Lee had no idea if Susie Banks would be awake or asleep when he arrived at the MDC at seven thirty on Friday night, though he did know she’d been transferred from the ICU on 6 to the medical floor on 5. His heart ached for all her suffering. Has she had any visitors? Is someone making arrangements for her parents’ funerals? Hopefully someone was hard at work trying to locate the right people to care for her. The doctors and nurses could see to Susie’s physical recovery, but the wounds she had suffered went far beyond anything medicine alone could cure.
Lee made his way along several quiet corridors en route to the elevator bay. After the sun went down, a certain hush settled over the hospital, and tonight was no exception. Plenty of foot traffic was about, but the pace had downshifted to a noticeably lower gear.
Lee liked it here at this hour. Hell, he liked it here at any hour. Medicine may have become a terrible business, but it was a calling he would do for free if he could afford it. His father would have done the same.
He rode the elevator alone, reminding himself to keep it brief for Susie’s sake. Later, he would try to find the name of the social worker assigned to her case, assuming the assignment had been made.
Another thought came to him. If the eye exam he planned on giving Cam revealed a cherry-red spot on his macula, Lee would have to align himself quickly with Susie’s primary care physician. A medical mystery connecting the president’s kid to other gifted students attending the TPI would send shock waves through Washington and beyond. Lee had to brace himself for the coming tsunami, and that meant getting to Susie’s doctor before Gleason had the opportunity.
Thoughts of Gleason made Lee think of Karen. He wondered how she had made out. By now, if everything had gone to plan, she should have secured samples of the nootropics Cam was taking. An itch of worry raced up his neck. She’s fine, he assured himself. Karen was always fine. But he wondered. Was he telling himself this, or trying to convince himself of it?
The elevator came to a bouncing stop and Lee got out. He waved his badge in front of the card reader, unlocking the secured doors to the medical floor. Having admitting privileges granted Lee full access to the MDC’s many units.
To Lee’s left were the hospital rooms, and to his right were stretchers and wheelchairs. A set of portable oxygen tanks stood near the curved nurses’ station.
Lee waved to the nurse in floral scrubs seated behind the desk. Other nurses popped in and out of rooms like whack-a-moles, appearing and disappearing at random intervals. Down the hall a tired-looking nurse with hunched shoulders, dressed in blue scrubs, a stethoscope clasped tightly around his neck, came toward Lee with his face buried in a medical chart. Lee had his eyes peeled for Susie’s room and the two almost collided in front of the nurses’ station. Were it not for Lee’s fast and fancy footwork, they would have.
“Sorry, sorry!” Lee called out, leaping to one side.
The nurse made a startled noise and apologized as well. The brief commotion caught the attention of a repairman farther down the hall, a small ladder slung over his shoulder. He was walking toward the stairwell exit at the opposite end of the long hallway. A flicker of recognition came to Lee and he tried to place the man with blond hair and a thick mustache. He thought he’d seen him before, when Susie was up on the ICU. A repairman on both floors where Susie was a patient nagged at Lee, but he pushed that thought from his mind to make room for other considerations.
Lee glanced at the repairman as he walked away. Nothing about his behavior was suspicious, and yet …
He noticed the man wore blue sterile hospital gloves, not the heavy-duty kind he would have expected a workman to need.
“Is the heat turned down in 5-H?” the nurse in blue scrubs asked. “It was a terrarium in there last I checked.”
“Maintenance fixed it a few minutes ago,” the other nurse answered.
“Excuse me, I’m looking for Susie Banks’s room,” Lee said, interrupting.
“And you are?”
The nurse in floral screwed up her face. The medical floor did not receive many house calls after hours.
“I’m Dr. Lee Blackwood, a hospitalist assigned to Susie’s case.”
He said this with the same authority as before, and again, got no pushback. Hospitalists were a common practice these days, so his coming to see Susie, even at this hour, had a logical explanation.
Lee took another glance at the repairman, who was walking slowly toward the exit. Again it was probably nothing, but the encounter irritated him for some reason, like the steady ping of radar going off, a sound letting him know something was there. But what?
At that moment, alarms started to sound. The nurse in floral scrubs studied the telemetry monitors before her.
“She’s in 5-H. Speaking of Susie, her vitals just took a little dip.” The duty nurse spoke in the flat voice of someone accustomed to vitals dipping all the time. Lee’s internal radar pinged louder when he glanced again at the repairman, walking a bit faster than before.
First maintenance fixed a heat problem in Susie’s room and now there’s a sudden dip in her vitals?
The gas exposure was already suspect in Lee’s mind, and this repairman, his presence here and before, congealed to form a worrying picture.
Did he do something to her?
The repairman moved along, stepladder slung over his right shoulder.
“Hey!” Lee called out to him. “Wait a second, please.” Lee wanted him to stop before he disappeared down those stairs.
Instead of stopping, the repairman quickened his strides. Lee started after him in a trot that soon became a run. He paused to glance into Susie’s room and saw clusters of nurses gathered around her bed, doing what needed to be done.
Lee hurried his steps. Susie was in capable hands and he had questions needing answers, but the repairman was at the exit now.
“Hold a moment!”
Lee’s voice boomed down the hall.
The repairman glanced back, and the man’s icy blue eyes flared before they cooled. He tossed the full weight of his body (considerable weight, too; all muscle, Lee speculated) against the exit door’s metal push bar, letting the stepladder fall off his shoulder and clatter noisily to the ground. The door swung shut and Lee lost sight of the man.
Worried he’d lose him entirely in the stairwell, Lee raced ahead, feeling tightness in his knees and chest. “Stop!” he yelled, sounding a bit winded.
Without slowing, Lee leapt over the discarded stepladder to hit the push bar with both hands. The door sprung open with force and Lee stumbled off-kilter into an echoing concrete stairwell. From below, he heard the sound of fast-moving footsteps, already two or three floors below.
Lee descended the first set of stairs like a slalom skier bounding down a slope. As he approached the landing, he leapt several stairs to gain ground on his fast-moving quarry. Airborne, he misjudged the distance and had only a second to brace for impact before slamming into an unforgiving cement wall. His shoulder took the brunt of the blow before he ricocheted off. A rush of adrenaline swallowed the sharp pain.
Reorienting himself, Lee repeated the same speedy descent to the next landing, and to the one after that, trying not to focus on the repairman’s footsteps beating an even faster retreat. The urge to get upstairs and check on Susie was hard to resist. He pushed ahead, paying no mind to the gap between him and the repairman.
Two floors from the bottom, Lee heard the exit door bang shut. Dismayed, he knew there was no way to catch the repairman now, but he went to the bottom anyway. There he paused, hands on his knees, panting to catch his breath. Soon, he was moving toward the exit, thinking he’d make a quick check of the first-floor hallway, when a gruff voice spoke to him from behind.
“Hey, guy.”
Lee turned and came face-to-face with the repairman. He must have opened and closed the exit door to make Lee think he had gone. Without another word, the repairman uncorked a punch to Lee’s chest, just below the midline. The blow turned his vision white as he fell to his knees.
A gauzy film descended over Lee’s eyes, but he could still see the repairman lift one of his big black work boots. His body tensed, fearing a devastating strike to his side. A tattoo on the repairman’s muscled forearm came into sudden and sharp focus. A skull head wearing a spiked helmet appeared to be grinning right at Lee.
Instead of giving him a steel toe to the ribs, the repairman placed his boot on Lee’s back, applied pressure, and pushed him to the floor. Lee turned his head to the side. Air, blessed air, had finally begun to work its way down his throat.
“I don’t like doctors and I don’t like being chased,” the man said in a raspy voice. He kept his boot on Lee’s back. “You try following me, and I’ll kill you.”
The repairman stepped over Lee. The stairwell door opened and closed. Just like that, he was gone.
Eventually, Lee managed to get to his hands and knees, his breathing still severely compromised. Gripping the banister for support, Lee pulled himself to a standing position. He checked the hall. The repairman was gone. He took out his phone to call security as he started up the stairs to check on Susie. There was still time to hunt the repairman down. As he climbed higher he heard a strange, muffled sound from above—screaming, he thought. He climbed higher. The voice sounded familiar, and if he was right, Susie Banks was in terrible agony.
Lee put his phone away. There was no time for phone calls. He had to get back upstairs, had to help, do anything and everything he could. Whatever the repairman had done to Susie, it was not going to hurt her.
It was going to kill her.