He turned his attention from the car windows to those on the near side of the clinic. All except the first of three or four running toward the back had their blinds raised. Glenn saw an overnight attendant in lab whites filling out paper forms at a desk behind the last window. Insofar as he could tell through his lenses, they were charts comparable to the sort nurses and doctors would hang from beds in hospitals that treated patients of the human variety. There was, he noticed, bluish light flickering from somewhere in the room… probably a television set. It wouldn’t hurt if the attendant had its sound up.
“Okay,” Ricci said. “You ready?”
Glenn nodded.
“Give me exactly two minutes.” Ricci tapped the face of his WristLink. “Remember… anything goes wrong, head straight for the car and take off.”
Glenn hesitated. This had been another point of disagreement between them, but Ricci had been relentless in his insistence on drawing the heat if there was a foul-up.
Ricci stared at him in the dark, waiting for his second nod. He gave it with slow reluctance.
“I thought it’d be ‘In for a penny, in for a pound.’ ”
“Bullshit,” Ricci said. Then he slipped away toward the left, bent low under the ponderous boughs of the hardwoods.
Hoping the cops would continue to lean back in their seats a bit longer, an eye on the tritium dial of his own watch — not quite as jazzed as Ricci’s, but accurate — Glenn knelt into position with the rifle.
Ninety seconds later he sighted through its night scope, counted down the final half minute to himself, and then pulled the trigger with a silent prayer.
The muted crack of the subsonic round leaving his weapon was no louder than the hammer click of a dry-fired revolver. It traveled straight through the cruiser’s open window, skimmed between the cops and the windshield, and struck the interior of the passenger door’s frame.
The startled cops jerked in their seats as the sabot burst open on impact to release its superconcentrated fill of dimethyl sulfoxide and zolpidem — a soporific aerosol formulated to be instantly absorbed into the bloodstream on contact with skin or mucous membranes. Glenn knew a microscopic amount of the agent would be enough to knock out someone the size of a pro-basketball center within moments, and neither of the cops was built like Shaquille O’Neal.
They dropped off into unconsciousness, spilling over each other in the front seat of the car. The two probably hadn’t had time to wonder what was happening to them. Their exposure to the chemical incapacitant would leave them with pounding heads, queasy stomachs, and a whole lot of confusion when they recovered. But they would be alive and well.
Glenn produced a long exhalation of relief, slung the rifle over his shoulder, and looked out past the treeline with his binocs.
Ricci had emerged from the woods and was hurriedly moving across the parking lot toward the patrol car.
Extending a gloved hand through its partially open window, Ricci unlocked the passenger door of the cruiser, pulled the senseless cop in the shotgun seat upright, and propped his weight against the backrest to ensure he’d remain in that position. Then he reached down between the seats for the prone driver’s dislodged cap, careful not to lean too far inside. Any residual trace of the DMSO/ zolpidem agent that hadn’t been biologically absorbed should have become inactive within seconds of its release into the air, but he did not want to take unnecessary chances.
He started toward the front of the clinic. At the entrance Ricci donned the uniform cap, knocked, and waited with his head bowed almost against the peephole. Moments later, he heard footsteps on the other side of the door.
“Back already?” The night attendant. Standing there behind the door. “Fella, the way that coffee passes through you, you’re gonna have to start drinking a weaker blend.”
“Or less of it,” Ricci said from the shadows, speaking quietly, his face still turned down so all the attendant would see through the peephole was the peak of the officer’s cap.
He heard the snap of the turning lock, braced himself. The door began to swing inward, light from the clinic’s vestibule filling the open space.
Then the night attendant spoke again as the space widened: “C’mon in before y—”
Ricci quickly shoved through the door and locked his arms around the attendant, a full body tackle that landed him on his back, the wind leaving his mouth with a grunt of mixed pain and surprise as he struck the floor. Down on top of him, Ricci grabbed hold of his arm, wrenched it hard, got him onto his side, twisted the arm some more to make him flip onto his stomach, then pressed a knee into his spine below the shoulder blades. Another pained grunt escaped the attendant. He tried to lift himself up, pushing his free hand against the floor. Ricci dug his knee in deeper to keep him still, got a spray canister of DMSO/ zolpidem out of his belt holster, held it to his face, and thumbed the nozzle.
The guy went limp. Pain gone; one, two, three.
Ricci rose to his feet, hustled across the vestibule and waiting area, and then passed through a swing door into the rear section of the building. There was a short hallway. Two examining rooms to his left, an operating room, a cubbyhole office beyond them, then a fourth room near the end of the hall to the right. All were doorless.
He hooked into the last room and immediately saw the cluttered desk where the attendant had been working on his charts. On a table beside it, the television that had cast a flickering glow through the window was tuned to a late-night talk show, its host mugging at his viewers. Otherwise the area was very sparse. There was a steel gurney in the middle of the floor. Some file cabinets stood against one wall. Another wall was lined with a dozen or so boarding kennels, the four largest on the floor, the rest above them on wide metal shelves.
Ricci scanned the kennels from just inside the entryway. Most were vacant. Each of the few containing animals was tagged with a case number and what was presumably the pet-owner’s surname. He saw a house cat watching him curiously from an eye-level shelf. Several kennels apart from it on the same shelf, a small furry dog was curled up into a sleeping ball.
In a big kennel on the floor, a greyhound lay on its side facing him, its bandaged flank rising and falling with its slow, heavy breaths, an IV tube running into it from a drip bag mounted above the kennel’s wire-mesh door. The dog’s eyes were open, staring, and blank. Ricci couldn’t be certain whether it was aware of his presence.
The tag below the door read: 03-756A-HOWELL CENTER.
Ricci’s gaze held on the dog a long moment, went to the file cabinets. No, he thought. Not there. Case is too fresh, too outstanding.
He turned toward the desk and noticed a rack holding several plastic clipboards, their neatly labeled tops facing outward. The board with the number and name matching those on the greyhound’s kennel jumped out at his eyes almost at once.
Ricci pulled it from the rack, hastily inspecting the notations on the attached sheets of paper.
His eyes widening, he heard his own sharp intake of breath.
Ricci needed under a minute to take digital snapshots of every handwritten page with his WristLink. After he was finished, he replaced the clipboard, went through the desk drawers, located the tray that held the sealed glass vials and transparent evidence bags referenced in the vet’s notes, and photoed them as well before returning them to the drawer in which they’d been found.