John Gilstrap - At all costs

Her characterization made George smile. “That’s the one.”

She smacked her forehead with a palm. “Duh,” she said. “He’s in the hospital, all right, two floors up in pediatric ICU.”

Travis’s lungs screamed for relief as he kicked and squirmed on his bed, trying to break free from Wiggins’s grasp. As he thrust his head violently in an effort to get away, his attacker’s hand never loosened, and he could feel the long plastic tube shifting from side to side, deep inside his chest. His eyes begged for mercy, but it was like pleading with a shark as he dragged you deeper and deeper into the water.

His sheet was gone now, kicked off onto the floor, and his body’s struggle to breathe had pulled his sweaty, smooth skin taut against his thin frame. The bones of the boy’s chest seemed to rise out of his skin as his diaphragm strained to pull in a breath, and his abdomen seemed to collapse, his navel heaved so far into his belly that it looked like it might actually touch his spine.

Please stop! Oh, God, please make him stop! I’ll be good! Tears poured from his eyes as he realized he was going to die. He started to hear the same rushing sound in his ears that he’d heard in the car, and the colors started to drain again from his surroundings…

Wiggins let go.

The rush of air into his body made Travis feel suddenly dizzy, as if somebody had put his bed on a lazy Susan and spun it. There wasn’t enough air in the world now to fulfill the boy’s need. He sucked in huge lungfuls, and he ended up swallowing nearly as much as he breathed. He gagged once and tried to vomit, but nothing came up.

He was alive! The feeling of relief was overwhelming.

“Told you that would be scary, didn’t I?” Wiggins said, smiling. “I timed that one. A minute and a half. That’s it. Felt like a much longer time, didn’t it?”

This asshole wasn’t done! He said that already, didn’t he? He said he was gonna kill me! Travis remembered the syringe, and his panic bloomed even larger than before.

Wiggins just kept talking, like he was trying to figure out where to have dinner. “I mean, it felt like a much longer time to me, and I was just standing here. For you, it must’ve seemed like an hour.”

The fight had left Travis exhausted, soaked with sweat. Even through the fear, he could smell his own body odor, and it was horrible. His muscles told him to quit, but his brain shrieked at him to keep fighting. He tried to move his right hand again and could feel the fleece lining slide a little further down his wrist. If he used his imagination, he could almost feel the restraint sliding off his hand.

Wiggins seemed suddenly tired of this game. “Want to go on that ride one more time, or shall I just get on with my business?” Holding the syringe directly in front of the boy’s face, he took his time sliding the blue plastic cap off the end of the needle. “I think you’ve probably suffered enough,” he said as he shot a spider-silk stream of poison into the air.

Pediatric or otherwise, the ICU was anything but cheerful. It had the same rectangular design, but it was much smaller. This was a place for very, very sick children, and under the circumstances, the larger-than-life mural of Barney the Dinosaur looked horribly out of place; sacrilegious almost.

The place was bedlam. Over on the far side of the nurses’ station, a cast of thousands swarmed like gnats around the bedside of a child who looked way too small to have a problem so big. Sparks recognized the look of helplessness in some of the faces, and he knew what it meant. He turned away. It had been a long, long time since he’d dealt with death real-time, and the fact that the victim was a kid made it worse.

“What happened?” George asked as he approached the uniformed guard at Travis’s door.

The commotion down the hall had obviously unnerved the cop as well. “Can I help you?” he asked in a half-polite, half-surly tone.

The agent flopped open his black credentials wallet. “George Sparks, FBI.”

Recognition flashed in the cop’s face. “Oh, sure,” he said. “I know you. Bill Rubie.” He turned his gaze back down the hall. “I don’t know. Best I can tell, the kid just died. They’ve got every doctor in the state trying to bring her back.” He looked at his shoes as he sighed. “Makes you think.” When he looked up, he was past it all. “What brings you here?”

“Travis’s mother tried to hang herself in jail last night,” Sparks explained, eliciting a pained groan from Rubie. “I was downstairs when they brought her in, and she was babbling about some plot to kill her kid. I told one of your buddies I’d relay the story to you, so he could stay put with the prisoner.”

“And who’s supposed to be hatching this plot?”

Sparks started a chuckle, then stifled it as he remembered that death was nearby. “The FBI,” he said. Traces of a smile remained.

Rubie rolled his eyes. “Ah. I see. Well, the only folks who’ve been in with the kid are doctors and nurses, and they’ve been coming in by the truckload.”

Sparks reached for the doorknob. “Have you checked in on him yourself?”

The cop shrugged. “I see him when the door opens, but other than that, what’s to check?”

George considered that for a moment, then nodded. “Good point. Mind if I peek in on him?”

The cop made a face that spoke his words: “Suit yourself. There’s a doc in there right now, though. Said he wanted to have some privacy with the kid.”

Sparks paused, his hand a half inch from the knob. “I’ll wait,” he said. “I hate the body fluids business, anyway.”

Rubie laughed at the turn of phrase. “I don’t know how they do it,” he agreed.

Travis closed his eyes at the sight of the needle. This was it, fifteen seconds from now, he’d either be alive or he’d be dead, all depending on what he did next. Concentrating exclusively on his right hand, he forced his thumb as far in toward his palm as it would go. His wrist hurt as his thumb formed an X with his pinky, making his hand as small as it would ever get. He yanked once, very hard, and spun his wrist in the fleece. There was resistance for maybe half a second, and then he was free!

He moved faster than Wiggins could react. The needle was poised under Travis’s suspended IV bag, just an inch from the brown rubber injection site, when the boy made his move. With no idea what might happen, Travis grabbed a fistful of IV tubing and pulled. The swiftness of the move caused Wiggins to jump back as the tubes came free of the bag and flopped like so many clear snakes across the boy’s legs.

Furious, the killer lashed out and smacked the boy across the face. Travis felt something rattle inside his mouth, but he ignored it. Instead, he shifted his attack to the EKG monitor on his left. He needed some attention, right this very second, and this seemed like the way to get it. As Wiggins recoiled for another blow, Travis rolled to his left and smacked the side of the heart monitor as hard as he could, sending thousands of dollars of machinery crashing to the floor.

“What the hell was that?”

At the sound of the crash, Sparks and Rubie spun together and dashed through the door, into Travis’s room. Neither was prepared for what they saw. A doctor was beating his own patient!

“Hey!” Sparks yelled. “What the hell…” The instant the man turned, Sparks knew he was no doctor, and the rest of the situation crystallized. He reached for his weapon.

The attacker moved with remarkable speed, launching a vicious kick to Sparks’s hand, just as the pistol cleared its holster. The weapon skittered across the floor. A second kick-really a continuation of the first-folded Rubie’s knee backward onto itself, rendering him instantly useless.