Critical Condition (31 page)

“IT’S ME,” CAME AMANDA’S VOICE.

Gina’s pounding pulse choked her words. Damn, she hadn’t thought she had any adrenaline left, but suddenly she was spilling over with it, gut twisting, fingers trembling, toes tingling.

Two flashlights clicked on, revealing Amanda and Jerry.

“Gina,” Jerry said, rushing to hug her. “You’re here.”

He tasted of plaster, smelled of sweat, but he was warm and whole and there, really there, she wasn’t imagining it.

Gina’s mind couldn’t comprehend the reality, and for a moment she froze until her brain could reboot. She buried her head in his neck, kissing and inhaling and absorbing the facts her senses told her were true.

Jerry
was
here, alive. Joy surged through her, drowning out any doubts or fears. He was here, right here in her arms again.

She could have stayed there kissing him until the next New Year’s. Finally, she remembered LaRose and reluctantly pushed him away—not too far, just far enough that she could breathe.

“LaRose had a stroke.” Gina gave them the PowerPoint version of their odyssey. “I need to get her this TPA. She’s in the OB-GYN room.”

“I can do that.” A woman’s voice came from the shadows between the rows of lockers. Melissa, one of the ER nurses, came forward.

Gina handed her the transport bag. “Everything you need should be in there.”

Amanda stood watch by the door, holding her gun at the ready like a James Bond girl. She cracked the door, checked the hall, then held it open far enough for Melissa to pass.

Jerry’s light hit her, and Gina barely contained her laughter. Amanda’s blond hair was streaked with dirt and cobwebs, her pale skin was smeared with gray powder and black grime, her dress—Gina’s dress—was in tatters, and she was barefoot. “What the hell happened to my Manolo Blahniks?”

Gina didn’t really care about the shoes, just wanted to see a smile—Amanda was always smiling—replace the look of desperate anger her friend now wore.

“They got Lucas.” Amanda’s voice had no tears; instead it was resolute.

Then the light caught her eyes. Gina was wrong. She didn’t look like a James Bond glamour girl. She looked like Rambo. Ready to kill to avenge the man she loved.

“They’re in the auditorium, but I think there’s only two or three guards now.” Amanda quickly filled Gina in on their hostage rescue and how it ended.

“So Jim’s dead?” A heavy blow hit Gina midchest at the thought. Now she knew who she had killed with her stupid attempt at bluffing Harris. It seemed like a lifetime ago, a murky distant memory, but she knew she’d never be able to totally forget or forgive herself.

“We can’t just run,” she told them. “Harris rigged the backup generator to blow. If it goes, the entire hospital will go up in flames. We have to stop him.”

“How? I have six bullets left. How many do you have?” Amanda nodded to the gun in Gina’s pocket. Gina had forgotten about the damn thing.

“None. It’s empty.”

“Not a big help.”

“We need to split up. Take out Harris and his men. And get Harris away from his radio, the detonator.”

“Sure, sounds easy—in theory,” Amanda said, sounding more like cynical Gina than Gina herself did. Since when did Gina become the optimistic one?

“We take the fight to them.”

“Best defense,” Jerry said, taking Gina’s hand and swinging it back and forth as if they were in the schoolyard planning a bout of capture the flag.

“Exactly. If there’s only two or three of them left, they can’t cover both doors
and
the hole in the wall you guys created. Who has the greater firepower?”

“The South African,” Amanda said. “He has both a machine gun and a pistol.”

“So you two go in the main doors, one to each entrance. Amanda, you act as a decoy, get the South African’s attention. Jerry can take him from behind.”

“No,” Jerry said.

“He’s right. He’s still pretty unsteady,” Amanda said.

Gina knew that, but if he was too unsteady to threaten a man at a distance, how could she possibly let Jerry get close enough to be a decoy? He’d never move fast enough to get out of the line of fire.

“I can do it.” Jerry grabbed her hand, squeezing. He knew what she was thinking. Just like he used to.

A faint hope flickered to life in Gina’s heart, and she squeezed back. “You sure?”

He nodded.

“Amanda, you okay taking down the South African?”

“No problem. But how do we keep Harris from detonating the generator?”

“That’s my job. You threaten him, get him running. I’ll be waiting.”

Jerry reached for Gina again. “No. Stay here. Stay safe.”

Gina swallowed her laughter. They wouldn’t understand. But safety wasn’t an option. Not anymore. Not if she could take out Harris and finish this now.

 

 

IT BECAME CLEAR VERY FAST THAT LYDIA’S FATHER—the thought of those two words together when face-to-face with this killer made her gag—wouldn’t tell them how to stop Harris from burning down Angels. If he even knew.

Instead he insisted on playing mind games with them, alternating between threatening them with dire consequences and trying to bribe them, saying he had access to vast amounts of wealth and power. Lydia tuned him out, which only infuriated him more.

“Do you have any idea who I am?” he demanded.

“Yeah. You’re the guy who gets to sit in the dark with his buddy until the cops get here.”

After making sure that he and the other shooter were securely restrained, Lydia and Trey ran back out to Bessie. Lydia tried to call Angels while Trey drove. No luck. She used the radio to call the emergency response center and learned that Janet Kwon had just requested a SWAT team to Angels, but they were still en route. She asked the operator to dispatch police to her address to pick up her father and Smith.

“Looks like we’re the cavalry,” she told Trey as he turned off Penn Avenue.

The snow had slowed, as had the wind. In the distance they could see the lights of the first plow trucks slowly making their way down Penn Avenue. The street in front of the hospital was piled deep with drifts—probably from the wind having had little to slow it as it scoured through the cemetery, Lydia guessed. Even with the snowplow on Bessie, Trey couldn’t get them any closer than the far end of the ER drive.

“Guess we walk from here. You up to it?” He nodded to Lydia’s arm with its broken cast. She’d wrapped it in duct tape to give it some stability; it still hurt like a son of a bitch, but not half as bad as knowing that her friends were in danger because of her. No way in hell was she waiting on the sidelines.

“Let’s go.” She opened her door and climbed down onto a snowdrift, settling her weight slowly to make sure it wouldn’t collapse. She didn’t slam the door shut, worried about how far the noise would carry now that the wind had died down. Only the faint scrape and diesel grind of the snowplow in the distance interrupted the silence.

Trey climbed around to meet her, and together they slid down the side of the drift and into the shelter of the ambulance bay.

“Who the hell are you?” A man’s voice came from an Excursion parked to Lydia’s right. He came around the SUV, aiming a machine gun at them.

“We’re here to help,” Lydia said in a bright tone as she edged her left hand into her pocket. She had the Taurus holstered on her belt and the nine-millimeter she’d taken from Black in her pocket. She’d forced Trey to take the other semiautomatic, although she suspected he wouldn’t use it.

“That’s nice,” the man said. “I need some help. Starting with the keys to your snowplow.”

“It’s not really a snowplow,” Trey said, reaching into his pocket. He didn’t make eye contact with Lydia, but he didn’t have to. She knew exactly what he was planning. She stomped her feet as if she were cold and eased over a little more to her right so they could catch the man in a crossfire. “It’s a rescue vehicle.”

“Whatever. Just give me the keys.”

Trey and Lydia drew their guns simultaneously. The man jerked his own gun, but his gloved finger caught in the trigger guard before he could fire. Trey moved with the grace and speed that always made Lydia catch her breath—they were what had attracted her to him in the first place—easily snatching the gun away. Then he patted the man down and took a pistol and a knife from him as well. They soon had him restrained with some Flex-Cuffs they found in the Excursion.

“How many inside?” Lydia asked as Trey examined the machine gun. For a man who hated guns, he suddenly seemed very interested in them.

“I want a lawyer.” The man pinched his lips tight together, his eyes slitting into a sullen stare into oblivion.

Lydia ignored him as she rummaged through the rear of the vehicle. She pulled out a roll of building plans. “Look, pictures.”

Trey joined her and they scrutinized the plans. “Looks like they were containing everyone ambulatory in the auditorium. And blocking the fire doors to all the floors so no one would be able to leave from the other patient floors.”

“Makes sense—once they locked the elevators down, they could search the hospital at will.” Lydia tried not to think about how the men with guns had been searching for
her
, wandering the halls of the hospital, taking her friends hostage. “Probably at least half a dozen men.”

“More like eight or nine,” Trey said. He flipped the page of schematics to one showing the utilities and wiring. “They were making notes on the wiring for the backup generator and its fuel intake.”

Lydia drew back and stared at him. “Black said these guys were going to burn the hospital down.”

“That’d be the place to do it.” Trey craned his head up at the dark towers above them. “And it would explain why they needed to turn the power off.”

“Does it say what they did?” To her the blueprints were a squiggle of lines—but Trey had experience reading building plans; they obviously made sense to him.

“No, but there aren’t many ways they could. Easiest would be to rig the wires to send a live current through the fuel when the generator is started. Maybe add a long-distance current source as an igniter so they could remotely control it.”

“Can you fix it?”

He squinted, his features solemn in the map light. “I think so.”

“Okay, you go after the generator, I’ll go after the hostages.”

“Wait, alone?”

Lydia loved it when Trey wrinkled his eyes in dismay like that and his eyebrows collided in an inverted V—it was so nice that someone cared. Even if he didn’t have a chance in hell of winning this argument. “Yes, alone.”

 

 

NORA HAD NO IDEA WHAT THE HELL SHE WAS doing—it was a very uneasy, yet liberating feeling. She could understand now why Gina had been tempted to impersonate Lydia. She felt like she was impersonating someone else herself, anyone but a by-the-book charge nurse.

“Just because you didn’t get what you came for is no reason to leave empty-handed.” She leaped down from the stage and ambled down the aisle toward the men, her stride confident, cocky even.

“She’s stalling,” Harris said. He waved the South African onto the stage. “See what’s going on behind that curtain.”

Harris kept his gun trained on Nora as the South African bounded past her and leaped onto the stage, ignoring the stairs. He yanked back the heavy velvet curtain, revealing the escape route. “Looks like this is how the others got out.”

“Okay, come on back.” Harris raised his voice. “The rest of you—yeah, I know you all are down there—just stay where you are.”

“I don’t trust you,” Harris told Nora as the South African rejoined them.

“You don’t have to trust me,” she told them. “This is a hospital. We have a vault full of drugs. Not to mention cash—you’d be surprised how much cash a place like this has on hand, especially for a holiday weekend.”

“She’s right,” the South African said, his eyes glinting. “We should walk away with something for our trouble. They’d need more cash on hand for the holiday weekend,” he reasoned. “You know, for the cafeteria and pharmacy and all.”

One down, one to go.

Harris was still unconvinced, shaking his head at Nora. “What’s in it for you?”

“Simple. We get to live. You get the money and leave.”

“How do we access the vaults with the power off?”

Ah, now he was hooked too. Greed, it never failed. “You didn’t kill Tillman, did you?”

“No, we’ve got him stashed outside. Couldn’t put up with his whining any longer.”

“Good. He has the override key in his office.” She couldn’t believe the words coming out of her mouth—she was creating a vault and overrides and keys, spinning them from thin air. And from Seth’s addiction to caper movies. Which was why she gave them Tillman. Every good caper needed a fall guy.

A light went on in Harris’s eyes, and she saw him calculating how long it would take them to get to Tillman’s office, ransack the vault, and get out before triggering the explosion that would burn down the hospital and kill everyone—which, of course, was why he didn’t seem to really care about the hostages escaping the auditorium. He knew their fate was sealed.

“Okay,” he said finally. “But you come with us. Anything goes wrong—”

The South African laughed, finishing the sentence for Nora by hoisting his machine gun.

 

 

AMANDA STILL THOUGHT THE PLAN WAS A SUICIDE mission. But if it gave Lucas a chance to get out alive, she was willing to go along with Gina’s crazy ideas. She and Jerry helped Gina gather the equipment she needed and carry it down to the auditorium. They set up in the lobby right in front of the doors, using the darkness as cover.

“Okay, I’m ready,” Gina whispered to them, pocketing Lucas’s otoscope to use as a light source when she was ready. “Remember, send Harris out the far door.”

“Maybe I’ll just shoot them both, save you the trouble,” Amanda muttered, surprising herself by being more than half serious. It was one thing to have your fairy-tale New Year’s Eve dream date ruined, quite another to have the man you love placed in danger. She wondered if she could actually kill someone—not that Harris and the South African didn’t deserve it.