Chapter 4 - The Glass and the Lead
Glass rained down on the vinyl floor of the waiting room, heavy shards bouncing off the wooden chairs and striking the plaster walls with sharp, metallic clicks.
Evelyn acted before her brain had finished processing the sound.
She grabbed Adrian by the lapels of his coat and shoved him backward into the narrow hallway toward the surgical room, her weight driving him through the doorway just as a long, high-frequency burst of automatic gunfire tore through the front drywall.
Thump-thump-thump-thump-thump.
The rounds were heavy—nine-millimeter submachine gun fire, suppressed, sounding like a high-powered staple gun going through cardboard.
Plaster dust exploded into the air, turning the narrow hallway into a foggy, white vault filled with the smell of pulverized lime and burnt gunpowder.
"In the back!" Evelyn hissed, dragging Adrian toward the floor.
Adrian didn't argue. He rolled onto his side, his hand coming out from beneath his coat holding a heavy, black Sig Sauer P226 that had appeared as if from thin air.
"Grant!" Adrian shouted over the ringing in his ears.
From the dental chair, Grant didn't move. He was still deep in the drug-induced coma Evelyn had put him in with forty milligrams of propofol.
"He's under," Evelyn snapped, crawling on her hands and knees through the white dust toward the stainless steel cabinet where she kept her supplies. "He won't wake up if a grenade goes off in his lap."
"Good," Adrian said. He raised his weapon, his eyes locked on the corner where the hallway met the destroyed reception area. "Then he won't panic."
A boot stepped over the broken glass in the front room.
The sound was heavy, thick-soled, the unmistakable crunch of tactical footwear on tile.
"Cross!" a voice shouted from the front. It wasn't the voice of a street thug. It was crisp, trained, with the flat Midwestern vowels of a veteran police officer. "We know you're in here! Come out with your hands clear or we burn the structure!"
Evelyn froze on the floor, her hands resting against a pile of fallen drywall.
She knew that voice.
Five years ago, that voice had belonged to Deputy Chief Thomas Callahan—the man who had stood in the administrator's office at Northwestern Memorial while eighteen-year-old Marcus Vance bled out in Trauma Bay 4.
"Callahan," she whispered, her face turning as white as the plaster dust coating her sweater.
Adrian glanced down at her, his eyes cold and sharp as chipped flint. "You know him?"
"He's police," she said, her voice trembling—not with fear, but with an old, bitter rage that had been buried under five years of quiet work in Bridgeport. "He was the one who told the hospital board to hold the Vance boy in the hallway until the federal warrants were signed."
"He isn't police tonight," Adrian said, racking the slide of his pistol with a clear, metallic clack. "Tonight he's working for the Vance family's rivals. And he's here to make sure Grant doesn't live long enough to name the men who paid for the hit."
"He's bringing five men," Evelyn said, her mind instantly shifting back into the cold, analytical mode she used during multiple-trauma arrivals in the ER. "That's standard tactical entry for a two-room building. Two through the front, two around the alley, one holding the perimeter."
Adrian looked at her with a flicker of genuine surprise. "You know entry tactics?"
"I treated sixty-four SWAT team members in eight years, Cross," she said, reaching behind the lower cabinet door and pulling out a heavy, green oxygen cylinder—a full forty-pound tank of pure O2 with a brass regulator attached to the valve. "I know how they think. And I know what happens when you hit a high-pressure oxygen valve with a spark."
Adrian looked at the green tank, then at the box of road flares she pulled out from beneath the sink.
The smile returned to his face, wider this time, sharp and dangerous as a razor.
May you like
"Dr. Carter," he whispered, leaning his shoulder against the doorframe as another boot crunched in the hallway. "I think I'm falling in love with you."
"Shut up and shoot the regulator when I tell you," she said.
