7
ANSON
Nobody stopped us in the hallway.
Nobody stopped us at the elevator.
We rode to the fourth floor with two nurses who rattled on as if we weren’t there about some cardiologist they called McGrabby.
I was in the wheelchair with a blanket draped over my lap, holding Vincent’s .
38. I didn’t want the gun—Father had preferred knives to guns and instilled those values in me—but Vincent had no pockets, and he felt if he put the gun in the bag with our clothes, he wouldn’t find it if or when we needed it.
I suppose there was some truth to that, but I didn’t like it.
The metal was cold, slick with sweat from my palms. My finger played over the trigger with a mind of its own, wanting to fire the weapon if only to ensure the gun actually worked. A knife always worked.
It was when the doors opened on the fourth floor that the three of us realized we had a serious problem.
The hallway was filled with cops.
Uniformed officers.
Detectives.
Others who were probably civilians but had a smell about them. A cop stink. No doubt staffers from one or more local precincts.
One of the nurses said to the other, “You’d think instead of standing around, all these people would be out looking for whoever shot him.”
“You’d think,” the other replied as they both exited the elevator and vanished in the crowd.
When the doors started to close, I stuck my foot out and stopped them. “Are we going to do this?”
“Maybe we need a new plan,” Paul said softly.
“Fuck it,” Vincent grunted from behind his mask and pushed my chair out into the crowd.
My hand tightened around the gun, and that time, I nearly did pull the trigger, which would have landed a bullet in my already injured leg. I twisted the barrel around, pointing it straight ahead, and moved my finger to the guard. I held it there even though it wanted to go back.
“Which way?” I heard Paul say, although it was pretty obvious to me, as the crowd of cops thickened up ahead.
There were several gray-haired men who had that I’m in charge look about them.
I had no doubt room 412 was somewhere in the middle of all that.
Vincent must have understood that too because he didn’t pause, didn’t slow down; he kept pushing the chair forward as if we had a destination and all these people were just in the way. Just another day at the busy hospital.
When we passed the door to 408, he slowed, but only a little; at 410, he didn’t have a choice. The people standing around there, the I’m in charge folks, didn’t move for us. They were the kind of people who expected others to walk around them.
When we came upon room 412, we moved at a crawl.
I counted thirteen guns strapped to the hips of the various people surrounding us, and that didn’t include the detectives who kept their weapons hidden beneath their jackets or the legs of their pants.
We were deep in enemy territory, and it would only take one person to recognize us.
This was not something we’d get out of. If I pulled the trigger, if Vincent made a grab for the gun and tried to shoot some path out, the three of us would be dead in seconds. I gripped the gun tighter.
The door to 412 was open. Vincent made no effort to stop, but we were moving so slowly that it didn’t matter.
All three of us got a good look. I pulled on everything Father had taught me—I took a mental snapshot.
Not just a visual, but the smells, the sounds, every beep, whir, and tick of the machinery inside.
There were three people in the room.
The man who had to be Sam Porter was in the bed, surrounded by screens and various devices.
His head was heavily bandaged. A plastic mask over his face.
A thick tube ran from the mask to a machine behind him that gently rose and fell with a soft hum, some kind of ventilator.
Three separate IV bags—two converging at his wrist, the other in a vein at his neck.
His body was wrapped in thick blankets like some man-made cocoon.
He wasn’t conscious; there was no doubt about that.
Although only one eye was visible, it was clearly closed.
Other than the steady rise and fall of his chest with that machine, there was no movement.
If someone told me Sam Porter had died ten minutes ago, I would have believed them.
A nurse hovered over him, and something seemed peculiar about that.
There was something odd in her eyes. With that brief glimpse, I got the impression she wasn’t just caring for him; she cared for him.
When she checked his pulse, her hand rested on his just a little longer than necessary, lost in the tangle of tubes and wires.
I couldn’t help but wonder if she knew what kind of monster he was. What he did when he wasn’t in that bed beneath her hand. Had anyone told her Weasel was dead because of him? Would she care?
If I harbored any doubt about his involvement, it vanished when I saw Van Man standing in the far corner of the room, his back to everyone, staring out the window at God only knew what.
He wasn’t wearing his trench coat; I saw that draped over the back of a chair.
He did have a gun, though, in a holster attached to his hip right next to a badge that caught the light just so.
I saw all of this in the handful of seconds it took for Vincent to maneuver the wheelchair past the door and through the crowd. It was only when we reached the far side of the hallway that he leaned down and whispered, “That fuck isn’t telling us shit about Guyon.”
Paul leaned in too. “You saw Van Man, right?”
And we all had.
But there was no getting to him right now.
As I mentally replayed all the faces I saw in that hallway, I couldn’t help but wonder which others were bad. Who would Van Man turn to with Porter, Stocks, and Welderman down? Like Sam Porter’s ventilator, some machines didn’t stop running; defective parts were simply replaced.