Pablo Cruz stepped off a maintenance elevator that put him in a narrow hallway behind the hospital cafeteria. Despite the opiates the ER docs had given him, he was in ferocious pain from the broken teeth and facial bones.
And it was taking everything in his power to block out the clammy, sticky feel of the cowl of cold, dead skin that he’d pulled down over his head to cover the bruising and bandages on his face. That’s who they’d be looking for if they were looking. The guy with the bandages. Not some old man with saggy gray skin.
Cruz had tied on a surgical cap to hide part of the incision lines he’d had to make to skin the corpse’s head. He’d put the female pathologist’s headphones on to hide another four inches of cut skin. The hooded rain jacket covered the incisions down the sides of the neck. So did an ID on a chain he’d taken from the dead pathologist in the morgue.
But he was worried about how it looked around his eyes, nose, and lips. Did they sag too much? Would someone know?
He put the hood of the rain jacket up and cast his eyes down while he walked along the hallway, nervous that a hospital worker might appear; he didn’t want to test his disguise up close in any way.
Cruz passed the cafeteria, hearing pots and pans banging and a woman singing in Spanish. Then he smelled garbage.
He followed the smell out a door onto a loading dock. To his right there were men unloading a linen-service truck.
Cruz paid them no attention, just bounded down the stairs and trotted out the open overhead door into chill pouring rain. He zipped the jacket to the collar and tugged on the hood strings to tighten it before lowering his head and walking very fast south on Twenty-Third Street.
A knot of four or five people in raincoats or carrying umbrellas hurried ahead of him on the sidewalk, medical personnel, judging from the way they were talking. They were worrying about how they’d get home with all the public transit shut down.
A block away, a police cruiser was parked across the intersection, its blue lights flashing. The shooter moved closer to the group ahead of him.
When they were near the intersection with H Street, Cruz held the hood tight and turned his head briefly toward the police car, as if he were curious.
Then he looked away, having given them just enough to know his face wasn’t bandaged but not enough to see he wore a dead man’s skin.
Cruz crossed the street behind the others and heard no one call out. He stayed with them as the rain fell harder, and still he heard no one yell after him.
It wasn’t until he was a block and a half south of the medical center that he heard a symphony of sirens start up, all of them getting closer, trumpeting and wailing their way toward a hospital where the president’s shooter wasn’t anymore.