Night never came here. The lights never dimmed and true stillness never really settled. No such thing as rest in peace, Logan thought grimly as he slipped in through the lower entrance door and passed the morgue. In here, even the dead were not given a respectful darkness. Maybe the light was to fool them into thinking they hadn’t started their last, long journey. Logan didn’t think so. But he didn’t have time to ponder the question right now. He had a journey of his own to make.
The one positive about spending so much time in this place was that he knew his way around. Every closet, every cupboard. All the places where he’d be spotted immediately. And all the places he wouldn’t. At the end of the basement hallway, the door to the supply closet was slightly ajar. Logan slipped through the opening and the door clicked quietly closed behind him. This closet was perfect. Not often used, out of the way, and most important, unlocked. Nothing special in there. Nothing restricted. Not even doctor’s scrubs, which tended to walk out the door if they weren’t locked up. Just gowns and flat sheets and big cardboard boxes of toilet paper.
Inside the closet, Logan pulled off his gloves and jammed them into the pocket of his coat. He crushed the coat flat deep inside the nearest pile of sheets. Checked his boots. It was safe to leave them on, but only if they were dry. The staff around here would spot a trail of water on the floor as quick as thinking.
Under his coat, Logan wore a set of green scrubs, acquired before the nurses began locking some of the supply closets. He’d worn them a lot when he was living here and they were pretty threadbare, but that was the idea. He wanted to look like he fit in. The truly sickening part, the part that made his stomach churn, was that he did fit in. Too well. He’d been here before and he would be here again. But not tonight. Tonight he wasn’t here to stay, just to make a brief withdrawal and then be on his way. Miles to go before I sleep, he thought.
The route up the back stairs was easy. Almost no one used stairs in a hospital, and certainly never at night. The third-floor stairwell was one of the places he had gone in the past when he needed to escape. And that’s where he stood right now, panting only a little. His conditioning was not what it once had been, but it was coming back. A good thing, because speed was his only hope. Speed, and a little luck.
The door handle snapped downward and Logan’s heart shot into his throat. By instinct he grabbed the opening door. One of the night cleaners tottered through the gap with her bucket, stumbling a little since her passage had cleared so unexpectedly. Logan caught a glimpse of a sprig of holly tucked into her hairnet before he pulled his face back into the shadow of the door.
“Sorry about that,” he mumbled, keeping his head down.
“Oh no, it’s all right,” she answered, her accent heavy in the dead air of the stairwell. “It is easier to roll my bucket when someone holds the door. Thank you, sir.” She pulled her dripping mop from the bucket, cranked a handle to wring out the grey stringy mass, and began to mop the floor at the top of the stairs.
Sir. Logan nodded, his head still turned so she couldn’t see his quick grin. Not too many people around this place called him “sir.” Couldn’t remember it ever happening before, truth be told.
His grin evaporated as he stepped out onto the third floor, pulling the door closed behind him. Only two wards on this floor — Children’s and ICU — and things suddenly became a lot stickier. His face might be vaguely recognized around the rest of the hospital, but there he had a certain anonymity shared by all the patients. Here he was a known quantity.
His single advantage was stealth. This was the one place on the planet no one would expect to find him, so if he kept out of the way all should be well. But the next part was the most tricky and he focused his attention on his goal. Deep breath. Move.
The hallway lights had been dimmed to the usual night-time gloom, but he could still make out two late-shift nurses, busy in the station at the far end of the hall. Logan glanced at his watch. Eleven p.m. As planned, his timing was perfect. The nurses would be assembling pills in tiny paper cups to distribute to the patients during the six o’clock morning parade. His mouth took on a bitter taste and he leaned against the wall for a moment. The thought of years ahead — a whole lifetime of pills in the morning — made a wave of weakness wash over him.
Suddenly, a third nurse stepped out of the room nearest to him and shut the door quietly behind her. Logan ducked back into the shadows. She headed down toward the station and he closed his eyes with relief. If he hadn’t paused, he would have arrived at the door just in time to walk right into her face. All his work would have been for nothing.
He could see from her brisk walk that it was Nurse Takehiko. Cleo called her Medusa. Or Cyclops… or something like that. Logan couldn’t really remember; Cleo had weird nicknames for each of the nurses. One time she had told Logan that they were all the names of mythical monsters, but he still couldn’t keep them straight. Logan didn’t feel Takehiko was so bad, actually. All the same, he didn’t want to run into her — or anyone — right now.
There are times when long legs are an asset and this was one of them. Logan peeled a strip of duct tape from his pant leg and crossed the hall in three lanky strides. As he opened the door he slipped the tape over the latch so the door slid silently into place behind him.
The room was in darkness, apart from the blinking LED lamps of the equipment that buzzed and hummed along one wall. The darkness was an asset here, as Logan knew this room more intimately than any other in the hospital. There was space for only a single patient, and it was here he’d spent some of the worst days of his life. It was a place he’d vowed never to come back to. Not for the first time that evening, he thought about turning on his heel and bolting. The smell of the place made him sick. But if he left now, he might as well just go home. And he almost had what he needed — just a few moments more and he could leave. He took a deep breath and waited until his eyes adjusted to the dim light.
The other half of the room had been emptied of its patient furnishings years before. Instead, a tiny, cluttered desk was crammed into one corner of the room. For some reason Logan didn’t understand or care about, cutbacks meant that space was at a premium. So this room was shared — by a patient, and during the day, a teacher. Still, thinking back, Logan knew there were worse roommates he could have been stuck with.
Abigail Zephyr had been the in-hospital teacher for extended-term patients since long before Logan had moved in. And Abbie’s desk was where he was headed now. She had something he needed — enough to bring him back here to the one place on earth he never wanted to see again. He stepped easily though the dark interior of the room, curtained off from the bed, but not locked. Never locked, because she wanted the kids to be able to find her — or whatever else they needed — at all times.
Logan stepped up to the desk. This side of the room had no beeping or sighing equipment. No window, beyond the glass wall that separated it from the hall outside, and that was heavily curtained to allow the patient what darkness there was to be had. But Logan didn’t need light. What he needed was under his hand — and then in his hand. He had the notebook. Time to go.
When the glow came from the bed on the other side of the room it was sudden enough, and bright enough, to make Logan gasp aloud. His eyes had adjusted to the darkness, so the face illuminated in the light from the open computer screen looked brilliant, so white as to be almost blue in the glare. The only other thing Logan could see was a single, pale hand holding a red button on a cord.
“So what’s it going to be, Logan? Are you going to tell me why you’ve got Abbie’s notebook, or am I going to call the nurse? Your choice.”