Backfire fst-16

by Catherine Coulter

  Again, Emma looked thoughtful. “That wouldn’t be good. Sean couldn’t work three jobs to support his wives if he went to jail.”

  A nurse appeared in the doorway beside Molly. “Judge Hunt, are you ready for your trip to your very own private corner room? It’s the same room the president would be given if something happened to him in San Francisco. It even has Monet reproductions on one of the walls. There’ll be room for half a dozen guards to buzz around you.” She frowned at him, seeing that he was in pain and guessing he hadn’t used the morphine pump recently. Then she sighed. She understood why. She smiled at Emma. “Your daddy’s so buff and strong he’ll be better in no time, so don’t you worry.”

  “My dad’s real tough, and he’s going to have my back all my life; he told me so.”

  ICU nurse Janine Holder hadn’t cried in the hospital for a long time because it never helped, but she felt tears come to her eyes. This beautiful young girl was hovering protectively over her father, and what he’d said to her, so simple, so heartfelt—Janine swallowed and smiled. “If you’re ready, Judge Hunt, I’ll call everyone in and get it done. Mrs. Hunt, you and Emma need to come with me.”

  Two days was long enough in the surgical ICU, Ramsey thought. Too much beeping and clanging and buzzing all day and night. At least he hadn’t heard any flatline whines, hadn’t heard anyone dying. He’d have some peace and quiet now, even if there would be half a dozen guards. If he wasn’t yet ready to be released into the wild, at least he would have a more comfortable cage.

  Ramsey heard Molly say outside his cubicle, “Emma, we’ll go get some sandwiches in the cafeteria, then go to your daddy’s new room and wait for him there. Did you know Uncle Dillon and Aunt Sherlock are outside? We can say hello.”

  Ramsey wasn’t stupid—he pumped in some morphine for the move. No matter how careful everyone was, he imagined there would be jostling, and it wouldn’t be fun.

  Officer Mancusso came to stand in the doorway. “You’re not to worry, Judge Hunt. Hughes and I will be accompanying you. Nothing will happen to you, sir.”

  Ramsey could only marvel at the odd mix of pride and promise in the young officer’s voice. He realized he didn’t know his first name, and asked him.

  “It’s Jay, Judge Hunt,” Mancusso said.

  It looked like an honor guard, Sherlock thought, when they finally got the bed wheeling down the hall toward the east elevators. Officer Eddie Hughes was on one side of the bed and Officer Jay Mancusso on the other side. Eve and fifteen-year-veteran Deputy Marshal Allen Milton walked at the head of the bed, and a muscular orderly with a big Fu Manchu mustache steered and kept an eye on the IVs dangling from the headboard and the chest tube pinned to the sheets. Ramsey had tried to smile at them as they wheeled him by.

  Sherlock saw Ramsey’s face was white with pain. At least Molly and Emma weren’t here to see him. But Ramsey would live, and they would catch his shooter. She wondered how she’d be holding up if Dillon had been the one shot and nearly killed. She gave him a fast kiss.

  Savich, Sherlock, and Harry got in the back of the line behind Ramsey’s bed. Eve stood beside him, her hand resting lightly on his arm. She leaned over for a moment to say something to him and her ponytail swung down to lie against her face. Sherlock smiled. After the interview with Milo Siles, Dillon had told her, “I learn something new every single day. Do you know there appears to be power in the ponytail?” And he’d grinned like a bandit.

  When they reached the elevator, they looked up and down the now-empty hospital corridor. They watched the doors open, and five people squeezed into the elevator around the bed. The doors closed behind them.

  An SFPD officer waited with them for the other elevator, which seemed to be tied up on the seventh floor, while yet another deputy marshal used the stairs. They stood quietly, watching the arrow of Ramsey’s elevator leave the fourth floor and hover at the fifth floor.

  They heard a loud clanging noise and the sound of muffled gunfire.

  Savich ran to the stairs door, yelling over his shoulder, “Sherlock, Harry! Find out where the shooter got access to the elevator! Get him!”

  When he burst out of the stairwell door onto the fifth floor, he was greeted with the yells of hospital staff and the screams and shouts of patients standing at the doors of their rooms, staring at smoke seeping out between the closed elevator doors. Half a dozen hospital personnel were trying to pull the elevator doors open, but no luck. Savich ran to the fire extinguisher case and pulled out the ax. He shouldered through and slipped the edge between the doors and pulled down across the safety beam. The doors sprang open.

  Thick black smoke billowed out. When it was cleared enough to see inside, Savich saw blood spattered everywhere.

  San Francisco General Hospital

  Fifth floor

  A shout came out of the chaos. “The shooter’s on the roof of the elevator! Officers down!” Officer Eddie Hughes stumbled out, panting and coughing, holding his bloody arm and trying to keep Deputy Marshal Allen Milton upright, blinded by the blood streaming down his face. Both men still had their guns in their hands.

  SFPD officer Jay Mancusso staggered out, his Glock at his side, his eyes tearing from the smoke, coughing. He wheezed out, “He threw a smoke bomb down through the top of the elevator and opened fire. Barbieri, she’s with Judge Hunt. I don’t know—” And he bent over in a fit of coughing. At least he hadn’t been shot that Savich could see.

  The orderly was trying to pull himself up, blood soaking his white pants.

  All of it had happened in seconds.

  Savich was coughing, fighting to see through the gray haze of smoke still clouding the elevator. A frantic voice came through the chaos, “Judge Hunt! How is Judge Hunt?”

  Savich managed to push his way in, and his heart stopped. Eve was lying stretched out on top of Ramsey, and she wasn’t moving. He was afraid to touch her. “Eve? Answer me!”

  Slowly, Eve raised herself off of Ramsey. She was in pain, obvious to Savich, but he didn’t see any blood. She turned to look at the myriad faces staring down at her, then settled again on Savich’s face. He helped her slide off the bed. She stumbled, and he helped her right herself. “Sorry, the bullets knocked me silly. I’m okay.” She pulled away from him and looked down at Ramsey’s white face. “Ramsey—talk to me.”

  He opened his eyes. “Hi, Eve.”

  “Are you all right?”

  A doctor and a nurse squeezed into the elevator beside them and eased them aside to tend to Ramsey. “Yes, I’ll live.” He coughed and moaned. “All the smoke and gunfire. How is everyone else? How are you, Eve?”

  “I’ll live, too. He shot me three times in my back, missed my head, thank goodness, or I’d be a goner. The impact knocked the breath out of me, that’s all.” She gave a wild grin, even though she felt like she’d been whacked by a two-by-four too many times. “Thank the good Lord for Kevlar.”

  A doctor tapped Eve on the shoulder. Ramsey gave her hand a squeeze, and reluctantly, Eve released his. They wheeled him out of the elevator. He said to all of them, “I’ll be all right, don’t worry about me.” Three doctors, including Dr. Kardak, panting from running from surgery to get here, hovered over him as they wheeled his bed down the hall, two SFPD officers and one deputy marshal flanking them.

  They heard Ramsey say, “You’d be wheeling me down to the morgue in the basement if not for Eve. I’m going to kick her butt for taking such a chance.”

  Eve waved into the elevator car. “It looks like a war zone in here.” She pointed up, nearly groaning at the pain in her back. “Would you look at the ceiling? Our guys shot the crap out of it. They fired nonstop, but I don’t know if we hit him.”

  She closed her eyes. It had looked like the end, but no one was dead. She sent a prayer of thanks upward. “Please tell me you got this idiot.”

  Savich said, “Sherlock and Harry are on it; they’ll be here soon.”

  Harry Christoff gently picked up an elderly man by his elbows a
nd set him aside. He shoved two police officers out of his way and stood in front of Eve, panting from running down three flights of stairs. He took in her tearing eyes, her blond straggling ponytail, her smoke-blackened face. “Good grief, woman, look at you. You’re all right, aren’t you?” He saw that she was hunched over and touched her arm.

  Eve smiled at him. “I’m okay, thanks to the miracle of Kevlar. We all survived.”

  Sherlock burst out of the stairwell, panting.

  Savich said immediately, “Ramsey’s okay. Everyone’s alive. Is he still inside the building?”

  She started toward Eve, but Eve said quickly, “I’m in one piece. Did you get the guy?”

  Sherlock ignored the god-awful mayhem in front of her and forced herself to calm. “He made it out of the elevator shaft. We started a search, but we can’t lock down the whole hospital. He’s probably out on the street by now.”

  “How could he have pulled this off?” Eve asked.

  Sherlock said, “Okay, he had to case out the elevators and hang out close enough to the ICU to find out when Ramsey was going to be moved. It looks like the shooter called both of the east elevators to the roof. There’s an access hatch up there for servicing. He immobilized one of them and settled himself on top of the working elevator when it was called down. He loosened the ceiling hatch and waited. We don’t know how long he was up there, but he must have cut this pretty close, otherwise someone would have called for service on the immobilized elevator, and he didn’t want that.”

  “But how did he know?” Eve smacked the side of her head. “Am I an idiot or what? I’ll bet even the dishwashers in the cafeteria kitchen knew when Ramsey was being moved.”

  Sherlock said, “It’s even better than that. He didn’t even have to look in. The shaft acoustics are incredible, so he could hear Ramsey being pushed into the car, got himself set. The moment the car started up, he shoved the hatch aside, dropped the smoke canister in, and started firing. He couldn’t see any better than you guys could through all the smoke, but he must have seen where Ramsey’s bed was, focused his fire there. Eve, what happened inside?”

  Eve tried to straighten, but a jab of pain punched her ribs. She felt Harry’s hand tighten on her arm. She said, “I didn’t think; I threw myself on top of Ramsey, and right away three shots hit me in the back—in the blessed Kevlar. He kept firing, but our guys were firing back, so his shots were pretty wild. Whatever he hit was random after that. I’ll tell you my heart nearly stopped while I was lying there, thinking of how helpless Ramsey was.” She paused for a moment. “You know, I’m betting the shooter thinks he killed Ramsey.”

  Sherlock stared at the blood splattered on the elevator walls, stared at Eve and at Harry standing behind her. She knew that three close-range shots in the back, even through Kevlar, would make you feel like you’d been beaten with a baseball bat. “If you hadn’t been wearing the vests, he’d have killed all of you.” She felt such rage she was shaking with it.

  Sherlock asked Officer Mancusso, “What about Hughes and Milton? How badly are they hit?”

  Officer Jay Mancusso said, “Deputy Milton’s head wound looked bad, but they always do. I heard one of the doctors say it was only a scalp wound, though. Eddie Hughes—he got it in the arm, through and through. The orderly who got shot in the leg went right off to the ER.”

  A nurse, still looking on, called out, “Doug was pressing on his leg wound himself. You’d better believe he was hollering for the trauma team. He’ll be all right.”

  Jay said, “Both Eddie and I got two shots in the Kevlar, but we’re okay. We didn’t get hammered like Deputy Barbieri.”

  Savich said, “Eve, tell us what else you remember.”

  “Jumping on Ramsey, covering him as best I could, screaming at the orderly to take cover. There was so much gunfire after a second or two, most of it from our guys, shooting wildly upward through the thick smoke, and then there wasn’t any more return fire. The shooter was gone.”

  Sherlock patted her arm. “Yeah, he got out, but guess what? I’ve got some good news I haven’t told you—one of you wounded him. I saw some blood drops on the top of the elevator car, bloody handprints on the shaft ladder, and a couple of drops on the roof and in the stairway. Then he must have managed to get himself bandaged enough so he didn’t spill anymore. That means we can spot him on the security cameras, see how badly he’s hurt, but best of all, we’ll have his DNA.” She cocked her head to one side. “Or Sue’s DNA.”

  “Excellent,” Savich said. “At last we’ve got a break.”

  Harry cupped his elbow around Eve’s arm and said without looking at her, “You think you got any broken ribs?”

  “They feel like they’re in splinters. Don’t worry, I’ll get it checked out.” She knew she wouldn’t be up for smelling the roses for the next couple of days. Bruises would cover her back. She prayed no ribs were cracked. She wondered who’d managed to nail the shooter. DNA. Dillon was right, at last they’d caught a break.

  The last people Eve wanted to see here came running up in the next moment. She walked toward them, away from the elevator, and said quickly, “Emma, Molly, Ramsey’s all right. The doctors took him back to his new room. He wasn’t hurt, I swear. He’s okay.”

  Emma clung to her mother and swallowed, but she couldn’t stop shaking. Neither could Molly. Emma stared at Eve and the drifting dirty smoke, and then she looked toward the elevator. “How can everything be okay, Aunt Eve? I can see the blood.”

  “I’m not lying to you, Emma.”

  Emma still stared into the bloody elevator.

  One very old man called out from a doorway, “Is Judge Dredd dead?”

  Emma turned on him. “Don’t you say such a thing! My daddy’s fine.”

  Eve said, “Some people were hurt, Emma, but not your dad. I promise.”

  They looked up to see Dr. Kardak walking toward them. He said, more to Emma and Molly than to them, “Judge Hunt is well. We’re all a little shaken, but we’ve checked him out thoroughly, and he wasn’t injured. We’re settling him in his new room.” He gestured toward Molly. “I suggest, Mrs. Hunt, that you and Emma stay here a while longer before you come back.

  “As for you, Deputy Barbieri, I understand you were injured. You need to come with me.”

  Once they stood in an empty hospital room, Dr. Kardak said to Eve, “Take off the vest, Deputy Barbieri. Let’s see the damage.”

  When Eve and Dr. Kardak came out a few minutes later, three pairs of eyes fastened on them. The doctor said, “She won’t be having much fun for a couple of days; there’s going to be a lot of bruising from the impacts. I didn’t feel any cracked ribs, and that’s good. We’re going to get an X-ray to be sure.” He pulled a pad out of his coat pocket and wrote a pain prescription for her. A nurse trotted over and handed her a pill. “Take this, it’ll help.” She closed her hand over Eve’s wrist. “Thank you for saving Judge Hunt.”

  San Francisco General Hospital

  Hospital security chief Ron Martinez walked into the small security office off the hospital lobby, where Savich, Sherlock, Harry, and Eve sat in folding chairs waiting for him. He loaded a disk into the office computer and almost immediately paused it and pointed. “We think this is our guy, based on when and where he left, but we can’t be sure. I had the tech start this at the beginning, where we think he came in, because, unfortunately, that’s most of what we got. He walks straight to the two elevators on the right, no hesitation, like he knows exactly where he’s going. Less attention from anyone at the reception desk that way.”

  Martinez reversed the disk and paused it where the camera got a close-up.

  They stared at a man of indeterminate age wearing loose pants, sneakers, a loose navy Windbreaker, dark sunglasses, and a Giants ball cap.

  “Bingo,” Harry said. “He fits the description of the guy we’ve been looking for.”

  “He’s well disguised,” Eve said. “He knows you’re getting him on film. He’s not even trying to avo
id the cameras, and I’ll bet he knows where every one of them is. He looks middle-aged to me. What do you think?”

  “Maybe older,” Harry said. “Thin, maybe about five-foot-nine. I can’t see his face or his hair with the sunglasses and the pulled-down cap, but we get a glimpse there of part of his neck—does his neck look saggy to anyone?”

  “An elderly assassin?” Martinez’s eyebrow shot up.

  Savich said quietly, “Listen, it might even be a woman.”

  Martinez’s other thick black eyebrow shot up. “A woman? In a shoot-out like that?”

  Savich said, “Since we’ve got DNA, we’ll soon know everything about him or her, including the time of birth. That is, if he’s in the system.”

  “Or about Sue,” Eve said.

  Chief Martinez pressed the play button again. “Sorry, guys, but we don’t have cameras on the roof of the hospital where he accessed the elevators.” He fast-forwarded. “The next time we have him on camera, he’s exiting the west stairwell into the lobby and waltzing out of the hospital. This is within a couple of minutes of the shooting.” A new camera angle showed the shooter walking quickly out of one of the hospital entrances on the west side.

  “But look at this. He’s holding his arm. That’s got to be where they hit him.”

  Sherlock said, “Yes, and the Windbreaker covers any blood.”

  Chief Martinez told them the security people, SFPD officers, and deputy marshals were showing hard copies of the photos of the shooter to everyone who might have seen him, questioning the garage attendants, even people on the street. It was plain to see no one held out much hope of that happening, but on the other hand, it was worth a try.

  They left Martinez singing a happier tune about what the DNA might show, and all returned to Ramsey’s room. They passed a deputy marshal and an SFPD officer sitting on each side of the door, talking about Deputy Marshal Allen Milton’s head wound. “The bullet slicked along the side of his head. Allen’s blaming his head, said if it wasn’t so big he could have tucked it inside his vest where it belonged.”