AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Harrow now frowned, noticing two bright flashes appear from the jobsite. Two loud bangs followed seconds later.
Something had happened at the base of the cranes.
Lord, this was one of the attacks!
The huge thing was starting to tilt.
He removed his glasses and wiped the lenses and replaced them.
The sound of a Klaxon began to fill the air.
It leaned farther and farther …
Then, like cutting a marionette’s strings, it collapsed fast. His apartment was about a half mile away and it took a second or two for the sound of the collision to reach him.
“Shit,” Harrow gasped, grabbing his phone and dialing 911, even though he was sure dozens if not hundreds of calls were already being made.
A voice nearby startled him. “Shit!”
He glanced up. Rimbaud was looking over the cloud of dust in the distance. He squawked once more. “Shit. Uh-huh. Shit.”
58.
JENNY HAD MADEa joke when Martine was born.
“You ever notice the smell? It’s Eau d’Hospital.”
And Ron Pulaski had inhaled and said, “Yeah. They all smell alike. Don’t do a start-up that sells it. I’d think it’d be a limited market.”
Pulaski was aware of the same scent now as he walked, head down, along the corridor of the general administration wing.
He was in East Side General Hospital illegally. At least where he presently was, in the guts of the place. He could, of course, spend as much time in the visitor area as he wished. But strolling through the security door with the expired NYPD ID card and a silver badge that was a souvenir Brad had bought in the gift shop of one of the big movie studios after a tour? Nope. Not good. He wasn’t in uniform—that would be an offense too far, he judged—but was in a dark suit and white shirt. A tie that he wore maybe three times a year.
So, a silver-badge detective. Probably no one would know that was a contradiction.
He’d signed in, but the scrawl was illegible, as was the lettering in thePrint Your Nameblock. He thought of Detective Ed Garner’s trick, getting him to draw a sloppy diagram of where the accident took place and of Burdick’s plan of using his past medical incident to sideline him.
It took a moment to let the anger dissipate.
A pleasant nod to some nurses, two round men in good moods. He passed a lunchroom, a copier room, several meeting rooms … and then he came to the site of his second impending crime:Records.
He stepped into the large room—easily fifty feet long, twenty wide—and saw that it was unoccupied. He sat down at a nearby workstation and clicked on the computer. Medical files were stored here digitally as well as the original hard copies, he learned. To find them you first typed in the patient’s name and date of birth, then the date of their admission. This called up the digital file and also gave the location of the physical file itself.
A strident warning against violating patients’ privacy rights under HIPAA appeared. But that went away by itself after two seconds.
Now for the hunt.
He’d expected layers of frustration and challenge.
A knotty gut, sweating brow and palms.
None of that.
No passwords were required and in less than a minute he found exactly what he needed.
Twenty minutes later, he strode from the hospital, a dozen sheets, folded letter size, sitting in the right breast pocket of his wedding-graduation-funeral suit jacket.
Feeling good about the operation.
