The man on the forklift had no chance at all.
Scott lunged across the seat, thrusting the beveled edge of the crowbar upward through the soft tissue beneath his jaw, and then on through the bone of his palate. The man slumped forward before toppling off the seat and onto the concrete floor. Scott fell back with the effort, but just as quickly Laura had him back on his feet. She helped him onto the seat, took her place beside him, and turned the key.
The forklift's electric engine whirred to LIFE at the moment they heard the cries and footsteps of approaching men.
Scott spun the wheel to the right, heading at full speed across the aisle by their cell, and then left into the corridor leading straight to the huge front doors.
Laura glanced over her shoulder just as several men rounded the corner behind them.
"Stay low!" Scott yelled, crouching behind the wheel.
The forklift sped ahead toward the doors as several shots were fired.
"Not there, asshole!" someone screamed. "Those are the goddam ammo crates!"
His screaming was punctuated by a rumbling from within one of the crates. Suddenly the entire wall exploded, showering the forklift with debris. Another explosion followed, and then another. The warehouse instantly filled with hot black smoke. Scott hunched over the wheel, staring intently ahead.
I'll be damned," Laura heard him say.
"They were here. They were here all the time."
She glanced over and saw him actually smiling.
They were less than twenty feet from the door. Behind them, the exploding maelstrom continued. Then, directly ahead of them, Lester Wheeler stepped into view, his pistol ready.
"Get down and hang on!" Scott ordered.
The sound of Wheeler's rapid volley of shots was lost in the explosions, but bullets clanged off the forklift. An instant after the last shot, they slammed against the warehouse doors at top speed. The two central panels flew apart, ripped free of their supports, and crashed to the pavement. Black smoke billowed out from the gaping opening, and moments later, Lester Wheeler raced through.
"Stay down!" Scott demanded, looking back over his shoulder at the scene.
At that instant his head snapped oddly to his left, and he pitched forward onto the wheel. The forklift swerved right, then left. Laura steadied the wheel with one hand as she pulled her brother free with the other. His body was limp, although his foot remained pressed on the accelerator. Then Laura saw the hole-a small black rent in his forehead just above his right eye. A trickle of blood had already begun to seep from the margins of the wound. Beneath the hole, Scott's eyes were glazed and unseeing.
"No!" she screamed. "God, no!" The forklift had skidded past an oil-drum pyramid and out onto the long pier. Scott was totally lifeless except for his hands, which still clutched the wheel, and his foot, which held fast on the accelerator. Behind them, with the rumble of a hundred freight trains, Warehouse 18 blew apart.
Still steadying the wheel, Laura looked back. A fireball of pitch-black smoke was rising from the destruction. Lester Wheeler, who had stumbled during the blast, was scrambling to his feet.
"You bastard!" Laura screamed. "You goddam fucking bastard!"
Wheeler stopped, leveled his gun at her, and fired at the moment the forklift careened off the end of the pier. Scott's body lolled off the seat as the heavy machine yawed in the air and plummeted the fifteen feet to the harbor. It landed on its side, nose first, hurling Laura ahead as if she were shot from a cannon. She skimmed several feet across the surface, then hit the chilly water with dizzying force.
Laura felt herself sinking beneath the weight of her sodden clothes, but the icy chill almost instantly cleared her head and she struggled back to the surface. Scott was nowhere to be seen. Above her, Lester Wheeler appeared at the end of the pier, fixed his weapon on her once again, and fired. She ducked back beneath the surface as first one bullet, then another, skimmed past her face.
She had instinctively taken a decent breath, and now she desperately forced herself to calm down and concentrate. She was about four feet below the surface, and was being maintained in calm perfect buoyancy against the salt water by her clothes. This was her world, she realized, her element. Above her was the man who had just murdered her brother.
When it seemed he had nothing left, Scott had reached inside and found enough to save her. Now she had to do the same for herself She had to move, then breathe, then move again. If she could just hold out and fight the cold, she could beat him. She could beat him!
Ignoring the overwhehning chill and the air hunger burning in her chest, Laura forced herself down another two feet and kicked back toward the pier.
Not yet, she screamed to herself as she pulled ahead. Not yet, not yet, not yet!
Water seeped through her nose and into her lungs.
Still, eyes closed, she swam.
Finally, with her head pounding and her chest screaming for air, she kicked to the surface.
The original buildings of Metropolitan Hospital of filled most of two blocks between the South End and Roxbury sections of the city. In the days before medicare and Medicaid, it was the busiest of all the Boston hospitals, at times running as many as five hundred patients a day through its emergency room. Now, with a progressive drain to many newer facilities, its patient load had dropped off, and two of its three medical school affiliations had pulled out. Still, with its location near the poorest section of the city, there were plenty of severe trauma cases and medical crises.
With the E.R. at White Memorial inaccessible to him, Eric had chosen to use the frantic pace of Metro to provide him with a weapon he could use to break down Haven Darden. The ride there took fifteen minutes-precisely the same amount of time it took him to find a place to park. He set the material taken from Donald Devine's safe on the floor of the Celica, and entered the hospital through the main entrance.
The key to moving unnoticed about any hospital, Eric knew, was simply to look and act as if one knew precisely what one was doing. He also knew that the bigger and busier the facility, the less precise one had to be.
His first stop was in the house officers'quarters, located on the fifth floor of a crumbling red brick building named for a nineteenth-century surgeon, and probably built not long after his death.
About half the doors on the floor were unlocked.
There was nothing of use in the first two rooms he checked.
Opening another door, he had actually stepped inside before realizing that a nurse and resident were on the narrow bed locked in flagrante delicto, their uniforms in a heap on the floor. The couple glimpsed him just as he was slipping back out the door, pulled a sheet over their heads, and giggled.
In the next room he tried, Eric found what he needed. He undressed there and emerged wearing someone's discarded surgical scrubs and a white clinic coat. Next, he headed to the E.R.
He crossed the waiting room and entered the treatment area. Every room, it seemed, was in action.
A nurse hurried past, taking no notice of him. A second nurse smiled at him as she entered the room of a new trauma victim.
Purposefully, he continued down the busy corridor and into the med room, which was deserted. In less than a minute he was out. His hand was buried in his clinic coat pocket, concealing a filled 10cc syringe, hooked to a 11/2-inch-long, 22gauge needle. Then, casually, he strolled from the emergency room back to the house officers' building to change.
The game was on.
The drive from Moab along unmarked dirt tracks took Bernard Nelson nearly three hours in his Land Rover.
Before college, Nelson had spent six years in the marines, most of those with a wilderness survival unit.