A Blind Eye (20 page)

I dashed down the hall, grabbed her hand, and dragged her away.

“He's up there,” Connor shouted.

I was rounding the corner into the surgery room when the gun fired again, the noise exploding in my ears. I slammed the door and locked it, hoping it would hold better than Dr. Wyden's.

My arm burned. I looked down. Blood soaked my shirt sleeve, just below my shoulder. Scarlett dreamed I'd die from a gunshot—in an operating room. In her dream, there were two other bodies with me. I only had Jenny, and she was still breathing. But this wasn't over yet.

Christian vs. The Center for Vision Repair

I heaved the giant exam chair up against the door to brace it shut. Then I pulled out my phone and dialed 911. A pool of blood spread across the white floor tiles.

In the hall, Connor and his friend slammed their bodies against the door.

I grabbed a stack of green surgical cloths from the counter and pressed them on Jenny's chest. She was breathing hard, moaning with every exhale.

“I got you. You're safe now,” I lied. I would help her as long as I could, until they broke through the door and killed me. Maybe someone would get here in time to save her.

“Multnomah County nine-one-one. What is your emergency?” the woman's voice on my phone said.

Pound
.
Pound
.
Pound
. The exam chair slid an inch or so, and I let go of Jenny long enough to slam it back in place.

“A girl's been shot. I need an ambulance.”

Pound
.
Pound
.

“What's your location?”

“The Center for Vision Repair. Corner of Gleason and Hawthorn.”

A siren wailed outside, and the pounding stopped. That was fast. The 911 operator said something to me. Asked me a question. I didn't hear. I let my phone drop, concentrating on Jenny. Her breathing slowed. She looked up at me. Her eyes were wide and scared, and the light that had sparked in them only a few minutes before grew dim.
Help me
, she pleaded without uttering a single word.

“It's okay. You're gonna be fine.” I brushed her hair away from her face. “The ambulance is on its way.”

She nodded weakly and closed her eyes.

Her blood soaked the knees of my jeans. I pressed even harder on the wound. More gunshots, from farther away, maybe downstairs. More sirens.

Her chest stopped moving.

“Jenny?”

She didn't respond.

“Someone help us,” I yelled. I put my fingers against her throat. Nothing.
Please help me
, I prayed. With one hand on top of the other, I placed the heels of my palms at the base of her rib cage and thrust down in quick succession. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. All the way up to thirty.

I put my mouth over hers, plugging her nose with my fingers.

Breath.

Breath.

Still nothing.
Please don't let her die.
I went back to her chest. One. Two. Three. Four.

A knock on the door. “Christian? It's Detective Parker. Open up.”

Nine. Ten. Eleven. Twelve.

“Christian,” he called again. Then he yelled to someone else. “I need help with the door.”

More pounding, hard and heavy.

Twenty-one. Twenty-two.

The chair slid back, and the door opened a few inches. Detective Parker's face appeared then disappeared. “He's in here. Get the paramedics.”

Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine. Thirty.

Breath.

Breath.

A few more heavy slams, and the chair scooted again. A man squeezed through wearing blue rubber gloves and carrying a duffle bag with a large red cross on it.

I put my hands back on her chest and pumped some more. One. Two. Three.

He skidded to the floor and laid his fingers on the side of Jenny's neck. “How long ago did her heart stop?”

Eight. Nine. Ten. “I don't know.” I had lost track of time. “Maybe a minute or two.” People were still pushing against the door.

He opened a hard-plastic case and pulled out a machine. He ripped Jenny's shirt open and placed the metal plates on her skin. He met my eyes. “Clear,” he said.

I let go and sat back on my heels. Her body twitched with the electric shock. More people came through the door. Another paramedic took my place, scooting me off to the side. He gave her a shot of something in her chest. Right into her heart.

Someone pulled on my arm. “Christian. Let's go.” I looked up. It was Detective Parker.

“Clear.” Her body jerked again.

Parker tugged me to my feet. “Come on.”

“But . . .” I couldn't take my eyes off Jenny. How could I leave her here when this was my fault?

“They'll take care of her. Let's get your arm looked at.” He pulled me from the room while the second paramedic started CPR again.

A line of red trailed down the hall, a dark smear connecting the dots of her two pools of blood. My hands were covered with it. I stumbled down the stairs, and Parker tightened his grip.

In the back of the clinic, by the emergency exit, another body lay on the ground. He had thinning, sandy-blond hair, a scar across his eye, and a white bandage on his nose. Connor. More EMT guys bent over him. They didn't seem to be working on saving him. He must already be dead.

“Did you shoot him?” I asked without taking my eyes off the lifeless body.

“Yes,” Parker said quietly.

I felt the slightest twinge of envy. “What about Deepthroat, the tall guy that's always with him?”

“We're still looking for him. Do you know his name?”

“No.”

Parker tugged me along and sat me on a gurney in the waiting room. A paramedic cut a nice, even slit up my shirtsleeve and started working on my arm, washing the wound with stinging liquid. My arm was on fire, but that was nothing compared to the pain in my chest, like the space around my heart was being filled with liquid nitrogen—burning and freezing at the same time.

I plowed my free hand through my hair and said to the detective, “This is because of me. I shouldn't have come here. This is all my fault.”

Parker shook his head. “No. It's not. Listen to me.” He waited until I looked him in the eye. “Bad people do bad things. It's not anyone else's fault. I see this all the time. Today, it happened here, to you. Tomorrow, it will be someone else. There's no one to blame except the man who pulled the trigger. Do you understand?”

I nodded. I understood what he meant—Connor made the choice to shoot his gun. But if I hadn't been here, he wouldn't have shot it at Jenny. Who then? Jay? My dad? As long as Deepthroat and the others ran free, everyone around me was in danger.

“You should put me back in jail,” I said. “For the safety of my friends.”

“Is she your friend?” He nodded his head in the direction of Jenny, up the stairs.

“No.” If a deflated balloon could speak, I imagined that was what I sounded like. Limp, empty, withered, small.

The paramedic shined a beam in my eyes, checking each eye twice.

“You were very brave to save her.” Parker patted my shoulder in a fatherly way. At least, it seemed fatherly. I wouldn't know from experience. “I need you to tell me what happened. Can you do that?”

I nodded again. Where should I start? From school? From my dad's building? I didn't want to discuss anything about my dad with Parker. “I came here to find out why Dr. Wyden's men were still after me, even though Scarlett went home.” I knew now she wasn't home. Just right back in their hands. Had Connor shot her too? No. She doesn't die by gun. She dies on an operating table.

“Did they come to your house?” he asked.

I flinched as the paramedic wrapped a roll of wide gauze around my arm and then secured it with white tape. Already, red showed through the cotton binding. I clenched the fist of my good hand, trying to squeeze away the pain. Pain that I deserved.

“They came to my school. But I got away. I climbed out the window. They followed me into the city.” Fast forward. “I heard them say something about Dr. Wyden. I called the clinic and found out she wouldn't be in today.”

The paramedic filled a syringe with liquid. He rolled up the sleeve of my right arm, the arm that hadn't taken a bullet, and scrubbed it with an alcohol wipe. “Morphine. You ready?”

I nodded. He stabbed me with the needle and squeezed the burning fluid into my arm.

“So you came here and snooped around?” Parker asked.

“I guess. Jenny, the receptionist, gave me a tour.”

“What happened in Dr. Wyden's office?” His tone suggested that I might have taken advantage of Jenny in there.

“Not that. I swear.” I pulled the creased photo out of my back pocket and handed it over. “I found this.”

He studied it for a few seconds then shrugged. “And?”

“And yesterday, a man came to get Scarlett. A guy who used to work at her school in London. He came to take her home. She's been staying with him for about three months because her mom skipped out. Turns out, it's him.” I pointed to Simon in the photo.

“What does this have to do with Dr. Wyden?”

“He's Wyden's husband.” I explained about Wyden's sightless daughter and her plans for an improved retinal implant. I told him about Katie and how I thought they kidnapped her so she would design it and that Scarlett was the next test victim. Every word that left my mouth eased the freezing burn in my chest. Now someone else, someone capable, could take the burden of figuring out Wyden's master plans.

“We've got an APB out on the other suspect, based on the description your father gave us. Do you know that man's connection to the deceased or Dr. Wyden?”

I shook my head.

“We'll search this place. Something will turn up that will lead us to him.”

The paramedic that first worked on Jenny came out from the back of the clinic carrying his defibrillator. Detective Parker questioned him about her.

He shook his head. “She didn't make it. I put her down as DOA.”

I dropped my head into my hand, covering my face. I didn't save her. I didn't save anyone. I lay down on the gurney. “Take me away. Take me away and lock me up.”

Parker waved off the paramedics. “Christian, I'm sorry about the girl. But I need you to focus. So we can find Scarlett.”

“Scarlett is dead. She already dreamed it. I thought I changed it. But I didn't. And I'm supposed to be dead too, but she dreamed it wrong, and it was Jenny.”

“How do you know Scarlett is dead?”

I sat up. “Because she dreams about people dying before it happens. Like a vision of the future. And then it comes true, just like in her dream. That's how she recognized Dr. Wyden in the first place—from her dream. She dreamed that I would get shot and die. And I did get shot, but Jenny died.”

I had laughed with Jenny and talked her into helping me go through Wyden's stuff, and look what it got her. Not a nice dinner at Andina's, that's for sure. Just bleeding out on the exam room floor.

I lay back down on the gurney and closed my eyes, waiting for them to cart me away to prison or an asylum or anyplace where this would all be over. The paramedic that had been hovering in the background covered me with a metallic blanket. “I think he's in shock,” he said to Parker.

“I'll tell his dad.”

My eyes snapped open. “My dad?”

“Yes.” He pointed out the front window to the tiny parking lot, where a man with bent shoulders paced back and forth, hunkered into a dark gray overcoat against the drizzle. A ribbon of yellow police tape separated him from the two cops standing guard. Parker, great detective that he was, must have figured out the state of my relationship with my dad. Why else would he be out in the cold instead of sitting on a comfortable leather sofa in the reception area?

“Why is
he
here?” The words spilled out like acid.

“He's here because he's your father. And because he just saved your life.”

I sat up again. “What?”

Parker obviously expected this, and his smug smile spread across his face. “After you left your father's office, the man you call Deepthroat came up and asked the receptionist about you.”

“Yeah, I overheard them talk about it.”

“Well, she told your father, and he called me, worried that you might be into something over your head.”

I glanced at my dad out of the corner of my eye.

“I accessed your call log and found the last number you dialed—the clinic. I hurried over in case they followed you.”

“I called nine-one-one. I thought that's why you came. But that would have been too fast.” It made sense now. Maybe my dad did save my life. I shook my head, not knowing how to process that information.

“They dispatched an ambulance. It was only a couple of minutes behind me. The hospital is just two blocks away.”

“Next time, can you get here a little sooner? I could have used some backup five minutes earlier.”

Parker chuckled, even though I wasn't joking. “No problem, cowboy.” He handed me my cell phone sealed in a plastic baggie. It was coated with blood—a mixture of mine and Jenny's. “Here's a question,” he said. “How did you manage to move that surgical chair? It took three of my strongest men to pull it out of the way.”

I shrugged and then winced. My arm didn't appreciate the shrugging. “I don't know. I didn't think about it; I just did it. Adrenaline, I guess.”

I shivered and wrapped the tinfoil blanket around my shoulders. My arm ached, and the throbbing pain crept up through my shoulder and neck until my head wanted to explode. My hands, still covered in blood, shook. I must've done something to my ribs trying to shove the mammoth chair against the door; it hurt to breathe.