No Time for Goodbye - Linwood Barclay [120]
I brought the chair up so Clayton could drop himself into it. I spun him around and headed for the elevator.
The nurse ran back to her station, grabbed the phone, said, “Security! I said I needed you up here now!”
The elevator doors parted and I wheeled Clayton in, hit the button for the first floor, and watched the nurse glare at us until the doors slid shut.
“When the door opens,” I told Clayton calmly, “I’m going to be pushing you out of here like a bat out of hell.”
He said nothing but wrapped his fingers around the arms of the chair, squeezed. I wished it had a seat belt.
The doors opened, and there was about fifty feet of hall separating me from the emergency room doors and the parking lot just beyond them. “Hold on,” I whispered, and broke into a run.
The chair wasn’t built for speed, but I pushed it to the point where the front wheels began to wobble. I feared it would suddenly veer left or right, that Clayton would spill out and end up with a fractured skull before I could get him to Vince’s Dodge Ram. So I put some weight down on the handles and tipped the chair back, like it was doing a wheelie.
Clayton hung on.
The elderly couple who had been sitting in the waiting room earlier were shuffling across the hall. I shouted ahead, “Out of the way!” The woman’s head whipped around and she pulled her husband out of my path just in time as we went racing past.
The sensors on the sliding emergency room doors couldn’t react fast enough, and I had to put on the brakes so I wouldn’t send Clayton through the glass. I slowed down as fast as I could without pitching him forward and out of the wheelchair, and that was when someone I assumed had to be a security guard came up behind me and shouted, “Whoa! Hold it right there, pal!”
I was so pumped up on adrenaline I didn’t stop to think about what I was doing. I was working on instinct now. I spun around, using the momentum that seemed to be stored in me from moving so quickly down the hall, forming a fist in the process, and caught my pursuer square in the side of the head.
He wasn’t a very big guy, maybe 150 pounds, five-eight, black hair and a mustache, must have figured that the gray uniform and big black belt with the gun attached would get him by. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet pulled his weapon, assuming, I guess, that a guy pushing a dying patient in a wheelchair didn’t pose much of a threat.
He was wrong.
He dropped to the emergency room floor like someone had cut his strings. Somewhere, a woman screamed, but I didn’t take any time to see who it was, or whether anyone else was going to be coming after me. I whirled back around, got my hands on the wheelchair handles, and kept pushing Clayton, out into the parking lot, right up to the passenger door of the Dodge.
I got out the keys, unlocked it with the remote, opened the door. The truck sat up high, and I had to boost Clayton to get him into the passenger seat. I slammed the door shut, ran around to the other side, and caught the wheelchair with the right front tire as I backed out of the spot. I heard it scrape against the fender.
“Shit,” I said, thinking about how perfect Vince kept the vehicle.
The truck tires squealed as I tore out of the lot, heading back for the highway. I caught a glimpse of some people from the ER, running outside to watch as I sped off. Clayton, already looking exhausted, said, “We have to go back to my house.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m already heading there. I need to know why Vince isn’t answering, make sure everything’s okay, maybe even stop Jeremy if he shows up, if he hasn’t already.”
“And there’s something I have to get,” Clayton said. “Before we go see Cynthia.”
“What?”
He waved a weakened hand at me. “Later.”
“They’re going to call the police,” I said of the people we’d left behind at the hospital. “I’ve practically kidnapped a patient, and I’ve decked a security guard. They’ll be looking for this truck.”
Clayton didn’t say anything.
I pushed the truck past ninety on the way north