Scare Me (23 page)

 

CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

 
 

Will realised he couldn't get out of the way in time and waited for the impact of whatever had fallen from above. After a few seconds, however, he opened his eyes and relaxed his shoulders. He examined the flagstones for signs of what he'd seen. There was nothing.

He glanced up again. The object was suspended about twenty feet above his head. He was looking at the benign, alabaster features of a medical bust with Chinese characters on different subdivisions of the cranium. A white cord was tied around its neck. It spun slowly, the face circling him before it suddenly dropped a few inches more. Will quickly sidestepped it, but the bust remained in position. Beyond it was the open window to the room it was dangling from. Will assumed it was 22.

He watched the hovering bust for a few seconds more before a guttural sound escaped the window. He hit the stairs, taking them two at a time. The motion rammed a hot bayonet of pain through his side. He paused only to suck in breath before he took the next flight up the windowless stairwell.

Just before he reached the landing of the fourth floor, he heard an ominous smash. The bust had dropped. He didn't know why, but he was positive its descent signified an end to whatever had been happening in the room. He gripped the handrail and hauled himself up.

When he pushed the door to the sixth floor, he was in an aseptic, white corridor facing a wall of green, frosted glass. An elevator was further down. Underneath large Chinese characters on the translucent wall it also read:

 

Zisuzi Treatment Centre
 

Doctor Zhi Ping Ren CMD
 

 
 

He tried the handles, but the doors didn't give. It was still early in the morning. No patients yet. Then the lock whirred and opened.

He pulled them wide and found himself looking at a small waiting room through a short corridor of floor-to-ceiling fish tanks. Will crossed the dark carpet, illuminated by their blue bulbs. He was standing in the centre of a small space edged by leather-seated chairs. The only sound was bubbles and the low murmur of pumps.

A few prints of botanical species were the only decoration. The reception hatch was closed. He put his laptop on the counter. The patients' entrance to the surgery was shut in front of him.

A man's jagged voice, speaking some kind of Chinese. The curses were stifled, only half their volume escaping. Will opened the door into the room beyond.

The woman was leaning beside the open window, arms folded. She was wearing another high-collared, two-piece suit buttoned tightly to her slim frame, this one coral. Her hair was tied up in a bun. The door opened wider and he took in the rest of the surgery.

A high-backed swivel chair with its occupant facing away from Will was positioned between them. She was looking blankly at whoever was seated in it. The chair trembled and Will could see the ankles of its prisoner bound with metal links. Chain was also looped around him to hold his shoulders in place.

She tilted her gaze up to Will. “You might still be in time,” she said, her rapid words overlapping.

She bounced her back from the wall and picked up the canary yellow clutch purse from the desk. “Although I think he's going into shock.” Her concern for the man in the chair made it sound as if she hadn't actually been responsible for his condition.

Will stepped into the surgery and moved around the chair. The squat figure seated in it had long, straggly white hair that hung down from a broad, tanned bald patch. Agony was wringing out his Chinese features. In his hand was a bloodied knife. He moved his head in circles, his shuttered eyelids stretching and his tongue pushing against the black tape over his mouth.

“I'd summon assistance right away,” she respectfully advised and moved past Will to the door. “Call a real doctor though.”

“Wait!”

She turned, analysing him from behind still features. “You should hurry. There's no first aid kit here, but you could try the other office.” She nodded towards a second door then turned on her heel.

“Who's paying you? I'll pay you!”

“Everyone does,” she barely whispered as she left.

“What are we supposed to have done? I'm not going on with this!” He wanted to mean every word. Will contemplated Dr Ren writhing against the chains. She knew he couldn't follow her.

He knelt in front of the bound man. His eyes hadn't been cut from his head, but Will realised they'd been glued. One lid was sealed; the other was stuck to his eyeball. The skin of the lids stretched taut as they attempted to open. Why not do the same as she'd done to the others? Why take his sight, but allow him to live?

“Try to calm down.” He touched Ren's shoulder, but the doctor twisted his head sharply to the side. “I'm here to help you.”

He continued to squirm, incoherent words inflating the tape at his lips and erratic breath sucking it in again. His body started to buck.

Will ripped away the tape and Ren screamed. Will darted to the desk. “I'm calling you an ambulance.”

Ren coughed violently and dark fluid jetted from the back of his windpipe. Will snatched up the handset and held it to his ear. Where was the blood on the knife and his fingers from? The blade dropped to the floor as his body spasmed.

 

CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

 
 

The operator patched Will through to emergency services. While he relayed the location, he watched in horror as Ren's neck muscles locked. His head pressed into the back of the chair. As soon as a female voice assured him an ambulance had been dispatched, Will dropped the handset and attempted to release him.

The metal was biting tight into the doctor's chest and was secured there by a small padlock. His hands weren't bound, but trembled in his lap where the pressure of the chain held them. His bloodied right fist clenched, the fingers of his left gripped tightly onto the tattered viscera protruding from the slit in his stomach.

“They're on their way.” Will picked up the sushi knife from where it had fallen. His gloved fingers slipped on the bloodied handle as he tried to insert the blade between the links and Ren's shuddering rib cage. If he could just prise a gap to give him some room to breathe…

The chain had been wound too tightly to his frame. Ren's bound feet stomped against the carpet and a low growl chased out another geyser of blood.

Will ditched the knife, wrenched open two wall-mounted cabinets, but found only rows of glass vials. He yanked the drawers in the desk and pens rattled against golf balls and tees. Then he recalled what she'd said about the first aid kit.

Crossing the room he entered the reception office, frantically scanning it for an implement he could use to sever the chain.

Will found a familiar face staring at him from the back wall. Not one expression within a black frame, but a whole gallery of them screwed there. There were photographs of him with Carla and Libby, images of him at Ingram events with the company's name and logo emblazoned on pulpits and plaques, and then there were the more recent shots. He'd been captured walking up the driveway of the house in Ellicott City, snapped sitting in the cab he'd commandeered outside the residence in Bel Air and fleeing the apartment in Chicago. She'd waited for him and taken the pictures. This time nothing was to be hidden within the crime scene.

Below the gallery, positioned for his convenience, was a can of petrol with a Zippo lighter lying on top of its metallic screw cap.

Ren gagged in the surgery. Will tore his gaze from the wall and focussed on what he needed to do. He dragged more drawers, tipping out their contents and finding only stationery. He threw the doors wide to a metallic locker. Below the coats was a blue toolbox. He slid it clear and opened it, hinging out the cantilever drawers and discarding the boxes of fuses and tacks in the top section. Underneath he found some flimsy pliers and a larger pair of wire cutters.

When he got back to the surgery the doctor was still alive, but his lips were tugged back from his gums and there was no sound coming from his mouth.

“Hold on…”

He knelt beside Ren again, jamming his fingers under the chain so he could draw breath. Ren briefly turned his distorted expression towards him. His sealed eyelids strained against the tension and the interior of his mouth glowed bright red.

The padlock was too substantial to tackle so Will clamped the wire cutters round a link of the chain. His wrists and the heels of his hands ached as he increased pressure on the metal. He could feel the handles bending as his body shook. He ground his teeth, the plastic grip biting into the muscles of his hand. The cutters weren't even scratching its surface.

He kept trying, swapping hands and his body going rigid about the titanium shackles even when he knew Ren's movements were only because of his.

Will dropped from him, stumbling back into the desk. His wrists throbbed angrily. The doctor's chin was fixed to his chest, his strands of hair overhanging his dead features.

Only Will's chest struggled for breath now. He was alone in the room.

The entry telephone chirped in reception and the noise seemed absurd. Will moved unsteadily to the far window and looked down at the red and white ambulance. He hadn't even heard a siren.

He had to go. They'd be coming round the back soon. Doctor Ren, whatever significance he had, was the one he'd nearly saved. How could he leave him when the last air was still escaping his body? He thought of Monro's wife and her breath on his face.

The ambulance men tried the entry phone again. Libby couldn't afford for him to wait.

His eyes scoured Ren's slumped corpse. There was a signet ring on his finger. It was inset with an identical amethyst stone to the pendant.

The entry phone went silent.

Will seized Doctor Ren's lifeless and bloodied right fist and pulled the index finger from the ball it was curled into. But the ring only slid halfway up it before it got jammed behind the skin of his knuckle.

Will tugged the metal firmly against it. He heard an impact downstairs. They'd found the stairwell. It hadn't taken him long to climb the stairs to the surgery.

The ring still wouldn't slide off. Ren's knuckle was swollen, pumped up from the tension in his hand. It had to be removed. The wire cutters.

They still hung from the chain holding Ren. He unhooked them, their handles slipping back into the trench they'd already made across his palm.

Were they on the first floor, second floor by now?

Will slid the end of the cutters against Ren's extended finger. He gripped his manicured nail firmly. Screwing his eyes shut, he squeezed the handles again. His wrist shook and the grips slipped and buckled. There was a loud click as the pincers connected.

He bent the ring where he'd severed it, parting it at the gap and slipped it off Ren's finger.

He returned to the reception office. How long before the surgery was an official crime scene? And how would he ever be able to leave Singapore to make it home if he left what was on the wall intact?

He picked up the Zippo lighter and gripped it between his teeth while he unscrewed the lid of the petrol can. Hefting its full weight he jabbed it towards the wall, clear liquid striking the photos. Will heaved it higher so he soaked every frame. As petrol cascaded off the images he dumped the can and flicked the lid of the lighter, rolled the flint and held the flame to the wall. An orange tapestry unfurled upwards and the heat immediately tightened his face.

Staggering away from the room he looked at the doctor's slumped body as the flames hooked under the top of the doorway. Everything was as she'd planned. But as the temperature shaved the hairs off his neck he knew there was one thing he wouldn't allow her.

The fire alarm activated. Will grabbed the chair Ren was lashed to and rolled it out of the surgery and into reception. The closed hatch there was already bruised black. Choking, he grabbed his laptop and shunted the body through the waiting area, bursting through the glass doors and out into the cool air of the corridor.

He could hear two ascending sets of feet reverberating in the stairwell so left Ren where he was and headed for the opposite end of the corridor. He pressed the button to summon the elevator and then hid in the turning beyond the shaft.

Will watched a pair of black shirted paramedics halt at Ren's body and exchange a glance before shielding their eyes against the smoke being disgorged by the surgery. One of them shouted through the doorway and waited for a response. He made to enter, but his colleague stopped him. A brief but heated exchange terminated with the first paramedic entering and the other reluctantly following.

Will emerged to wait for the elevator doors to open. The arrow and red numeral of the digital display indicated it was on its way up from the second floor. How long before they came out again? It was probably only a matter of seconds.

The numeral still hadn't changed. He wondered if he'd need a swipe card to get out of the building through the main entrance. Plus there'd probably be other members of the emergency services waiting out the front. He trotted back to the fire exit, taking a last glance at Ren before he took the stairs again.

He slipped down the first two floors as quietly as he could, but then the door slammed against the wall above him. As he took longer, heavier strides he heard a panicked exchange of male voices echoing down. Will ignored the agony and leapt the bottom steps of each flight.

Back in the enclosed courtyard he deliberated whether to return the way he'd come. Rapid footfalls hammered behind him. He jumped shakily onto the green plastic garden chair and looked over the creosoted fence to the other side. It was a graveyard of industrial gas ovens and it was at least a ten-foot drop to the yard. He hooked his laptop over the edge and heaved himself over.

He landed hard. Pain took on a whole new dimension. He limped away from the perimeter and through the metallic clutter. Will looked back and saw black smoke boiling from the surgery window, flames spiking from within.

His mobile rang. It would alert them to his hiding place. Will scrabbled for it in his pocket as he slalomed round the rusted hulks. He pulled it from his jacket, muffling it with his hand and darted in the direction of an open pair of warped, aluminium gates.

Nobody spoke when he put it to his ear. He looked about him, half expecting to find Ren's killer observing him from behind the scrap.

“Carla?”

Will jogged through the gates, trying to discern what the sound was on the other end. It had been her name in the display. “Carla?”

There was the sound again. A constricted breath.

He vaguely realised he'd emerged into a residential street. “Speak to me.”

Carla was distressed. “They've killed Luke… and posted the picture on the website.”