After visiting Brenda Woburn in the ICU, John Calvino stopped in the adjacent visitors’ lounge to leave his card—his home and cell numbers written on the back—with Davinia Woburn and her aunt Lois. Lenny remained asleep on the austere couch.
“Your mother’s a brave woman,” John told the girl.
Davinia nodded. “She’s my hero. She always has been.”
“She may want to call me. I’m always available, day or night.”
“We just heard Daddy’s out of surgery,” Davinia said. She was radiant. “He’s going to be all right.”
She seemed to John like a cross between Minette and Naomi, though he could not say why. He wanted to hug her, but he hardly knew her.
“It’s looking better, anyway,” said Lois. “They’ll probably be bringing Jack up here in another hour, maybe sooner.”
“That’s great,” John said. “That’s wonderful. Remember—day or night, if your mother has anything more to tell me.”
He followed the corridor to the elevator alcove. Six stainless-steel doors, three on each side. According to the indicator boards, two cars were downbound, one was ascending, one was in the basement, and two were at the ground floor. He pushed the call button, and a car on the ground floor headed up.
Officer Andy Tane pushes through the swinging door to the post-op recovery room. The place is quiet and softly lighted. The air smells of an antibacterial cleaning solution.
The only patient present is Jack Woburn. He’s lying on a gurney, a sheet drawn up to his shoulders. He’s sleeping, hooked to a heart monitor and a ventilator.
Jack doesn’t look good. He could look worse.
In an alcove off the recovery room, a nurse sits at a computer, typing. She doesn’t see Andy enter.
After killing Mickey Scriver, Andy reloaded his service pistol. You always want a full magazine when you’re after a bad guy, and you especially want a full magazine when you
The hard crack of the shot spins the nurse in her chair, and she springs to her feet just as the airborne blood and tissue soil the white-tile floor. She sees Andy, his gun drawn, and she’s too stunned to scream. She dives out of sight, scrambling for whatever pathetic cover the alcove offers,
Because Andy’s rider has no interest in the nurse, Andy turns away from her and leaves the recovery room. The elevator car in which he ascended from the ground floor is still on 2. The doors slide open the moment he pushes the call button. Inside, he presses DOOR CLOSE on the control panel to hurry the process, then presses 10, and the car rises toward satisfaction.
According to the indicator boards, two cars were on the way up, the first a floor behind the other. When one of them arrived, John boarded it and pressed the button marked LOBBY.
Just as the doors began to close, a nurse hurried into the alcove, hoping to catch the car. John jammed his thumb on the DOOR OPEN button to accommodate her.
“Thanks a bunch,” she said.
“No problem.”
As the doors sighed shut a second time, he heard the
Passing the open doors to the ICU visitors’ lounge, Andy’s rider sees Jack Woburn’s nagging bitch of a sister—as Reese Salsetto had thought of her—and the exquisite girl whom it’s still got a chance to ruin, such a deliciously creamy little twist, and the moon-faced boy sleeping on a couch.
The girl and the woman see Andy, but they have no reason to wonder about him. He will deal with both sluts when the oh-so-heroic, self-sacrificing mother is forced to finish what she started by her own hand: dying.
He proceeds twenty feet to the end of the corridor, where the door to the intensive-care unit is locked. He presses the intercom button to call a nurse. When one of them replies, asking if she can help him, he glances back to be certain that the hallway is deserted and that no one can overhear him, and then he says, “It’s a police emergency.”
A nurse arrives to look at him through the window in the door. Andy taps his badge impatiently. Opening the door but blocking his entrance, she says, “What emergency?”
Andy puts a hand on her shoulder, and even though she tries to shrug his hand off, the rider knows her entirely in the instant. It could take her if necessary. Her name is Kaylin Amhurst, and she is an extremely cautious angel of death who over the years has decided that certain patients have been too much of a drain on the medical system and has euthanized eleven of them, the most recent being a woman named Charlain Oates.
Andy says, “Charlain Oates was only fifty-six and had a damn good chance of recovering.”
Stunned, eyes protuberant, mouth sucking for breath that she can’t draw in, like a fish drowning in air, Kaylin Amhurst backs away from him.
Sixteen beds occupy the perimeter of the room. A monitoring station stands in the center, where two other nurses are at work.
“Go to your station, Nurse Amhurst, and wait for me,” Andy says, in the cold tone of voice that he uses with any perpetrator.
Of the sixteen beds, seven are unoccupied, and curtains are drawn around the other nine. But Andy’s rider knows in which bay Brenda Woburn waits, because that, too, was learned from Kaylin Amhurst when the whole of her was read at a touch.
It doesn’t want to use his gun a lot, preferably not at all, because gunfire will alert those in the visitors’ lounge, with whom it will deal next. It must not scare off the delectable girl and then have to smell her down like a hound snuffling after a bitch in heat.
As Amhurst retreats to the monitoring station, the other two nurses look up, perplexed. One of them frowns, wondering what Andy’s doing in here, but no doubt she assumes that he wouldn’t have gotten past the angel of death unless his mission was legitimate.
At Brenda Woburn’s bay, he pulls back the curtain, then closes it after himself. Awake, alert, she turns her head toward him, but she isn’t alarmed because he is a policeman, after all, sworn to defend and protect.
He leans over the low bed railing and says, “I have wonderful news for you, Brenda. I’m going to suck Davinia’s sweet tongue right out of her mouth.”
Andy is a large man, solidly muscled, with big fists. As the woman tries to rise from her pillows, he hammers her throat with everything he’s got—once, twice, three times, four—crushing her larynx, her airway, rupturing arteries.
The nurse from the tenth floor got off at the eighth, and an orderly boarded, pushing a wheeled cart holding several white boxes. He was Hispanic, thirty-something, with an overbite, teeth as square and white as Chiclets, and he looked familiar.
He pushed the button for the sixth floor and said, “Remember me, Detective Calvino?”
“I do, but I don’t know from where.”
“My brother’s Ernesto Juarez. You cleared him of killing his girlfriend, Serita.”
“Yeah, sure, you’re Enrique, Ricky.” The orderly grinned and nodded, and John said, “How’s Ernesto doing these days?”
“He’s okay, he’s good. It’s four years, but he’s still grieving, you know, it was hard for him. Half the family thought he did it, you know, and he’s never quite got over they didn’t have faith in him.”
At the sixth floor, Enrique kept a thumb on the button that held the door open, while John got caught up on where Ernesto was employed these days and what his hopes were.
Working homicides, you usually recognized your guy the first time he walked on the scene, and it was only a matter of discovering what mistakes he made, so you could hang him. You did not often get a chance to clear someone who was innocent but who looked guilty from sixteen different angles, and it was satisfying when it happened.
