“Yes.”
Lifting a shopping bag from the floor, she removed three items Henry had requested and laid them gently on the bed. Then she unbuttoned her blouse and unsnapped her brassiere. When both she and Henry were ready, she rapidly transferred the cardiac sensors to her own body. An alarm tripped for a few seconds, then returned to normal.
“You’d better go now,” she advised.
On his first try to rise from the bed, Henry got so dizzy that he fell back on the mattress. His mother told him to forget it, but he only redoubled his efforts. The second time, with her help, he managed to get to his feet. The pain took his breath away—worse in his head than in his belly, where the knife had gone in. Probably from the bullet, he realized.
While waiting for his mother, Henry had shaved his mustache, his goatee, his lower legs, and the backs of his hands, thanks to a cup of water and a toiletry kit begged from Irma McKay. From his mother’s handbag he took her extra wig and fitted it over his head. She made a few small adjustments, then lay back on the bed. Finally he donned an old raincoat of his father’s that resembled the coat she’d worn into the hospital. He hated wearing anything that reminded him of that man, but tonight he was willing to bear it. The coat pockets held a pair of sturdy sandals, which he carefully donned by dropping them to the floor and sliding his feet into them.
“You’re not on IV pain meds anymore,” his mother said. “I had some OxyContin left at home from my last surgery, so you’ll have to make do with that. But it’s not the same as Dilaudid or fentanyl.”
“I’ll be all right,” he assured her, his head feeling like a water-filled balloon. “Just as long as I make it past the guard at the side door.”
His mother rose up far enough to put an arm around his waist and gently hug him. “I wish I could help you more. But I know God is watching over you. If he wasn’t, you would have died tonight.”
With great effort, Henry bent and kissed the top of her head. Then he put on her hat, picked up her purse, walked slowly to the door, and gave her their prearranged signal: the “okay” sign.
“You take care of yourself, honey!” his mother called loudly. “I’ll be back first thing in the morning. Don’t you bother these nurses too much, all right? They need some rest, too.”
“I won’t,” Henry said in a dull voice.
Then he opened the door and, with his chin touching his chest, walked right past the FBI guard stationed outside, who sat in a folding chair, typing a text message. Henry made his way down the hall to the right, aping his mother’s painful stoop with an ache that he didn’t have to fake. With his mother’s purse hanging on his arm, he brushed back the hair of the wig with what he fancied an authentically feminine gesture and padded slowly toward the hospital’s side exit. The pain wasn’t as bad as he’d expected, thanks to the Dilaudid still coursing through his system, no doubt. But soon that cushion would vanish. All the way down the hall, he waited for the cry of “Halt!” like a POW trying to escape from some prison camp. But the FBI agent never called out. Nobody did.
When Henry reached the side entrance, the man standing post outside scarcely even registered one more woman walking out after the night shift—especially one who ignored him like she owned the place.
It took Henry quite some time to make his way around to the front parking lot, where his mother had left her old Impala. With a prayer of thanks on his lips, he unlocked the door, then very carefully slid behind the wheel and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Once it did, he opened the pill bottle she’d given him and crunched an OxyContin between his back teeth. The bitterness surprised him, but he swallowed the fragments gratefully.
Two men who looked like FBI agents stood talking in the light of the hospital’s porte cochere entrance. Henry shut his eyes for a few seconds, wondering if they were real. When he opened them, the men were gone.
Wiping tears of confusion from his eyes, he craned his neck over the front seat and looked down at the floor. His mother’s 12-gauge Winchester pump shotgun lay there, just as he’d requested. His father had bought the gun in 1957, the last year they’d made that model, and it was one of the few of his possessions that Henry’s mother hadn’t given to the Goodwill or burned in the backyard. Encouraged to have come so far, Henry slid her key into the ignition, started the Impala, then put it in gear and drove slowly out the of hospital lot. Barring unforeseen complications, he would arrive at his destination before the pain became too intense to bear. After that …
What would be, would be.
CHAPTER 90
CONSCIOUSNESS RETURNED AS a hammer pounding the base of my skull and lights flashing in the stinking dark. I’m lying on the metal floor of a van, Caitlin beside me, still unconscious. Duct tape binds our hands and ankles, and Chief Logan’s cop lies senseless at our feet, near the van’s rear doors. Two minutes ago I pried off one shoe with the other and searched for his carotid pulse with my toe, but I felt nothing.