Chapter 15
They sped back to the hospital, to Shana.
Cap made some calls to try and mobilize his men while they drove.
“Damn it,” Cap said. “Everyone is on site with the bomb, dealing with the disarmament, evacuation and traffic control.”
As he slammed the car with its lights still flashing to a halt, Dane jumped out and raced inside. He was stopped momentarily at the door. The place was on lock down, but they’d seen him jump from the police car and let him in. He paused at the reception desk, vibrating with fear and tension.
“Where is she? Shana George? What room?” His breath came in ragged gulps, but not because he’d run too far or too fast. It was because he was panicked. Dane didn’t remember the last time he’d been panicked. But then it wasn’t every day that a man’s worst nightmare came true.
“She’s in room 322, Mr. Blaise.”
He forced himself to ask the next question. “What room is Whitey Nash in?”
“He was in room 240, but we had a report that he’s—”
Dane didn’t wait to hear anything further. He didn’t wait for Cap to catch up with him. He took off.
But the receptionist shouted down the hall after him.
“He has a knife. He stabbed a one of the officers. Watch yourself.”
He raised a hand in acknowledgement of her warning and headed for the exit sign and stairs. Talking himself down as he took the stairs two at a time, he ran the scenario through his head. He needed his wits about him to handle the situation.
Nash had escaped the watch of the two officers assigned to him and stabbed at least one of them. Dane knew he likely still had the knife with him. Likely something he’d stolen from the hospital somewhere. Nash hadn’t been armed when they’d brought him in, that was for damn sure.
As Dane approached the stairwell door for the third floor, he opened it slowly to check the corridor.
No one was there. Then the building’s alarms went off and he dashed down the hall, reading the door numbers as he flew by.
Three eighteen, three twenty. He slowed and took his gun from its holster.
He saw the nurses at the station from the corner of his eyes behind the counter. No one else was in sight.
Then Cap appeared off the elevator. He hadn’t heard the elevator ping under the racket of the alarms. Damn. Dane wanted to do this alone. He didn’t wait. He pushed through the door.
Whitey Nash was in the room with Shana. She’d been prepped for surgery. There were two terrified nurses with her standing on the other side of the bed. And there was a female police officer lying face down on the floor. Shit. There was a growing pool of blood seeping out from under the officer.
Shana looked groggy and defenseless, but she saw him when he came in the room, looking past Whitey. Whitey stood there at her bedside, less than a foot from Shana, with a bloody knife at his side. It looked like a damn scalpel.
Dane raised his gun as Cap pushed into the room behind him.
“Stop where you are and drop the knife. Raise your hands,” Cap yelled.
Cap was textbook, bound by official law enforcement rules, but Dane couldn’t care less about them.
He couldn’t care less about endangering the other people in the room.
So as soon as he saw Whitey raise his hand, the one with the knife still in it, Dane concentrated all his focus, blocking everything else out, and pulled the trigger.
He was at point-blank range and the shot hit Whitey in the back, right through to the heart.
Dane moved in fast to make sure Whitey didn’t fall forward.
There’d been no need to shoot him a second time, but Dane swung Whitey around, away from Shana.
The man’s knife clattered to the floor and he fell back against some beeping equipment.
Then Dane looked Whitey in the face, his horrible disfigured face, and Whitey looked back, still alive but conscious, bleeding out.
Dane took aim.
The second shot blew half of Whitey’s head off. He looked at Shana then. She stared at him, eyes half closed, soft smile in place. Thank you, she mouthed.
It all took less than three seconds to transpire and he’d been in his own laser-focused world, completely inside his head until then.
But as he smiled back at Shana, that all ended. He heard the screams, sensed the people rushing into the room, felt Cap grabbing his arms and pulling him away. Everything around him came rushing back into focus.