“My chest. It hurts…”
Oh, no. A coronary. And no ambulance in sight. At once she lowered his head onto the sidewalk, checked his pulse, and unbuttoned his shirt. She was so busy attending to her patient she scarcely noticed when the first patrol car pulled up in front of the theater. By then the crowd was a mass of confusion, everyone demanding to know what was going on.
She looked up to see Sam push out the lobby door again, this time carrying the woman in the evening dress. He lay the woman down beside Nina.
“One more inside,” he said, turning back to the building. “Check the lady out.”
“Navarro!” yelled a voice.
Sam glanced back as a man in a tuxedo approached.
“What the hell is going on?”
“Can’t talk, Liddell. I’ve got work to do.”
“Was there a bomb call or not?”
“Not a call.”
“Then why’d you order an evacuation?”
“The usher’s uniform.” Again Sam turned toward the building.
“Navarro!” Liddell yelled. “I want an explanation! People have been hurt because of this! Unless you can justify it—”
Sam had vanished through the lobby doors.
Liddell paced the sidewalk, waiting to resume his harangue. At last, in frustration, he shouted, “I’m going to have your ass for this, Navarro!”
Those were the last words out of Liddell’s mouth before the bomb exploded.
The force of the blast threw Nina backward, onto the street. She landed hard, her elbows scraping across the pavement, but she felt no pain. The shock of the impact left her too stunned to feel anything at all except a strange sense of unreality. She saw broken glass pelt the cars in the street. Saw smoke curl through the air and scores of people lying on the road, all of them just as stunned as she was. And she saw that the lobby door of the Brant Theater was tilted at a crazy angle and hanging by one hinge.
Through the pall of silence, she heard the first moan. Then another. Then came sobs, cries from the injured. Slowly she struggled to sit up. Only then did she feel the pain. Her elbows were torn and bleeding. Her head ached so badly she had to clutch it just to keep from throwing up. But as the awareness of pain crept into her consciousness, so too did the memory of what had happened just before the blast.
Sam. Sam had gone into the building.
Where was he? She scanned the road, the sidewalk, but her vision was blurry. She saw Liddell, sitting up now and groaning by the lamppost. Next to him was the elderly man whom Sam had dragged out of the theater. He, too, was conscious and moving. But there was no Sam.
She stumbled to her feet. A wave of dizziness almost sent her back down to her knees. Fighting it, she forced herself to move toward that open door and stepped inside.
It was dark, too dark to see anything. The only light was the faint glow from the street, shining through the doorway. She stumbled across debris and landed on her knees. Quickly she rose back to her feet, but she knew it was hopeless. It was impossible to navigate, much less find anyone in this darkness.
“Sam?” she cried, moving deeper into the shadows.
Her own voice, thick with despair, echoed back at her.
She remembered that he’d stepped into the lobby a moment before the blast. He could be anywhere in the building, or he could be somewhere nearby. Somewhere she could reach him.
Again she cried out, “Sam!”
This time, faintly, she heard a reply. “Nina?” It didn’t come from inside the building. It came from the outside. From the street.
She turned and felt her way back toward the exit, guided by the glow of the doorway. Even before she reached it, she saw him standing there, silhouetted in the light from the street.
“Nina?”
“I’m here. I’m here….” She stumbled through the last stretch of darkness dividing them and was instantly swept into an embrace that was too fierce to be gentle, too terrified to be comforting.
“What the hell were you doing in
“Looking for you.”
“You were supposed to stay outside. Away from the building. When I couldn’t find you…” His arms tightened around her, drawing her so close she felt as though it were his heart hammering in her chest. “Next time, you
“I thought you were inside—”
“I came out the other door.”
“I didn’t see you!”
“I was dragging the last man out. I’d just got out when the bomb went off. It blew us both out onto the sidewalk.” He pulled back and looked at her. Only then did she see the blood trickling down his temple.
“Sam, you need to see a doctor—” “We have a lot of people here who need a doctor.” He glanced around at the street. “I can wait.”
Nina, too, focused on the chaos surrounding them. “We’ve got to get people triaged for the ambulances. I’ll get to work.”
“You feeling up to it?”
She gave him a nod. And a quick smile. “This is my forte, Detective. Disasters.” She waded off into the crowd.
Now that she knew Sam was alive and safe, she could concentrate on what needed to be done. And one glance at the scene told her this was the start of a busy night. Not just here, in the street, but in the ER as well. All the area hospitals would need to call in every ER nurse they had to attend to these people.
Her head was starting to ache worse than ever, her scraped elbows stung every time she bent her arms. But at this moment, as far as she knew, she was the only nurse on the scene.
She focused on the nearest victim, a woman whose leg was cut and bleeding. Nina knelt down, ripped a strip of fabric from the victim’s hem, and quickly wrapped a makeshift pressure bandage around the bleeding limb. When she’d finished tying it off, she noted to her satisfaction that the flow of blood had stopped.
That was only the first, she thought, and she looked around for the next patient. There were dozens more to go….
ACROSS THE STREET, his face hidden in the shadows, Vincent Spectre watched the chaos and muttered a curse. Both Judge Stanley Dalton and Norm Liddell were still alive. Spectre could see the young D.A. sitting against the lamppost, clutching his head. The blond woman sitting beside him must be Liddell’s wife. They were right in the thick of things, surrounded by dozens of other injured theater patrons. Spectre couldn’t just walk right over and dispatch Liddell, not without being seen by a score of witnesses. Sam Navarro was just a few yards from Liddell, and Navarro would certainly be armed.
Another humiliation. This would destroy his reputation, not to mention his back account. The Showman had promised four hundred thousand dollars for the deaths of Dalton and Liddell. Spectre had thought this an elegant solution: to kill both of them at once. With so many other victims, the identity of the targets might never be pinpointed.
But the targets were still alive, and there’d be no payment forthcoming.
The job had become too risky to complete, especially with Navarro on the scent. Thanks to Navarro, Spectre would have to bow out. And kiss his four hundred thousand goodbye.
He shifted his gaze, refocusing on another figure in the crowd. It was that nurse, Nina Cormier, bandaging one of the injured. This fiasco was her fault, too; he was sure of it. She must’ve given the police just enough info to tip them off to the bomb. The usher’s uniform, no doubt, had been the vital clue.
She was another detail he hadn’t bothered to clean up, and look at the result. No hit, no money. Plus, she could identify him. Though that police sketch was hopelessly generic, Spectre had a feeling that, if Nina Cormier
