The Timer Game (40 page)

A roll of gauze lay on the ground and he bent painfully down, the pressure in his bleeding arm slowing his progress to a trembly set of lurches, and retrieved it. He remembered his keys then and found them inside the open locker.

It was too hard to stand right away, and he eased into a sitting position and rested his back against a closed locker and looked at his arm. The tourniquet had bled through. He pressed the gauze against the wound. The crash cart still sat with a drawer open, the way Grace had left it.

He was in a hospital. He could crawl into the hall and yell. Somebody would find him. Help him. No time. He had to stop the bleeding and find Katie. Not get stalled in ER explaining himself.

He planted his feet and took deep breaths, and when he was ready, he used his good arm to pull himself up. His legs shook from the effort. He shuffled to the crash cart and found suturing thread and a needle and a sharp blade he used to saw the tourniquet free. He rolled up what was left of his shredded sleeve and pressed fresh gauze into the wound, forcing his panic down. She’d only nicked him a good inch or so, not severed a vein. It was messy but it wasn’t lethal. He mopped the blood and stitched the damage, remembering the slippery feel to the arm of the soldier in Kubul, how he’d stitched him up, how he’d helped Grace those weeks with everything she needed in the clinic. Sewing people up sometimes. Old men. Little kids.

Where in the hell was Katie?

He finished and cut the thread and wrapped a piece of gauze around the stitches. He was shaky then, but okay. He looked up.

Lee was watching him from the doorway, a smile playing across her perfect features. She was wearing fresh scrubs. In one hand she held a gun. In the other, a cooler.

“This what you’re looking for?”

It was small, an Igloo that could hold a six-pack of beer and a couple of sandwiches.

“What did you do?” He grasped his bandaged arm and shuffled toward her, voice hoarse.

“I think you already know the answer to that.”

“You did this to Katie?”

“Oh. You know about Katie.” Lee swung the cooler gently in her hand.

Some cold dark thing moved in his solar plexus; he’d never felt as close to killing anyone as he did in this moment, facing this woman staring calmly back, one small hand grasping the cooler. He wondered if it already carried his daughter’s heart, a heart slack in a bubble of saline, resting on a bed of shaved ice. “Where is she?”

“Gone, Mac.”

He shot forward and his hand closed on her throat.

Lee pressed the gun against his head. “Don’t. Do. Not. Step back. Away.”

Lee held his gaze and he felt her blood surge through his fingers, how easy it would be to squeeze her throat, press harder. He dropped his hand and took a step back.

“It was a lie, all of it.”

“The lab-built hearts. Yes. It’s not possible, at least not with the technology we have now.”

Mac weighed the chances of knocking the gun free, smashing a fist through her face and yanking the cooler out of her manicured hands. The revolver was a Bodyguard Airweight, a Smith & Wesson five-shot, specially altered with a silencer so it wouldn’t snag silk when she ripped it out of her pocket and aimed it, like she was now, at somebody’s face.

“Where is she? Where’s Katie?”

“What do you care where she is?”

He forced himself to think logically. If the heart was just the first harvest, it meant Katie was still vented on a heart-lung machine. “That’s what you do in your lab; you and Warren carve up kids.”

“Only two,” she said mildly.

“Two.” If she was vented, maybe he could still save her.

“How do you think Eric Bettles got a perfect heartin-a-box a year ago? Thanks for your part in it. You played it perfectly.”

She stared at him quietly, a mocking smile on her face.

“We’re not monsters, Mac. Just greedy. Belikond wants to buy the Center and its assets, and the big one is the heartin-a-box
.
So we had to make it look real.”

“And then you take the money and leave.”

“We take the money and leave,” she repeated. “The transfer is complete in exactly—” She glanced at her watch. “Ten minutes. And then we—”

“Disappear,” he finished.

“Yes.” She smiled briefly. “Clearly, I’m going to kill you, that’s the only reason I’m telling you all of this.”

The pain made him dizzy and he shifted his weight, trying to stay balanced. His knees felt soft. His fingers moved in his pocket, and he found what he needed. The blade was broken where he’d snapped it off, but it still had a good inch on it, straight across.

“Did you target Katie in the particular?”

“Of course, she was yours and Grace’s child.”

That knocked the air out. “You knew.” He felt along the edge.

“Katie had to die. When we realized how you’d leeched onto Hekka we needed to know what you knew. Nothing, as it turned out. That’s why I came on to you, to find that out.”

Mac kept silent, his fingers moving. He found the handle. “So when you came on to me you were just…”

She laughed. “You are such a guy. What a guy thing to say.”

She raised the gun.

“Good-bye Mac. It’s been fun.”

Chapter 46

Katie lay draped in sterile sheets, curls limp. It was the stillness, the quiet of her small body that made Grace’s heart seize.

Her bare chest glowed under the harsh light. EKG leads had been pasted to her arms and a trach tube burrowed down her slack throat. She was vented. A machine was breathing for her, but she was still alive.

Grace’s mind raced, running down paths, sorting. Every path led straight to this, staring into an operating arena where her five-year-old daughter lay poised like a sacrifice on the altar of a psychotic god.

“I haven’t killed her—not in the technical sense. She’s not brain dead. I did that to prolong your exquisite suffering. We’ll be doing multiple harvests with this donor. Normally, the kidneys go first, but Hekka coded, so we’re taking the heart first.”

Warren leaned over Grace, casually using the clicker as a pointer, pointing out the less flamboyant aspects of harvesting.

“We’ll be harvesting the liver, lungs, corneas, kidneys. We’ve dummied paperwork for the transplant coordinator, so you have the comfort of knowing that every scrap of Katie will be used. But the heart, well, that one needs no transplant papers. That’s the one perfect match in the bunch, the heartin-a-box
.”
He laughed.

Her mind was slow, numb. All she could see was her daughter and how defenseless she looked. “Is she on a neuromuscular blocker?” Her voice had a quaver in it.

Warren’s mouth twisted in a smile. “That would be rich. Awake and paralyzed. She’s on a blocker, but she’s out cold, Grace. Has been since we mixed chloral hydrate into a glass of lemonade and left it in her bathroom. She’s on desflurene and a new neuromuscular blocker, succinylcholine. The old one caused liver damage and since we’ll be harvesting her liver…” He shrugged.

The words were slow, not understandable.

“What about her voice? Calling me?”

He went to a console near the screens and leaned into a microphone and said, “It’s all black. An’ an’, it feels like it’s shaking. Moving.” He punched a button, adjusted dials, and the voice morphed, getting higher and higher until chillingly, the voice coming from the console was Katie’s, with just the right timbre, pitched with anxiety.

It’s all black. An’, an’, it feels like it’s shaking. Moving.

“We had her doll. So we could match the voice and build what we needed.”

“You told the anesthesiologist that Hekka wasn’t getting a heart.”

“You think somebody was on the phone when I said that? No, they’re expecting it. They probably have Hekka’s heart removed by now, the procedure taped by Mac’s crew. Isn’t that rich? Taping the operation where his own daughter’s heart is implanted in the chest of another kid. Titus Andronicus has nothing on us. Hekka’s waiting. Won’t have to wait much longer.”

Grace looked down at her daughter and thought of the transplants she’d done at the Center, the seamless preparation with an experienced anesthesiologist, OR techs opening the instrument trays and setting them up, the circulatory nurse, the main surgeon, the assistants.

The room was empty, except for Katie.

She couldn’t imagine an entire medical team participating in this evil.

“There should be at least ten people in the room. You’re not doing the transplants there.”

“No, Grace, just the killing.”

Grace couldn’t breathe.

“She’s under deep sedation, a barbiturate coma. All we have to do is take her off the respirator long enough to affect her brain. It won’t take long. We’ll monitor it closely and when her heart rate starts slowing, we’ll put her back on the vent, but of course, by then, she’ll be brain dead. Then she’ll be wheeled into an OR where a team will perform the transplants. You don’t need accomplices, Grace. Just coordination and good paperwork. And of course, a killer.”

From the cement scrub room, a woman emerged dressed in scrubs and a hospital mask, a pager attached to her lab coat. She raised her face curiously and stared at the wall as if she could see them, and Grace recognized Opal.

“It’s dangerous, the line of work you’re in,” Warren said. “You make so many enemies with time on their hands. Opal Perkins, trying to help out a boss by getting what he needed from a competitor. Using that audio bug on a chart. Costly, her arrest and trial. The unpleasantness cost her a career at Scripps. She was happy to walk across the street to the Center for BioChimera. Happy to groom damaged adults into playing their parts. The nurse and Dr. Mike Yura. Those were mentally ill clients, five years ago, who lived at the halfway house. Conveniently gone now. Opal groomed them into following DeeDee Winger and her husband into the parking lot, following Robert Harling Frieze and his wife. Talking them into coming back later that night. The advantage to using the mentally ill is that they
believe.”

“Jasmine.” Grace remembered what DeeDee Winger had said about the woman who’d met them that night at the Center and taken them down into the basement.
Really beautiful black hair. . .Looked almost Indian
.

Warren nodded. “Jasmine had a bit part but Opal was a star. Happy to come back at odd hours and extract bone marrow she later injected into the wombs of women carrying children with malformed hearts. Happy, so happy to be here tonight, Grace. For the final act.”

Warren prodded Grace with the pistol and she felt the cold metal press into the small of her back.

“Come on, take a seat.”

Below her in OR, Opal peered up at Warren, waiting, only her eyes visible under the mask, eyes bright with malice. Warren shook his head slightly. He pushed a button so his voice could be heard through the speakerphone in OR. “Patience, Opal.”

Opal nodded and crossed her meaty arms, staring at Katie with a look of such hatred it made Grace’s blood cold.

“Well, shall we?” Warren pointed at the viewing chair. It was bolted to the ground and had armbands of steel. Next to it lay the heavy chain attached to the wall, the chain with ankle cuffs.

“Wait. What about Eddie?”

“What about him?” Warren’s voice was bored.

“You picked him on purpose? Sent him in the taco van to deliver a message to me. A warning. You’d scrambled his thinking; you knew he’d kill the drug agents because they were in Tyvek suits, and the patrolman out back because he was a threat. You knew I’d have to kill him before he killed me.”

“Of course.”

“You wanted him to die.”

“I was counting on it. Senator Loud was trying to shepherd through legislation which would have impacted the dollar value of my assets, allowed generics to be marketed more easily. I warned the Senator, discreetly, of course, that if he continued, I’d harm what he held most dear. He continued. It was business, Grace. That’s all.”

He shifted his gun. “Ready?”

“Wait. Wait.” A plan came into Grace’s mind. Not a plan, an act of desperation. Her last, if it failed. “I’d like to hold something of hers in my hands.”

She kept all hope out of her face. Katie lay in the half-light, draped and prepped, her small face pale. Warren shrugged.

“Fine.” He flicked a glance at his wristwatch. “Thirty seconds on the clock, Grace. Remember the door’s locked and I won’t hesitate to shoot you in the back if you try to run. Ready. Go.”

She raced to the exhibit of Katie’s things, passing the odd exhibit of the dress billowing over bellows. The dress continued to balloon as if a phantom Grace was inside, gasping.

She reached for the Air Walkers, her back to him.

“Fifteen, Grace. You have to be back in your seat by then. Show’s about to start.”

She ripped open the shoes’ tiny pockets, the little cubbies, praying it was still there.

A dime. Bubble gum.

A latex balloon.

Chapter 47

Mac dodged to the right and snapped the blunt blade out of his pocket. He hurled it straight at Lee, putting his good arm and shoulder into it. It glanced off her scrubs and clattered uselessly to the ground.

It was just enough to make her shoot wild. It was a shocking pop, a small sound. A bright hole slivered a locker behind him. She steadied the gun and aimed, her lovely yellow-green eyes wide, the gun hot in her hand.

It wobbled.

She looked confused for a moment, and then her hand went to her throat, and Mac could see an ivory handle, wedged into the hollow. She opened her mouth and closed it, making little sucking noises. The gun banged to the ground and she pulled the bloody shaft of the knife out of her throat and stared at it, her eyes puzzled, as if still trying to figure out what it was.

A wash of blood bibbed down through the slice in her neck, soaking her scrubs red. She toppled and fell. Mac stared at her. He felt numb. He snatched up the cooler and opened it.

There was only ice in it and Mac let out a low sound of pain and relief. Katie’s heart hadn’t been harvested yet. Maybe he could still save her.

Don Jose stood hunched in the doorway.