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My heart started pounding faster, and suddenly my fists were clenched again. “Boris,” I said in a firm voice, “we need to find that nurse. Now.”
I didn’t have to ask him if the nurse—if the guy even was a nurse—was Puerto Rican. Because what had just happened to Ivan wasn’t malpractice. It wasn’t a screw-up.
It was a damned assassination.
“Hey!” A yell from the lanky medic who had lingered behind the crash-cart team tore my eyes away from Boris’s incredulous face and forced me to look in the direction of the nurse’s station. Then a compact, muscular man, olive-skinned and with jet black hair, came racing out of it. He was wearing a nurse’s scrubs, but they pulled across his broad back and flooded at the ankles. A bad disguise.
He saw us staring at him and turned to race in the other direction.
I bolted after him, aware of the bulk of the gun under my coat but also of the security cameras everywhere. I had to catch the bastard, had to question him. But he was fleet and desperate and raced ahead while I followed him toward the service stairs.
I heard Boris pounding after me as I followed the man into the stairwell, where I lost him for a moment before a clatter on the stairs below told me where he’d bolted to. I took the stairs two at a time around the open stairwell to catch up, determined to get my hands on that fucker before he could get away.
I was halfway to catching up with him when I saw a flash of metal in his hand and ducked back just in time. A bullet rang off the concrete wall where my face had been.
“Fuck!” Boris yelled, and we both drew our guns. If this guy wanted to shoot it out with us, he was going to answer my questions with a few bullets in him.
I made sure to break the security cameras on the way down, knowing the last thing I needed was a video circulating with my face on it after this mess. Whoever that man was, he was screwing up my life more and more with every passing minute.
He fired again as I rounded another corner. I ducked, and this time fired back. I heard him let out a little yell of panic as the bullet barely missed him.
Boris was lagging behind. I was so full of adrenaline that I wanted to yell at him for screwing up again. Ivan had died on his watch. This assassin had slipped past his men. And now he was an inch from getting away because Boris couldn’t fucking keep up!
But I couldn’t get the breath to yell right now. I had to save it for running, while the air went acrid from gun smoke.
We were almost to the ground floor. I lunged forward and fired at the man’s back right as he ducked around the corner. Damn it! This was getting ridiculous.Boris, where the fuck are you?I thought as I clattered down the last few flights.
We were lucky. In his panic, the killer ran right past the door to the ground floor, and into the service basement. Jaw set, I quickly followed, praying I could corner the man before he fired again.
The basement looked like a low-ceilinged warehouse, with shelf after shelf of file boxes sitting in three rows running all down its length. The man had hidden somewhere in there, waiting to ambush us.
“You’re not doing yourself any good, stranger,” I called as I descended into the shadowy room. “You can try to put a bullet in one of us, but it won’t go well for you. Give up now, and have a chance at life.”
I heard an echoing clatter somewhere in the rows of shelves, but the concrete walls and the size of the room bounced sounds around strangely. I wasn’t quite sure where he was.
Boris came down the stairs fast and nearly knocked into me. “Watch where you’re going!” I snapped, completely out of patience with him.
“Sorry, boss.”
I lowered my voice to a whisper. “We split up. Check the left side of the room. I’ll take the right. Be careful. This guy’s waiting for us.”
He nodded and gave me a thumbs-up. When he turned his back to cross the room, I rolled my eyes. I had never seen him act this way before. It was like he’d never chased a man down before.
Was it shock from Ivan’s death? Guilt? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to speculate. Whatever it was, Boris had gone from my strong right hand to someone who bumbled things far too much, and I didn’t understand how or why that could be happening right now.
I moved row by row, as silently and methodically as I could, fighting to keep my cool in spite of the nerve-wracking situation and my rage. We had to catch this guy, and we had to catch him alive.
Now and then I looked down my row and saw Boris, moving in as low a crouch as he could. The sight of his boulderlike profile should have reassured me. But for the first time, it didn’t. I half expected Boris to stumble on the guy and get into trouble I would have to rescue him from.
What was going on with him? It was like someone had taken my super competent and reliable friend and turned him into an idiot. It had me so angry after Ivan’s shock death that I found myself contemplating how I would punish him for this.
Certainly, I wasn’t going to put him in charge of anything important for a while.
The minutes crawled past as we worked our way up the aisles. The guy was keeping still, but I knew he was still in here. Lying in wait for us, him and his gun.
I was almost at the end of the row. Nothing yet. Had he slipped out of the aisles and hidden somewhere in the back of the room?
All of a sudden, I heard a scuffle on the far side of the room, and Boris let out a grunt and a curse. I was just turning to race in that direction when two shots went off, deafening in that echoing space.
