by Dean Koontz
Jack Woburn’s vital signs will not be stable much longer.
After visiting Brenda Woburn in the ICU, John Calvino stopped in the adjacent visitors’ lounge to leave his card—his home and cell numbers written on the back—with Davinia Woburn and her aunt Lois. Lenny remained asleep on the austere couch.
“Your mother’s a brave woman,” John told the girl.
Davinia nodded. “She’s my hero. She always has been.”
“She may want to call me. I’m always available, day or night.”
“We just heard Daddy’s out of surgery,” Davinia said. She was radiant. “He’s going to be all right.”
She seemed to John like a cross between Minette and Naomi, though he could not say why. He wanted to hug her, but he hardly knew her.
“It’s looking better, anyway,” said Lois. “They’ll probably be bringing Jack up here in another hour, maybe sooner.”
“That’s great,” John said. “That’s wonderful. Remember—day or night, if your mother has anything more to tell me.”
He followed the corridor to the elevator alcove. Six stainless-steel doors, three on each side. According to the indicator boards, two cars were downbound, one was ascending, one was in the basement, and two were at the ground floor. He pushed the call button, and a car on the ground floor headed up.
Officer Andy Tane pushes through the swinging door to the post-op recovery room. The place is quiet and softly lighted. The air smells of an antibacterial cleaning solution.
The only patient present is Jack Woburn. He’s lying on a gurney, a sheet drawn up to his shoulders. He’s sleeping, hooked to a heart monitor and a ventilator.
Jack doesn’t look good. He could look worse.
In an alcove off the recovery room, a nurse sits at a computer, typing. She doesn’t see Andy enter.
After killing Mickey Scriver, Andy reloaded his service pistol. You always want a full magazine when you’re after a bad guy, and you especially want a full magazine when you are the bad guy. He puts the muzzle under Jack Woburn’s chin and fires one round.
The hard crack of the shot spins the nurse in her chair, and she springs to her feet just as the airborne blood and tissue soil the white-tile floor. She sees Andy, his gun drawn, and she’s too stunned to scream. She dives out of sight, scrambling for whatever pathetic cover the alcove offers, then she lets out a scream, and she’s got a good one.
Because Andy’s rider has no interest in the nurse, Andy turns away from her and leaves the recovery room. The elevator car in which he ascended from the ground floor is still on 2. The doors slide open the moment he pushes the call button. Inside, he presses DOOR CLOSE on the control panel to hurry the process, then presses 10, and the car rises toward satisfaction.
According to the indicator boards, two cars were on the way up, the first a floor behind the other. When one of them arrived, John boarded it and pressed the button marked LOBBY.
Just as the doors began to close, a nurse hurried into the alcove, hoping to catch the car. John jammed his thumb on the DOOR OPEN button to accommodate her.
“Thanks a bunch,” she said.
“No problem.”
As the doors sighed shut a second time, he heard the ding of another car arriving on the tenth floor.
Passing the open doors to the ICU visitors’ lounge, Andy’s rider sees Jack Woburn’s nagging bitch of a sister—as Reese Salsetto had thought of her—and the exquisite girl whom it’s still got a chance to ruin, such a deliciously creamy little twist, and the moon-faced boy sleeping on a couch.
The girl and the woman see Andy, but they have no reason to wonder about him. He will deal with both sluts when the oh-so-heroic, self-sacrificing mother is forced to finish what she started by her own hand: dying.
He proceeds twenty feet to the end of the corridor, where the door to the intensive-care unit is locked. He presses the intercom button to call a nurse. When one of them replies, asking if she can help him, he glances back to be certain that the hallway is deserted and that no one can overhear him, and then he says, “It’s a police emergency.”
A nurse arrives to look at him through the window in the door. Andy taps his badge impatiently. Opening the door but blocking his entrance, she says, “What emergency?”
Andy puts a hand on her shoulder, and even though she tries to shrug his hand off, the rider knows her entirely in the instant. It could take her if necessary. Her name is Kaylin Amhurst, and she is an extremely cautious angel of death who over the years has decided that certain patients have been too much of a drain on the medical system and has euthanized eleven of them, the most recent being a woman named Charlain Oates.
Andy says, “Charlain Oates was only fifty-six and had a damn good chance of recovering.”
Stunned, eyes protuberant, mouth sucking for breath that she can’t draw in, like a fish drowning in air, Kaylin Amhurst backs away from him.
Sixteen beds occupy the perimeter of the room. A monitoring station stands in the center, where two other nurses are at work.
“Go to your station, Nurse Amhurst, and wait for me,” Andy says, in the cold tone of voice that he uses with any perpetrator.
Of the sixteen beds, seven are unoccupied, and curtains are drawn around the other nine. But Andy’s rider knows in which bay Brenda Woburn waits, because that, too, was learned from Kaylin Amhurst when the whole of her was read at a touch.
It doesn’t want to use his gun a lot, preferably not at all, because gunfire will alert those in the visitors’ lounge, with whom it will deal next. It must not scare off the delectable girl and then have to smell her down like a hound snuffling after a bitch in heat.
As Amhurst retreats to the monitoring station, the other two nurses look up, perplexed. One of them frowns, wondering what Andy’s doing in here, but no doubt she assumes that he wouldn’t have gotten past the angel of death unless his mission was legitimate.
At Brenda Woburn’s bay, he pulls back the curtain, then closes it after himself. Awake, alert, she turns her head toward him, but she isn’t alarmed because he is a policeman, after all, sworn to defend and protect.
He leans over the low bed railing and says, “I have wonderful news for you, Brenda. I’m going to suck Davinia’s sweet tongue right out of her mouth.”
Andy is a large man, solidly muscled, with big fists. As the woman tries to rise from her pillows, he hammers her throat with everything he’s got—once, twice, three times, four—crushing her larynx, her airway, rupturing arteries.
The nurse from the tenth floor got off at the eighth, and an orderly boarded, pushing a wheeled cart holding several white boxes. He was Hispanic, thirty-something, with an overbite, teeth as square and white as Chiclets, and he looked familiar.
He pushed the button for the sixth floor and said, “Remember me, Detective Calvino?”
“I do, but I don’t know from where.”
“My brother’s Ernesto Juarez. You cleared him of killing his girlfriend, Serita.”
“Yeah, sure, you’re Enrique, Ricky.” The orderly grinned and nodded, and John said, “How’s Ernesto doing these days?”
“He’s okay, he’s good. It’s four years, but he’s still grieving, you know, it was hard for him. Half the family thought he did it, you know, and he’s never quite got over they didn’t have faith in him.”
At the sixth floor, Enrique kept a thumb on the button that held the door open, while John got caught up on where Ernesto was employed these days and what his hopes were.
Working homicides, you usually recognized your guy the first time he walked on the scene, and it was only a matter of discovering what mistakes he made, so you could hang him. You did not often get a chance to clear someone who was innocent but who looked guilty from sixteen different angles, and it was satisfying when it happened.
With her throat crushed, she can’t breathe, so her heart races and her blood pressure spikes. Monitors sound soft alarms.
Andy turns away from the bed, and as he reaches for
the curtain, a nurse—not the angel of death—whisks it open, steel-bead glides clicking softly in the track. She says, “What’re you doing?”
He punches her in the face, and she goes down, and he steps over her. His rider is exhilarated, striding toward the door to the corridor, the ultimate prize within reach.
Kaylin Amhurst cowers against the central monitoring station, as pale as any of her patients after she euthanized them. The third nurse is on the phone, and Andy hears her say “security,” but he’s rolling now. The outcome is inevitable.
When he steps into the corridor, drawing his pistol, no one in the visitors’ lounge has heard anything from the ICU. No one has come out here to investigate.
They’re still in the positions where he last saw them. Entering the room, he shoots the dozing boy twice, point-blank, and the kid is dead in his sleep. Aunt Lois starts up from her chair as if she can somehow stop him. He pistol-whips her to her knees and then kicks her flat.
He is between the girl and the door. She can’t get past him, but she stands defiant, scared and at a dramatic physical disadvantage, yet ready to defend herself. If she has some fight in her, she will claw and bite. Although the rider doesn’t care what happens to its horse, there isn’t time for a prolonged struggle. It doesn’t want to shoot her because it still has a good chance to use her, which is an important part of doing this right.
So Andy Tane snatches the four-inch can of capsaicin spray out of its pouch on his utility belt and, from a distance of eight feet, he squirts her twice. The first stream catches the outer corner of her right eye and sweeps across her left. The second stream spatters her nose and—as she cries out in surprise—splashes into her mouth.
The girl is instantly disoriented, virtually blind, everything a bright blur, and she’s desperately wheezing, overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation, though she is not suffocating. Andy has been sprayed with an aerosol projector as part of his police training. He knows how it feels. He knows how helpless she is now.
Holstering his pistol and the aerosol can, he moves around Davinia. He seizes her from behind, pulls her against him, and encircles her neck with his left arm. It’s not a full choke hold because he doesn’t complete it by gripping his left wrist with his right hand. But he’s got her tight. She’s not going anywhere he doesn’t want her to go.
The fumes from the capsaicin spray burn in his nose, but direct contact is necessary for a serious effect. He has no difficulty breathing or seeing.
At the small of the girl’s back, he grabs the belt of her jeans. Using that handle, pushing up on her chin with the arm that’s around her neck, he lifts her off her feet. She kicks backward feebly and claws at his forearm, but he tightens the choke hold for a moment, which panics her because already she has trouble getting her breath, and she relents.
Pulling her tight against him, holding her off the floor, he carries her out of the visitors’ lounge. Although seventeen, she’s petite and weighs no more than a hundred pounds. He could carry her a couple of city blocks if he needed to do so.
In the corridor, the door to the ICU is closed. But to the right, maybe fifty feet away, a group of people in white uniforms—three nurses, two orderlies—are hesitantly venturing this way, in response to the shots and the girl’s cries. They halt when they see him.
To further confuse them, he shouts, “Police! Stay back!”
Given a closer look at the girl, they won’t be able to believe she is a threat to anyone, so Andy Tane isn’t going to carry her through them to the elevator alcove. Anyway, there’s a more direct route to where his rider wants him to go. Across the hall from the ICU lounge is a fire exit. The door features a push-bar handle. He slams through with the girl, onto the tenth-floor landing.
If he goes down, he won’t get to his car and away before he’s stopped. His best chance to do what he wants with her is to go up.
Enrique Juarez said good-bye to John, took his thumb off the DOOR OPEN button, and pushed the stainless-steel cart into the sixth-floor elevator alcove.
The doors closed, and the car descended once more. Between the fourth and third floors, a voice arose in the elevator shaft, evidently from another car that shared it. Someone talking loudly. Agitatedly. As if on a phone. The car passed. John thought it had been ascending, the voice fading on the rise.
35
OFFICER TANE, WHIPPED AND SPURRED BY HIS SECRET RIDER, half carries and half drags the pepper-sprayed and gasping girl up two flights of concrete stairs toward the last floor in the building. Up there are not merely the administrative offices but also the corporate offices of the parent company and two conference rooms. The rider has learned this not from Andy Candy but from Kaylin Amhurst, the one-nurse death panel and Jack Kevorkian acolyte.
The upper door opens into a windowless, wood-paneled receiving vestibule containing no furniture. Only three elevators come to this final floor. Opposite the fire exit are double doors to a reception lounge. It’s locked at this hour. Corporate officers don’t work the graveyard shift. Andy draws his pistol. Fires two rounds not into the door that features the lock assembly, but into the one that receives the deadbolt. Chunks, chips, splinters of wood explode. The mahogany disintegrates around the bolt. He kicks the door open.
Startled by the shots and backspray of debris, the girl screams. She has no volume, but the effort exacerbates her breathing. She’s wheezing, choking, gagging at the same time—and still struggling, but weakly.
An alarm sounds, not a siren—this is a hospital, after all—but a soft beep-beep-beep followed by a recorded voice: “You have violated a restricted area. Leave at once. The police have been called.”
With his left arm still around the girl’s neck, Andy forces her through the doorway, into the reception lounge. Big desk with a granite top. Chairs. Coffee table with magazines. Large posters of impressionist paintings.
Two closed doors lead out of the room. The one to the left will open on a hallway that serves the rest of the eleventh floor. The one straight ahead is to a conference room. He manhandles Davinia through the second door.
The recorded voice continues to warn him of the seriousness of his trespass.
Andy Tane is figuratively and literally a horse, as strong as one, but his rider brings to him the additional supernatural strength of a furious and obsessed spirit. Once in the conference room, Andy throws the girl aside, out of his way. She hits the floor, tumbles, knocks her head against the wall.
Andy switches on the lights, slams the door, twists the thumb-turn that drives home the deadbolt. He says, “Now she’s ours, Andy Candy. Now she’s all ours.”
John stepped out of the elevator and crossed the deserted lobby, which was hushed in the fluorescent half-light. The faint squeak of his shoes on the polished travertine sounded like the plaintive whimpers of a wounded animal.
He glanced at a few high-placed cameras, certain that primary public spaces of the hospital were monitored around the clock by guards at a central station. He understood the need for security in a world gone as wrong as this one, but the prospect of an oncoming universal surveillance dismayed him. He suspected that, ironically, society would be less safe under such a regime.
The automatic doors slid open. He stepped out, into the portico, and stood for a moment, breathing deeply of the cool night air, which seemed country-fresh to him in his current mood.
The restaging of the Sollenburg killings with the Woburn family had been thwarted by a quick-thinking woman skilled with a handgun. This bane, this ordained threat, this curse, whatever it should be called, was not a fate set in stone. If the Woburn family could be saved, so could the Calvinos. In fact, the disruption of the new cycle of crimes might have already broken the spell. The best-laid plans of men most often failed or withered short of fulfillment, and a curse was indeed a kind of plan.
A police car was parked in the outer of the two lanes, between the portico columns. John’s Ford stood in front of the cruiser, which had not been there when he arrived.
>
The hospital driveway continued straight along the front of the building, beyond the portico. At both ends, it curved out toward the street.
The building faced east. The ER entrance lay on the west side. Maybe that farther entrance bustled with activity, but here in the east, long after visiting hours, the night was uncannily quiet, not just the hospital but also the light-stippled buildings of the city beyond, rising toward a moon-ruled sky.
He stood there, enjoying the coolness and the quiet city.
Blinking to clear her stinging eyes, weeping copiously, breathing slightly better but not easily, spitting out the bitter hotness of the capsaicinoids administered by the aerosol projector, Davinia crawls past the long conference table. She frantically paws at the chairs, trying to find the end of them and something else, maybe something she can use as a weapon.
Andy Tane doesn’t need to find a weapon. He’s a walking weapon: his fists, his teeth, the singular viciousness of his rider. Besides, he possesses two deadly weapons. One is the pistol. On his braided utility belt are the swivel holster with the gun, two leather pouches each holding a spare magazine, a Mace holder, a handcuff case, a key strap from which also dangles a gleaming nickel-plated whistle, and a flap-covered holder with two sleeves for pens. He carries one pen and, in the second sleeve, a slim switchblade knife. The blade isn’t issued by the department. It’s not even legal. It’s a drop knife that he can plant on a suspect to explain an otherwise unjustifiable shooting.
By the lightest touch of the inset button on the mother-of-pearl handle, the blade springs out. Five razor-edged inches. A point keen enough to pierce animal hide.
The question is time. There’s not enough precious time both to deflower her and to cut her up alive. One or the other. Debauchment or disembowelment. Ravish or butcher. Either will be a pleasure for the rider. The recorded voice of the alarm is still hectoring. The police are coming. The hospital security guards will be here even sooner, in minutes, and they also will be armed. Rape or cut. The object is to terrorize. Break her spirit. Reduce her to a godless despair.
