Jesus, that was silly, almost as bad as his dream of being an avenging cyborg. Stupid.
The elevator doors were rattling closed. An older woman hurried toward the diminishing gap, her heels clicking on the polished white floor in the hospital foyer. Steve closed his eyes, willing the doors to close, but a bell sounded above his head and he knew that he was trapped.
The doors whispered open.
“Oh my,” the woman said. “I’m glad I caught this one.”
Steve nodded. The woman had gray curls, glasses, and a grin that seemed to waver, as if it were about to collapse into a frown at any moment. The doors closed. Steve was standing next to the controls, but the woman didn’t ask him to push a button for her.
The elevator rose. The woman was heading for the third floor.
Maybe she was Royce Lewis’s wife.
Christ. Stop it. But he couldn’t. He was in an elevator with the caretaker’s wife. He was sure of it. He started sweating, and he leaned against the wall as the elevator came to a jarring stop on the second floor.
A man pushing a shopping cart filled with patient records entered the elevator, taking the space between Steve and the woman. Steve’s thumbs closed over his fingers. Dull cracks echoed in the elevator as he popped his knuckles. He wasn’t an avenging cyborg, but he felt like one. What he had done to the caretaker was inhuman. Going after the old guy with a shovel. Just brutal. The guy couldn’t have seen him well enough to make a positive identification. The confrontation had taken place after midnight, the only light from the moon and a flashlight.
But Royce Lewis had seen him. Steve was sure of that. He remembered the man’s unforgiving eyes.
Steve stared at the woman. Beneath heavy bifocals, her eyes were wet, tortured.
The hospital attendant punched a button. The doors closed. The elevator jerked. And then Steve wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t a cyborg. He was a hit man in some bad movie. He was here to murder a South American dictator who was in the hospital for brain surgery. Steve would smother the bastard with a pillow if necessary, but he was going to get the job done, no matter the cost.
The doors slid open. The attendant pushed the cart into the foyer.
The woman glanced at Steve. Her grin faltered. Steve shored it up with one of his own, and she stepped onto the third floor.
No. He wasn’t going to do it. He couldn’t do it now, anyway. He was in uniform, for christsakes. He couldn’t just walk in, pull out his revolver and fire away like a shootist in a Clint Eastwood-
“Austin! Hey, what are you doing here?”
Steve recognized another cop, Pete Rojas.
“And what’s with the uniform?” Rojas asked, not waiting for an answer to his first question. “I’ve heard of heavy overtime, but this…”
Steve stepped from the elevator. “I haven’t made it home yet. That thing this morning at the cemetery…I don’t know if you heard about it, but it really got under my skin.” Steve said that, and he knew it was no bluff.
“That’s why I’m here,” Rojas said. “You can stop worrying. Lewis came around about two hours ago. Guy’s a diabetic. He faded out bad at the cemetery Blood sugar crashed big time. Getting whacked on the head and practically drowning didn’t help him any. I just finished questioning him.”
“Get anything?”
“The old guy doesn’t remember much. He knows it was a man who hit him, but he can’t recall if the guy said anything. And he couldn’t give me much of a description, apart from the fact that the guy was big…and white.” Rojas grinned. “Hell…that could be you, Austin.”
Steve managed a sick little smile. “Yeah. Put me on the list of suspects.”
Rojas slapped Steve’s shoulder. “I guess I saved you a trip. How about a cup of coffee before I hit the streets?”
“No thanks,” Steve said. “I think I’ll look in on Mr. Lewis.”
“Sure.” Rojas stepped into the elevator. “Like they say-seeing is believing.”
The corridor was too white and there were no shadows. Steve had no place to hide. He stood near the nurse’s station, just across from Room 303. Inside the room, the woman from the elevator held the hand of the gray little man who lay in the hospital bed. A bandage masked the man’s forehead and his eyes were closed, but the steady rise and fall of his chest was apparent, even from Steve’s distant position.
The knot in Steve’s stomach uncoiled just a little bit. The old guy had been through hell, but he was going to be okay. And he didn’t know anything. Steve turned and started for the elevator. And then it hit him. Royce Lewis. The woman in the elevator-Lewis’s wife. Steve realized that he was actually feeling something for them. He shared their pain. He desperately wanted things to be okay with them. They had broken through the distance that separated him from the world.
They were real. Steve cared about them. The way he cared about the nesting doves, and the crazy cartoon dog, and April. The way he cared, in his dreams.
8:13 P.M.
Amy kicked the balled-up cheeseburger wrapper. It ricocheted off of April’s foot and spun away at a weird angle.
“Hey, nifty shot,” Amy said. “Not bad for a corpse. Score’s only ninety-seven to one, now.”
Amy didn’t retrieve the wrapper. She was tired of kicking it. Instead, she sank into the La-Z-Boy. The cool leather smelled like Steve Austin, and his undeniably male scent stirred primitive feelings of safety and protection in Amy. That was too weird, considering that Austin-the owner of glands that produced the manful odor of hearth and home-had locked her in his basement.
False imprisonment was what most people called it.
So here she was, snuggled up in the big guy’s favorite chair, just like Goldilocks in the bears’ house. Wondering what was going to happen when Papa Bear came home. She leaned back, reclining comfortably, and found that the end table was now within reach. On it sat the Halcion bottle, the bottle of Jack Daniel’s, a glass, and an ice bucket.
Why the hell not?
She grabbed the glass. It was fairly clean. She scooped some cubes from the ice bucket. They were the little hollow cubes you bought at the grocery store. Ice for midgets, she called it. She tipped the bottle, filled the glass. The first swallow sparked a fire in her empty belly. The second swallow warmed her and she found that she needed to be warm.
The chair creaked as she settled into the soft leather.
She closed her eyes and listened to the fluorescent flight buzz.
She sipped Jack Daniel’s.
Two drinks improved Amy’s demeanor. It was high time that she and April had a little talk.
“Y’know,” Amy said, imagining what she looked like wearing a cheerleader’s outfit and holding a glass of whiskey in her hand, “you never did this kind of thing when you were a good girl.”
April didn’t reply. Her face remained slack, her closed eyes puffy, as with sleep.
“I’ll bet there were lots of things you never did back then,” Amy continued. “But, on the other hand, I’ll bet you ended up doing lots of things that you never imagined you’d do.”
Amy smirked at that last dig and took another sip of whiskey. That’s telling her, she thought. That’ll hit her where it hurts. But then the voice inside her added. But you did lots of things you never imagined you’d do, too. You played all those little get-ahead games you thought you’d never play. You always thought that you were different, better, but you weren’t different. Not really. Maybe a little smarter Maybe a little tougher. But nobody
