“They made me buy packing tape.” Her shudder wasn’t fake. She’d never prepare a box to be mailed without that memory. “And cough medicine.” She wrapped the battered dinner jacket closer to her body, wanting to make sure that no pothole threw it open enough to reveal the holster. “They’re in a plastic bag at the station.”
He flipped open a notebook. “I’ll need your name—”
The ambulance stopped, and a paramedic wrenched open the rear doors, cutting off the rest of his question, but she knew what he wanted. Under no circumstances could she show him her passport, so she scrambled after the gurney.
Stig raised a hand and moaned a word that sounded like her name.
“I’m here, Will.” She reminded herself to use his new name. “Right here.”
Her single heel and broken shoe click-slapped alongside the squeaking wheels, making too much noise for her to hear whether the police office followed her and the EMTs. The deeper into the hospital she got, the farther from the police, Wend, Skafe and anyone else. “I promise I won’t leave.”
Chapter Five
The man was full of plans, crazy plans. On the gurney rolling down the hall, his chest covered in blood, he reached past the trauma nurse pressing a giant pad to his side and yanked Christina close enough to whisper, “Cut the lights and run.” He sounded perfectly normal.
Another nurse shouldered Christina aside. “Stand back,” she barked. “Family members wait at the end of the hall.”
Stig let go of her hand and groaned while he pointed at the wall on her right. His first finger stuck out from a loose fist, a gesture that didn’t look random. She glanced where he pointed, but saw nothing except a red fire alarm pull, an extinguisher, a bulletin board and a gray metal panel.
Staff wheeled the gurney through a set of swinging doors. She couldn’t follow, but she watched through the large glass windows as a team of people worked over Stig.
He porpoised with a violent seizure and sat straight up, facing her. His right arm raised, then jerked down in a pulling gesture before two nurses shoved his shoulders. With the medical staff occupied trying to push him flat and hook him to monitors, only she saw his lips quirk upward and his left eyelid close and open.
He’d winked.
She retreated until her spine hit the tile wall opposite the doors while doubt about his wounds infiltrated her gut. It would be insane, he couldn’t possibly have had Halloween-style fake blood stashed in his pocket, but everything else had been extraordinary. This might be too.
The hall was bright and long. The gray panel Stig had pointed at was a circuit box. He really had meant cut the lights.
She studied the cover of the fuse box, more confident than ever that whatever had happened in Paddington with the gun, he wasn’t dying. Despite the stuff that she’d assumed was blood all over the floor, and the hole she’d seen in his side, he wasn’t injured.
A small key dangled from the lock on the fuse box, like a gym locker key. Completely accessible.
She abandoned her useless footwear and glanced left and right. The cop was twenty feet to her left, in profile to her with a phone in his hand. Any minute he’d find out Stig wasn’t another police officer, then he’d confront her with fresh questions. At this point there was more than her business at stake, because the way she’d come to Britain had been the dumbest move she’d ever made. If a momentary plunge in the dark would let her vanish, she’d do it.
The key turned easily and the neat labels identified the switches inside. Only hit the lights, nothing else, don’t cut the equipment or the trauma bays except—she looked over her shoulder—number three, and this one at the bottom labeled alarm. The little clicks as she flipped the fuses caused an instant reaction. The entrance, the hall and finally the room holding Stig went dark.
She ran. Stig hadn’t said where, so she ran away from the cop and the faint streetlight coming through the far doors, away from the shouting that erupted in her wake, and deeper into the hospital. Commotion swelled behind her, but she dashed silently in her shredded stockings. The linoleum tiles were cool and slightly slippery beneath her feet. By the time she’d turned a corner, run the length of a corridor with widely spaced emergency exit lights and hit another turn, she could hear nothing but her own heavy breathing. She was on her own, unless Stig found her.
This hall ended at a door with a picture of stairs. She shoved at the steel bar handle, and the door swung into a concrete stairwell that stank of urine. An empty paper cup and food bags sat in the corner of the landing.
Up or down? Basements were for scary movies, so she chose up.
She couldn’t ascend the two flights as quickly as she’d pounded down the hall, partially because the spray-concrete coating on the stairs scraped through her stockings, and also because she had to grip her left side where the pain of a stitch reminded her that she wasn’t exercising enough back in California.
Her mouth was dry. She needed a drink of water, shoes and rest, but she had to hide or escape, whichever opportunity appeared first.
At the third floor, the glass inset in the door showed a dim and empty corridor, a logical place to hunt for hospital scrubs and booties to disguise herself. She also wanted to ditch the holster.
This hall was completely quiet. The counters had no computers, as if the area wasn’t in daily use. Gray morning light filtered through windows along one side, but the view was merely a brick wall with windows facing back.
She stayed as far from the windows as possible. It would be ridiculous to have a person in another building spot her and give her away.
The ER had smelled like disinfectant, but here the dusty furniture smelled like it needed a crew armed with cleaners. Nothing useful lying around obvious behind the counter, so she started yanking open drawers in the two battered metal desks. The futility left her mind with plenty of space to catalog the crimes she’d committed since landing at Heathrow. It was probably an odd felony like malicious mischief to cut the power in an ER, and then there was impersonating a police officer. Well, she hadn’t exactly done that, but she’d played along.
She ran out of drawers before she ran out of crimes, but the only contents were broken pencils, empty wrappers and a loose white button. Nothing for her.
The universal shape of a female marked a restroom opposite a cluster of torn couches. It should have a garbage can for the holster. This section of the hospital seemed so remote and unused that it might be a long time before the evidence was found.
Inside the bathroom, she saw her face in the mirror. Her hair was well past disheveled. The rain outside had added frizz and she must have rubbed her eyes after Stig was shot, because dark red smears marked one of her cheekbones. The other had the faintly purpled swelling of a fresh bruise under a road raspberry, a reminder of one of the times she’d been knocked down this evening. At this point, only her dress looked like the person who’d entered Bodeby’s last night.
The cops didn’t know who she was. Immigration had admitted her on Angelina’s passport, but she’d used her real business card at Bodeby’s, and she hadn’t given the police at Paddington a name. Her fingerprints would be all over the shooting scene at Paddington, the ambulance and the fuse box, but she hadn’t had to use a fingerprint scanner at Heathrow.
It was still possible that the woman who’d entered Britain with Angelina’s identity might not be linked to the woman at this morning’s mayhem. If she could walk out the hospital doors and blend with people on the morning sidewalks, she had a chance. Slim, sure, but she’d started a small business that had lasted six years. She could make long shots come home.
That was when she saw the black combat boots under a stall door. Someone else was in the bathroom. Her stockings were more hole and dirt than nylon, and bare feet drew attention. She needed those boots, and probably the clothes that went with them.
She faced the closed door, ig
nored the graffiti and cleared her throat.
The boots didn’t move.
She heard a sigh, so the occupant was alive.
The door drifted open when she tapped. A thin girl maybe in her twenties, but age was hard to pin on someone that skinny, sat fully clothed on top of the open toilet. The reason was obvious from the rubber tie on her arm and the needle balanced on the empty toilet paper dispenser.
The junkie’s eyelids drifted open. “Wotcher?”
“Hi.” That sounded too American, but she had no idea how to build a rapport with a strung-out chick on a toilet seat. “Hello, uh, would you be interested in selling your boots?”
The reply was a long stare from the abnormally tiny pupils.
She opened her purse and, without taking the money out where this woman could see, counted the bills she’d grabbed at an airport currency exchange. Fifty-odd pounds, which was about seventy or eighty dollars. “Twenty pounds for the boots and the jeans.”
“Forty or sod off.”
“For that worn-out crap? I bet you can buy better in a second-hand store and still have ten pounds for lunch. Or whatever.” Doubtful this chick ever ate, but she couldn’t let her desperation for those boots show.
“Forty. I got ’em, you don’t.” The girl closed her eyes and let her head fall back to the wall, which was good, because talking to someone with barely noticeable pupils was unsettling.
“For forty, I want your jean jacket too.”
No answer, so she popped the half-open door with the bottom of her fist. The clang as it hit the metal stall partition roused the girl.
“Said what?”
“The boots, jeans, T-shirt and jacket. For forty pounds.”
“Eh?”
“You agreed to trade clothes, remember?” With forty pounds held out in her hand, she walked backward as if beckoning a puppy with a treat. She had no qualms about lying to a drug addict too high to know. “Let’s switch.”
The other woman stumbled to her feet and leaned on the wall, oblivious to the grime, her unfocused gaze following the money.
Putting on this girl’s clothes, any item, was worse than wearing a bathing suit from the pool lost and found, because at least there was a lot of chlorine involved in borrowing one of those. Once she got out of here, she’d find a cheap clothing store and then a hot shower, but for now she unzipped the black dress. It was as gross as the junkie’s clothes.
As they both stripped, the sink mirrors offered pitiless reflections of their bodies. The other woman’s ribs showed. She didn’t wear a bra or need one.
“Here.” Christina helped her twist the black dress to face front, where it gaped away from her collarbone. “Zipper’s on the side.” The arm holes fell away from her spindly arms, which emphasized the scabs on the pale skin around her inner elbow.
“Your jacket’s nasty. Keep it.” The girl tossed the jacket on a sink.
“Seriously?” Christina looked up from where she was crouched, tying the boot laces. The black combat-style footwear was at least two sizes too large, but she wasn’t going to complain. “You’re being picky about covering the tracks on your arms?”
With a wordless shrug, the girl stuffed the two twenty-pound notes in her backpack and pulled out a small zipper case. When she turned back to the stall, presumably to pack up her damn needle, Christina peered at the backpack. A hat would be excellent.
There was a phone on top.
“All floors, all personnel, code yellow lockdown.” The public address in the lobby was loud enough to hear in the bathroom.
Her dry throat and inability to swallow might be due to her complete certainty of the rest of the announcement, or it might be because she was stuffing the junkie’s phone in the pocket of the jacket she’d bought.
“White female, dark hair, black dress, black jacket, no shoes—”
“Giz the ring too.”
Christina jumped. Had the girl seen her take the phone?
Leaning on the doorframe, the junkie smirked. Even strung out, she understood exactly how much desperation the announcement created.
“And white male, blond, black trousers, no shirt, potential chest wound. Report immediately. Do not confront. Repeat, do not confront.”
“The ring, and I walk out of here lookin’ like you. ’S what you want, innit?”
“I—” The single pearl on a silver band was the gift her biological father, the one she’d never met, had given her mother before he’d headed north for work. An engagement ring and a promise of a better life for both of them and their baby, a promise her mother had believed enough to wear on her finger every day of her life. After she married Frank, her mother had moved the ring to her right hand, but she’d never put it away. “I can’t.”
The junkie closed her eyes and for an insane second Christina visualized hitting her, taking a running start over to her and pushing her head into the wall, maybe grabbing the girl’s ears and then slamming her hard into the tile floor.
But the girl was taller than she was, and even though she was skinny, she was probably street-tough. Christina wasn’t going to hurt her, no matter that the bitch wanted her mother’s ring. “I’ve got another ten pounds. That’s it.”
“Tenner and the ring.”
Time that Christina knew she didn’t have stretched out between them.
“Just take this, alright?” She shoved the other British bill at the girl.
But apparently when an addict got an idea, it took hold like a fist. “And the ring. Then I won’t rat on you. No ring, no deal.”
She closed her eyes and felt the pearl twist around her finger. With her hands cupped to her chest, she let her thumb agitate that smooth little ball back and forth, a motion that had reminded her at some level of her mother stroking her hair away from her temple at bedtime. Giving up the ring wouldn’t mean giving up those memories, it would only mean that they were harder to find when she needed them.
“Here.” And fuck you, she wanted to add after the retreating figure.
Alone, she stared at her hair in the mirror. To look as much like the passport photo as possible, she had to keep it long, but she needed to conceal it now. Stig’s crumpled jacket had a silk lining, which she started to yank away from the hem.
A clatter of wheels outside the door gave her a few seconds warning, and she was already shuffling, shoulders hunched and head dropped forward, toward the last stall when the door opened. Her hands trembled as badly as the junkie’s when she reached for the handle.
“Your fingernails are the first giveaway.”
At that voice, her heart stopped and then charged forward. She turned and confirmed that it was Stig, no one else, leaning on a mop in the middle of the floor. His gray coveralls stretched around a significant gut and he leaned on the handle of a mop tucked into a yellow rolling bucket, but the crinkles around his eyes were definitely the man she’d met at Bodeby’s. He looked good. Only by clamping her elbows tight to her sides did she squelch the compulsion to run over and throw herself at him for a hug.
She followed his gaze to her hands and understood his comment about her fingernails. After she’d washed in the sink, her fingernails were clean, smooth and rounded, the hands of a recent manicure, not of a punk addict.
“Good to see you too.” Her voice trembled due to surprise, that was all.
“The shakes work, like you need a fix.” He dug his fingers into his side and scratched as casually as a dog before he swished the mop in the water. His injury had certainly been faked, because he didn’t look or sound wounded. “Hold out your hands.”
“I don’t understand, but I’m guessing those were blanks in the gun?” Relief that she hadn’t tried to threaten Skafe with a useless weapon mixed with dread that she had considered it, and fear of what would have happened if she had.
&nbs
p; He stretched the dripping mop at her, swiping it across her hands before she could jerk out of the way.
“Gross! I just washed my—”
“That’s the problem. You’re too clean for your clothes.”
That made sense, but she still wiped her wet palms on her denim-clad thighs.
“The private wing’s quite posh, but downstairs is where they bring the overdoses.”
“Thus the person I bought these from.”
“Under no circumstances open your mouth.”
“Why not?”
“Besides the painful accent, you have middle-class American teeth.” He grinned and his straight white teeth had been replaced by a yellowish, slightly overlapping bite. “No junkie has those pearlies. Bet you even floss.” He reached into his mouth and yanked until the teeth sat in his hand. “Here.” They glistened with his saliva in the middle of his more-than-grimy palm. She must have made a face, because he said, “You can’t afford to be up yourself.” He rinsed the teeth at the sink and held them out. “Not if you want to get out of here.”
“Use soap first.”
He rolled his eyes and returned to the sink. “Now pop them in, Miss Priss.”
They felt like a sports mouthguard, but when she smiled at the mirror, her face changed. She’d always had defined cheeks, not her mother’s rounded ones, so she imagined her biological father had been angles and edges, worked to lines like the wiry men she knew in the vineyard. With these teeth, her top lip stuck a little bit over and squished up to her nose enough to make it appear broader.
“Here’s the plan.”
“Ano-zzer one?” Pushing her tongue into the fake teeth was a weird sensation. She tried the motion again. “A-nother. There. This.”
“You sound natural. American, unfortunately, but natural.”
“Who the hell carries fake teeth in their pocket?” She crossed her arms and waited.
“What makes you think I stowed them in a pocket?”
She froze at the thought of the places these could have been.
The Second Lie (Immortal Vikings Book 2) Page 7
