by Grant Pies
“No,” Olivia shook her head and stared at the bills. “No one would have chemo three times a week for months. They take weeks off to recover.” She pointed at the billing code. “No, I’m betting this is dialysis. DYL.”
Carter faced her. “They’d do that three times a week?”
“If they’re really bad off. Like if they’re waiting on a—"
“Transplant,” they said together.
Carter sighed and looked at the body covered by the white sheet. “He didn’t look sick,” he said quietly.
“It wasn’t for him. The patient name on the invoice is Elizabeth Dawson.”
Carter’s stomach sank even more than it already had. He pulled the framed family photo from the desk drawer. “Shit,” he whispered and shook his head. His eyes moved between Jake Dawson’s wife and his daughter. Which one had Carter killed by shooting Jake?
“They would have billed his wife directly.” Olivia set the invoice down on the desk with the rest. She spoke softly, the voice Carter imagined she used to break bad news to patients. “Elizabeth is his daughter.” She placed her hand on Carter’s back.
Carter’s glazed eyes drifted around the room and landed on a mini fridge in the corner. “He said they gave him meds. Anti-rejection meds.” He opened the fridge.
“He?”
“Dennis.” Several vials of medicine sat on the top shelf. He grabbed a vial.
“Who’s Dennis?”
“Another guy they bribed with an organ. What do you make of this?” He handed it to Olivia.
Holding the vial in her hand, she said, “Envarsus … yeah, that’s an anti-rejection medicine for post-transplant patients. That’s a lot of it.” She pointed at the mini-fridge stocked with vials. “Will, we need to leave. Someone surely heard the gunshots.” She walked to the door and peeked out. So far there were no blue and red lights waiting outside.
“Okay, okay,” Carter said. “Just give me a second. There’s gotta be something in here that will tell me where Sam is. They have him, and God knows what they’ll do once both their henchmen don’t show back up with you or me. They were probably supposed to text them once they had us—" Something clicked in Carter’s mind. “Wait! Text!”
He raced to the dead man—Jake—and reached in his pockets. He yanked a phone out and pressed the man’s thumb against it. The phone lit up. He threw the sheet back over the man, and moved to the desk.
Carter flipped through his notes to the string of numbers he’d jotted down from the other man’s phone. Then he turned to Jake Dawson’s phone and looked through the text messages until he found a similar string of numbers.
“Got it!” he yelled. “The guy at the motel was supposed to bring me back here. Then they’d bring us in together. They each had one half of a GPS coordinate!” Carter looked over his shoulder at Olivia. She stood at the door, her hand on the knob.
“That’s bloody wonderful, Will. Now can we get out of here?”
He scribbled the complete coordinates down in his notepad. “Yeah, let’s go.”
Olivia opened the door and stepped outside. Carter stood in the doorway and took one last look at the crime scene.
He wondered what would come of Elizabeth Dawson now that her father was gone and no longer able to do Accenture’s bidding. With equal weight on his mind, he also wondered what Elizabeth Dawson would do without her father, regardless of how long or short her life would be.
“I’m sorry,” Carter said to the man on the floor.
He stepped out into the dark night air and shut the door behind him.
L’appel Du Vide
“I’ll take you back to the hospital on the way,” Carter said, sitting in the van and typing the GPS coordinates into his phone.
“Forget it,” Olivia said. “Just go straight there.”
“No,” he said emphatically and shook his head. “I’ve already gotten you into way more than I ever should have.” He threw the car into gear. Jake Dawson’s van still sat in the parking lot.
“Will!” Olivia raised her voice. “You don’t have bloody time to argue with me!” She pointed at the map on his phone. “Look, that’s in the opposite direction from the hospital. Who knows what they’re doing to Sam? You don’t have time. Plus, he might need a doctor once you find him.”
“That’s assuming I get him out of there.” But Olivia was right, he didn’t have time to argue. Seeing what he saw in the Accenture building, he knew what these people were capable of, and he needed to get Sam out. He headed in the direction of the GPS coordinates.
They sped through the empty industrial streets where gray soot covered everything. The buildings were all the same headstone gray color. The machinery and the shipping containers – gray. The smokestacks spit out gray clouds that tinted the bits of sky glimpsing through the skyline. For the first time since hijacking this van, Carter looked at the gas gauge. Less than a quarter of a tank.
“When we get there, you stay in the van. Got it?” he instructed.
“Don’t worry.” Olivia massaged the red lines on her wrists where the zip ties had dug into her skin. “But what are you going to do?”
“I’m going to get Sam and get the fuck back to the van.” He gripped the steering wheel so hard, he felt like he could rip the entire thing from the steering column.
“But how? You don’t even know what you’re walking into.”
He weaved around a car and ran through a yellow light. “You’re right. But I’m going anyway.”
“And if he’s not there?”
“Then I find someone who knows where he is.”
Carter slowed as he approached his destination. It wasn’t a busy street, and most of the offices nearby were closed for the day. Up ahead, he pointed at a two-story building. “An eye clinic. Figures.” He parked on the side of the street.
“Owned by Accenture?”
“Accenture. Blair. BioLife. Take your pick.” Corporate incest he thought.
He pulled the gun from his waistband and dropped the magazine out. With his thumb, he pushed each bullet out onto his lap, counting each one. Twelve bullets. His hands shook when he pushed them back into the magazine.
“Wait here ten minutes. Fifteen max.” He looked at Olivia, and she looked down at his shaking hands. His eyes burned through her when she looked back up. In that moment, he realized how little they really knew of each other, that this was their first shared experience.
“If I don’t make it out by then … well, there’s no sense in you waiting longer than that.”
“Will,” Olivia started.
“No,” Carter cut her off. “You leave if I don’t come back by then. Once you’re a safe distance from here, you ditch the van, wipe it down, and call a cab. Understand?”
“And what? Just go home? Pretend like it’s any other day?”
“Yeah, at least you try. This isn’t your fight.”
“Is it yours?”
Carter looked down, breaking eye contact with Olivia. “Maybe not before, but it is now. I have to try, even if I won’t make it back.”
“You’ll make it back. And I’ll be here when you do.”
Carter shoved the gun back into his waistband and pulled his coat over it. “I’m sorry. I never meant for anyone else to get into this. Hell, I never intended to get into this.”
Olivia gripped his shoulder, “Sometimes, even when you’re trying to do something good, bad things happen. You just hope the good outweighs the bad.”
“Can we start over … when this is done, can we start over? Meet again, like at a coffee shop or something? Something normal.”
“I quite like how we met.”
“Eh, I’d have preferred not to suffer some injury just before meeting you.”
“You make it back to this van, and we can meet wherever you want. Coffee shop, wherever.”
Carter nodded and forced a smile. The reality of what he was about to do rushed back to him.
“Fifteen minutes,” he said. He looked down at h
is watch.
“Fifteen minutes,” she repeated and nodded.
Carter stepped out of the van and headed towards the eye clinic. The lighted sign outside cast a long shadow behind him. The rain had started again, pelting Carter’s waxed canvas jacket and rolling to the street below.
He had no plan, but he knew he had the element of surprise on his side. He rounded the back of the building, tucked his hands in his coat pockets and hung his head low, avoiding any cameras.
Around back was another van, just like the one he drove there. The door was unlocked and the keys inside. Either someone was extremely forgetful or they were coming right back to the van.
Without much time to think, he moved swiftly. A crazy plan is better than no plan … at least he hoped. He climbed into the van, threw it into drive, and circled around to the front of the clinic.
He wished there was time to improvise some distraction, to draw everyone outside so he could sneak in undetected. He wished he had materials to pick the lock and creep through the clinic. But he didn’t. He had twelve rounds and a body that was testing its limits.
He backed up until he was around forty feet away from the front entrance of the clinic and jammed his foot on the gas pedal, tensing his body just before the crash. He squeezed his eyes shut, barreling through the clinic. The windshield cracked as the aluminum frame around the clinic’s windows bent and scraped against the van. Glass rained all around.
The van crashed through the front desk. His instincts were to let off the gas, but he kept his foot down, driving further into the wall behind the front desk. The airbag exploded from the steering wheel, punching Carter in the face and rubbing a layer of skin from his cheek. Eventually, the tires lost traction, and the van was stuck on top of a pile of debris. Slowly, Carter pulled his foot up off the gas.
Powder from the exploded airbag wafted in the air, and shards of glass covered his lap. He stumbled out of the van, ducking to avoid a dangling fluorescent light that sparked and flickered. A single ceiling tile fell to the floor.
For a moment, Carter thought he smelled gasoline, but he was quickly distracted by the flashing overhead emergency lights and the high-pitched siren screeching through the clinic. Carter pulled his gun from his waistband, staying low as he made his way into the back of the clinic.
He barged through the double doors behind what was left of the front desk, and stood in a mostly empty space slightly larger than a gymnasium, with rooms lining the perimeter. The rest of the area was scattered with mobile curtains on metal frames, the type used for temporary privacy around hospital beds. Crouching, he made his way along one wall, tugging on the doors. Empty. Each one. Twelve minutes until Olivia left and Sam was nowhere to be found.
Carter turned towards the middle of the room. He moved each curtain from his face, pulling them away like shower curtains, only to reveal another and another. Until eventually he pushed aside the last curtain.
Something was there, in the middle of the space. A room made of glass. The emergency lights were the only source of light, so moments of pitch black were interrupted by short flashes of red light, then back to darkness. He took cautious steps forward, feeling more and more vulnerable as he made his way to the middle of the clinic. His eyes fought to adjust between flashes of red. The room was only ten feet away, all four walls glass, like a display case. He gripped his pistol and pointed.
“Sam!” he yelled over the squealing siren.
Each time the emergency lights overhead flashed, a spotlight shone down inside the glass room. Carter spotted some sort of machinery, humming rhythmically, almost pulsing, like it was alive and breathing.
“Sam?” Once he got closer, the flashing lights revealed a hospital bed in the center of the glass cell. “Shit.” The lights flashed again, revealing a figure on the hospital bed.
The machine inside the glass room hummed. Carter peered through the wall. It wasn’t Sam in the room. It was a girl. Dark haired and still.
“Rose?” Carter tapped on the glass. “Rose?” It felt thick and solid under his fingertips. Ten minutes.
A gunshot rang out, drowning out the siren. A bullet pinged somewhere around him, and Carter dropped to the floor.
“Not at the girl!” a man yelled. Carter pressed his back against the glass wall. Two men circled around the cell, flanking him on each side. He darted to his left, firing aimlessly until he reached cover, then slid across the floor and ducked under one of the many curtains.
Two more gunshots popped from somewhere in the room. Someone groaned. Carter laid flat on his stomach, sprawled out on the linoleum. He pressed his face against the floor to look under the curtain that hung just an inch or two from the ground. One of the men sat gripping both of his hands around his thigh, with a grimace of pain. Carter scanned the room and saw the other man peeking around the corner of the glass cell.
“You hit?” he yelled from his cover.
The man on the floor didn’t answer, just groaned again and scooted backwards across the floor until his back was pressed against the wall along the perimeter. A trail of blood smeared on the floor from where he was to where he sat.
“You still with me?”
“I’m here!” the shot man managed to say.
Carter counted out how many times he pulled the trigger and guessed he only had a few bullets left. Five. Six at the most.
“You see where he went?” the man by the glass room asked.
“Was the room hit?” the injured man yelled out, ignoring the other man’s question. “Was she hit?”
Carter stayed flat on the ground, keeping his cheek against the cold tile floor to look under the curtain. He watched the second man stand and assess the condition of the glass room.
“One wall’s hit.”
Carter glanced at his watch. Eight minutes before Olivia left, and Rose was surrounded, locked away. He looked back at the man he shot. He was clutching his hands around his upper thigh as a pool of blood leaked out around him.
“And the girl?” he asked, clenching his jaw.
“Looks fine!”
The injured man sighed and leaned his head back against the wall.
“Where’d he go?” the man by the glass cell asked again.
“You tell me. I’m a bit busy!” The injured man answered, looking around for anything nearby to tie his wound off with. Finding nothing, he pulled his boot off. One hand still firm around his thigh, he held the shoe to his mouth with the other hand and unlaced the boot with his teeth. Then he wrapped the shoelace around his thigh, letting out a short gasp as he cinched it tight. He tied a knot and gripped his gun. “You circle the room then check out front. I’ll stay here and protect the girl.”
“Girl’s not important anymore!” the other man shouted back over the alarm.
By now the shot man had pushed himself up and was hobbling against the wall, bracing himself on anything within reach. “Well, I’ll stay here anyways, if it’s all the same to you.”
The other man rounded the corner of the glass cell and walked towards where Carter was, checking behind each curtain before moving on. Carter pushed himself up into a crouched position. He heard the man toss curtains aside and his boots squeak on the polished floor.
Carter waited, gripping his gun barrel, the butt facing out. He breathed deep and tried to block out the flashing lights and screeching siren. As the man threw the curtain aside, Carter slammed the butt of his gun into the bridge his nose. He cried out and doubled over, cupping his hand over his face. Carter bashed his gun into the back of his head, collapsing him to the floor.
He grabbed the unconscious man’s gun and made his way to the glass cell. Right then, the sprinkler system kicked on, raining down on the room. Carter wondered what had happened to the van out front to trigger the sprinklers, and how much time he had before a fire spread through the entire clinic.
He found the injured man leaning against the glass.
“Drop it,” Carter said, pointing his gun.
Th
e man didn’t argue. He held the gun gently between his thumb and forefinger, and placed it on the ground.
“Kick it over,” Carter demanded.
The man clenched his jaw and gave Carter a short shake of the head. “You think I can kick anything over to you?” He was bracing most of his body weight against the glass cell. His hands were slick with blood.
“Back up then.”
The man hobbled back one step and Carter bent down to pick up the gun. Another Smith and Wesson M1911. He held one gun in each hand, the other stuffed in his waistband.
“Open the door.”
Shaking his head, the man said, “I can’t do that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Won’t.”
“And if I shoot you?” Carter said.
“Again?”
“Yeah, again. What if I shoot you again?”
“Don’t know if I could take another shot. Wouldn’t get you any closer to getting in that room.” The man had a lantern jaw, and he puffed his chest out as much as he could, given his injury.
“I’m guessing that siren isn’t connected to any emergency services?” Carter asked, looking up at the flashing lights in the ceiling.
“Affirmative.” The man’s breathing was getting heavier, and his complexion was growing pale, but he still looked strong, not someone Carter wanted to fight.
Four minutes.
Carter looked at the keypad on the door. “What if I shoot this? Will it open?”
The man’s eyes grew wide, and he said, “Don’t shoot at the door. You could hurt her.”
Both Carter and the man were soaked from the sprinklers overhead. Carter looked inside the cell and saw Rose was soaked as well, but she didn’t wake up. Carter lowered one of his guns and gripped the other more tightly.
“I think she’d want me to take my chances.”
He pointed the gun at the keypad and fired a single shot. The keypad sparked and fell to the ground, leaving a mess of wires, as the glass around the keypad cracked. He fired two more shots at the door until it unlatched from the rest of the cell and swung inward.
The man flinched and held his arms in front of his face. “What the fuck!”