The Clone's Mother (28 page)

Chapter 44

Schroeder’s eyes burned at me, with menace and outrage. That wild look I’d seen when we passed at the morgue was in full bloom. His hair was a mess, his clothes slept in. He looked mad. The crazy
and
furious kind.

I stared back. I was gagging on my heart, which was lodged in my throat. I had no idea what to say.

“What the hell are you doing?” he shrieked.

I stuttered and stammered, unable to come up with a good explanation for why I was entering his office just then. Some idea finally popped into my head and I blurted out, “I’m looking for Sheila.” That made no sense, but at least it was something, and perhaps he’d just think I was really stupid. More so than he already did.

“What’s this?” he said, grabbing the key from the doorknob. “Where did you get this?”

“It was there when I opened the door. How else do you think it unlocked?” I couldn’t think. The words just came out. I had to hope they’d hold water.

Oops. They didn’t. Holes everywhere.

“Where did you get this key?” he shouted again.

“Um, have you seen Sheila? I really need to talk to her.” Maybe he’d think she loaned it to me, if she even had one, and I could make him believe we were good friends now. “She said to come look up here for her.”

“Stop lying to me! You’ve crossed the last line. Your career here is finished.” He grabbed my arm, slammed the door and pocketed the extra key. He yanked me along beside him and pulled me down the corridor toward the elevator door. I wanted to scream, but nothing came out. If he’d been behind Howard’s and Charlotte’s killings, and Anna’s shooting, then he’d think nothing of eliminating me from the face of the planet.

“Let go of me.” I tried to shake him off.

He veered to the stairwell and dragged me down the steps to the first floor. From there he wound me through the hallways of the hospital, tugging me alongside him at such a quick pace I had to scramble to keep my feet under me.

“I have patients to take care of. I need to get back to my floor. I can’t abandon my patients.” I didn’t have any more, really. But he didn’t know that.

Guess my work ethic didn’t weigh heavily on his conscience. He ignored my words. When we got to the front lobby, he shoved me past the guard desk at the front entrance.

“Give up your badge,” he demanded of me. “Al,” he said to the guard, “see to it she never enters here again. Take her badge and keep her out!”

“You can’t do that,” I said.

His glare would have burned me if I hadn’t already been turned to ice with fright.

“Give Al the badge,” he demanded through clenched teeth, his fury seething.

I reluctantly tugged on it and the clip let go of my scrub jacket. Al collected it with a weary look.

Once Carl stormed away, Al said, “Sorry, ma’am. Gotta do what the boss says.”

“What about my things? I need to go back to the unit and tell my charge nurse and pick up my purse.” I couldn’t believe he had only delivered me to the door. Maybe there was still a chance to get back and find that book.

“Can’t let you do that. I’ll call up for you and arrange for someone to bring down your belongings.”

Al wouldn’t budge. He wasn’t letting me back in.

I skulked out of the hospital, defeated and depressed. I’d have to come back later for my stuff. I’d failed. And I’d lost my job—for good this time—in the process.

I had change in my pocket, maybe enough for bus fare, or a phone call to Mack. At least Carl only fired me and hadn’t killed me or anything like that. I had that to be thankful for.

On the side of the main entrance was another smoking table, hidden behind some bushes. This time of morning no one else sat there. It was too dang cold anyway. So I took a seat, wrapping my arms around myself to stay warm, and tried to process what had just happened.

I wasn’t there for more than two minutes when I saw Sheila, bundled in a fuzzy jacket, hustle from her red Mustang across the street into the hospital.

Something was going on. She certainly wouldn’t be there that early to start work, even if she had been scheduled for day shift, which I knew she hadn’t. And she wasn’t there to get a tasty, nutritious breakfast from our short-order cook in the cafeteria. Betty was still out with the flu.

Sheila had to be meeting Carl for some reason, and I was certain why.

After she’d cleared the door, I hopped up and hurried back to Al’s post. When he saw me, he looked at me with his weary gaze.

“Someone’ll bring down your belongings as soon as possible. I told your floor not to expect you back.”

Bet that went over well.

“I just saw Sheila Langley come in. Maybe she can bring them down.”

“She didn’t go up there. Said she had a meeting downstairs. Now, don’t you worry. Someone’s sure to be down shortly with your things.”

“Can I use the phone?”

“Pay phone is right over there.”

“Ah, come on, Al. I barely have money for a Coke. Just let me use your phone to call for a ride home. Please?”

After a long pause to consider, he handed me the phone, but not before looking around to see if anyone would see him showing compassion to the exiled outlaw.

“Thanks.”

I dialed up Mack, hoping Jackie wouldn’t be near the phone. It was a relief when his sleepy voice came on.

“Hello?”

“Hi, it’s me.”

“Kind of early, isn’t it?”

I turned away and crouched around the phone, pulling the cord as far as it would go, whispering so Al wouldn’t hear me.

“Something’s going on.”

“What do you mean?”

“Carl is here, and so is Sheila. I tried to get into his office, and he caught me.”

“You what? I told you I’d take care of things.”

“I think they’re doing the transfer. I’ve got to stop them.”

“Stay put. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“I don’t think there’s time.”

“Just wait for me.”

“I need to get back in, but Carl fired me and kicked me out.”

“Kate, just slow down. Don’t do anything more. It might be dangerous. I’m coming.”

“You said Carl wasn’t violent, and you were right. He just escorted me to the front desk. I’ll just interrupt or something, keep them from going ahead till you get here.”

“Why’d you try to get into his office?”

“I wanted his book, his record. Everything is in it. I want it to make him stop—”

“Kate—”

“To prove what he’s done.”

“Kate!” He sounded exasperated.

“What?”

“I have his book.”

I suddenly downshifted, screeching from sixty to a dead stop. “You what?”

“I got it this afternoon.”

Unbelievable.

“You know about his book?”

“I just found it. I told you I’d take care of things. He gave me a key a long time ago. So I used it and went snooping. I found his record book and kept it.”

“Well, uh, you could have told me.”

Completely unbelievable.

“I planned to. This is my first chance. I called you at work, but your charge nurse said you weren’t available.”

Geez Louise.

“So now what? We still ought to stop them.”

“I’m coming.” His voice jiggled like he was hopping into his pants. “Just wait there. We’ll figure something out.”

“Well, hurry up.”

“Wait for me. Bye.”

I gave the phone back to Al. “Thanks. I’ll just wait out in the fresh air—unless you’ll let me—”

He was already shaking his head, so I quit trying to persuade him to let me back in.

I gave an
it was worth a try
kind of shrug and skulked outside. I headed back toward the bench to shiver and wait for Mack, when flashing lights caught my eye.

An ambulance stopped under the emergency room canopy. The EMTs unloaded an unconscious corpulent man who was being bagged with oxygen and had several clear bags of IV fluids flowing into him through a tangle of tubes. Poor guy. But he presented just what I needed.

I showed up alongside the gurney, thankful I was in scrubs, and no one seemed to take any notice of me. They were so glad to have an extra hand maneuvering the four-hundred-pound-if-he-was-an-ounce patient that they didn’t question my sudden appearance.

Inside, I stayed close to the group, even carrying an extra IV bag for a moment to get past the security door. Once we were inside, several ER nurses converged on the purple-bloated guy and began doing all kinds of specific jobs. I needed to get out fast before someone assumed I’d know what to do. If this guy had a baby to deliver, I’d be fine. But otherwise, he was out of my element.

Just as I thought I had my chance to disappear, a scary, stern woman who had to be the head nurse of ER caught me.

“One hour of the shift left and staffing finally sends me another hand. You from ICU?” she asked.

“L&D,” I answered meekly.

“For godsakes,” she wailed. “What in the world good are you to me?”

“Sorry.”

“Here. Make yourself useful.” She slapped a syringe of potassium into my palm. “In room Five, find Vincent. He’s waiting for this to make up an IV. And don’t take all night. He’s been waiting nearly that long already.”

She dismissed me from her presence by running into the other room to follow the huge purple guy who wasn’t having a baby. I figured I was home free now, and since Vincent had already spent the shift waiting for his potassium, his patient obviously wasn’t in any dire need. So I slipped the syringe into my pocket, skipped room Five, and headed for the basement.

I thought I should look first in Mack’s lab. If Carl was using the incubators there, that’d be as good as any place to find them. Especially since Al said Sheila had gone downstairs.

I let myself into Mack’s lab. My eyes had to adjust to the darkness for a moment before I could even begin to get my bearings. The power lights on all the equipment gave an orange, eerie glow to the place. Shadows layered over darker shadows, casting images of things not there all over the room. But in spite of my vivid imagination, it appeared as though I was alone. I turned to leave and find another possible meeting place, and I noticed the closet door was outlined in light.

It was the closet I’d seen full of boxes on the JCAH tour. Strange. Why was there such a bright light behind that closet door? I groped along the wall for the switch, then turned on the lab lights. The overhead florescent tubes flickered, turned bright white, and settled into their humming.

I pulled open the door. The boxes were gone. This was no closet.

A brilliant spotlight beamed from a gooseneck exam lamp in the center of a small room, focused right on Sheila lying on a procedure table with her feet up in stirrups. Carl sat at the foot of the table, between Sheila’s knees.

Carl’s head snapped up. He sprang from his chair, catapulting the wheeled-stool across the small room behind him.

Recoiling from the oncoming attack, I jumped back and slammed the closet door shut. What was I going to do?

I had to think fast. In the split second before he burst through the door, I saw what I needed.

When the door crashed open and Carl barreled out, I backed against an incubator and held my ground.

Carl froze like an ice sculpture when he saw what I held. Then fury took over his eyes.

“Put that down,” he snarled. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a snub-nosed revolver. Then he howled, “Put that down, damn you!”

I didn’t put it down. I figured if he held a gun at me, my best chance of staying unshot was to keep under my control the very thing he wanted for himself. It was a tray littered with test tubes and petri dishes. Each was labeled with one of two words:
Zoe
or
Jack
. In my hands was the source of his children’s DNA.

I held the tray at arms-length in front of me over the hard tile floor. I inched farther away from him.

“Stay away from me, and don’t shoot me, or I’ll drop this and shatter everything,” I threatened.

We circled slowly around the island in the center of the lab, him with his gun trained on me, me with my tray of Zoe and Jack held high over the floor.

Sheila’s voice came through the door, muffled and whiny. “Carl, what’s going on? Can I get up yet?”

He yelled over his shoulder toward the closet door, “Don’t get up. Shut up and lie down.” He kept his eyes glued to me. We continued to rotate around the room.

“You have to stop this, Carl,” I said.

“Shut up,” he said. “All you’ve done is get in my way. You’re not going to anymore.”

Droplets of sweat on his forehead caught the light.

I’d step. He’d step.

We couldn’t circle like this all day. I needed to do something, to gain an advantage somehow. Getting shot was a bad option.

“I’m pregnant with Jack,” I blurted out.