The Select (42 page)

She wasn't sure she could handle
that.

But she didn't feel strong enough for
the stairs right now, so what choice did she have?

None.

Taking a deep, tremulous breath, Quinn
straightened her spine and marched back down the hall. The nurses
station was empty as she passed it, and she intended to keep
walking past Ward C, but when she reached the window she had to
stop. No way she could breeze by without one more look.

Both nurses were in there now,
standing around the patient who'd signaled her. Marguerite was just
removing a syringe from his IV line. Was something
wrong?

Quinn pressed closer to the glass. The
blinking lights bordering the window made it difficult to see, but
she still could make out the patient's left hand, the one that had
been stretched into the hang-loose sign—it now hung limp and
lifeless. As she watched, the nurses gently rolled him to his left
and repositioned him on his back. Everything so normal. Just
another day of routine patient care on Ward C.

The nurse who had helped Quinn a few
moments ago looked up and smiled at her. Quinn gave her a friendly
wave, then forced herself to walk on.

Half dazed, still weak and shaky,
feeling as if she were in a dream, Quinn found the elevator control
slot and slipped her card into it.

What had just happened here? What was
real? What was not? The questions whirled about her in a maelstrom
of confusion. Nausea rippled through her stomach and inched up
toward her throat. She feared she might get sick right here in the
hall.

She had to get out of here, back to
the dorm. Back to her room where she could lock the door, crawl
into bed, pull the covers over her head and think.

Maybe Mom and Matt had been right.
Maybe it wasn't such a good idea to stay down here the extra
week.

When she got outside, the snow was
falling heavily. Everything was covered with a thin coat of white.
At any other time she might have stopped to appreciate the silent
beauty of the scene. But now she broke into a careful run for the
dorm.

*

Tim stared at the ceiling.

What was wrong with Quinn? She'd been
looking right at him as he'd given her the hang-loose signal. She'd
even reacted as if she'd seen it, looked like she'd been about to
faint, but she'd done nothing.

Nothing!

Maybe she hadn't really
seen it, or maybe she didn't
believe
she'd seen it. It didn't
matter which. He'd never get a chance like that again. It was over.
Might as well pack in the hope and forget about ever getting out of
here.

Still staring helplessly at the
ceiling's mottled whiteness, Tim felt himself tumbling into a black
hole of despair.

TWENTY-TWO

This isn't a highway, Matt thought.
This is a parking lot.

The New Jersey Turnpike wasn't exactly
stopped dead, but for an hour now it had been moving too slowly for
the speedometer to register. As far ahead as the he could see, the
three southbound lanes were a stagnant river of glowing brake
lights fading into the falling snow.

Not falling, exactly. Racing
horizontally was more like it. And lots of it. The windows on the
passenger side of Matt's Cherokee were caked with an inch or better
of white. It was piling up on the road and the
shoulders.

Matt banged impatiently on the
steering wheel and glanced at the dashboard clock. Nine o'clock. He
should have been there by now. Instead he was just south of Exit
7A, only halfway through Jersey. And the longer he stayed here, the
worse it was going to get. He'd played all his CDs twice, and the
radio had nothing but traffic reports about the snarl-ups all over
the East Coast and weather reports about how much worse it was
going to get during the next few hours.

This little jaunt was turning into an
ordeal.

A sign on the right with logos for Roy
Rogers, Big Boy's, and Sunoco told him that the "Richard Stockton
Service Area" was two miles ahead. Matt glanced at his gas gauge
and saw it edging onto "E". At his present pace, those two miles
could take an hour, maybe more. Running out of fuel now would be
the icing on the cake.

He edged the Cherokee to the right and
began riding along the shoulder at around twenty miles per hour. It
wasn't legal, but at least he was moving. He just had to hope he
didn't run into a cop. A ticket would be the candle on the icing on
the cake.

He slammed on his brakes and skidded
to a halt as a beat-up, twenty-year-old Cadillac DeVille with New
York plates pulled out in front of him and stopped. Matt flashed
his high beams and honked, but the Caddy didn't budge. He had two
choices: sit here behind the guy, or try to slip past him on the
right, but that meant risking the snowy slope that dropped away
from the shoulder at a good forty-five-degree angle.

He got out and walked up to the Caddy.
The driver window rolled down as he approached and a bearded face
glared at him.

"Don't fuck with me, man."

"How about letting me by," Matt said.
"I'm trying to get to the service area."

"You wait like the rest of
us."

"I'm going to run out of
gas."

"Tough shit."

Matt stared at him a moment. Everyone
was fed up, but this guy was looking for a fight. Matt was tempted
to help him find it, but for all he knew there could be three
others like him in that car. He looked at the big heavy caddy, at
the snowy slope beyond it, and had a better idea.

Without a word, he returned to the
Cherokee. He put her in four-wheel drive and slowly eased to the
right. The Cadillac responded, moving right to block him. Matt
edged further onto the slope, and the Cadillac mimicked him,
matching Matt's every rightward move.

When he was sure all four of the
Caddy's tires were on the slope, Matt pulled sharply to his left,
darting back uphill. The heavier car tried to respond but its rear
wheels spun uselessly on the snow. It began to fishtail as it
slipped further down the slope, swerving ninety degrees until it
was sliding back-end first, its rear wheels spinning madly. It
stopped with a jolt in the gully at the bottom, its headlights
pointing skyward.

Back on the shoulder again, Matt gave
two quick toots on his horn and drove away.

"All I wanted to do was get by," Matt
said softly.

No one bothered him the rest of the
way to the service area.

"What's the problem up ahead?" he
asked as the attendant filled the Cherokee's tank. He had stringy
blond hair and was maybe nineteen. "It can't be just
snow."

"It ain't. Scanner says a tractor
trailer jack-knifed coming down the Exit 6 on-ramp."

"Six? That's where I get off. Damn,
I'll be here forever."

"Maybe longer. We heard that four cars
piled into the truck. There was a fire and everything. A real mess.
If I was you I'd find a parking spot, get a comfortable seat in
Roy's or Big Boy's, and figure on spending the rest of the night
there."

Uh-uh, Matt thought. He saw a set of
headlights glide across the overpass just south of the service
area.

"Will that road take me to the
Pennsylvania Turnpike?"

The attendant followed Matt's pointing
arm and nodded.

"Yeah. Eventually. If you could get on
it. But there's no off-ramp to that road. Like the man says: You
can't get there from here."

"Suppose I make my own
ramp?"

The attendant looked at the Cherokee,
then back at Matt.

"There's a corn field back of the
service area here. With four-wheel drive you just might be home
free."

"I'm not heading home, but at least
I'll be free of the Turnpike."

"Hope it's real important to get where
you're goin'. You bust an axle or blow a tire out in that field
you'll have a lotta explaining to do in the morning."

"I've got a friend in need," Matt
said.

The attendant grinned. "And you're the
friend indeed, right?"

"You might say that."

"I got my break in a couple of
minutes. I'll show you a way out the back."

Matt shoved a twenty into his
hand.

"Show me now."

*

Quinn sat cross-legged on
the bed in her darkened room and watched the snowflakes tumble
through the bright cones from the dorm's exterior floodlights. She
wished she could glide out the window like one of the kids
in
Peter Pan
and
get lost in the storm.

Then she wouldn't have to think about
that patient in Ward C, and the hand signal he'd made for
her.

It was Tim.

As crazy as it sounded, it had to be
Tim. The more she thought about it, the more convinced she
became.

He was Tim's height, had Tim's build,
and he'd given her the signal, the Hawaiian hang loose that only
Tim would have known to give.

Quinn's first impulse had been to run
to the police, to call Deputy Southworth and demand that he charge
into Ward C and save Tim from whoever had imprisoned him there for
whatever reason.

She'd made it as far as her door
before having second thoughts. And third thoughts.

She imagined the conversation with the
sheriff's department:

"Who do you think kidnapped
your boyfriend and imprisoned him in the burn ward, Miss
Cleary?"

"Dr. Alston, I guess. He's
in charge of Ward C."

"Why would The Ingraham's
Dean of Medical Education want to do something like
that?"

"I don't know. Maybe
because Tim discovered the place was bugged."

"But his own father brought
in an expert who couldn't find a shred of evidence of electronic
surveillance."

"He's there in Ward C. I
know he's there."

"How do you know that, Miss
Cleary?"

"I was watching one of the
Ward C patients when he gave me a secret hand signal Tim and I used
in Atlantic City."

"A secret hand signal. I
see. Did you get close to him? Did you see his face?"

'No, but—"

"Why were you watching this
particular patient?"

"He's built like Tim. He
reminded me of Tim."

"You really miss your
buyfriend, don't you. You really wish he was back."

"Yes, but—"

"We understand, Miss
Cleary. We'll be sure to look into this matter very soon. But don't
call us. We'll call you when we find something. Good
night."

So now Quinn was back on her bed,
staring into the swirling wilderness and racking her brain for a
way to convince the police that Tim was in Ward C.

If indeed he was in Ward C.

Sometimes you see what you
want to see.

What if she did manage to convince
Deputy Southworth to barge into the Science Center and they found
out the new Ward C patient was a farm boy from West Virginia who'd
been riding a tractor when the fuel tank exploded under him? What
would happen then?

The Ingraham would probably kick her
out.

And then where would she be? She'd
still be without Tim, but she'd be without a medical education as
well.

Quinn could come up with only one
solution: She had to be able to go to the sheriff's office and say
she had looked into the patient's face and it was Timothy
Brown.

And that was just what she was going
to do. Tonight. After the change of shift.

It was the only way.

She shivered. It wasn't cold in the
room. She was terrified.

*

Matt rubbed his burning eyes. His arms
were leaden, his fingers cramped from gripping the steering wheel,
and his right leg throbbed from incessant switching between the gas
and brake pedals. He glanced at the dashboard clock.

I don't believe this, he
thought. After midnight and I haven't hit Gettysburg yet. And
it's
still
snowing like crazy.

After getting lost twice in the rural
backroads of western New Jersey, he'd finally made it to the
Pennsylvania Turnpike. That, too, had been slow going, with
accidents eastbound and westbound, but it least it had been
moving—a big improvement over the Jersey Pike.

But he'd made his big mistake around
Harrisburg when he got off the Pennsy Pike and headed south toward
Maryland. He'd had three choices: Route 83, Route 81, or Route 15.
The first two were major roads, but 83 would swing him too far back
east, and 81 would take him too far west; Route 15 ran right
between the other two and offered to bring him closest to The
Ingraham in the fewest miles.

But Route 15 was only two lanes, lined
with dark, sleeping houses and snow-coated trees bending their
laden branches low over the road. Matt had been crawling for miles,
with hours more to go, most likely.