Dr Nikki Roberts should never have gotten herself involved with him. But the good doctor made her own bed. Mick Johnson knew what he had to do – if Luis Rodriguez, the boss, hadn’t already done it for him.
Turning on his flashlight, Johnson swiftly found the fuse box and flipped up the main switch. Light flooded the cramped space, momentarily blinding him. He heard footsteps, running, on the floor above.
‘Luis!’ he called out, his deep voice echoing up the empty stairwell.
He started to climb.
Luis Rodriguez shielded his eyes against the dazzling light, instinctively pressing his back against the wall and raising his gun blindly. He could hear someone calling to him from below, but he didn’t give him much thought. He would deal with them later. Right now he was on the hunt, his nostrils flaring for the scent of blood. Dr Roberts’ blood.
The thought of the kill excited him. He could almost taste her. ‘I’m coming!’ he called out in a sing-song voice, taunting, like a child playing hide and go seek. As his eyes began to adjust to the light, he saw dark splashes of blood, leading towards the staircase. His groin still throbbed but the pain was nothing compared to the thrill of the chase. Killing Willie Baden had been the hors d’oeuvre, an amuse-bouche before the main event. After all this time, he was finally going to do it. He was going to execute that bitch. Then he and Anne would live happily ever after.
‘Come out, come out wherever you are!’
He pushed open the door to the stairs.
Nikki had been asleep when the lights came back on, dazzlingly bright, dragging her reluctantly back into consciousness. The land of the living. But not for long. Rodriguez would find her and kill her, like he had killed Baden. She knew that now. She couldn’t move and no one was coming to save her. But she didn’t care.
Soon she would be with Doug. Then she would know the truth at last. Either that, or she would be in a place where truth no longer mattered.
I’m so tired.
Her eyelids fluttered. She gazed blankly at the bloody wound below her knee. Her whole leg had stiffened and no longer felt part of her. There was pain, but it wasn’t the sharp, stinging pain of before. More of a numbing ache, like the kind you get swimming in the cold ocean.
With a click, the door above her opened. She heard Rodriguez’s voice, taunting her, thick with cruelty and excitement. ‘Where are you, Doctor? I’m coming.’
Fear returned to her then, unexpected. Some primal instinct to survive, its roots deeper than exhaustion, deeper than pain, took hold. She shrank back into her alcove, her terror building with each slow, deliberate step he took towards her. She saw his boots first, black and polished, then the legs of his suit trousers. She heard a whimper of fear and submission, before realizing with shame that the noise came from her own lips.
‘There you are, my dear.’ He loomed above her like a malevolent giant, his legs slightly apart, his gun held casually at his side as she cowered beneath him. ‘Look at me, please.’
Nikki shook her head, pleading.
‘I SAID LOOK AT ME, BITCH!’ Luis roared, his voice ricocheting off the stairwell walls like the boom of a canon.
Shaking uncontrollably with fright, Nikki did as he said. She found herself looking up into a face that might have been handsome were it not so contorted with hatred. Luis’s eyes were two hard brown stones of polished cruelty, glinting down at his victim, compassionless and cold. He raised his gun slowly, savoring the moment, a wolfish smile spreading over his thin, sadist’s lips.
‘Rodriguez! Put your hands in the air! Police!’
Goodman’s voice sounded distant to Nikki. Unreal, like a voice in a dream.
Apparently, Luis Rodriguez felt the same as he continued raising his gun and smiling, unconcerned.
‘I’m right behind you, Luis. Do not shoot her.’
Nikki saw Goodman then, standing on the top landing, his service weapon pointed directly at Rodriguez’s back. He wasn’t in uniform, but everything about him radiated confidence and authority. The firm set of his jaw, the steady command in his voice.
He’s come to save me! Everything’s going to be all right after all.
The relief was overwhelming. Nikki looked from Goodman to Rodriguez and back again as for a long, tense moment, neither man lowered their weapon. Then, his smile still fixed, Rodriguez slowly lowered his arm and let his pistol clatter to the ground.
Turning around, he seemed oddly relaxed, greeting Goodman almost like an old friend. ‘See, Detective? I didn’t shoot her. I’m sure she appreciates your romantic gesture.’ He chuckled, as if all this were some sort of elaborate practical joke. ‘So what happens now? Are you going to arrest me?’
He held out his arms as if for handcuffs, still grinning.
He’s insane, thought Nikki, wondering how she hadn’t realized this before. He’s not just bad, he’s mad. Crazy. Deranged.
She looked gratefully up at Goodman, waiting for him to read Rodriguez his rights, and wondering if any back-up were on its way. She wouldn’t feel completely safe until Rodriguez was cuffed and taken away. Even without his gun he was a strong man and …
Bang!
A single shot rang out. At such close range, Rodriguez’s skull exploded. Shards of bone and brain tissue spewed onto the walls of the stairwell. Nikki’s blouse, face and hands were all liberally splattered with blood.
Coolly stepping over Rodriguez’s corpse, Goodman walked down to where Nikki lay, curled up in the cramped alcove. He crouched next to her.
‘You killed him,’ she whispered. She was in shock, her breath coming in short, erratic gasps.
‘Yes.’ Reaching out, Goodman laid a hand softly against her blood-splattered cheek.
‘You didn’t try to arrest him.’
‘No,’ he said soothingly. ‘I didn’t.’
Nikki started to tremble violently. Then she started to cry, her body dissolving into long, shuddering sobs of relief.
‘Thank you!’ Reaching up, she put her hands around his neck and hugged him.
After a few moments clinging to him, breathing in his familiar scent, the scent of safety and normalcy and hope, she finally let go, sinking back weakly against the wall. Her leg was completely numb now, like a stone. She needed to get to hospital, fast.
‘You saved my life,’ she said gratefully, her eyes seeking out his own.
He looked back at her, and for a second Nikki was filled with confusion. His expression was exactly like Rodriguez’s had been. Evil.
‘You really are an incredibly stupid woman,’ he sneered, pressing his gun to Nikki’s temple.
Outside in the street, a seamstress heard another loud bang from the empty warehouse. Then nothing.
Quickening her pace, she hurried to her bus stop and hopped aboard.
She didn’t look back.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Fiona McManus loved her job at Good Samaritan Hospital. Not that Fiona saw nursing as a ‘job’ per se. In her view it was more of a vocation. A calling, to help others, to serve. ‘Just as long as it’s a calling that pays the bills,’ Fiona’s mother Jenny liked to remind her, wryly.
Luckily, it was. The wages were good, the doctors and nurses she worked with every day inspirational, and the patients … well, the patients were mixed. Some were incredibly brave. Many were also kind and respectful, grateful for the treatment and care they received from Fiona and her colleagues. But of course there were others too. Drunks and addicts who could be abusive. People who had a hard time with pain, or even discomfort. And then there were those made angry by suffering and grief, those who couldn’t be helped or whose injuries or illnesses were beyond treatment.
Pulling open the curtains to allow the sunlight into the room, Fiona glanced across at the bed where this morning’s patient was sleeping peacefully. Gunshot wounds could be notoriously difficult. Even following successful surgery, patients could collapse or suffer heart failure from shock hours, days, or even weeks after the event. The sleeping figure i
n the bed looked better to Fiona than they had yesterday, with more color in the cheeks and good oxygen levels in the blood. Although that might be the morphine.
Rearranging a vase of flowers on the windowsill, Fiona looked down at the milling crowd of reporters and television crews still gathered in the parking lot, like vultures waiting for a fresh carcass. Like the policemen stationed outside, in the corridor of the private wing, they reminded Fiona that this morning’s patient was an important person. Not because of who they were, necessarily, but because of the circumstances that had brought them here, circumstances that were still all over the news, forty-eight hours later.
‘Hello?’
A voice from the bed, surprisingly strong, made Fiona spin around.
‘Oh my goodness! You’re awake. Let me get Dr Riley.’
She started to move towards the door but a wail of distress from the patient stopped her in her tracks.
‘Why am I here? I shouldn’t be here.’
‘It’s all right. Try to stay calm now,’ Fiona said soothingly. ‘You’re at Good Samaritan Hospital. You were brought here after—’
‘NO!’ It was a shout. ‘I’M DEAD!’
The patient slumped back against the pillow, seemingly unconscious. A cacophony of beeping began as, one by one, the vitals started to drop.
Fiona pulled open the door and yelled down the corridor. ‘We need Dr Riley in here. Right now!’
Sam Riley burst into the room at a run. Normally Good Samaritan’s most eligible surgeon would have stopped to exchange flirtatious pleasantries with the pretty, red-headed Nurse McManus. But there was no time for that today. This patient had to live. Sam had fought too hard to have it go any other way, not now.
‘What happened?’ he asked accusingly as he lifted each unresponsive eyelid in turn. The beeping had stopped now and the heart rate stabilized, but these sorts of abrupt losses of consciousness were not a good sign.
‘Nothing happened.’ Fiona defended herself. ‘I opened the curtains and she opened her eyes. She said “Hello” – she was calm at first, but then she quickly became agitated. She said she was dead, that she shouldn’t be here. And then she just, sort of, stopped.’
Dr Sam Riley looked down at the sleeping face of Dr Nikki Roberts. Sam had seen Dr Roberts before, on the news, as the famous Beverly Hills psychologist at the center of the Zombie Killings mystery. She’d looked beautiful then, on screen. No doubt that was one of the reasons the story had run for so long, despite there being no more victims or arrests. But she was even more beautiful in the flesh, regardless of the bruises, with her soft skin, dark eyes and fragile, feminine features. He hadn’t fully appreciated it before. He’d been too busy trying to save Nikki’s leg and repair the damage caused by Luis Rodriguez’s bullet as it tore through the flesh and ligaments.
The operation had gone as well as Sam could have hoped, but the risk of infection was ever present, as was post-operative heart failure.
‘Stop the morphine,’ he instructed Nurse McManus.
‘Reduce the dose, you mean?’ Fiona asked innocently.
Sam fixed her with a gimlet eye. ‘Is that what I said?’
‘Well, no,’ Fiona stammered. It wasn’t like Dr Riley to be so tetchy. Thanks to the media attention they were all feeling the pressure with this particular patient. ‘But the pain, Dr Riley. She’s going to need something.’
‘She needs to be awake,’ Sam said firmly, walking over and disconnecting Nikki’s morphine drip himself, replacing the bag with plain saline solution. ‘Besides,’ he added, looking down at Nikki’s bruised and scratched complexion, ‘I suspect this lady has a high tolerance for pain. She’s certainly used to it.’
He was right. When Nikki woke an hour later she was lucid, but her right leg felt as if someone were slowly pouring acid into an open wound. Gritting her teeth, she asked the nurse to give her something for the pain.
‘I can give you a strong ibuprofen with codeine,’ Fiona explained apologetically. It was late afternoon now, and the sun was throwing long shadows into the room, stretching all the way from the window to the head of Nikki’s bed. ‘I’m afraid Dr Riley’s said no more morphine or opiates.’
Nikki turned her head away, resigned. The pain had its upside. It reminded her she was still alive, although she still didn’t know how that was possible. The last thing she remembered was Lou Goodman, her friend, her savior, at one time almost her lover, pressing his gun to her head and preparing to shoot her.
‘You really are an incredibly stupid woman.’ Those had been his last words to her. And Nikki could only assume he was right, because she had no idea why Lou Goodman would want her dead, or why he’d killed Luis Rodriguez, if not to protect her? It made no sense. None of it made any sense.
What had happened after that was a total blank.
Crunching the pain pills the nurse gave her, she fought down a wave of nausea and began to ask some questions. The nurse seemed to know nothing about what had happened at the warehouse or how Nikki had survived. ‘You were shot in the leg and the ambulance brought you here,’ was all she said. She was more informative about what had happened since. Nikki had gone straight into surgery on arrival. Dr Riley had operated on her leg for nine hours. The operation had gone well and Dr Riley was ‘hopeful’, whatever that meant, that Nikki’s leg would now heal.
‘He can tell you more about that when you see him,’ the nurse said, smiling. ‘I’ve paged him to let him know you’re awake. And your other visitor’s still here. I don’t think he’s left the hospital since they took you in for surgery, bless him.’ She smiled, and Nikki noticed for the first time what a pretty girl she was, with her red hair and freckles. Wholesome was the word that sprang to mind.
‘What visitor?’ Nikki asked.
‘The cop,’ said the nurse. ‘The one who brought you in? He came with you in the ambulance. He’s been beside himself with worry, poor man.’
Nikki’s mind raced, full of confused images. Goodman had brought her in? But hadn’t he just tried to kill her? Or was that whole scene a figment of her imagination, some sort of delirium brought on by blood loss or … something?
‘Can I see him? The cop.’
‘Sure you can!’ the nurse brightened. ‘As long as you feel up to it. I’ll pop out and let him know.’
‘You will come back though?’ Nikki blurted, suddenly fearful. ‘I mean, you will stay with me, while he’s here? In the room? Just in case I … need anything?’
Fiona looked at her patient curiously. Dr Roberts had shown incredible physical bravery up till now. Most people would have hit the ceiling after a wound like that once they switched the morphine off. But this brave woman was visibly afraid at this moment.
Perhaps, after everything she’d been through, it was to be expected?
‘Certainly I’ll stay,’ Fiona said kindly. ‘And if you start to feel tired or need to rest, I’ll kick him out pronto, don’t you worry.’
She left, and Nikki lay there for what felt like an age.
What would she say to Goodman? What should she ask? She tried to think of possible, rational explanations for his words and actions at the warehouse, but there were none. And yet, he’d saved her – twice. He’d brought her here. Her palms started to sweat from fear and pain and she dug her nails into her flesh to try to distract herself. At last she heard footsteps and the nurse’s voice – ‘She’s right in here. She’s still very tired from the operation so try to be patient …’
The door opened. Nikki held her breath.
‘Hello, Dr Roberts.’ Detective Johnson’s fat red face lit up. ‘Welcome back!’
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
‘You …?’
Nikki’s eyes narrowed as she took in the familiar, hated figure of the bigoted detective who had made her life so intolerable these last few weeks. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Waiting for you to wake up,’ Johnson said cheerfully, either missing her hostility or choosing to ignore it as he took a seat be
side her bed. ‘I hear you’re gonna keep your leg? That’s good news, Doc. You always did have great legs.’
Nikki scowled. Was there literally no circumstance in which this awful man could refrain from being sexist, or racist, or otherwise insulting?
‘You know, you’re a great-looking woman, but you’d look even better if you smiled once in a while,’ Johnson went on, adding insult to injury. ‘I mean, not to blow my own trumpet or anything, but I did save your life.’
‘What do you mean?’ Nikki sat up in bed, wincing at the pain in her leg as she moved. She loathed Detective Jonson, but her need to understand what had happened trumped her instinct to throw him out of the room. ‘How did you save my life? What happened back there?’
Now it was Johnson’s turn to sit up. Cocking his head to one side like a curious dog, he looked at her and said, ‘Seriously? You don’t remember?’
Nikki shook her head.
‘I remember some.’ She frowned in confusion. ‘I went there to meet Anne. She called me out in the desert. I remember seeing Willie Baden, dead, nailed to the wall like a piece of meat.’ Her face crumpled as the grotesque image came back to her.
‘What else?’ asked Johnson.
‘Two men came and took Anne away. Her husband was there. Luis Rodriguez. He’d beaten her. He made her call me.’
‘I wouldn’t waste too many tears on Anne Bateman, if I were you,’ Johnson said brusquely ‘Beaten or not, she must have known her old man planned to whack you when she lured you there.’
‘Luis tried to shoot me. Twice!’ Nikki became agitated as the memories rushed back to her. ‘He told me everything. How he’d murdered Charlotte Clancy and made Carter Berkeley watch. How Willie Baden had tried to cheat him, so he’d tortured and killed him too, and made Anne watch. How he hired Brandon to kill me. Then the lights went out, just as he fired his gun. That must have been when he shot me in the leg. I hit him – in the groin I think? – and I got away.’
Johnson nodded again.
Fiona stepped forward. ‘Try to keep yourself calm now, Dr Roberts. Your body’s been through enough shock. It’s important not to—’
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