I’d been wrong to assume the unit had been cleared, I now realized. Nurses and visitors were hiding behind every curtain and closed door. The administration had walled off the ER when they’d initially brought in the prisoners, but the Code Silver had caught them off guard. There simply hadn’t been time for security to evacuate the expansive critical-care wing when the prisoner escaped. It was all they could do to initiate their shelter-in-place procedures.
“What’s happening?” the woman in scrubs whispered. She had horrible acne and looked too young for whatever job she might have had in a hospital.
“An armed prisoner is loose. I need to get into the surgical wing.”
“You keep going down the hall.”
“The automatic doors are locked. Is there another way in from this side?”
“No.”
“Are you certain? Maybe there’s a way you never use yourself.”
She shook her head no. But I knew she had to be overlooking something. This part of the hospital was a warren.
Across the room, seemingly in the right direction, I saw a door labeled JANITORIAL.
As I hoped, it seemed to be a pass-through, accessible to custodians moving between surgery and post-op. The room stank of headache-inducing chemicals and was jammed with custodial carts. The shelves contained neatly folded bedclothes and cardboard boxes containing who knew what.
I crossed to the opposite door and pressed my ear against it.
More shouting. The words shapeless. Just noises.
Then the doorknob rattled. Someone was trying to open it. But the bolt was still shot.
I reholstered my service weapon. With my left hand, I reached for the lock. It made the softest of clicks. I closed my hand around the knob.
What happened next took only seconds, yet it unfolded in super–slow motion.
As I pulled the door inward, I felt movement. A gore-soaked man had pressed himself against the lintel. He had coffee-colored skin and a neck as thick as my thigh, and he was holding a pair of surgical shears to the throat of a woman in scrubs. The cutting edge had already given her a ruby necklace of blood. He must have had his other arm wrapped like a python around her waist.
Facing both the man and his hostage—and now me—was a semicircle of firearms. The faces of the officers holding them were blurred. The barrels of their weapons were the only things in focus.
The inmate stutter-stepped as he felt his structural support disappear behind him. Whatever he’d expected, it hadn’t been the previously locked door opening of its own accord.
He rolled his eyes sideways, trying to catch me in his peripheral vision. I grabbed the wrist holding the shears and gave it a yank, throwing my weight backward. Both the hostage taker and the hostage fell with me through the doorway.
Time seemed to stop. I became aware of the smell of shampoo in the woman’s hair. I saw the shears still clenched in the prisoner’s hand as the sharp edge slashed within an inch of my eyeball.
A gunshot exploded, shattering the moment like a hammer breaking a mirror.
Then gravity kicked in again and we continued our fall.
The woman knocked the wind from my lungs when she landed on top of me. A split second later, I felt the considerable weight of the inmate slam my shoulder to the floor. I smelled gun smoke. I even thought I heard the spent shell casing bounce off a hard surface. I turned my head and stared into the ragged red hole in the center of the dead man’s forehead: a third eye already focused on the world beyond this one.
5
The prisoner’s name was Darius Chapman. Despite his clothes being blood soaked and half-shredded, his identification tag was still clipped to his shirt pocket. I had never heard of him before.
But I recognized the correctional officer who’d shot and killed him: Rancic, the dark-eyed man behind the prison body scanner. I watched the guard as he holstered his still-hot weapon. From his self-possession and the hardness with which he returned my gaze, I suspected that Chapman wasn’t the first man Rancic had killed in his life.
The nurse was lifted off me, then rushed away to be treated for the laceration to her neck.
Brother officers helped me to my feet.
A man in physician’s scrubs examined Chapman’s corpse on the floor for a pulse.
I was escorted to the ER, where another doctor sat me down on a gurney. He instructed me to remove my jacket, which had been contaminated by blood, and toss it into a hazardous-waste bin. Next, my shirt, also stained. I was relieved I got to keep my pants.
With the help of a nurse who appeared at his unspoken command, the doctor swabbed the gore from my face and applied some sort of neutralizing agent to the potentially disease-carrying brain matter in my hair. He checked me for open wounds. Finding none, he walked off without a word, the silent nurse trailing behind.
A state trooper told me to sit tight until I could give a statement on what had happened with Chapman, but I got up anyway. I had no intention of waiting there, bare chested and shivering, until the scene commander could delegate an officer to interview me.
Hospital staff rushed back and forth along the hallway, and assorted cops and prison guards milled in and out of the now-open ambulance-bay doors.
“Where’s Billy Cronk?” I demanded of one of the interchangeable guards.
“Surgery.”
Once more, I crossed the hall to the surgical wing. The operating rooms were all blockaded by thick-bodied men in uniforms. They didn’t want a repeat of what had happened with Chapman.
I must have checked three different rooms and asked three different officers the same question.
Finally one of them answered, “Yeah, Cronk’s in there. Why?”
“Is he going to live?”
“How should I know? I’m just guarding the door.”
Someone tapped my shoulder. “Mike?”
Skip Morrison had finally relocated me. The chief deputy
