“Well, for one thing, she’s the one who told me the patients here come in and don’t go out again.”
“Yes, of course.” He sat back down in the chair he’d gotten out of only a little while before. “She doesn’t think . . . she doesn’t think there’s anything sinister happening here, does she?”
“Sinister?” I laughed. After days of worrying, it felt good. “You sound like a sci-fi movie. If what you mean is that Madeline thinks you’re a shady little son of a bitch who’s scamming people to get them in here then doing who-knows-what with them . . . well, yeah, I guess you could say she thinks you’re doing something sinister.”
“She would think that, of course.” Doctor Gerard ran a nervous hand over his shirt sleeve. “She doesn’t know—”
“What?”
“That I help them as a way of showing my thanks, of course.” Some of the tension went out of his shoulders, and he smiled more freely. “I mean, when they leave here. Madeline doesn’t know...She didn’t...I hadn’t started that part of the program yet. She’d have no knowledge of it. When I’ve finished studying those other patients...” He drew in a long breath. “Well, you see, Pepper, I don’t mean to brag, but I find them homes. And jobs. Of course no one sees them on the streets again. I help them start new lives.”
He sounded so sincere, I actually might have bought into the line of bullshit.
If not for those jars of brains I’d seen the night before.
“Funny, Madeline never mentioned it,” I said. It seemed a better strategy than saying anything about the brains. “She hangs around at the clinic, you know.”
Doctor Gerard’s gaze darted around the room. “Is she here now?”
I looked around, too. “Not that I know of.”
“Has she told you . . .” He licked his lips again. “What else has she told you?”
Of course he was nervous. He was worried word might get out about that bungalow in the Bahamas. And the cooked books.
And I wasn’t stupid. The coffee was terrific. The croissants were tasty. But my sudden status as Princess of Patients would disappear in a flash if Doctor Gerard knew that I knew more than I should have. Or more importantly, if he knew that I knew something damaging. And if he thought I’d spill the beans to the authorities.
I shrugged like it was no big deal. “She hasn’t told me a whole bunch. She’s pretty boring. Oh!” I added this as an afterthought just so he didn’t get any ideas about how I had to be shut up permanently. “She thinks you walk on water. You know, the whole helping the homeless and the mentally ill and blah, blah, blah. I’d hate to disappoint her and let her know how unhappy I am with the way I’ve been treated here.”
“Yes, yes, of course.” When he got up and went around to the other side of the desk, Doctor Gerard looked relieved.
When he came back with some sort of machine that reminded me of one of those old portable CD players, I was less so.
He held out what looked like a set of headphones. “Go ahead, put them on. Then when you make contact with Madeline again, I’ll be able to monitor what’s happening inside your head.”
“But I can’t just make contact. Don’t you get it?” I didn’t like being that close to one of his weird brain-reading gizmos, so I turned and walked to the other side of the office. “They come to me. The dead, I mean. And when I want them to show up, well, sometimes they do. But most times—”
“We’ll find a way to conquer that little problem.”
When Doctor Gerard returned to his desk, I breathed a sigh of relief. I’d dodged the test-Pepper’s-brain scenario. At least for the moment.
Or at least I thought I had.
Until I realized he’d pressed a buzzer on his desk and that when he did, Thaddeus the hulking orderly showed up.
“Get her into the chair,” Doctor Gerard ordered, and Thaddeus closed in on me.
There was no use fighting. He was bigger and I wasn’t on top of my game. When he grabbed me and hauled me to a chair, I sat as directed, and when Doctor Gerard put the gizmo on my head, I knew that if I didn’t sit still, Thaddeus would make me.
“Call them,” Doctor Gerard ordered me.
I looked from him to Thaddeus who was standing nearby, his arms folded across his big-as-Hoover-Dam chest. “I can’t. I—” A tingle like electricity prickled over my scalp, and I let out a tiny screech of surprise.
“Call them,” the doctor said again.
“You’re not getting this, are you? It doesn’t work—” Doctor Gerard hit a button on the CD player look-alike he held on to. The tingle intensified.
“Call them now,” he said again. Poor ol’ Doc Gerard. He was dying to talk to the dead, but he didn’t know how stubborn I could be, and by that time, I was pissed. Cooperating was the last thing on my mind. Even when he turned up the juice on the machine and I screamed.
14
Just my luck. That night, after I went through all the trouble of moving the ceiling tile in my room and sneaking up inside the filthy crawl space, I found that somebody had remembered to lock the door to the lab.
I stood in front of it, my heart slamming my ribs and my spirits as deflated as I had no doubt my hair looked after who-knew-how-many days without the right shampoo and the proper conditioning. That’s when I heard it.
Footsteps out in the hallway. And they were getting closer.
Whoever was out there stopped right outside the door to the lab.
I would have held my breath if I wasn’t so busy letting it out in a gasp of horror.
Because the next sound I heard was someone unlocking the door.
I gulped. I’d never replaced the ceiling tile. I was dead meat.
Unless I could hightail it out of there before the person could raise the alarm.
When the lock clicked and the door eased open, I grabbed a stool from one of the lab stations, reared back, and swung.
I hit him in the midsection, and the man in the doorway gasped and staggered back, but damn, he didn’t fall down, and that meant I couldn’t get past him and out the door.
In fact, instead of collapsing in a heap like any self-respecting adversary should have, the guy pivoted and grabbed me. The bad news was that the stool clattered to the floor and I was left without a weapon. The good news was that even though he had a hold of my left arm, my right hand was free. I took a chance and threw a punch. He ducked and swerved, and my fist glanced off his cheek.
Before I could even think about trying another jab, he had my other arm in an iron grip. Still hanging on with one hand, he grabbed me around the waist with the other, turned, and flipped. The next thing I knew I was on my back on the floor and he was on top of me. I looked up into the face of—
“Dan?” Not sure I was seeing clearly, I blinked. When I looked again, the man sitting square on top of me was still Dan.
And I still wasn’t sure if this was good news or bad.
I didn’t want to take a chance, so I squirmed and kicked, but as Dan had proved back at Garden View when he fought off the attack of a vicious hit man, he was no pushover. The more I twisted, the tighter he held me, and when I took a breath to let out a scream, he put a hand over my mouth.
He hissed my name, and trying to make sure he was getting through to me, he looked into my eyes. “I’m not going to move until I’m sure I can take my hand away and you won’t scream. OK?” He waited for me to nod my agreement, and when I finally did, he sat back. “What the hell are you doing here? You nearly scared me to death.”
“I nearly scared you?” I pulled myself out from under him and sat up, my back propped against the nearest lab station. “What’s going on? What are you doing here?”
“I came to find you.” Dan got to his feet and offered me a hand up, and when I took it, he didn’t waste any time. He dragged me toward the door. “I’ll explain later,” he said. “For now, we’ve got to get out of here and we’ve got to get out fast. I think maybe we made a little too much noise.”
I looked down at the
stool, still spinning against the green linoleum. “You mean—”
“Somebody must have heard us. They’re going to be coming.”
That was all I needed to hear. With Dan leading the way, we tore down the hallway toward the exit door I’d seen the night before. Good thing I hadn’t wasted my time with it then; it was locked. When Dan hesitated in front of the door, I tugged on his hand to get him moving again. “We can’t get out this way.”
“Sure we can.” He pulled a set of lock picks out of the pocket of his winter coat. I remembered I’d seen them back in Cleveland when I was investigating the death of Vinnie Pallucci. Now, like then, Dan knew exactly what he was doing. He messed with the lock for just a couple seconds before I heard the satisfying sound of it clicking open. I grabbed the doorknob and pushed open the door, but before I could step through it, Dan stopped me.
“Not so fast.” He leaned forward and listened, but I guess he didn’t hear anything, because he took a careful step out into the stairwell. I followed along, and when he looked over the railing at the winding stairs that led down into the darkness, I looked, too. There was nothing to see.
“I dunno.” Dan’s voice was a whisper. His hair was mussed from our scuffle. He brushed it back. “It’s too quiet down there. Makes me nervous. Let’s head up.”
“To where?” I stopped him when he made a move to climb the steps. “We’ll end up on the roof or somewhere. Then what are we going to do?”
In the dim light, I saw him grin. “We’ll shimmy down a rain gutter.”
This was not the reassurance I needed, but who was I to argue? I didn’t know how Dan knew where I was or why he came to find me, but I did know that now that he was there, I wasn’t about to let him out of my sight. When he took the steps two at a time, heading up, I followed right behind him.
We’d already gone up a couple floors when he stopped suddenly and held out a hand to hold me back.
“What—”
He turned long enough to put a finger to his lips to signal me to be quiet, and I got a whiff of what spooked him—cigarette smoke. “Somebody’s up there.” Dan’s mouth worked over the silent words and he pointed up. I got the message. Carefully, I turned to head back down the stairs. I would have made it, too, if I didn’t bang my knee into the metal bannister.
“Shit!” I wasn’t sure if I was cursing because my knee hurt or because I forgot myself and grunted the word. I only knew that the next second, a light snapped on on the landing above us.
“Who’s down there?” Glenn the security guard looked over the railing. He might not have recognized me on sight, but he knew trouble when he saw it. And two people who didn’t belong in the stairwell meant nothing but trouble.
I’d barely had time to register any of this when Dan zipped by me and grabbed my hand. We raced down the steps to the next landing, and he went for the door.
“It’s going to be locked,” I warned him, but he wasn’t listening.
He punched the door open. “Only from the inside,” he said.
We found ourselves in a hallway that was a duplicate of the one outside my room—down to the burly attendant who was mopping the floor behind the desk. He saw us, dropped the mop, and closed in. Just as Glenn banged through the door.
Dan pushed me out of the way and yelled, “Find another way out of here, fast!” right before he turned to face the security guard and the beefy attendant alone.
Adrenaline pumped through my body and fed the fear that bubbled into every corner of my being. I raced down the hallway, then slowed my steps. No matter how many doors I found, I knew they’d all be locked. But the door Glenn had barreled through had banged against the wall and stayed open. With the attendant and the security guard busy beating on Dan, I just might be able to slip behind them, get out the door, and head back upstairs and to the roof where he thought we’d find a way to escape.
With that thought in mind and the sweet idea of freedom calling me, I doubled back.
Until another thought took its place.
Dan.
Facing two burly guys.
Alone.
I am not by nature a brave person. At least no braver than I’ve ever needed to be. But I’m not a quitter, either. Especially when it comes to my friends.
Hell, I didn’t know how to fight, but I guess I didn’t know how not to, either. I screamed, leaped, and joined the battle.
I slammed into the attendant just as he threw a punch at Dan that landed with a boof. The attendant staggered one way; Dan stumbled the other. But as I’d seen back in the lab, it would take more than that to knock Dan down. When the attendant turned on me with fire in his eyes, it was just enough of a distraction for Dan to launch a counterattack. He landed a nasty right hook to the attendant’s face. Blood exploded out of the man’s nose. It polka-dotted his white scrubs. The attendant froze—right before he looked down at all the blood and passed out cold.
That left Glenn and believe me, he was plenty pissed. Cursing a blue streak, he came at me. I kicked him in the shins and darted behind him. But when Dan moved in, Glenn took something out of his pocket. Even I knew a Taser when I saw it. I also knew that Dan was in big trouble.
I grabbed the mop the attendant had dropped, and as hard as I could, I smacked Glenn over the head with the wooden handle.
I wasn’t sure if the crack I heard was the mop handle snapping or Glenn’s skull. I did know that when his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell to his knees, we were home free. At least for the moment.
Dan didn’t waste a second. He latched onto my hand and we were off running again. This time when we hit the stairway, we went down, and by the time we got all the way to the bottom and we slammed through a door and found ourselves in a boiler room, all I wanted to do was curl up on the floor and hide.
Dan tugged me along. “We’ll be out of here in a couple minutes. Then you can rest. But not now, Pepper. Not yet. Can you keep going? For just a couple more minutes?”
I was pretty sure I couldn’t.
I shrugged, anyway, and said, “Of course.” It was the first I realized that my sleeve was ripped and hanging from my sweater. In just about any other situation, I actually might have cared. But somewhere above us, we heard a commotion. People running. Walkie-talkies blaring.
I gulped. “How are we going to get out of here?” I asked Dan.
He gave me a wink. “Not to worry. I know this place. It’s the old Gerard Hospital for the Insane and Mentally Feeble.”
I remembered something Madeline had once told me. “In Winnetka? Is that where we are? I thought... the hospital . . . it closed years ago.”
“Apparently not.” He pulled me behind the boiler, and from there, through a maze of pipes that traveled along the wall. “There’s an old tunnel near here somewhere. It hasn’t been used in years, but if the stories I’ve heard about it are true, it leads out to the lakeshore. Back when the hospital was open, they didn’t want to get a bad reputation, so that’s how they transported the dead bodies out of here.”
“Bodies?” The very thought froze me in my tracks, but hey, who was I to argue? Especially when an alarm sounded through the building.
I got moving—fast.
An escape tunnel was better than imprisonment any day. No matter how many dead bodies were in it.
Once we were so far back in the sprawling basement that he figured no one would see us, Dan pulled out a flashlight. It was one of the high-tech ones with a halogen bulb, and its light was pure and bright. With it, we were able to find a metal door that looked as if it hadn’t been touched in fifty years.
The door weighed about a thousand pounds, and it took both of us to open it. I broke another fingernail, but in the long run, it was worth the sacrifice, because we slipped out of the hospital and into a cavern that had been chipped from the rock beneath the building. The ceiling of the tunnel was rounded, and not more than a foot above my head. The walls were covered with ice. The floor was rocky and pitted, and at the same time Dan war
ned me to be careful and watch my step, he put his shoulder to the door and inched it closed.
The moment it snapped shut behind us, I knew we weren’t alone.
“Shit!”
Dan patted my arm. There was no heat in the tunnel, and his hand was ice cold. That didn’t stop him from slipping out of his coat and helping me put it on. I would have felt guilty if I wasn’t freezing, and if he didn’t have another, lighter-weight jacket on beneath it. “Don’t worry. I know tunnels are scary for some people, but we’re going to be OK, Pepper. There’s nothing here to be afraid of.”
“You think so, huh?” In the light of Dan’s flashlight, I looked down the shaft of the tunnel. The flashlight was bright, and in its glow, I could see maybe a hundred yards ahead. Every single one of those yards was filled with ghosts.
Night of the Loving Dead Page 18