The Second Mouse - Archer Mayor [74]
Nancy’s voice was hesitant. She didn’t have much time. The plan had been for her to tell Doris that she was stepping out for a soda from the machine. “Do you know the number?”
There was a pause, followed by “Three-oh-four.”
“Great. Thanks. Sorry to have bothered you. How do I get there?”
“Elevators are at the end of the hallway.”
“Where?”
“Down there.”
A second pause. “I’m sorry. I forgot my glasses. Where?”
Ellis couldn’t actually hear it, but he imagined a sigh. He heard footsteps approaching and Coleman’s voice saying, “Straight on down.”
“Could you show me?”
It was childishly transparent, and now that he was actually overhearing what they’d rehearsed, he half expected the bathroom door to fly open and Nurse Coleman to ask him, “And you thought this would work?”
But instead, he heard her kindly comment, “I’ve had days like that. Come with me, and don’t feel bad.”
He waited five seconds and opened the door without a sound. The two women were retreating down the hall, no one else was in sight, and all the doors he could see were closed. He cut to the left, toward the nurses’ station, went straight to the desk drawer he remembered from the last time, and pulled it open, his hand trembling.
The key was where he had hoped it would still be.
He quickly slipped it into his pocket and returned to the bathroom, the sounds of their conversation still echoing down the hall. Moments later, he heard Nancy’s parting thanks as she returned to Doris’s side, and the soft footsteps of Ann Coleman getting back to her post. As soon as she passed, he reversed his earlier move, leaving the bathroom silently and cutting right, making a beeline back to the stairwell.
There he leaned against the wall and wiped his face with his sleeve, wondering if he’d remembered to breathe during the whole ordeal. One obstacle down, two more to go. He headed toward the subbasement.
Downstairs, he felt slightly more comfortable. This wasn’t a medical part of the hospital but the heart of its services area—food preparation and delivery, laundry, the custodial system, and what he was after: waste management.
He retraced the steps he’d taken with Coleman days earlier, blending in with the steady flow of other people who reminded him of himself, with rough hands, work clothes, or homebuilt haircuts, until he reached the same unmarked door they’d commented on at the time.
Looking as self-confident as possible, he fitted the stolen key to the lock and let himself in.
The last time he was here, they’d been alone, so he was startled to find one of the previously closed doors wide open at the end of the short corridor and to hear both music and conversation coming from it.
He stood stock-still for a moment, wondering what to do, expecting someone to appear at any second.
But no one did.
As Coleman had done before, he used the key again to unlock the storage room door and confronted the familiar, randomly stacked pile of thrown-together garbage bags, their apparent chaos mitigated by each one’s having a carefully labeled tag attached at the throat.
Suddenly, he was stumped. Did it make any difference which one he took? He knew that the contents of this room fit a sliding radioactive time frame, but what if his choice was only hot for a few hours, versus one that would percolate for several months?
Standing there, stalled, he suddenly heard a thump behind him, and two voices bursting into the tiny hallway. Instinctively, he glanced over his shoulder as two white-coated lab techs appeared behind him, chatting, one of them fiddling with a key ring that he’d fished out of his pocket. Fighting panic, Ellis took a big step farther into the closet and laid both his hands onto the nearest bag before him, putting on a great show of shoving it about, as if he were attempting to tame the unruly pile.
It worked. After the one with the keys locked his own door, both men passed by Ellis without a glance, still deep in their conversation, and exited into the