Thomas Hoover - Life blood

"No." I turned and feeling a hit of nausea, hurried back to his side. "What happened? Did-?"

"Fat Hispanic guy. Spic bastard. He had a couple of young punks with him. Mrs. Reilly had just left and I went to the door, thinking it was probably you ringing my bell. He flashed a knife and they shoved their way in. Then one of his thugs went into the bedroom and carried her out. When I tried to stop them, the SOB knifed me. I guess I… swooned cause the next thing I remember is waking up here on the floor."

It sounded garbled and probably didn't occur as quickly as he thought. But I knew immediately what had happened Ramos-of course that's who it was-had come to take Sarah. It was his one sure way to stop me from mentioning Children of Light in my film. She was a hostage. My first instinct was to kill him.

"What else can you remember?" I was already dialing 911. Time to get an ambulance. And after that, the cops.

After about ten rings I got somebody and, following an explanation that was longer than it needed to be, a woman with a southern accent told me the medics would be there in fifteen minutes. I took another look at Lou and ordered them to hurry, then hung up. I was going to call the police next, but first I needed to hear exactly what had happened before he got quarantined in some emergency room.

His eyes were glazing over again, as shock and blood loss started to catch up with him. Clearly he would pull through, but right now, sitting there in a pool of blood, he could have been at death's door.

"Look… at that." He was pointing, his rationality beginning to fail. For a second I didn't realize what he meant, but then I saw a fax lying beside the phone. I picked it up. The time on it was 9:08 P.M. and it was from somebody named John Williams. Then I remembered. Wasn't that the FBI computer whiz he'd talked about the other day at the hospital, after we'd deconstructed Sarah's waterlogged passport?

There was no message, just a sheet with a date-two years old-and a list of names accompanied by numbers and a capital letter. Then I noticed the letterhead of Aviateca, the Guatemalan national airline, and it dawned on me I was looking at a flight manifest.

I scanned down the page, and then I saw it.

Sarah Crenshaw, 3B.

Williams found her, I thought. And she was traveling First Class.

What caught my eye next was the name of the person sitting in 3A, the seat right next to hers. A. Godford. Probably a computer misprint. Or maybe it was the name he used when he traveled. So if it was him, which it surely was, the bastard didn't even try to hide it.

I just stood there, thinking. Maybe you get one big-time coincidence in life, and if so, this must be mine. Sarah and I had both found Alex Goddard. Or he'd found us. Other women came and went through Quetzal Manor, but we were different. She'd escaped from him, half dead but now he'd sent Ramos to bring her back. It was the one way he could be sure to keep me under his control. But again, why? Was it just to stop my film, or was there more to the story?

"Morgy," Lou groaned "that son of a bitch took her tonight. I just know it."

That was my conclusion precisely, though I hadn't been planning to say it to him, at least not yet.

"How can you be so sure?"

"Something they said. I didn't quite catch it, but it sounded like, 'He wants you back.' Then some word. It sounded like 'Babylon' or something."

I stared at him a second trying to remember where I'd heard that before. Then it clicked in. That was the last thing Sarah had said she'd whispered that word when I was putting her to bed. What could she have been talking about?

He wheezed and I went back to him and pressed the towel against his side. The bleeding was about stemmed but he was definitely due for a hospital stay. A siren was sounding down the street. Probably the ambulance. Thank God I thought. Now it's time to call the police.

Then I noticed he was crying. What was that about?

"Morgy, they didn't actually kidnap her. You see, she-"

"What?" I guess I was trying to take it in. "What do you mean?"

"Know what she said? Sarah?" He choked for a second, then continued. "She said, 'Yes, I want to go back.' "

Before I could ask him what the hell he was talking about, the medics were ringing the doorbell. They strode in with a gurney, also rolling a portable plasma IV, young guys who looked like they'd be more at home at a Garden hockey game, followed immediately by two uniformed policemen, actually policewomen, one short and heavy, with reddish hair, the other a wiry young Hispanic. (I found out that ambulances called out for stabbing or gunshot wounds automatically get a cop escort.) In less than three minutes, Lou was in the blue-and-white ambulance and on his way to St. Vincent's emergency room.

I rode in the backseat of the squad car as we followed them and tried to explain what little I knew of what had happened. It turned out to be an education in the mindless sticking points of the law.

Long story short: The fact that I hadn't reported the burglary of my apartment that very same day immediately cast doubt on my seriousness as a truth-seeking citizen; I had no proof the unreported burglary of my apartment (if, indeed, such had actually occurred) was by some Guatemalan military attache named Jose Alvino Ramos; since Lou had never seen Colonel Ramos before tonight, he couldn't possibly identify him as that burglar either; accusing diplomats of a crime without ironclad proof was frowned on downtown; and when I stupidly repeated what Lou had said about Sarah's last words (well, he was going to tell them sooner or later, it would just come bubbling out at some point), the whole case that she was kidnapped went into revision mode.

By the time we got to the hospital, I was getting questions that seemed to imply that maybe it was all a domestic affair-like most of their calls: some spaced-out chick who'd run away once and got brought back and then, still unstable and crazy, decided to knife her own dad and disappear again. Now he was understandably covering for her. Happened more than you'd think.

I kept stressing that Lou was former FBI and not the sort to invent such a whopper, but this was listened to in skeptical silence. If it was a kidnapping, they then wondered aloud what was the motive and where were the demands of the perpetrators? I was ready to start yelling at them by the time we parked in the Seventh Avenue driveway of the emergency room at St. Vincent's.

They next made me cool my heels in the waiting room while they went back to interrogate Lou. They were with him for almost an hour, then came back to where I was and asked me to read and sign the report they'd written.

A troubled girl, who had emerged from a coma and apparently was suffering bouts of non-rationality, had disappeared and her father had been stabbed but not seriously. He was the only witness to the incident and claimed she'd been kidnapped. However, the girl had run away once previously, and there was no physical evidence she'd been taken against her will; in fact, her father admitted she had declared just the opposite. The whole incident would be investigated further after he came downtown and made a complete statement.

"I'm not going to sign this." I handed it back, fuming.

"Is there anything here that's not factually correct?" The Hispanic cop was looking me straight in the eye, her expression cold as Alaska.

The question made me seethe. Sarah was probably already on her way out of the country, and here I was trying to reason with two women who practically thought she was the criminal. But I knew a lost cause when I saw one.

"Forget about it. I want to see Lou."

An intern was coming out and I snagged him, announced I was next of kin to a patient, and demanded to be taken through the official door and into the back. At that moment, the stout cop's radio crackled. They were being summoned to a Christopher Street gay bar where somebody had just been knifed in a back room. She looked at me, as though to say, "This sounds like a real crime," and then they hurried out for their squad car. Christ!