by Tom Hunt
“Listen, I’m not abandoning my wife. So drop it.”
He stood up from the table. Paced. Shook his head.
“Please, just—”
“Shut the hell up,” Ross said. “Be quiet. I need to think.”
* * *
• • •
The room was silent for a long time. Ross continued to pace around the room, past the rows of shelves. Occasionally, he would spray some paint into the paper bag and deeply inhale. His chin and cheeks were smudged with dried red spray paint. The few times she tried to say something, Ross cut her off with a wave of his hand.
“Think I got an idea,” Ross said, his voice cutting through the silence in the room. He stared at Karen. “This hospital Amber’s at, you work there, you said. Right?”
Karen nodded.
“You know the layout, all that stuff?”
“Mostly, yes.”
“Okay, so here’s what’s gonna happen,” Ross said. “I want you to go there and break Amber out of her room. Help her escape from the hospital.”
“What?”
“You go to the hospital. Use your ID badge to access the doors, everything like that. You help her escape from her room, bring her back here, and me and her will leave.”
Karen felt like rolling her eyes. Or sighing. There was so much stupidity in Ross’s idea, she didn’t even know where to begin.
“That’d be impossible,” she said.
“Why?”
“There are a million reasons. I can’t just walk into her room undetected. The bay she’s in is small. People will see me. And there are security cameras everywhere. I mean everywhere.”
“So wear a disguise. One of those masks that doctors wear, put one of those over your face.”
“It’s not that easy. She’s probably handcuffed to the bed. Good chance that a security guard or even a police officer is watching her room. She might not even be strong enough to walk. I’m telling you, it’d be impossible to get into her room and leave with her.”
“There’s gotta be a way.”
“There isn’t.”
“Well, figure something out.”
“Take the car and leave. That’s the only way to end this. You can—”
“No, dammit!” Ross yelled. Some spittle flew from his mouth. He sprayed some paint into the bag and took another pull. He glared down at Karen.
“Listen to me. You ain’t calling the shots around here,” he said. “I am.”
He pulled the gun from the waistband of his pants. Karen’s heart jumped in her chest.
“Okay, okay. Just calm down.”
“You don’t think I’m serious, is that it?” Ross said.
“No, no, I don’t—”
“You think I’m a punk?”
“No. Just calm down and—”
He lifted the gun and pointed it at Joshua. The muscles in his forearms were tight, like coiled hemp ropes. His grip was steady and firm holding the gun, only a slight tremble.
Joshua closed his eyes. Every muscle in Karen’s body froze.
“No, please!” she screamed.
“I’m no punk,” Ross said. “I’m not messing around here.”
Karen opened her mouth to scream, but she was too late. With the gun pointed at Joshua, Ross pulled the trigger. A gunshot like a cannon blast exploded from the barrel.
TWELVE
The sudden, sharp crack of the gunshot made Karen jump in her seat. Her ears rang. Her head spun.
And then she saw Joshua. His eyes were closed, jaw clenched, and he was bracing himself in the chair. Just behind him, a bullet hole had been ripped in the wall.
The smell of gunpowder filled the room. Ross stood in front of Joshua, the gun still extended. He slowly turned his head toward Karen. Nothing but clear, lucid intensity in his eyes, like he was a completely different person.
“Six inches,” he said. “I aim six inches lower, and there’d be a big, big mess to clean up.”
Karen was silent. Her ears continued to ring. The paralyzing fear that gripped her after the gunshot still lingered. For a brief, horrifying second, she’d truly thought Joshua had been shot, right in front of her.
“You’re right, you know,” Ross said, eyes never leaving Karen. “I’m scared as shit. All I want to do is get the hell out of here. But I’m not leaving alone. Amber is all that matters to me. Whatever it takes, I’m getting her back.”
He lowered the gun.
“Next time I shoot, I’m not missing,” he said. “So lemme ask the question again: You gonna break my wife out or not?”
“Yes,” she said. The word was barely audible. She cleared her throat. “I will.”
“Good. How you gonna do it? What’s your plan?”
“I don’t know,” she said. She could barely think straight. “I need some time.”
“Fine. Think. Have an answer when I get back.”
Ross left the room. Karen’s entire body was shaking. Her heart had stopped beating in the moments after the gunshot, but it was roaring now, hammering away.
She looked over at Joshua. He’d finally opened his eyes. His lips were drawn, his expression distant, dazed.
“Are you all right?” she said.
Joshua nodded. But he didn’t look all right.
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “Just calm down. Take a few breaths.”
She took her own advice, but the breaths did nothing to calm her.
* * *
• • •
She thought.
Her mind was so disoriented, it was difficult even to picture the place where she’d worked for the past decade. She couldn’t recall the layout of the floor, the surrounding area, anything. But she concentrated. Thought about the endless precautions in place to protect patients, to keep them safe. She tried to think of any way she could bypass all of that and break Amber out of the hospital without being seen.
Eventually, she had something. A seed, then an idea, then a plan.
There was a chance it might succeed. Probably an even better chance it would fail. A million things could go wrong. It was a risk—but not doing anything was an even greater risk.
* * *
• • •
“You got an answer?”
Ross stared at Karen. He stood at the edge of the room, slouching against the doorframe, the can of spray paint in his hand.
“Well? You got a plan or not?”
Karen nodded. “I think so.”
“What is it?”
For the next few minutes, she spoke in a quiet, calm voice as she told Ross her plan to break Amber out of the hospital.
“You think this’ll work?” Ross asked when she finished.
“It could. If everything happens like I hope, it might.”
He nodded. “Okay. Let’s go, then.”
“It has to happen later. At noon.”
“Later? Why?”
“She’s being taken in for tests at noon. That’s what they told me earlier. That’s my chance to break her out.”
He looked at the clock on the wall. Just after nine thirty a.m.
“I’ll help you,” Karen said. “I’ll do everything I can to break her out. But I want you to do me a favor. I want you to let my son go.”
“No.”
“Please. I just want him to be safe. I want you to let him go.”
“So he can run to the cops? Tell them everything? Hell no. He’s staying right here.”
“He won’t go to the police. Please. Do this for me.”
“No chance,” Ross said.
And he left the room.
* * *
• • •
Karen and Joshua sat in their chairs, not speaking, not moving. It was like the events from the morning were just too much to handle and they
couldn’t do anything until they shut down and let their bodies decompress.
Joshua looked so gloomy and defeated. His face was pasty and colorless, looked like he was about to get sick. She imagined she probably looked the same.
“Doing all right, J-Bird?” she asked.
He did something with his head that wasn’t really a nod, wasn’t really a shake.
“We’ll be fine,” she said. “No need to worry.”
He didn’t respond. She didn’t expect him to. The words didn’t even sound convincing to her.
“Your plan,” he said. “Your plan to break the woman out. You think it will work?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if it doesn’t?”
“Same answer. I don’t know.” She shook her head. “I don’t even want to think about that.”
The room faded back to silence. She blankly looked at the shelves surrounding her. This room always brought a smile to her face, coming in here and looking at Joshua’s things. There was a little bit of everything in the room. A milk crate overflowing with his old G.I. Joe toys, shoeboxes crammed with baseball cards, Tupperware containers full of Legos. One shelf held a stack of books—sports biographies, those Hardy Boys books he used to read, a few books about prepping for college entry exams. Balanced against the edge of the shelves was a set of plastic Fisher-Price golf clubs.
Every shelf held a memory, but looking at it all brought no smile now. It was mind-blowing that so much could happen in a single morning. And the morning wasn’t even over. She could only imagine what surprises were in store for later. Space aliens landing in their front lawn, maybe.
And to think, this had all started because of a car accident. Out in the middle of the forest.
“The accident,” she said to Joshua. “Tell me about the accident and everything that happened after.”
“I already told you about it.”
“There has to be more to it. I still don’t understand why you didn’t go to the police. Were you up to something you shouldn’t have been?”
“No. We were just hitting golf balls. I don’t know. . . . When it happened, everything was so frantic. It was like a million things were happening at once. The guy was screaming at me, at Dad. Then he was shoving us, and he was so strong and powerful. The next thing I knew, he had Dad pinned to the ground. I really thought he might kill him. And then I saw the rock on the ground. About the size of a baseball. I grabbed it and smashed it against the guy’s head. The guy dropped to the ground. When I saw he wasn’t breathing or moving, I went over and started pounding his chest. Trying to bring him back. But he was dead.”
He shook his head.
“And then it was like I hit a wall. I couldn’t move or think. It was like I wasn’t even there. We stood in silence for a long time; then Dad started talking. Said he didn’t think we should go to the police. Kept talking about that case from a few years ago, said he didn’t want that to be me. Going to the police wouldn’t bring the guy back to life. He kept saying that. All it would do was maybe get me in big trouble. And . . . I don’t know. . . . I was so blown away that I agreed. I wasn’t thinking right; maybe he wasn’t, either. It was just so much happening at once. And we were so far out there. The body probably won’t be found for days, weeks even.
“Then the next day came. And I really thought about going to the police. I felt terrible. But it seemed like it was too late to go to the police at that point. Like I really would be in trouble if I went to them a day later and told them we left the body out there.”
“Do you know who this person was?” she said. “Do you know why he was all the way out there?”
“I have no idea. It’s weird. This time of year, there’s never anyone in the forest. No clue why he would’ve been there.”
“Were you going to say anything to me?”
“Probably, yeah. At some point. I don’t know.”
Joshua went silent and blankly stared off some more. She was angry at him—and Teddy; she had so many questions for him—but she couldn’t let her emotion get the best of her. She had to focus on their current situation. That was all that mattered now.
She turned back to the shelves and stared at all the toys and assorted items. She tried to focus on the happy memories that each item held, those bright moments of Joshua’s life, but she couldn’t concentrate at all, not when she had so many questions about what would happen next.
THIRTEEN
Amber’s head was floating from whatever drugs they’d given her. She’d drifted in and out of sleep for the past few hours (hours? days? how long had it been?), able to recall only bits and pieces from everything that had happened since she was shot. She remembered being taken into the ER, remembered a few meetings with nurses and doctors after surgery, remembered being told that they expected her to survive the injury.
There’d also been a visit from a police detective. That had been the shocker of the day. Thinnish, middle-aged guy. He told her that he searched the car she arrived in and found the backpack full of money. Found the Star Wars masks, too. Those stupid masks. Shane had thought it’d be so funny to wear them for the robbery, but now those masks had made it easy to link them to the robbery in Nebraska.
The detective asked her questions. Questions about the bank robbery, questions about the people who’d helped her, nonstop questions, one after another. She hadn’t answered them, partially because she was so groggy from the medication, partially because she was still in shock from everything that had happened.
Right before he left, the detective said something to her that she’d been thinking about constantly: fifteen to twenty years. That’s what she was looking at for armed robbery.
She slowly moved her head and looked down at her wrist. She was handcuffed to one of the rails on the bed. First time she’d ever been handcuffed in her life. Staring down at the handcuffs, she almost started crying but caught herself before the tears came.
She wanted Ross. She felt so alone without him, here in this cold, empty room. Why had they ever left Nebraska? In retrospect, it was such a foolish idea. Their life in Nebraska might not have been perfect, but at least they’d had each other. Screw over Shane, take the money, and just start a new life—how had she not realized how ludicrous and poorly thought out that plan was? Predictably, it had ended in disaster.
She was shot.
She had no idea where Ross was.
The money was gone.
She was looking at twenty years in jail.
Suddenly, the tears broke through. Hot, streaming tears rolled down her cheeks. She cried because of the hopelessness. She cried because of the sad, lonely room around her. But more than anything, she cried because she missed Ross.
She just wanted him by her side.
* * *
An hour passed. Karen and Joshua mostly sat in silence. She was alternately wired and exhausted. She’d closed her eyes a few times but she knew there was no way she would sleep. It was incredible how quickly all of this had happened. Just last night, she’d been finishing up dinner with Joshua, still on a high from his college acceptance. She’d been looking forward to a weekend doing nothing. And now, here she was. Tied up. A prisoner in her own home. About to break a patient out of the hospital.
She wondered if someone might try to reach her this morning, get suspicious when she didn’t respond, maybe even come to the house to investigate. But she doubted it. It was the weekend—she wasn’t scheduled to work and Joshua didn’t have school. Neither of them had any plans. Their neighbors wouldn’t be stopping by; they mostly kept to themselves. Truthfully, she didn’t think she wanted anyone to stop by. There was no telling how Ross would react.
As they waited, Ross would walk by the room every couple of minutes and look in on them. After a while, he entered the room carrying her laptop computer. Must’ve grabbed it from her room. He set it on the table and sat dow
n.
“What’s the password?”
She told him. He entered it and clicked the trackpad, pecked away at a few keys. She could just barely see the screen. The Internet was up and an article about a bank robbery was displayed. She figured it was the robbery they were a part of.
“Well, shit,” Ross said, staring at the screen.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He closed the computer.
“Can we check our phones?” she asked. “See if anyone is trying to contact us.”
“No.”
“Someone might be trying to call and—”
“You’re not checking your phones. So shut the hell up.”
Ross left the room. There was more sitting, more waiting, more silence.
Half an hour later, Ross returned to the room carrying one of her kitchen knives.
“Almost time, right?” he said.
She nodded. Ross cut through the zip ties securing her wrists to the chair arms. Blood rushed to her hands the moment she was free, her fingers tingling with a low pain. He cut the zip ties around her ankles. Same tingling feeling in her feet.
“You ready?” Ross said.
She almost laughed. Of course she wasn’t ready. How could she be ready for this, for any of it? She wasn’t even at the hospital yet, and already she was nervous. Deep in her stomach, she felt raw, fluttering panic, like a bird trapped in a cage.
“Same plan you talked about before?” Ross asked. “Nothing’s changed?”
“Same plan.”
“Okay. I’ll stay here. Me and the kid. You break Amber out, bring her back here, and we’ll leave. Let’s go.”
She stood up from the chair. Her knees popped like dull firecrackers. Slight cramps in her legs.
She took a few steps toward the door and stopped.
“Wait,” she said. “Can I kiss my son?”
Ross looked over at Joshua, a few feet away.
“Make it quick,” he said.