My knees were shaking. I glanced up in the same hallway mirror I had seen Frank in; now I saw him again, in the distance, coming out of Steven’s room. I looked down, not wanting Justin Davis to see him, hoping Frank did not see me. I knew that if Davis saw Frank, he would shoot him. And Frank didn’t know that Justin Davis was Thanatos, so he wouldn’t be ready to defend himself.
I caught my reflection in some glass along the hallway, and realized I looked anything but natural. I was too scared to carry it off.
Suddenly, down the hall, I saw one of the last people I wanted to see at that moment. She stopped and briefly studied me, then came walking toward us, smiling.
“Do you know her?” Davis asked, tightening his grip on my wrist.
I nodded.
“If you don’t want her to die, you’d better give a star performance.”
“Hello, Sister Theresa,” I said as naturally as I could.
“Irene! You’ve got a new haircut. And who is this?”
“This is my friend — Jimmy.”
“Pleased to meet you,” she said with a nod, and I thanked God that she hadn’t tried to get him to shake hands.
“Well, I’ve got to rush,” she said. “So much going on here at St. Anne’s tonight — but let me see here—” She reached into her habit. I could feel the tension in my captor and watched him reach into his left-hand jacket pocket.
I was on the verge of screaming a warning when she brought her hand back out with — of all things — a holy card. I stared at it dumbly and she pushed it into my left hand. A holy card of St. Jude. I wanted to break into hysterics.
“Thank you, Sister,” I croaked out.
“You do know your saints, don’t you, Irene?”
“Yes, Sister.” She nodded and went on down the hall.
SEVEN PEOPLE KILLED BECAUSE OF HOLY CARD. What a headline that would make. HOLY CARD BLAMED IN HOSPITAL MASSACRE. ST. JUDE SHOOTING SPREE.
I had to inwardly shout at myself to get myself to pull it back together.
We walked outside and through the cold, heavy rain as if it were not falling. He opened the passenger door to a blue van. He pulled the gun out and said, “Get in.”
He climbed in behind me, poking me in the ribs with the gun. “You drive.”
As I crawled into the driver’s seat, I noticed something like a backpack in the back of the van. There was only one.
“Get going. Head out to Dunleavy Road.”
I did as he said. I started to reconsider the backpack notion. Dunleavy Road led out to a private airstrip. It was about six miles out of town, up in the hills.
“Doing some parachuting?” I asked.
“You’ll be dead by the time I do.”
“Nasty weather for it.”
“That’s merely a reprieve for you. But the storm is letting up, and by tomorrow, when we take off, the skies should be that glorious blue that only rain or a Santa Ana wind can bring to Southern California.”
“This storm doesn’t look like it’s letting up.”
“Oh, but it is. This is just the tail end of it. I’ve monitored this storm quite closely. You’ll see. Before long, it will hardly be drizzling.”
We fell into silence as I made the series of turns that would take us out to Dunleavy. Once or twice I thought someone was following us. My hopes would soar, then be dashed at the next intersection.
“I know your mother was killed,” I said. “But why blame people who were only children? Why not go after people who were adults at the time?”
“Ah, so your curiosity is still alive. Good, good. It will make these last hours of yours pass more pleasantly.” He didn’t say anything for a while, then answered. “They set themselves up as gods. The Olympus Center and its little gods. It was time for them to fall from Olympus.”
“But they were
“Children are the most cruel beings on earth.”
“They didn’t even remember the incident.”
“Exactly. The most painful, awful time of my life. And to them? Nothing. They caused my mother’s death. They blamed her. They were wrong.”
“She did lose her temper.”
“No. They said she lost her temper, but she didn’t. You see, they were false judges. None of them saw what happened very clearly. But they took advantage of us. We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford the kind of attorney that could have saved her life.”
