The First Patient

CHAPTER 44

Important stuff to talk about, big fella. Please call me. Anytime, day or night.

A.

There was something wrong.

With Alison's note propped up against his desk lamp, Gabe dialed her home and cell phone numbers again. Nothing.

How long ago had she been in the clinic? What sort of important stuff did she mean? Big fella made it sound as if she was enthused and in a good space. Why couldn't he reach her now?

It was nearing eleven fifteen. An hour and forty-five minutes before, hopefully, the mystery of Jim Ferendelli's disappearance and his relationship to Lily Sexton would be unraveled for Gabe.

Between the events earlier in the day at Lily Pad Stables and now his strong feeling that the president was either lying to him or holding something back, this had already been a hell of a trying day. Now Alison wasn't answering either of her phones.

Where in the hell was she at this time of night?

As often happened in stressful situations, Gabe's temples were beginning to throb-one howitzer shell burst for each heartbeat. What possible sanguine explanation could there be for Alison leaving the note she did, then not being available on her home phone or cell? It had to be something simple like a low battery or other malfunction of her damn phone. Back in Wyoming, he carried a cell phone because every doc on the hospital staff was expected to. But he didn't trust them-not in Tyler and not here. That had to be it, he tried to convince himself-her cell phone.

His jaws clenched against the frustration and concern.

Without any rummaging in his desk drawer that he was aware of, suddenly the vial of various pills was in his hand. It was like a number of patients with weight problems had told him over the years-the sad, recurrent tale of finding themselves standing in front of the open refrigerator and having absolutely no recollection of how they got there.

What in the hell was he, a supposedly sober alcoholic, doing with pills in his hand every time the going got difficult for him? He needed to face the fact that just as some people were functional active alcoholics, managing to hold down a job and maybe keep a marriage going despite their drinking, he was functioning despite the smoldering depression that had stunted his spirit for decades, since the nightmare of Fairhaven and the inestimable horror of having taken the lives of a woman and her unborn child.

One Valium. Five milligrams would take the edge off. It wasn't really that much. The manufacturer made a damn ten milligram.

He dialed both of Alison's numbers for a third time, leaving a concerned message with each. It was right there beside where he was sitting that she had tied his tie-right there where she had stood on her tiptoes, kissed him softly, and pleaded to let there be time for them. Now she was missing and he was preparing to respond to the crisis by taking yet another pill.

She deserved better. She deserved better, and so did he.

He took his secret stash into the bathroom, poured the pills into the toilet, and flushed them away.

Darkness… duct tape… and rats…

For some time after she regained consciousness, all Alison was aware of was the duct tape pulled tightly across her mouth and binding her wrists, elbows, ankles, and legs to some sort of heavy chair. Then, as the fog lifted from her senses, she became aware of the feet, scurrying from one side of the space she was in to another, and at least twice, she felt certain, brushing against her.

With time, her vision was able to make use of a small amount of light slipping beneath a door. She was in a cluttered room-a storeroom of some kind, it seemed. The air, which she had to work to draw in through her nose into her lungs, was cool and slightly musty. Across from her, she could discern the distinctive outline of a harp… then of a hat rack… and finally, behind them, a large sign that read: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, MR. PRESIDENT.

She was still in the White House-a prisoner in a storage room in the basement or even the subbasement if there was one, held there by the number-one guardian of the president.

Being uncomfortably bound and having to strain for each breath were distracting enough to keep her from being as frightened as she might have been, even with the rats. She should have written more in the note to Gabe, she chastised herself now-at least mentioned that there were problems with Treat Griswold. She had been too paranoid to do so.

One by one, she tested her restraints. No chance. Even the tape over her mouth had been wrapped tightly around her head and then reinforced in front with something firm to keep her from biting through. At the moment only two things were clear-she was absolutely helpless, and she wasn't dead.

She wondered how Griswold could have caught on to her. The answer was elusive. What was clear, though, was that unless Griswold was satisfied that she had told him everything she knew and why she had been prying into his life, in all likelihood she was going to get a lesson as to how much pain she could endure.

Would Griswold risk holding her here in the White House? However unlikely, it had to be unpredictable when someone might happen to need something from this room. There was a light outside the door. That meant her prison wasn't all that isolated.

An hour or so later, her questions were answered. With a soft click, the door opened, flooding the room with light from a concrete corridor outside. Treat Griswold slipped inside, flicked on the single bare overhead bulb, and eased the door closed behind him.

"Time to hit the road, lady," he rasped, his lips beside her ear. "But first, a little something to keep you from getting carsick."

Without another word, he stepped around behind her, buried a needle to the hilt at the base of her neck, and injected the contents of a syringe into her muscle. After just a minute, the room began to spin viciously.