Any Means Necessary (a Luke Stone Thriller-Book #1)

Chapter Twenty

Zero Hour

Between Alive and Dead

He drifted, listening to the sounds.

Music was playing, some kind of quiet classical music with violins and piano. The people gathered around him were talking in mechanical voices.

"Scissors. Scalpel. Suction. I said suction! Can't you clear that out some more?"

"Yes, Doctor."

Then: "He was lucky. An inch to the left and it would have nicked his aorta. He'd have been dead in a couple of minutes."

Eldrick wasn't interested in the doctors, and he wasn't interested in the body on the table. They were all below him now, and he caught a glimpse of the thing the doctors were working so hard to save. It reminded him of a dead dog by the side of the road. It didn't seem like something worth saving.

He turned and through the doorway he saw his grandmother in the next room, standing at the stove and stirring a pot. Something smelled really good.

"LT, get your butt in here."

He ran in there. It was afternoon, the sun was shining outside the windows of their apartment, and he wanted to go down to the park and play some ball. But the smell of dinner was enough to make him shake with anticipation. It was a happy time, before everything had gone so wrong.

"You finish your homework, honey?"

"Yes, Grandma."

"You wouldn't lie to me, would you?"

He smiled.

She turned to him, and her face was serious. "You've done a bad thing, haven't you?"

He wasn't a child after all. He was a grown man, and she was the little old lady she became before breast cancer took her away.

He nodded. "I did a bad thing."

"Can you make it right?"

He shook his head. "I don't know if anything will ever be right again."

9:30 a.m.

Johns HopkinsBayviewMedicalCenter - Baltimore, Maryland

"Here come a couple of them," Luke said.

He and Ed stood in a hospital corridor, about twenty yards from a door marked PHARMACY. A few moments before, Luke had tried to open it. It was locked. Up the hall, two men in blue scrubs and white lab jackets walked toward them. They were chatting and laughing about something.

There were surveillance cameras every at every corner. It didn't matter. Luke planned to act fast. He was already in trouble. What was a little more?

"Excuse me, guys," Luke said. "Are you men doctors?"

"Yes we are," one said, a fit middle-aged guy in wire frame glasses. "What's the trouble?"

Luke stepped close to the man. His gun was out. He pressed it to the man's stomach, down low, away from the video cameras. He put a friendly hand on the man's shoulder. "Don't say a word, either of you."

Ed stepped in close behind the second man. Luke could see a gun in Ed's hand. He pressed the muzzle hard into the small of the second doctor's back.

"We're not going to hurt you, if you do exactly what I say."

The first doctor, so confident a moment before, was trembling. "I..." he said. He couldn't speak.

"It's okay," Luke said. "Don't talk. I need you to open the door to the pharmacy over there. That's all I need you to do. Open the door and come inside with me for a few minutes."