Critical Judgment (1996) (52 page)

“I have no patience for this,” she said. “As far as I’m concerned, it’s high time you were the one doing the suffering. Once I shoot this thumb off, I guarantee you, as only a doctor can, that it’s not going to grow back. What does your precious sixth sense about me have to say about my willingness to do that?”

Without a word Lew hopped to the cargo bay and awkwardly rolled onto it. Abby searched the barn and found another length of rope. Then she wrapped him snugly and completely in the vinyl tarp and lashed him securely in place.

“Don’t do this to me, Abby,” he said. “I’ll never survive in here like this. I’ll suffocate.”

“We’ll see,” Abby replied, securing the rear gate and taking her place behind the wheel. “We’ll see.”

The engine kicked over on the first try. With Lew’s meticulous attention to the details of his life, she had never doubted that it would.

“Josh, I need to get out of the valley without going on any of the state roads. Can you do that?”

“Yes.… My head is … killing me.”

He took the vial of pills from his pocket but was unable to open it. Abby helped him shake out two. He swallowed them without water.

“Which way?” she asked.

“South and west … toward the house.”

The road to which Josh directed her was steep and rutted. By the time she was a mile into it, he was semiconscious again, with a rag doll’s control of his body. Again and again jolts sent his head snapping against the window. As much as she could, she drove holding on to the neck of his sweatshirt. Once she stopped to check on the bundle in the cargo bay. Lew was furious, but uninjured.

There were no forks or turns off the dirt road, so there was no reason to try to rouse Josh. For forty-five minutes Abby drove through the rain-soaked forest. Suddenly, after a steep, mercilessly jouncing downhill stretch, she saw headlights flash past ahead. She slowed and crept forward, cutting the lights. Finally she reached the margin of the woods. Josh had done it. The highway was the two-lane state road through the mountains that she had taken to San Francisco, and then later to Feather Ridge.

“Josh, we made it!” she said excitedly.

He did not respond. His breathing was sonorous, unnatural.

“Josh?”

Abby shook him, but he did not respond. She turned his face toward her. The muscles in his face were twitching. Another seizure—this one more focal than the last.

“Damn,” she said softly.

To the right, with luck, she still faced more than a four-hour drive to the city. To the left, half an hour back, was Patience—a viper-filled pit for her, without a single ally she could count on. She bit at her lower lip and looked again at Josh. Then she took a single deep breath, flipped on the headlights, and swung a right
onto the road, headed south. Ten miles, twenty, fifty. Josh had long ago stopped seizing, but he remained in a coma. She was about five miles from the cutoff to the town of Feather Falls, and beyond that, Feather Ridge. Ezra Black had his own helicopter. With it Josh could be on the roof at St. John’s in forty-five minutes or so. At the very least it was worth a call.

Abby was looking down at the floor for the cellular phone when the cab was lit up by a flashing blue-white strobe. Her heart froze. The cruiser was a few car lengths behind her, inching closer as the officer inside waited for her to pull over. The town was just ahead. Being stopped now might well mean being brought back to whatever unthinkable fate awaited her in Patience. It certainly meant delay and trouble for Josh. And with no arrest warrants out for Lew Alvarez, it was quite possible Galatín would be able to talk the police into setting him free and even into adding kidnapping to the charges against her. She was seven miles or so from Feather Ridge—no more.

“Hang on, baby,” she said, though Josh was far beyond hearing her.

She rammed down on the accelerator and felt the truck surge forward with surprising power. Instantly, the siren from the cruiser pierced the night. Abby kept her foot tight to the floor. The cruiser tried to pull beside her, but the narrow road made it easy to keep it at bay. Luckily, at this hour there was little traffic. She flew over a small hill, bottoming out the chassis as she hit. Ahead, she could see Main Street. She was doing over eighty now. Wind was tearing through the open window, whipping her hair against her face and into her eyes. Josh was slumped over almost double, jostling violently from side to side. The cruiser pulled alongside her once more. Again she fought it off.

Then, up ahead, she spotted a second cruiser, parked across the middle of the road, strobes flashing. There was room for the truck to the right of it, but only if the
pickup was tougher than a pedestrian bench and a stop sign. Eighty-five. Eighty-eight. Abby saw the officer standing by the cruiser realize that she wasn’t slowing down, and dive off to the left. At the last moment she swung the pickup onto the sidewalk. Her head snapped forward as the steel plow frame took out the wooden bench. But the stop sign sheared off with just a minor jolt.

Seconds later she was beyond the town, flying up and down the roller-coaster hills toward Feather Ridge. Behind her the two cruisers were gaining. But now, she knew, they would not be driving with such a sense of urgency. She was trapped. Not a mile ahead was the massive gate to Feather Ridge. What they had
no
way of knowing, though, was that she had absolutely no intention of stopping.

Apparently, the police had been able to call ahead to the guardhouse. As Abby approached it, a dark sedan snapped its lights on, and a security man appeared at the roadside, gun in hand. Abby got her bearings, aimed for the center of the gate, gripped the wheel tightly, and ducked below the level of the dash. A bullet cracked through her window and thudded into the roof of the cab. Then a second shot must have hit the left front tire. It exploded with a bass-drum sound, tearing the wheel from her hands at precisely the moment the pickup slammed into the gate. Abby’s forehead smacked against the steering wheel, dazing her and sending blood cascading down into her eyes. But the pickup barreled on through the gate, careening to the left into the orchard.

Abby kept her foot to the floor as she battled to regain control of the wheel. The truck flattened several young trees, then lurched to the right and back onto the pavement. The smell of burning rubber filled the cab. It took all her strength, pulling the wheel to the right, to keep the pickup on the road. Blood from her forehead had her nearly blind. The cruisers and the third car were
pulling alongside again. But ahead of her now, sprawled across the side of the mountain, was the estate.

The battered truck careened down the last hill. Abby could see perhaps half a dozen guards running to take up positions in front of the house. With a final, unspoken prayer, she slammed on the brakes. There was a deafening screech as the pickup skidded sideways, spun completely around, tipped way up onto two wheels, then dropped back heavily onto four. The doors were snatched open. Rough hands pulled her and Josh out and threw them to the ground. Instantly, a dozen or more men, guns drawn, were around her. Half a dozen powerful flashlights shone on her face. One of the men kicked her onto her back with his boot, then roughly pulled her to a sitting position by the front of her sweatshirt.

Abby blinked, trying to focus on him, but could hardly see anything through the blood. Suddenly the guard let her go and stepped away. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. Through the glare of the lights a man approached and handed her a handkerchief. She tied it around her head, putting pressure on the gash, which she now could appreciate was not that big. Then she peered up at him.

“You must have wanted very badly to see me,” Ezra Black said.

Abby waved off help, stood by herself, and rushed around to where Josh lay. He was unconscious but crying out softly. His vital signs seemed strong, and there were no other indications that he had been injured in their ordeal.

She retrieved the plastic bag from the truck and motioned Black away from his men. Back at the pickup, she could see some of the guards untying the tarp. After the violent pounding Galatín must have taken during the harrowing chase, it was quite possible that there would be a corpse wrapped inside. But after a few seconds she heard him moaning.

“That man on the ground needs to get to St. John’s in San Francisco,” she said. “Could your helicopter take him?”

“What’s the matter with him?”

“He’s been poisoned with cadmium. Just like your son was. He’ll die soon without help.”

She reached into the plastic bag and brought out the box of cadmium and the article about the Colstar explosion. Black studied them. It was clear from his expression that the name Luis María Galatín was one he knew.

“Galatín is responsible for this?”

“He is.”

“And where is he now?”

“There.”

Abby motioned toward the truck, where Galatin was sitting, crying out about a pain in his arm.

“And is that all you want from me? A ride to San Francisco?”

“No. I want that lab beneath Colstar closed down for good.”

Black eyed her for several seconds.

“Can I count on your total discretion if I guarantee that?”

“You have my word.”

Abby unfolded the list of cadmium victims.

“This man, Josh Wyler, is the one on the ground. The next one, Willie Cardoza, is the one who ran down Peggy Wheaton. There’s Ethan’s name, right there. Galatin was working in the Patience Regional Hospital ER under the name Alvarez. These people all worked for Colstar. He gave the cadmium to all these people when he sewed up their cuts. He had no idea that given intravenously, the metal would become concentrated in a place in the brain where it would cause the sort of insanity that killed your son. He didn’t care. He only wanted to get Colstar closed down.”

“I see.… So, is this a trade?”

Abby glanced over at the truck.

“I want the best lawyers money can buy for Willie Cardoza and Josh. And I want something done about Quinn.”

Black looked at her admiringly.

“You’re tough,” he said.

“I wasn’t before this all happened.”

“For what it’s worth, I will promise you that Quinn is finished in Patience. I also have heard that they will not be able to save his leg.”

“I’m not sorry. I want Kelly Franklin to get the very best medical care and rehabilitation. And if she doesn’t make it, I’d like to contact you about having Colstar take care of her two daughters.”

“Is that it?”

“Yes.”

“You sure, now?”

Abby thought for a moment.

“I’m sure.”

“Thank goodness.… Hey, Nick,” he called out to one of the group of men. “Get ready to fly. This lady and her friend need to get to a hospital in San Francisco.”

Abby motioned toward the truck with her head.

“What about him?”

“I don’t recall that my sharing that information was part of our deal.”

Abby hesitated, then said, “It wasn’t.”

“For what it’s worth, I have no intention of killing Galatín, although at some point he may wish that I had. I have some good friends and business associates in the Paraguayan government. I know for a fact that they’ll be most grateful for this … this scum’s return home. Most grateful.”

Abby held the billionaire’s gaze for a time; then she nodded that their business was completed. She turned away and followed the men who were carrying Josh to the helipad. Minutes later they were airborne. Abby sat at one end of a plush, sofalike seat at the rear of the
elegant aircraft. Josh was stretched out next to her, his head resting on her lap. He had regained consciousness only briefly, but long enough to manage something of a smile.

The chopper banked a graceful arc over Ezra Black’s estate and then headed southwest. Abby gazed out the window past the battered, exhausted reflection that looked vaguely like herself. She reached up and flicked off the cabin lights. Far to the north, almost lost in the pitch-black landscape and sky, she could just barely make out a smudge of red.

T
hree thousand miles away, just to the east of the Tennessee/North Carolina border, Lally Dorsett lay supine on the stretcher, watching the ceiling fluorescents flash past. Forty-five years she had lived in the town of Gilbert, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains, and she had not been sick a day. Now, because of a little dizziness, she was in the damn hospital. Hell, she thought, for most of those four and a half decades, Gilbert didn’t even
have
a hospital. Now, suddenly, it seemed as if there were doctors coming out of the woodwork.

There was a time, not so long ago, when she would have simply written off her dizziness and waited it out. It would have gotten better, too. Problems like that always did. But now, because her children insisted, and because the hospital was there, here she was getting wheeled down for a test her doctor couldn’t even explain to her. An MRI, he said. Well, this was the last time she was going to submit to any test without a fight. Her kids meant well, but they just didn’t understand that there was a direct correlation between the number of doctors in a town and the number of sick people.

The stretcher was wheeled into the place Lally had been told to expect—a gleaming, bright room with
something like a huge spaceship in the middle, a hollow tube running through its center. She refused the technician girl’s offer of help and scooted herself from the stretcher to a sliding bed attached to the hole in the ship. At her doctor’s recommendation, she consented to the earphones and black eye shield. Then she allowed herself to be pushed into the cylinder.

“Are you ready?” the girl asked through the earphones.

“Ready’s I’ll ever be.”

Some George Strait began playing in the headset. Beneath the mask, Lally’s eyes closed. The banging and clanging of the magnet that she had been told to expect was scarcely blocked at all by the music. From someplace behind and above her, a fan started blowing. The air in the tube began to smell sweet and just a bit heavy. Her doctor hadn’t said anything at all about that. Lally wondered if she should say something to the girl.