by Jonas Saul
He raised the gun, aimed it at her forehead.
“Wait!” she yelled. “At least tell me why you’re into she-males.”
He paused, frowning, then lowered the weapon. “What?”
“You know, ladyboys. Why are you so into them?”
“What the hell are you talking about? You’re just wasting time.”
She dropped to the ground in an attempt to roll under the car behind her as the gun fired. The loud report forced a scream from her lips as she rolled. Unfortunately, the car was too low to the ground for her to crawl all the way under it.
“Fuck!” she railed against it, smacking the underside with her open hand.
The gun went off again. She hadn’t felt the impact of the bullet. It could have happened when she had dropped to the pavement. In a panic to escape, she rolled out from under the car and bumped into something on the pavement behind her. Heart thudding in her chest, Sarah looked into the dead eyes of Detective Timothy Simmons.
Disbelief enveloped her as she laid there frozen, the detective’s blood oozing into her shirt and the top of her pants near the belt line.
“What the hell?” she whispered. “He shot himself?”
As soon as she spoke the words, she knew that someone else had shot Tim in the neck and hip area. Tim’s unfired gun was still in his dead hand. His cell phone had popped out of his jacket pocket and tumbled to where it lay under her shoulder now.
Who shot the cop?
Another man stepped out from between two vehicles five down from her. He remained hunched over moving with stealth as he neared her position. She had allowed the panic of the moment to take over and hadn’t gotten up for fear a sniper was out there trying to off people in the parking lot.
“Here,” the man said as he tossed something at her.
She caught it in mid air. A gun, the smell of cordite still issuing from its muzzle.
The weapon that killed Simmons.
The man, shrouded in shadows, turned his face away and started off down the parking lot. Sarah checked the chamber. The gun was empty. A moment ago it had two bullets and both were in Simmons’ body now.
Suddenly the man turned back around and pulled another gun.
“Really?” Sarah asked. “Doesn’t this get old?”
“Freeze!” the man yelled. “Sarah Roberts, you’re under arrest. Drop the weapon or I’ll have to shoot.”
She flung the weapon away, shock settling over her system as she lay with the dead detective.
Get tougher, Sarah. Like the old days. Shake this off and start running.
Sarah sat up, spun on her butt and lay back down beside a pickup truck. Before rolling away, she snatched Simmons’ cell phone off the pavement and gripped it close to her body.
The man fired, the bullet nicking the cement where her face had been a second before. Only a foot had separated her from an entry wound.
“Stay where you are, Sarah,” the man yelled.
His footfalls reached her as he ran toward her position. She rolled under the pickup, waited until he rounded the back of the vehicle, then rolled out the other side. Jumping to her feet, she flung the baseball cap behind her to make a scuffling noise distraction, and ran for the hospital, hoping she didn’t get a bullet in the back for her efforts.
Bobbing and weaving between vehicles, Sarah ran as if a pack of salivating Rottweilers were on her heels. She chanced a look over her shoulder, but the man was gone. No one was chasing her and no one was pointing a weapon at her.
The door she had exited not ten minutes ago was clear of people. She rushed inside and started down the stairs.
The nightmare wasn’t over. It was just beginning.
“Hey!” a hospital security guard shouted from one stair level above her. “You can’t go down there,” he shouted.
His heavy steps echoed down after her.
She descended the stairs toward the morgue—Vivian’s prophecy—knowing that Simmons was dead and the gun that killed him was covered with her fingerprints. Whoever that man was in the parking lot knew she would be there. That person knew Simmons was looking for her. They also had an agenda, and that agenda was to execute Simmons.
What they didn’t count on was Sarah getting away. What they won’t count on is Sarah coming back to continue killing in the name of what was right.
That or die trying.
The guard chased her down the stairs. She slammed a door shut, then shoved a chair behind it before racing down a hallway going deeper into the bowels of the cancer hospital.
Chapter 20
In the quiet basement of the Princess Margaret Hospital, empty of people due to the evacuation, Sarah checked doors along the corridor. The alarm had silenced. Other than the recently deceased, this area was vacant. She was two hallways away from the guard who chased her down the flight of stairs. Whether he got through the blocked door or not, she wasn’t sure. But one thing she was sure of, they were coming. The guard would report her. The man from the parking lot—Simmons’ murderer—would come for her, too. Locating an exit and simply walking out wasn’t looking good. She had to find a place to hide until normal hospital activity resumed.
But where?
A room on the right was bathed in a purple florescent light that reminded her of a nightclub. She had a brief moment where she wondered what that was for but Vivian whispered something to her about sanitization and germs.
Sarah frowned and kept moving down the hallway.
A door banged in a distant corridor. Voices floated through the corridor coming her way. Someone said the word girl and chased her.
Vivian, a temporary hiding place would help.
Sarah ran another dozen feet and turned into a cavernous room with what looked like three stainless-steel shelves on wheels in the shape of beds.
Autopsy room? Embalming room?
She wasn’t sure, but maybe the embalming happened after the dead left the hospital at a funeral home.
The wall to her left was covered with steel doors, the size of mini fridge doors. They had large numbers on the doors and small circular temperature gauges that upon closer inspection said the inside was about three degrees Celsius, or thirty-seven Fahrenheit.
Cold storage. Dead bodies.
Another door banged in the corridor, closer this time. They were coming and unless she was willing to try to explain everything away, which probably wouldn’t be very effective, she had to hide.
“No way,” Sarah said to the wall of steel doors.
She glanced over her shoulder at the opening to the room. Someone was coming. Many someones. And they were close.
“Shit.”
She opened a door nearest the far wall. A soft smell of death wafted out as the tagged feet of a corpse came into view.
She jammed that door closed and checked another one. Then another, gasping for breath as the smells infused the air with its particular toxins.
Footsteps were closer.
The next door was waist high. When she opened it and discovered it to be empty, the odor of disinfectant hitting her nose, she jammed Simmons’ cell phone in her back pocket and dove inside, head first. Once inside, she used her foot to ease the door closed as far as she could without it locking her in.
A thin strip of light kept her from absolute darkness and losing her mind. How much oxygen would one of these things offer? How long could she stay in here, huddled up against the cold? How long could a person handle a few degrees above freezing?
The voices were in the room now.
She shivered with a full-body shake, but bit down on the moan that followed. Every part of her skin that touched the inner walls of the cold storage unit felt like it rested on ice.
She would wait until the voices disappeared. Once they were gone, she would kick the door open and nonchalantly leave this place. She hated hospitals as a rule. Only stayed in them if absolutely needed. To be stuck in one, and not just stuck, hiding in the morgue, was making her sick.
Add to tha
t how bad this trip to Toronto had turned out to be. What would Aaron think of her now? Sure, come to Toronto, meet with Aaron, have a chat, work things out. Instead, she was wanted for murder and she had set Aaron up to be arrested in a violent takedown.
The perils of being my boyfriend.
Maybe that was what the message was here. Maybe she shouldn’t be attached. Perhaps someone in Sarah’s line of work was destined to be single.
Parkman came to mind. She loved him in a different way and yet he seemed to make it around her just fine. So maybe Aaron could, too?
She hoped so. That is if Aaron wanted to be around her. Sarah wanted this life, needed it. She wanted to make things better wherever she could. It was in her soul, her belief system and her will to fight. But Aaron just wanted her without the other shit. That was why he left California. That was why he left her.
This might have been a hopeless trip. It occurred to her as the shakes took over and her body fought the frigid temperatures inside cold storage, that they were probably done as a couple.
The light near her feet dimmed and then brightened again. Someone was leaning on the door. She had no defense. If they opened the coffin-sized chamber they could shoot her and close the door behind them, leaving it closed for a few weeks. Then commit her to the crematorium. No one would ever find her.
That’s how it’s done, Vivian whispered.
The shadow was at the door again.
“Excuse me, doctor?” a man said. “Are these doors supposed to be open?”
“No, Officer,” another man said.
The light by her feet disappeared as the cold storage door closed and locked from the outside.
“Oh shit,” Sarah whispered.
There was no inside release lever. Until someone came and opened the door to let her out, she was stuck inside a cold storage chamber in the basement morgue at the Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital.
Her breath caught in her throat. She broke out in a full-body sweat even though the inside of the pitch-black chamber suddenly got colder.
Then she was panting like she had run a hundred-meter dash. Her heart pounded in her chest like a caged animal angry at the cage that confined it. Her bladder urged release as Sarah fought to control her panic. With each gasp of air, she wondered how much oxygen was left, while wondering what cold storage unit she was in.
She hadn’t read the number on the outside of the door. She had no idea what chamber she was in on a wall littered with doors.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit …”
Chapter 21
Outside the restaurant, Parkman asked Aaron if he wanted to join him for a digestivo before he headed to his hotel room.
“Sounds good to me,” Aaron said.
They walked north on Yonge Street until they found a bar where the music wasn’t too loud. Aaron located a table while Parkman went and ordered two Johnny Walkers.
Once seated, Parkman nudged his briefcase up against the wall beside the table and took a large drink from his glass.
“So I got to thinking,” he said. “If researching Niles Mason gave me nothing, maybe Sarah wanted me to go deeper. So I looked into his partner, Marina Diner.”
Aaron set his glass down and stared across the table at Parkman. “What did you find?”
“She’s even cleaner than Niles and that’s saying something because you can’t get cleaner than Niles.”
Aaron drank half his whiskey in one gulp.
“Is there something else in that file except clean cops?” Aaron asked.
“There is one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“There’s a cop missing. Officer Mark Hemmings has been missing since just after last Christmas.”
“How is that connected?”
“Hemmings was Mason’s old partner.”
“Okay. Fluke coincidence since Sarah asked you to look into Niles, or do you think Niles has something to do with Hemmings’ disappearance?”
Parkman popped another toothpick from his stash into his mouth, played with it a moment, then drank the rest of his whiskey.
“If Niles had anything to do with it, he’s damn good. The night Hemmings was reported missing, Niles was on vacation. I checked where he went and found pictures of Cancun and the Mayan ruins on his Facebook timeline. Niles wasn’t even in the country when Hemmings disappeared.”
“So it wasn’t Niles Mason?”
“It wasn’t Niles, but there’s something. Otherwise Sarah wouldn’t have asked me to look up—” Parkman’s cell phone buzzed notifying him he’d received a text.
He looked down at it.
“That’s weird,” he said.
“What?” Aaron asked.
“I just got a text that says, and I quote, ‘I’m in the cancer hospital morgue. I’m freezing. Hurry.’ And it’s from a number that I don’t know.”
“That is weird.”
Parkman tilted his head in thought and stared at Aaron through half-lidded eyes. “You don’t think it’s Sarah, do you?”
“Why wouldn’t she use her own cell?”
Parkman shrugged as he looked down at his phone and reread the text. “Not sure. I’ll text back and ask.”
After typing his question back, he headed to the bar for two more whiskeys. By the time he retook his seat, his phone buzzed again.
“Listen to this,” Parkman said. Aaron leaned closer, already half done his beverage. His eyes were already swimming. “It says, ‘Vineyard. Santa Rosa. Gun. Almost shot you. Come now or when I get out, I will shoot you for this. Hurry. Freezing my shit off.’” Parkman met Aaron’s gaze. “That’s Sarah.”
“Then we have to go. Now.”
“Where’s the cancer hospital?” Parkman asked, already jumping out of his chair. He shot back the rest of his drink and Aaron did the same.
“Don’t know.”
Aaron ran for the bar and tossed a couple of twenties on the counter.
“Hey, barkeep? Where’s the cancer hospital?”
“Princess Margaret is the cancer hospital,” the bartender said, a towel and a glass in his hand.
“Where’s that?”
The bartender frowned and pointed out the window. “That way.”
“Thanks, you’ve been a great help,” Aaron said sarcastically.
Parkman grabbed Aaron’s arm and said, “C’mon. We don’t need to know where it is.”
They headed for the doors. Clearly Aaron didn’t understand how they would get there if they didn’t need to know where they were going.
“But how?” Aaron started. “I don’t get it, Parkman. And I don’t drink whiskey too often. I don’t feel so good. That was a lot of—”
“I know, Aaron. Just come on.” Parkman shot a hand out to hail a cab. A taxi did a U-turn and pulled up alongside them.
Once inside, the driver asked them where they wanted to go as Aaron slouched in the seat, leaning his face against the window.
“Take us to the Princess Margaret Cancer Hospital,” Parkman said.
“Got it.”
The driver watched his mirrors a moment, waited until a few cars had passed, then did another U-turn and headed south on Yonge Street.
Parkman’s cell buzzed again. He checked the message.
“She wants to know if I’m coming.”
He typed back that they were on their way.
“I told her we were both coming. She hasn’t responded.” Parkman looked up from his phone. Aaron stared out the window as if he was watching the people on the busy sidewalks at this hour. “Did you hear me?”
“Yeah. Just thinking about Sarah and about this cycle of always going in after her.”
“Just like California, eh?”
“Just like California. And all the other times.”
“You okay to do this?”
“That’s what I was thinking about.” Aaron turned to address Parkman.
“And?”
“And I’m excited to step up and be there for her. I let her down in Ca
lifornia. I let myself down. When I pulled away, Sarah was all I could think about. I won’t do that again. I owe her. I owe her big. It’s funny how this situation has been put in front of me. I’ve been given a chance to come for her, to help her and I won’t fuck that chance up. I’m in all the way, Parkman. That is, if she’ll have me.”
