“If you’re going to drive an ambulance, you ought to look like ambulance drivers,” Charlie said.
“Then if you’re going to be a shaman, you should dress like one, too,” Thomasine said.
“Yes. How about a stick through your nose?” Brad said, and everyone laughed, Charlie included.
The planning dragged on until well after midnight. Despite the lunacy of what they were mapping out, Charlie and Bostwick were both sticklers for detail. They did not want to leave anything to chance.
“Merry Christmas Eve,” Thomasine said to Brad when Charlie and Bostwick had left. “For what it’s worth.”
He hadn’t noticed the calendar until now. The idea that it was almost Christmas was too cruel to contemplate, so he did not contemplate it.
“Merry Christmas Eve,” Brad replied. “For what it’s worth. Now we should sleep. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow. A very long day.”
“Today.” She corrected him gently.
“Today.”
CHAPTER SIXTY-THREE
Wednesday, December 24
Early Morning
Christmas Eve dawned with a leaden sky that looked heavy enough to come crashing down on Morgantown. Snow was forecast. A storm that had buried Michigan and Ohio was roaring eastward, and it was expected to arrive by nightfall, according to the radio weatherman’s artificially cheerful dawn report—ensuring the Berkshires’ first white Christmas in three years.
According to plan, Thomasine and Brad waited for Bostwick at Brad’s. Bostwick had been very firm on this arrangement. He’d ridden on the ambulance they were going to steal a dozen times. Knew the owner. Knew the office. Knew where the keys hung. One rock through the door window, one hand inside to the doorknob, and he was home free. There really was no need of three or four people doing the work of one, not when the work was this simple.
Brad cooked sausage and eggs. Neither he nor Thomasine was able to eat any of it, although both agreed it would be in their best interests to start the day with a few calories. The best they managed was orange juice and coffee. Again, Brad’s desire for a smoke was intense. At six thirty-five, five minutes after the doctor’s scheduled arrival, he was a wreck. He was convinced Bostwick had been caught, or hadn’t been able to start the ambulance, or had started it and the engine had crapped out five minutes later, or had blown a tire in downtown Morgantown, or had run out of gas outside the state police barracks . . . on and on and on, a treadmill of nightmare possibilities.
“Relax,” Thomasine said, although exactly the same scenarios were running through her mind at triple speed, too.
“What if he got caught?” Brad mused. “One little slipup and the whole house of cards comes crashing down around us.”
“He didn’t.”
“What if the owner of the ambulance company was there?”
“At six in the morning?”
“What if there was an emergency? Those guys are on call around the clock.”
“He’ll be here,” Thomasine said, struggling to believe herself.
And he was. At six thirty-seven they saw the ambulance moving up Thunder Rise Road, its headlights still on. It pulled into Brad’s drive and stopped, engine racing. Bostwick tooted the horn, and Thomasine and Brad bounded out. There was a moment of confusion while they figured out how to get on board, then Bostwick gestured toward the rear doors. They hopped inside.
“We start with grand larceny,” Bostwick joked, “then move on to the big ones.”
“The big ones?” Thomasine said.
“Kidnapping, trespassing, attempted murder . . . whatever the hell they choose to throw at us in New York if we get caught. Just think of the headlines in the Post, Brad: DOC AND NUTS JAILED FOR KIDDIE SNATCH!”
Everyone laughed. Nervous laughter, preferable to silence. Last night, huddled over Brad’s table, they’d calculated the odds. Considering all the elements of the operation—the ambulance theft, taking Abbie from the hospital (no one had used the word “kidnapping” because no one could decide if returning her was, in fact, criminal), the return trip, the breaking and entering jobs Charlie would have to perform to get both dynamite and the spear—they’d concluded they had about a fifty percent chance of getting caught.
Considering the circumstances, Brad decided those were pretty good odds.
Bostwick turned onto the Massachusetts Turnpike, and the ambulance headed toward the Taconic Parkway, which would take them south, into New York.
At the same time Bostwick was fiddling with the choke of a twelve-year-old ambulance in the parking lot of On-Call Services, Inc., Charlie Moonlight was trying unsuccessfully to pick the lock to a warehouse of the Western Mass. Sand and Gravel Company, three miles east. After fifteen seconds he gave up. He just didn’t have a burglar’s skills, a fact which did not shame him in the least. He backed off a few feet, put his shoulder down like a guard executing a block, and threw his weight against the door. It flew open with a crash. Glass from the window sprayed inside, shattering on the floor with a loud tinkle. No matter. It would be another hour before the fellow with their Dunkin’ Donuts coffees trickled into work.
Charlie knew precisely what he wanted, even if he didn’t know precisely where he would find it. Once—an entire summer he’d been unable to get plugged in at the casinos, the worst dry spell he’d ever experienced—he’d taken a job as a common laborer on a dam being built outside Las Vegas on the Nevada-Arizona border. Because of a booming economy, good, reliable help had been hard to find that summer, and Charlie was rewarded for his responsibility and smarts by being apprenticed to not one but three trades: bulldozer operator, pile driver, welder. He’d gotten close enough to blasting to get the basic elements down, although in the decade since, he’d never once had occasion to put that knowledge to use.
(For some reason that had struck him as strange even then, he’d kept his manual for the safe handling of dynamite, plastic explosives, gasoline, propane, solvents, and a slew of other hazardous materials. Last night at Brad’s, reviewing the book to refresh his ten-year-old memory, he finally understood the reason.)
The explosives locker wasn’t hard to find. It was at the back of the warehouse, by itself, not surrounded by machinery or fuse boxes or electrical wires or anything else that had the remotest chance of producing an errant spark. The locker had been covered with skulls and crossbones and the word “DANGER,” spelled in fluorescent orange letters as tall as a man’s forearm. A giant padlock protected the contents. Charlie scrutinized it. Contrary to popular belief, modern dynamite wasn’t particularly unstable—provided it was handled properly. He could still hear the damn foreman’s warning: “Respect it and it’ll respect you.”
With a claw hammer he pilfered from the workbench, Charlie went to work. The locker was made of old, dry wood, and the clasp separated from it with ridiculous ease.
Charlie helped himself to a plunger, a set of keys to operate it, a fresh battery, a two-hundred-foot length of wire, caps, and a dozen sticks of dynamite. He placed everything carefully in a cardboard box, cradled the box in his forearms, and went out the door to his Cherokee. He’d lined the back with several blankets, and he arranged the box on top of them, then tied the box down so it could not shift while the vehicle was in motion. Driving slowly, but not so slowly as to arouse suspicion, he made it to his cabin.
At the cabin he hid the dynamite in a small shed, far from wood stove sparks. He went inside the cabin for a moment, lifted the floorboard over where he kept his cash, and pulled out a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills. Then he drove to Springfield, where he was reasonably sure he could shop without being recognized.
In less than two hours he had purchased a trailer hitch, a John Deere snowmobile, a trailer to tow it, two hardwood toboggans, an Echo chainsaw, and a pair of snowshoes to go with the three pairs he already owned. He paid cash for everything. As a precaution, he gave an alias and a phony address when clerks were filling out receipts and warranty cards.
He was back in
Morgantown by noon, at the end of Thunder Rise Road by twelve-twenty. He backed the snowmobile off the road, unhitched it, and covered it with spruce bows. Chainsaw in one hand, a can of gas and a carton of bar lubricant in the other, he disappeared into the woods. The snow, which had been diddling around most of the morning, seemed ready to come down in earnest.
CHAPTER SIXTY-FOUR
Wednesday, December 24
Late Morning
The storm teased Manhattan, slicking streets and frosting skyscrapers with a sugarcoating of snow. It was not enough to activate the plows and sanders yet, but it was more than ample to make driving treacherous for Bostwick, who’d volunteered to take the wheel. The Henry Hudson Parkway, clogged by construction and fender benders, was itself almost a two-hour nightmare. If Bostwick and Thomasine hadn’t been with him, Brad would have been a candidate for the forensic ward. The last time he’d been on this road, it had been summer, and Abbie had been with him, and Abbie had been healthy, and their new beginning had stretched out in front of them like the Yellow Brick Road, and . . .
. . . and he couldn’t keep punishing himself like that, Thomasine and Bostwick implored him. It wasn’t his fault. Wasn’t anybody’s.
It was almost noon when they wended their way through Wall Street traffic and reached the hospital, an eight-story brick building that took up part of a block next to Pace University. They circled it once to review their strategy.
“The critical thing,” Bostwick reminded them, “is to look as if we know where we’re going. As if we belong. I’ve spent enough time in hospitals to realize that if you act as if you know what you’re doing, no one will question you. We’re going to blend right in, believe me. Hospitals are like bus stations, a million people always coming and going.”
“I wish one of us had been in the place before,” Brad lamented, “or seen a floor plan. It would make me feel a hell of a lot better.”‘
“That’s exactly what you shouldn’t let show,” Bostwick said sternly. “The fact that you’re uptight.”
“It’ll be over in ten minutes,” Thomasine said. “Then we’ll be going home.”
“OK,” Bostwick said, stopping the ambulance when they were around the corner from Beekman. “Your turn, Brad. It wouldn’t look kosher for the doc to be behind the wheel.” He and Brad exchanged seats. Brad put the ambulance in gear, and they proceeded slowly down Gold to the ambulance bay. Brad backed them in. He had never been more nervous behind the wheel. One little accident, and the game would be over.
The second the ambulance stopped, Bostwick threw open the doors. Clutching his black medical bag, he jumped onto the platform. He looked determined, preoccupied, professional. Thomasine followed. Brad killed the ignition and joined them on the dock.
“The stretcher,” Bostwick exhorted.
“Oh, yeah,” Brad said. He and Thomasine went back into the ambulance, rolled the stretcher out, then extended its folding legs. They’d practiced on the ride down, and the procedure went off like clockwork.
“Give ‘em hell,” Bostwick muttered under his breath as he headed through the swinging doors.
A blue-uniformed guard carrying a sidearm met them immediately. They had expected to see security somewhere in the hospital, but his instant appearance unsettled Brad. Bostwick seemed unperturbed.
“Transfer,” the doctor barked convincingly. He ought to do TV, Thomasine thought with a mixture of bemusement and admiration.
The guard eyed them suspiciously, as if something weren’t quite right, but he’d be goddamned if he could put his finger on what it was. Maybe it was the number of them. You almost never saw three people to an ambulance. One doc and one EMT, or two EMTs, or one RN and one EMT . . . but a doc and two EMTs or whatever these other two were supposed to be?
“Where you from?” the guard demanded.
“Pittsfield,” Brad replied.
“Where’s that?”
“Massachusetts.”
“Who’s the patient?”
“Abigail Gale.”
“You got papers?”
“Yes,” Bostwick said coolly. He opened his bag and withdrew a set of documents. “BERKSHIRE MEDICAL CENTER ADMISSION,” the form read. Bostwick had forged them last night. The guard scanned them without digesting what they said. They looked official enough. He handed them back.
“You got the room number?”
“No. But she’s in intensive care.”
The guard eyeballed them again. It wasn’t the number that was wrong. It was rare, but once in a while you’d see three to a meat wagon; usually, it was one of the rich folks who were going for a ride. No, there was something else fishy about this group. Not the doc. He seemed legit. But the two with him . . . yeah, it was them. They had the right uniforms, all white and starchy and everything, even had their names stitched on there above their breast pockets. But the way they stood there, their thumbs just about stuck up their assholes . . . especially the guy, the way he was fidgeting, like he was late for his own wedding . . .
“You got any ID you can show me?” the guard said in a surly voice.
“Certainly,” Bostwick said, reaching smoothly for his wallet. He showed the guard his driver’s license, his AMA card, a slew of other papers.
“How about you two?” the guard said, gesturing toward Bostwick’s companions.
Brad sputtered, “We—”
“We don’t carry wallets when we’re working,” Thomasine said indignantly, “and as far as I know, there’s no law in this or any other state that says we have to. What is this, anyway, an interrogation? We’ve got a sick girl to move, pal. A very sick little girl. And if you’d like to be responsible for holding her up, well, then I’m sure your supervisor would be happy to hear all about it. In fact, why don’t you get on the horn there and ring him up? Go ahead. We’ll wait.”
Oh, Jesus, Brad thought. Now we’re dead.
But the gamble paid off. “I guess you’re OK,” the guard said reluctantly. “It’s just that in New York City—man, you never know what kind of crap people’s gonna pull. ICU’s on the third floor. Down this corridor, take a right through the ER, then around the corner. Elevator’s there on the left.”
“Thank you,” Bostwick said, and they were off.
“I thought we were done for,” Brad whispered across the stretcher to Thomasine as they passed through the commotion of the emergency room. No one seemed to notice them. Except for the guard, it was as Bostwick had predicted.
“Mention ‘boss,’ and types like that always back down,” Thomasine said.
They found the elevator without a snag. Brad pressed 3, and they were whisked up. The doors opened, discharging them into a hall where the fluorescent lights were too bright, the floor so clean and overpolished that it looked slippery. The entrance to intensive care was on the right. Bostwick pushed the hold button on the elevator, then led them through the doors, through a small, empty waiting room, and into the inner sanctum of the ICU. They stopped, reconnoitering. From her station the nurse acknowledged their presence and motioned that she would be free momentarily. She was on the phone. No one else was visible. Bostwick supposed her colleagues were busy with patients.
Brad’s body was supercharged—his nerves and muscles like a computerized weapons system, activated and standing by to engage the enemy. It wasn’t only the risk of their mission, although that was a substantial contributor. He wanted desperately to see his daughter, to touch her, kiss her . . . confirm that she was still alive. The whole drive down, this morbid premonition that they were already too late had been churning inside him.
“May I help you?” the nurse said, hanging up the phone.
“We’re here for Abigail Gale,” Bostwick said coolly. He looked at the nurse’s name tag. “R. JONES,” it said. “If you can show us which room, Miss Jones, we’ll get on with it.”
“Room three,” she said, indicating the room at the end. “But are you sure you’re supposed to get Abbie?”
“Oh, yes. She�
�s going back to Pittsfield. I have all the paperwork here.” He took the documents out of his bag and handed them over.
Miss Jones perused them. Her face went momentarily blank; then her look of concern deepened. “I’m afraid I don’t have any order to that effect from this end,” she said.
“Well, there must be some kind of mistake,” Bostwick politely replied. “An oversight.”
“I don’t think so. Her physician, Dr. Chou, just left—it couldn’t have been ten minutes ago. He didn’t mention anything about any transport. Not a word. And I believe he would have. He’s a very conscientious physician.” Suddenly Miss Jones was very uneasy. Does she know anything about how Abbie got here? Brad wondered. Is she a co-conspirator?
Bostwick had anticipated this reaction. He still hoped he would be able to talk his way through it instead of resorting to force.
“I know Dr. Chou personally,” Bostwick said, “and as far as . . .”
While they quibbled, Brad slipped past them into room 3. Abbie was there, alone, looking little different from the way she had at Berkshire Medical. Her eyes were closed, and she was breathing with difficulty.
Thank God, she’s alive.
He leaned over her, brushing her hair with his hand. Her forehead was burning. “Apple Guy,” he whispered, “it’s me. Dad. I love you, honey. Oh, God, how I love you. And I’m going to take you home. Right now.”
His words registered somewhere, and her eyes flitted open. A second later they shut. There was no sign she had recognized him.
“It’s going to be all right,” he whispered, straightening up. “Going to be all right, pumpkin.”
In the hall Bostwick was getting nowhere. Miss Jones was a young woman of great common sense, and now she was also panicked. Although it was a tiny intensive care unit—perhaps four beds in all—Bostwick knew she could not be alone. It was probably only a matter of minutes before another nurse or an orderly reappeared. Much sooner if Miss Jones started screaming.
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