Jay Giles (37 page)
I heard her, but the words didn’t reach me. I’d experienced that with her before when she’d talked about the grief, and all I knew was emptiness.
“Matt? Are you there?”
“I’m here. Just trying to take in what you’ve said.”
Her voice changed. The clinical tone gone. “Matt, I’m concerned about you. I want you to call me every day until you’re through this.”
“I will. It’ll be good to have someone to talk to.”
“Don’t try and shoulder this all on your own, Matt. You always want to do everything, make things right for everybody. Those are great qualities for a person to have. I never want you to lose them. However, this is a situation where you can’t do it all by yourself. Let other people—Ellworth, for example—help protect you and Tory. Realize you can’t please everybody. There’s no win/win solution here. Do what it takes to get the two of you through this.”
“I will. Thanks, Adelle. I’ll call tomorrow.
“Do that. Take care, Matt.”
I hung up the receiver. Told myself she was right. My job was to get us through this. To do that, I had to anticipate what was going to happen. By now, D’Onifrio had to know Wilder had failed and we were alive. That would only anger him more. He’d want us eliminated as soon as possible but probably wouldn’t try anything while the hospital was busy. He’d come in the small hours of the morning.
I headed back to Tory’s bedside, got ready to pre-empt the future.
A nurse was taking Tory’s vital signs. She seemed a little startled by my arrival. “How is she?”
“Heart rate, temperature, and blood pressure are good. We’ll know a lot more when she wakes up. Are you her husband?”
“I think I qualify as a significant other,” I said, smiling. “I’m planning on spending the night here.” I put my hand on the chair. “Dr. Kline told me that would be all right.”
She looked disapprovingly at the chair. “I’ll see if we have something better than that.” She showed me the nurse call button on the side rail of the bed. “If she needs anything, press this button.” She left, returned a few minutes later with a chair that had padding and arms.
“Thank you,” I said as we swapped chairs.
“You wouldn’t have gotten any sleep on this thing,” she said knowingly.
Little did she know—I wasn’t planning on sleeping.
I positioned the chair so I could watch over Tory. Although there wasn’t really anything to see. She hadn’t moved. She seemed to be resting peacefully. I also positioned the chair so I could see anyone coming down the hallway. Once I had the chair where I wanted it, I walked back to the waiting room, got a cup of coffee from the machine, carried it back, and took my position.
I had the watch until dawn.
At one o’clock, coffee gone, backside aching, I stood, walked to the waiting room, got a fresh cup. It didn’t taste very good, but it was something to do. I carried it back, sipping a little bit off the top so it wouldn’t spill.
My watch said one-fifteen. I was the only thing moving. The floor was quiet, buttoned up for the night. Even the nurses in the center station had their heads down and were silently filling out paperwork. Every now and then, a monitor went off or there’d be a patient check, and one of the nurses would attend to it. But for the most part, the place was calm, peaceful.
It was just the kind of setting where someone could tiptoe in and—using a silenced gun or a knife—kill and get out without anyone noticing. Maybe that was an exaggeration, but sitting there in the dim light, lulled by a soft symphony of monitor beeps and buzzes, it sure seemed possible.
Worse, here I was sitting in a chair at the end of her bed, like hanging out a sign saying, here we are. The more I thought about that, the more sitting there seemed a really dumb thing to do. Especially since I was rapidly convincing myself that whoever D’Onifrio sent would get past Ellsworth’s people.
I stood, stretched, carried my chair over to the nurses’ station.
An older nurse with curly gray hair, working at a laptop, looked up at me. “Did you need something?”
I pointed over in the direction of the waiting room. “I was going to try and get a little sleep in the waiting room. Would it be okay to turn off the lights in there? They’re kind of bright.”
“Sure, the switch is right by the doorway.”
“Thank you.” I placed my chair against the wall, started for the waiting room. I had a thought and returned to the nurses’ station.
She looked up again. “Yes.”
“My sister is coming from out of town. I won’t miss seeing her arrive because I’m in the waiting room, will I?”
“Well, you will if you’re asleep. But to get here from either “B” or “C” elevators, you have to go by that waiting room, so conceivably you could see her.”
“Thank you.”
I yawned. She went back to updating the patient files. I went to the waiting room, found the light switch, flipped it off. The room was dark except for the soft glow of light from the illuminated fronts of vending machines. Anyone walking down the hallway would have a difficult time seeing who was inside.
My next task was to secure a weapon. I remembered the old TV show, McGyver, where the hero would defeat the bad guys by making a device out of whatever he happened to find handy—a comb, two paper clips, a hub cap. I walked around, looking, but nothing jumped up and said use me as a weapon. I finally decided to take an arm off one of the chairs. It was heavy wood I could use as a club. Not very ingenious. McGyver would have been disappointed.
With a dime, I unscrewed three of the four screws that held the arm to the chair. The fourth wouldn’t budge. I pulled. Wiggled. Strained. Got nowhere. Frustrated, I made a loud sneezing sound and slammed it with my foot. The arm splintered at the end and broke away. I gave it an exploratory swing. The proverbial blunt instrument. It would work.
I made myself comfortable in a seat in the corner of the room that gave me the best view of the hallway. A round clock on the wall told me it was one-thirty-four. There’d be a shift change with lots of people coming and going sometime around five. If D’Onifrio was going to try something, it would have to be before then.
Of course, I had no idea how many people he’d send, how they’d be armed. Even with my chair arm, I didn’t have any illusions I could best armed assailants. My only hope was to scare them off.
To do that, I was counting on the fire alarm box I’d discovered on the wall to my right. I theorized that once I pulled the alarm, sirens would go off, lights would flash, and D’Onifrio’s people would scatter.
Not a great plan, but all I could come up with.
I tried to stay awake by watching the black hands creep around the white face of the clock. Every five minutes, I’d move, stretch, cross my legs—anything to mark time. It got old, of course. And it didn’t keep me from dozing off. There was a stretch in there from about two to two-forty-five where I must have dropped off. I awoke with a start, suddenly alert.
I tiptoed to the doorway, my heart pounding, fearful of what I might see. I peeked cautiously into the hallway. It was empty. All was quiet at the nurses’ station. I used the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and went back to my seat.
That little bit of sleep had helped. I felt surprisingly refreshed. The clock on the wall said two-fifty. Two more hours, I told myself and tried staying awake by thinking of companies and their stock symbols. That seemed more effective than watching the clock, but by three-thirty, my eyes were once again getting heavy. I’d closed them—just to rest them for a second—when I heard that “dink” sound of an elevator’s arrival followed by the whoosh of doors opening.
Through the glass portion of the waiting room hallway wall, I saw the heads and shoulders of two women in white—nurses probably—get off the elevator and head toward ICU. I almost ignored them. I’d been expecting D’Onifrio to send men. But something about the one woman, a blond, seemed vaguely familiar. Bam, it hit me. Ann, the blond from D’Onifrio’s office.
Every nerve in my body tingled as I tiptoed to the doorway to make sure. They were halfway to the nurse’s station, backs to me. My heart raced faster. The other one looked like the woman who’d sat next to me at City Hall.
There wasn’t any doubt. Nor was there any time to go back and pull the alarm. They were almost to the nurses’ station. I did the only thing I could. I charged.
I had the element of surprise going for me. Running up behind, I swung the chair arm as hard as I could at the side of the dark-haired woman’s head. It connected with a solid thump, dropped her like a bag of rocks.
The nurses at the station screamed. To them, I was attacking one of their own.
“Call the police,” I yelled back and dove for the dark-haired woman’s purse. I was sure there’d be a gun in there. I jammed my hand inside, bumped into something hard.
Ann launched a kick that caught me in the kidney. Pain shot up my left side. Worse, my hand slipped away from the gun. She landed another kick to my ribs. Started to kick again. This time I saw it coming, grabbed the heel of her foot, yanked upward. She went down on her ass. I reached for the purse.
It was good I was quick. By the time I had the gun out of the purse and pointed at her, she was back on her feet, coming at me. She kept coming, daring me to pull the trigger. A dare she would have lost.
“Freeze. Police,” a voice boomed from the end of the hall.
She looked around wildly. Realized she was sandwiched between us. The plainclothes officer walked closer, gun drawn, calling for backup on his walkie-talkie. When the backup arrived, he handcuffed her.
“You know her?” the first officer asked, nodding in her direction.
“I know she works at Shore for D’Onifrio.”
“How about that one?”
“She does, too. She’s the one who drugged me at City Hall.”
He reached down, picked her purse off the tile floor, found her wallet, read from her driver’s license: “Virlinda D’Onifrio. Looks like we got a relative. Too bad we didn’t get him.”
Virlinda wasn’t moving. They handcuffed her hands behind her back anyway.
“Call this in to Ellsworth. He’ll want to know,” the one officer said.
The nurses at the station must have been calling, too. A young doctor from the emergency room arrived to look at Virlinda. He bent down, examined the back of her head, said, “Ouch, that’s going to hurt.”
“Is she going to be okay?” I asked.
He looked up at me, shrugged his shoulders. “Headache. Possible concussion. She’ll live.”
The officer who’d called Ellsworth returned. “He wants Gary and me to bring these two in. You guys stay. He’ll have someone relieve you at eight.”
The doctor struggled to roll Virlinda over on her back—an awkward maneuver with her hands handcuffed behind her. Her head rose, rolled, hit the floor with a wham. “Oh, Jeez,” the doctor mumbled and quickly waved some smelling salts under her nose.
She wrinkled her face, groaned. As soon as her eyes opened, they hauled her to her feet.
“Get ‘em out of here,” the lead officer said.
Once they left, all I wanted to do was collapse. I couldn’t believe how much that had taken out of me. I was tired, drained. Thank goodness it was over. I needed sleep.
But before sleep overtook me, I wanted to watch over Tory, talk to her, let her know I was there.
I carried the chair back over, put it at the end of the bed, walked to her bedside. I held her hand for a little bit, said what was in my heart. I desperately wanted to hear her answer me. It wasn’t to be. She didn’t move. She was quiet. The room was quiet. My words exhausted, I went to the foot of her bed, settled into the chair. My eyes closed, my body relaxed. I could feel myself begin to nod. Still, some niggling thing was keeping me from sleep.
I was cold.
I tried to forget about it, settle back down, will myself to sleep. Instead, I found myself focusing on how chilled I felt. Unless I did something, I’d never get to sleep.
Annoyed with myself, I stood up, walked over to the nurses’ station. A young black nurse looked up as I approached. “Is there a blanket I could use?” I asked her.
