Chapter Forty-One #3
The leg was stiff today, but it didn’t hurt. He massaged the wound as he sat there, and he wanted to hurry this process up, talk to his doc, and get his ass back to Ghost Town.
As ordered, he’d removed his watch and any other metal objects on his body.
He’d answered a questionnaire given to him by the technician ensuring he had no bullet fragments in his body, and that he wore no other jewelry.
The only other metal objects he’d brought into the hospital with him were his phone, which he’d turned off, his backup pistol, and a knife.
His primary concealed weapon, a Staccato HD P4 9-millimeter, was currently in a lockbox in his truck, but he also carried a tiny Ruger LCP MAX micro .
380 pistol in his boot, and this was in the locker, right next to his Ka-Bar Ek Commando fixed-blade knife.
His phone and keys were locked up, as well. He had a key to his locker in his hand, hanging from a string, and he swung it around. He felt naked without his weapons, felt extra vulnerable at the doctor, but he was used to this.
Zack had been injured more times than he could count in his career; this was just another MRI, another doctor’s visit, another day.
He looked at the clock on the wall. It was ten thirty a.m.
—
The Voorhies brothers entered the imaging center a full minute apart, and each man immediately pulled a disposable mask from a dispenser by the door to cover his face.
They took seats across the busy lobby from one another, then spent a couple of minutes there, getting a feel for the layout of the area and texting back and forth.
These two guys were not exactly strangers to this sort of thing.
Two years earlier the brothers had partnered with four older and more experienced men in their organization to go on a three-month crime spree.
They hit a pair of sporting goods stores in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, for guns and ammo, and three credit unions outside Portland for cash.
Todd had shot and wounded a security guard at one of the credit unions, and Lee had pistol-whipped a clerk reaching for a sidearm in Coeur d’Alene, so the duo had blood on their hands, and from the older members they’d learned how to quickly register patterns in a business.
The attentiveness of the employees, what parts of the building were busy, which parts were idle and accessible.
These and many other factors went into casing a location before committing a crime, and the brothers used this hard-earned knowledge today.
Within moments of arriving in the busy medical office, they had both noticed that a side hallway was quiet, and a doorway at the end of this hall had a trickle of patients exiting through it.
This showed them that the patients to the imaging center, when finished with their procedure, were not led directly back through the doors in the lobby they’d entered through, and this gave Todd, the older brother, an idea.
Without a word to his brother, Todd rose and began heading down the hall, and as Lee followed, the older brother rushed to catch a door opened by a departing vending machine attendant.
Once inside the inner portion of the facility, Lee found a map on the wall that showed them the location of the MRI suites, down past a row of X-ray machine rooms and right before a CAT scan area.
The map also indicated the small waiting room for the MRI center, along with two dressing rooms adjacent to it.
Both men could feel the weight of the pistols under their shirts, but they’d decided they’d do this with knives, catching their unsuspecting target outside the MRI scanning room. Each man carried a fixed blade mounted to his belt under his coat.
Todd whispered to Lee just as they neared an area with a pair of nurses standing at a table and typing on laptops. “Spread out. Patients don’t walk around together.” Lee nodded, lagged back.
They passed a medical technician who gave them a nod without really looking, and then, when they were alone in a hallway on the way to the MRI suite, they passed shelves of storage, then walked by an elderly patient heading for the exit.
They entered a door that was marked Zone 2: MRI.
There were computers, a desk, and a few chairs, and the men saw doors marked Dressing Room 1 and Dressing Room 2.
No one was around at the moment, so each man pulled his knife, and after a quick look and nod between them, they yanked open the two doors.
Both rooms were empty. Lee came to Todd, and they looked in the little room he’d just entered.
Stacks of gowns in plastic bags, socks with grippers on the bottom, and hair nets lay on shelves next to a row of four lockers.
Three of the lockers had keys in the locks with strings hanging on them, but the fourth locker had no key.
The men rushed over to the only other door in the room, then read the sign there.
Zone 3: Control Room. There were various caution signs on the wall, but the Voorhies boys were too amped up to read them.
They knew MRIs could be dangerous, but they’d gotten back here quickly, and they figured they’d either kill Hightower before the procedure started, or else they’d put a knife to the neck of the technician and get them to turn the machine off so they could stab Hightower where he lay, vulnerable inside the big cylinder.
Todd started to reach for the door, but then he saw that he needed a key card to get in.
“Fuck,” he whispered. Quickly he began looking around the desk, opening drawers.
He found a white key card in one of the drawers, but it didn’t work on the lock.
While he went back to continue looking, his brother stepped to the door out of the room, then pulled his Smith and Wesson pistol from under his coat.
Cracking the door open, he looked out, saw a nurse alone at a computer monitor on a rolling stand.
She wore several ID badges and cards on a lanyard around her neck.
She didn’t see him, but he hid the pistol behind his back and called to her. “Ma’am…the technician told me to change, but I can’t get my locker open.” He laughed a little. “I think it’s stuck.”
The woman had a slightly confused look on her face, but she helpfully came to the door; he held it open for her, and she moved a few steps in before noticing Todd, still behind the desk.
She said, “You can’t be back there, sir.
” It seemed to occur to her, at just this time, that there was no reason two patients would be back here at the same time, so she began to turn back to the man behind her, but before she did so, Lee Voorhies slammed the butt of his pistol into the back of her head.
She crumpled to the ground, and then he tore the lanyard off her neck.