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“What difference does it make?” the doctor snapped.
She shrugged. “Just that Yuri isn’t here yet. I had Dwayne stay late to let Yuri in when he gets here.”
Dwayne was the security guard inside the back door Alex always used. As he waited, Alex stood slump-shouldered, trying to act passive. With the way the orderlies stood at ease, it seemed to be working. If only he could slow down his galloping heart.
Henry came forward, pulling out the keys attached to the reel on his belt. “We don’t need Yuri to get started.”
“What was Helen Rahl doing in here?” the doctor asked as Henry worked the lock.
“Taking a pee,” the nurse said.
As the doorway leading into the shower opened, Alex could see that only one light was on. The cavelike room beyond had a ghostly cast to it. He thought that it looked like a place where death itself waited.
His heart felt like it came up in his throat when he saw Jax still hanging there. In addition to the blindfold, she was now gagged with a cloth through her mouth and tied behind her head. She trembled slightly. It was clear that she was having a lot of trouble breathing. She had to push up on her toes as best she could to draw each ragged breath. Her arms shook with each effort.
Alex was so enraged that it was hard for him to focus on where everyone was around him. He reminded himself that he had to keep track of where everyone was or he could be blindsided. Surprises could be deadly. He had to take a measure of the situation and not make a reckless mistake. He couldn’t afford a mistake.
Jax couldn’t afford a mistake.
The nurse dragged a straight-backed wooden chair from the side. The chair’s feet stuttered across the tile floor, the sound echoing around in the shower. She set the chair in the center of the room, not far in front of Jax. Alex remembered seeing Jax’s clothes thrown to the side, but he didn’t remember seeing the chair before.
Henry, grinning with anticipation, pulled off the blindfold. Jax squinted and blinked at the sudden light, even though the light wasn’t bright. She took appraisal of everyone in the room. When she met Alex’s gaze there was a world of meaning, a shared understanding, in that silent connection.
Henry slid his hand down her belly and between her legs. “Getting eager for me, aren’t you?”
Alex thought the deadly glare Jax gave him should have backed him up a few steps, but it didn’t.
Henry, obviously enjoying his control over her, probed further as he used his other hand to pull the gag from her mouth. He let it hang around her neck. “Oh, sorry.” He chuckled. “I couldn’t hear you.”
“You’re already dead,” she told him. “You just don’t know it yet.”
Henry removed his hand from between her legs and put it over his heart in mock alarm. “Really? Don’t tell me, you intend to kill me?”
By the look in her eyes Alex could see that her rage easily matched his. She let that lethal look be her only answer.
“Did you find Alice?” the nurse asked, tiring of the game Henry was playing.
The doctor gestured irritably. “No one has seen her.”
“We looked everywhere,” Henry said as he turned his attention away from Jax, “and like the doc says, there’s no sign of her. She’s vanished.”
Jax’s gaze immediately sought Alex. He smiled the smallest bit in answer to the question in her eyes. A hint of a smile came to the corners of her mouth. In that smile he could see that she grasped that he’d had something to do with Alice’s disappearance.
But then she had to close her eyes with the effort of pulling herself up with her arms as she stretched on her tiptoes to get a breath. Alex could see how mightily she was struggling to fight back panic at not being able to breathe.
“Maybe she went back for some reason,” Henry suggested.
The others started speculating as to why Nurse Alice would have left without saying anything. It seemed to be common consensus that the woman typically did things without telling others what she was up to, so, as far as they were all concerned, it wasn’t entirely out of character.
No one was looking at Alex as he stood submissively. He wanted Jax to be ready. When her eyes turned to look at him again, he gave her a small wink. The smile grew and stayed on her lips as she returned the wink. He didn’t know if she grasped his full meaning or if she was merely heartened by the wink.
Losing interest in the talk about Alice, Henry pulled a folding knife from his pocket, letting everyone know that it was time to get on with it. Pressing on the thumb stud, he flicked his wrist and snapped open the blade. One of the other two orderlies did the same. Alex saw that the nurse had a syringe.
Henry used the point of his knife to back Alex up a few steps. “Have a seat.”
The nurse shoved the chair against the back of his legs. Alex flopped down in the chair. In his peripheral vision he tried to keep track of the syringe.
His level of alarm rose suddenly when the other orderly stepped up close behind, pressing against the chair to hold it in place. The orderly in front of him with the knife pulled a handful of zip ties from his pocket.
Alex realized what they intended to do.
37.
HURRY UP AND SECURE HIM to the chair,” Henry said. “Thorazine or no Thorazine, I don’t want to have to worry about either of them being loose and getting difficult to handle when we start cutting.”
It appeared that they weren’t going to wait for Yuri to show up. While that was one less man to worry about, Alex knew that he had to remain aware that Yuri could show up at any moment. The nurse had said that they were early, though. Maybe Henry had decided to grab the glory, and Jax, for himself.
Alex kept an eye on the knife hand of the orderly in front of him. He knew that it was the hands that were the killers.
“Put your arms behind your back,” the big orderly growled as he seized Alex by the hair.
Alex knew that if they restrained him he would have no chance at all. Jax would have no chance.
He had run out of time and options.
He remembered lessons Ben had taught him from a young age, warnings that you couldn’t always choose the fight. The best thing to do was to avoid a fight, if you could. But the way that it all too often happened, his grandfather had told him, was that you would find yourself in a fight you didn’t want, outnumbered, and outmatched in weapons. That was because people would generally only attack if they felt confident enough in their superiority to feel sure of the outcome.
Alex recalled, as a boy just entering adulth
ood, being troubled by the warning. It didn’t seem fair. He asked Ben what he should do if he ever found himself in that situation. That question was the gateway to a whole new level of training.
Ben had told him that in such a case there wasn’t any such thing as fair. His only chance was speed, surprise, and violence of action.
Henry stepped up beside the orderly facing Alex. “Come on, let’s get this over with so we can get to her.”
As the man with the zip ties took a step forward, Alex pushed his shoulders back against the man behind him, as if trying to back away from the two knives in front of him. The man behind leaned in to keep Alex from sliding the chair back. That was exactly what Alex had wanted him to do.
There was no choice now. He had only one chance.
Alex pressed his shoulders against the man behind him. The man pushed back.
In an instant of exquisite, unrestrained rage, Alex put all his force into screaming a battle cry as he uncoiled, throwing a mighty kick squarely into Henry’s chest.
The blow was powerful enough to break ribs. It drove a grunt from the big man as it knocked him back.
The orderly in front of him was so surprised by the sudden burst of movement that he stood motionless for just an instant. An instant was all Alex needed. With Henry clear, in that instant when everyone else was frozen in shock, before the man behind could get a better hold on him, Alex bounded out of the chair and seized the wrist of the hand holding the knife.
With an iron grip on the man’s wrist, Alex dove under the arm and came up behind. As he sprang up he used all his momentum and strength to violently twist the arm up in a way it wasn’t meant to go. The shoulder popped out of its joint. Sinew separated with a sickening rip. Alex spun around, taking the arm with him. In less than a heartbeat the man’s shoulder was torn apart enough that the arm was useless.
Jax was the only one who had been ready for the sudden attack. At the same time as Alex was taking out the orderly with the knife, before Henry could recover, Jax threw her legs around him, pinning his arms to his side. She locked her ankles.
