White Trash Zombie Unchained (White Trash Zombie 6)

“Thank you, Angel.” She stood. “After I finish the interview, I need to make some public appearances. I’m going to talk to Marcus right now. I have Victor for protection, and I’m sure he and Mr. Gentry and I can come to a satisfactory arrangement.”

“Sure,” I said with a snort. “After Gentry tells you all the reasons you can’t leave.”

Jane smiled sweetly. “I’ve spent enough time in Congress to be quite adept at dealing with bullshit.”

“You go, girl!” I said with a grin. Pierce didn’t stand a chance against her.

She and Victor headed out. Portia stepped aside to let them pass then entered, carrying an elegant dark leather briefcase. “Ready when you are.”

“Let’s ditch this place.” I led her through the lab and garage then out the back of the building, where a helicopter crouched on a bare patch of ground. Kyle, Rachel, and Brian waited nearby.

Brian stepped toward us. “Dr. Antilles, may I help you in?”

“I would be most grateful,” she replied, pure class and elegance. I took mental notes on how she carried herself.

Kyle and Brian both helped Portia get settled and buckled up, then Brian plugged in her headset and showed her which channels were for public or private conversation.

Brian gestured for me to climb in. “We’ll be relieving Dan, Raul, and Pierce.”

At the mention of Pierce’s name, Rachel gave Brian a measuring look. Rachel wasn’t one of the people “allowed” to know Pierce was Pietro, but now I wondered if she’d figured it out on her own. More power to her.

I took the seat facing Portia’s, glad that I’d paid attention during the headset instructions. Brian took the front seat by the pilot—a no-nonsense middle-aged woman.

This was only my second time riding in a helicopter, and the first had been a vastly different experience. It had been a military-style chopper, manned by Tribe people who knew how to handle the brain-starved injured zombie they’d plucked from raging floodwaters. There’d been no plush seats, or passenger headsets to block out the loud rotor noise.

Not that I cared. The chopper had saved my dad’s life and that was all that mattered.

Kyle sat beside me, and Rachel across from him. The pilot secured the doors then settled in the cockpit and started the rotors. I put my headset on as the noise level rose, then gawked out the window as the ground dropped away. Portia’s face shone with delight as she took in the early morning sky and the view. Ahead of us, the sunrise was a slash of fire along the horizon.

I pulled the punch card out of my pocket and frowned down at it, hoping that the answer would miraculously come to me in a fit of brilliance. TPR1064638. TPR . . . Tupperware? Hell, maybe Reno wanted to upgrade his food storage containers.

Kyle tapped me on the wrist then held up three fingers. When I looked at him stupidly, he pointed to the headphones.

Oh. Right. I switched to channel three.

He nodded toward the card. “Why do you have an EMR number?”

“It’s the only clue I salvaged from the Big Bubba mission. What’s an EMR number?”

“Electronic medical records. TPR plus seven digits is Tucker Point Regional Hospital.”

Excitement raced through me in a tingly wave. “So this is a person’s medical file?”

“I suspect so,” Kyle said. “Normally only an admin or a doctor assigned to the patient can access the records, in which case all that’s needed is the patient’s name and date of birth. They would rarely, if ever, use the patient number to pull up the records, though it’s not out of the realm of possibility.”

“What could one of Kristi’s people—namely Reno Larson—do with the number?”

“If he located or created a back door to the EMR database, he’d be able to access the file with the patient number, possibly without leaving a trace.”

I thrust the card at him. “Can you find out whose record that is?”

He waved the card away. “I have it memorized. I’ll make a call after we land.”

I did a little jiggy dance in my seat then joined Portia in watching the scenery go by. Whose medical record would Kristi want, and more importantly, why? She sure hadn’t gone about getting it in a legitimate way. But Reno’s high-speed flight from the cops had happened before Douglas Horton became the first shambler case, which meant it was probably something completely unrelated to our current crisis.

The pilot began a gradual descent a few miles from NuQuesCor, low enough for me to see people below tip their faces up to watch us fly past. The cars seemed to crawl along the highways compared to us.

One of the cars made a turn onto the road that led to NuQuesCor. No big deal except that it was a dark green Chevy Impala.