Vendetta (22 page)

Eight long minutes later, Nikki gasped, “We did it! Alexis, make sure those battery-operated warming packs didn’t slip. He has to stay warm. The ambulance will be heated but we don’t want him getting a chill. He has to be alive and well when he leaves here.”

Myra looked up at the security monitor over the kitchen door. “I can see the ambulance. I’m going to open the gates now. If anyone wants to say goodbye, this is the time to do it.” The women ignored her. She reached up for the whistle and blew two sharp blasts. The guard dogs raced to the heated barn.

The two men who got out of the ambulance were big and burly wrestler types. They breezed into the kitchen, looked at the ironing board, then at the women. “Is this the patient?”

“Now that’s a brilliant deduction if I ever heard one,” Alexis smirked. The men ignored her as they shook out a large warming blanket that they draped over the ironing board.

And then they were gone.

Myra looked dazed. “I’ll make tea,” she said.

“Like hell you will,” Isabelle said as she reached into the cabinet for the liquor bottles. “We have a problem, girls. We drank all the brandy during Myra’s last tea-making episode. We’re going to have to drink this fine old Kentucky bourbon that says it’s over a hundred proof and
aged
. Whatever the hell that means.” She tilted the bottle and took a healthy gulp before she passed the bottle around the table.

Before long, the bottle was empty and the women were as drunk as a bunch of skunks.

Charles eyed them for a long minute when he entered the kitchen. He tried not to laugh as he carried them one by one up to the second floor. Myra was the last. He bent over her chair, his nose almost touching hers. “I think it’s time for bed, my darling. You are some kind of woman, Myra Rutledge.”

Myra opened one eye. “Charles! Oh, I have so much to tell you. About my road trip with Kathryn. We’re going to the Truckers’ Ball but we have to get suitable outfits. I don’t want to embarrass Kathryn and her friends. Is…is it over, Charles?”

“It’s over, Myra.”

“I’m drunk, Charles. The girls didn’t want my tea. I had to do what they wanted. You don’t think I’m going to turn into a…a sot, do you? I think I like beer better. I do love you. You are my prince. My shining knight. My love for all time. I will marry you. The girls can be our attendants.”

Charles laughed as he picked Myra up and slung her over his shoulder. “I hope you remember this when you wake up, my dear. I’ve been asking you to marry me for twenty-five years.”

“Oh, I’ll remember, Charles. Maybe we can get married at the Truckers’ Ball.”

Charles laughed so hard he almost dropped his most precious possession in the whole world.

Kathryn jerked awake when the cellphone in her pocket buzzed to life. She bounced out of her chair to go to the kitchen so her voice wouldn’t carry to the two sleeping men down the hall.

“Charles! Is something wrong?”

“No, nothing is wrong. Our guest just left. An ambulance will be picking you up in exactly forty-five minutes. They’ll bring you here to Pinewood. Kathryn, this is crucial so listen to me. Sweep the house, clean everything you touched, even the handle on the toilet. Do not, I repeat, do
not
miss anything…Oh, I didn’t know you were wearing surgical gloves. Julia gave them to you? Still, do as I say. When will your guests wake?”

“By morning. I’ll be waiting outside for the ambulance. Is Murphy all right?”

“Murphy is fine. He’s sleeping with Myra right now. He does miss you, though. Be careful, Kathryn.”

Kathryn raced through the small house, wiping and shining everything she thought she might have touched. She had a queasy moment when she looked at the tomato juice bottle filled with Jack’s urine. She did what she had to do and moved on. When she was finished, she stood in the middle of the floor and looked around, trying to recollect what she had and hadn’t touched. She looked down at the gloves she was still wearing. Satisfied, she put her coat on and was about to leave when she remembered the thermometer and the case it came in. She carefully wiped it down and returned it to the medicine cabinet. She was still wearing the surgical gloves when she locked the door behind her and stepped outside.

Kathryn was stunned at how hard it was snowing. It was three thirty. She thought about her footprints in the snow. How much more snow would fall before Jack and Mark woke up in the morning? How quiet and still everything was. She shivered inside her warm coat. She was at the end of the walkway the minute she saw the low square lights of the Hummer. A heavy-set man got out, helped her in, and then he and another man carrying a strange-looking broom proceeded to obliterate her tracks. The first man held a small machine that blew snow in all directions. Kathryn watched, boggle-eyed.

Who
were
these people?

It was toasty warm in the converted vehicle. She opened her coat, stripped off the latex gloves and removed the wig, the cotton padding in her cheeks and the false teeth caps. Now she felt like Kathryn Lucas again.

“Home, James!” she said. When neither man responded, Kathryn leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes.

Mark Lane woke first. He rolled over and stretched. Then he sighed. He finally opened his eyes and looked around. He looked down at the Batman quilt and then across the room at Jack, who was snoring loudly.

“Jack!” he bellowed. “Wake up!”

“Wha…What the hell! What the hell’s wrong with you, Mark?”

“Open your goddamn eyes, Jack, and look around. Where the hell are we? Oh, Jesus, now I remember. Those two guys! They said they had a message from you and wanted twenty bucks. I never saw the second one till he jabbed me in the ass. Are you awake, Jack? Are you listening to me? Get up! Holy fucking shit, where is this place? How’d we get here? How did you get here?”

Jack rolled over and then swung his legs out of the bed. “Will you shut the hell up for a minute? I need to think. I got sick at Mulligan’s and asked Nikki to take me home. She wanted to take me to a doctor or the hospital but I said no. I couldn’t even stand up. She had to practically carry me to the car. I didn’t send anyone to see you. There was a nurse here. She gave me pills and a bottle to pee in. Man, she was one ugly woman. I know this place, but I don’t know how I know it.”

“We’re wearing pajamas. Someone dressed us. Look, there’s my clothes. Yours are over there on the other chair. Did you hear me, Jack? Some one saw our…Oh, shit!”

Jack got up, surprised that he was no longer light-headed or dizzy. He walked around gingerly, Mark right on his tail as he made his way through the small house. “I know whose house this is. It belongs to the Lewellens. Son of a bitch! Those goddamn women outsmarted us!”

“So what else is new? It’s not the first time, Jack. I think it’s time we gave up on this shit. Every time you get a brilliant idea we get shot down by those
women
. How the hell did you fall for it?”

“Fall for what? You saw me, I was sick as a dog when I left the apartment. I just got sicker and Nik…Nik…drove me home.”

“Does this look like home to you, Jack? She brought you here.”

“Then how did you get here, smart ass?”

“That grungy guy with the dreadlocks must have brought me here. See, it was a plan, and Nikki was in on it. We’re here, so don’t even think of disputing my theory.”

Jack sat down on one of the kitchen chairs. “Make some coffee, Mark. Jesus, look at all that snow! And we don’t have a car. How the hell are we going to get out of here? Wait a minute, where’s the damn nurse?”

“You mean the nurse in your dreams? How the hell should I know? I never saw a nurse. It might be a good idea to find out what day today is. Is there a television or radio anywhere? What about a phone?” Mark asked as he filled the coffee pot with water.

A small ten-inch black and white television sat on the kitchen counter. Jack turned it on. “We’ve been here for three days and nights — four, if you count today,” he said, his voice full of awe. “They needed all that time to…to…to do something. They had to get us out of the way. We’re fools!”

“Watch it with that
we
stuff.”

“I wasn’t the one who let some
scuzzball
shoot a drug in my ass — you were. If you were that dumb you deserve whatever you got,” Jack snarled.

“Oh, no, you were just the guy who let an old girlfriend work her magic on you. Five bucks says she drugged your coffee or whatever you were drinking. Then she plays Florence Nightingale and brings you here. How’m I doing, Jack? Talk about dumber than dumb.”

“All right, all right, you made your point. But where’s the nurse? When did she leave?” Not bothering to wait for an answer, Jack ran to the front door and opened it. There wasn’t a footprint or tire mark to be seen. He ran to the garage door and opened it. No footprints, no tire marks. “Did she fucking fly out of here or go up the chimney?” he bellowed.

When Jack returned to the kitchen, Mark was leaning against the doorframe, coffee cup in hand. “They snookered us, Jack. We’ve been out of circulation for three days. This is just my opinion, but I would guess the nurse, and I use the term lightly, left after she drugged us up for the night. There’s at least ten inches of snow out there and it’s still falling. We’re grounded, buddy.”

“Yeah, looks like it. This isn’t the end of it, Mark. Far from it.”

“Famous last words, Jack.”

A wet, freezing snow — in fact more sleet than snow — was cloaking the arthritic-looking trees in the English countryside. Inside the house, which doubled as a private hospital, a doctor and nurse, both dressed in sterile white, looked out the window, their eyes full of concern at the weather conditions. In the background, shrill screams and curses could be heard.

The doctor-nurse medical team never speculated or gossiped about their patients. They did, however, discuss medical issues. For the first time in three decades, the nurse looked up at the doctor and said, “I can’t wait till he leaves. He’s driving me insane with his screams. You’ll have to have me committed if the plane can’t leave tonight.”

The doctor’s face was grim, his lips pressed into a tight line. “They’ll be committing two of us if the flight is cancelled. He should have quieted down an hour ago. He’s fighting it and it’s working to his disadvantage.”

The heavy-set nurse, who had huge breasts, steel-gray hair and a ferocious expression, stomped her foot in anger. “Christmas is in two days. I want to spend the holidays with my family. The man was supposed to leave a week ago. They made a promise to us.”

The tall, slim doctor’s face took on an expression of annoyance. “We’re healers, Maxine, not killers. He hadn’t shed all his scabs last week. His new skin needs to be treated. He’s screaming and cursing us because he itches. We’d be doing the same thing if we were in his position. The truth is, I doubt either one of us could deal with what that man is dealing with. I know I would be a raving lunatic by now. He refuses to accept the fact that we’re helping him.”

The phone behind the couple began to ring. They looked at one another before the doctor walked across the room to pick it up. “Hospital,” he said curtly, and then listened. He gave the nurse a thumbs up, meaning the patient would be leaving as scheduled.

The doctor broke the connection. “It seems our employers found a daredevil pilot who is willing to transport our patient. For a huge sum of money, I might add. Someone will be here to pick the poor guy up,” he looked down at his watch, “in exactly one hour from now. I have to get his paperwork ready and then I’ll help you to dress him. They want him unconscious when they arrive. We have to work quickly, Maxine.”

“Where…where are they taking him? Do you know?” the nurse asked.

The doctor looked up from the papers he was shuffling on his desk. “I don’t know and I don’t care. Nor should you. We’ve kept the man alive. He’s virtually healed, which means we did what we were supposed to do. If you want my guess, I’d say he’s headed for his homeland, China, and we’re headed home for the holidays.”

That was the most personal conversation the medical couple had ever had in their long years of service together for Her Majesty.

John Chai struggled with the restraints that bound him to the narrow hospital bed. He stopped cursing and shrieking long enough to stare at the nurse in her starched white pants outfit. “Give me something to stop this itching! I demand that you help me. What kind of medical person are you, you fat pig?”

“I’m the kind of fat pig who is not going to give you anything to stop your itching. You need to be quiet. I suspect you’ve already harmed your vocal chords. Be a good lad and lie quietly and the itching will lessen.”

“If it takes me the rest of my life I will find you and kill you. You and all those women who did this to me. Do you hear me, you fat pig?”

“Yes, I do hear you. You don’t even know where you are or where you’ve been. So, how are you going to go about this?” the nurse asked as she opened the locked medicine cabinet.

“It doesn’t matter. I’ll find you. My father’s people will find you. I never forget a face. I will kill you.”

The nurse turned around, a hypodermic in her hand. She tapped the top of it. A small squirt of liquid shot out. “You big silly,” she said, a smile on her face. “You can’t scare me.”

“Then you’re a crazy old fool. All women are fools. I’ll get even with every last one of you. That’s what you have to look forward to.”

“If you don’t lie still, this
will
hurt. It’s your choice.”

John Chai closed his eyes. He’d had enough pain. They weren’t killing him, and the nurse told the truth when she said they’d kept him alive. That had to mean that at some point he was going to be freed. Then it would be his turn for retribution. The Americans had a saying. What was it? He struggled to remember as the drug started to take hold. Oh, yes. What goes around, comes around.

The nurse stood by the gurney in the entrance hall but her eyes were on the doctor who waited by the window, a manila envelope containing John Chai’s identity papers in his hands. There were two sets of papers — his real ones, under the name of John Chai, and a new set, compliments of Charles Martin’s people. Chai had left China under the name of Gan Jun and was returning under the same name. When he reached his final destination, he would be carrying his real papers, which would not show any entry or exit stamps of any kind. Further proof that he’d never left his country.