Chapter 4 - The Tactical Retreat
"I’m coming out," I called, sliding the phone into the waistband of my leggings, flat against the small of my back where the curve of my pregnancy would hide the bulk.
I reached for the chrome flush handle, held it down for five seconds to mask any sound, and turned the cold water tap on at the sink. With my left hand, I splashed water across my face, over the dried blood on my lip, letting it run down the collar of the paper hospital gown.
When I pulled the door open, Ingrid was standing six inches from the threshold.
Her knitting was gone. In her right hand she held a digital pulse oximeter, its red light blinking like an insect’s eye, and in her left was a small plastic medicine cup containing two round, yellow tablets.
"You look pale as lard, treasure," she said. Her eyes traveled down my front, checking my hands, checking the pockets of the gown—which were empty. "Dr. Sterling has arrived. He’s in the corridor with Julian. He agreed with Arthur: you need something to quiet the brain before the casting."
"What are those?" I asked, backing toward the bed until the backs of my knees hit the frame.
"Just a little something for the blood pressure," she lied smoothly, her gray eyes flat and unblinking. "A little hydralazine. To keep the baby’s heart from racing."
Hydralazine tablets are pink and oblong. I knew that because my mother took them for five years before her kidneys failed.
Yellow tablets. Round. Scored with a cross.
Haloperidol. Five milligrams. A heavy-duty first-generation antipsychotic used in locked psychiatric wards to render violent patients chemically inert. If that hit my bloodstream, within thirty minutes my tongue would feel like dry leather, my motor control would vanish, and any judge who looked at me would see a drooling, unresponsive wreck who couldn't be trusted with a houseplant, let alone an infant.
"Set them on the table," I said. "I want a glass of water from the dispenser."
"I have water right here," she said, lifting a carafe from the tray.
"It’s warm," I said. "It tastes like the pipes. If you want me to take the pills, Ingrid, get me fresh ice from the machine across the hall. Or do you want me to vomit them onto Julian’s shoes when he walks in?"
Ingrid stared at me. For a second, the mask dropped entirely: her mouth thinned into a pale, bitter line, the skin around her nostrils whitening with disgust. She looked at my swollen, broken arm, then at my face. She saw a broken animal that was simply being difficult about the slaughter.
"Two minutes," she whispered. "And if you aren't in that bed when I return with the ice, Clara, Dr. Sterling won't use the tablets. He’ll use the needle. And the needle goes in whether you’re sitting down or pinned to the floor by three men."
She turned and stepped out of the room, letting the heavy door swing to within an inch of the latch.
The moment the rubber sole of her shoe squeaked on the corridor floor, I moved.
Not toward the hallway. Toward the window.
Room 412 was on the fourth floor of the old river wing. Outside, the rain had turned into a thick, clinging sleet that coated the six-inch stone ledge running below the sills. Sixty feet down was the gravel service drive where the biohazard waste trucks parked.
I didn't need to jump. I needed the fire riser.
In modern hospitals, the risers are enclosed in drywall. But St. Jude’s was built in 1928; the old cast-iron standpipe ran through the corner of every fourth-floor room in this wing, boxed in by an ornamental wooden column that Julian’s decorators had added to make the room look like an English library.
I caught the edge of the wood panel with the fingers of my good hand and pulled.
Julian’s carpenters were cheap where it didn't show. The finish nails were only two inches long; the pine trim popped with a dry, sharp craack that was swallowed by the wind rattling the glass.
Behind the wood was the raw brick of the original exterior wall, the heavy, four-inch black iron standpipe, and—running vertically beside it—a three-inch PVC conduit containing the low-voltage communication cables for the nurse call system.
Beside the conduit was a hole.
A six-inch core-drilled penetration through the twelve-inch concrete floor slab, left open when the contractors replaced the old steam radiators with ceiling heat pumps two years ago. They had stuffed it with yellow fiberglass insulation to stop the draft, but they hadn't sealed it with fire-caulk.
I dropped to my knees, ignoring the scream of pain from my cracked ribs as my belly pressed against the linoleum. With my left hand, I tore the fiberglass out of the hole, shoving it under the skirt of the bed until my fingertips hit cold, empty air.
Directly below me was Room 312.
The linen supply room.
I reached into my waistband, pulled out the burner phone, and looked at the screen.
Upload: 100%. Video clip saved to encrypted cloud.
I opened the messaging app. I typed Marcus’s number.
Text: Under the pipe. Room 312. Drop the line.
I waited. Ten seconds. Twenty.
A faint scratching came from the hole.
A length of black paracord—the fifty-pound tactical line Marcus kept in his tackle box in the truck—snaked through the core penetration, its brass snap-hook clinking against the concrete.
I caught the hook with my left thumb.
I didn't have time to write an explanation. I took the burner phone, wrapped the paracord twice around the rubberized case, clicked the snap-hook through the lanyard loop, and tugged once.
The line went taut.
The phone vanished down the hole, sliding smoothly through the dust and old plaster, disappearing into the dark of the third floor.
I kicked the fiberglass back into the gap, slammed the pine column shut until the nails caught the old holes, and dragged myself up using the radiator pipe.
The door to the corridor flew open.
Dr. Ronald Sterling walked in, followed by Julian and Arthur. Sterling was sixty, with a florid, gin-blossomed nose and small, wet eyes behind gold-rimmed bifocals. He didn't carry a clipboard; he carried a stainless steel medical tray with a five-milliliter syringe already drawn, its long needle capped in translucent pink plastic.
Behind them came Ingrid, carrying a plastic cup of crushed ice.
"She’s out of bed," Ingrid said, her voice sharp with triumph. "I told you, Julian. She won't stay still. She’s completely unmanageable."
Julian didn't look angry. He looked sad. He had perfected that expression for twenty years: the mournful developer who had to evict sixty pensioners from a boarding house to build a luxury marina.
"Clara," he whispered. "Why do you make this so hard on everyone? We just want you to rest."
Dr. Sterling stepped forward, his thumb resting on the plunger of the syringe.
"Mrs. Vance," Sterling said, his voice flat, professional, entirely indifferent to the woman in front of him. "You are presenting an immediate risk of harm to yourself and your thirty-two-week fetus. Under Section 9.39 of the Mental Hygiene Law, I am administering emergency chemical restraint. Julian, hold her right shoulder. Arthur, get her feet."
"Don't touch me," I said.
I backed up until my shoulder blades hit the windowpane. The glass was freezing through the paper gown.
"Clara," Julian said, his voice dropping into a register that was almost tender. "Don't scream. It only makes the report look worse."
He stepped toward me, his hands outstretched, reaching for my uninjured arm.
Downstairs, three floors below, a siren began to howl.
May you like
Not an ambulance.
The heavy, mechanical, two-tone air horn of a county fire engine, followed immediately by the high-pitched yelp of three municipal police cruisers tearing up the gravel service drive at sixty miles an hour.
