Retribution (32 page)

The tech looked at him, in answer to his unvoiced question, and said, "The sooner we get her on a ventilator, the better. She's not burned, but these artists types… that's nasty stuff when it gets to burning. Her lungs are trying to shut down."

Her face looked pale under the smear of smoke and ash, her eyes half-open but unseeing. John found that numb spot deep inside himself expand and swallow him. All he could do was put out a trembling hand and try to straighten her tangle of hair, to smooth it away from her face. "I'm here," he told her. "Jagger's here. The worst is over, you're going to be fine."

One of the hosemen came around from the side yard, calling, "Captain!" He ignored the rescue scene on the lawn, heading to the truck where hose units were still being monitored as they pumped.

The captain looked up.

"What is it, Jacobs?"

"I think we've got a pretty clear-cut case of arson back here."

John rocked back on his heels.

Valdor watched in agitation as the narrow streets boiled with activity and he saw the opportunity he had created slip through his fingers. Scattered paintings on the lawn were being picked up and leaned against a thick, well-trimmed hedge that separated one lawn from another. He slipped through the night, wove his way inconspicuously through the curious and the helpful, but he could not get close enough to the canvases. Twelve of them! Twelve! Nearly a million dollars' worth of art stacked haphazardly, exposed to the over-spray from the fire hoses and the ash drifting in the air.

Quentin's long, lean car pulled up, and Valdor recoiled into the fringe of bottlebrush bushes and crape myrtle framing a house, watching as Quentin boiled out of the car and immediately begin to take charge, shouting hoarsely, confronting the EMTs as they lifted Charlie's limp form onto a gurney and began to roll her down the street to the only access point the ambulance had had, the bigger fire engines blocking most of the available space. Quentin carried and used his cell phone the way some people used guns, pointing it as he gave directions, making calls, giving Mary a quick squeeze for comfort as the woman leaned over the gurney, her shoulders shaking.

Valdor pressed his forehead to the cold, indifferent stucco of the structure he hugged. The window of opportunity was being shut before his very eyes, and he rubbed his throat where the point of the ice pick had drawn blood, and he swallowed with difficulty. Still, he waited. Saw the new boyfriend heft up the dog… damnable creature… had chased his car down the street till Valdor had thought he'd lost him… and observed as the man and dog were ushered into Quentin's car.

Jane Gilley from the Peppermill came running up, a light windbreaker over what looked to be pajamas, and hugged Quentin, then Mary, and helped Mary get into the medical transport with Charlie. Quentin hand-waved the transport out through the labyrinth of cars and emergency vehicles, then turned to Janie. The wispy redhead listened intently to Quentin and walked over to the hedges, and began to gather up the paintings.

Valdor let out a vitriolic noise and smothered it with the back of his hand till he left his own teeth marks in his flesh. Janie would take the paintings back to her gallery— Quentin would see to that. Shrewd, emotionless except when it came to his wife and stepdaughter, he knew what Charlie had risked her life to save. Still on the cell phone, he returned to his car. Bright, leonine headlights pierced the night as Quentin pulled forward, illuminating the hedge so that Janie could see and mentally catalog what she dealt with. The two men leaned their heads together briefly, consulting in the interior, as Janie returned to her minivan and eased it down the street until she could pull into a driveway. She began to load the canvases quickly, efficiently, seemingly unaware of being in the spotlight of Quentin's car. One by one the valuable pieces disappeared from his sight. Tears crawled to the corners of Valdor's eyes.

Now he could give no quarter. It was his life or theirs. He slunk farther back into the bushes and shadows and disappeared.

* * *

Quentin slipped into ICU behind Mary, and put his arm about her waist, knowing that she had no eyes for him at the moment, all her attention on Charlie's quiet form, monitors humming and beeping softly in the hospital room, the pump and quiet hiss of the ventilator keeping Charlie breathing. She took a shivery breath that made her rib cage press into his arm, and he knew that she had just recently stopped crying. He put his lips to the side of her head and kissed her gently.

"Where's Jagger?"

"Ruby took him back to the kennel in my car. He'll bring it back here."

She stroked his forearm absently. "They got her in here as quickly as they could."

"What's the prognosis?"

"Smoke inhalation. They'll evaluate her in the morning, see if they can take her off the ventilator. If that's all it is." Mary tried to take another deep breath and he tightened his arm about her in support.

"All?"

"She's comatose, Quentin. It could be… they said they put in an emergency call to Wade Clarkson… they say the brain wave patterns are showing abnormalities." She pressed a tissue to her face as if she could hold back the flood of emotion.

He did not want to say to her what he felt he had to. "Mary, the captain says there is evidence the fire was started on purpose."

She shook. "No!"

"Arson inspectors will be on the scene first thing in the morning." He smoothed her hair back, exposing her brow. "Hon, we have to be prepared for this. Charlie may have started that fire. Either in some kind of delusion or possibly even suicidally."

His wife began to tremble in his hold. He braced himself for her protest, but she did not say a coherent word, mumbling a nearly inaudible sound. They had a contract. Charlie had insisted. Had she planned this? He looked at the white-sheeted form of the young woman he'd raised and loved as his own daughter. "You have to be ready to be there for her. Give her whatever she needs, whatever it is." Mary felt warm in his arm, vibrant, so alive. So much of what he loved about Mary had always been in Charlie. Till now. All of it seemed gone, drained, stolen away, and only the faint noise of the ventilator seemed to be giving her life. Cold fingers seemed to press the back of his neck. "Let's go get some coffee. Decide what we're going to do. Plan our options."

She made a furtive movement as if to edge away from him, then surrendered, as he guided her out of the ICU cubicle. She combed her ash-blonde hair from her face and leaned on his arm. "I can't believe Charlie would do something like that."

"Come on with me. It's going to be a long night." Quentin Saunders supported her easily and guided her down the hospital corridor, familiar to him as the back of his hand, and his jaw tightened.

* * *

Midnight came. It brought her to the ER at Sunset, ushered in by the throbbing lights of an EMT van, and gurneys being unloaded, sobbing victims on backboards and in neck braces, blood-splashed, techs rushing out to meet the paramedics halfway, exchanging the bags of Ringer's lactate and vitals. "Female, white, mid-forties; male, white, early fifties; car crash; male appears to have chest compression and injuries, possible broken ribs, concussion; female was wearing seat belt, but the impact drove her sideways into the passenger window, multiple lacerations in the face and torso, possible broken right arm…."

Sliding doors opened to swallow up the gurneys, injured, and techs, shutting away the moans and cries of pain and shock, leaving on the EMT van, its lights strobing the darkness.

It left her watching, ghostlike, over the exterior of the hospital.

A moment of silence followed, almost contemplative, then a car door opened, its yellowish interior light slicing across the darkened breezeway. A silhouette exited and stood, as if watching the drama which had passed beyond the emergency room entrance. Figures in scrub greens and county uniforms could be seen through the wire-reinforced windows of the swinging doors as they escorted their charge. The silhouette stood unmoved by the drama, then turned and took a side door into Sunset Hospital.

Three floors up, a skeleton crew of nurses and orderlies worked the late shift.

A shadow moved across glazed brown linoleum floors. Midnight brought her after the shadow, made her watch, drew her after it. It stalked the rooms quietly, pausing in each corridor as if to gauge direction by drawing it from the wind, from paranormal senses, from the sounds of suffering on these upper floors. A darkness without cloud or chill, it drifted through the passageways, occasionally stopping for long moments, then moving on, as though whatever it searched for had not yet been found. At the end of each floor, the fire exit stairway door opened and clanged shut, as the shadow moved on.

Finally, it halted outside a room, a semiprivate room in critical care where sounds of moaning could be heard with each breath, a keening, heartbreaking testament to the pain of living. A hand reached out of a dark sleeve to push the door open. The volume of the moaning rose like a banshee, then quavered away into momentary silence.

The shadow stepped in, and if it was Death, it had a firm tread.

An elderly woman lay under a thin yellow blanket and a white hospital sheet, her bedding twisted around and underneath her wispy frame. Lank white hair straggled across the flat pillow, emphasizing her sallow features and the only spot of color in her face were her lips, chapped pink with a crust of a yellow fever blister across one withered curve. As he watched, she took an agonizing breath, and her moaning began again. He seemed to be the only witness to her struggle. The other bed lay empty, its mattress stripped bare and awaiting sterile sheets only when a patient would be assigned. The bathroom door had swung open, its beige interior uninhabited, the medicinal smell of the disinfectant last used to clean it still lingering.

Another odor hung amid the faint antiseptic smell, an odor of disease and decay, and the foul discharge of every hard-fought-for breath. The woman knotted her bony hands into her covers fretfully as she slept, and suffered, and dreamed.

He stood watching, his presence an ombré sliver, an abyss of light and hope, falling across her bed and face.

When he moved, it was to take a small pillow resting in the side chair and lightly press it across her face. It was almost as though he did not intend to smother her, but to shield her from the sight of what he would do. The movement woke her with a waving of a frail, blue-veined hand and a shake of her palsied head, the pillow slipping away under his slight grasp.

Her eyes met his, drowsy and pain-ridden, yet no fear shadowed them.

She licked dry and peeling lips, a tiny, furtive movement of a tongue that seemed no moister. "Help me," she said. "So much pain…." The clawlike fingers that curled about his, drew closed in soft prayer.

He said nothing for a moment, then answered, "Don't worry."

He moved his hand to his pocket, withdrew a small glass vial and syringe, and swiftly filled a dose. Reaching for the IV tube and connection, he injected the dosage, adjusted the drip, and stepped back. Both syringe and empty vial he pocketed, then gently put a hand out and stroked tangled strands of hair away from her frail expression. He kept his fingers pressed lightly to her temple, where a blue vein pulsed valiantly, and then began to tremble under his touch.

He stood impassively in the long moments it took her to die, as the tides of midnight swept over her, a riptide of drowning into nothingness she futilely tried to resist. Her hand brushed feebly at his, scraping, as if she could pull him away. Midnight kept Charlie from helping her, but she felt every drumming effort of the heart to keep pumping, the lungs to keep expanding until she ached. The old woman's mouth opened. Her chest sucked for breath as if she truly drowned, growing weaker and weaker as her life ebbed away. Her hand fell back to the sheets.

He took the long, deep breath she had been fighting for. He held it as if clearing away the fascination and power of her death, and stepped back. He left the room after one, last look back, and when he left, he was cloaked in Midnight… and Charlie lay stranded in the hospital, alone, bereft, struggling.

* * *

The monitors in Charlie's room flickered and danced with life, spiking unexpectedly, the recording strips of paper cascading out of them, inked lines darting in impossible directions, her eyelids fluttering. She might have been dreaming, violently, her arms and limbs reacting to the stimulus… or she might have been suffering a seizure. It was difficult to discern, even with the monitor readings.

He stood at the foot of the bed, watching. The tape around her lips holding in the ventilator tubing kept her mute, but her fingers twitched as if signing words, emotions, though her face showed no sign of consciousness. Then, motor movement seeped away from her body, and the monitors subsided into normalcy, and vitals even slipped below that of normal. He watched them momentarily. Charlie seemed to slip farther into nothingness, her chest rising and falling only because the ventilator dictated that it should.

He reached out and yanked hard. "God help us both, Charlie."

* * *

Midnight tortured her again. Visions pressed on her, kneeling on her till her throat ached and she could not breathe. Her mind swirled. She felt herself twitch, willing muscles to run, to carry her away, body caught in the stasis of sleep, thoughts imprisoned within Midnight. It fell on her with a crushing weight. She could not breathe. She ached and burned and hurt, her throat and bronchials raw, and she tried to open her mouth to gasp down air, to swallow it whole, to push Midnight away from her.

Charlie's eyes blinked. Tubes and tape covered her mouth and nose. She could not breathe! She began to claw at it, weakly, futilely, trying to free herself.

* * *

On the other side of the horseshoe unit, a sharp alarm went off. Nurses began running in and out of a room at the far end of the hall where he could hear the sharp whine of a defib powering up, the light outside the room blinking in a life-and-distress signal. No one paid any attention to his presence in the unit.