Chapter 16 - The Linen Cart
"Martha, listen to me!" I shouted into the phone as Detective Miller’s unmarked sedan screeched up the emergency ambulance ramp at Swedish Medical Center. "Look under the bathroom sink! Is there a red hazardous-waste bio-bin or an oxygen cutoff valve on the wall?"
"There is a steel grab-bar bolted to the tile and a porcelain tank lid on the toilet!" Martha panted as wood splintered loudly on the other side of the phone line.
"Take the porcelain lid off the toilet tank right now! Hold it above the door handle! When the first hand reaches through to unlock the deadbolt, bring that porcelain lid down with everything you've got! We are in the elevator right now—sixty seconds!"
Ricardo, Miller, Mara, and I burst out of the emergency stairwell onto the fourth floor—we hadn't even waited for the elevator.
Down the corridor outside Room 412, the two patrol officers were groaning on the linoleum floor, rubbing their eyes where they had been blasted with military-grade pepper spray.
The door to Room 412 was wide open.
Ricardo reached the doorway first, moving with terrifying speed.
Inside the room, a tall man in stolen blue surgical scrubs—the crooked hospital administrator Adrian had paid off—was howling in agony, clutching a shattered right wrist beside a broken porcelain toilet lid on the bathroom floor.
And Celeste had Vianey pinned against the bathroom sink, violently forcing the terrified seven-year-old’s right thumb down onto a portable Bluetooth biometric scanner wired to her phone.
"Hold still, you little monster!" Celeste shrieked, her manicured nails digging into Vianey’s small wrist as the scanner beeped at 80% completion. "Just hold still for two seconds!"
Before Detective Miller even cleared the threshold with his service weapon drawn, I lunged past the man in the scrubs, grabbed a heavy stainless-steel IV pole with both hands, and swung the weighted base straight into the biometric scanner in Celeste’s hand—smashing the glass screen and her cell phone against the tile wall in a shower of sparks.
Celeste screamed, spinning around with her hand raised to claw at my face—just as Ricardo caught her by the collar of her cashmere coat and threw her backward out of the bathroom onto the hospital bed.
"Touch my daughter again," Ricardo whispered, standing over her while Detective Miller snapped handcuffs onto Celeste’s wrists and pinned her face-down into the mattress. "Touch her again, and the police won't get you out of this room alive."
"Daddy! Elena!"
Vianey scrambled off the counter into both of our arms at once. Ricardo lifted her off the floor, burying his face in her neck while I held her freezing little hands and kissed the top of her head, whispering over and over that it was over, that the monsters were in cages now.
In the corner of the bathroom, sixty-five-year-old Martha stood calmly wiping her hands on a hospital towel, looking down at the whimpering administrator on the floor.
"In Poland," Martha said dryly, "we had worse cockroaches than this."
As additional SWAT and patrol units flooded onto the fourth floor and dragged a hysterical, cursing Celeste down the hallway in leg irons, Mara stepped into the room holding her ringing phone.
May you like
Her face was deadly serious.
"Ricardo, Elena," Mara said, covering the mouthpiece. "That's the night chair of the Vance Logistics board of directors calling from Geneva. When Adrian's arrest hit the police blotter twenty minutes ago, an automated dead-man's switch triggered on the corporate server. An emergency board vote has been called for 9:00 AM sharp to liquidate the company to a hostile buyer—unless we show up with the balancing invoices and a new Chief Financial Officer."
