‘I should get out more often,’ she said. Trying to joke. She shivered.
‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he said. ‘Run if you have to.’
She nodded.
‘Celeste?’
She raised her eyes to his.
‘Thank you. You saved us both.’
She swallowed. ‘Go. Leave me your cell phone. If I have to drive off… call me, I’ll come back for you.’
He shut the door, waited for her to click the locks, and headed toward the hospital’s rear parking-lot entrance.
Every step made him want to run in the opposite direction. A mental hospital. The place he’d feared the most as his mind started to play tricks on him, as Andy began to chime into his days and nights. The place he was afraid Allison would send him. He kept walking toward the building.
If he could drive, he told himself, he could do this. Just walls, just floors, just people, it wasn’t a horror.
‘Introduce me to the guard,’ Andy said. ‘That’ll get you in real fast.’
The main building was large, with an adobe exterior, four stories tall. Two smaller buildings stood behind it, a gravel trail of roads snaking between them and the main house. It had the air of an exclusive club more than the clinical lines of a psych hospital.
He guessed there were cameras on him right now; surely they showed who came and went in the parking lot. He ducked his head down. Most of the main building’s windows were darkened; lights gleamed in the windows on the first floor.
He held the electronic passkey up to the reader on the door; the panel light flicked from red to green and the door unbolted with a click. He stepped inside.
At the end of this short hallway was a door with a conventional lock, and he tried the three keys on Hurley’s ring. The last one worked.
He expected to see a guard with a gun aimed at him when he opened the door.
Miles cracked the lock, went through the door, and closed it behind him. The hallway was empty, the lights dimmed. He took three deep breaths, trying to clear his head of Hurley’s junk.
Late night in the hospital. His heart hammered in his chest. He pulled out his gun, stiff-armed it in front of him, watched the steady red light of a mounted camera eyeing him down the hallway. Despite the Sangre de Cristo’s elegant architecture and immaculate grounds, he wondered if every asylum wasn’t designed by the same cracked architect, immured behind bars deep inside one of his own creations. Locks at the end of every hallway, bends and twists to confuse anyone who might risk a run, light that had never been born of the sun – hard and white and ugly.
He turned a corner and a guard was waiting for him, ready, a baton swinging hard at Miles’s neck. Miles jumped back – the baton smacked with bone-crushing force into the wall. The backswing caught his shoulder and agony burst up from the well of nerves at the joint. Miles fell to the floor and the guard – young, with heavy features – rammed the baton hard against his throat.
Miles closed hands around the baton’s ends, tried to push back. The guard grinned and gritted teeth and shoved the baton, bolstered by his own weight, against Miles’s windpipe.
Darkness danced on the edge of Miles’s vision. But then Miles thought of staying inside this place, the doors closing and locking behind him, faceless men strapping him to a bed, confinement as sure as a coffin. Here. Forever. Locked up.
Fear surged in his muscles and Miles shoved back, using the floor as leverage for his shoulders and arms. The baton popped hard into the guard’s mouth, then Miles hit him again in the nose. The guard reeled away from Miles. Gasping, Miles fought him for the baton. The guard wouldn’t let go, made a choking yell for Jimmy and Dwayne past the blood coursing from his mouth and nose. Miles powered the guard’s head into the wall, bit the fingers holding the baton. The guard let go; Miles dropped him with a blow on the back of the head. The guard collapsed to the floor, unconscious.
Miles glanced up and down the hallway. Deserted. He guessed these were offices and administration; no patients or caretakers here. A crackle and a buzz cut through the sudden silence, a voice calling for Robert. He leaned over the guard. An earpiece gleamed in the young guard’s ear, cabled to a walkie-talkie clipped to the shirt pocket. Miles removed the earpiece and walkie-talkie and clipped them on himself.
‘Robert? You got him?’
Miles thumbed the button and spoke in a whispery rush that might camouflage his voice. ‘No, he broke free from me. Headed to the elevator.’ He found the elevator, its doors open, pressed four – the top floor. Nothing. Four must be a secured floor. He waved the electronic passkey over a panel above the buttons and a green light lit. He tried again, pressing four, and this time the button glowed in answer. Then he stepped out of the elevator. The doors slid shut and the elevator started its climb.
‘Robert?’ the other guard’s voice repeated through the earpiece.
‘I think he’s headed to four on the elevator.’ The diversion might leave the fourth floor stairwell clear for him.
He headed for an EXIT sign, found the stairwell. Stairs were good, elevators were bad. The well was dimly lit. He headed up the stairs, expecting to see Groote on the landing or a guard who hadn’t bought his story… but there was no one. Radio silence from the guards.
Sweat slid down his cheek, coursed down his back. He forced himself to take each step.
Andy stood at each turn of the stairs, smirking.
Miles’s breath tightened in his chest. He reached the top floor.
Tried the door. Locked. He slid a key home, worked the lock. The door opened.
‘Hello, Nathan,’ Sorenson said.
Nathan opened his eyes. Tried to focus. ‘Who…’
‘My name is Sorenson. I’m a colleague of Doctor Vance. We met, oh, so very briefly, at Doctor Vance’s house.’
Nathan said nothing.
‘You hit me. It’s okay. I don’t think you realized I was there to help you. I’d like to talk to you for a minute.’
Sorenson took a step into the room. Groote followed him, a step behind.
‘Are you better, Nathan, than you were when you first came to Sangriaville?’
Nathan nodded, glancing at Groote.
‘That’s wonderful to know,’ Sorenson said, and in one brutal move he grabbed Groote’s arm, wrenched it up while slamming Groote into the steel door. Groote yelled and Sorenson deftly twisted his arm. Groote screamed. Sorenson pounded his elbow twice into Groote’s face, breaking the nose, hammering the back of his head into the steel door.
Groote collapsed to the floor. Sorenson kicked him once in the ribs, then in the jaw. Groote went still. Sorenson leaned down, seized Groote’s gun, and raised it at Nathan. ‘What have you told them?’
‘I don’t know what you mean… I don’t know anything!’
‘Ten seconds to rethink,’ Sorenson said. ‘What names did you give them?’
‘I don’t know what you mean, please don’t!’ Nathan yelled.
The soft buzz nearly made Miles jump out of his skin. Then he realized the stairwell door was set to give off a ping when opened. He closed the door quickly, aware he was without cover. But no one stood in the darkened hallway. No guards at the elevator, awaiting him. The lift had already arrived and the doors closed again and he saw on the digital indicator the elevator had returned to the first floor. Probably set to do so automatically. Maybe the guards on the floor had seen the empty elevator and ridden down to help the battered Robert.
He moved from the door, close against the wall, crouching low. He inched down the hallway, glancing through the wire-reinforced glass in the doors. Beds, with men asleep in them, mostly younger guys but a scattering of men in their fifties and sixties. None was Nathan Ruiz. Miles tested the doors; all locked in for the night. Or perhaps to keep the patients out of the line of fire when the guards stepped out and mowed him down. Two rooms held women, also asleep. An office with a computer and a set of cameras, empty, the screens showing more deserted rooms.
