Solitude Creek (Kathryn Dance 4)

He tossed a match into the puddle and it ignited explosively. The liquid was perfect since it burned hot but without any smoke; this would delay the fire department's arrival, s

ince no automatic alarm would be activated. Meanwhile, though, the passengers would feel the heat rising from beneath them and smell the smoke from the Honda burning at the inn and be convinced the hospital was on fire and they were about to be roasted alive.

Now Dr. March walked casually down a corridor, head down, and took the exit to the hospital's parking garage.

He pictured the people in the elevator car and reflected that they were in absolutely no physical danger from what he'd done. The smoke was faint, the fire would burn itself out in ten minutes, the car's emergency brakes would not give out and send it plummeting to the ground.

They would be completely fine.

As long as they didn't panic.

Chapter 63

Got to get out, got to get out...

Please, please, please, please, please.

The orderly was paralyzed with terror. Emergency lights had come on--the car was brightly lit--and it didn't seem to be in danger of falling. But the sense of confinement had its muscular tentacles around him, choking, choking...

"Help us!" an older woman was crying.

Three or four people were pounding on the doors. Like ritual drums, sacrificial drums.

"You smell that?" somebody called. "Smoke."

"Christ. There's a fire."

The orderly gasped. We're going to burn to death. But he considered this possibility in a curiously detached way. A searing, painful death was horrific but not as bad as the clutching, the confinement.

Tears filled his eyes. He hadn't known you could cry from fear.

"Is anybody there?" a woman nurse, in limp green scrubs, was shouting into the intercom. There'd been no message from security through the speaker.

"It's hot, it's hot!" A woman's voice. "The flames're right under us. Help!"

"I can't breathe."

"I've got to get out!"

The pregnant woman was crying. "My baby, my baby."

The orderly ripped his shirt open, lifted his head and tried to find some better air. But he could only fill his lungs with stinking, moist, used breath.

In one corner, a woman vomited.

"Oh, Jesus, lady, all over me." The man beside her, forties, in shorts and a T-shirt, tried to leap back, to escape the mess. But there was no place to go and the man behind him shoved back.

"Hey, watch what you're doing."

The smell of vomit overwhelmed the orderly and it was all he could do to control his own gut.

Not so lucky with the woman beside him. She too was sick.

Phone calls:

"Yes, nine-one-one, we're trapped in an elevator and nobody's doing anything."

"We're in a car, an elevator in Monterey hospital. East Wing. We can't breathe."