You're Next

Chapter 37

Dodge’s hands twitched again. One moved to the tangle of tubes on the cart beside Annabel’s bed, the other slipping into the thigh pocket of his cargo pants.

The partition curtain screeched back on its tracks, shrill as a scream. Dodge barely had time to pivot when Shep hit him on the side of the neck, staggering him. Dodge took a knee, broad fingers groping, clutching for air, his mouth agape. One hand settled on Annabel’s bed, fisting the blanket into a black-hole whorl. Even with Dodge stooped, his mass dwarfed Shep, making him look, improbably, average-size.

Before Dodge could regroup, Shep grabbed him by the shirt collar and arm and rode him like a battering ram toward the closed door. Dodge twisted at the end, falling, ball-peen hammer magically in hand, steel head whistling past Shep’s temple, just missing. The collision was titanic, both men bouncing back into the room. The door cracked but did not cave. Stunned, it wobbled open.

Dodge’s breath came as an ongoing squawk, a reed-thin draw of air smothered in his throat. His Adam’s apple jerked. Even drowning, he was finding his feet, hammer loose at his side like something mythological, something Nordic. He drew himself up, his back to the doorway, a head taller than Shep.

Shep had torn his St. Jerome pendant from around his neck. One worn silver edge protruded from the fingers of his fist like a push dagger. He drove flesh and metal into the high center of Dodge’s chest, a brimstone variation on Dr Cha’s sternal rub. Dodge flew back through the doorway, arms and legs trailing weightlessly.

Shep slammed the lockless door closed, leaning all his weight into it. A thunderclap shuddered it in the frame as if a truck were butting the other side. Shep’s sneakers left the floor, chirp-landed on the tile. He drove the door closed. Another thunderclap, the door yawning open a foot this time, then banging shut.

Silence. Shep panting, shoulder to the wood, waiting. The wound on his forearm had torn open around the stitches.

A nearby smash. Someone screamed down the hall. A bang, farther away. Footsteps and panicked voices.

Then the handle rotated again in Shep’s grip, and someone shoved at the door. After Dodge it felt like a puppy nuzzling a palm.

Shep stepped back, and security and nurses spilled into the room, rushing toward Annabel. Two guards moved to grab Shep, but Dr Cha was shouting, ‘No, no, he’s okay!’

Shep shoved through and across the threshold. Dodge’s wake told the story of his flight – a knocked-over patient tangled in his gown and IV pole, then a bleeding orderly picking herself out of an upended gurney, then a kneecapped security guard moaning and clutching either side of his leg as if to keep it from exploding. Finally, at the end of the hall, the stairwell door swinging closed, wiping from view the sliver of blackness beyond.

Dr Cha sat in the stillness of Annabel’s room, restitching the cut on Shep’s forearm. A drape of blood hung from the slit, dripping off his elbow. Her fingers moved nimbly, a blur of hook and Prolene. Two security guards were posted outside. The silence, long delayed, was welcome.

‘Stitching a nick like this twice,’ she said, ‘is not the best use of a trauma surgeon’s time.’

Shep said, ‘Sorry I wasn’t injured worse.’

‘So am I.’ She smirked, then repositioned his arm like a slab of meat on a grill.

They’d recounted the official version endlessly. Dr Cha had explained to the responding cops, as she and Shep had rehearsed, that she’d permitted him to go back to the room to pick up his good-luck pendant that he’d forgotten there. What fortunate timing that he’d been inside when the intruder had burst in.

On the bed Annabel stirred, her face drawing tight in a grimace. Progress.

Dr Cha went on alert, her hands pausing, then slowly resuming their work. She finished and wiped the blood from Shep’s arm with some wet gauze.

Shep looped the thin silver chain back through his pendant and, ducking his head, secured it around his neck. His lowered gaze snagged on a small length of electrical wire partially hidden behind one of the medical cart’s wheels. He retrieved it, held it to the light. He realized she was watching closely.

‘A signal wire,’ he explained. ‘For a digital transmitter – a bug.’

‘Why?’

‘So they’d know when Mike came to visit. It’s the one place they think he’ll show up. Where they can trap him within four walls.’

Dr Cha cracked her knuckles, shook out a neck cramp. Her choppy black hair framed a swan’s neck. She was quiet a moment. Then she said, ‘This hospital isn’t safe as long as she’s here.’

‘No,’ Shep said.

‘I spoke to Annabel’s father this evening after he landed. The health-care-proxy hearing, I gather, is first thing’ – a bleary glance at her Breitling despite the wall clock overhead showing a quarter past four – ‘this morning. Proxies are very rarely reassigned, not without drawn-out legal battles, but I have seen the rights suspended.’

Shep stared at her patiently.

She continued, ‘If Mike Wingate wants to make a request to transfer his wife, he needs to get me something signed in the next six hours.’

‘I thought she can’t be moved,’ Shep said.

Dr Cha’s smirk, this time, held an element of cunning. ‘She can’t.’