He took the guard’s place, standing with his back to the hospital while surreptitiously searching for danger. Then slowly he ambled towards the front of the building like a man bored by routine and killing time by patrolling the grounds. No one watched him from any of the windows. He noted CCTV cameras, but doubted that he’d been observed due to the lack of troopers charging in his direction. He went up the steps and through the front door as if he had the right to do so.
Immediately inside was an automatic door. Beyond it an auxiliary nurse was busy at a desk. Rickard moved through the doors as they whisked open. The faint purr of the motor caused the woman to glance up at him.
‘Toilet break,’ Rickard told her.
‘You know where they are.’ The nurse gave him no more attention, turning back to her work. A spurt of anger went through him. Teaching her a lesson wasn’t a good idea, not at this moment, but maybe on his way out he’d show her he wasn’t to be ignored. He marched by her, looking like he knew exactly where he was going.
Signs pointed him upwards.
He went that way.
At the top he found a hallway bordered by wards. This being a private facility, he expected each ward to be separated into more individual rooms, but to his surprise found them to be open spaces lined with beds. The fact that the beds contained no patients gave him a trickle of unease.
He recalled the administration buildings and how deserted they’d looked.
Something else: where were all the staff? A hospital like this should be bustling with doctors, nurses and support personnel. That solitary woman at the front desk? She was a plant. Probably FBI. Everyone else had been moved because they were expecting him.
He’d just walked into a trap.
Panic clutched fleetingly at him. In the next second he pushed it aside, feeling instead the rage roiling in his innards.
He turned back, ready to return to the reception area and show this latest bitch what became of those who schemed against him. He pulled out his ceramic blade and thumbed it open.
Another thought struck him.
Maybe it made sense that Alisha had been brought here.
Perhaps it was a logistical – and logical – decision to take Alisha out of the Cedars and bring her somewhere more remote. Less chance of collateral damage if Rickard did come calling. Perhaps this facility had only recently closed down, and had been commandeered as a temporary safe house for the critically ill woman. That would explain the lack of patients and medical staff.
Feasible?
Not very, but Rickard wasn’t going to run away without first checking out his theory.
He gave the wards only a cursory inspection, then moved further along the hall. A door led into a descending stairwell. He could detect the faint residue of cooking smells left over from a once-bustling kitchen area. She wouldn’t be down there. Instead he went a little further along the corridor and found another staircase, this one leading up to the third level. It would be unusual for a patient to be closeted away up there when there were so many rooms on the lower levels, which was exactly why he thought that was where Alisha was roomed. He went up the stairs, passing his knife to his left hand and drawing his gun in his right – the two-weapon style of Musashi.
The upper hall was dull under muted lighting. But at the far end he could see a door and around the jamb leaked brighter light. The obligatory armed guards were nowhere to be seen, which was peculiar. Perhaps they were inside.
He moved forwards stealthily, ears straining to hear voices from within the room. He could make out the electronic blip . . . blip . . . blip of monitors and something else like a distant chorus of voices. As he progressed he heard music and realised that a radio or TV was playing in the room, the volume low.
He was walking into a bottleneck. The hall behind him had only one exit and that was the way he’d come up. A couple of doors on each side led into cupboards or maintenance rooms with blind walls formed from the sloping roof. Should anyone come up the stairs, his only recourse would be to go directly into the room and damn the consequences.
But that was OK by him.
His mantra still played in his head.
Moving right up to the door, he placed an ear to the wood. He thought he heard the shifting of a body on a bed but couldn’t be sure, as it could easily have been noise from the radio or TV programme. He glanced behind him, checking that the hall was still empty. It was.
Having no idea of the dimensions or layout of the room behind the door, he only had one plan of attack. Go in hard and fast, shoot anyone standing.
This was wrong.
Not his intention but the scenario.
His mind was screaming at him that he was walking into a trap.
He felt that the second he burst through that door he’d be confronted by a dozen armed troopers who would open up on him like a firing squad.
Let them try. He’d kill them all anyway.
He took in a deep breath, settling himself.
Used his left hand, the knife palmed in it, to twist the doorknob.
Then he threw the door open and followed it inside with a lunge. He was wearing Kevlar and could trust the armour to stop any return fire while he chose his targets.
Except there were none.
The room was empty of FBI commandos.
He checked a second time.
No one.
At the far end of the long, narrow room was a bed. Someone was swaddled in blankets, tucked up high under the armpits. Arms lay flat to each side, intravenous tubes hooked up to bags and electronic monitors. Bandages covered much of the head – funny, because he hadn’t shot her in the head. Maybe Alisha had banged her skull on the floor as she’d fallen down and had required surgery. He could just see a couple of locks of corn-coloured hair peeking from under the bandages. An oxygen mask covered the mouth and chin. A table had been wheeled alongside the bed, and a tray with a water jug and an empty glass tumbler had been twisted so it extended across the person’s middle. A small wall-mounted TV screen had been positioned so that the patient could watch without having to sit up.
He couldn’t clearly see the figure in the bed, but the hair was the correct colour.
He slowly closed the door behind him.
Walked forwards.
With each step he took, that trickle of unease he’d experienced earlier intensified.
He looked at his gun. Redundant for the time being. He tucked it into the holster on his utility belt. Transferred the knife to his right hand.
He was twenty feet away from the patient and closing.
Her face was hidden by the mask and by the bandages but even so she looked different than he remembered. Maybe it was the lack of make-up that made her skin look so pale and waxy.
Ten feet from the bed he paused.
‘Alisha . . . it’s me, babe.’
The woman in the bed didn’t stir.
Had her unconscious mind grown accustomed to the droning voices on the TV?
‘Alisha.’
He moved the final few feet and stood at the foot of the bed.
‘Honey, it’s me.’
Then he ripped back the blankets.
The knife was forgotten as his mind tried to make sense of what he found.
‘What the hell is
this
?’
The woman in the bed was already a corpse.
Chapter 45
‘Wait here, Rink. Anyone but me walks out of that room, just kill them.’
‘Rather be coming in with you, brother.’
‘Don’t know what we’re walking into. I’d rather one of us gets a second chance at him.’
‘What about Hubbard’s men? They come up, you want me to stall them?’
I gave my friend a wink and he shook his head, laughing deeply in his throat. ‘Second chance, my ass; you just want Rickard to yourself.’
‘If he gets by me he’s all yours.’
Rink shrugged. After all, it was me that Rickard had originally targeted, so there was personal investment in it for me.
‘Just be careful, OK?’
‘I will.’
I left Rink at the head of the stairs and moved along the hall. My carbine was with Rink, as I’d chosen to go with the SIG that was such an integral part of me. The gun was held alongside my ribs, my elbow bent, finger on the trigger, ready for anything.
The intense feeling of déjà vu struck me. The astringent smell of disinfectant was heavy in the air, just like when I approached Jimena Grajales’ sickroom. Inside I would find Luke Rickard poised to strike. The only difference this time would be that Rink was watching my back so there’d be no one lobbing hand grenades at us.
Didn’t mean that I’d walk away from this encounter alive, but I was more determined than ever that Rickard wouldn’t either.
The irony wasn’t lost on me that here again we were about to fight to the death alongside a woman’s hospital bed, but at least the patient wouldn’t attempt to shoot me this time. This poor soul, a Jane Doe with a passing resemblance to Alisha Rickard, had died from a drug overdose and had been brought here to pose as the killer’s wife. Maybe the trap Walter laid was a little unethical but when it was weighed against the alternative I couldn’t really argue. Alisha was out of danger, tucked up nice and safe at another medical facility to the north of the city.
The ruse would only last seconds after Rickard entered the room, which was why I now hurried along the hall. I expected the door to fly open, for Rickard to come out in a rage. The hall didn’t offer much in the way of cover, just a couple of utility closets, and he’d cut me down in the enclosed space. I had to make it inside the room before he recovered from the shock of finding a corpse.
Running, I felt as if I did so through a nightmare. Each yard felt like a mile and the door seemed to recede away from me. But it was all a lie of my strung nerves, a result of adrenalin overdrive, and I almost careened through the door without stopping. At the final moment I did manage to slide to a halt and ducked low to the left of the door jamb. Briefly I glanced back, and I could just make out Rink’s tawny features as he watched me from along the hall. I pumped my clenched fist in the air counting down from three, then grabbed for the doorknob and opened the door. At the same time, I went to my belly on the floor, training my SIG on the far end of the room, expecting a swarm of bullets to cut through the space above me.
The bullets didn’t come.
Pushing with my feet I cleared the door frame and checked left and right.
No sign of Rickard.
With my worm’s-eye view I could see under the bed. Rickard wasn’t hiding there. The blankets had been pulled off the corpse and hung over one side of the bed, and I could tell that the only person on the mattress was the dead woman.
‘Where are you, you bas . . .?’
I saw the black rectangle in the ceiling and knew.
The tricky son of a bitch.
Coming quickly to my feet, I moved into the room, gun now aiming high as I approached the bed. Now that I was much closer, the rectangle didn’t look so black, just an empty space in the hung ceiling. Dust filtered down from above and I heard the subtle movement of a shifting weight. Glancing once at the woman was enough to cause an involuntary cringe. A dusty boot print was centred on the white slip she’d been clothed in. Rickard had used her as a step up while he clambered into the roof space above.
Clever. I’d used a similar escape once when cornered by sheriff’s deputies who’d been misled into thinking I was a dangerous fugitive. The difference here was that I’d used a credenza as a stepping stone to an attic; using the woman like this was sacrilegious.
Then again, just about everything that Rickard did went against what was good or holy, so I shouldn’t have been surprised.
A low noise from behind alerted me to Rink’s presence. The lack of gunfire had brought him to the room to see what was going on. We shared a glance and I nodded up at the ceiling. ‘He’s getting away.’
‘You going after him?’
‘There’s nothing else for it.’
‘Of course there is. We could go outside and pick the punk off with rifles when he shows.’