by Kira Peikoff
Then she remembered something. She let go of the gun. It plopped against her stomach, rising and falling with her breath. In one quick defiant motion, she yanked off her ruby ring and hurled it across the room. It smacked into a wall and plunked to the floor.
With a trembling hand, she picked up the gun again and thrust its barrel into her skin. She hesitated. Would this be an act of betrayal or bravery? Victory or defeat? And most importantly, would the people who still mattered forgive her in the end?
Her index finger slid into place over the trigger.
In her head, a countdown began.
Three.
But Greg loved her.
Two.
He would be destroyed.
One.
Which was exactly what he deserved.
PART FOUR
CHAPTER 50
Isabel
Isabel stepped out of Roosevelt’s fourth-floor elevator, her cheeks tingling from rushing through the cold. Here inside the hospital, the blustery dead of night didn’t exist. Harsh fluorescent lights glared overhead. The stale air smelled of disinfectant. Muffled beeps could be heard emanating from various rooms.
A deserted corridor stretched before her like a sterile white tunnel. She hurried past door after door, scanning their plaques for number 403. Clutched under her arm was a leather messenger bag on loan from Galileo. Inside it, chilled within a miniature cooler, lay the glass vial that she hoped would secure Richard’s life.
Whether from nerves or the frigid air outside, she was shivering. She tightened her wool coat, praying that Galileo’s bold last-minute plan would carry her and Richard through the night unscathed. But it had all come together of necessity so fast that her confidence faltered. Everyone was depending on her—and yet for once, she was utterly alone.
As she hastened down the hallway, she thought of enlisting a nurse or two to accompany her into Richard’s room for protection. But what could she tell them? That she suspected the patient was in danger of being murdered, but she had no way to prove it? They would think she was nuts; they might even throw her out. She didn’t dare risk that. Anyway, the plan couldn’t work unless she was by herself.
Room 403 flashed into view. She stopped before the plain white door and gripped the knob. It turned. She pushed open the door, peering nervously around it.
The first thing she saw was an older male doctor’s white coat. He was leaning over Richard’s bed with his back to her. His salt-and-pepper hair was thinning at the crown of his head, though his body looked trim and muscular. Relief washed over her like a reflex at the comforting sight of authority. His presence emboldened her to step into the room.
That was when he turned around. A strangled gasp escaped her.
His face was unmistakable: Those light blue eyes, that Roman nose, the chiseled symmetry of his jaw. He was too handsome to forget. She recalled her only previous sighting of him—on a bench in Riverside Park—and the picture of him and Joan together on a beach. But if there was any doubt, the embroidery on his lapel confirmed his identity: Gregory Hughes, M.D.
Aka Robbie Merriman.
His eyes remained deadly serious as his mouth twisted into a smirk. A kind of feverish menace radiated from his gaze. Six feet away, she tensed under its spell. But the second she stepped back to run, she noticed what lay hostage in his grip. Horror struck her as the balance of power between them shifted in his favor. He acknowledged her recognition of it with a haughty lift of his chin.
He was holding a fist-sized pump attached to a tube that split off in two directions: one branch led up to a fluid-filled bag that hung on a pole, while the other snaked down to a needle that disappeared inside Richard’s elbow. Richard, whose left eye was taped over with gauze, appeared to be sleeping comfortably, unaware of any danger to his life. The heart monitor beside him beeped at regular intervals.
“You can’t!” she cried. “You won’t get away with it!”
“Quiet,” he snapped. “Do you really want to test me?”
She gave him the dirtiest look she could manage, but closed her mouth.
“Now take that chair in the corner and push it against the door.” He waited while she reluctantly obeyed, hauling a heavy solid oak armchair into place to block the door; apparently hospitals didn’t have locks inside patients’ rooms.
“Good,” he said.
She dared to take her eyes off him for one moment to scan the ceiling for a camera. If she gave it her most pleading expression, then maybe someone on the other end would notice and come to help.
“Looking for that?” He tilted his head up at the far left corner of the room, where a white camera was positioned to capture both the patient’s bed and the door. There was only one problem: a black handkerchief obscured its lens.
“No one will notice for a bit, probably not until morning,” he said. “So it’s just you and me. Sorry babe.”
She crossed her arms, glaring at him. His smirk stretched a little wider. He seemed to be enjoying her imposed silence.
“You know, you’re not quite as annoying as I thought you’d be.” His gaze shifted to the messenger bag under her arm. “A present for moi?”
She remained stock still, her hatred rising by the second. His amusement morphed into a snarl with astonishing speed. He wagged his thumb above Richard’s pump.
“Just hand it over. Hurry up.”
Barely taking her eyes off his thumb, she slid the bag from her shoulder, unzipped the mini cooler, and lifted out the chilled glass vial. She cradled it in both palms like a fragile bird, making sure not to jostle it—or, God forbid, drop it.
“Very good,” he said. His tone had regained its glee, but an ominous edge lingered. “Now I thought we could run a little experiment together.”
Still holding the pump with one hand, he reached underneath Richard’s bed and produced a glass flask filled with clear chemicals.
“Still warm,” he noted. “My lighter came in handy.”
He blew on the top of the mixture. A whiff of hydrogen peroxide and pungent sulfuric acid floated her way. Her nose wrinkled. He snickered at her obvious dismay.
“You didn’t think I was gonna run the test? But I promised I would. I always keep my promises.” He set down the flask on Richard’s nightstand and beckoned to her. “Bring me the vial.”
Her pulse throbbed in her temples. She felt totally helpless, a chess piece trapped in checkmate. Any step would be the wrong one—backward, forward, sideways. Frustration and fear swelled within her: Nothing short of Richard’s life hung in the balance. Yet again she was failing, and this time he wasn’t about to rescue either of them.
“I said, bring it to me.” Greg’s nostrils flared with impatience. “Are you deaf?”
She started to walk toward him. Then, forcing herself to take the unthinkable risk, she opened her mouth. The words streamed out at the pace of an auctioneer’s spiel.
“I have to tell you—”
“Shut up!” he interrupted. “What did I say?”
In the same breath, he jabbed the button on the IV pump.
Richard’s head lolled to the side on his pillow. His sleeping eyelids fluttered and a string of drool dribbled out of the corner of his mouth. A sudden drop registered on his heart rate monitor, but after a few seconds the number stabilized.
“There’s more where that came from,” Greg warned.
His arrogant little smirk was back again.
She regarded him with a look of pure loathing—and terror.
“Come put the vial at my feet,” he commanded. “Right now.”
She had no choice but to comply. She approached him defensively in a side stance, with her elbows sticking out, the vial still cradled in her palms. When she was two feet from him, she crouched down to set it on the floor.
He let go of the pump to kneel and grab it, but just as she stepped back, he caught hold of her wool coat and jerked her toward him. She sunk her teeth into his hand as hard as she could, but he didn’t release he
r. Instead he shoved his hand farther into her mouth, gagging her screams, and wrestled her onto her back in spite of her flailing limbs. His substantial weight felt like a bear crushing her chest. All she needed was a split second for him to let go of her mouth so she could scream, and then surely someone would hear and come to help.
She let her body relax, as though she were giving up, and as soon as she felt the pressure of his body ease up, she jerked her foot up into his solar plexus. But instead of him falling backward like she expected, he actually smiled, his hand hardly budging from her mouth.
“Tough cookie,” he muttered, almost to himself. She tried to catch his eye—to make him reckon with her agony—but he was focusing on something inside his coat....
He kept her pinned with his knee and fist, while his left hand reached into his front pocket and withdrew a long needle. Her eyes widened; she gave a last desperate jerk and scooted her head an inch away from the needle just as he depressed the plunger. Clear fluid spurted out onto the floor beside her face. “Dammit!” he snapped.
She caught a glimpse of his enraged face before he jammed the remaining solution into the back of her neck.
The needle stung like a hundred bees. She let out a wail, but his rigid hand remained clamped over her mouth. Almost immediately, she was overcome by the sensation of her insides hardening. Her legs, arms, abs, neck, face—every bit of her seemed to be suddenly turning to stone. After five seconds, she couldn’t even blink her eyelids. A coherent thought broke through the plume of her rising panic: How was this even possible?
But then the panic expanded like a gas throughout her entire skull, nullifying all thought—it felt like insanity, a frenzied protest of every fiber of her being at once. Neurons fired urging her arms to punch, her legs to kick, her teeth to bite, but all she could do was emit a silent shriek that died in her throat before it had even begun. The urge of her lungs to gulp all the air in the room resulted in a pathetic wisp of a breath.
She remained completely motionless.
“That’s better.” Greg stood up with an approving nod.
“Now,” he said, “we can get down to business.”
CHAPTER 51
Greg
“You’re probably wondering what the hell just hap-Ypened.”
Greg sank to his haunches in front of Isabel, who sat gagged and bound to a dusty wooden chair in the corner of Richard’s room. It had taken a ridiculously small amount of effort to scrape her limp body from the ground and tie her up with a couple of double-knotted pillowcases. Then he’d stuffed a chunk of cloth in her mouth and secured it with a strip of white medical tape. She offered zero resistance, of course. Unless you counted the venomous look she was managing to communicate in spite of her frozen state. If she’d gotten the whole damn dose of the drug, she wouldn’t even be breathing right now, let alone staring at him with pure hatred.
He ran his finger along the needle before dropping it back into his white coat.
“Succinylcholine,” he said. “My favorite untraceable drug. It’s used to paralyze anesthesia patients before intubation. But don’t worry, it wears off real fast. In the meantime”—he bustled around collecting the chemical flask and the glass vial off the nightstand and the floor—“I’m going to run my little experiment.”
The only response came from Richard—a nasal snore. Greg glanced over at him lying on the bed. His mouth was wide open and his only visible eyelid was twitching in deep sleep. Good. The extra boost of painkiller on top of sedation had knocked him out solid. Greg never could have gotten away with actually killing him—his monitors would sound the alarm and the nurses would burst in with a crash cart—but Isabel didn’t know to call the bluff. Perception always mattered more than the truth.
Double-fisting the flask and the vial, he returned to crouch before her. She stared at him without blinking, a lock of hair hanging over her eye. Inside her ugly woolen coat, her body remained inert—hands fastened behind her back, each ankle secured to a leg of the chair.
“First, though, I owe you a thank-you—and an apology.” He set down the flask near her feet, still clutching the ice-cold vial. Its clear liquid sloshed a tiny bit, and he was surprised to notice that his hand—his steady operating hand—was trembling.
“I appreciate your compliance,” he said to her. “This means everything to me, assuming it’s real of course. But”—he paused, staring at a spot above her head, then back at her—“even if it is, I can’t let you out of here alive. You know too much.”
Her eyelids lifted ever so slightly, and in that almost imperceptible movement, he could read the intensity of her panic. He could also see that the quick half-life of the succinylcholine meant it was already beginning to wear off.
“It’s nothing personal,” he went on. “You’re in the business of survival, so you of all people should understand.”
Her brows flicked, a mere twitch, but he recognized her attempt at a challenge.
“How would I get rid of you without getting caught? Simple.” He pointed to the window. “No one would be the wiser if you happened to jump to your death in that dark alley in the middle of the night.”
She lowered her gaze to the floor. Her feet began to squirm against her restraints, the soles of her sneakers scuffing the linoleum. A spot of wetness appeared on her lower lids.
“You know,” he said, “the fastest growing demographic with mental illness is young women.” He shook his head. “It’s really a tragedy. I’d hate to come of age in this era. Your generation just got the shit end of the stick.
“Anyway.” He turned his attention to the flask not far from her jerking feet. “Let’s do this.” He held up the glass vial, regretting the fact that he hadn’t thought to locate an eyedropper. His goddamn hands had to stop shaking so he could pour out a tiny drop; he literally could not afford to spill.
He tried to focus on holding the vial steady, but the continual scraping of her squeaky shoes against the floor was driving him insane. She seemed to be doing it for that sole purpose, too, because there was no way she was actually going to break out of her restraints.
“For God’s sake!” he snapped. “Cut it out.”
But she only escalated her speed, tapping and scraping with apparently desperate urgency. There was only one thing that annoyed him more than distraction, and that was disobedience. He fished in his breast pocket for the red Swiss Army knife he carried around—it came in handy quite often—and whipped it out in front of her face. He peeled back one of the crisp silver blades.
“Don’t make this messier than it has to be. I said, hold still.”
She had the gall to ignore him. But, he saw, most of her body actually was motionless. She wasn’t struggling to free her arms or get up from the chair. In fact, not even both of her feet were moving. It was just her right foot. When he focused on it, she grew excited—nodding her head in an exaggerated motion and moaning into her cloth gag. Her gaze kept switching from his eyes to her ankle, back and forth.
That was when he noticed something odd. Her foot kept scraping the ground in the same way over and over. What he’d thought was a deliberate attempt to aggravate him instead seemed to be some sort of frantic message. The longer he watched her foot, the faster she pumped out the pattern. He inched closer to get a better look.
He watched the downward swoop of her toes, their slide to the left. Then an oval. A triangle. And an upside-down u. Over and over, the exact pattern repeated.
What the—
A glimmer of comprehension dawned on him. They were letters.
The first one was indisputably j. Then o.
Holy Fucking Christ. She was spelling Joan.
But that was impossible. To her, he was Robbie Merriman. He was a voice on the phone. An anonymous ghost. He didn’t have a wife named Joan.
A cold shiver tore through him. He ripped off the tape over her mouth.
“Where did you get that name?”
It took a few seconds for her to cough out the cloth,
find her tongue. When she finally did, it wasn’t to scream or to curse. Instead her soft voice came out resigned.
“Your wife knows everything. I tried to tell you before but you wouldn’t let me.”
“Bullshit.” His ears buzzed with static. Joan knowing the truth was as absurd as an alien materializing in the room. He’d spent the last five years covering every possible track.
“No, I’m serious.” Isabel glared up at him. “You’re going to kill me anyway, why would I make this up? She knows all about Robbie Merriman and what you did to me.”
He smacked her hard across the face. “You’re lying.”
Her eyes watered but she didn’t back down. “Your address is two-fourteen West 104th Street. The ring had a tracking device inside it. I went and told her everything last night and she totally freaked out. She said she was going to help me get you arrested, but tonight I tried to reach her like twenty times and there was no answer. I just feel like she might be in trouble.”
Greg suppressed a rising scream. Before she could say another word, he was scrambling to pull out his iPhone and call his wife’s cell—they didn’t have a landline—but her phone rang and rang, then went to voice mail.
Something was seriously wrong. She always slept with her phone charging on her nightstand in case of an emergency. He tried again but got voice mail.
Isabel’s frown deepened. “Is there any other way you can check on her? I didn’t mean to cause any harm . . . I just wanted her to know the truth . . .”
He drew a sharp breath. The security camera. They’d recently installed one connected to a subscription app so they could check on their home in real time from afar.
He brought up the app on his phone and quickly typed in his password. It went black for a few moments while a progress bar loaded. He saw nothing; felt nothing; not even the glass vial still in his hand. His entire existence compressed down to the blue bar at the bottom of the screen.
After a ten-second eternity, a bird’s-eye view of their living room popped up.