Chapter 6 - BLOOD IN THE ICU
The three men spun around, their flashlights blinding me for a fraction of a second.
THWACK. THWACK.
Two silenced shots echoed through the narrow hallway. The two men holding the door breachers dropped instantly, their flashlights rolling across the linoleum floor, casting long, dramatic shadows against the walls.
The third man—a massive, scar-faced mercenary—lunged at me, tackling me against the wall. My gun flew out of my hand, skidding into the dark corridor.
We hit the floor hard. He pinned my arms, drawing a combat knife from his chest rig. The silver blade glinted under the red light of the emergency sign.
"You're old, Ghost!" he grunted, pressing the blade down toward my throat. "You should have stayed buried!"
I looked into his eyes and smiled.
It wasn't a human smile. It was the smile of a creature that had survived thirty years in the deepest, darkest depths of the criminal underworld.
I relaxed my body, letting him think he had won. As he leaned forward to drive the knife into my collarbone, I snapped my head forward, driving my forehead straight into the bridge of his nose.
CRACK.
He shrieked, his grip loosening. I wrapped my hand around his wrist, twisting the knife back toward his own chest, and drove it home between his ribs.
He went limp, collapsing onto my chest.
I pushed his heavy body off me, gasping for air, and scrambled to my feet. I picked up my dropped pistol, checked the magazine, and kicked open the door to Room 812.
The room was quiet.
The heart monitors were off due to the power outage, but the faint glow of a battery-operated pulse oximeter clipped to Renata’s finger showed a small, steady green light.
Beep... beep... beep.
She was still breathing.
Standing beside her bed, holding a syringe filled with clear fluid, was Emmett Varela.
He was shaking violently, his face wet with tears and sweat. "Don't... don't come any closer! I'll put this in her IV! It’s potassium chloride! Her heart will stop in ten seconds!"
I lowered my weapon slowly.
"Emmett," I said softly, stepping into the room. "Look at me."
"Stay back!" he screamed. "My dad is outside! He's got fifty men! You can't win, Salgado! You can't beat us!"
"Your father isn't outside, Emmett," I said, taking another slow step forward. "Your father left you in the hallway of my old docks twenty minutes ago while he tried to board a boat to Panama. He didn't come here to save you. He sent you here to die so I would be distracted while he ran."
Emmett froze. "No... no, he wouldn't... he loves me!"
"Look at the syringe in your hand," I said. "Where did you get it?"
"My... my dad gave it to me. He said it was a sedative to keep her quiet so we could move her."
I pointed toward the clear liquid inside the plastic barrel. "That's not a sedative, Emmett. That's a lethal dose of digitalis. If you had put that into her IV, the police would have found her dead, and they would have found your fingerprints on the needle. Your father was setting you up to take the fall for another murder so the law would stop chasing him."
Emmett looked down at the syringe in his shaking hand.
The horror of what his father had built him to be finally shattered his arrogant illusion. He dropped the syringe. It shattered against the tiled floor, the clear liquid pooling around his expensive leather shoes.
He fell to his knees beside Renata’s bed, burying his face in his hands, sobbing uncontrollably.
"I didn't want to do it..." he wept. "He told me if I didn't help him, he’d throw me out... he said I was nothing without him..."
I walked over, picked up the gun from the floor, and tapped Emmett on the shoulder with the barrel.
"Get up," I said.
May you like
He looked up, his eyes full of terror. "Are you going to kill me?"
"No," I said, grabbing him by the collar and dragging him toward the door. "You’re going to do something much worse. You’re going to tell the federal prosecutors everything your father ever did."
