Deliverance (19 page)

“Huh?”

“Never mind. I can handle it. How do you find these situations, Amaro?”

“It’s better if you don’t know the details. When the government goons interrogate you, I’ll be safe.”

“Hey!”

“Just kidding. I’ll send you the details. The admission ticket has a photo on it. You can leave Victoria’s on there and hope for the best or put your own photo on it.”

“Thanks. I’ll use my own photo.”

“The venue is Comerica Theater, downtown. Victoria lives in Carefree, somewhere out in the desert. Homes blending in with nature. Sounds like hippie stuff.”

“Hound?”

“Is planning to have a talk with the good Dr. Jill this evening. He also thought you might need some help and he wanted you to talk with a guy he knows in Phoenix.”

“What’s special about this guy?”

“He’s a decorated Vietnam vet. He and Hound go way back. His name is Mickey Deer and he’s a sniper.”

“A sniper about sixty years old.”

“I wouldn’t raise the age issue with Hound if I were you. Hound says Mickey’s sharp, in shape, and bored with sitting around. He wants to see some action.”

“I can’t bring him in as a sniper. I’d have to get to know him a lot better.” An idea occurred to her. “Since Hound trusts him, though, I might have a role for him. Can you get him a ticket to the president’s appearance?”

“Sold out way in advance. That’s why you need Victoria Blake’s ticket. She’s got a reserved seat in the first row near the fire exit.”

“Nice. Most of the tickets aren’t reserved seating, though, right?”

“Only the ones that include the fund-raiser dinner afterward. Five thousand dollars a plate.”

“The tickets probably have bar codes on them,” Maliha said, “so they can be swiped, keeping track of who’s there. What happens if you make a duplicate ticket for Mickey with the same bar code as an existing ticket?”

“It would give an error when swiped . . . unless . . .” Amaro was quiet for a minute. “Unless the database record for that ticket ID is overwritten by the second swipe. Yeah, I can do that. Ninety percent chance, at least. The real ticket holder would have to get there first.”

The delights of having a world-class hacker on your team.

“Good enough for me. That should put some excitement in Mickey’s life right there.”

“You’re going to put me out of business if you keep thinking up this stuff.”

“Thinking and doing are far apart. Your job’s secure. Send me everything you have on Victoria, the theater, and whatever you can learn about the security arrangements. I need Mickey’s phone number, too.”

Maliha spent the evening planning and having a long talk with Mickey. She liked him, but there was no substitute for an aura check that told her things people didn’t put into words. She went to bed with the full moon shining through her sheer curtains, painting the room in a ghostly light.

Nothing like a home invasion to start tomorrow off right.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

D
r. Jill Bakkum had rounds at the hospital, her second time that day seeing her small patients. She was good with the kids and their parents, striking the right balance of infusing hope and determination yet remaining honest.

A hard thing to do when you’re talking to a bald eight-year-old with brown eyes the size of saucers.

Hound thought she was an excellent doctor who’d stepped into quicksand of her own creation, a step that would soon prevent her from doing the work she loved. He didn’t detect any definite signs of Dexedrine usage, although the doctor was a little irritable and it seemed like she’d lost weight lately. The loss on her small frame made her look almost gaunt. Both of those were possible side effects of Dexedrine abuse, but they could also have been caused by stress, something the doctor had in abundance on a daily basis.

I can’t imagine her taking a saw to an innocent man’s limbs. There could be some hidden mental problem here.

When she left the hospital, a Mercedes from the car service picked her up and took her home. Hound followed her to Harbor Point Towers, keeping his distance at first, closing in when she walked down the hallway to her condo door. When she opened her door, he rushed her and pushed her inside. Slamming the door behind them, he grabbed both of her hands and held them in one of his large ones, careful not to break any bones. She looked fragile. The next thing he knew, he was flat on his back, his gun was missing from his shoulder holster, and he was looking down the barrel of it.

Fuck. I’ve just been taken down by a woman half my size.

“Appearances can be deceptive,” she said. “I hold black belts in several forms of martial arts. Why have you been following me all day? Or shall I just pull the trigger and not bother with any questions?”

Hound sat up and stretched his legs out in front of him as she watched closely. “I’d prefer we go with the questions,” he said.

“Who are you?”

“Good start. I’m a private investigator, hired to find a man named Xia Yanmeng. He also happens to be a very good friend of mine. You wouldn’t know where he is, would you?”

She ignored his question. “Who hired you?”

“Not at liberty to say.”

Her foot hit his chin and he toppled backward onto the floor again.

I’ve had enough of this. And I want my damn gun back.

“Who hired you?” she said again. Her voice was calm, as though she held a gun on large men on a regular basis.

“The woman who has been on the receiving end of those body parts belonging to Yanmeng.”

“Oh. Miss Winters. Get up into the chair, please.” She gestured with his gun.

She’d gotten close, too close for a man with a good reach. He just had to make sure she didn’t use his weight against him.

Stay on the ground. No leverage with fancy-schmancy martial arts.

He sat up again, as if to follow her order to get on the chair, then lunged at her feet instead, pulling her ankles toward him. She went over backward and he threw himself on top of her like a wrestler going for the pin. She gasped with the pressure of his weight. He locked her hands over her head and spread her legs wide with his so she couldn’t flip him. He knew that in this position, rape would be screaming in her mind and he hoped it would scream a little while longer. Pounding her wrist into the floor, he made her release the gun. He grabbed it and rolled away fast, ending up ten feet across the room pointing the gun at her.

“Get up into the chair, doctor,” he said. “Don’t try anything dumb. I have a black belt in shooting.”

For the first time, a bit of fear showed in the doctor’s face. Her eyes darted around the room, no doubt trying to figure out if she could get to him or a hidden weapon before he could fire. Giving up on that, she sat in the chair and gripped the wooden arms tightly. Hound was careful to stay far enough away from her. He sat in a chair across the room.

“We use the advantages we have, Doc,” Hound said. “I’m not here to hurt you. I’m sorry I frightened you. . . .”

“You didn’t frighten me,” she said with her chin up. It would have made a good show, but the chin was trembling a little. “What do you want? I don’t keep drugs here.” She stared at him closely. “I know I saw you at the hospital today. Are you stalking me?”

“Stalking? No. Following? Yes. I already told you that I’m a private investigator.” He pulled out his pocket ID card with his photo and licensing information and held it up.

“Come closer, I can’t read that,” she said.

“Nice try.” He put away the ID. “My name’s Hound. We were talking about Xia Yanmeng and what you’ve been doing to him. I’ll show you mine, and then you can show me yours.” He gave her a brief description of what he knew about the malpractice suit. “Did a woman named Elizabeth approach you? Tall, blonde, never been in a tanning bed, red fingernails. You’d remember the fingernails.”

Like little vampire teeth, Maliha said.

Dr. Bakkum hesitated.

“I’d hate to have to shoot you,” Hound said. “Starting with those talented surgeon’s hands of yours.”

She looked down at her hands in alarm. Shattering them would end her career without even a trial.

“It wasn’t the woman you described. I’ve only dealt with a man. An attorney, he said, but he didn’t give me his name. He said he could make the lawsuit go away if I did some custom surgery. I thought he meant something like changing a person’s appearance so he could pass as someone else. You know,
Mission Impossible
stuff.”

“Could you identify this man?”

“Absolutely. It turned out that he wanted horrible things done. A man kept in a drug-induced coma and submitted to operations where I had to cut off . . . extremities. I did everything in an operating room. Amputation isn’t my specialty, but I use a Gigli saw on the skull at times, and it works well for cutting bone elsewhere.”

“Two handles with a wire band between them, pulled back and forth?”

She nodded. “Surgical-grade stainless steel. Blood transfusions. I was provided with whatever I asked for. Mr. Xia’s alive and pain-free, for now. If the drugs are discontinued, since he has no brain injury, he should recover consciousness with no problem.”

“No problem except for his missing pieces. Is his memory intact?” Hound said.

“Almost certainly.”

“Almost? Not what I want to hear.”

“There are no guarantees in medicine, Mr. Hound. To add to the horror, I had to make deliveries to a condo in this building. The attorney gave me a device he said would prevent the hall cameras from seeing me. If I’d known it was going to be so medically and morally repugnant, I would have said no and taken my lumps from the malpractice suit. At least I was told I wouldn’t have to kill the patient.”

“More like the victim, not the patient. Why didn’t you stop when you found out what you had to do?”

The doctor sighed. “I have a son.”

“Your son’s life was threatened?”

She squeezed her eyelids together, but that didn’t stop the tears from escaping. That was all the answer that Hound needed.

How the hell do I get this woman to help me without jeopardizing her son?

“Where is Yanmeng?”

“In a secure facility where I do research.”

“Cancer research needs a secure lab?” Hound said.

“I didn’t say it was cancer research.”

“Then what the hell is it?”

“Research in emergency techniques that can be programmed into battlefield robo-surgeons.”

Well, damn. I guess medics are gonna look a lot different.

“I can’t bring him out of there,” she said. “I can’t let you in, either.”

“What’s the name of this place?”

She hesitated.

“I’m not after your secret robot project. I just want to help my friend.”

“Qixotic Labs,” she said.

“Where is Yanmeng located inside the building?”

“I don’t know.”

“What the fuck? You’ve been chopping on him for days and you don’t know where he is? Try again.” Hound waved the gun as a reminder.

“I really don’t. When I go to see him, I’m seated in a wheelchair and a black hood is put over my head. Someone takes me all around the building, up and down in the elevator, and spins the wheelchair a few times. By the time I get inside the surgical suite, I have no idea where I am. Before I got involved in this, I had seen other people being wheeled through the halls and thought it was strange. Now I’m one of the hooded ones. And before you ask, there aren’t any windows in the room.”

Hound whistled. “There’s some weird shit going on in there, Dr. Bakkum.”

She nodded. “Please, call me Jill. When I go to my usual work area for robotics, I know where that is and I walk there by myself. I only have an escort when I go to visit Yanmeng. My research is challenging, pays very well, and has the chance to save injured soldiers. When this malpractice suit came up, I thought that if it all goes bad for me, I’d disappear into my research and not do clinical work. Even if I lose my license, I don’t think it would matter to them. But God only knows what goes on in the rest of the building.”

“Jill, has it occurred to you that you were told you wouldn’t have to kill Yanmeng because someone else was going to do it? When they don’t need any more parts from him.”

“I didn’t want to think about that.”

“Here’s something else to think about. When they’re done with him, they’re done with you, and you know too much to live,” Hound said.

Jill lapsed into deep thought. Finally she said, “It makes sense. It’s hopeless for both of us. I can only hope my son survives. I’ve done something terrible and others are paying for it.”

“I have an idea, but it’s going to take your cooperation.”

“Tell me what to do. If I can do it without killing my son, I will.”