Harry motioned to Ray’s pillow.
“No problem keeping that concealed?”
“Not as long as my nurse, here, keeps volunteering to do things so the people out there don’t have to. They’ve already thanked her so many times, I wouldn’t be surprised if they took up a collection for her. Any progress in the outside world?”
“The calls have slowed down, but they’re still coming in. One lab tech from Good Samaritan swears our man was a balding medical resident from Poland. A nurse from University Hospital is certain he’s an orderly there, only with dark hair and an earring.”
“He probably was both,” Santana said. “If we could ever pinpoint what days he was spotted in those hospitals, I’d bet we’d find a death or two in patients insured by The Roundtable companies.”
“Well, if what we’re doing here doesn’t work, I promise I’ll help you put those posters back up. By that time, I’ll have nothing to lose.”
“True enough. But if something goes wrong here and we get caught, I’d be surprised if they’d even let you back in this hospital as a patient.”
“But hey, amigo, we’ve got our system down pat,” Harry said with comic bravado. “What on earth could possibly go wrong?”
All day Ray Santana had been having a more difficult time than usual with pain, primarily behind his eyes and in his fingertips. He had received a Percodan at ten in the morning and required a shot of Demerol five hours later. Finally, fifteen minutes after the shot, he drifted off into a fitful sleep. A powerful antibiotic, ordered to treat his heart-valve infection, was dripping from a plastic IV bottle into the thick gauze bandage wrapped around his arm.
Maura washed her face in preparation for her sixth eight-hour shift in three days, and her second one in a row. She felt tired, but still keyed up. Their trap had been a long shot from the very beginning. But it hadn’t collapsed around them yet.
Santana was beginning to breathe more deeply and regularly as Maura settled down in her chair with the latest People. Next to alcohol, the magazine remained the most addictive thing she had ever found. And like booze, it was perfectly easy to keep away from—as long as she didn’t start. The door to the room was nearly closed. From out on the floor, she heard the footsteps and multiple conversations of a group of people approaching. Then there was a man’s voice.
“… The hospital has three rooms with the reverse ventilation necessary for proper infectious-disease isolation,” he was saying. “The new wing will be connected through this floor, and will provide three more. That will make this hospital number one in the city in the event of an infectious epidemic.…”
Maura, her concentration split between the magazine and the lecture, did not realize that Santana was suddenly awake, up on one elbow, rubbing at his eyes.
“Maura,” he rasped, “can you see him?”
“Can I see who?”
“The man, dammit! The man who’s talking!”
His eyes were wild from the drug, his mouth cotton-dry.
“… But you say the cost per day of these rooms is now more than double a standard room?” a second voice was asking.
“Yes, but compared with what’s charged at medical centers comparable to this one, that’s still a bargain. Now, if you ladies and gentlemen will follow me this way, I’ll show you the latest in …”
Santana was sitting bolt upright now, the pillow on his lap shielding his gun. Panicked, Maura threw her magazine aside and moved toward him. Ray, perspiring profusely now, was clumsily trying to disengage himself from the bedclothes and IV line at the same time.
“Open the door!” he demanded in a gravelly whisper. “Open it now!”
“Please, tell me what’s going on.”
“Dammit, Maura, hurry! Open the fucking door!”
Santana was on his feet now, still shielding his pistol. Maura swung the door open. About ten yards down the hall, amidst the usual midday crowd of nurses, patients, and visitors, a group of ten or eleven well-dressed men and women were moving slowly away from them.
“Excuse me,” Maura called out to them. “Excuse me, please.”
The speaker stopped and the group turned in unison. For several frozen seconds, they stood there as Santana peered out at them from beside his bed. Maura scanned the group, too. But at that distance she was unable to determine which of them, if any, was Anton Perchek.
“You son of a bitch!” Santana suddenly yelled, raising his gun. “You fucking son of a bitch!”
Instantly, there was screaming and chaos in the hallway as the business people and perhaps a dozen others dove for cover or turned to run.
The IV line pulled away from the plastic bottle as Santana bolted toward the door. The portable pole on which it hung clattered to the floor. He stumbled over it and lurched against Maura, knocking her to one knee and momentarily losing his balance at the same time.
“You son of a bitch!” he hollered again.
The IV line dangling from beneath the bandage on his arm, he braced himself against the doorway, leveled his gun, and fired the length of the hallway. The shot reverberated like a cannon blast. Everyone who was still standing dove to the floor. The screaming intensified. Scrambling to her feet behind Santana, Maura saw the glass that was covering a large floral print at the very far end of the hallway shatter from the bullet. Several feet to the right of the picture, three of the businessmen jammed through the door to the stairway. Waving his gun wildly with his IV line snapping like a whip, Santana sprinted barefoot after the men, down a gauntlet of screaming, terrified visitors, staff, and patients.
“Call security!” someone shouted.
“Get him!” someone else yelled.
Several men had gotten to their feet and were running—though with some caution—after Ray, who had now reached the end of the corridor and exploded through the stairway door. Another gunshot echoed back through Grey 2, then another.
Maura stripped off her gown and mask. Her only thought was to get away before anyone remembered her and started asking her questions. She was wearing a store-bought nurse’s uniform and a shoulder-length wig. While the action and attention were still fixed on the far end of the hallway, she moved quickly in the opposite direction, to the stairway past the elevators. Once on the stairs, she raced down to the first floor, then took a calming breath and stepped into the main corridor of the hospital. She had gone less than ten feet when two uniformed security men charged past her and up the stairs. Moments later, two NYPD officers, one of them shouting into a radio, ran past, heading for the far end of the hospital.
The response to the crisis was rapid and well coordinated. Maura felt certain that it would be only a few minutes before Ray Santana was captured … or worse. She found herself hoping that before he was taken or killed, he at least got a clean shot at The Doctor.
Battling to maintain her composure, she strolled through the crowded front lobby. There was a mounting electricity in the air, along with an urgent exodus through the main doors, as word spread of a crazed gunman loose in the hospital.
“Not another one,” she heard someone say as she exited with the crush into bright late-afternoon sunlight. “It seems like every time you turn around some wacko is shooting up a post office or hospital.”
With police sirens blaring, Maura walked away from the medical center. In less than a block, half a dozen cruisers had screamed past her. Loudspeakers were blaring, and a number of uniformed policemen were sprinting toward the streets circumscribing the medical center.
She was two blocks from the hospital when she finally felt safe stopping to call Harry. She phoned the office first. Mary Tobin was there, but Harry had had no further patients and had left for home half an hour before. He had told her he would be in the hospital at five, making evening rounds on his two inpatients.
“Mary, there’s been some trouble at the hospital,” Maura said. “I can’t explain right now, but I suspect before too long you’ll get some details if you turn on the news. I think you ought to cl
ose the office as soon as possible and go home.”
Mary was too wise, and had been through too much in the past weeks, to ask for clarification.
“Whatever you say, child,” she said.
“Thanks for understanding,” Maura said. “Now, I’ve got to call Harry. Oh, by the way, the Max Garabedian you’ll hear them talking about on the news is Ray Santana.”
“Who?”
“Ray—I mean Walter Concepcion. We’ll get back to you as soon as we can, Mary. Please go home. Get out of there now.”
Maura fished out another quarter and called the apartment. The machine answered.
“Harry, please, it’s me, Maura,” she said. “Harry, if you’re listening, please pick up.… Harry?…”
She was about to hang up when he came on the line.
“Maura, hi. Sorry to make you do that. I’m still screening calls. But listen, we’ve had a break. Maybe a big one. I’ll be heading into the hospital in just a few minutes to tell you and Ray about it.”
“Harry,” she said, “I don’t think I’d do that if I were you.…”
CHAPTER 35
By the time Maura reached the apartment, news bulletins of the crazed gunman at the Manhattan Medical Center were already blanketing the airways. Max J. Garabedian, a forty-eight-year-old stockbroker, had quite suddenly charged from his hospital room wildly firing a gun down the hallway. Details were sketchy, but as yet no injuries had been reported. And Garabedian, who was wearing blue pajamas and no shoes at the time, remained at large.
Furious at Santana, and as close to panic as Maura had ever seen him, Harry paced from one end of the apartment to the other, speaking as much to himself as to her.
“I shouldn’t have trusted him. As soon as he put those damn posters up I should have brushed him off like—like … I hope he’s okay. But right now I want to strangle him. I absolutely want to strangle him.… It must have been Perchek out there to upset him so. But why didn’t you spot him?… The police could show up here any minute, Maura. Insurance fraud, attempted murder—who knows what else?… Dickinson will have a field day with this one, a jubilee.… What in the hell am I supposed to do now?”
The fiasco at the hospital wasn’t the only serious development Harry had to deal with. He had only a short time left in which to make a decision that would cost him twenty-five thousand dollars—almost every bit of savings he had. Santana’s meltdown had forced him into a corner. The police were certain to arrive at the apartment before long. If he was going to accept the deal offered by a stranger on the phone, he had to make preparations and leave before they came.
“Please sit, honey,” she said. “Just for a couple of minutes. Sit and try to relax a little.”
She turned back to Channel 11. The reports were varying widely from station to station, most of which were still rushing crews over to the hospital. But Channel 11 and one other station had already announced that Garabedian’s physician was Dr. Harry Corbett, still the chief suspect in the bizarre murder of his wife, Evelyn DellaRosa, who had also been a patient at MMC.
Harry was concerned for what the real Max Garabedian was about to go through. He had tried calling the school custodian at home, but got no answer. Almost certainly, the man was still at his job, although Harry had no idea at which school. Maura tried calling the Department of Education, but got no response there either.
“Only four-thirty and no one’s there,” she said. “No wonder so many kids in this town can’t read.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Harry said, for perhaps the tenth time. “That guy is expecting me in New Jersey at nine. The bank closes in another hour and fifteen minutes.” He started pacing again. “We’ve got to start moving and moving fast. The longer I wait, the more likely it is the people at the bank will have learned that I’m in the news again. As it is, I’m not sure how happy they’re going to be about forking over twenty-five thousand in cash. No matter what we decide, I’ve got to go and get that money now. Then I don’t think we can come back here.”
The call that had upped the ante by twenty-five thousand dollars had come to the apartment around the same time Ray Santana was shooting up Grey 2. When Harry arrived home from the office there were two messages on his machine, neither of them any more promising than the several dozen others they had logged over the past four days. Thinking that this call might be the change-of-shift check-in from Maura, Harry preempted the machine.
“Hello?”
“Is this Dr. Harry Corbett?”
The voice was a man’s, youngish to middle-aged, with an accent Harry couldn’t place with certainty—possibly German or Swiss.
“It is,” Harry said.
“I am calling about the man in your poster and the fifty-thousand-dollar reward.”
Harry made a face and wished he had let the answering machine do its job. Instead, he opened the log notebook and wrote in the time of the call.
“Go ahead,” he said. “What hospital are you with?”
“I am with no hospital,” the man said. “I learned about the flyers and your reward from my employer.”
“And who is that?”
“The man in the poster. His initials are A.P. I will not speak his name over the phone. But you may already know it.”
Harry stiffened at the mention of The Doctor’s initials and immediately wondered if the caller could be Perchek, himself. But the voice was just too different from The Doctor’s. Harry tried desperately to think of any reason why he should deny knowing who Anton Perchek was. Would he be giving anything away?
“Who are you?” he finally said.
“I handle security at his mansion and work as one of his bodyguards when he needs me to do so. I am at a pay phone right now. If you know A.P. at all, you know that he would not hesitate to kill me on the spot for making this call.”
Harry had opened the spiral-bound notebook and was writing down as much of what the man was saying as possible.
“Go on,” he said.
“I wish to meet with you tonight and to make an exchange. My information for your money.”
“How much money?”
“I do not intend to remain in this area or even in this country after we meet. The Doctor and I have had some problems between us. I have reason to believe he intends to kill me. I will settle for half of what you have offered. Twenty-five thousand in cash.”
“I don’t have it.”
“Then get it. I will not negotiate any lower than that. Twenty-five thousand or no deal. In exchange, I will give you the location of The Doctor’s mansion and a recent photo of him taken without his knowledge. I will also tell you what security he has at the mansion. There you will find proof of his role in the death of your wife, and other evidence against him as well. How you handle that evidence will be up to you.”
“But—”
“Dr. Corbett, I have no time for this. I have preparations of my own to make. Nine o’clock tonight. If you know The Doctor, you know why I do not trust anyone. You must do exactly as I say or we will both lose out. Now, here is what you are to do …”
Harry’s bank was open until six that night. He had a total of $29,350 in his savings account, plus another five thousand or so in checking. He also had no personal connection whatsoever with anyone at the bank. Cursing himself for not making more money, and for not having taken the Hollins/McCue job, and for not going into ophthalmology, and for ever trusting Ray Santana, Harry took his savings and checkbooks and, with Maura, slipped out the rear basement door. They hurried to his garage for the BMW, stopped briefly at a newsstand, and then drove to his bank. With no idea how much space twenty-five thousand dollars would take up, especially in bill sizes of one hundred dollars or less, as the caller demanded, Harry had dumped out a briefcase and brought it along.
He entered the bank half an hour before closing. It was a moderately large branch and was still servicing a line waiting to see the six tellers. Twenty-five thousand was more cash than he had ever handled at one time. Wa
s it conceivable the bank wouldn’t have that much on hand?
Outside, Maura sat behind the wheel of Harry’s BMW, the driver of the getaway car. The ground rules Perchek’s security chief had laid down were that Harry was to bring the money to a landfill on the New Jersey side of the Hudson, not far from the city of Fort Lee. He was to come alone and to arrive at exactly 9 P.M. The directions to the spot were minutely detailed. The landfill was a dump site at the end of a winding dirt and gravel road. Harry was to drive to the center of the clearing, flash his lights four times, and wait beside the driver’s-side door. The caller insisted on knowing the make and plate number of his car. If any other vehicle approached the landfill, whether it had anything to do with Harry or not, the meeting would be off … forever.
“The money means a lot to me,” the caller had said, “but not enough to die for.”
“How do I know this isn’t a trap?” Harry asked.
“What kind of trap? To what end? If my employer wanted to kill you, you would be dead. It is that simple. If you know him at all, surely you know that. You are much more important to him alive. Besides, he delights in inflicting pain. The permanence and peace of death are his enemy.”
Harry fought off an involuntary chill.
“I’ll have a gun.”
“You would be foolish if you didn’t. I can assure you I will.”
“I want a chance to inspect what you have before I turn over the money.”
“You will have five minutes.…”
The young teller studied Harry’s withdrawal slip for fifteen seconds. Then she verified his balance and looked through her Plexiglas cage at him, smiling.
“How will you want this?” she asked.
This was New York City, Harry reminded himself, not some boondocks village. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal was everything to him, but probably not so uncommon to any of these people.
“Hundreds or less,” he said, knowing that there was no sense trying for an air of nonchalance when she had his bank balance on the screen right in front of her.
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