Part 13 (1/2)

From within their midst toppled a uniformed club guard, a boxy man with a fresh bullet hole in his forehead. The floor knocked a gleaming revolver from his hand.

Recalling Isadora's description of Drummond as a natural, Charlie's umbrage evaporated. Had William Tell been as good a shot, he would have had no famous dilemma.

Spotting Isadora's wheels inching through the doorway, Charlie dropped behind the vacated operating table. Drummond, her likelier target, jumped behind the stalwart fireproof cabinet. Neither had a shot at the other.

The pandemonium dissolved to just the mechanized humming and intermittent beeps of the machines. The acrid gun smoke faded. The room brightened. Charlie was reminded of the moment at the end of a party when everyone realizes it's time to go.

'Try not to kill me for a minute, Drummond, dear,' Isadora said. 'I need to speak to the two of you.'

'You want a minute?' he said. 'Does that mean you expect your backup here in forty-five seconds?'

She wheeled the chair tentatively with her left hand. She held her gun with her right, letting it dangle from her index finger by the trigger guard. 'My backup is here already.' She pointed to the boxy guard, facedown in a pool of his own blood.

Still Charlie didn't chance budging from behind the operating table. Drummond, too, held fast behind his cabinet.

'I was ordered by my superiors to hand you over to these men,' Isadora said. 'I didn't have the vaguest idea it would turn out like this.'

'Do you expect us to believe that you were just obeying an order?' Drummond asked.

She gasped theatrically. 'Don't tell me you've given up on your belief that obedience is next to G.o.dliness?'

'I just have a hard time imagining you listening to anyone.'

'Well, I did, sir sir. I heeded our club manager, who believed these men were DIA on a legitimate operation, and he's a sphinx when it comes to bona fides*or, I should say, he was was a sphinx.' With a grimace, she nodded at the slain waiter. 'I expected you weren't in for a rollicking time of it in debrief, but that's the game. As for you, Charlie, if I hadn't agreed to turn you over, I would have been charged with aiding and abetting federal fugitives and obstruction of justice, for starters. Still, I agreed to it only after I was given complete a.s.surance that you would, truly, walk away.' a sphinx.' With a grimace, she nodded at the slain waiter. 'I expected you weren't in for a rollicking time of it in debrief, but that's the game. As for you, Charlie, if I hadn't agreed to turn you over, I would have been charged with aiding and abetting federal fugitives and obstruction of justice, for starters. Still, I agreed to it only after I was given complete a.s.surance that you would, truly, walk away.'

Charlie took it for granted that she was lying. 'Don't sweat it,' he said. 'These mix-ups happen all the time.'

Drummond seemed to soften. 'So who are they?' he asked her.

'In hindsight it would appear DIA was just cover, and at the least they co-opted the club personnel,' she said. 'The manager and security guard positions at a glorified nursing home don't generally merit the highest pay grades.'

With a grunt of agreement, Drummond stepped out from behind the fireproof cabinet. He checked the double doors to the recovery room. She inspected the corridor. 'The guards here mostly patrol the grounds,' she said. Both she and Drummond seemed satisfied that there was no imminent danger.

'So what do you think this is about?' he asked.

'I would imagine a secret that you either know, knew, or unwittingly have stumbled onto,' she said.

'That narrows it down to a stack's worth.'

'I might have an idea. First, there's something our son needs to know.'

Charlie felt safe in rising from behind the operating table.

She turned to him. 'In our trade, Charlie, good and evil often blur to the point that it's impossible to distinguish the two. At home, the oil and the water made a better couple than your father and I. On the job, I would stake my life that he's on the good side, anytime, in sickness and in health. So we can rest a.s.sured that the culprit in this case is*'

A gun boomed from the corridor and her head snapped sideways.

17.

She was dead.

Charlie broke free of horror's grip and threw himself to the safety of the back of the operating table. On the way down he glimpsed the lieutenant who had initially brought Drummond and him to the clubhouse. The man was ducking into the conference room across the hall. He must have been hiding there. And evidently he'd been co-opted sometime before that.

In retreat to the back side of the fireproof cabinet, Drummond fired twice more. His bullets came within inches of the lieutenant but damaged only the conference room door.

Isadora slumped in her wheelchair like a rag doll. Her purse tumbled from her lap, cigarette case, lighter, keys, and change spilling out and bouncing away.

Charlie's seconds-old fondness crumbled into heartache. 'Coming here might not have been such a good idea after all,' he said, nausea reducing his words to mutterings.

'Let's take a moment for a silent prayer,' Drummond said.

Charlie, who'd never known his father to utter so much as grace before a meal, peeked out from behind the operating table. With an index finger held to his lips, Drummond nodded at the corridor. Charlie saw no one, but he heard a dull groan of floor tile*one man, maybe two, creeping toward the operating room.

Drummond snapped the selector on Cadaret's pistol to an automatic setting, aimed at the wall between the operating room and corridor, and flattened the trigger. He delivered a burst of bullets into the wall, bra.s.s casings arching over his right shoulder. From the other side of the wall came a man's agonized shout, followed by a heavy flop of body against floor. A second man*a guard who was younger and even brawnier than the lieutenant*dove past the operating room doorway. The lieutenant hauled him into the conference room in advance of Drummond's fire.

The duo initiated a hail of their own gunfire. Charlie pressed himself so low to the floor that he could taste the lemon in the cleanser. Even with his hands over his ears, it felt as though the reports would blow his eardrums.

The guards' target was Drummond. Their bullets turned his cabinet's facing to pegboard, but failed to hit him, thanks to computer hard drives within it, as well as a gurney, a steel rack full of monitors, and an anesthesia machine with the dimensions of a floor safe*he'd gathered the lot around him. Still, he wasn't fully s.h.i.+elded: One shot ricocheted off the ceiling, causing a steel tray atop the anesthesia machine to spin away like a Frisbee, giving flight to several loaded hypodermic needles. A few stuck in the ceiling. Drummond dodged the rest. Meanwhile more bullets pierced the cabinet and reached the monitors, resulting in an eruption of gla.s.s and sparks from which he could only turn away and s.h.i.+eld his eyes. Additional rounds shredded the linoleum tiles and filled the air with particles of the glue that had adhered them to the subfloor.

Squinting into the resulting gritty green haze, Drummond returned fire. Two shots drove the guards back into the conference room. His next pulls of the trigger resulted only in flinty clicks.

Charlie hoped Drummond was merely pretending to be out of bullets, that a ruse was in the works. But Drummond dumped the gun onto the anesthesia machine beside him and dropped to the floor, obviously searching for another weapon.

The lieutenant and the junior guard scrambled into the operating room, ducking in and around the machinery with the clear intent of flanking Drummond. Like Charlie, they probably expected Drummond would obtain another gun.

As they closed in on the anesthesia machine, Charlie made out the barrel of the boxy guard's s.h.i.+ny revolver against a baseboard, well out of Drummond's reach. Mortimer's gun lay by his body at the entrance*the guards blocked Drummond from it. Drummond's last option was Isadora's gun, still dangling from her hand, also beyond his range. Charlie thought about going for her gun himself. To move from behind the operating table all but guaranteed the guards would obliterate him.

Drummond stepped out from behind his cabinet, head lowered, hands empty. Charlie glimpsed a thin plastic tube connected to the anesthesia machine, caught on Drummond's right sleeve. The guards shared a look of self-satisfaction.

Drummond placed his hands before him, as if to raise them in surrender. Isadora's Zippo dropped from his left sleeve and into his left hand. He spun the spark wheel at once, transforming the invisible gas flowing from the thin plastic tube into a spray like a dragon's breath. The operating room turned orange.

Charlie averted his eyes; the guards' primal howls painted the picture more than adequately. A burst of gunshots followed.

Charlie looked to find the corrupt lieutenant dead on the floor. Also, Drummond had obtained the lieutenant's gun and used it to put an end to the other conspirator.

Simultaneously, a cardiac event monitor, the size of a kitchen television, hurtled through the air, thrown from behind Drummond by Cadaret.

'Dad!' Charlie shouted in warning.

Drummond looked to him, too late. The monitor crashed into his upper back, staggering him. Then Cadaret pounced. Other than a welt where the rock from the bal.u.s.trade had struck his jaw, the killer appeared in the peak of health.

He grabbed Drummond around his rib cage and rode him down. Drummond's head banged into the floor, costing him his hold on the gun taken from the guard. He ended up flat on his back. Cadaret sat astride him, preventing him from regaining the gun.

Drummond somehow sat up, like a jack-in-the-box, surprising Charlie. Cadaret appeared to have expected as much, but his eyes bulged with shock at what flashed in Drummond's hand: the biggest of the hypodermic needles from the anesthesiologist's tray. Drummond thrust it deep into Cadaret's shoulder and hammered the plunger, flooding the killer with anesthesia.

Presumably.

Nothing happened.

Cadaret laughed. 'Must be a placebo.' He pried the needle from his shoulder, tossed it aside, and s.n.a.t.c.hed up the guard's gun.