Thirteen Stitches

Chapter Five: Code Blue

"Help! I need help in here!"

Ezra's shout tore down the corridor, and the ICU came alive. A nurse slapped the red button on the wall, the overhead speaker called a code blue to room 614, and the crash team poured past him with a cart.

Abel lay still under the sheet, a tube taped into his mouth, his skin the color of old candle wax. On the steel tray beside the bed sat a syringe with the plunger pushed all the way down, its label turned to the wall. Ezra snatched it up.

Potassium chloride.

"A man in scrubs just walked out of here," he said, holding it up. "He put this in the line."

The doctor read the label and swore. "Charge the paddles. Push calcium, now."

The first shock jerked Abel's thin body off the mattress, and the line stayed flat. Ezra forgot to breathe. Then the second shock hit, and the monitor stuttered, spiked and settled into a ragged, beautiful rhythm.

"We've got him," the nurse said.

Ezra was already running.

The far doors opened onto a stairwell, and below him footsteps went from unhurried to fast. He took the stairs three at a time, six flights in a blur of concrete and painted floor numbers, and caught the man just as he hit the bar of the ground-floor fire door.

They slammed into the metal together. An elbow drove back into Ezra's bruised ribs, but he held on, twisted the man's arm up behind him and pinned him face first against the door. The scrub trousers had torn at the knee in the struggle, and beneath them Ezra saw charcoal wool so fine it shone under the stairwell light. Super 150s, hand-finished, three thousand dollars at least. The man had pulled the scrubs on over his own suit.

"Who sent you?"

The man said nothing.

Two hospital security guards came pounding down the stairs a minute later. They cuffed him, promised Ezra the police were on their way, and locked him inside a small holding room off the security office.

When Ezra went back to check within the hour, the door stood open and the room was empty.

"Shift change," the guard said, not quite meeting his eyes. "Paperwork's being processed."

Ezra stood in the lobby afterward, staring at a brass plaque he had walked past a hundred times without reading. Castellane Medical Center, endowed by the Castellane family. It was one of the names in the coat. The hospital keeping his grandfather alive belonged to a family that would be richer if both of them died.

He spent the rest of the day in the chair beside Abel's bed with the gray coat on his shoulders, and he didn't sleep.

At a quarter to midnight, the hospital administrator arrived with a clipboard and a smile that never reached his eyes.

"Mr. Lockwood, given this afternoon's incident, we've arranged to transfer your grandfather to the state facility in Northgate tonight. Purely for security concerns. The ambulance arrives at one."

Ezra looked at the ventilator breathing for Abel, at the lines and tubes and the fragile rhythm on the screen. He pictured a dark road, an ambulance with no one watching, one line quietly coming loose. An old man on a ventilator, moved across the city in the middle of the night, would not arrive alive.

"He's not going anywhere," Ezra said.

"I'm afraid that isn't your decision."

"Maybe it should be," said a warm voice from the doorway.

The man who strolled in carried a bouquet of white lilies, the heavy, waxy kind people sent to funerals. He was about thirty-two, golden-haired and relaxed, in a camel overcoat that sat on him like it had been finished that morning. Ezra knew the face from the business pages. Lucian Draycott, heir to Draycott Bank. At the nurses' station outside, two nurses had stopped writing on their charts to watch him pass.

"Give us a minute," Lucian told the administrator, who left as if his own boss had dismissed him.

Lucian set the lilies on the windowsill and looked at Abel with perfect sympathy.

"Terrible thing. My grandfather was fond of him, so I'll be direct. A private clinic upstate, tonight. Armed guards around the clock, the best doctors in the country, and thirty million dollars in an account with your name on it." He smiled. "And Danny, handled however you like."

"In exchange for what?"

Lucian's gaze moved, unhurried, to the gray coat on Ezra's shoulders.

"You know what. You can't protect him, Ezra. Look around you." He spread his hands. "I can."

Ezra glanced at the funeral lilies, then back at the man who'd brought them.

"My grandfather sewed for your family for forty years," he said. "He said the Draycotts always wanted hidden pockets."

Lucian's smile thinned. Before he could answer, the door opened behind him.

Isolde Varne walked in holding a sheet of paper, with the administrator trailing her like a nervous dog.

"A signed order from Judge Morrow," she said. "As of tonight, Abel Lockwood is a protected witness in an active attempted-murder investigation. State police will be on this door within the hour, and he doesn't leave this room without my signature."

The administrator read the page twice and seemed to shrink inside his suit. "Of course. We'll cancel the transfer."

Lucian turned, and his charm settled back over his face like a well-pressed lapel.

"Isolde. Rupert's been telling the whole city we'll be engaged by Christmas. I didn't expect to find you here."

"Rupert says a great many things," she said coolly. "Good night, Lucian."

His smile slipped, just for a moment. Then he nodded to them both and walked out, leaving the lilies behind.

When the door closed, Isolde let out a slow breath, and some of the steel left her shoulders.

"Morrow will want that favor back someday," she said. "So will everyone I called to get it signed at this hour. I just spent political capital I don't actually have."

"Why would you do that?"

"Because someone tried to murder the victim in my investigation, in a hospital, under my name." She folded the order away. "That makes it personal."

Ezra didn't trust himself to answer. The cord along the edge of Abel's blanket had frayed where the bedrail rubbed it, so he took a needle and thread from the small kit he always kept in his coat pocket. His hands needed work. He stitched the loose end down, neat and tight, and tied it off twice, the way Abel had taught him as a boy.

Isolde watched him in silence. When he looked up, the prosecutor was gone from her face, and something younger and less certain had taken her place.

"You still double-knot your thread," she said softly. "Like the boy who fixed my funeral dress."