Sarah was holding herself together pretty well, especially with her bullet wound. Since she hadn’t bled out already, and clearly no bones had been clipped, Jolaine had hope for her. But she needed a doctor, and she needed one now.
“I’m sorry, Graham,” Sarah said. “I’m okay, really. I’ve just got a lot of things going through my mind right now.”
“So, are we going to the police?”
“No, not tonight.”
“A hospital, then,” Graham said. “You’re hurt. You’ve been shot.”
Sarah’s hunt through her pocket produced a cell phone. Jolaine was hoping for something else. She wasn’t sure what, but some kind of a solution would have been nice.
“You’re going to make a phone call?” Jolaine said. “How about you answer my question? We’re all in danger here, you know. Not just you.”
Again, Sarah ignored her. The smart phone’s screen bathed her in a silver-blue light that highlighted her pallor. As she swiped at the screen, she left bloody streaks.
“What are you looking for?” Jolaine insisted. Ahead, the twisting country road was an opaque black ribbon.
“I found it,” Sarah declared. She pressed a button and brought her phone to her ear. Whoever she was calling had better be of calm temperament, Jolaine thought. Ten-thirty at night was late for anyone.
“Doctor Jones, please,” Sarah said into the phone. “This is Mrs. Smith.”
Ah, Jolaine thought. They’re spooks. I should have known.
“Four seven four bravo,” Sarah said after a pause. “Gunshot. Serious.” After another pause, Sarah said, “I’m sorry, but I’ll never remember all of that. Let me hand you over to someone who will. Yes, a trusted source.” With that, she handed the Droid across the center console to Jolaine. “This is Doctor Jones,” she said.
Sure it is, Jolaine didn’t say. She brought the phone to her ear. “Hello?”
“What’s your name?” the voice asked from the other side.
“What’s yours?”
“Don’t trifle with me, missy. You already know my name. I am Doctor Jones.”
“Fine,” Jolaine said. “My name is Doe. Jane Doe. Don’t trifle with me, either, Doc. The last few minutes have been really, really intense. I’ve got a seriously injured woman sitting next to me who needs help, and you want to do small talk. Seriously, Doc, who’s trifling whom?”
Five seconds of silence convinced Jolaine that she’d either made her point or driven the doc to hang up. “You sound like you’re part of the Community,” Jones said.
“On the periphery,” Jolaine confessed. “A contractor, never official.”
“I see. How bad are her wounds?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t seen them. There’s a lot of blood. She’s pale but she can talk, and she seems to have it together cognitively.”
“Cognitively,” Jones mocked. “That’s a high-dollar word for a grunt.”
“Why did you want to speak with me?” Jolaine pressed. She didn’t have time for bullshit, and she figured the best way to avoid it was to stay away from the bait.
“I want you to bring Mrs. Smith to my clinic. We can care for her here.”
Translation: the Company had a contract with a quick-quack that would keep serious injuries off the grid.
“How do I know I can trust you?”
The doctor laughed. It sounded like genuine amusement. “Well, Jane, you don’t. You can’t. But let’s be honest. You have no option.”
Jolaine didn’t answer.
“All right, then,” Jones said. “I’m going to give you an address. Do you have a GPS system to punch it into?”
“I have my phone.”
“Are you ready to copy the address?”
“Stand by,” Jolaine said. Then into the rearview mirror: “Graham, listen up. Are you listening?”
“To what?”
“Just listen.”
“Who’s Graham?” Jones asked.
“He’s the patient’s son.”
“He can’t stay here.”
“Let’s do that later,” Jolaine said. “Let’s have the address.”
Jones gave an address in Defiance, Ohio, and Jolaine repeated it. “Got it, Graham?”
“Yes,” he said. The kid was blessed with perfect recall — literally, he remembered every word said to him and everything he read.
Jolaine asked the doctor, “How far is that from Antwerp, Indiana?”
“Worst, worst case, thirty minutes.”
Jolaine clicked off, whipped the BMW onto the right-hand shoulder, and hit the brakes.
“What are you doing?” her passengers asked in unison.
“I’m figuring out where we’re going,” she said. “Recite back the address, Graham.” As he regurgitated the house number and street, she entered them into the phone’s navigation program. Good news: fifteen miles, seventeen minutes.
She bet that she could make it in thirteen.
With an utter disregard for speed limits, it actually took twelve. Doctor Jones lived slightly north of nowhere, off a road that was marked only with a caduceus.
“What is this place?” Graham asked.
Jolaine resisted the urge to extinguish her headlights to provide less of a target. To do that would be to commit them to total darkness, which could mean driving into a ditch or a tree.
“It’s the doctor’s house, sweetie,” Sarah said. Her voice had become breathy, and there was a grunt of pain between “house” and “sweetie.” “He’s going to make me all better.”
Sarah often spoke to her son as if he were three years old, and the tone made Jolaine wince.
“Dad’s dead, isn’t he?”
“Don’t talk of such things,” Sarah said. In those words, Jolaine caught the hint of the Eastern European accent that Sarah worked so hard to camouflage. Jolaine thought it was a sign that the woman was becoming weaker.
Jolaine also noted the absence of an answer to the boy’s question. That could mean any number of things, but in Jolaine’s mind, it only meant one: Yes, Graham, your dad is dead.
If there was a paved roadway in here, Jolaine couldn’t see it. Navigating — if that was indeed what she was doing — was mostly a matter of not hitting the surrounding foliage. By default, the road was where a bush or a tree was not.
Judging distance was an exercise in futility, as was assessing the passage of time. After what felt like several long, whole minutes, she saw another caduceus just like the previous one, but this one was underlined by a reflective arrow that pointed to the right. Jones hadn’t mentioned the driving gauntlet during their telephone conversation. Spooks thrived on mind games. She’d known a lot of spooky people when she was tromping through the Sandbox, and most made her want to take a shower after speaking with them. Even “hello” needed to be treated with suspicion.
Finally, the driveway opened up, and she saw a house in the distance. Barely discernible in the dark, it would have been invisible had a single coach light not burned in the front.
“How sure are you that this is a good idea?” Jolaine thought aloud.
“How many other options can you think of?” Sarah responded. The accent was even thicker.
As Jolaine cleared the woods, with fifty yards or more separating them from the house in the distance, she cut the lights. The risk of getting raked by gunfire from the building trumped any worries about wrecking the car.
“I’m scared,” Graham said.
“I am, too,” Jolaine said. The words were out before she could stop them. She wished she had a plan. Back in the day, she and her comrades from Hydra Security would never have made an approach like this out in the open. Of course, she would not have been the only operative wielding a weapon, either.