The Law of Nines

36

LONG AFTER DARK ALEX WAS STILL WAITING. He worried that they might have hatched some new plan. A thousand different terrors ran through his mind as he waited. As the night wore on, there might have hatched some new plan. A thousand different terrors ran through his mind as he waited. As the night wore on, there was nothing he could do but wait. He had no way to get to Jax on his own.

Henry and Dr. Hoffmann finally showed up long after lights-out. The doctor was without his usual stethoscope, although he was wearing his white coat. Henry, looking smug — as smug as he could look with bandages covering his nose — waited back near the door.

Before the door had closed, Alex had seen two more orderlies fold their arms and take up posts just outside. They apparently were going to be ready if his reduced medication had rendered him more alert than they expected. They expected him to be at least aware enough to care what happened to him and Jax, but rather slow and submissive. Alex wanted them to see what they expected to see, so that was the part he played.

He rose from his chair as the doctor approached, trying to do it in a way that would look dull and a little awkward.

“Alice gave you your medication this morning?” the doctor asked as he smoothed thin strands of hair over his bald patch.

“Yes.” Alex gestured to the wastebasket. “I threw the cups away after I took the medication.”

The doctor glanced toward the trash. Alex didn’t think that the man would actually go through the trash and inspect the discarded paper cups, and fortunately he didn’t. He instead looked back at Alex’s eyes.

“Throughout this entire thing I’ve tried to do this without people having to get hurt. I believe that such methods are the best way of actually getting the truth. Torture is a poor way to get good information. It isn’t reliable. People being tortured will say anything they think the questioner wants to hear. People being tortured will confess to witchcraft if that’s what is expected. But whether I like it or not, the time for trying to find answers my way is past.”

He pressed his lips tight for a moment. “Take my advice, Alex. Answer their questions.”

“Did they touch her?”

The doctor glanced back over his shoulder at the big orderly waiting by the door. “No. But she’s been hanging there since last night. The drugs are wearing off and she’s coming around, but that may only be making it worse for her. Hanging by your arms like that is dangerous in and of itself. She’s having trouble breathing.”

Alex’s insides roiled. He remembered Jax telling him about how Sedrick Vendis liked to hang people up by their arms and how it slowly and painfully suffocated them. He was so angry that it was making him dizzy. Rage strained to be let loose.

Instead, he kept quiet as he waited. He knew that the doctor was working up to something.

“I have a deal to offer you, Alex.”

Alex frowned a little. “What kind of deal?”

“If you cooperate and tell us everything we want to know, right now, right up front, I’ll see if I can’t get them to let me give you both an overdose.”

“An overdose? You mean to kill us?”

Dr. Hoffmann nodded as he looked into Alex’s eyes. “One way or another, after you both give up what you know, you’re both going to die. They’re pretty adamant about wanting you dead and being rid of the Rahl line — after they get what they need from you, of course — but they’re especially eager to waste Jax.”

“Do they know you’re making such an offer?”

“No,” he admitted. “But if you cooperate and tell me everything, I’ll see if I can’t talk them into letting me give you each an injection. They want the information, and they want you both dead. Give me the information without having to resort to torture and I can make it a peaceful death for both of you. You’ll just go to sleep and never wake up.”

Alex knew that Vendis, Yuri, and Henry would never go for such a deal. They were looking forward to what was coming and they had well-founded confidence that they would get all the information they wanted in their own way.

“You’re in the wrong line of medicine, Dr. Hoffmann. You should have become a veterinarian.”

The doctor frowned. “Why do you say that?”

“Because veterinarians get paid for performing euthanasia. When you do that to people it’s called murder. Murder is punishable by death.”

A small, cruel smile touched the corners of his mouth. “But if you don’t let me help you, I won’t be committing murder — they will.”

Alex tried to act a little slow in his response, as if he had to work to talk. “The nurses’ station is filled with records. You’ve no doubt been billing the state for care while trying to extract information from people. After all, you have to justify the patient count and all the drugs you’ve been using. I’m sure that you’ve been going through large quantities of controlled substances.

“Sooner or later when the state authorities audit the hospital’s drug records they’re going to discover that something strange has been going on here, that the numbers don’t match. They’re going to want to talk to your patients, but your patients, listed in those records, will be dead.

“By the way, what do you plan to do with the bodies? Are you experienced at disposing of dead people? How many deaths have you been party to, Doctor? What are you going to do if corpses of your patients are found? The authorities will certainly have a lot of questions for you.” Alex let him wonder how he would explain it, let him worry about all the evidence sitting there in those records that would tie him to murder.

The doctor glanced briefly in the direction of the nurses’ station, where the files were kept on shelves.

“They aren’t going to learn anything,” he finally said.

He didn’t sound confident. He sounded concerned.

“How much are they paying you to be a party to murder, Doctor? Or were you a killer before they ever came along? Did you become a psychiatrist to hide your need to kill? To hide your urges? Did you think that being a doctor to psychopaths would be the perfect cover for your own perverted needs?”

Dr. Hoffmann’s expression soured. “Have it your way. You can’t say I didn’t offer to help you out. Maybe if you give up the information quickly enough you’ll get lucky and they’ll cut your throat before they start in on Jax. I would have thought you would have taken the offer for her sake if not your own.”

Alex almost grabbed the man by the throat the way he had Alice. With the greatest of effort he restrained himself. He had to get to Jax. After what he had just heard about her condition, that was more important than ever.

“Let what they do to her be on your conscience, since that’s the choice you made for her.” The doctor gestured toward the door. “Let’s go.”

“Any ideas?” Henry asked as they approached.

“Alice must have gotten cold feet and taken off,” Dr. Hoffmann said.

He sounded annoyed and short-tempered. Alex knew that he had gotten to the man. He wanted him distracted and preoccupied.

“Just as well.” Henry’s face betrayed anything but worry for the woman. “She was too uppity for my taste. I often suspected that she was planted here to watch us. Maybe now that it’s being wrapped up she was recalled. We have more important things to worry about. Let’s go.”

Alex fell in behind Henry as they turned down the hall. The lights were mostly off, leaving the corridor to gloomy shadows. Two more orderlies that Alex hadn’t known were part of the scheme shadowed the doctor. He wondered if the whole place could be a front for their activities.

The nurses’ station was staffed by three nurses, all engaged in a light conversation with an orderly sitting at a desk to the side. Charts and a jumbled stack of files sat on the desk. When they saw the somber group enter their station on the way through, they made themselves busy.

The women’s ward on the ninth floor was just as dark as the men’s wing had been. The small group paused when Alex’s mother unexpectedly shuffled out of the bathroom. She was wearing pajamas and a pink robe that Alex had given her. She only briefly glanced in their direction before yawning and turning back toward her room. She had looked at Alex, along with the rest of the party, but he didn’t think she had recognized him.

When she had shuffled down the hall and turned in to her room without looking back, Henry shoved Alex into the women’s bathroom. It was better lit than the hall so that patients could use the bathroom in the night if they needed to. A sign saying “Out of Order” was taped to the shower door.

A nurse leaning against the wall unfolded her arms and looked down at her watch. “You’re early.”

“What difference does it make?” the doctor snapped.

She shrugged. “Just that Yuri isn’t here yet. I had Dwayne stay late to let Yuri in when he gets here.”

Dwayne was the security guard inside the back door Alex always used. As he waited, Alex stood slump-shouldered, trying to act passive. With the way the orderlies stood at ease, it seemed to be working. If only he could slow down his galloping heart.

Henry came forward, pulling out the keys attached to the reel on his belt. “We don’t need Yuri to get started.”

“What was Helen Rahl doing in here?” the doctor asked as Henry worked the lock.

“Taking a pee,” the nurse said.

As the doorway leading into the shower opened, Alex could see that only one light was on. The cavelike room beyond had a ghostly cast to it. He thought that it looked like a place where death itself waited.

His heart felt like it came up in his throat when he saw Jax still hanging there. In addition to the blindfold, she was now gagged with a cloth through her mouth and tied behind her head. She trembled slightly. It was clear that she was having a lot of trouble breathing. She had to push up on her toes as best she could to draw each ragged breath. Her arms shook with each effort.

Alex was so enraged that it was hard for him to focus on where everyone was around him. He reminded himself that he had to keep track of where everyone was or he could be blindsided. Surprises could be deadly. He had to take a measure of the situation and not make a reckless mistake. He couldn’t afford a mistake.

Jax couldn’t afford a mistake.

The nurse dragged a straight-backed wooden chair from the side. The chair’s feet stuttered across the tile floor, the sound echoing around in the shower. She set the chair in the center of the room, not far in front of Jax. Alex remembered seeing Jax’s clothes thrown to the side, but he didn’t remember seeing the chair before.

Henry, grinning with anticipation, pulled off the blindfold. Jax squinted and blinked at the sudden light, even though the light wasn’t bright. She took appraisal of everyone in the room. When she met Alex’s gaze there was a world of meaning, a shared understanding, in that silent connection.

Henry slid his hand down her belly and between her legs. “Getting eager for me, aren’t you?”

Alex thought the deadly glare Jax gave him should have backed him up a few steps, but it didn’t.

Henry, obviously enjoying his control over her, probed further as he used his other hand to pull the gag from her mouth. He let it hang around her neck. “Oh, sorry.” He chuckled. “I couldn’t hear you.”

“You’re already dead,” she told him. “You just don’t know it yet.”

Henry removed his hand from between her legs and put it over his heart in mock alarm. “Really? Don’t tell me, you intend to kill me?”

By the look in her eyes Alex could see that her rage easily matched his. She let that lethal look be her only answer.

“Did you find Alice?” the nurse asked, tiring of the game Henry was playing.

The doctor gestured irritably. “No one has seen her.”

“We looked everywhere,” Henry said as he turned his attention away from Jax, “and like the doc says, there’s no sign of her. She’s vanished.”

Jax’s gaze immediately sought Alex. He smiled the smallest bit in answer to the question in her eyes. A hint of a smile came to the corners of her mouth. In that smile he could see that she grasped that he’d had something to do with Alice’s disappearance.

But then she had to close her eyes with the effort of pulling herself up with her arms as she stretched on her tiptoes to get a breath. Alex could see how mightily she was struggling to fight back panic at not being able to breathe.

“Maybe she went back for some reason,” Henry suggested.

The others started speculating as to why Nurse Alice would have left without saying anything. It seemed to be common consensus that the woman typically did things without telling others what she was up to, so, as far as they were all concerned, it wasn’t entirely out of character.

No one was looking at Alex as he stood submissively. He wanted Jax to be ready. When her eyes turned to look at him again, he gave her a small wink. The smile grew and stayed on her lips as she returned the wink. He didn’t know if she grasped his full meaning or if she was merely heartened by the wink.

Losing interest in the talk about Alice, Henry pulled a folding knife from his pocket, letting everyone know that it was time to get on with it. Pressing on the thumb stud, he flicked his wrist and snapped open the blade. One of the other two orderlies did the same. Alex saw that the nurse had a syringe.

Henry used the point of his knife to back Alex up a few steps. “Have a seat.”

The nurse shoved the chair against the back of his legs. Alex flopped down in the chair. In his peripheral vision he tried to keep track of the syringe.

His level of alarm rose suddenly when the other orderly stepped up close behind, pressing against the chair to hold it in place. The orderly in front of him with the knife pulled a handful of zip ties from his pocket.

Alex realized what they intended to do.