Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
“Oh, Hans,” he said sadly. “I think this is the end of the best part of our relationship.”
There was another pause. “My name is not Hans.”
“I’ve Gruber’d you in my head. Just so you know.”
“I’m complimented. Ivan Reitman is one of my favorite actors.”
“Alan Rickman, you mean. Reitman did Ghostbusters as a producer.”
A soft chuckle was almost a purr. “You are very smart, Dr. St. Claire. And the time for obfuscation is over.”
“Big word, there, Hans—and it’s too bad. I was enjoying our back-and-forth. The initial stupor is receding and I’m feeling quite chatty now.”
“Good. For you.”
As some kind of second phase ramped up, tremors began to go through his body, a buzzy energy making his teeth rattle.
Seizure coming? he wondered.
“Not that you care,” he chattered, “but I hate the fact that Alan Rickman died so young. And you know another thing that’s always bothered me? Alex Trebek. Which then makes me think of Patrick Swayze… Michael Landon. John Hurt. Do you know what those five have in common?”
“Dr. St. Claire, we are off track—”
“Pancreatic cancer.” Gus shook his head and felt the facial mask move, the band around his ears shifting. “Silent killer, most don’t find out until it’s too late, and then it’s a fucking bitch with conventional treatments—and even if you do the Whipple procedure, the five-year survival rate is only twenty percent. We need to do better with so—”
A sharp, thin line of pressure across the front of his neck stopped him.
“The codes, Dr. St. Claire.”
Gus swallowed, and felt the blade cut into his Adam’s apple. “Is that a knife, Hans?”
“It is not a pencil.”
“Look at you, quite the jokester.”
Abruptly, another image of C.P. Phalen came to the forefront of his mind. No suit or stillies this time, and her pale hair was all frazzled, her face younger without the makeup. She was wearing one of his fleeces, the soft folds of navy blue fabric billowing around her upper body, and sitting on a hospital bed down in the lab. She had been scared and keeping a lid on the fear as best she could, just like all the other patients he’d ever had.
She was just like that Daniel Joseph. Stage four. Different kind of cancer, though, not that that mattered because hers couldn’t be treated anymore, either.
God, he hated that woman.
Fine. He just wished he could hate her. And on that note…
“You might as well use that knife now, Hans,” Gus said softly. “Because I’ll die before I help you hurt that woman.”
FOUR
SO WHY’D YOU give Vita to Gus.”
As Catherine Phillips Phalen glanced over her shoulder to the Suburban’s middle row of seats, two things occurred to her. One, given the angle of her view, apparently she was driving. This was a news flash that shouldn’t have been a surprise—and probably a contraindication for her being behind any wheel. Secondly, with the way Daniel was propped up against the rear door’s blacked-out window, his shoulders collapsed into his chest, his mostly bald head at a bad slant, one arm lying dead across his lap, she probably should have laid him out flat in the back-back.
“We’re almost home,” she heard herself say as the great stone wall marking her acreage started to run beside them on the shoulder of the rural road. “Less than a mile.”
The guard next to her nodded, but didn’t look up from his phone. His role in this fast-track back to her estate was monitoring an overhead drone feed. Meanwhile, his assigned partner for this shift was in the rear bench seat and on a constant pivot, his eyes swiveling an owl-worthy three-sixty. The other two she’d brought with her were still in Plattsburgh going through Gus St. Claire’s condo, looking for what she was willing to bet they would not find: fingerprints, footprints… hair and fiber samples that were not the doctor’s.
Her hand went to rest on her abdomen. Gus. I’m going to find you, I swear.
As she looked down, like she intended to make the vow or prayer or whatever it was stick, it was as if the child she was carrying were God or something.
Which would make her the Virgin Mary. Or the Virgin Catherine, as it were—
Okay. It was official. She’d lost her mind.
Daniel spoke up again. “You might as well have put a target on the man’s back. He’s not like you and me.”
That’s right on too many levels to count, she thought.
Gus was the finest oncologist, researcher, and doctor she’d ever met—but he was also a prince among men, an Afro-sporting counterculture rebel with a Nobel Peace Prize brain, the moral compass of a saint, and an inexplicable, yet somehow charming, penchant for concert t-shirts from the seventies. He also liked basketball. Coke from a can.
What was she, his eHarmony profile?
“Why didn’t you tell me?” Daniel demanded.