It was an empty threat. The last thing she could do was shoot Abbie. How would she explain that?
Abbie’s eyes wandered. She seemed unable to focus.
Lucy cursed under her breath. She didn’t have time for this. She tucked her gun in the back of her pants and gripped Abbie’s left wrist. She slapped the handcuff on.
One wrist down, one to go.
“L’autre,” she said. “Give me…your…hand…your…other hand!”
Lucy held down Abbie’s limp left wrist with her own right hand. She reached over Abbie’s body, holding out her left hand, palm up, fingers curled and wiggling with impatience.
“Your hand,” she said. “Your other—”
Abbie’s right hand flew out from under the covers. Before Lucy knew up from down, Abbie stabbed Lucy’s extended forearm with a syringe and injected its contents into her bloodstream.
In disbelief, Lucy stared for a moment, just one beat, at the needle sticking out of her forearm, and then she reacted, instinctively reaching with her right hand to remove the syringe.
Instinctive, but a poor choice. And Abbie was way ahead of her, anyway. Abbie’s right hand clawed Lucy’s left cheek, the damaged one with the enormous bandage. Lucy howled in agony, even as she realized something dark and terrifying:
She had completely lost control of the situation.
She was off balance, stretched over the bed, the needle still sticking out of her arm, her left cheek in scorching pain.
Before she knew it, Abbie had gripped Lucy’s hair with both hands and yanked her forward. Abbie swung her own head forward and head-butted Lucy right above the eye.
Stunned, Lucy tried to recover, tried to move her hand to reach back for her gun, but Abbie had locked her in a fierce bear hug and held on tight. Lucy tried to struggle but it was becoming harder and harder, with each passing second, to do so. Maybe she had underestimated Abbie’s strength. More likely, it was the narcotic, whatever Abbie had injected into her bloodstream.
“Sweet dreams, you stupid bitch,” Abbie whispered, gripping Lucy tighter still. Lucy’s defenses wavered to nothing. Her body went limp. She had underestimated Abbie. And now she was at her mercy.
CHAPTER 96
SABINE CHECKED THE clock in the guard’s station outside the infirmary door. It was now 1:40 a.m. It had been twenty minutes. What was taking so long?
She couldn’t turn on the security camera. Whatever was caught on camera was recorded in a database. If she activated the camera, even for an instant, Lucy would be recorded stringing Abbie up. They would be cooked, Sabine included.
Sabine grabbed her cell phone and punched up Lucy’s private cell number. She and Lucy had agreed that any communication would take place by cell phone. They couldn’t use the hand radios; other guards would hear them.
Sabine waited impatiently for one, two, three rings.
On the fourth ring, she heard a voice, breathless. “Allô?”
“Is everything okay?” Sabine asked in French.
“Yes, but there’s blood,” the voice answered in French. The voice was breathless, barely above a whisper.
“Blood? There’s blood? What did you do, Lucy? You weren’t supposed to beat her first!”
“Help me clean it up,” the whispery voice replied.
“Help you—?” Sabine looked at her watch and sighed. The clock was ticking on their little mission. Ten minutes, tops, and they had to get out of there.
She cussed and left the guard station and buzzed herself through the infirmary door. She shouldn’t have left this to Lucy. She should have done it herself.
She approached the window to the secured room and saw the empty bed where Abbie had once lain. As she got closer she saw a woman in a guard’s uniform, with dark hair and, of course, a large gauze bandage on her face, bent over, scrubbing the floor with a towel. When Sabine rushed through the door she saw a body lying prone on the floor in Abbie’s prison garb.
“What a mess,” Sabine complained.
She started to ask Lucy why Abbie was still lying on the floor as opposed to hanging from the ceiling by a strap. But other questions invaded her mind all at once, in the space of one beat of her pulse.
Why did Lucy’s uniform seem a bit large on her? And why had her hair grown a few inches? And why did Abbie’s prison outfit suddenly look so small on her?
Questions that came a few moments too late, as Abbie, dressed in the guard’s uniform and the gauze bandage, popped up from the floor and pointed a gun at her.
Lucy’s uniform. Lucy’s bandage.
Lucy’s gun.
“Hands on your head,” Abbie said in French. “I killed Lucy and I’ll kill you if I have to.”
“Please don’t,” Sabine replied in French, the situation now fully clear to her. Abbie Elliot surely had nothing to lose. She would kill Sabine in a heartbeat if need be. Why not? She was already serving a life sentence for murder. What more could they do to her?
“Turn around,” Abbie ordered her. “If you want to live.”
Her hands on her head, Sabine turned around. “Don’t kill me,” she repeated, as she felt the stab of a needle in the side of her neck. She jumped and removed the needle. Too late. The contents of the syringe had been injected.
Abbie trained the gun on Sabine. “That drug won’t kill you,” she said, “but I will if you make one move.”
Sabine glanced over at Lucy, lying motionless on the floor. But she did seem to be breathing. Maybe Abbie wasn’t going to kill them, after all.
“I want to thank you, Sabine,” Abbie said. “You arranged everything perfectly to kill me tonight. You waited until you were near a shift change. You picked the dead of night, when all the prisoners are locked down, and when there is the smallest number of prison staff on duty. You kept things to just you and Lucy. You cleared out the infirmary, and I’d be willing to bet there isn’t another guard on this entire wing, is there?”
Sabine began to swoon from whatever Abbie had injected into her.
“No, of course there isn’t,” Abbie continued. “You couldn’t run the risk of another guard stopping by unannounced. This whole side of the prison is probably empty right now. Am I right?”
Sabine felt her legs giving out. She fell to her knees, catching herself with her hands. She was on all fours, like an animal.
“Why do you…thank me?” she asked.
Sabine’s vision became spotty. She was losing consciousness.
Abbie approached her, got down on a knee so she could whisper in Sabine’s ear. Ordinarily that might be a risky move, but Sabine was on the verge of collapsing.
“Because in creating the perfect conditions for me to be murdered,” said Abbie, “you’ve also created the perfect conditions for me to escape.”
CHAPTER 97
I LOOKED AT MY watch: 1:47 a.m. Thirteen minutes before the shift change. And who knew if the replacement guard might come a little early? I might have just a handful of minutes.
I looked back at my handiwork in the secured room. My mind was racing. The rush of adrenaline was clouding my thoughts. Had I done this right? Thought of everything? I knew, in my semipanicked state, that it was possible I’d made a mistake.
But there was no turning back now.
I closed the door to the secured room behind me. I ran through the main area to the infirmary’s exit door. Before, there was no camera on me, so I didn’t need to worry about appearances.
But now I did.
I took a breath to calm myself before I opened the door into G wing. I hoped like hell that I was right and that Sabine had cleared out this wing.
I opened the door with shaky hands. I looked down the corridor at the guard booth by the door leading downstairs to the parking garage. Empty. I looked the other way, at the guard booth near solitary. Also empty.
What I expected, but you never knew.
Very soon, the prison staff getting ready to leave would be coming down this very corridor in G wing to take the stairs down
to the parking garage.
I went to the guard booth where Sabine and Lucy had conveniently turned off the security monitors. I turned them back on. I looked at the grainy, black-and-white image on the screen that monitored the secured room. It looked okay. It looked as I wanted it to look.
I found a set of keys, presumably Lucy’s, and her key card. Her shift would be ending soon. She’d already visited her locker and picked up her keys. Her plan had been to kill me and then waltz downstairs and drive out of the garage.
I walked to the door leading to the underground parking garage, past the empty guard booth next to it—G-3, I think they called this booth. Some of the prison staff who would be passing by here soon, when their shift ended, might find the empty guard booth alarming. The regulations were clear, of course, that any possible exit out of this prison, including access to the parking garage, required a guard booth. But our prison was notoriously understaffed, it was the middle of the night, when every prisoner was locked down, and what bleary-eyed staffer leaving work at 2:00 a.m. feels like making waves?
That was my hope, at least.
I swiped Lucy’s key card and the door handle released. My heart did a small leap.
I heard voices at the far end of the corridor, two or three women with the frivolous lilt to their voices that came with being happy to be leaving work—and leaving a tad early, at that. They were coming my way, to this same staircase.
I took the stairs down quickly. I could taste it now—freedom. When I got to the bottom of the staircase, there was a gray door and another slot for the key card. I swiped it and the door handle released.
The smell of gasoline greeted me in the underground parking garage. The surface area was large, but it was the overnight shift, and there were only about forty or fifty vehicles down here. Most of them were clustered in the front rows of the parking garage, nearest the door. A few were spread out along the back, separated by several rows from the cluster.
Shit.
The voices behind me would be coming down here soon, so I had to move fast. I had to find Lucy’s car. Once those women got down here, I’d have a hard time explaining who I was, or why I didn’t know which car was mine.
I weighed Lucy’s car keys in my hand. Why the hell couldn’t she have one of those key-fob remotes that made her car beep?
Playing the odds, but not necessarily using logic, I picked the cluster of vehicles closest to the door. I jogged down the first line of cars, looking for Lucy’s car. I had no idea what kind of car she drove. That information would have been too risky for Giorgio to convey to me, even in code, over the telephone.
But I did know her license-plate number, which Giorgio had discovered simply by parking his car outside the prison two nights ago and waiting for Lucy to drive out.
As I jogged along, scanning the license plates in the third row, the parking garage door opened and the voices of those staffers echoed through the garage. I crouched down so they wouldn’t see me. I peeked through a couple of cars at them.
Three women. All guards, cracking a joke as they walked toward me.
Now what?
Move. I couldn’t let them see me. If they did, it was game over.
I stayed in my crouch, moving quickly on the balls of my feet to the far end of the row. The women, without breaking stride and still chatting, sliced through the middle of the parked cars in the front cluster, the stride of their heavy boots echoing on the concrete. I was crouched behind a car on the end, ready to move to stay out of their line of sight.
They all stopped in the fourth row. Carpoolers?
No. Each of them got in a separate car, all within a few spots of each other.
Oh. Oh, sure. They worked the same shift. They arrived at approximately the same time. That made sense. One shift full of cars parks as close as possible to the door. Then the next shift comes in and parks farther back. Then the next shift comes and takes the better spots up close, which were vacated by the two previous shifts. The cycle would repeat itself.
The clump of cars here up front were the cars parked by the eight-to-two shift, which was just ending.
But Lucy worked a double shift today. She started at 2:00 p.m. She wouldn’t be parked with this shift. She’d be parked with the two-to-eight shift.
I looked to my left, to the cars in the back cluster. About ten cars. Fewer than a dozen people had worked double shifts. One of those cars belonged to Lucy.
I heard two things simultaneously: the parking garage door opening again, as other prison staffers snuck out a few minutes early; and the squeal of tires as more cars came into the lot down a curved ramp in the far corner—the overnight shift arriving for duty, entering the prison from the side opposite the exit.
They were coming at me from both directions now.
I considered my options, which included literally sliding under a car and hiding. But it was only going to get worse. I looked at my watch: 1:54 a.m. The remainder of this shift was going to be coming down the stairs any minute. And a number of other employees were going to be arriving starting now, and parking in the available spaces in the back, by Lucy’s car.
I was running out of time.
CHAPTER 98
I REMOVED LUCY’S cell phone from my pocket. Then I stood up from my crouch as though I didn’t have a care in the world and started talking into the cell phone and walking toward the back of the lot. The three women who had come into the garage after me were in their cars now. If they wondered where I had come from, they didn’t say anything. They just started their cars.
Some more prison employees were spilling into the lot, just getting off, but I was ahead of them. I hoped that if any of them were even remotely inclined to speak with me, they would be less likely to do so if I were chatting on my cell phone.
As I approached the sprinkling of cars in the back, my pace slowed, and I scanned the cars’ license plates.
Avec Amour, 243, Avec Amour.
There. I saw it. It was a blue compact. Apparently, it was a Clio. I didn’t know cars, and I’d never heard of a Clio. But I was sure this was Lucy’s car.
License plate AA-243-AA.
I got into the car. Turned it on. Some dance music on the stereo was cranked way up and startled the piss out of me. The car clock said 1:56 a.m.
The car was a stick shift. It had been ages since I’d driven stick, but I’d have to make do. It wasn’t like I had a choice.
I drove toward the exit of the underground garage. I managed to fall in line behind one of the other guards, one who was driving a beige Toyota sedan. Good, because the three cars in front of me were going to show me the way out. Not so good, because they weren’t on my timetable. They were in a get-the-hell-out-of-work hurry. I was in a run-for-your-life hurry.
I followed the other three cars up the outgoing ramp. Idling on an incline is about the hardest thing to do when driving a stick shift, and I was out of practice. The car rocked back and forth as I balanced between the gas and the clutch, but I didn’t have the rhythm down and the engine died. I cursed under my breath and started the car up again, trying very hard not to panic, and this time I used the emergency brake when idling.
The guard in the first car reached out her window and swiped her card through a slot. The wooden arm lifted. So did the garage door. The first car drove out and the wooden arm lowered again. Everyone moved up one spot. I let out the emergency brake, hit the gas too hard, lurched forward, and almost hit the car in front of me before slamming on the brake pedal and killing the engine.
“Dammit!” I hissed. Try again. Got the car running again and didn’t look ahead or in my rearview mirror. It didn’t do any good to wonder if anyone was eyeballing me. Instead I looked at the clock: 1:58 a.m.
By the time the third car got out and it was my turn, it was 1:59 a.m.
I slid Lucy’s key card through the slot, the wooden arm lifted, the steel door rose, and I drove up and out onto the main road leading to the exit.
So far, so good.
But now it was 2:00 a.m. And I was still inside the prison walls.
CHAPTER 99
LUISA WALKED DOWN G wing toward the infirmary. She passed by the guard station at the door leading down to the underground parking garage, G-3. Empty. That was odd, but not entirely unheard-of at this time of night, when all prisoners were locked down. Budgets were tight. This time of night, the prison often wasn’t staffed at full capacity.
Luisa could see from a distance that the guard booth at the infirmary, G-2—her assigned position—was empty as well. When she reached the booth, she found the check sheet—the form the departing guard had to fill out, verifying her head count and containing an inventory of all equipment—was resting on a clipboard, not filled out.
Sabine, she thought. Fucking Sabine.
Sabine, the head guard, would have anyone else written up for this. But Sabine seemed to think that the rules didn’t apply to her. She was probably gallivanting around somewhere and would expect Luisa not to complain about the check sheet. In fact, she’d probably expect Luisa to do the inventory herself.
Luisa raised her hand radio and spoke into it. “This is Luisa at G station two for Sabine,” she said in French. “Luisa at G station two for Sabine. Over.”
She waited a minute and got nothing back.
She looked around the booth. The inmate sheet said they had an overnight guest tonight—Abbie Elliot, one of the president’s assassins. If someone was staying overnight, that meant the secured room.
She looked at the security monitor. Sure enough, in bed 1, the bed closest to the camera, a motionless figure with dark hair was lying on her left side. The black-and-white picture was somewhat grainy, and the lighting was dim. The lights didn’t turn all the way off in the secured room, because the camera couldn’t see in the dark, but they dimmed enough to allow the inmates to sleep at night while still allowing the camera to monitor them. So Luisa couldn’t quite make out the facial features of the sleeping figure, but she didn’t think twice about it.
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