by Scott Blade
CHAPTER 30
THE OLDER GUY from Kill Team A had no idea Glock was dead. He sat in the breakroom for hospital employees. It amazed him how easy it was to stay undetected in stolen hospital scrubs and a tray with half-eaten food on it.
He had stolen the scrubs out of the locker of an orderly he saw finish his shift. He had followed the guy down to his locker and waited for him to shower and leave. Once the guy left, breaking his combination lock without anyone noticing was easy enough. A stolen screwdriver from maintenance used as a chisel and the butt of his Glock 17 as a hammer worked like a charm. The lock broke, and the uniform was his for the taking. Although he had wished that the guy kept a clean set in his locker instead of tossing his old ones in there.
The older guy from Kill Team A had been in the hospital for twenty-four hours, but he wasn’t tired, not at all. He had gotten plenty of sleep. Being a retired police officer had given him the ability to sleep anywhere. He had learned to sleep on stakeouts and on sentry duty when no one was looking. For him, sleeping wasn’t a problem. He had seen a lot of cops who’d had a real problem sleeping on the job—not him. For him, it was never a problem. And actually, sleeping on the job wasn’t the problem for other cops, either. The problem was not waking up when they needed to. But he had a trick for that.
He had spent the night propped up in the waiting room, feet up on another chair, eyes shut. His trick was that he had his earbuds in and the other end jacked into his phone. He listened to soft white noises to help him sleep. He listened to an app he had downloaded. It played sounds of the ocean, which was okay with him, but not his favorite. He really liked rainforest showers. There was something about a rainstorm over a jungle that really soothed him.
He was Hispanic by birth and was well aware of the Principal’s hatred of his people. He didn’t care. There was no need to get one’s feathers all ruffled over ideologies. Especially when one of them was a multimillionaire and the other one was not. He knew the Principal was John Sheridan. They all knew. Glock had told them.
Sheridan considered himself the brains of the operation, but he was really just the financier, the money. He was, in a way, the originator. Sheridan wasn’t a stupid man, and he was far from a saint. The older man had known of him for years. Back when the older man had first met Glock and worked with him, they were running drugs across the Mexico-Texas border, a decade ago. And back then, the older man knew of Sheridan.
Sheridan worked for the DEA, but not in the tough, undercover sense that one normally gets from hearing the acronym DEA. Sheridan was a pencil pusher. He was in charge of a small unit. How exactly he had gotten that job didn’t require police work to find out. He had gotten it from his daddy’s connections. The Sheridan family tree had been full of well-connected scam artists.
Sheridan’s unit did good work and got themselves noticed. Sheridan had taken all the credit, and then his career in politics had taken off.
Of course, some of the major busts his unit had gotten were from Glock tossing him a bone here and there.
Just then, the old man’s trick worked because his headset rang with his phone. He answered it.
“Yeah,” he said.
“It’s me,” Sheridan said. Not Glock. Which was very unusual.
“What’s up?”
“Have you heard from Glock?”
The old man stopped and checked his phone in case he had slept through it ringing. No missed calls. He said, “No.”
“He’s not answering his phone.”
“Maybe he’s busy.”
“No. No. He always answers. Especially now. We got too much riding to let the Hood situation go on.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Sheridan was quiet for a long, long beat, and then he said, “I’m about to have dinner with my family. We’ve got company. Some people from our candidate’s campaign are here. You know what that means.”
“They want to talk with you about building the wall.”
“Shut up! Don’t say that over the phone. Just say yes.”
“Relax. You’re paranoid. No one is listening.”
Sheridan didn’t respond to that. He just said, “Give Glock thirty more minutes. Call him.”
“What if he don’t answer?”
Sheridan paused. The old guy could hear a little girl in the background calling him Dad and asking him to play with her.
Sheridan said, “If he doesn’t answer, take care of it. Call me back after.”
The phone went dead, and Sheridan was gone to have dinner with his family, which turned the old man’s stomach, even though he was a killer. The image of this Texas senator acting squeaky clean in the eyes of the public and his family but really being one of the biggest mobsters in South Texas still affected the old guy. It made him second guess who was the brains. Maybe it was Sheridan.
Either way, he shrugged. The guy was paying him to kill a dying woman. And that’s what he’d do, but not yet. He still had thirty minutes. He looked up at a wall clock and then switched his ambient music back on. He put his head down on the table next to his tray and shut his eyes.
CHAPTER 31
THE LATE AFTERNOON sun lit the sky with its earliest shades of red, which reminded Widow of the red mist he had seen from shooting Glock. He couldn’t lie to himself that he hadn’t enjoyed seeing it.
Widow looked down at Jemma. She was buckled in tight to his right. She had her head on his arm. Her hair rested out across his forearm. She was starting to stir. She had snored the entire chopper ride.
Her eyes moved, squinted, and her arms stretched out.
“Take your time,” Widow said.
She opened her eyes and seemed disoriented at first. She looked up at him and asked, “Where are we?”
But he could barely hear her. He took the headset off and leaned in. He raised his voice and said, “We’re in the sky. Over Texas. Want to see?”
Her eyes opened wide, and she looked around. She saw the rear cabin of the Bell 206. She was very surprised. Widow wondered how much she knew. Did she see them beat her father to death? He hoped not. He hoped she was shot with a tranquilizer dart right after him, which turned out to be the case because she looked very confused.
She asked, “Where’s my dad?”
Widow’s hope exploded into disappointment, fast. He didn’t want to be the one to answer that question for her. He looked out the window and then looked back. He said, “Have you ever been in a military helicopter before?”
She shook her head.
“This is a Navy chopper.”
“Are you in the Navy?”
He nodded and said, “I was.”
She was quiet.
He said, “Hey, you wanna ride in the cockpit?”
“Cockpit?”
“Yeah. It’s up front. By the pilot. He might let you fly it.”
She perked up and seemed to forget about her dad, at least for the moment.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay. Let me check with the pilot. I got good news for you.”
“What?”
“Guess where we’re headed?”
“Where?”
“We’re going to see your mom,” he said. Then a thought struck him and made him regret saying it. What if it was too late? What if she was dead? He couldn’t bring himself to tell her that her father was dead, plus her grandmother, and now he might have to tell her she lost her mother too.
He felt about as bad as he ever had felt for someone. Jemma would have to be a tough little girl to endure the news that she had lost three family members all in one night. He shook those thoughts off. No need worrying about the unknown. Right now he saw a huge smile on her face, and that was good enough.
He put his headset back on and asked the pilot.
“That’s not permitted, sir,” the pilot said.
“None of this is permitted,” Widow said.
“That’s true. But I don’t know.”
“Just do it. You can blame me.”
The pilot said nothing back.
Widow took off his headset and unbuckled his harness and Jemma’s. He led her to the cockpit. She shook and stumbled the whole way, partially from the conditions of the flight and partially from side effects of the sedative they had drugged her with.
Widow helped her to the front, past the pilot, and into the copilot seat.
The pilot said, “Hey there, miss.”
Widow put a headset on her so she could hear.
The pilot said, “So you’re going to help me. Be my copilot. My name is Mr. Michelle.”
Jemma laughed and said, “You got a girl’s name?”
“No, no. It’s my last name. I’m a Navy pilot. We call each other by our surnames.”
She looked confused and asked, “Surnames?”
Widow said, “It’s your last name. But why not give you a codename?”
The pilot said, “Yeah. A codename. We use those too.”
She asked the pilot, “What’s your codename?”
“Mine’s Maverick like Top Gun.”
She looked at him funny.
“You know. The movie.”
She shrugged.
Widow said, “She’s only six. She doesn’t know that crap.”
The pilot nodded, reached out, and flipped a couple of switches in a row. He asked, “What do we call you?”
She said, “Call me, Pip. That’s my codename.”
Widow stayed quiet and looked out through the windshield. They were over El Paso.
Jemma asked, “What’s your codename?”
Widow said, “Call me Black Widow.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a poisonous spider.”
“But aren’t those bad?”
“Only if you mess with them. If you leave them alone, then they’ll leave you alone.”
Jemma was all strapped into her harness in the front, next to the pilot. She looked out at the city below and looked like she was calculating or processing this new information. She was a very inquisitive girl, Widow knew that once she’d gotten through all of this tragedy, eventually she’d grow up to be something special.
She said, “Black Widow, thanks for taking me to my mommy.”
Widow stayed quiet, just politely smiled. He felt the way he imagined Babe Ruth must’ve felt when he was asked by a dying little boy to hit a grand slam for him.
The pilot said, “Better sit back. We’re almost there.”
Widow nodded and returned to his seat, strapped back in, and waited.
CHAPTER 32
HOSPITAL SECURITY was already on the roof of the hospital when the Bell 206 started to descend. Two security guards, one in uniform and one in a uniform that included a brown windbreaker with no logo on the front, but a simple word printed on the back in yellow, block letters—SECURITY.
The chopper’s rotor wash blew and kicked up wind and Texas dust from the roof as it went in for a landing.
Widow hadn’t thought about it, but he was rather grateful they didn’t already have a chopper parked on the roof, which was often the case whenever it wasn’t in use.
The landing skids touched down and bounced a low distance and returned to touch the concrete.
Widow faced away from the pilot and from Jemma and pulled the Glock 17 out of his jeans, racked the slide, and chambered a round. He didn’t have to click the safety to fire because the Glock 17 had no external safety. Its safety action was internal. Therefore, it was ready to use right out of his pocket. He slid it into the front of his jeans, which wasn’t the most inconspicuous place for it, but it made it harder for someone to disarm him. He had no idea what the last guy, posted here to kill Lucy, looked like. He figured the last guy didn’t know what he looked like, either. Nevertheless, he wasn’t going to walk with his only weapon out of his sight. Widow had already lost two innocent members of Lucy’s family. He wasn’t going to lose any more. He wasn’t going to take any chances.
The pilot pulled up his visor, exposed his face, and slowed the propeller blades. After a long moment, the noise from the engine settled, and he said, “I was told you might need a ride back. So I can wait here.”
Widow said, “Yes. Stay here and keep watch over her. I’ll be back.”
The pilot looked a little reluctant, but in the end shrugged it off. Widow figured the guy would much rather be doing this than flying some admiral to his golf game or whatever these guys did during peacetime.
The pilot said, “Sure thing. She’ll be fine here.”
Jemma said, “I want my mommy!”
Widow said, “And you will see her soon. I need you to stay here for a moment. She doesn’t know you are coming.”
“It’s a surprise?”
“Yeah. Like a surprise,” Widow said, hoping that he wasn’t lying. He turned and jerked open the side door and jumped out.
Security was standing twenty feet from the chopper.
The front guy, without the windbreaker, said, “You can’t land here. What’s going on?”
“I’m with NCIS. We’ve got a situation at your hospital.”
“NCIS?” the guard asked. A lot of people had no idea what NCIS was. In fact, if it wasn’t for a long-running TV show, almost no civilian would know what NCIS was.
Widow said, “Navy police. We’re like Homeland Security.”
That last part made the guy light up. He looked at the word Navy written on the side of the chopper and didn’t need any more proof than that. He asked, “Are you like a cop?”
“Special Agent.”
“What’s going on?”
“Sorry we didn’t radio you. We’re here to apprehend a suspect. I can’t tell you more than that.”
The security guard asked, “Do you have jurisdiction here?”
“NCIS isn’t a military agency. We have jurisdiction. And I’ve got no more time to explain.”
“What do you need?”
“I need to know the floor and room number for a patient.”
The guy said, “What’s the name?”
“Lucy Hood. She’s a cancer patient. She’ll be somewhere critical. She’s on her last leg.”
“Okay. Let’s go. All the cancer patients are on seven.”
Widow followed the guards to a metal door that led to a staircase. They wound down a couple flights of stairs to an elevator. The guard pressed the call button, and they waited.
He got on his radio and asked another guard to radio back with the room number for Lucy.
The elevator door opened, and they got on and pressed seven. The ride was short because the building was only twelve stories high. They rode the elevator down, the bell dinged, and the guard on the other end of the radio came back and gave Lucy’s room number.
They entered a large lobby area with a nurse’s station out front like a toll booth to enter the cancer ward. The walls were a yellow-white. There was thick carpet and red cushioned chairs welded together and a sofa. A wide-screen television was implanted into the wall frame—custom made.
Generic potted plants and flowers were scattered along the walls and corners and next to a square pillar. The floor was well lit from bright bulbs under a tiled ceiling. Widow looked at the wall clock. It was nearing sundown, and it was two minutes before the end of the hour. This being Texas, there was always something about sundown. And less than two minutes before the hour meant that Lucy might be out of time. He’d killed John Glock. There was no one left to give orders except for the senator. In Widow’s experience, whenever someone gave a tactical kill order, it was generally on the hour or the half-hour mark. No one ever ordered a kill at ten minutes till or five minutes after. People everywhere started work at the hour mark. Same went for hitmen. They killed at the hour mark. But less than two minutes to go wasn’t encouraging because many people acted early. When someone’s a target, what was the difference between two minutes before and two after? It was all around the same time.
Widow looked at the faces in the waiting room. He saw an older
couple sobbing. A doctor stood over them. He’d probably just given them some bad news. He saw a pair of small children, a boy and a girl, a brother and sister. They were arguing over their mom’s purse. Not loud, just the way kids do. She was ignoring them and reading a magazine.
There was a man seated in the corner. Widow stared at him. It wasn’t him. No way. There was a sadness on the guy’s face that couldn’t be faked. He was about to lose someone close to him as well. No doubt.
The security guard without the windbreaker asked, “What now?”
“How many exits are there from this floor?”
“There’s the stairs and this elevator.”
The guard with the windbreaker spoke for the first time. He said, “There’s the service elevator too.”
Service elevator.
Widow said, “I need one of you to go and stand by the stairs and one to stay with this elevator. Get another guard to stay at the exits downstairs. No one leaves. Not yet.”
“Should we call the police?”
“They’ve been notified,” Widow lied.
The guard in the windbreaker took off to the stairs, and the other stayed behind. He told Widow the room number again. Widow nodded but remembered it.
He started off down the hall, following the sign to that room number. The nurse at the station didn’t stop him. The security guard waved at her.
Widow ran through a pair of double doors and onto a tiled floor that had been recently mopped. It was dry, but not all the way. He slid running down it and stopped at another corner. He passed busy staff members as he ran. Doctors talked to nurses, and nurses made their rounds.
He saw orderlies pushing carts and moving patients and making beds.
He came to another turn that was near a public restroom with a water fountain out front. Widow turned and stopped in front of Lucy’s room.
He pushed the heavy green door open and busted in. The door’s hydraulics stopped it from slamming, and it closed sluggishly behind him, making a slow swoosh sound.
The lights in the room were dim, but they were on. The bathroom door was wide open. Widow gazed around the room, his hand on the hilt of the Glock. The entire room was empty.
