With her throat crushed, she can’t breathe, so her heart races and her blood pressure spikes. Monitors sound soft alarms.
Andy turns away from the bed, and as he reaches for the curtain, a nurse—not the angel of death—whisks it open, steel-bead glides clicking softly in the track. She says, “What’re you doing?”
He punches her in the face, and she goes down, and he steps over her. His rider is exhilarated, striding toward the door to the corridor, the ultimate prize within reach.
Kaylin Amhurst cowers against the central monitoring station, as pale as any of her patients after she euthanized them. The third nurse is on the phone, and Andy hears her say “security,” but he’s rolling now. The outcome is inevitable.
When he steps into the corridor, drawing his pistol, no one in the visitors’ lounge has heard anything from the ICU. No one has come out here to investigate.
They’re still in the positions where he last saw them. Entering the room, he shoots the dozing boy twice, point-blank, and the kid is dead in his sleep. Aunt Lois starts up from her chair as if she can somehow stop him. He pistol-whips her to her knees and then kicks her flat.
He is between the girl and the door. She can’t get past him, but she stands defiant, scared and at a dramatic physical disadvantage, yet ready to defend herself. If she has some fight in her, she will claw and bite. Although the rider doesn’t care what happens to its horse, there isn’t time for a prolonged struggle. It doesn’t want to shoot her because it still has a good chance to use her, which is an important part of doing this
So Andy Tane snatches the four-inch can of capsaicin spray out of its pouch on his utility belt and, from a distance of eight feet, he squirts her twice. The first stream catches the outer corner of her right eye and sweeps across her left. The second stream spatters her nose and—as she cries out in surprise—splashes into her mouth.
The girl is instantly disoriented, virtually blind, everything a bright blur, and she’s desperately wheezing, overwhelmed by a sense of suffocation, though she is not suffocating. Andy has been sprayed with an aerosol projector as part of his police training. He knows how it feels. He knows how helpless she is now.
Holstering his pistol and the aerosol can, he moves around Davinia. He seizes her from behind, pulls her against him, and encircles her neck with his left arm. It’s not a full choke hold because he doesn’t complete it by gripping his left wrist with his right hand. But he’s got her tight. She’s not going anywhere he doesn’t want her to go.
The fumes from the capsaicin spray burn in his nose, but direct contact is necessary for a serious effect. He has no difficulty breathing or seeing.
At the small of the girl’s back, he grabs the belt of her jeans. Using that handle, pushing up on her chin with the arm that’s around her neck, he lifts her off her feet. She kicks backward feebly and claws at his forearm, but he tightens the choke hold for a moment, which panics her because already she has trouble getting her breath, and she relents.
Pulling her tight against him, holding her off the floor, he carries her out of the visitors’ lounge. Although seventeen, she’s petite and weighs no more than a hundred pounds. He could carry her a couple of city blocks if he needed to do so.
In the corridor, the door to the ICU is closed. But to the right, maybe fifty feet away, a group of people in white uniforms—three nurses, two orderlies—are hesitantly venturing this way, in response to the shots and the girl’s cries. They halt when they see him.
To further confuse them, he shouts, “Police!
Given a closer look at the girl, they won’t be able to believe she is a threat to anyone, so Andy Tane isn’t going to carry her through them to the elevator alcove. Anyway, there’s a more direct route to where his rider wants him to go. Across the hall from the ICU lounge is a fire exit. The door features a push-bar handle. He slams through with the girl, onto the tenth-floor landing.
If he goes down, he won’t get to his car and away before he’s stopped. His best chance to do what he wants with her is to go up.
Enrique Juarez said good-bye to John, took his thumb off the DOOR OPEN button, and pushed the stainless- steel cart into the sixth-floor elevator alcove.
The doors closed, and the car descended once more. Between the fourth and third floors, a voice arose in the elevator shaft, evidently from another car that shared it. Someone talking loudly. Agitatedly. As if on a phone. The car passed. John thought it had been ascending, the voice fading on the rise.
35
OFFICER TANE, WHIPPED AND SPURRED BY HIS SECRET RIDER, half carries and half drags the pepper- sprayed and gasping girl up two flights of concrete stairs toward the last floor in the building. Up there are not merely the administrative offices but also the corporate offices of the parent company and two conference rooms. The rider has learned this not from Andy Candy but from Kaylin Amhurst, the one-nurse death panel and Jack Kevorkian acolyte.
The upper door opens into a windowless, wood-paneled receiving vestibule containing no furniture. Only three elevators come to this final floor. Opposite the fire exit are double doors to a reception lounge. It’s locked at this hour. Corporate officers don’t work the graveyard shift. Andy draws his pistol. Fires two rounds not into the door that features the lock assembly, but into the one that receives the deadbolt. Chunks, chips, splinters of wood explode. The mahogany disintegrates around the bolt. He kicks the door open.
Startled by the shots and backspray of debris, the girl screams. She has no volume, but the effort exacerbates her breathing. She’s wheezing, choking, gagging at the same time—and still struggling, but weakly.
An alarm sounds, not a siren—this is a hospital, after all—but a soft
With his left arm still around the girl’s neck, Andy forces her through the doorway, into the reception lounge. Big desk with a granite top. Chairs. Coffee table with magazines. Large posters of impressionist paintings.
Two closed doors lead out of the room. The one to the left will open on a hallway that serves the rest of the eleventh floor. The one straight ahead is to a conference room. He manhandles Davinia through the second door.
The recorded voice continues to warn him of the seriousness of his trespass.
Andy Tane is figuratively and literally a horse, as strong as one, but his rider brings to him the additional supernatural strength of a furious and obsessed spirit. Once in the conference room, Andy throws the girl aside, out of his way. She hits the floor, tumbles, knocks her head against the wall.
Andy switches on the lights, slams the door, twists the thumb-turn that drives home the deadbolt. He says, “Now she’s ours, Andy Candy. Now she’s all ours.”
John stepped out of the elevator and crossed the deserted lobby, which was hushed in the fluorescent half- light. The faint squeak of his shoes on the polished travertine sounded like the plaintive whimpers of a wounded animal.
He glanced at a few high-placed cameras, certain that primary public spaces of the hospital were monitored around the clock by guards at a central station. He understood the need for security in a world gone as wrong as this one, but the prospect of an oncoming universal surveillance dismayed him. He suspected that, ironically, society would be less safe under such a regime.
The automatic doors slid open. He stepped out, into the portico, and stood for a moment, breathing deeply of the cool night air, which seemed country-fresh to him in his current mood.
The restaging of the Sollenburg killings with the Woburn family had been thwarted by a quick-thinking woman skilled with a handgun. This bane, this ordained threat, this curse, whatever it should be called, was not a fate set in stone. If the Woburn family could be saved, so could the Calvinos. In fact, the disruption of the new cycle of
