That made her laugh. It was a good sound, as beautiful as everything else about her.
“All right,” she said, sniffling. “Let’s go meet Mom.”
27.
IT WAS EARLY AFTERNOON when they arrived at Mother of Roses in the older section of Orden. As was his custom, Alex found a parking place on a hill and at the end of a block so that if he had to he could let the car roll to get it started. The spot was only a few blocks from the hospital.
He cocked the wheels against the curb, set the brake, and then turned to Jax. “We can’t take weapons into this place.”
“They won’t see my knife.”
“They don’t have to see it. They have technology that detects metal. The machine will set off an alarm if we have any weapons on us.”
Jax sighed. “We have ways of detecting weapons, too.”
“I have to leave my gun here. You have to leave your knife.”
“Knives,” she said.
“How many do you have on you?”
“Three.”
“Well, you have to leave them all here.”
She didn’t appear to like the idea one bit. “Without my knives I can’t defend us as well.”
“I understand, but we have to go through the detector in order to be allowed in to see my mother. If we set off an alarm they won’t let us go in, period. Worse, if they find the kind of knife on you that I saw the last time, then we’re going to have problems we don’t need.”
When she hesitated he asked, “Do you want to wait here? I can go alone and see if my mother can tell me anything. You could wait here until I—”
“No,” she said emphatically. “Your grandfather’s place is gone, you don’t go to that gallery anymore, and you’ve left your house. Not being able to find you at places they know—the patterns of your life abruptly changing—may spook them into changing their plans. You come here regularly. They could be watching the place to find out where you are. I have to be there to protect you.”
“All right, but since we have to go unarmed let’s try to make it as quick as possible. If my mother is out of it, then there’s no need to stay anyway; she won’t answer anything when she’s in that state.
“I’m hoping, though, that if she sees you with me that might draw her out. I’m hoping that you might have a positive influence.”
Jax frowned. “Why would that make any difference?”
“She’s my mother. You’re going to marry her baby boy. She’ll want to wring your neck.”
Jax smiled as she hooked a stray lock of wavy blond hair behind an ear. “Maybe you’re right that a new face will get her attention. Maybe I can help get her to talk.”
“I sure hope so, since we’re pretty much in the dark and we need some kind of answers. I really don’t want to have to come back every day until she’s aware enough to talk to me. Sometimes that can take months.”
“We don’t have months. With the things that have been happening, I’m not even sure that we have days.”
Alex let out a sigh. “Let’s hope she can tell us something, then.”
He wrapped his gun, safely in its holster, in one of the old T-shirts he kept in the truck. He used them as rags for cleaning brushes when he went on painting excursions to the countryside. He reached down and stuffed the bundle under the driver’s seat where it would at least be out of sight.
He had also stashed nearly all of his money farther back under the seat. He didn’t like walking around with large quantities of cash, so he had placed it beneath the carpet in a depression in the floor.
When he looked up, Jax handed him three knives. He wondered where she’d been keeping them.
Two of the knives, with leather-wrapped handles, were in simple but well-made brown leather sheaths. The third sheath was a fine-grained black leather, trimmed in silver that matched the knife’s silver handle. Elaborate, beautifully engraved scrollwork decorated the silver handle. Not wanting to take the time to admire it, Alex hurriedly rolled the three knives up together in another old T-shirt from the bag on the floor behind him and stuffed the bundle under the passenger seat.
“What about your pocketknife?” she asked.
“It’s more of a common tool. It doesn’t look scary like those knives you carry—especially that silver one. They don’t want anything that could be used as a weapon going into the hospital, so I have to give them my pocketknife and keys for safekeeping when I visit.
“I’ve been coming to visit my mother for years. I know most everyone who works here. This isn’t a place like when we went shopping for clothes where there were strangers coming and going all the time. I know most everyone here.”
Jax looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “That’s all the more reason to be careful.”
“You said that Cain’s people don’t know enough yet and they’re just watching me.”
“These people are killers, Alex. I’m only making guesses about what they’re doing and what they may be thinking. We can’t count on that assumption. I could have it all wrong.”
“All right, I get it. We still have to worry about getting our necks broken.”
“We should be so lucky if they catch us.”
Alex cast her a suspicious look. “What do you mean?”
“They only break people’s necks when they don’t have the luxury of time and the person isn’t important enough to warrant closer attention.”
“What do they do if they have time?”
“Any number of things,” she said. “They’re pretty inventive.”
Alex wondered why she was being evasive. “What do you mean?”
Jax looked away, staring out the window for a time. She finally turned a serious look on him.
“One of the things Sedrick Vendis likes to do to get people to talk is to hang them up by their wrists, stretched up high enough so that they can just barely touch the ground with their tiptoes. Suspended by your wrists like that, you have to stretch on your toes to take some of the weight off your arms in order to breathe. It’s an agonizing effort to pull air into your lungs. After a short while, if you don’t use your toes for support, it’s impossible to breathe.
“I’m told that it feels rather like you’re drowning. You struggle for every breath as you slowly suffocate. It takes all your strength and effort to help keep enough weight off your arms so that you can get each breath. As you become exhausted, panic sets in, heightening the terror of it.
“After a night like that, alone, unable to sleep, having great difficulty breathing, exhausted from the effort of taking enough weight off their arms so they can get each breath, people are only too eager to tell everything they know, eager to believe that if they cooperate they will be let down.
“Talking, though, doesn’t do them any good. Once the person has confessed all they know, they are of no further use. Strips of skin are peeled down their back and left hanging to attract animals. Birds, ravens especially, will clean the meat right off the exposed ribs. Maggots start growing in the exposed flesh while the person is still alive.
“Dehydration, shock, blood loss—it’s not a pretty way to die, nor is it fast. Unless, of course, they grant you mercy and break your legs so that you can’t support your weight. Then you suffocate and death comes quickly.”
Alex didn’t know what he had been expecting, but it was nothing like this. He couldn’t have imagined such a thing.
He had to remind himself to breathe. “I can’t imagine anyone being that inhuman, that barbaric.”
“Then I won’t tax your imagination by telling you the things they do that are worse.” Her brown eyes turned to focus on him. “You think about that before you let yourself get caught.”
Alex hadn’t been thinking about not getting caught. He’d been thinking only about not letting them catch her. That was the thought that truly terrified him.
He finally took a full breath. “Jax, I’m sorry. . . . I shouldn’t have asked such a question.”
He wiped a hand bac
k across his face. He felt hot and a little sick to his stomach.
“I didn’t mean to sound angry at you for asking,” she said. “I’m angry at the people who do these things. You were right to ask—after all, it’s you they’re interested in. You need to know what these people are really like. You need to understand the consequences of hesitation.”
Alex clenched his jaw as his revulsion began to melt into smoldering rage.
Her expression softened into regret. “I’m sorry I have to bring such things into your life, Alex. I’m sorry that I—”
“You didn’t bring them into my life,” he said as he held up a hand to stop her. “The truth is the truth. Only a real friend would warn me about the kind of people who are after me.”
She smiled sympathetically, relieved that he understood.
“Now,” he said, “let’s get in there and see if we can find out what these bastards want from my world.”
28.
WITH A CASUAL BUT CAREFUL LOOK, Jax scanned the entire area before opening her door. He saw her appraise the same older couple walking up from behind them that he’d noticed in the rearview mirror. Jax returned a smile when the couple smiled as they passed by. He noted that she trusted no one, not even an old couple shuffling along the sidewalk.
He wondered how she could summon a smile. He couldn’t.
Alex tossed his jacket in the back seat and then locked the Cherokee. He checked the back hatch to make sure that it was locked as well. He didn’t like leaving a gun in the truck that a thief could discover and steal, but he had no choice. Even though he was licensed to carry a concealed weapon, they still couldn’t be taken into a mental institution.
He wondered what he was going to do if they ended up having to leave the state. While he was licensed to carry in Nebraska, that license wasn’t valid in other places, especially Boston, where the law took a dim view of people protecting themselves.
Alex had a very clear-cut belief about his fundamental right to his own life. He didn’t think that he should have to die just because a criminal wanted to take his life. He had only one life and he believed that he had the right to defend it, simple as that. Ben had taught him how.
In light of the kind of people they were up against, the kind of animals Jax had just told him about, he knew that he would rather risk facing a gun charge than be without a means of protecting himself, and more than that, protecting Jax. He wasn’t willing to die because of the dogmatic principles of imperious public officials. It was his life, not theirs.
From bits and pieces Jax had revealed, he knew that Cain would love nothing more than to have her in his clutches. Alex knew that if they ever got their hands on her they would do those things that she’d said he couldn’t even imagine. Whatever those things were, he didn’t want to know. He was already angry enough.
The limbs of the maple and oak trees lining the residential streets whipped back and forth in the gusty wind, filling the bright day with a rush of noise. Jax had to use one hand to hold her hair back off her face as they made their way quickly along the sidewalk. She used the other to hold on to his arm, playing the part of his fiancée.
The storms had left the ground littered with leaves so that it looked a little like autumn, except that the leaves were green instead of bright colors. Here and there limbs that had been torn off during the storms lay on lawns and at the sides of the street. The air had an odd, dry feel to it, as if hinting at the looming change of season.
Jax silently eyed the imposing front façade of Mother of Roses as they walked down Thirteenth Street. Many of the people climbing the broad bank of steps on their way to visit patients carried flowers or small boxes wrapped in bright paper and decorated with ribbons.
As they continued past the front entrance, without turning up the steps, Jax frowned questioningly up at him. “Family visiting the ninth floor can go in the back,” he told her. “It’s easier.”
“The ninth floor,” she repeated in a flat tone.
He knew what she was thinking. “I’m afraid so.”
Around the side, the usual collection of service vans were crowded into the small lot that was really nothing more than an irregular blacktopped area off the alley. The back of the building was virtually deserted compared with the activity in front. That had always added to Alex’s feeling of alienation; he wasn’t visiting a normal patient, someone who would eventually get better and go home, he was visiting someone who was imprisoned because she was a danger to society and would never be released.
He guessed that in the back of his mind he had always felt a sense of shame over that, not to mention anxiety that he might end up the same as his mother. Now he felt a sense of anger, because it was seeming more and more likely that her condition was the fault of strangers meddling in their lives, strangers who wanted something and didn’t care who they had to hurt to get it.
Out of habit, as they took a shortcut across the grass and patches of bare dirt beneath the shade of the huge oaks, Alex glanced up at the windows on the ninth floor. He saw nothing more than shadows through the nearly opaque glass.
“Are all the windows covered with wire?” Jax asked as she noticed him looking up at the top floor.
“All the ones where we’re going.”
When he pulled open the steel door at the back entrance, Jax paused and wrinkled her nose at the unfamiliar hospital smell. She stole a quick glance to each side before stepping through the doorway.
Inside, the smell of food mixed unappetizingly with the hospital smell. The kitchens were back off the entrance area. Often-times smaller supplies were taken to the kitchen through the back entrance.
As he did at every other visit, Alex tossed his keys, change, and pocketknife in a blue plastic tub on a table to the side of the metal detector. His phone was taking a bath in the outlet mall. As he had coached, Jax walked slowly through the metal detector. With her hands hooked in her back pockets, she looked completely natural, as if she did it every day. Wearing jeans and the black top she looked completely normal, as if she belonged with him. Except that he had never been with any woman as breathtaking as Jax.
The older security guard, Dwayne, who never smiled at Alex, smiled at Jax. She returned the smile. As well as Alex was beginning to know her, though, he recognized that her smile wasn’t sincere.
After Alex had gone through the metal detector, Dwayne reached in the tub as he usually did to hand back the phone.
He looked up. “You don’t have your phone.”
Alex snapped his fingers. “Must have left it in the truck.”
The guard, with no phone to give back, simply placed the tub on a table against the wall that he used as a desk. He would return the keys, change, and pocketknife when they were on their way out. There were no other blue tubs on the table against the wall. The rest of the empty tubs were stacked together beside the metal detector. As was often the case during the day, Alex was the only visitor to the ninth floor.
At the steel desk beyond the metal detector he picked up the registry clipboard and blue plastic pen attached to the clipboard by its dirty string. He signed his name, paused, and then wrote “Jax, fiancée” in the guest column.
Doreen, who had been paying close attention to Jax, took the clipboard from him and turned it around to see how he’d filled in the “guest” portion. Alex had never brought a guest with him when he went to see his mother.
Doreen looked up with a grin. “Fiancée! Alex, I never knew. I’m so happy for you.”
Alex returned the smile and introduced Jax. They shook hands. Doreen seemed unable to look away from Jax’s mesmerizing eyes. Alex knew the feeling.
“How long have you two been together?” the beaming Doreen asked.
“It all happened pretty fast,” Alex said. “She just dropped into my life out of the blue. Surprised the hell out of me, to tell you the truth.”
“Oh, that’s so exciting, Alex. When’s the big date?” she asked Jax.
“As soon as we work out
the details,” Jax said.
Alex was relieved that Jax had handled the question with such simple grace.
On their way to the elevator, Alex leaned close. “That telling-the-truth trick of yours works pretty well.”
She gave him a smile at their inside joke. He noticed that she smiled differently at him than she did at anyone else. There was something special about it, something he liked very much.
When the green metal door of the elevator opened, Alex took a step in. Jax balked, her hand on his arm dragging him to a halt.
“What is this?” she asked.
Before anyone noticed them stopping, he put an arm around her waist and ushered her inside. “It’s an elevator. It takes us up to the ninth floor, where my mother is held.”
She turned around the way he did and faced the front as the door glided closed. “I don’t like being locked in a metal box.”
“I can’t really blame you, but it’s fine, honest. It’s just a device that goes up and down, nothing else.”
“Aren’t there stairs?”
“There’s a fire escape on the outside of the building, but you can’t use it except in an emergency. The regular stairway is kept locked to control access to the ninth floor.”
Jax tensed at every clunk and clatter of the elevator’s ascent through the building. She only seemed to relax when it wobbled to a stop and the doors opened.
As she stepped out, her gaze swept the nurses’ station, taking in everything, noting the position of everyone working behind the counter. There were four nurses, three female and one male, plus a woman at the computer. Back down the hall Alex could see an orderly getting a mop and bucket out of a utility room. He was sure that Jax was also checking to make sure that she didn’t recognize anyone.
Standing at the high counter at the nurses’ station, Alex signed his name and wrote in the time. Not a lot of people visited the ninth floor. He saw his signature from previous visits several places higher up on the sheet. He slid the clipboard over and motioned Jax to step up to the counter.