Chapter 37 - Code Black in Room 412
I slammed my foot through the floorboards. The SUV’s supercharged engine roared, hurtling past the hospital entrance barrier, splintering the wooden arm into flying shards.
We screeched to a halt across the ambulance bay. Marcus and I hit the ground running, our weapons drawn, bursting through the double automatic doors of St. Jude's Memorial Hospice Wing.
The fourth-floor corridor was eerily quiet. A medical cart was overturned in the hallway, prescription bottles scattered across the floor like colorful candy. Two private security guards lay unconscious near the nursing station, their tasers stripped and wires cut.
"Code Black!" Marcus shouted into his radio to alert the local precinct. "Fourth-floor palliative wing! Armed suspect on site!"
We moved down the hall, backs against the wall, clearing the rooms one by one. The air carried the sharp, sterile scent of rubbing alcohol mixed with the iron tang of fresh blood.
Room 412 sat at the end of the corridor, its door cracked open three inches.
A slow, rhythmic mechanical beep came from inside.
*Beep... Beep... Beep...*
I kicked the door wide, sweeping the muzzle of my Glock across the room.
Arthur Vance sat upright in his hospital bed, propped up against pillows. His eyes were wide, glazed, staring into nothingness. Across his chest, written in dark, drying crimson blood, was a single word:
*LIAR.*
His ventilator had been torn from his trachea, the ribbed plastic tube dangling uselessly against the bedframe. He wasn't breathing.
On the floor beside the bed lay Chloe, unconscious, blood pooling in her blonde hair from the head wound, but her chest was still rising and falling in shallow, ragged intervals.
"Arthur’s flatlined," Marcus said, pressing two fingers against his father’s carotid artery. "He's gone. Eleanor did this five minutes ago."
"Then where is she?" I whispered, my eyes sweeping the shadows behind the privacy curtains, the bathroom door, the medical closet.
A soft, metallic click sounded from directly behind the heavy oak wardrobe in the corner of the room.
"Right behind the dead girl," a raspy voice whispered.
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The wardrobe door swung outward. Eleanor lunged, not with a weapon, but with a flare gun aimed directly at the centralized oxygen valves on the wall behind Arthur’s bed.
"If I can't have the Vance bloodline," Eleanor screamed, her finger tightening on the trigger, "no one leaves this room alive!"
