Snake Skin (45 page)

It wasn't her job to be making life and
death decisions. She was only here to observe, not get involved.
She climbed to her feet, staggering towards the elevator, towards
escape.

"Out of our way," Fletcher ordered her. He
held a gun in one hand and a car alarm remote in the other. His arm
was wrapped around Guardino's neck, the gun at her head.

Very theatrical, but it worked for Cindy.
Once she saw those clay-colored bricks strapped to his chest,
anything he said was fine by her. She backed away, her heels
skidding in Melissa's blood, hands held up in surrender.

"Thank you," he said as the elevator doors
opened and he and Guardino climbed inside.

Cindy blinked as the doors closed. Blinked
again and in a thunderclap realized that all around her people were
moving—nurses herding patients and families down the emergency
stairs, two more rolling Burroughs onto his back, another talking
furiously on the phone.

She watched as Burroughs opened his eyes,
one hand slapping against the floor. "Gun," he gasped. "Where's my
gun?"

Cindy saw it. It had skidded under the
clerk's desk. She knelt and retrieved it, then crawled over to
Burroughs.

The nurses were trying to restrain him,
pulling his shirt up, checking him for wounds, but he kept batting
their hands away. "I'm fine, I'm fine."

"Holy shit," one of the nurses said, raising
the small pager-sized device needled into Burroughs' belly. His
insulin pump. There was a ugly red area below where the pump had
been attached.

"The bullet. It hit your pump." The nurse
turned the pump over, the silver of the bullet catching the
overhead light and gleaming.

"Tell me about it," Burroughs grunted, still
wheezing as if he couldn't catch his breath. "Hurts like a
sonofabitch. Give me my gun and help me up."

Cindy handed him his gun. She held onto his
waist while the nurse caught him under his arms and together they
helped him up. He leaned heavily against the counter, breathing
fast and shallow. His color was pale and he was sweating.

"Where'd they go?"

"Down," Cindy answered.

"Ashley. Did he get Ashley?"

"No. It was just Fletcher and Guardino."

He glanced at the elevator then down the
hallway. "I have to get to Ashley."

Staggering, he stumbled down the hall, one
hand brushing the wall as if he needed a guide. Cindy looked down
at her bloody hands, at Melissa's body and decided it was better to
be with a man with a gun, even if he was a bit wobbly, than out
here on her own. She raced after him, heels click-clacking on the
linoleum.

He stopped in front of a door, waving her
back as he held his gun at the ready, using both hands to steady
it. He kicked the door in and stepped inside. Cindy saw the lights
click on and followed him.

The room was empty.

"Ashley," Burroughs groaned, slumping
against the wall, his gun dangling uselessly in his hand. "Where is
she?"

She allowed the girl named Megan to herd her
down the stairs. People rushed past them, some parents, some nurses
carrying small children, IV tubing and monitor wires hanging from
their bodies. The sound of weeping, panicked voices, and pounding
footsteps vibrated into her awareness.

But all she really heard was her mother's
voice saying that she was dead. She hadn't been able to see her
mother—Megan had been yanking her in the other direction, but Megan
had been looking that way and the terror in her eyes after the
gunshot told everything.

Her mother was dead.

Her mother said Ashley was dead.

Maybe her mother was right. About
everything.

Suddenly they were alone in the stairwell,
everyone else streaming out the doors to the first floor. Megan
stood on the landing below the main floor, hefting her mother's
gun.

"The morgue. She's bringing him to the
morgue," Megan was saying.

It made perfect sense. If she was dead, then
the morgue was the place for her.

Then it dawned on her that the "he" Megan
was talking about was Jimmy. He had saved her once—had he returned
to save her again? Bring her back from the dead?

"I'm going with you," she told Megan,
clamping her hand over the younger girl's wrist.

Megan gave her a hard look, then smiled as
if relieved to have company on this quest, even if her companion
was a nameless dead girl.

"Okay," she breathed out. "Let's go."

"It was your job to keep her safe!" Fletcher
shouted once they were alone in the confines of the elevator. He
shoved Lucy away from him, throwing her against the wall. "Isn't
that what you always say, the children come first? How the hell
could you let this happen?"

He waved the Glock in her face as if the
threat of blowing the entire hospital to kingdom come wasn't enough
to get her attention. Lucy felt laughter bubbling up and swallowed,
stomping it down hard.

"When I tackled her, she hit her head," she
improvised. Pain lanced through her shoulder, down her jaw, seemed
determined to rock her entire body as it stampeded along her nerve
endings. Her knees kept threatening to give out on her—worse of
all, she was so exhausted, that she was about ready to let them
surrender. "The doctors said given her weakened condition—she was
severely dehydrated and her electrolytes were out of whack—that she
had bleeding in her brain. It was slow, didn't show up for a few
hours, until after they gave her enough fluids to bring her blood
pressure back up."

Tears were streaming down his face as she
spun a tale using everything she'd ever learned watching from TV
and autopsies. "I'm sorry. We tried to save her, but—"

"Didn't try hard enough." His voice was low
and deadly and Lucy feared she'd pushed him too far.

The elevator came to a halt and the doors
opened. He shoved her out, his weapon pressed against her
spine.

"No one cared about her except me," he
continued his lament as they followed the signs to the morgue.
Their footsteps echoed in the dimly lit, empty corridors. "You
should have left us alone. I could have made her happy. Taken care
of her."

They turned a corner and came to a halt in
front of a wooden door labeled: Pathology. Authorized Personnel
Only.

Fletcher nudged her and she tried the
handle. Locked. No surprise. They wouldn't want just anyone
waltzing in to visit the dead.

A frustrated growl emerged from Fletcher's
throat as he raised the Glock, the barrel resting alongside Lucy's
face. A flick of the wrist and he'd be firing a forty caliber
hollow point into her brain.

Torn between closing her eyes and needing to
watch every second, she edged her gaze to center on his trigger
finger. Braced herself, images of Nick and Megan cascading through
her mind as he squeezed it.

The explosion was deafening.

Chapter 40

Monday 2:17 am

Burroughs clutched his belly, wanting to
hurl but knowing it would hurt too much and waste too much time. He
lurched back out into the hallway only to collide with a man.

"Where's my wife? Where's Megan?" the man
asked Cindy who exited Ashley's room behind Burroughs. "What
happened?"

"Fletcher," Burroughs said, recognizing the
man as Guardino's husband. The white water rafter. Callahan, that
was his name. He slowly moved down the hall, wishing he could run,
wishing he could fucking breathe.

"Fletcher has them? Where?" The man didn't
get hysterical, instead cut to the essentials. Burroughs liked that
in a man, especially when he could barely draw enough air to keep
himself upright, much less talk.

"The morgue," Cindy answered for him.

Callahan sprinted to the elevator, jabbing
the button. It opened just as Burroughs arrived, crammed full with
patients in wheelchairs and their nurses.

"It's no good," Cindy said. "They're
evacuating the building because of the bomb."

"Bomb? What bomb?" Callahan asked. He didn't
wait for an answer, instead spotted the staircase on the other side
of the elevator bank and ran to it.

He was halfway down the first flight by the
time Burroughs made it through the door. Burroughs would have
shouted at him to stop, after all he was a civilian and unarmed,
but it took every ounce of energy he had to stay upright as he
hurtled down the stairs, pain ricocheting through his body with
every step.

Pressure built in Lucy's ear, deafening her
and sending a shockwave of pain through her body. Then it released,
a gush of fluid seeping down her neck, the sound of Fletcher's
breathing abnormally loud in that ear. He sounded like a beached
whale making love, huffing and puffing as he holstered his gun and
reached through the large hole he'd blown in the door to turn the
handle.

She could have trapped him there, taken him,
but it wouldn't have done any good—not with the deadman's switch.
She had to get him inside, into the most secure place she could
think of.

He pushed her through the open door. The
labs were dark. She groped along the wall, found the lights and
suddenly they were surrounded by stainless steel tables, bright and
expensive looking microscopes and a thick steel door marked:
Autopsy
.

Lucy shook her head, trying to quiet the
whooshing noises the gunshot had left behind. Her balance was off
and she had ruptured an eardrum. Least of her worries.

She led the way to the stainless steel door.
It wasn't locked. Opened it. Beyond was a tile walled hallway. To
the right was a glass walled room with autopsy tables. To the left
was a larger area with several empty stretchers and X-ray
equipment.

And straight ahead lay what she'd been
looking for, hoping for. The large, wide, thick steel door of a
walk-in refrigerator.

"She hates the dark," he said, shoving her
forward. "Get her out of there."

"You're the one who put her in the dark,"
she reminded him. "Who tortured her."

Now that they were here, she needed to
stall, give the staff time to evacuate as many patients as
possible. She had no earthly idea if her plan would work given the
amount of C4 strapped to Fletcher's chest.

"I know," he blubbered. "I need to make
things right. That's all I wanted, was to make things right for
her, give her a chance at a new life."

"Abusing a fourteen-year-old girl was your
way to make things right?" As she spoke, Lucy heard movement behind
her. She edged toward the refrigerator door at an angle, trying to
catch a glimpse in the reflection from the darkened windows of the
autopsy suite.

"I haven't abused anyone!" His voice
quavered and more worrisome, so did the finger holding the
deadman's switch.

Lucy stopped and turned to meet his gaze,
keeping his attention cemented on her. "I saw the barn, Jimmy. Saw
where you kept Ashley—you had her tied up like an animal. And you
tortured her with snakes. What else did you do to her, Jimmy?"

The movement at the entrance had stopped.
Lucy got a look in the dark windows and felt her resolve crumble.
Megan took a step forward, gun in her hand, aimed at Fletcher.
Beside her stood Ashley. Fletcher had his back to them. Lucy meant
to do everything in her power to keep it that way.

"You're sick, Lucy. I never touched her—not
the way you think. I saved her. It was all necessary, for her own
good."

Lucy could almost reach the door handle,
just a step farther. She kept sidling toward the refrigerator,
trying to pull Fletcher along with her, praying for Ashley and
Megan to leave. Instead, she saw Ashley take the gun from Megan's
hand. Her breath caught in her throat as she remembered Ashley
firing the revolver at her earlier.

She reached out, yanked the refrigerator
door open. Only one weapon left—the truth.

"Torturing a little girl is for her own
good? How about the girl you killed at the Tastee Treet, Jimmy? Did
you know she had a little baby, only four months old? What about
Vera Tzasiris? She was only nineteen, barely spoke English—did you
torture her before you killed her?"

His head jerked in a nod as she hammered him
with each accusation. "I didn't have a choice. They all had to
die—so that I could save Ashley."

"It wasn't Bobby," Ashley's voice sounded
raw and harsh as it echoed down the tiled hallway. "It was you. All
along, it was you."

Fletcher startled, almost dropping the
deadman's switch as he whirled around. Lucy clamped her hand over
his, holding the switch down.

"Megan, Ashley, run. Now!"

Chapter 41

Monday, 2:22 am

Burroughs reached the busted door to the
labs just as he heard the gunshot. He gulped in a lungful of air
and ran as fast as he could. Callahan was pulling a young girl, not
Ashley, out through a steel door leading into the main lab.

"Lucy's still in there," he gasped.

"And Ashley," the girl cried, struggling in
her father's arms to return to the hallway.

"Go," Burroughs told him, raising his gun.
He stepped into the hallway, surprised to see Lucy and Fletcher
standing in front of an open refrigerator, Ashley holding a gun on
them.

Fletcher was bleeding from one leg, Guardino
holding him up, one hand wrapped around his hand with the deadman's
switch. Her other arm had him in a choke hold. His face was dusky
purple and he was slumped in her grasp. His gun lay on the floor,
beyond Guardino's reach even if she didn't have her hands full.

"Get her out of here," Guardino shouted.

He stepped forward and Ashley whirled,
aiming the weapon at him. Her face was blank as if she didn't know
what was real and thought this was all just some kind of crazy
game.