What the Night Knows

34

RIDDEN LESS LIKE A HORSE THAN LIKE A MACHINE, WITHDRAWN to a coward’s perch in a back room of his brain, Andy Tane parks the patrol car near the entrance of St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the main lobby, half the fluorescent lights are doused. The information desk is not staffed at this hour. The gift shop is closed. No one is in sight.

Maybe he should have parked at the ER entrance. But he knows how to find his way to the emergency room by an interior route.

At this late hour, even the ER is deserted, except for three patients. A heavyset woman sits at the only open registration window. A middle-aged couple, she in a blue-and-white exercise suit, he in tan jeans and a white T-shirt, sit watching the blood-soaked towel wrapped around his left hand, waiting to be taken seriously by someone.

Politely because politeness will more quickly get him what he wants, but with official solemnity, Andy apologizes to the heavyset woman and interrupts the registration clerk—ELAINE DIGGS, according to her breast-pocket badge—to inquire as to the whereabouts of two gunshot victims, Brenda and Jack Woburn. Elaine Diggs consults her computer, makes a quick phone call, and reports, “Ms. Woburn is in the ICU. Mr. Woburn recently came out of surgery and is in post-op recovery.”

As an officer of the law, Andy Tane is familiar with the layout of the hospital. The ICU is on the tenth floor. The operating rooms are all on the second floor, as is the recovery room, where patients are taken after surgery until the anesthesia has worn off and their vital signs are stable.

Jack Woburn’s vital signs will not be stable much longer.

After visiting Brenda Woburn in the ICU, John Calvino stopped in the adjacent visitors’ lounge to leave his card—his home and cell numbers written on the back—with Davinia Woburn and her aunt Lois. Lenny remained asleep on the austere couch.

“Your mother’s a brave woman,” John told the girl.

Davinia nodded. “She’s my hero. She always has been.”

“She may want to call me. I’m always available, day or night.”

“We just heard Daddy’s out of surgery,” Davinia said. She was radiant. “He’s going to be all right.”

She seemed to John like a cross between Minette and Naomi, though he could not say why. He wanted to hug her, but he hardly knew her.

“It’s looking better, anyway,” said Lois. “They’ll probably be bringing Jack up here in another hour, maybe sooner.”

“That’s great,” John said. “That’s wonderful. Remember—day or night, if your mother has anything more to tell me.”

He followed the corridor to the elevator alcove. Six stainless-steel doors, three on each side. According to the indicator boards, two cars were downbound, one was ascending, one was in the basement, and two were at the ground floor. He pushed the call button, and a car on the ground floor headed up.

Officer Andy Tane pushes through the swinging door to the post-op recovery room. The place is quiet and softly lighted. The air smells of an antibacterial cleaning solution.

The only patient present is Jack Woburn. He’s lying on a gurney, a sheet drawn up to his shoulders. He’s sleeping, hooked to a heart monitor and a ventilator.

Jack doesn’t look good. He could look worse.

In an alcove off the recovery room, a nurse sits at a computer, typing. She doesn’t see Andy enter.

After killing Mickey Scriver, Andy reloaded his service pistol. You always want a full magazine when you’re after a bad guy, and you especially want a full magazine when you are the bad guy. He puts the muzzle under Jack Woburn’s chin and fires one round.

The hard crack of the shot spins the nurse in her chair, and she springs to her feet just as the airborne blood and tissue soil the white-tile floor. She sees Andy, his gun drawn, and she’s too stunned to scream. She dives out of sight, scrambling for whatever pathetic cover the alcove offers, then she lets out a scream, and she’s got a good one.

Because Andy’s rider has no interest in the nurse, Andy turns away from her and leaves the recovery room. The elevator car in which he ascended from the ground floor is still on 2. The doors slide open the moment he pushes the call button. Inside, he presses DOOR CLOSE on the control panel to hurry the process, then presses 10, and the car rises toward satisfaction.

According to the indicator boards, two cars were on the way up, the first a floor behind the other. When one of them arrived, John boarded it and pressed the button marked LOBBY.

Just as the doors began to close, a nurse hurried into the alcove, hoping to catch the car. John jammed his thumb on the DOOR OPEN button to accommodate her.

“Thanks a bunch,” she said.

“No problem.”

As the doors sighed shut a second time, he heard the ding of another car arriving on the tenth floor.

Passing the open doors to the ICU visitors’ lounge, Andy’s rider sees Jack Woburn’s nagging bitch of a sister—as Reese Salsetto had thought of her—and the exquisite girl whom it’s still got a chance to ruin, such a deliciously creamy little twist, and the moon-faced boy sleeping on a couch.

The girl and the woman see Andy, but they have no reason to wonder about him. He will deal with both sluts when the oh-so-heroic, self-sacrificing mother is forced to finish what she started by her own hand: dying.

He proceeds twenty feet to the end of the corridor, where the door to the intensive-care unit is locked. He presses the intercom button to call a nurse. When one of them replies, asking if she can help him, he glances back to be certain that the hallway is deserted and that no one can overhear him, and then he says, “It’s a police emergency.”

A nurse arrives to look at him through the window in the door. Andy taps his badge impatiently. Opening the door but blocking his entrance, she says, “What emergency?”

Andy puts a hand on her shoulder, and even though she tries to shrug his hand off, the rider knows her entirely in the instant. It could take her if necessary. Her name is Kaylin Amhurst, and she is an extremely cautious angel of death who over the years has decided that certain patients have been too much of a drain on the medical system and has euthanized eleven of them, the most recent being a woman named Charlain Oates.

Andy says, “Charlain Oates was only fifty-six and had a damn good chance of recovering.”

Stunned, eyes protuberant, mouth sucking for breath that she can’t draw in, like a fish drowning in air, Kaylin Amhurst backs away from him.

Sixteen beds occupy the perimeter of the room. A monitoring station stands in the center, where two other nurses are at work.

“Go to your station, Nurse Amhurst, and wait for me,” Andy says, in the cold tone of voice that he uses with any perpetrator.

Of the sixteen beds, seven are unoccupied, and curtains are drawn around the other nine. But Andy’s rider knows in which bay Brenda Woburn waits, because that, too, was learned from Kaylin Amhurst when the whole of her was read at a touch.

It doesn’t want to use his gun a lot, preferably not at all, because gunfire will alert those in the visitors’ lounge, with whom it will deal next. It must not scare off the delectable girl and then have to smell her down like a hound snuffling after a bitch in heat.

As Amhurst retreats to the monitoring station, the other two nurses look up, perplexed. One of them frowns, wondering what Andy’s doing in here, but no doubt she assumes that he wouldn’t have gotten past the angel of death unless his mission was legitimate.

At Brenda Woburn’s bay, he pulls back the curtain, then closes it after himself. Awake, alert, she turns her head toward him, but she isn’t alarmed because he is a policeman, after all, sworn to defend and protect.

He leans over the low bed railing and says, “I have wonderful news for you, Brenda. I’m going to suck Davinia’s sweet tongue right out of her mouth.”

Andy is a large man, solidly muscled, with big fists. As the woman tries to rise from her pillows, he hammers her throat with everything he’s got—once, twice, three times, four—crushing her larynx, her airway, rupturing arteries.

The nurse from the tenth floor got off at the eighth, and an orderly boarded, pushing a wheeled cart holding several white boxes. He was Hispanic, thirty-something, with an overbite, teeth as square and white as Chiclets, and he looked familiar.

He pushed the button for the sixth floor and said, “Remember me, Detective Calvino?”

“I do, but I don’t know from where.”

“My brother’s Ernesto Juarez. You cleared him of killing his girlfriend, Serita.”

“Yeah, sure, you’re Enrique, Ricky.” The orderly grinned and nodded, and John said, “How’s Ernesto doing these days?”

“He’s okay, he’s good. It’s four years, but he’s still grieving, you know, it was hard for him. Half the family thought he did it, you know, and he’s never quite got over they didn’t have faith in him.”

At the sixth floor, Enrique kept a thumb on the button that held the door open, while John got caught up on where Ernesto was employed these days and what his hopes were.

Working homicides, you usually recognized your guy the first time he walked on the scene, and it was only a matter of discovering what mistakes he made, so you could hang him. You did not often get a chance to clear someone who was innocent but who looked guilty from sixteen different angles, and it was satisfying when it happened.

With her throat crushed, she can’t breathe, so her heart races and her blood pressure spikes. Monitors sound soft alarms.

Andy turns away from the bed, and as he reaches for the curtain, a nurse—not the angel of death—whisks it open, steel-bead glides clicking softly in the track. She says, “What’re you doing?”

He punches her in the face, and she goes down, and he steps over her. His rider is exhilarated, striding toward the door to the corridor, the ultimate prize within reach.

Kaylin Amhurst cowers against the central monitoring station, as pale as any of her patients after she euthanized them. The third nurse is on the phone, and Andy hears her say “security,” but he’s rolling now. The outcome is inevitable.

When he steps into the corridor, drawing his pistol, no one in the visitors’ lounge has heard anything from the ICU. No one has come out here to investigate.

They’re still in the positions where he last saw them. Entering the room, he shoots the dozing boy twice, point-blank, and the kid is dead in his sleep. Aunt Lois starts up from her chair as if she can somehow stop him. He pistol-whips her to her knees and then kicks her flat.

He is between the girl and the door. She can’t get past him, but she stands defiant, scared and at a dramatic physical disadvantage, yet ready to defend herself. If she has some fight in her, she will claw and bite. Although the rider doesn’t care what happens to its horse, there isn’t time for a prolonged struggle. It doesn’t want to shoot her because it still has a good chance to use her, which is an important part of doing this right.

So Andy Tane snatches the four-inch can of capsaicin spray out of its pouch on his utility belt and, from a distance of eight feet, he squirts her twice. The first stream catches the outer corner of her right eye and sweeps across her left. The second stream spatters her nose and—as she cries out in surprise—splashes into her mouth.

The girl is instantly disoriented, virtually blind, everything a bright blur, and she’s desperately wheezing, overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation, though she is not suffocating. Andy has been sprayed with an aerosol projector as part of his police training. He knows how it feels. He knows how helpless she is now.

Holstering his pistol and the aerosol can, he moves around Davinia. He seizes her from behind, pulls her against him, and encircles her neck with his left arm. It’s not a full choke hold because he doesn’t complete it by gripping his left wrist with his right hand. But he’s got her tight. She’s not going anywhere he doesn’t want her to go.

The fumes from the capsaicin spray burn in his nose, but direct contact is necessary for a serious effect. He has no difficulty breathing or seeing.

At the small of the girl’s back, he grabs the belt of her jeans. Using that handle, pushing up on her chin with the arm that’s around her neck, he lifts her off her feet. She kicks backward feebly and claws at his forearm, but he tightens the choke hold for a moment, which panics her because already she has trouble getting her breath, and she relents.

Pulling her tight against him, holding her off the floor, he carries her out of the visitors’ lounge. Although seventeen, she’s petite and weighs no more than a hundred pounds. He could carry her a couple of city blocks if he needed to do so.

In the corridor, the door to the ICU is closed. But to the right, maybe fifty feet away, a group of people in white uniforms—three nurses, two orderlies—are hesitantly venturing this way, in response to the shots and the girl’s cries. They halt when they see him.

To further confuse them, he shouts, “Police! Stay back!”

Given a closer look at the girl, they won’t be able to believe she is a threat to anyone, so Andy Tane isn’t going to carry her through them to the elevator alcove. Anyway, there’s a more direct route to where his rider wants him to go. Across the hall from the ICU lounge is a fire exit. The door features a push-bar handle. He slams through with the girl, onto the tenth-floor landing.

If he goes down, he won’t get to his car and away before he’s stopped. His best chance to do what he wants with her is to go up.

Enrique Juarez said good-bye to John, took his thumb off the DOOR OPEN button, and pushed the stainless-steel cart into the sixth-floor elevator alcove.

The doors closed, and the car descended once more. Between the fourth and third floors, a voice arose in the elevator shaft, evidently from another car that shared it. Someone talking loudly. Agitatedly. As if on a phone. The car passed. John thought it had been ascending, the voice fading on the rise.