the drugs into the bottles. She slid down behind the stainless steel cafeteria cart so that she was hidden from the guards’ sight. Straining to see in the dim light, she carefully worked the needle under the rim of each bottle’s cap, aiming it up through the plastic below the seal. She injected half of the ketamine/Versed mix into each bottle, then inspected her work. Even knowing it was there, she couldn’t find the puncture—hopefully it would be just as difficult to see once the caps were removed and the bottles opened.

Now she needed a diversion. She looked over at the floor in front of the stage where Emma Grey was reading Deon’s books to the kids.

Harris and the South African were both gone; Tillman as well. Good. She couldn’t trust Tillman, and the other two were the ones with the no-nonsense trigger fingers. In their place were two men dressed in hospital security guard uniforms, leaning against the wall between the two sets of doors and talking quietly to each other, barely glancing in the direction of the hostages. They looked bored, not deadly.

There might never be a better time.

“Deon,” she called quietly to the boy sitting Indian-style on the carpet, listening to his grandmother’s story. He jerked his head over his shoulder and pointed a thumb at himself as if he were unsure who she wanted. “Yes, come here.”

Smart kid that he was, he craned his head to see over the seats and look for the guards. Then he scooted on his behind backward to where Nora sat.

“I need you to do something for me,” she said. He nodded eagerly. “Do you still have your camera?”

“Yes.” He pulled it out of his pants pocket, some rubber bands, a few coins, a pencil stub, and a rock cascading out along with it. “Right here.”

“Do you know how to work the flash on it?”

“Oh yes—it has a flash, and a zoom lens, and the book says the flash is the fastest—”

“Here’s what I need you to do.”

 

 

“ARE YOU OKAY?” LUCAS ASKED AS AMANDA RAN out of the pantry and into the kitchen. “Did he hurt you?”

“No. I’m fine, I’m great!” She clasped his arms and stood on tiptoe to kiss him. “I think I know how we can save them.”

“How?”

“First, we need to make sure that he”—she indicated their prisoner with a jerk of her head—“can’t give us away. Can you put the tape back over his mouth and move him somewhere else? Somewhere we can lock him in and not worry about him.”

Jerry spoke up, his voice holding a trace of his old spark. The few minutes sitting alone in quiet seemed to have revitalized him. “Fridge.”

“No, we don’t want him to freeze.”

“There’s room in the storage closet where they keep the catering supplies,” Lucas said. “That’s where I found the Sterno. And there’s a lock on the door.”

“Perfect.”

Lucas went to sort out their prisoner’s accommodations and move him. Jerry touched Amanda’s arm, hesitantly as if he weren’t sure he really wanted to hear what she had to say.

She didn’t have the heart to remind him that they had no idea where Gina was, so she tried her best to reassure him. “If Gina’s in there, we’ll get her out. Don’t worry, Jerry.”

He nodded gratefully. Lucas returned, out of breath, his face exhilarated. “What’s the plan?”

“Do you remember two years ago when the hospital renovated the auditorium? Added all that computer equipment and the new projector and all that?”

“Sure. Why?”

“They had to gain access for all that wiring, right?”

He nodded. Jerry was watching Lucas and nodded as well.

She carried the Sterno into the pantry. “This is where they did it. The stage is right behind that wall. And under the stage—”

“Is access to the rest of the auditorium,” Lucas finished for her. “The drapes on the front of the stage will hide any movement.”

“And the dark will help as well.”

Jerry left while they were talking and returned with a chef’s knife and a wooden mallet. He squatted in front of the drywall and plunged the knife into the wall. He swung the mallet, missed the knife but still made a nice hole in the wall and began tugging at the edges with his fingers. It didn’t make as much noise as Amanda feared it would, just a dull thud. “Gina, I’m coming!”

Lucas and Amanda ran back out to the kitchen to get supplies. By the time they returned, Jerry had made a fist-sized hole by tearing the drywall back with his hands.

“Wait,” Lucas said as he pulled on a pair of dishwashing gloves. “Don’t go higher than the stage floor; we don’t want to risk them seeing our light.”

Jerry pulled back while Lucas drew a horizontal line about thirty inches off the floor. “The stage is three feet high, so that should be low enough.”

He and Amanda joined Jerry in widening the hole. Soon they had all the drywall off, exposing the studs. A metal conduit ran horizontally across the studs about eighteen inches off the floor.

“It’s small.” Lucas measured the space between the studs with his hands. “Maybe fourteen inches.”

“Tight fit,” Jerry said, lying on the floor and trying to squirm through the gap. He couldn’t twist his body through it, not with the metal conduit blocking the way. He came up coughing, drywall dust flying from his body. “Cut this?”

“No.” Lucas examined the conduit. “It’s carrying electrical wires, if the power comes back on—”

“Saw through one of the studs,” Amanda said. “We can use serrated knives, they’re pretty much like saw blades.”

“That’s going to take a while.”

“I’ll go on ahead; you guys enlarge the opening.”

Lucas shook his head, frowning. “No.” He pushed at the two-by-four, his muscles bulging with the strain. “No, I’m not risking you. I’ll go.”

“Lucas, I’ll be fine.” Amanda loved that her fiancé was protective of her; he knew he couldn’t budge the block of wood by hand, never would have done something so illogical if emotion hadn’t blinded him to reality. He also knew she had a little thing about confined spaces, ever since her brothers had locked her in a trunk in the attic when she was a kid. It was nothing as bad as his own phobias about dirt and germs, so even the fact that he was willing to offer to go in her stead was proof of how much he cared for her—not that she needed proof. “I’ll scout the path, get everyone ready. I promise, I won’t even get anywhere near the bad guys.”

Still Lucas hesitated. Jerry started sawing the base of the two-by-four, using a large bread knife grasped in both of his hands.

Finally, Lucas kicked at a piece of drywall lying on the floor and gave a grudging nod. He handed her the Smith & Wesson. “Here. You’d better take this. Just in case.”

She secured the gun in her sash and took his otoscope for light.

“Be careful.” He punctuated his words with a kiss that made her toes tingle.

“I will.” Amanda knelt and shone the light through the opening. Dust and grime and darkness greeted her. Getting on her belly, she had to shift so that she was on her side, crawling between the studs, Lucas helping to propel her until her body was the entire way through. She craned her head up and waved at him that she was okay, then rolled onto her belly and continued into the darkness.

 

 

GINA DUCKED INSIDE THE MORGUE AND SAT, BACK to the door, thinking hard and fast. She had to get Ken and LaRose out of there, but no way could she do it without the guard seeing. Okay, so she had to take care of the guard first. How?

Club him over the head? That would mean climbing up into the guard shack, getting close enough to strike, and taking him out with one blow, all before he could reach for his gun and shoot her. Even though the guard seemed relaxed, she didn’t think he’d ignore someone climbing up three steps and coming into the shack with him.

Drugs? Maybe nitrous or an anesthesia gas—she would only have to open the door a crack, enough to slip some tubing into, close it, and wait. But the guard shack looked to be around eight feet on each side, which was . . . damn, she couldn’t do the math, her brain was fried . . . sixty-four times eight, call it four-eighty, five hundred cubic feet. How long would it take to work? Shit, there was also the smell—no way to get around that. Plus the fact that if he was running a kerosene heater there might be an open flame, and a few whiffs of anesthesia could turn the shack into a firebomb before she had a chance to free LaRose and Ken.

Think, think!
Gina shoved her hands into her cardigan pockets, trying to stay warm, and found the half cigarette that she’d smoked earlier. Her matches were long gone, but she rolled the cancer stick beneath her nose, inhaling its fragrance. Ahhh . . . as always, anxiety churned up cravings, urges to indulge in both pleasure and punishment. Not tonight.

Tonight there was no time for her to fight (and lose to) her personal demons. She needed to save lives. God, she wished Jerry were here. Dropping the cigarette, Gina reached for the ring she wore on a chain around her neck instead. Old Jerry, New Jerry, she honestly didn’t care. He’d find some way to cheer her up, motivate her, keep her going. He’d never let her surrender or fail.

She rocked her head back against the door, eyes squeezed shut, conjuring up Jerry’s face, his goofy smile that made him look like a pushover although he was one of the smartest men she knew—maybe not book-smart, not genius-smart like Ken, but people-smart, street-smart.