John’s nerves were raw with tension. Everything looked so normal. My God, what if he was wrong about Korenev? That would mean he’d sent Paige off into chaos. He reached for his cell as he quietly walked to the window. He’d been so sure he was right.
She didn’t answer. She always answered. She hadn’t had time to get all the way to Cheyenne, and he had the sickening feeling she wasn’t responding because she saw the call was from him....
He stared down at the well-lit lot for a second as the phone switched to her voice mail. Was it possible Korenev had seen John enter the hospital and was now waiting for him to come back out? Hell and damnation, anything was possible.
Chuck-Charles. The name came back again, as elusive as a web of invisible thread. That’s what his aunt had called him. She’d thought he was Charles.
His father.
For a second, John stopped breathing. His father was named Charles, he was sure of it although he wasn’t sure how.
Suddenly a flock of large, dark birds appeared out of nowhere and swooped over a nearby lamppost, veering toward the hospital window right at John. John gasped, threw his hands over his head and backed up, dropping the phone in the process. For a second, he cowered, and then he straightened up and braced his hands on the window frame, peering outside, scanning the darkening sky.
Nothing.
But he’d seen them, and now their sounds filled his head. In a parody of his nightmares, the hooting morphed into screams, and these pierced him like poison darts.
Owls swooping in the night, chasing him, children screaming.
Children screaming
…
He was screaming.
But he wasn’t, it was all in his head. Everything was in his head. Without a single doubt, he
knew
that the same overwhelming guilt that currently churned his gut with agonizing worry about Paige and her sister was familiar—it had happened to him before. He’d been responsible before, responsible for something that had ended in disaster.
But what?
His fault…
He had to get out of this room. He had to find Korenev and Katy. He had to find Paige.
He swallowed hard and turned from the window.
Chuck Miner stared at him with confused pale eyes in which enlightenment dawned like the lighting of a match. He pointed at John. “I thought you were dead,” he said.
“Tell me how we met before,” John said. His voice sounded scratchy, as though bird talons had clawed their way up his throat.
Miner narrowed his eyes. “I know I set you up, but you gotta believe me, I didn’t know he was going to try to kill you.”
“You hired me, didn’t you?” John said. He was trying hard to hear Miner over the screams in his own brain.
“Sure. I gave you some song and dance about an old girlfriend blackmailing me and you fell for it. Listen, you gotta believe me, that guy Korenev said he just wanted to rough you up a little, and all I had to do was hire you for some made-up job and get you up to that park and then get lost for a while. But you know how it went down. You and I drove up together, then Korenev attacked both of us and you disappeared into the river. What did you ever do to that guy?”
“I’m not sure,” John said. “Where is he now, do you know? How did you get in contact with him before? I have to find him—”
Miner held up his hands. “I don’t know, man. I never called him, he called me. I never want to see that dude again.”
The phantom screams had actually grown louder. Damn, he didn’t have time for head games. “I have to go.”
“Say, why are you here?” Miner asked.
“I’m not sure,” John said, swallowing hard. He took a step, amazed at how the floor seemed to buckle under his feet. Stumbling, he grabbed the back of a chair to steady himself.
“What’s wrong with you?” Miner demanded.
Good question. John took a deep breath. “Korenev will try to get to you,” he said. “You need to…to get the guard back on your door.”
Miner’s gaze shifted that direction and back. “What? The nurses who were in here before said he was out there.”
“He wasn’t when I came into the room.”
And right on cue, there was a noise at the door and both Miner and John turned to look. If it was the guard checking in, he’d demand to know what John was doing here, and John wasn’t sure he could explain. He didn’t have time for this. He had to get to Cheyenne, and it was hours away.
Paige.
A gray-haired orderly wearing Coke-bottle glasses and green hospital scrubs juggled a dinner tray with his left hand as he closed the door behind him.
John took another deep breath. He couldn’t seem to get enough air.
The orderly’s nearsighted gaze darted between Miner and John as he slowly approached the bed and set the tray on the rolling table. His hand caught John’s attention as the light reflected on a gold-and-black ring.
Miner pushed the tray away. “Was the guard out there?” he asked the orderly.
The orderly shook his head.
“Call someone for me, get the guard back,” Miner pleaded. “And take the food away, I’m not hungry.”
Silently, the orderly picked up the tray and, in one sudden and violent sweep of his arm, swung it at Miner, hitting him in the head with it. Miner slumped unconscious. Lime Jell-O ran down his face.
But the signet ring was all that John could really see. A gold-embossed owl set on a jet oval. It was as though dynamite exploded in his brain. He gripped his head. His skin was on fire. He knew that ring.
The orderly removed the glasses from his face. In an instant, he turned into Anatola Korenev—or whoever he really was. A knife appeared next, held in his maimed right hand. With a backward stabbing motion, he speared Miner without his gaze straying from John’s face.
“Your turn next, Mr. Cinca,” he said with no emotion as he wiped the blade clean on the bedsheet.
Chapter Fifteen
“Where’s Katy?” John said, but it sounded like a squeak. He was only half-aware of the blood blossoming across Miner’s chest. He could not take his eyes off that ring. The room seemed to swirl like a whirlpool with the golden owl the center of the disturbance, the eye of the hurricane, sucking him in.
“Sister is dead,” Korenev said, advancing with a limp. “Paige Graham next, after you.”
He’d failed. He’d been right and wrong at the same time, and he’d failed. Paige would suffer because of him if she didn’t manage to avoid Korenev—or even if she did. “Who are you?” John asked. “Why are you doing this?”
“Real name Aleksey Smirnov. Head of security in Traterg. Ring bells? No? You think we don’t know you come to Kanistan last month to ask questions of Ognevas? They call us.”
“And you killed them. Who were they?”
He shrugged. “Just people. They had job to do, that is all. What did they tell you?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember,” John said.
“Doesn’t matter now. You get back memory of being boy, you have to die.”
Being boy.
“The ring—”
“See, is true. I forget to take off ring.”
“There was an explosion.”
“Meant for ambassador.”
Ambassador!
“I don’t understand.”
“Too much talk, I lose time in hallway closet with dead guard waiting for medic people to leave. Then here you are, too, like big gift. If I had my way, you would be dead years and years ago when you were nosy boy in wrong place at wrong time.”
John had kept retreating as they spoke. Images were bombarding his head, images at once vague and yet vivid, more vivid even than what was unfolding in this room, in front of his eyes. It was the same ring, but it was on the hand of a clown and it held a box.
And then an explosion.
Tyler! Cole!
Brothers. They were his brothers....
“What did you do to them? To Tyler and Cole?”
“Dead,” Korenev said. “You see them soon.”
John finally backed into the wall. In a flash, Korenev was upon him, transferring the knife into his left hand so that now it was the owl that gripped the handle. Reality crashed back in a searing streak of pain as the glinting blade slid into John’s stomach.
John gasped and began to sag. He knew Korenev would hold on to the knife while gravity pulled John to the floor, gutting him like a fish.
He heard a shot.
Korenev, shock written on his face, gray wig askew, managed a halfway turn before collapsing.
With both hands, John gripped the knife handle that protruded from his gut. He looked across the room. An angel stood at the open door, holding a gun straight out in front of her.
“Paige,” he whispered as the world shrank to a single black dot.
* * *
P
AIGE DROPPED THE GUN
, screamed for help, then ran to John. She cradled his head, paralyzed with fear. She was too late.
“Hold on,” she pleaded. There was very little blood; perhaps the knife more or less plugged the hole in his body. She smoothed his damp forehead. He was very pale.
“I love you, John. Please don’t leave me,” she whispered as she smoothed his forehead. She’d remembered that twenty seconds after hanging up from Brian. Then she’d turned around and headed this direction, turning off her phone so Korenev couldn’t call, or Brian, either. One thought had consumed her—go to John. Right or wrong, Katy or no Katy, her place was with him, and she did trust him, she’d always trusted him. Why stop now when the stakes were so high?
But where was Katy? She shouldn’t have killed Korenev. She should have just wounded him and then beat Katy’s whereabouts out of him. She’d reacted in blind panic when she saw what he was doing to John, but now how would she find Katy?
People arrived and the room was suddenly crowded. The bed was pushed aside, Paige was pulled to her feet. Tears rolled unheeded down her cheeks as they carefully lifted John onto a gurney. Would she ever see him alive again?
“Leave the others, they’re both dead,” someone said as they raced out of the room, wheeling John between them.
“Wait for me,” Paige called, but a nurse turned and caught her arm.
“There’s nothing you can do, honey. The waiting area is down the hall. Go there, the police will want to talk to you, as well as the hospital office. We’ll need information on the injured man.”
“But John—”
“He’s going into surgery immediately. I’ll let you know as soon as he’s out.”
She bustled off. Paige didn’t want to go sit in a room and wait for bureaucracy to grind into gear, not when she was riddled with worry about John and with Katy still missing. She had to do something.
She turned around and stared at Korenev’s corpse. He’d hot-wired cars in the past, but it was also possible he had stolen cars whose owners had left the keys in the ignition. It was worth a shot.
She immediately knelt down and tore through his clothes as she fought the revulsion of touching him. At last she found his keys. There were only three and none looked as though it belonged to a vehicle. She checked his other pocket just to make sure and hit pay dirt in the form of a key chain that held a single battered-looking key. The clincher was the tiny pink leather cowboy boot used as a fob—no way would Korenev own something like this.
She gripped it tight in her hand. Stepping over Korenev’s body, she started for the door just as a whole new group of people began arriving. One tried to stop her, but Paige kept going, breaking into a run. She took the stairs instead of the elevator and burst out of the hospital only to stop dead in her tracks.
Police sirens in the distance warned her there wasn’t much time until someone came looking for her. She ran to the rental and got in, then took off for the perimeter of the lot. She’d start on one side and circle around to the other, looking for an old vehicle parked off by itself where there were few lights.
And found it amazing how many old cars, trucks and vans tended to get parked by the fence. She got out of her car at each and every one of them, pounding on metal, peering in windows, yelling Katy’s name, trying to fit Korenev’s key in the door of the vans or the trunks of the cars.
What if he’d broken his pattern and taken a new vehicle or parked under a bright light? She should have asked everyone in that hospital to help. Why had she tried to do it by herself?
Fifteen vehicles later, her headlights swept over the bumper of an old white van and Paige hammered on the brakes. The bumper sticker was red and pink and said Cowgirls Do It on a Horse.
She got out of the rental with the engine still running, the headlights illuminating the double back doors. Heart in throat, Paige tried the key and sure enough, it slipped in the lock. With shaking hands, she turned it.
The interior consisted of a large open space covered with cast-off hay. Bridles and halters and other horse tack hung on a rack affixed to the side walls. On top of the hay lay a pile of blankets. Paige started pulling at them.
A moment later she lifted the last one to uncover her sister’s ashen face. “Oh, Katy,” she murmured as she took in the cut on her left cheekbone, the swelling on her forehead, the silver duct tape covering her mouth and her closed eyes. She looked dead.
Climbing in the van next to her, Paige touched Katy’s throat and felt the flutter of her pulse.
“What’s going on out here?” a man’s voice boomed.
Paige had been so focused on Katy that she hadn’t heard anyone approach. She looked up now to see a large man in a uniform shining a flashlight on her.
“I got a report someone was going berserk out here, yelling and banging on cars,” he added. His gaze dipped and his eyes widened. “Lordy, ma’am, what’s wrong with her? Is she dead?”
“No, she’s not dead. She’s my sister and she was kidnapped,” Paige explained. “Help me get her up to the hospital.”
A few minutes later, with an unconscious Katy stretched out on the backseat and the hospital security officer following, Paige drove to the emergency-room door. The officer must have phoned ahead because the car was met by three people and a gurney and Katy was transferred inside.
Paige left the car where it was and followed. She called her mother, who had just learned about Matt’s murder on the television, and promised to come at once. She gave insurance information and personal details about Katy to the hospital office, and then she ran upstairs.