The Cage (5 page)

She instinctively tried to roll toward the weapon, but an arm pulled her back under the cot. A hand slipped over her throat and squeezed. She felt her airway constrict and the gag reflex take over.

Her eyes watered, and her brain cried out for oxy-gen. She felt small and afraid. The light began to shrink away.

Then the killer’s grip loosened, and he pulled her close to his face. He smelled her hair and said, “I’ve missed you, Jennifer. You never responded to my letters.”

Her voice came in a raspy whisper. “I had nothing to say to you.”

“Oh, my dear, we both know that’s not true. Either way, thanks for busting me out.”

“You’ll never get through all the security checkpoints. Bert will stop you.”

Ackerman leaned forward. The light from the outside corridor illuminated a portion of his face, but the other half remained cloaked in shadow. He smiled. “Bert? Not ‘the guard’? Or ‘Officer Bert’? Just plain ‘Bert’? It sounds to me as if you have a personal connection with this guard, which means that I won’t have any problems getting past good old Bert.”

Jennifer’s whole body trembled as she felt the kiss of the revolver’s barrel against the small of her back. Ackerman gently persuaded her forward and down the hall by applying pressure with the gun. She knew that if she tried to warn Bert or slip Ackerman’s grasp, the killer could easily shoot her through the spine. He crouched behind her white doctor’s coat, its folds hiding him from the camera. But she knew that this tactic would only get him so far, and if Bert was paying close enough attention, he would spot the killer.

She prayed that Bert could stop him; otherwise, she had basically given him the keys to the kingdom by opening his cell and leaving the security door and the control room open. Now only one checkpoint and one guard stood between Ackerman and the main building of the hospital. Cedar Mill was a psychiatric facility, but the majority of its patients were there of their own free will. Ackerman couldn’t just walk out the front door, but it was nowhere near as secure as a prison, especially since he had already donned the uniform of one of the guards from the control room.

With a trembling hand, she pushed the call button and could tell from Bert’s voice that he had not seen the killer behind her.

As Bert caught a glimpse of Dr. Kelly approaching from down the hallway, he switched off the portable DVD player he had been using to watch a movie and placed his bag of veggie straws beneath the table. His girlfriend, Marla, had him on a strict diet to lose some weight—she said that she was concerned about his health, but he suspected it was more from embarrassment. The veggie straws had been the closest thing to potato chips that he could find.

After brushing the crumbs from his chest, he looked up to see that Dr. Kelly had reached the security door. She pushed the call button and asked to be allowed inside. He pushed the button for his mic and said, “Did you forget your coffee, Doc?”

Her face filled with a strange expression, a mixture of confusion and something else that he couldn’t identify. After a second, she tensed and said, “Yeah, I left an extra for the guys.”

Bert wondered why Jennifer seemed so distracted, but it wasn’t his place to ask. After all, she was the shrink, not him. He pressed the button to buzz her through.

He turned toward the bulletproof plate separating him from the containment hallway but jumped back when Jennifer flew forward and smashed face-first against the glass. With a movement born from his training, Bert’s hand snapped out for the alarm button.

But before he could reach the control, he saw the killer standing behind Jennifer with a gun.

“If you touch that button, she dies,” Ackerman said.

Bert felt trapped in a place between action and in-action. His training told him to never give in to the demands of a hostage taker, but Jennifer’s tear-streaked face told him something else entirely. His hand shrank back from the button. Not giving in looked great on paper in a classroom, but it didn’t seem to hold true when staring into the eyes of a friend whose life was on the line.

“Good . . . Bert.”

His heart seemed to stop. How did Ackerman know his name? His extremities shook uncontrollably, and he felt like a little boy staring into the eyes of the boogeyman.

“Now, I want you to open the door to this security station.”

Bert’s arms tingled, and he wondered if this was the beginning of a heart attack or stroke. Maybe Marla really was right about his health, or maybe the thought of being up close and personal with Ackerman would be enough to give anyone a coronary.

“Open the door, Bert!”

The situation seemed to have shifted drastically. He couldn’t open the door. He not only had Jennifer’s life to be concerned with, but also his own, and he suspected that if he opened the door, they would both die.

“I can’t do that,” he said.

He expected Ackerman to scream at him. He expected the killer to fill with rage at his refusal. But what the killer did was even more frightening.

Ackerman’s face shifted from threatening to a state somewhere below calm and became almost friendly. The killer looked deep into Bert’s eyes. “Have you ever heard of the rule of ten thousand?”

Bert searched his memory, but the question must have been rhetorical since the killer continued without an answer. For some reason, Bert always had problems identifying rhetorical questions.

“The rule of ten thousand claims that it takes around ten thousand hours to become an expert at anything. This applies to skills like learning a foreign language or becoming an excellent piano player. Over the course of my life, I’ve become an expert in many things. When I was a boy, my father kept me locked away in a dark little room, subjecting me to all sorts of experiments, both physical and psychological. He kept me there for over two years of my life. That means I’ve become an expert in pain almost twice over. Think for a moment, Bert, about all the ways that I could demonstrate my expertise on Dr. Kelly.”

The tingling in his arms had grown worse, and Bert was unable to think or reason clearly. He remained transfixed by the killer and frozen with indecision.

“Maybe a small demonstration is in order.”

The killer shoved Dr. Kelly’s left hand flat against the bulletproof glass, placed the gun’s barrel over her pinky finger, and pulled the trigger.

David cracked open the door to Jennifer’s office and called her name. He hoped that she had cooled down enough to talk about whatever it was that was bothering her. Anger over her comments had taken root for a while, but it soon faded. This wasn’t the first time that Jennifer had blown up, and if they continued their lives together, it wouldn’t be the last. She usually just needed some time to calm down and gather her thoughts, and then she’d apologize. Or at the very least, she’d pretend as if it never happened, which suit-ed him fine.

“Jennifer?”

He had already called down to the front gate to see if she had left the hospital grounds to return home, and he knew that she wouldn’t be seeing any patients at such a late hour. She should be back at any moment.

He walked farther into the room and noticed the picture of her family sitting on her desk. He picked it up and examined their faces, noting the resemblance between Jennifer and her mother. To anyone who didn’t know the full story, it wouldn’t seem out of place among the framed diplomas and awards that adorned the walls. But he did know the full story, and he wondered if Jennifer kept the photograph there as a reminder of the pain of her family’s deaths. He sometimes suspected that Jennifer couldn’t let their deaths go because she felt that she should have died with them that night, some kind of survivor’s guilt. But he was no shrink.

He set the photo down and sat in Jennifer’s chair, reclining back and running his hands over his close-cropped hair. The exotic floral scent to which Jennifer was partial surrounded him and gave rise to pleasant memories of the nights they spent together.

Then his thoughts shifted to his soon-to-be ex-wife and how he had told Jennifer that she was cheating on him while he served in Iraq. It was the truth, but not the whole truth. He neglected to mention his drug problem prior to shipping out and how he had pushed his wife away.

His hand strayed to his pocket and pulled free the ring that he had been carrying around for the past few weeks. It had been his mother’s wedding ring, and he had inherited it after she died when he was seventeen. He had considered giving it to his first wife, but even before they were married, he had doubts. It somehow didn’t feel right giving her his mother’s ring. He wondered if that was why his marriage had failed, because he never truly gave himself to it. He always kept a part of himself locked away somewhere in a drawer.

He vowed not to make the same mistake with Jennifer, and he carried the ring in his pocket as a reminder that things were about to get better. Jennifer had yet to meet his daughter—he didn’t want to intro-duce them until the divorce was final—but as long as there were no complications on that front, he planned to propose within six months, if he could wait that long. He knew a good thing when he found it, and he wasn’t about to let Jennifer slip away.

Rain drizzled down the window, the drops tracing lines across the glass. The somber dance captivated him for a moment. Then he stood and was about to go back to his own office when he noticed a note on Jennifer’s desk with his name on it.

His eyes fell closed, and he tried to convince himself to ignore the letter. He couldn’t imagine any reason that she would write him a note—any reason with a positive outcome, anyway.

But curiosity got the better of him, and he snatched it up and read the words. Then, letting the note fall to the floor, he sprinted in the direction of the Iron Circle.

Jennifer’s scream echoed through the secure chamber. The pain exploded outward from her hand and up her arm. She had never experienced such agony, and her mind couldn’t process all of the information her nerves were sending. The smell of gunpowder fresh in her nostrils and her ears still ringing from the blast, she clutched the ruined hand to her chest and tried to will the pain away.

After what felt like minutes but was likely only a few seconds, she regained her senses enough to try to warn Bert not to open the door. But she was too late. The door to the security station clicked open, and Ackerman immediately pushed his way inside. The killer tossed her against the station’s far wall. She slammed into a small filing cabinet. Her weight pushed it over, and a stack of papers resting on top exploded across the floor. She rolled away and crumpled into a heap against a large metal ventilation grate on the wall.