Isadora slumped in her wheelchair like a rag doll. Her purse tumbled from her lap, cigarette case, lighter, keys, and change spilling out and bouncing away.
Charlie’s seconds-old fondness crumbled into heartache. “Coming here might not have been such a good idea after all,” he said, nausea reducing his words to mutterings.
“Let’s take a moment for a silent prayer,” Drummond said.
Charlie, who’d never known his father to utter so much as grace before a meal, peeked out from behind the operating table. With an index finger held to his lips, Drummond nodded at the corridor. Charlie saw no one, but he heard a dull groan of floor tile-one man, maybe two, creeping toward the operating room.
Drummond snapped the selector on Cadaret’s pistol to an automatic setting, aimed at the wall between the operating room and corridor, and flattened the trigger. He delivered a burst of bullets into the wall, brass casings arching over his right shoulder. From the other side of the wall came a man’s agonized shout, followed by a heavy flop of body against floor. A second man-a guard who was younger and even brawnier than the lieutenant-dove past the operating room doorway. The lieutenant hauled him into the conference room in advance of Drummond’s fire.
The duo initiated a hail of their own gunfire. Charlie pressed himself so low to the floor that he could taste the lemon in the cleanser. Even with his hands over his ears, it felt as though the reports would blow his eardrums.
The guards’ target was Drummond. Their bullets turned his cabinet’s facing to pegboard, but failed to hit him, thanks to computer hard drives within it, as well as a gurney, a steel rack full of monitors, and an anesthesia machine with the dimensions of a floor safe-he’d gathered the lot around him. Still, he wasn’t fully shielded: One shot ricocheted off the ceiling, causing a steel tray atop the anesthesia machine to spin away like a Frisbee, giving flight to several loaded hypodermic needles. A few stuck in the ceiling. Drummond dodged the rest. Meanwhile more bullets pierced the cabinet and reached the monitors, resulting in an eruption of glass and sparks from which he could only turn away and shield his eyes. Additional rounds shredded the linoleum tiles and filled the air with particles of the glue that had adhered them to the subfloor.
Squinting into the resulting gritty green haze, Drummond returned fire. Two shots drove the guards back into the conference room. His next pulls of the trigger resulted only in flinty clicks.
Charlie hoped Drummond was merely pretending to be out of bullets, that a ruse was in the works. But Drummond dumped the gun onto the anesthesia machine beside him and dropped to the floor, obviously searching for another weapon.
The lieutenant and the junior guard scrambled into the operating room, ducking in and around the machinery with the clear intent of flanking Drummond. Like Charlie, they probably expected Drummond would obtain another gun.
As they closed in on the anesthesia machine, Charlie made out the barrel of the boxy guard’s shiny revolver against a baseboard, well out of Drummond’s reach. Mortimer’s gun lay by his body at the entrance-the guards blocked Drummond from it. Drummond’s last option was Isadora’s gun, still dangling from her hand, also beyond his range. Charlie thought about going for her gun himself. To move from behind the operating table all but guaranteed the guards would obliterate him.
Drummond stepped out from behind his cabinet, head lowered, hands empty. Charlie glimpsed a thin plastic tube connected to the anesthesia machine, caught on Drummond’s right sleeve. The guards shared a look of self- satisfaction.
Drummond placed his hands before him, as if to raise them in surrender. Isadora’s Zippo dropped from his left sleeve and into his left hand. He spun the spark wheel at once, transforming the invisible gas flowing from the thin plastic tube into a spray like a dragon’s breath. The operating room turned orange.
Charlie averted his eyes; the guards’ primal howls painted the picture more than adequately. A burst of gunshots followed.
Charlie looked to find the corrupt lieutenant dead on the floor. Also, Drummond had obtained the lieutenant’s gun and used it to put an end to the other conspirator.
Simultaneously, a cardiac event monitor, the size of a kitchen television, hurtled through the air, thrown from behind Drummond by Cadaret.
“Dad!” Charlie shouted in warning.
Drummond looked to him, too late. The monitor crashed into his upper back, staggering him. Then Cadaret pounced. Other than a welt where the rock from the balustrade had struck his jaw, the killer appeared in the peak of health.
He grabbed Drummond around his rib cage and rode him down. Drummond’s head banged into the floor, costing him his hold on the gun taken from the guard. He ended up flat on his back. Cadaret sat astride him, preventing him from regaining the gun.
Drummond somehow sat up, like a jack-in-the-box, surprising Charlie. Cadaret appeared to have expected as much, but his eyes bulged with shock at what flashed in Drummond’s hand: the biggest of the hypodermic needles from the anesthesiologist’s tray. Drummond thrust it deep into Cadaret’s shoulder and hammered the plunger, flooding the killer with anesthesia.
Presumably.
Nothing happened.
Cadaret laughed. “Must be a placebo.” He pried the needle from his shoulder, tossed it aside, and snatched up the guard’s gun.
Fighting off queasiness, Charlie lunged for Isadora’s gun, prying it from her still-warm hand just as Cadaret pressed a thick muzzle into Drummond’s temple.
“Drop it!” Charlie called out, glad to have kept the tremble out of his voice. From a crouch behind the instrument cart, he fixed the side of Cadaret’s head squarely in his sights.
Cadaret didn’t flinch. Nor did he bother to look. “Whatchya got there, Charlie? Mom’s Colt?”
Charlie noted the rearing horse etched onto the grip. “That’s right.”
“Poor choice of names, in my opinion. It should’ve been Bronco or Mule, the way it kicks. My guess is, by the time you get off a decent shot, the three of us will be dead of old age.”
“Go ahead and shoot him, Charles,” Drummond said, as if growing bored. Probably he sought to calm Charlie.
Charlie suspected that the full contents of the anesthesia machine wouldn’t calm him now. The Colt’s grip was uncomfortably coarse, the heaviness of the pistol startling. He had blasted away with the gamut of weapons in virtual reality, but the only actual gun he’d ever held fired water. It was difficult just to keep the Colt steady. Although Cadaret was a mere twenty feet away, Charlie had no confidence he could hit him.
“Yeah, go ahead, Charles,” Cadaret said. “But if you do, know that even if, somehow, you get a bullet into me, I’ll put two or three easy into Papa Bear’s head, and at least one through that flimsy cart you’re squatting behind and into your red zone.”
He was articulating, practically verbatim, Charlie’s concerns.
“He’s afraid of you, Charles, or he wouldn’t be gabbing,” Drummond said. “At this distance your bullet will probably kill him before he’s able to process that you’ve pulled the trigger. At worst it will knock him well beyond the point of being able to do anything to me, except by happenstance.”
Charlie resolved to fire.
Cadaret spun at him and pressed his trigger first. At the same instant Cadaret’s eyes rolled up into his head, leaving them white. The anesthesia had kicked in.
Still the pressure of his finger against the trigger resulted in a blast from his gun.
A bullet bored into the ceiling directly above Charlie, dusting his hair with bits of soundproof tile. Cadaret crumpled to the floor.
Drummond said to Charlie, “Fine stall tactic.”
Charlie couldn’t tell whether he was kidding. Through a general daze, he replied, “Thanks, I was worried the fear I was going for wasn’t quite playing.”
Drummond hurried to his feet. “Now comes the hard part,” he said, plucking the gun from Mortimer’s corpse.
