Color Blind (29 page)

Jenna and Yancy slipped through the automatic doors. “You said yourself people talk way too much on these games. Isaac probably has a knack for eliciting confidences.”

They took the stairs, Yancy in the lead. Jenna followed, knowing he would remember which floor the shooting victims had all stayed on. Yancy jumped the stairs two at a time. For a guy missing a foot, he was more athletic than she’d have given him credit for.

When they reached the right floor, Jenna and Yancy burst through the doors. The nurses’ station seemed empty, everything quiet.

Yancy headed to the other side of the station, opened the
EMPLOYEES ONLY
door.

“Yancy!” Jenna whispered.

“Don’t worry. I know where the buzzer is.”

The buzzer was the last thing on Jenna’s mind. Regardless of what she’d posed as or been brought in as, technically, she was as much an agent as Ayana was. If something went wrong, her ass wasn’t even padded, much less covered.

Then the door unclicked, and she grabbed the handle anyway. So much for that half of her conscience.

They peeked inside every room on the way down the hall, including the one Yancy had occupied a few days ago. Some contained patients hooked up to beeping monitors, some bore only empty beds.

And a strange absence of medical professionals.

Just as danger garnet flashed in Jenna’s mind, a young, thin nurse backed out of a room on the right. At the sight of Yancy and Jenna, her face crinkled with confusion.

“Can I help you?”

Very different from the nurse the day they’d been in to interview Yancy, who would’ve taken one look at them in an employee only area and shot them on sight. In fact, seeing Nurse Twyla might be refreshing, given the situation.

“Is Twyla on duty?” Jenna asked.

The younger nurse’s mouth quirked as though the request was the strangest thing she’d ever heard. Having met Twyla, it probably wasn’t far from the truth.

“Wow, she’s popular today. She’s here. Her brother’s in with her now. Is there some kind of emergency?”

Brother?

“Where?” Yancy asked.

The girl nodded toward the end of the hall. “Last room. Is everything okay?”

“Call 911. Page hospital security.
Now!
” Jenna said as she passed the young nurse on the way to the last room.

The girl nodded hard, backed away a few feet, then turned and ran.

Jenna’s heart thundered. What the hell was she doing? She had no gun, no badge, no cuffs. No way to restrain a two-hundred-pound father hell-bent on revenge.

Which was why she gasped at the sight of Yancy removing a Ruger .380 from his prosthetic leg.

“What? I have a license to conceal and carry,” he said, defensive.

“In your
leg?
”

“If you gotta have a custom-made fake leg, you might as well use it. Now, go!”

She stood to the side of the last door on the left, and Yancy took up position on the other side. No sounds from inside.

“Three, two, one,” Yancy said.

He pushed the door inward, gun first. Jenna entered behind him, careful to shield herself.

Thadius Grogan stood near the window holding Twyla in front of him, a human shield. He held a SIG against her temple.

“Thadius, drop the gun! No one has to get hurt!” Yancy said, clear and loud. He leveled his gun with Thadius’s head.

Twyla trembled in front of Thadius, squeezing her eyes shut, saying something under her breath.
The Lord’s Prayer.

“Somebody’s already been hurt!” the gray-haired man said through gritted teeth.

Most cops would think it wise to say something about how all this bloodshed wouldn’t bring Emily back, but Jenna knew Thadius wasn’t looking to change the past. Not by a long shot.

“Twyla didn’t save Sebastian, Thadius. You know that. She wasn’t even in the emergency room when he was brought in. She wasn’t on the team that evacuated him from the park, either. She isn’t responsible,” Jenna said calmly.

Thadius’s hand holding the SIG wobbled. “She helped him.”

“Twyla did her job, Thadius. She didn’t know who he was or the things he’d done to hurt other people. How could she have?”

Twyla didn’t look at Jenna at all. Her eyes stayed upward, and her mouth kept praying. The nurse’s stubby fingers grabbed at Thadius’s hand around her rib cage and arms, almost as though she was using it for safety.

Keep saying Twyla’s name.

“Twyla didn’t know Sebastian hurt your daughter, Thadius. But we know. We know what he did to Emily and to other people. We’ll find him, and we’ll punish him. Put down the gun. Let us help you.”

Thadius edged backward. “That’s what they said last time.”

Then, before Jenna could scream, Thadius’s gun jolted away from Twyla’s temple and toward Yancy. He fired.

Jenna hit the ground behind the hospital bed. The gun fired again, glass shattered.

Jenna peered around the corner of the bed. Thadius had disappeared. Twyla lay on the floor where he’d dropped her, shrieking and covering her head but unharmed.

Yancy.
Jenna twisted her head to look for him, dread creeping up from her toes.

But Yancy was back on his feet, charging full-speed at the window.

Y
ancy leapt through the shot-up window after Thadius Grogan. Fucker might have fired the shot at him as a distraction so he could get away, but Yancy had had enough gunshots fired at him to last a lifetime and then some.

The outcropping wasn’t that wide, but Thadius was already out of sight. He couldn’t have jumped to another building. Even if the bastard was more agile than he looked, the closest rooftop was too far for an Olympic high jumper.

That’s when Yancy heard more gunshots.

His metal foot scuffed the granite of the outcrop as he ran toward the lip of the roof. He could hear Thadius screaming.

“Crank now!”

Yancy leaned over the side to see Thadius holding one of the window washers, gun to his head. Thadius had shot out one of the ropes stabilizing the swing scaffold, which explained the swaying platform.

The operator below ran toward the rope crank, yelling for Thadius to calm down.

“I’ll calm down when you crank! Do it now!”

The operator worked the pulley. Thadius pressed the SIG harder into the washer’s skull. “Hand over hand! Take us down!”

The side of the platform where Thadius stood with his hostage eased lower, but the other side remained stationary. Thadius took aim at the rope on the stationary side and fired. The bullet missed.

If Thadius hit the rope, he would go down. Fast. Problem was, so would the other guy.

Yancy leapt onto the scaffold and grabbed the rope. His eyes locked with Thadius’s, then he yanked at the rope, hand over hand, trying not to fumble his own gun. The scaffold descended, sloped. Yancy pulled faster to keep up with the other side.

“When we get to the bottom, you make one move, and this guy’s blood is on you,” Thadius said. “Leave your hands on the rope or he dies.”

Yancy hardly listened, just kept moving.
Please let the cops be here by the time we hit ground. For once in my life, let me be lucky.

They closed in toward the ground, the platform swaying precariously with their uneven, uncoordinated efforts. Yancy’s heart thundered, the Ruger heavy in his hand.

“Nobody moves!” Thadius warned.

The platform crashed into the cement on Yancy’s side first, jarring him off his feet. His bad grip on the gun slackened, and it dropped.

Thadius’s side hit bottom, and the man pulled the window washer with him, still holding him tight to his chest. “Don’t follow me!”

Dazed, Yancy glanced around for the Ruger, saw it a few feet away. He rolled to his stomach, his head throbbing.

Yancy pushed to his knees, crawled toward the gun. He didn’t know where Thadius was or if he was watching. He could only hope Grogan wouldn’t shoot him since he’d done nothing wrong. After all, Thadius had had the chance to shoot him in the hospital room and didn’t.

Yancy’s fingers found the gun. He grabbed it tight and twisted to face the direction Thadius had been. Nothing.

Yancy collapsed onto the cement on his rear end, then he used his arms to boost himself to his feet.
Follow him!

“Where?” he yelled to the crank worker.

The guy pointed to an alley to the side, and Yancy staggered that way. Thadius had a hostage and the advantage, but where could he go?

When Yancy turned the corner, though, that answer became abundantly clear.

The window washer leaned into the brick wall, face first, counting. Yancy looked past him to where the alleyway spilled into the opposite parking lot. A taxi line.

Thadius was gone.

T
hirty minutes later, while nurses stitched up the gash on Yancy’s head, Jenna considered bashing her own against the wall. If it would get her out of Hank railing at her for moving in on a suspect without police, she might.

“You could’ve been killed, you could’ve gotten other people killed! What were you
thinking
?”

She glared at him. “I was thinking there was a spree killer two rooms away from me and that letting him
go
would be worse than confronting him. He didn’t kill the nurse, did he? In fact, the entire hospital made it through his visit alive.”

“It could’ve easily gone the other way, Jenna.”

“I guess it’s a good thing for me it didn’t, then.”

All the ways the confrontation could’ve gone awry had already run through Jenna’s head, and even considering all of those, she still came to the conclusion she’d done the right thing. Thadius would’ve killed Twyla, whether Hank believed it or not. Finding out about Sebastian’s arrest history and that someone had the chance to put him away and didn’t had sent him on a worse spiral, and Twyla would’ve likely borne the brunt of that if Jenna hadn’t been there to talk Thadius down. Now Twyla was alive, and that made her a prime witness. They could talk to her, find out what Thadius wanted to know from her. That is, if Hank stopped wasting time arguing about what might have happened.

After Yancy had run after Thadius, Jenna had attempted to go after
him
. She’d been stopped by Twyla, who’d grabbed her leg and begged her not to leave. The pleading had been insistent, but the grip was what actually kept Jenna there. Looking back, it was a wonder Twyla hadn’t been able to take Thadius down, gun and all.

It had taken Twyla ten minutes to stop screaming at a full-on bloodcurdling level, then an additional two injections of Valium to stop crying and yelling at random intervals. Now the woman rested in the bed of the room where she’d been held hostage.

“How long until we can talk to her?” Jenna asked.

“
You’re
not talking to anyone! Do you realize how much hell I’m going to take for this?”

Jenna shrugged. “Probably a lot more if you don’t catch Thadius Grogan
or
Sebastian Waters.”

“I know how to profile, Jenna.”

“I’m sorry. I could’ve sworn it was me that showed up at the hospital when Grogan was still here. Or did I hallucinate that?”

Hank folded his arms. “Fine. But I’m present for the interview, and I know your next move before you
make
it. Clear?”

“Crystal.”

“Fine. I’ll go check when we can interview her,” he said.

When Hank walked away, Yancy stood from the bench in the waiting area where he’d been seated. “How’d that go?”

“You shouldn’t be walking around. Concussions don’t like movement.”

He waved her off. “Nothing compared to the blood loss you sustain when you lose a leg. Besides, they haven’t said it was a concussion yet.”

“Yet,” Jenna repeated.

“Come on. What’d he say?” Yancy pressed.

Jenna sighed. This day might be longer than the previous, and that was saying something. “He wasn’t thrilled about the Ruger.”

“Ah. It’s always the guns that get you. Next time, I’ll bring my trusty baseball bat. Would he rather you have hijacked some tranquilizers to fight Thadius? Or ask him politely to surrender?”