by J. M. LeDuc
“No,” he said quickly. “That would be great. I mean, please have a seat and rest for a few minutes.”
“Thanks so much,” Chloe said. She grabbed the open chair he’d had his feet on when she first walked in. She crossed her legs, letting her shoe fall to the floor, and then she rubbed her foot. She looked up and saw him staring at her legs. Becoming uncomfortable, she tried to divert his attention.
“I’m so sorry, where are my manners? My name is Mindy. What’s yours?”
“Jeff,” he said not taking his eyes off her legs.
“Nice to meet you, Jeff,” she said, putting her hand in front of his face for him to shake.
He took her hand and said, “Same here.”
Chloe was getting more uncomfortable and tried to engage him in conversation. She glanced at the book he was reading. “Star Wars! I love Star Wars. Tell me, who’s your favorite character?”
That got his attention and he started talking. Meanwhile, Brent pushed the gurney through the door. The dummy, covered with a sheet, lay on top. Jeff didn’t so much as turn his head.
“ID in the box, you know the routine.”
“Sure do, boss,” Brent said, and quickly pushed the gurney through the swinging double doors leading to the morgue and autopsy room. Once inside, he headed straight for the back wall where the bodies were kept on ice. He scanned the vitals on each door. Male; male; female, thirty-four; male; female, sixty-seven. All right, we’re in business. Brent thought with relief.
He opened the drawer, slid out the body and looked at the toe tag. She was a vagrant, no known relatives, died of natural causes, probably a heart attack. It listed the date and time she was to be picked up and brought to the city mortuary. Great, he thought, she’s not scheduled for pick up until tomorrow afternoon. She’ll be perfect.
Brent uncovered her face to make sure everything was intact and then checked the doors to reassure himself that the morgue clerk was still being distracted by Chloe’s attentions. He removed the sheet from the gurney and placed the dummy on the floor. With as much care and respect as possible, he moved the corpse onto the support rails under the gurney and draped the sheet over the empty gurney, making sure the sheet went all the way to the floor. He then put the dummy in the freezer, placed the toe tag on it and covered it with the sheet. He closed the drawer and then headed back out the way he had come in. Jeff was now massaging Chloe’s foot, the whole time talking about Star Wars.
When she spotted Brent, she pretended to look at the clock. “Oh my God, will you look at the time? I’m in so much trouble!” she said.
She swung her leg to the floor and pulled her shoe on in one swift movement. Chloe stood up and addressed Brent, “Excuse me, Doctor, can you help me get back to the main elevator?”
“Headed there myself, I’ll show you the way,” Brent acknowledged as he pushed the gurney back into the hallway.
“Jeff, you’ve been so sweet,” Chloe cooed. “I’ll make sure to come back for another foot rub.”
Jeff sat there, mouth open, and watched Mindy saunter through the door.
CHAPTER 40
“Foot rub? Was that necessary, Mindy?”
“It was either that or my boy toy was going to go looking for you.”
“I’ll forgive you,” Brent said with a smile. “As long as we can reenact that scene at a later date.”
Chloe held the door to the mechanical room open for him and said, “As long as I can call you Jeff.”
Brent laughed and then snapped back to the business at hand. “Help me maneuver the gurney behind the air handlers,” he said. “I don’t want Susan to see it, at least not yet.”
Together, they moved it to the back of the room. “Before we go any further, change into the scrubs. I’m having a hard time concentrating on what we have to do with you in that uniform,” Brent said.
Just then, the door opened and Susan walked in with another load of supplies. “That uniform never looked that good on me,” she said.
“Good maybe, but not appropriate,” Chloe said. “I’m going to duck behind the water heater and change into the scrubs.”
As she stepped away, Brent checked the rest of the supplies. “You’re amazing, Susan. I think that’s everything we need.”
“Thanks,” she said.
“There is one more thing, and this one’s big, very big. I want you to listen and give it some thought before you answer. Once this goes down, it may not be safe for you to stay here or come back for awhile. I want you to reconsider Chloe’s earlier offer. You can still go home sick and we’ll take care of the rest.”
“Look, I realize we just met and that I know very little about you. But what I do know is there is honesty in your voice and your eyes.”
Chloe finished changing and joined Brent and Susan. She stood next to Brent as Susan continued. “I’m in a dead-end job with no one or nothing to keep me here, so I’m in for the long haul. Besides, your ‘aunt’ will need nursing care for at least a week. Especially after what she’s about to go through.”
“Fair enough. It’s seven twenty. I need you to administer the drug at seven forty-five. It’s going to take the pills approximately one hour to metabolize. You’re to call me on my cell phone, in front of her guards, as soon as the seizure is under control. Refer to me by her admitting doctor’s name. I’ll order the MRI and then we go as planned. When you get down here, the signs will have been changed. The MRI sign will be on this door, so make sure you come to this one. We don’t want Heckle and Jeckle to get suspicious. Are we on the same page?”
“Seven forty-five, meds, call you after seizure, this sweat box is the new MRI center,” Susan repeated. “Got it. See you around nine thirty-ish.”
“Good luck,” Chloe said as Susan left.
“Thanks, same to you.”
She’s turned out to be a God-send, Chloe thought.
Brent reached into the bag Susan had just brought down and pulled out a kit used for taking blood, a tourniquet and sterilizing solution.
“What are you going to do with that?” Chloe asked.
“When Maddie blows a hole in the new Lucille’s head, it needs to be as real as humanly possible. We need at least a fifteen-minute head start to get the real Lucille out safely, since I’m not sure if they’ll discover the switch or not. It depends on how much time lapses before someone checks on her. The longer, the better. In order for this to look real, we need blood splatter and a lot of it.”
“Doesn’t the corpse still have blood?”
“Yes, but I need warm blood. It’s the details that make an assignment successful.”
“And where is the blood coming from?”
Brent looked at her with an expression Chloe didn’t like. “Oh, no. I can’t give blood. I have low blood sugar and I’ll pass out. Besides, what’s wrong with your blood, Captain Macho?”
“First of all,” Brent said as he reached into the bag, “I’ve already thought about the low blood sugar.” When he pulled his hand out of the bag, he held a Snickers candy bar, a box of granola cereal and a small carton of orange juice. “Second, I would use my blood but the genetic markers are all wrong. Since visual identification will not be possible, they may check the blood. The first thing they’ll check is the markers.”
Sticking her arm out, Chloe said, “Err, sometimes your intelligence can be a real turnoff, Captain. This is definitely one of those times.”
Chloe then stuck out her bottom lip and looked down to feign sadness. Brent held her hand and led her to the back of the room, behind the air handlers. “Come with me, princess. Daddy won’t hurt you, I promise.”
“Where do you think you’re taking me?” she asked when she spotted the gurney.
“I need you to lie down, in case you get dizzy and fall.”
Pointing to the gurney, Chloe said, “You don’t expect me to lie down on that,
do you?”
“Don’t worry, you’ll be the only one on it.”
“That’s so gross, how about I just lie on the floor?”
“No good, I need the blood to flow downward.”
Chloe climbed onto the gurney, swung her legs around and then stretched out flat. “You’re going to owe me big. I mean, really big for this one.”
Leaning in to kiss her, Brent said, “I’ll pay you back with interest.”
Chloe turned her head, “Oh no, not that. I’m talking diamonds, big diamonds.”
Brent laughed as he got the kit ready.
“What are you laughing at? I’m serious.”
“I know, this is nervous laughter,” Brent said.
As he tied the tourniquet around Chloe’s upper arm, he told her to make a fist. He stuck the needle into a vein, and blood moved from the rubber tube into the bag. “You should be nervous, mister, I’m talking a lifetime of jewelry.”
This time she didn’t move away as Brent kissed her. “Shh, I promise you’ll get your diamonds and anything else you want, but right now, I need your blood. So, if you wouldn’t mind, keep making a fist and hold it for five seconds, then release it for five seconds. Keep repeating that until I tell you to stop.”
Chloe smiled, then squeezed as she had been told to. Fifteen minutes later, the bag was full, and Brent told Chloe to stop squeezing. He gently removed the needle and applied pressure with a gauze pad. “Hold your arm straight up and apply pressure with your other hand for a few minutes.”
Brent left for a few minutes. When he came back, he handed the Snickers bar to Chloe, along with the orange juice. “Okay, princess,” he said, “I’m going to help you sit up. Then I want you to eat and drink. Please don’t stand until you’ve finished.”
Brent helped her stand and held onto her for a few extra minutes to make sure she wasn’t dizzy or woozy. When Chloe said she was fine, Brent let go of her. “All right now,” he said, and pulled the sheet from the gurney, exposing the corpse under it. “Let’s get Lucille ready.”
He picked up the corpse and laid it face up on the gurney. He took a syringe and loaded it with Chloe’s blood. When he removed the sheet from the body, he found her eyes to be open. Brent gently closed her eyelids, and asked God to please take her home and let her soul rest in peace. “What time is it, Chloe?”
“Eight thirty-five.”
“Susan should have given Lucille the medication at seven forty-five, which means she’s going to seize in about ten minutes. That gives us forty-five minutes to finish up, so we need to move quickly.”
“Where will you put the blood?”
“I’m going to put as much as possible around the scalp and in the temporal region. Then I’ll fill the sinus cavities with it. That way, the splatter will look real.”
Chloe watched with fascination as Brent meticulously injected her blood into the corpse. She could actually see a little color return to her complexion. “What about the back of the head where the bullet will go?”
“I’ll take the rest of the blood and inject it in the occipital area.”
“Octopus who?”
“The back of the head,” he said, smiling.
“Thanks for the translation, Dr. Captain. Is there anything you didn’t learn how to do in the Phantom Squad?”
“Yeah, they didn’t teach me how to forget.”
His comment made Chloe think about how hard it must have been for him while he was part of the squad. She wanted to ask him about his experiences and try to protect him from the past, but she knew that, for now, that was God’s job. Brent broke the silence when he asked Chloe to help him shift the body so it was lying on its left side. That way, when Maddie entered the room, the back of the head would be facing her.
Brent took a deep breath then sighed. “Now that she’s finished, we’ll have to get the room ready. We can’t let Ferric’s men see into this room when the door opens.”
Brent and Chloe hung two sheets so that they met in the middle of the doorframe just inside the room. “This way,” Brent said as they finished, “if Mutt and Jeff follow Susan they’ll only see the sheets.”
“What if they insist on coming in?”
“Then we switch to plan B.”
“Plan B?”
“I take them out. We make the switch, as planned and call Maddie. We tell her what’s happened, have her take a picture with her cell phone and send it to Ferric. She then tells him that his boys bailed before she got there.”
“By ‘take them out,’ you mean…”
“It won’t come to that, trust me.”
In truth, Brent wasn’t so sure it wouldn’t come to that.
“So, we’re ready?” Chloe asked.
“Almost. We need to change the signs. Stay here and make sure she doesn’t run away. I’ll be right back.”
He opened the door and made sure nobody was coming then he slipped into the hall. He slid the nameplate out of the sign holder on the door and walked down the hall to the door at the MRI entrance. He took that nameplate back to the mechanical room door, placing it in its sign holder. He heard the elevator door ding and knew someone was getting off on the basement floor. Checking his watch, he saw that it was nine forty-five, and he quickly went inside the room.
“They’re on their way,” Brent announced. “Stand behind me in case there is any trouble, I want you out of the line of fire.”
They could hear footsteps and the bed being wheeled down the hall. “I’m going to have to ask you gentlemen to stay in the hall outside the room.”
“We’d prefer to go in with Mrs. Conklin. She’s our responsibility.”
“Normally, I would have no problems with that, but the MRI suite is being renovated and there is no protection from the radiation where you’d have to sit. So, unless you want to risk sterility and burning when you urinate, I would suggest waiting in the hall.”
“How long will the test take?”
“Approximately forty-five minutes.”
“We need to have her back in her room at ten forty-five so we can do our paperwork and leave by the end of the shift at eleven.”
“You have my word,” Susan promised believably. “I’ll have them rush the scan. We may have to sedate her because we don’t want her to have another seizure when she’s in the machine.”
“Yeah, go ahead, makes no difference to us.”
The door opened and Susan came in wheeling Lucille’s hospital bed. She moved all the way into the room so the curtains closed fully. “That was scary,” she whispered, “but not as scary as upstairs. She had a tough time recovering from the seizure.”
“I’m sorry, but it was the only way,” Brent said. “We need to move quickly now, so follow me. Chloe, help Susan maneuver the bed back to the tunnel opening.”
“The tunnel what?” Susan asked, surprised. “What tunnel?”
“No time for questions, Susan. Just follow my commands and we’ll all get out of here alive.” The bed was pushed back near the air-conditioning vent. Brent removed the plate and pulled out the air filter to reveal the tunnel behind it. Susan saw the opening and couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
“You mean to tell me there are tunnels down here?”
“That’s what I’m saying,” Brent answered. He went behind the air handlers and wheeled out the gurney holding the corpse.
“Oh my God, who the hell is that?”
“Shh, no talking, just listen and do,” Brent said. He looked at the corpse and then at Lucille. “Chloe,” he said, “get your makeup out of your purse.”
She took it out of her purse and handed it to Brent. “We need to give her a little color. She can look sick, just not dead.”
“Here, give it to me,” Susan said. “I used to do the makeup for a mortician in town.” Susan took the bag and removed the foundation. She
applied a light coat to the corpse’s face and neck and then, with the blush, gave her a little bit of color.
“That’s enough. She’s got a date with a bullet, not the prom.”
“Wait, what about the hair? It’s not the same color,” Susan said.
“That’s why I asked you to put this in with the supplies.” Brent took out a cap that patients wear for surgery and put it on the corpse’s head. “Now help me take her off the gurney and place her on the floor. We’ll lift her by the sheet she’s lying on. Ready…one, two, three.” They gently laid the corpse on the ground. Brent folded the gurney up and carried it into the tunnel. Once he’d gotten it down the stairs, he opened it and spread a new sheet on top.
Re-entering the room, he motioned to Chloe to help him lift Lucille off the bed. Carefully, they lifted her off the mattress and down the steps, with Susan following closely behind carrying the IV stand and medication bags that were still attached to Lucille. “Chloe, stay down here with Lucille,” Brent ordered. “I don’t want her alone in the dark in case she wakes up.”
Brent and Susan went back to transfer the corpse onto the bed. They put her on her side and covered her so that very little of her showed. “Okay, Susan, listen to me carefully. When you put her in the room, tell the guards that she’s had a very stressful night and you would appreciate it if they would not let anyone in to see her for the rest of their shift. Then excuse yourself and get back down here.”
Susan seemed a little shaky, but she nodded.
“It’s ten twenty-five, be back down here by ten forty.” With that, Brent opened the door and Susan pushed the bed back into the hall.
“How is she?” one of the guards asked.
“She’s stable, but very weak,” Susan said. “She had another small seizure while they were administering the test, so they gave her another sedative. I doubt she’ll wake up until morning.”
Back on the floor, the nurse’s station was a beehive of activity.
“What’s this all about?” one of the officers asked.
“Shift change. It’ll be like this until a little after eleven,” Susan said.