The Angel of Darkness - Caleb Carr [130]
“What in hell…?” I mumbled, staring at the thing.
It was odd, all right; but I’d taken part in enough robberies in my life to know that when you were faced with a safe you didn’t have the tools to crack, you didn’t stick around to wonder why. I scooped up the still clawing Mike, who seemed to sense that he hadn’t done the job he’d been hired for and fought against me as I stuffed him back into the satchel and fastened it up good and tight. Going back to the stairs, I got halfway up them when—
Gunshots. I froze, already trying to figure how I was going to explain my presence in the basement. Then I realized: they weren’t gunshots but firecrackers, out on the street. They must have been right out on the street, too, judging by their volume. Sighing with relief and able to move again I reached over to shut off the basement light, then carefully moved on up to the door and opened it, the oiled hinges swinging silently.
Once in the front room again, I could hear the laughter of a bunch of kids out on the street. Then a few more firecrackers went off, their sound sharp and startling against the distant, dull thunder of the bigger fireworks over the river. I looked around quickly. We weren’t going to get the baby out that night, I knew that much, but I couldn’t bring myself to leave empty-handed. There had to be something …
I glanced at the secretary, and remembered what Marcus had said: if the Hunter woman had thought to cover the thing before she’d asked them in, it stood to reason that there was something that’d be of use to us in it. I grabbed my collection of picks out of my pants pocket and dashed over to it, getting the lock in the lid undone faster than even I’d thought I could’ve.
When I pulled the lid down and open, my first reaction was disappointment: there wasn’t anything but some letters in the desk’s little wooden slots, and a stack of papers on a worn-out blotter in front of them. Before locking the thing up again, though, I decided to overrule my thief’s instinct that such items were worthless, and picked some of the papers up to read—wisely, as it turned out.
At first they made no sense to me. The items on top were written on stationery from St. Luke’s Hospital: they were addressed to Elspeth Hatch, and they seemed to be a bunch of advisories concerning the condition of a child named Jonathan. Below these were a series of hospital admitting forms what seemed to pertain to the same child. And finally, there were a couple of old newspapers, all folded up and dating from two years before. I flipped back to the hospital admitting forms, not knowing what I was looking at or for, exactly: they were all too full of unreadable handwriting, all too complicated—
But then I made out a few words that stopped me cold. At the bottom of one form appeared the pretyped word DIAGNOSIS:—and next to it somebody had scrawled RESPIRATORY FAILURE, CYANOSIS.
That was enough for me. I took the whole stack of papers, stuffed them inside my shirt, and closed the secretary. I was sure that I’d found something, sure that I hadn’t wasted—
“Don’t you move, you little bastard!”
I did just as I was told. I’d been nailed before, and when you got a command like that it was generally best to follow it until you’d had a chance to see who and what you were up against. Putting my hands halfway into the air, I turned slowly toward where the growling, desperate, and somehow familiar voice had come from: the front stairs.
On them stood what must’ve been Micah Hunter. He looked to be in his fifties, and he was wearing a badly faded white nightshirt. Two bony white legs stuck out from its hem, and his grey, grizzled face—with a similarly colored, unkempt mustache—plainly bore the mad, foggy expression of a morphine jabber in full binge. He held