Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

Three people got off. Five got on. One was a biker, a Harley variety. Leather jacket, boots, stocking cap. And chains. What did anybody need to wear chains for? There was protest in the form of sighs and a glare or two and the doors closed and the car rose slowly, bobbing under the weight. Not because he looked dangerous, which he did, but at his size. They were completely packed in now, belly to back. Man could've waited for the next trip.

This is hell.

Shit.

"Ah, ah, ah..." the woman gasped.

"Almost there," the orderly said, reassuring himself as much as the pregnant woman.

Not that it worked.

As the car climbed toward floor three, conversation slowed, except for the complaining doctor, who was abrasively asking to talk to somebody in charge. "Well, I don't know. Maybe the restaurant manager? Is that so very hard to figure out?"

Almost there...

Seconds unreeled like hours.

Jesus Christ. Get to the floor. Open the fucking door!

But the door didn't open. In fact, the elevator didn't even make it to the third floor. It bounced to a stop somewhere between two and three.

No, no, please. He believed he thought this. But the prayer or plea might have been uttered aloud. Several people looked his way. That might, however, have been from the look of encroaching panic on his sweaty face.

"It's all right. I'm sure it'll get moving soon." It was the doctor, slipping his phone away, who'd offered this reassurance to the orderly.

And the pregnant woman in the wheelchair wiped abundant sweat from her forehead, tucked stringy hair behind her ears and tried to steady her breathing.

"Ah, ah, ah. I think it's coming. I think the baby's coming..."

Chapter 62

In surgical scrubs, cap and booties, Antioch March left the engineering room on the top floor of Monterey Bay Hospital, where he'd just cut the power to the east-wing elevator car number two. Twenty minutes earlier he'd done the same to car one, when it was empty. This drove the passenger traffic to the second car in this wing of the hospital, assuring it would be packed when disaster struck.

Which it was. He was watching the video image of the interior from the camera inside. Of particular interest was the pregnant woman, whose head was tilted back and who was gasping. Her face wincing in pain. Even better was the expression of the orderly accompanying her. Panic starting to foam. Exquisite.

March imagined what it was like in there. A dozen--no, more--people inside, belly to back, side to side, the air becoming denser and more useless. Hotter too. The power loss took out the air-conditioning unit, as well.

He closed up his computer, tossed his tools into a tote bag. He left the top floor, the fifth, and then headed to the basement. He didn't have much time, he knew. The repair crews had already been summoned to fix car one and, given their location in Salinas, could be here in twenty minutes. Car two, the occupied one, would be their priority once they arrived. The hospital maintenance staff too would head up to the infrastructure room on the top floor and look over the system. They'd see the vandalism immediately and might rig a solution, though given the dangerous nature of a two-thousand-pound piece of machinery, they'd probably wait for the pros.

Not much time, no, but he'd choreographed this attack as skillfully as the others. After deciding, at the aborted church supper hall, that a hotel would make a good target he'd come up with a plan that he believed even the brilliant Kathryn Dance could not anticipate.

He appeared to attack the nearby inn, setting fire to the Honda--he needed to dump it anyway. The police would concentrate on that, and assume the hotel was the target, while he hurried on foot to the hospital a quarter mile away.

They wouldn't consider the hospital much of a threat and wouldn't have added extra guards, he speculated, because there wasn't any one particular area of concentration; patients and visitors and doctors were spread out over several large buildings, which had numerous exits.

No, the charming and not unattractive Ms. Kathryn Dance was clever but she'd surely miss that those oversize elevator cars in a hospital would be a perfect site for the panic game.

He now double-stepped down to the basement and peered out from the stairwell. He was in scrubs, true, but had no ID pinned to his breast so he had to be careful. The corridor, though, was empty. He stopped in the storeroom and collected a gallon container of a substance he'd found here earlier, on recon.

Diethyl ether.

Ether was a clear liquid, nowadays utilized as a solvent and cleanser but years ago it was used as an anesthetic. Famed dentist William T. G. Morton, of Boston, was the first to use inhaled ether to put patients under for medical procedures. The substance was soon praised as better than chloroform because there was a large gap between the recommended dosage and how much ether it would take to kill you--with chloroform, that window of safety was much smaller.

However, ether did have one disadvantage: Patients who were administered the drug occasionally caught fire. Sometimes they even exploded (he'd seen the remarkable pictures). Ether and oxygen or, even better, ether and nitrous oxide--laughing gas--could be as dangerous as dynamite.

Hence the chemical was relegated to other uses, like here--a solvent. But March had been delighted to find some during his reconnaissance.

March now made his way to the elevator room door. He opened it up and dumped some of the liquid on the floor of the elevator shaft pit, holding his breath (ether may occasionally have blown up patients but it was a very efficient anesthetic).