Slaughter - Lutz John - Страница 62

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Gregg was glad to see there were still Zero bars in the machine. They were his favorite. They were delicious when washed down with a cheap red wine, but this wasn’t the time or place for that. Maybe later.

A female doctor entered, recognized as such by Gregg because she was wearing pale blue scrubs, a matching skullcap, and floppy pull-on shoe covers. A crinkled cloth mask was still tied loosely around the doctor’s neck. Coiled below the mask’s tie strings were the twin tubes and earpieces of a stethoscope.

“Beautiful evening,” Gregg said, and was answered with a smile. Everyone was so nice here it almost made you want to recover from something.

As the doctor eased around Gregg’s bulk, it occurred to Gregg that he’d never seen anyone who looked more like a brilliant surgeon.

That was what alarmed him.

Still smiling, he reached out as if he were going to shake hands with the doctor. Instead he grabbed her wrist and held it in a powerful lock in one of his big hands.

This felt great to Gregg. He hadn’t been fooled for long, and now he was making the collar. This was the kind of thing that might get him interviewed in the Times.

The play of strength in the doctor’s arm prompted Gregg’s first misgiving. Something was wrong here. The doctor was strong as a man. Was a man. Not a large man, but strong out of proportion to his size.

The man’s tightly fitted blue surgeon’s cap had tilted and revealed a protruding ear, almost perfectly pointed. It gave him a constant appearance of alertness.

Gregg’s smile faded as he said, “I think you’d better—”

He saw the stiletto-like knife in the doctor’s right hand. The long pointed blade looked as if it were designed for taking and not saving lives.

It entered Gregg’s corpulent body easily, angled upward tight to his sternum, and pierced his heart.

He couldn’t cry out an alarm. Instead he made what sounded like a hopeless sob. No one had ever looked more like a real lady surgeon than his killer. Gregg knew he should have noticed that, acted on it, alerted the others . . . But he’d done his job. And now the light was fading.

He needed a doctor!

He didn’t fall. The Gremlin supported Gregg and helped him to stumble over to a chair.

Gregg felt himself being eased down into the chair.

Once the brief struggle had begun, the whole thing hadn’t taken half a minute. Gregg was having a hard time seeing now. He was too weak to move under his own power, and he knew he was dying.

He heard a distant, amused voice. “Take two aspirins and call me in the morning.”

In some remote part of his brain, Gregg was glad somebody had a sense of humor.

Then the pain came.

When Gregg was dead, the Gremlin propped him firmly in the waiting room chair and arranged his arms and legs. Now he was posed looking like what he was, a cop taking a break. Arranging the body had gotten blood on the Gremlin’s surgical scrubs, but that was okay. He knew that now he looked even more like a genuine doctor.

Or one from Central Casting.

He glanced at his watch. It was time to make the phone call. The one that would end the game with the winner not in doubt. Time for Quinn to learn his final and most important lesson: The winning game was not always the long game. Not even always the game you think you’re playing.

He made his phone call.

And then another, that would change worlds and futures.

76

Weaver scratched beneath her left armpit where the bulletproof vest chafed. She tried to get something like comfortable. Her two-way produced nothing but static. She gave up for the moment. Probably some piece of medical equipment was running somewhere nearby, emitting rays that cured this or that, or displayed that or this, and interfered with communication. Weaver decided to give up for the time being and rest. A real coma wouldn’t be bad right now. Except for the fact that she might not wake up.

Keeping that in mind, she tried to ignore her restlessness, and to resist scratching where the bulky vest itched.

Weaver’s chief protector was now sitting dead near the other end of the hall. The killer had left a folded section of newspaper tented over the cop’s ample midsection so the blood wouldn’t seep through after a while and be noticed.

The Gremlin had scouted the territory, learning the layout of the rehab center. He knew the target’s room number, and had even glanced into the room while making sure he knew where the clean laundry was stored.

It had all worked well, at least for a while.

It took the police less than ten minutes to get there. Sirens growled to silence as two NYPD radio cars pulled in at an angle to the curb in front of the Center.

Quinn was already, along with Fedderman, running toward the room where Weaver played the mystery woman who’d entered and then left the afterlife, and just a few seconds ago had almost lost her corporeal life.

He made it to room 409 just in time to watch the elevator doors close. But not before he caught a glimpse of Weaver inside. She wore a hospital gown stained with blood, probably from her nose, which appeared broken. The Gremlin was holding her with her arm bent behind her, in such a way that any upward pressure made her grimace in pain.

When she saw Quinn she smiled.

The subtle smile was brief and only at the corners of her lips, but it informed Quinn that the Gremlin had taken the bait. He had, ostensibly, Pearl, disguised as Weaver, playing the role of Pearl.

This was the kind of labyrinth the Gremlin wanted, or thought he wanted. Advanced chess.

More radio cars, sans sirens, arrived silently and were lined up outside the center. Both ends of the driveway were blocked.

The Gremlin slid behind Weaver, locked the double glass doors, and retreated into the maze of halls and rooms beneath the center.

Weaver felt around beneath her gown for her Ruger but couldn’t find it. As they hurried down a hall lined with identical pea-green doors, the Gremlin removed the Ruger and held it up so she could see it.

Most of the rooms were unoccupied, but some of them sheltered recuperating patients. Now and then someone would glance at them from inside a room. If they had spotted something wrong, they didn’t want to become involved. They didn’t want to become dead.

The Gremlin needed one of those patients for a convincer. The woman who’d been dead but was somehow again alive had to know he would use the gun.

There was so much he wanted her to tell him.

A PA system clicked and buzzed. Then a woman’s calm voice proclaimed that there were “difficulties being dealt with,” and instructed patients and staff to remain behind the locked door of whichever room they were in until they heard the all clear. That was appropriately ambiguous, the killer thought. It carried exactly the right touch of controlled urgency. Panic was right around the corner.

Footfalls sounded ahead of them, and a uniformed cop and another nurse came into view. The cop had the woman by the elbow, hurrying her along. Suddenly they were face-to-face.

The Gremlin drew Weaver’s gun and blasted away. The cop, who’d managed to get his gun halfway out of its holster, sat down and his eyes went blank. The nurse stared horrified at the Gremlin and started backing away.

The Gremlin bent down to get the cop’s gun from its holster.

“You killed him!” the young nurse stammered, then she spun on her heel and ran down the hall to where it took a right turn.

“That was a bad idea,” Weaver said, “killing a cop. Haven’t you seen any of those old gangster movies?”

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