Nightlife (40 page)

55

J
udith lifted the package off her bed and worked at getting the heavy plastic wrapping off. She went to the kitchen and got a steak knife, then came back and made a slice along the top. The package said, “Hospital Scrubs, size S, OSHA Compliant.” She held the pants up in front of the full-length mirror and looked at them critically. Were the legs going to be just a bit long? She had bought the scrubs this afternoon at a uniform store that specialized in medical clothes, and she had not wanted to spend much time shopping or ask any questions.

She had just picked up the package, paid cash for it, and gone. She took off her jeans and T-shirt and put on the scrubs, then stared in the mirror. They felt like starched pajamas, but she liked the way they looked on her. She turned halfway around to look over her shoulder, then kept turning until she was facing forward again. She was very pleased. The only essential part was that the fit be good: no nurse would have scrubs that weren’t her size. Judith made a very attractive nurse.

She had chosen the maroon color because she didn’t want to be too visible in the dark. Some of the men and women she had seen walking up Russell Street from the hospital wore bright white coats or pants, and when a car came around the corner they seemed to glow in the headlights. The ones who wore dark blue or maroon were almost invisible.

Judith put on the pair of walking shoes she had chosen and checked the pant length again. The pants came right to the top of the shoes and rested there with only a half inch or so of overlap. That was just right. She lifted the loose pullover top and looked at her bare stomach. That was the only place for a gun. The loose top would cover it.

She stared into the mirror. She made a serious face, as though she were a nurse hurrying down a hallway to a patient’s room. Then she tried an empty face, and decided that was the right one. She wasn’t going to be clapping a defibrillator on somebody’s chest. She was just going to be a young woman coming off a long evening shift.

Judith used an elastic band that matched her scrubs to tie her hair in a ponytail, then put on the clear glasses she had bought in the hobby shop. They were for protecting people’s eyes when they worked on crafts, but they looked just like regular glasses. She looked smart in them.

She took off her top and picked up the roll of adhesive tape she had bought. She wrapped it around her waist twice, then twice more to hold Mary Tilson’s gun so it rode comfortably above the waistband without tugging on her pants. Then she put on her loose top and checked the effect. The gun was invisible.

She put on the hooded waterproof jacket she had bought when she had arrived in Portland, and decided the effect was right. It could rain in Portland at any time, and she had seen that the people she wanted to look like all wore jackets at night.

Judith examined the fabric purse with the long strap that she had carried in Denver, and tried it with her work outfit. She could fit the adhesive tape and the steak knife in it easily.

Judith looked around her small apartment to assess her preparations. She had already packed her suitcase. If she needed to run, she could. The place looked neat, nearly empty, and clean. She carefully folded her jeans and T-shirt, put them in a paper sack, and brought it with her suitcase.

She had a feeling of elation as she stepped out of her apartment and went down the back stairs to the outside. The night was clear and calm, a little like the late nights she had loved when she had been a little girl. There was a silent, private emptiness. There was nothing for a block or two that was moving, and the lights from the big busy streets to the south were blocked by apartment buildings.

She put the suitcase and the clothes in her trunk and started the car. She looked at the clock on the dashboard. It was eleven-fifteen, time to be moving. She let the car drift quietly down the alley behind the building, then accelerated gradually as she moved up the street.

Judith drove across the Broadway Bridge to North Interstate Avenue, then turned onto Northeast Russell. She could see the big shape of Legacy Emanuel Hospital as soon as she made the turn. She pulled over on the street near the east end of it and parked.

Judith looked at the car clock again. It was eleven forty-five. When she had followed Catherine up this street to her apartment building she had noticed that the activity picked up around midnight, which she assumed must be when the hospital shifts changed. She wanted to be ten minutes ahead of the change, so people would be leaving Catherine’s building when she arrived. She got out of the car, put her keys into the pants pocket of her scrubs, and looped her purse strap over her shoulder.

She walked up to Catherine’s apartment building just as a young man in green scrubs appeared in the lobby. She looked down into her purse as he hurried out of the building past her, but then she lunged ahead, caught the door before it could swing shut, and stepped inside. Her heart was pounding. She had made it past the first barrier.

But now Judith was in the lighted lobby, where people outside could see her, and anyone who came downstairs to leave would have to walk right past her. She stepped quickly to the row of mailboxes and read the Dymo labels stuck above them. There was one that said
HOBBES.
It was apartment 3F.

Judith opened the door to the stairwell and began to climb to the third floor. At least while she climbed, while she was in the deserted stairwell, nobody was looking at her. But when she reached the third-floor landing, she became tense again. She opened the door to the third-floor hallway a crack and listened. There were no voices, no footsteps, no sounds that indicated that anyone was awake. Judith moved cautiously into the hallway. She had never been in this building before, and so she had to think as she walked. She stepped along the hallway scanning, searching for any opportunity that would permit her to do what she wanted, and listening for someone who might stop her. As she came to 3D, she paused and listened for the sounds of people awake, then stopped at 3E and did the same, but there was nothing. She went on more slowly and quietly until she came to 3F.

When she had followed Catherine home last night, she had seen a whole row of windows light up. Catherine’s apartment had to be big—at least three rooms along the side of the building, probably with the bedroom in the back, away from the noise of the street. But Judith couldn’t know for sure. Catherine might be standing right on the other side of that door. Judith’s hand went to her belly, and she felt the hard, reassuring shape of the gun under her shirt. She leaned close and pressed her ear to the door. Catherine’s apartment was just as quiet as the others.

She prepared herself, then carefully touched the door handle at apartment 3F and tried to turn it, just in case Catherine had forgotten to lock it. The handle didn’t budge. She looked closely at the lock on the door. She didn’t need to try to slide a credit card between the door and the latch, or try to pry it open with the steak knife. She could see that the hardware was the heavy and expensive kind that was fitted tightly and would be sunk too deep into the receptacle to be opened.

She resumed her walk along the hallway. There was an unmarked door, so she tried it. The door opened. Inside were a set of circuit breakers and a supply of cleansers, carpet cleaners, mops, and rags. She stood with the door open and thought. She could pop the circuit breakers. People would come out of their apartments, and one of them would check the panel and flip the breakers back. But that wouldn’t work unless the one who did it was Catherine. If she was asleep, she would never know it had happened. What would rouse her? Pulling a fire alarm would do it, but that would bring firemen and cops. She closed the door to the little room and moved on.

The only barrier that kept Judith away from Catherine was a single wooden apartment door. She had to think of a way to get past that door. Was there a way around it? Was there a way onto the roof? Maybe she could find a rope or make one, tie it to something solid—the central-air-conditioning unit, a pipe—and then lower herself down outside Catherine’s window. She could look in and see her lying in her bed asleep. She could stay pressed against the window like a night creature. And then, when she was ready, she could fire through the glass. No. That was far too athletic for Judith—crazy.

She kept going, looking closely at everything she saw. The windows at the ends of the hallways opened, but that didn’t seem to her to do any good. She studied the ceilings. They were made of plasterboard. If she’d had a ladder, she could go to the ceiling outside of Catherine’s apartment, cut a hole in the plasterboard with her knife, climb up, and carve a hole into the ceiling on Catherine’s side so she could climb down. It was crazier than the first idea: far too loud, and too likely to get her caught.

The doors were beginning to look less substantial. After all, they were made of wood. Maybe, in an hour or two, she could carve a hole through one of them with the knife, reach through it, and turn the handle.

If she had to, she could simply stay here—maybe in the third-floor storage closet across from Catherine’s apartment—until dawn. She could wait and watch until Catherine came out. She recognized that as the first sensible strategy that had occurred to her. She had done the hard part, gotten in past the outer doors without being noticed. If she just stayed in the building, her chance would come. She decided to finish her tour of the building before she gave up and hid in the closet.

She reached the stairwell again, went back down to the lobby, and looked at the triple row of mailboxes. If the Dymo labels told her where people lived, then maybe an empty one would tell her which apartments were vacant. If she could find one, maybe she could break into it and wait in safety.

“Is something wrong?” It was a male voice from behind her.

She turned, her body instantly tense and ready to fight. He was in his fifties or sixties and he wore a uniform, but it wasn’t medical like hers. He was balding and chubby. He looked like a janitor. She said, “I forgot my keys.”

“Your apartment key?”

He didn’t seem threatening now, but she knew it was an illusion. She couldn’t make a mistake. “Yes. I thought it was in my purse, but here I am, and it’s not there. I’m hoping I didn’t lose it permanently.”

“How did you get into the building at all?”

“As I was coming up the steps somebody else was going out. He held the door for me. I didn’t know I didn’t have my key until I got up there.”

“Do you have your ID?”

“Sure.” She was making a plan. It was just a series of pictures in her mind, a flash of images. She would fire, and step around him to go out the front door. She would dash back along Northeast Russell Street to the hospital. If she was being observed, she would go into the building as though she were late for the midnight shift, then come out of the hospital at the parking lot entrance with whatever stragglers were left, make her way to her car, and be gone.

She opened her wallet and held it up so he could see the Catherine Hobbes driver’s license and the credit card. She pointed at the mailboxes. “See? That’s me—Catherine Hobbes.” She let her hand linger near the pistol she had taped to her body.

The man held out his hand. “I’m Dewey. I do the handyman work for these apartments and three others that the company owns.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Judith. She managed a sad smile as she shook his hand. “We’ll probably see each other a lot while I’m sleeping in the hall.”

“Don’t worry,” said Dewey. “I’ve got a grand master key for the building. I can let you in.”

“You can?” Her eyes widened, and her smile became real and grew. “Oh, that’s wonderful. You don’t know how awful I felt. Thanks so much.”

“Don’t mention it. What’s the apartment again?”

“Three-F. But there are six or seven interns on my floor, and at least half of them will be trying to sleep off a forty-eight-hour shift. Do you think we’d be quieter if we took the stairs?”

“It’s okay,” he said. “I’ve had all kinds of calls to come here in the middle of the night, and the elevator never wakes anybody up. When it’s a plumbing thing on an upper floor you’ve got to get up there quick, or it’s going to start coming through the ceilings. You a nurse?”

“Hmm?”

“A nurse. Are you a nurse?”

She tried to think of something he would know nothing about. “Yep. A surgical nurse.” She was fairly sure that anybody who’d had surgery would have been unconscious.

“You mean like when the surgeon says ‘Forceps,’ you’re the one who says ‘Forceps’ and hands them to him?”

“That’s me. Only sometimes I hand him the monkey wrench or the pruning shears for fun.”

Dewey chuckled. He looked at the numbers lighting up above the elevator door: 2, then 3.

She had to get whatever talk there was going to be out of the way before the elevator door opened, and she needed to head off trouble. She reached into the pocket on the side of her purse and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill. “I’d like to give you something for helping me out.”

He said, “It’s nothing.”

“Please,” she said. “I insist.” She had to hold him off this way or he would expect to come in, have a soft drink, and be sure her faucets weren’t leaking. She had to keep this under control and foreclose all chances of a mistake.

The elevator stopped and the doors slid open. She tiptoed to the door of apartment 3F, almost pantomiming the act of being quiet.

Dewey slipped his key ring off his belt and tried a key, but the lock on Catherine’s door wouldn’t accept it. As Judith waited, the noise of the keys on the ring seemed to her to be terribly loud. What if Catherine heard that jingling right outside her door? Even if he got the door open Judith might step inside and see Catherine standing there with a gun in her hand. Dewey held up his key ring again, picked another that looked like the first, and tried it. He pushed the door open, but Judith stepped forward and held it open only an inch. She leaned close, whispered, “Thanks,” then slipped inside and closed the door.

It was dark. There seemed to be no sounds of movement in the apartment. Judith stood absolutely still, listening. She heard Dewey’s heavy feet move off. After a few more seconds she heard the elevator doors open, then heard them slide shut. The last barrier was gone. She was in.