Dead Harvest (3 page)

  "I'm not supposed to unlock her," the nurse replied.

  I nodded toward Kate's sleeping form. "You think she's going anywhere?"

  She hesitated a moment, and then fished a small set of keys from her pocket, unlocking first one set of cuffs, and then the other. "The police should really be here when she wakes up," the nurse said. "They're going to want to talk to her."

  I nodded my agreement. "The officer that was stationed at her door was asleep when I arrived. When I woke him, he said he was gonna head down to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. If I had to guess, I'd say they're not going to be too happy with him if they find out he was gone when she came to. You could catch him if you hurry. Tell him to call in, let them know that she's been stirring."

  "And her?"

  "I'll keep an eye on her until you get back."

  She gave me a curt nod, and took off at a jog. A good kid, I thought – the trusting sort. It almost made me feel bad for what I was about to do.

  Beside the bed was a wheelchair, folded and propped against the wall. I yanked it open. Then, with a glance over my shoulder to ensure I wasn't being watched, I slid the IV from Kate's arm. Blood welled red in its wake. I blotted it with the bed sheet, and replaced the tape that had held the IV in place. Then I lifted her into the wheelchair. Her eyes fluttered, but she didn't stir.

  Outside Kate's room, the hall bustled with activity. The nurse had headed left, so I went right. No one gave me a second glance as I wheeled her down the hall, her head lolling to one side.

  What the hell was I supposed to do now? It would only be a matter of minutes before they discovered she was missing, and this girl was a hot commodity. I knew what I
should
do was make the collection and be on my way. I also knew that wasn't going to happen – not until I figured out what the hell was going on.

  "Hey! Hey, you!"

  The call echoed down the length of the crowded hallway. I pretended not to hear – just kept on pushing Kate down the hall like I hadn't a care in the world. As soon as we were around the corner and out of view, I broke into a run. The wheelchair rattled and shimmied beneath my sweat-slick hands – any moment I expected her to spill out of the chair and onto the floor. But she stayed put, and I kept running.

  Some fucking plan
this
was.

  There was a clatter of footfalls behind us, a bevy of shouts. We reached a bank of elevators, and I pressed the call button. My lungs and legs were burning, and my heart thudded in my chest. Kate, for her part, seemed content to sit and drool on the shoulder of her hospital gown. At least it beat the screaming.

  The elevator door pinged open. Two uniformed cops rounded the corner, guns drawn. I rolled Kate into the elevator and chose a floor at random. Then I hit three more below it, just to keep them guessing.

  The cops were rapidly approaching, and still the door was open. I pounded on the button to close it, and slowly, it began to move. One of the cops made a leap for the door, arm extended in desperate attempt to halt the door's progress. A second more, and he might have made it, but he was too slow, too late. The door slid shut. A bang reverberated through the elevator shaft as he pounded on the door in frustration. The sound filled the elevator car, and then receded as we lurched downward.

  And just like that, we were gone.

 
 

Shit.

  My hope was that I'd've had a couple of minutes before they noticed she was missing. And when they did, they'd be looking for a dangerous, psychotic,
awake
little girl; I could just wheel her out the front door unnoticed. But now they'd seen me with her, and that was going to complicate matters a bit.

  Of course, the fact that they'd seen
me
wasn't the end of the world. I could always leave this body behind and find another; around here, there were no shortage of volunteers. But whatever I looked like, I was still going to have to get her out, too. I couldn't afford to chance it in some broken-down old body. It just wasn't worth the cost.

  So what, then? My mother used to tell me when God closes a door, he opens a window, but I was guessing God didn't give two shits about me. Not to mention we were standing in a tin box with one door and no fucking windows. One door that was soon to open onto God knows what.

  The elevator jerked to a halt. I left Kate in the center of the car and pressed myself tight to the wall beside the door. As hiding places go, it wasn't much of one, but it would buy me a second or two, and I wasn't about to go out without a fight.

  When the doors slid open, I heaved a sigh. There was no one waiting, gun in hand, to reclaim Kate or evict me from this body. Of course, that didn't mean much – the hospital was too big to put a cop on every floor at the drop of a hat, but you can be damn sure they were gonna have the exits covered. The best I could hope for was to buy a little time, maybe come up with a game plan.

  I poked my head out into the hall. The plaque on the wall read Radiology. At the end of the hall, a couple of orderlies were wrangling an elderly woman out of a stretcher and into a wheelchair, but otherwise, the place was deserted. I wheeled Kate's sleeping form out of the elevator and down the hall. The old woman met my gaze as we approached. The orderlies paid us no mind. I flashed her a smile of reassurance, and she smiled back, wan and tired and grateful. Then the three of them disappeared into the imaging suite, leaving the empty stretcher behind.

  I said a prayer for her. It was the least I could do.

  Thanks to her, we just might get out of here alive.

 

Though it was just past 8am, Bellevue's ER was already bustling. The waiting room was crammed full of the sick and injured: children, hacking away on their mothers' laps; junkies, gray and shaking from withdrawal; a man in chef's whites, bleeding into a dish towel. The staff were bustling, too, with the cold efficiency of folks who've seen worse than this more times than they could count. The only indication they'd seen us at all was the slight change in their trajectory as they strode past us in the hallway. They had a job to do, and we didn't concern them in the slightest, so long as we were out of the way.

  To tell you the truth, they didn't concern me much, either. What
did
concern me was the cop manning the entrance. I'd been watching him for going on ten minutes through the criss-crossed panes of safety glass set into the doors that separate the waiting room from the ER. In that time, he hadn't budged, hadn't yawned – hell, he'd barely even
blinked
. Getting past him wasn't going to be easy. Lucky for me, an ER is a diversion waiting to happen; all I had to do was bide my time.

  Turns out, I didn't have to wait long. My pulse quickened in anticipation as I heard the squeal of approaching sirens. And I wasn't the only one. You could see it in their drawn faces; you could hear it in their clipped, efficient tones as they relayed details and called out orders. It was an accident. A bad one. Three ambulances en route, with more to follow. Patients in critical condition. They readied examination rooms and operating suites, and I readied myself as well. There were maybe thirty yards and one cop between me and freedom, and however this went down, I was only gonna get one shot.

  A dozen doctors, nurses, and orderlies pushed past me through the double doors as the first of the ambulances rocked to a halt outside the ER. The ambulance doors burst open. Inside, the EMTs hovered over a stretchered form barely recognizable as human. The stretcher was unloaded, no small feat since one of the techs knelt atop it, straddling the patient. A woman stumbled out of the ambulance cab, her face scraped, her hair matted with blood. When she saw the man in the stretcher, she began to scream.

  Two more ambulances screeched to a stop beside the first. Stretchers were unloaded amidst a sea of shouted instructions. The whole place was swarming with people – staff, the wounded, a throng of onlookers, pressing close. Still, the cop held fast. I jumped as the double doors banged open beside me, the first of the stretchers rolling past, at the center of a medical maelstrom.

  Outside the doors, the crowd of onlookers pressed closer, eager to absorb every lurid detail. Over the din, I heard a shouted
"Do something!
" – and reluctantly, the cop abandoned his post. He herded the crowd backward, trying desperately to give the doctors room to work.

  That was as good a chance as I was going to get. I gripped tight my borrowed stretcher and pushed it through the double doors. Kate, strapped down atop it, didn't stir. There'd been a set of folded blankets stacked on the shelf beneath the woman's stretcher, and one of them now covered Kate to her chin. Her head I'd bandaged with supplies stolen from a nurse's treatment cart left unattended in the hallway. The effect was less professional than I'd intended. It wasn't going to stand up to any kind of scrutiny, but from a distance, it did the trick.

  The ER waiting room had become a triage center; dozens of people not injured enough to require an ambulance were being sorted through by doctors too hurried to spare a second glance at me. Stretcher after stretcher careened past me, headed toward the operating suites. As I pressed toward the entrance, two more ambulances arrived, and were then abandoned as their crews wheeled their respective payloads inside. In his hurry, one of the drivers left his ambulance running. I swear I could have kissed him.

  Though the sky was gray overhead, and the air was thick with exhaust, the cool morning breeze was like a balm to my frayed nerves. The sidewalk was cold and rough beneath my feet. The wheels of the stretcher folded upward as I shoved it into the empty, waiting ambulance.

  I slammed shut the rear door and headed for the cab. A hand grabbed my shoulder – not gently. I turned to find the cop, dark eyes glowering at me from beneath a furrowed brow.

  "Where you think you're going?" he asked. Skeptical, but not yet hostile. That was OK. Skeptical I could work with.

  "Patient transfer."

  "Where you taking her?" he asked.

  "Him," I replied. "Got a suite waiting at Beth Israel."

  "Where's your badge?"

  "Sorry?"

  "Your badge? You know staff's supposed to display it at all times."

  "Of course," I replied. I patted the pockets of my lab coat, a smile of contrition pasted on my face. My left hand dipped into a pocket, and his eyes followed. He never saw my right hand coming.

  The punch connected with the bridge of his nose. A crunch of bone, a spray of blood, and he went down. Not dead, just sleepy. Parlor tricks like the one I'd pulled on the guard upstairs are all well and good, but sometimes, you just gotta go the direct route. Besides, subtle's never been my strong suit.

  I climbed into the cab and threw the ambulance into gear. I gave it a little gas, and it lurched forward. Through the side mirror, I saw a kid of maybe ten staring slack-jawed back at me. He was tugging at his mother's arm and pointing toward the cop sprawled across the pavement, but she ignored him. The show outside the ER was still going strong, and she wasn't about to miss it.

  I gave the kid a wink and a lazy mock-salute, and then pulled out of the hospital drive, disappearing into the early morning traffic.

 
 

"City and state?"

  Between the din of the nearby traffic and the work crew drilling through the sidewalk just a half a block away, I couldn't hear a word she said. I pressed the handset tighter to my ear and huddled closer to the payphone. "I'm sorry?"

  "City and state?" the woman repeated.

  "Uh, Manhattan," I replied. "Manhattan, New York."

  "What listing?"

  "Jonah Friedlander."

  The line hissed and clicked, and the woman was replaced by an automated voice that spat out the requested address. I was hard-pressed to tell the two apart.

  I dropped the handset back onto its cradle and hunched across the lot to the waiting ambulance. Across the intersection from where I stood, a police cruiser sat idling at a light. I watched him from the corner of my eye, thinking inconspicuous thoughts. The gas station was packed three deep with cabs waiting for a crack at the pumps, and droves of pedestrians filtered through for a paper or a cup of morning coffee – no way the cop had made me. Of course, the meatsuit didn't want to hear it. His heart was pounding a mile a minute; his palms were sweating; his mouth was dry as dust. Just once, I'd like to possess me a Mob enforcer or something. These peaceful, law-abiding sorts make this job of mine a bitch.

  Inside the ambulance, Kate was still unconscious. The question was, for how long? My stomach roiled as I recalled the bitter tang of blood and alcohol that clung to her mother's mangled corpse, and I gave her restraints a tug to ensure they were secure. Then I thumbed the ignition, and the ambulance sprang to life. I pulled out of the station and onto the crowded city street, disappearing into the swell of traffic.

 

Friedlander's apartment was a third-floor walk-up in Chelsea, the kind of place a realtor might charitably call a quaint Manhattan brownstone. It was brown, true enough, but its façade was faded and crumbling, and the paint on the sills had blistered and peeled, revealing rotten wood beneath. The whole building had the look of a musty old sweater – one well-placed tug and the whole thing might come tumbling down.

  The front door was propped open with a rolled-up newspaper, and thick bacon-scented smoke poured skyward from the hallway beyond. From somewhere inside, a smoke alarm cried. I nudged the door open with my foot and carried Kate's sleeping form across the threshold. The ambulance I'd left in an alley a block north. They'd find it soon enough, but I didn't much mind – Penn Station lay just a couple blocks to the east, and they'd be expecting us to run. Either I was too smart to run, or too stupid, but either way, we'd be safe here a while.