Dominique said, “My staff will show you out.”
“I know the way.”
“I must insist.”
The two well-dressed if steroidal security guards lumbered toward us, as I got to my feet and headed out. As I passed them, they fell in with me, one on either side.
When we reached the door, the round-head opened it for me, at my right, while the square-head gestured, on my left, for me to go on through.
“Real gentleman,” I said, and smiled first at the square-head, who nodded, and then back at the roundhead, who was nice enough to return my smile.
Then I shoved the square-head into the open doorway and shut the door on him, hard, catching him in the neck and the side of the head, approximately. As the round-head moved in, I yanked the door back, hard, slamming it into his moon face.
Square-head was staggering around like a drunk looking for a curb and I whapped him good, with my purse.
He went down in a pile and it sounded like a small building collapsing.
Round-head was fumbling for a gun under his shoulder, but the sharp suit’s buttons were slowing him down, and I hit him with the purse, too, a nice smack on the side of his sloping skull, and he went down slower, but he went down all right, kneeling to me for a moment, before flopping onto his face and kissing the parquet floor.
I got in the purse and removed the nine millimeter and, with an extended arm and a nicely steady hand, pointed it across the room...
...at Dominique Muerta.
“When I decide it’s time to show you out, Dominique? I’ll do it, personally....”
I returned the gun to my purse, snapping it shut, stepping delicately around the fallen security guards, saying, “Excuse me, fellas.”
The redheaded gatekeeper had disappeared and, just before I went out into the corridor, I heard one of the security boys behind me mumbling, “What...what the hell?”
I glanced back and saw Dominique in the doorway to her inner sanctum, looking down at her security team with an expression usually reserved for sucking sour lemon balls.
“She hit you with her purse,” Dominique was explaining. “You’re both fired, by the way.”
She’s strict, I thought, and went out.
ELEVEN
“What happened that night at the hospital,” I said, “was the real turning point—a tragic one, in some respects.”
“How so?”
I shifted in the recliner. “I wasn’t there for all of it, Doc, so I’ll give it to you as best I came to understand it....”
A dark-haired, trimly mustached uniformed cop of about thirty, Officer Anthony Clemens was sitting outside Roger Freemont’s room, playing a Nintendo DS handheld. On the other side of the door, Fremont remained unconscious in his hospital bed, IV tube inserted, heart monitor blipping, privacy curtain drawn, the room now being shared.
As Clemens played New Super Mario Bros., a tall, slender, severely attractive Hispanic nurse approached, a clipboard in hand. Her nametag said Garcia, and she wore latex gloves.
Outside Freemont’s room, about to go in, she paused and asked, “Are you Officer Clemens?”
Clemens looked up from his screen, grudgingly. “Yeah.”
She nodded back down the hall. “Call for you at the nurse’s station. A Lt. Valer?”
“Thanks,” Clemens said, and he began juggling the gaming system with the cell phone he was getting out of his pocket. “But I gotta stay at my post. I’ll call him—”
She gripped his arm. “Officer!”
He blinked up at her. “What?”
The woman’s tone was scolding. “Don’t you know you can’t use a cell phone in a hospital? Electronic interference.”
A little confused, Clemens put the cell away—slowly, but away. “What, like on an airplane?”
“That’s right...sorry. Didn’t mean to jump on you.” She smiled at the officer. “Go on and take your call, at the nurse’s station. I’ll stay with the patient till you return.”
He smiled back at her, said thanks, and as Clemens headed down the corridor, tucking away the evidence—his Nintendo DS—into a pants pocket, Nurse Garcia slipped into Freemont’s room.
On entering, the nurse’s pleasant expression hardened into a blank mask as she studied, in a clinical fashion, her patient, unconscious in his bed, the heart monitor’s blipping providing a percussive undercurrent.
The nurse tossed her clipboard on the foot of the bed and removed from her pocket a hypodermic syringe already filled with a black liquid. She pointed the hypo needle up to check it, giving it a test squirt.
Then she moved in on the unconscious Freemont, needle poised....
“Excuse me for interrupting, Ms. Tree,” Dr. Cassel said, and he was on the edge of his chair. “But how can you know this? Where were you when this was going on?”
I grinned over at him. “Didn’t I mention it, Doc? I was who Roger was sharing the room with....”
I whipped the privacy curtain open.
The empty bed where I’d been sitting and waiting—in slacks and blouse, not a hospital gown (I wasn’t sharing the room to that extent)—was to my back, and I was on my feet, with my nine millimeter in hand...
...and aimed right at the “nurse.”
I gave her a smile at least as nasty as the black remedy in that hypo.
“Maybe,” I said, “it’s time for your shot....”
But she was fast, and didn’t fluster, I’ll give her that: she hurled the hypo at me like a knife, and the damn thing hit me in the arm, hard, hard enough to pierce the blouse and stick in my arm and quiver there and for that matter bump me back against the bed, jarring me so that the gun went flying, clattering to the floor somewhere.
This put me out of commission long enough for Nurse Garcia to book it out of the room, moving quickly, not quite running.
I yanked the damn hypo from my arm—“Fuck!”—and wasted a second or two trying to spot my fumbled nine mil, slipping the hypo in my slacks pocket.
Gun was out of sight, so I said, “Shit,” and took pursuit, anyway.
I could see Garcia up there, nearing where she’d have to turn either left or right, but there were several real nurses in the hall as well; calling out was too risky, because it would encourage Garcia to take a hostage or otherwise misbehave....
Down at the end of the corridor, beyond the fleeing Garcia, came Uniformed Officer Clemens, trundling around the corner, gesturing in confusion. And right on his heels was another nurse, a genuine nurse, pushing a steel cart of meds.
“Hey,” Clemens said to Garcia, “I held on for like forever, and Valer didn’t—”
What happened next I saw but couldn’t do a damn thing about....
Nurse Garcia casually removed a small automatic from her right-hand dress pocket and shot Clemens in the head, just above and between the eyes.
He went down in a cloud of blood spray and landed on his gaming system, which made a pathetic little dying bleep bleep, and the poor dead bastard wound up sitting against the corridor wall, slumped there, game over.
As this was happening, that real nurse shrieked, abandoned her cart and ran back the way she came. And Nurse Garcia shoved the cart out of her path, upending it, spilling pills and other medical supplies, so that when I reached that point, the overturned cart was between me and Garcia and the route she’d taken, though I could see her, on the run now, full throttle, shoving aside people in white, nurses and aides and doctors, like human bowling pins.