Chapter 3

Nolan skirted in the shadows of the tall concrete wall between the employee parking lot and the emergency entrance of the hospital. He seemed to have finally caught a break. An empty ambulance was parked near the ER entrance. The back doors were open and signs of a recent transport were littered on the floor.

As he neared the back of the emergency vehicle, he glanced around. There was a camera, but no people were evident. He ducked his head and hustled into the back of the bus, closing the doors behind him. Something crunched under Nolan's foot and he looked down at the plastic sleeve of an Narcan injector. Naloxone. I should have guessed.

Nolan mulled over the rising struggle with opioids that gripped this part of the country while he set about robbing the ambulance. After the third compartment, he found a cloth bag stuffed with light blue scrubs. They were XXL, and he was reminded to hurry. He wouldn't want to be here when the guy who fit these came back.

Two minutes later, he slipped out of the ambulance and around the back of the hospital. He could enter through the ER doors any hour of the night, but it was usually crowded and surveillance would be a problem.

Instead, he stepped to a dimly lit metal door and began shaking the can of compressed air he brought from Nikki's apartment. The place smelled like stale cigarettes. A large smoker's pole had a wisp of smoke floating lazily from the hole at the top.

Nolan turned the can upside down and hit the RF badge reader on the underside with a blast of cold air. Steam rolled off and trailed up the wall as the seconds ticked slowly by. He watched the little red light on the reader intently. Drops of rain speckled the back of his neck as he looked nervously around.

Finally, the red light flashed violently. Nolan heard a little click. He tossed the can into the nearby weeds and yanked open the door.

Bright light made him flinch as he entered and quickly surveyed the area. He'd been here before with Nikki and knew where to go. The men's locker room was the third door on the left and Nolan slid in confidently.

Voices made him turn immediately left and duck into a bathroom stall. Someone was speaking loudly about a cardiac tamponade. Through the crack in the door, Nolan saw a man in scrubs like his saunter out the door with a cell phone pressed to his head.

Nolan exited the stall and crept past the rows of lockers to a tall wooden cabinet in the back of the room. He donned a mask and surgical cap before going down the row of lockers until he found one unlocked. The stethoscope he lifted looked cheap, and he didn't feel so bad about stealing it. The badge he found clipped inside the locker was significantly more valuable.

He moved swiftly but not hurriedly toward the elevator. The doors opened a few seconds later and two females, one pushing a folded wheelchair, poured out. Nolan slid behind them and pressed the button to the fifth floor. He tried to calm himself by regulating his breathing, but thoughts of his friend being shot wouldn't leave him be.

The hall to the left of the elevator was dark, but the double doors at the end of that hallway teemed with activity. The lab never sleeps in a hospital. Even one this small. Nolan tapped his stolen badge on the reader outside the third door on the right, and it opened with a beep and a click.

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The room was dark, and he wished he had a flashlight. It wouldn't do for some curious lab rat to see light coming from a day shift office.

With a shake of her mouse, Nikki's desk computer came alive to a login prompt. Nolan slapped the badge on the little Imprivata reader on the desk and Windows began loading. He opened a web browser when the desktop loaded and searched for the medicines he took from Nikki's apartment.

Benepali was a very strong anti-inflammatory drugged used by people with severe arthritis. That made no sense. Nikki didn't have arthritis. Cyproterone was even more perplexing. Nolan was sure Nikki didn't have prostate cancer.

Next, Nolan took out the papers and looked over the molecular modeling essay Nikki had been working on. The badge logged him into the computer as Hashmat Chada. It loaded the personal files for that person, but it wasn't hard for Nolan to figure out the path to Nikki's personal user space. Since she used the same password for everything, he was quickly browsing through a disorganized mess of files and folders.

He sorted by date and a file called 'G Strain – suppression models.docx' rose to the top. It was last opened two days ago. Nolan opened the file and found the same essay he printed earlier with a lot more data. The graphs and models loaded slowly as Nolan scrolled quickly down the document in search of something useful.

On the last page, the formatting changed dramatically. The clear and structured layout devolved into a page with fragmented thoughts listed one after the next. The very bottom was a bulleted list.

* Check on mom

* Get cash

* Buy a phone at BP

* Call Nolan

Call Nolan. This seemed like a bug out plan. He scanned the document again, but couldn't make much of it. He hit print and the printer on the shelf behind her came to life.

Nikki's mom was in a long-term care facility up north. Nolan wondered if Nikki had accomplished any of the things on the list. He made a mental note to check on Evelyn—Nikki's mom—as soon as he had the chance. He had to go.

Nolan grabbed the printout, folded it, and stuck it in his jeans pocket beneath his scrubs. The hall was empty, and he took the elevator back to the first floor.

The door of the elevator opened to pandemonium. A stretcher raced past carrying a wailing sheriff's deputy cradling a badly broken arm and blood covering the left side of his face.

The sheriff blew by, arguing with a resident as he followed the stretcher. Blood stained his face and hands.

Nolan waited until the hallway was clear before stepping out. He could go out the front exit easily, but curiosity pulled him to the crowd of doctors and nurses outside the ER bay to his right. They were stripping off gloves and aprons, wearing defeated looks.

The ER doctor, a man Nolan knew, was chatting with a pair of somber residents. Nolan heard the doctor say, "Hyper-adrenergic Infarction". It was a fancy way of saying a drug induced heart attack.

As Nolan crept by the room, he glanced at the patient sprawled on the gurney in the room. Two nurses were busy disconnecting IV lines and making notes in the digital EMR. The man was clearly dead. His face was twisted into a rictus of pain. His arms ended in bloody stumps, like he had been a victim of a corn picker. The tiny chain of a broken handcuff dangled from one stump. The man's skin was ashen and his bloodshot eyes were wide open.

Nolan swallowed hard and hustled past as he recognized the dead man. It was the tweaker from the jail. He flung the badge and stethoscope into the locker room as he hustled past. Maybe Dr. Chadda would think he just dropped them.

A blast of rain and cold air hit Nolan as he burst out the door and past a pair of smoking nurses. The ambulance had been moved, so he walked numbly along the wall up to the parking lot.

What happened to that guy? And the deputies?

The rain had picked up again, and it felt like some of the horror of the ER scene was being washed away. A spooling window got his attention, followed by a voice calling, "Hey doc, do you make house calls?"

Nolan stopped and looked in the window of the dark SUV at Tara Brown's wry grin.