The Law of Nines

28

WITH A CASUAL BUT CAREFUL LOOK, Jax scanned the entire area before opening her door. He saw her appraise the same older couple walking up from behind them that he’d noticed in the rearview mirror. Jax returned a smile when the couple smiled as they passed by. He noted that she trusted no one, not even an old couple shuffling along the sidewalk.

He wondered how she could summon a smile. He couldn’t.

Alex tossed his jacket in the back seat and then locked the Cherokee. He checked the back hatch to make sure that it was locked as well. He didn’t like leaving a gun in the truck that a thief could discover and steal, but he had no choice. Even though he was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, they still couldn’t be taken into a mental institution.

He wondered what he was going to do if they ended up having to leave the state. While he was licensed to carry in Nebraska, that license wasn’t valid in other places, especially Boston, where the law took a dim view of people protecting themselves.

Alex had a very clear-cut belief about his fundamental right to his own life. He didn’t think that he should have to die just because a criminal wanted to take his life. He had only one life and he believed that he had the right to defend it, simple as that. Ben had taught him how.

In light of the kind of people they were up against, the kind of animals Jax had just told him about, he knew that he would rather risk facing a gun charge than be without a means of protecting himself, and more than that, protecting Jax. He wasn’t willing to die because of the dogmatic principles of imperious public officials. It was his life, not theirs.

From bits and pieces Jax had revealed, he knew that Cain would love nothing more than to have her in his clutches. Alex knew that if they ever got their hands on her they would do those things that she’d said he couldn’t even imagine. Whatever those things were, he didn’t want to know. He was already angry enough.

The limbs of the maple and oak trees lining the residential streets whipped back and forth in the gusty wind, filling the bright day with a rush of noise. Jax had to use one hand to hold her hair back off her face as they made their way quickly along the sidewalk. She used the other to hold on to his arm, playing the part of his fiancée.

The storms had left the ground littered with leaves so that it looked a little like autumn, except that the leaves were green instead of bright colors. Here and there limbs that had been torn off during the storms lay on lawns and at the sides of the street. The air had an odd, dry feel to it, as if hinting at the looming change of season.

Jax silently eyed the imposing front façade of Mother of Roses as they walked down Thirteenth Street. Many of the people climbing the broad bank of steps on their way to visit patients carried flowers or small boxes wrapped in bright paper and decorated with ribbons.

As they continued past the front entrance, without turning up the steps, Jax frowned questioningly up at him. “Family visiting the ninth floor can go in the back,” he told her. “It’s easier.”

“The ninth floor,” she repeated in a flat tone.

He knew what she was thinking. “I’m afraid so.”

Around the side, the usual collection of service vans were crowded into the small lot that was really nothing more than an irregular blacktopped area off the alley. The back of the building was virtually deserted compared with the activity in front. That had always added to Alex’s feeling of alienation; he wasn’t visiting a normal patient, someone who would eventually get better and go home, he was visiting someone who was imprisoned because she was a danger to society and would never be released.

He guessed that in the back of his mind he had always felt a sense of shame over that, not to mention anxiety that he might end up the same as his mother. Now he felt a sense of anger, because it was seeming more and more likely that her condition was the fault of strangers meddling in their lives, strangers who wanted something and didn’t care who they had to hurt to get it.

Out of habit, as they took a shortcut across the grass and patches of bare dirt beneath the shade of the huge oaks, Alex glanced up at the windows on the ninth floor. He saw nothing more than shadows through the nearly opaque glass.

“Are all the windows covered with wire?” Jax asked as she noticed him looking up at the top floor.

“All the ones where we’re going.”

When he pulled open the steel door at the back entrance, Jax paused and wrinkled her nose at the unfamiliar hospital smell. She stole a quick glance to each side before stepping through the doorway.

Inside, the smell of food mixed unappetizingly with the hospital smell. The kitchens were back off the entrance area. Often-times smaller supplies were taken to the kitchen through the back entrance.

As he did at every other visit, Alex tossed his keys, change, and pocketknife in a blue plastic tub on a table to the side of the metal detector. His phone was taking a bath in the outlet mall. As he had coached, Jax walked slowly through the metal detector. With her hands hooked in her back pockets, she looked completely natural, as if she did it every day. Wearing jeans and the black top she looked completely normal, as if she belonged with him. Except that he had never been with any woman as breathtaking as Jax.

The older security guard, Dwayne, who never smiled at Alex, smiled at Jax. She returned the smile. As well as Alex was beginning to know her, though, he recognized that her smile wasn’t sincere.

After Alex had gone through the metal detector, Dwayne reached in the tub as he usually did to hand back the phone.

He looked up. “You don’t have your phone.”

Alex snapped his fingers. “Must have left it in the truck.”

The guard, with no phone to give back, simply placed the tub on a table against the wall that he used as a desk. He would return the keys, change, and pocketknife when they were on their way out. There were no other blue tubs on the table against the wall. The rest of the empty tubs were stacked together beside the metal detector. As was often the case during the day, Alex was the only visitor to the ninth floor.

At the steel desk beyond the metal detector he picked up the registry clipboard and blue plastic pen attached to the clipboard by its dirty string. He signed his name, paused, and then wrote “Jax, fiancée” in the guest column.

Doreen, who had been paying close attention to Jax, took the clipboard from him and turned it around to see how he’d filled in the “guest” portion. Alex had never brought a guest with him when he went to see his mother.

Doreen looked up with a grin. “Fiancée! Alex, I never knew. I’m so happy for you.”

Alex returned the smile and introduced Jax. They shook hands. Doreen seemed unable to look away from Jax’s mesmerizing eyes. Alex knew the feeling.

“How long have you two been together?” the beaming Doreen asked.

“It all happened pretty fast,” Alex said. “She just dropped into my life out of the blue. Surprised the hell out of me, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh, that’s so exciting, Alex. When’s the big date?” she asked Jax.

“As soon as we work out the details,” Jax said.

Alex was relieved that Jax had handled the question with such simple grace.

On their way to the elevator, Alex leaned close. “That telling-the-truth trick of yours works pretty well.”

She gave him a smile at their inside joke. He noticed that she smiled differently at him than she did at anyone else. There was something special about it, something he liked very much.

When the green metal door of the elevator opened, Alex took a step in. Jax balked, her hand on his arm dragging him to a halt.

“What is this?” she asked.

Before anyone noticed them stopping, he put an arm around her waist and ushered her inside. “It’s an elevator. It takes us up to the ninth floor, where my mother is held.”

She turned around the way he did and faced the front as the door glided closed. “I don’t like being locked in a metal box.”

“I can’t really blame you, but it’s fine, honest. It’s just a device that goes up and down, nothing else.”

“Aren’t there stairs?”

“There’s a fire escape on the outside of the building, but you can’t use it except in an emergency. The regular stairway is kept locked to control access to the ninth floor.”

Jax tensed at every clunk and clatter of the elevator’s ascent through the building. She only seemed to relax when it wobbled to a stop and the doors opened.

As she stepped out, her gaze swept the nurses’ station, taking in everything, noting the position of everyone working behind the counter. There were four nurses, three female and one male, plus a woman at the computer. Back down the hall Alex could see an orderly getting a mop and bucket out of a utility room. He was sure that Jax was also checking to make sure that she didn’t recognize anyone.

Standing at the high counter at the nurses’ station, Alex signed his name and wrote in the time. Not a lot of people visited the ninth floor. He saw his signature from previous visits several places higher up on the sheet. He slid the clipboard over and motioned Jax to step up to the counter.

“You need to sign your name and write down the time,” he said under his breath. “Sign your name on the line below mine and copy the time I put in.”

Alex watched her sign her name. He hadn’t known her last name before. When she had finished he slid it back across the counter to one of the nurses on duty. The big, hunched orderly spotted the two of them through the large window in the pharmacy and came out to greet them.

“Alex, what have we here?” Henry broke into a rare grin as he stared at Jax.

“Henry, this is Jax, my fiancée. Jax, this is Henry.”

She didn’t blanch at the size of the man the way most people did. “Nice to meet you, Henry.”

Henry smiled at the sound of his name coming from her lips. “I had begun to worry about Alex, but I can see now that he was just waiting for the right woman to come along.”

“You have that right,” Alex said. Eager not to be pulled into a “How’d you two meet?” conversation, he changed the subject. “How is my mother doing?”

Henry shrugged. “Same. You know the way she is. At least she hasn’t been causing a ruckus lately.”

“That’s good,” Alex said as he followed Henry to the solid oak door leading to the women’s wing.

In her sweep of the area, Jax noted a man — a patient — staring at them through the little window in the door to the men’s wing. She turned back and watched as the orderly pulled his keys out on the cable extending from the reel attached to his belt and then unlocked the door. He ducked and glanced through the window before tugging open the heavy door.

“Your mother was in the sunroom last time I did rounds. You two have a nice visit.” Henry handed Alex the plastic key for the buzzer. “Ring when you’re finished, Alex.”

Alex had probably heard the man say “Ring when you’re finished” a few hundred times. It seemed he should realize that Alex would know the routine.

Jax glanced at the varnished oak doors to each side as they made their way down the long corridor toward the sunroom. He knew that she was calculating every threat, watching for any source of trouble. Of all the places that concerned him, Alex didn’t really think this was a place they had to worry about. Still, Jax’s attitude was making him jumpy.

“We’re locked in here?” she asked. “There is no way for us to get out on our own if we have to?”

“That’s right. If we could get out, then so could the patients, and they don’t want that. We have to go back out the way we came in. There’s a fire escape that goes downstairs on the side of the building,” he said as he gestured surreptitiously ahead to the fire exit, “but the door is locked. A nurse or an orderly would have to unlock it. There’s a stairway in the back of the nurses’ station. It’s kept locked along with the elevator.”

When they reached the sunroom, Alex spotted his mother alone on a couch against the far wall.

She saw Alex coming. He could tell by the look in her eyes that she recognized him.