Gregor stretched, twisted, rubbed his temples. He reminded himself that waiting in the dark was never anything but interminable. He wished he were in a position to hear Robbie Yagger breathing. He opened the linen closet just another crack and stared out into the hall. Nothing, he thought. Nothing, nothing, nothing—
—except there was.
It started way down on the other end of the hall, the end that opened not onto the elevator doors and the nurses’ lounge, but the end that led to the back stairs. The door down there, like all the doors on the wards, was a firebreak. It was a heavy green thing on a pneumatic delay with a window at eye level. The window was a double pane of glass sandwiching in a thin net of wire. For a second, Gregor thought he saw a flash of light behind that window. It was gone so quickly, he couldn’t be sure. The door swung open slowly and steadily and then began to swing shut again. It took Gregor a moment to see that someone had come in down there.
“Someone” was as close to an identification as Gregor could get. In spite of the fact that he knew who this had to be, he couldn’t really recognize anything but a tall shapeless mass, moving toward him. He pulled back into the linen closet and held his breath. The figure was walking oddly, in jerky movements. The sound of shoes on floor was unnaturally loud. Gregor held himself against the sheets and waited. The figure came closer and closer. It was moving very slowly. It was being very careful.
Trench coat, Gregor said to himself, when the figure got close enough. That was all he could make out clearly in the shadows. A trench coat and a pair of long white pants, the kind the orderlies wore. The collar of the trench coat was pulled way up, over the back of the figure’s head. Gregor couldn’t even make out the color of the figure’s hair. That was odd, but he didn’t have time to think about it, not now. The figure was advancing on the door of Robbie Yagger’s room. It was going inside. Gregor let the door of the linen closet begin to swing slowly open.
Inside Robbie Yagger’s room, everything was in absolute darkness. Gregor and Hector had been careful to turn out even the small nightlight that was supposed to glow perpetually over the emergency buzzer. Robbie Yagger wasn’t going to buzz anybody by himself. He wasn’t going to turn over on his side until well after lunch tomorrow. What was important was making sure that Hector could not be seen by anybody.
The trick was to move without giving yourself away. Gregor had never been good at it. He got out of the linen closet without making any noise, but it took him forever. He got across the hall to the wall next to Robbie Yagger’s doorway, but he must have done something wrong. In the middle of the room, the figure hesitated. It looked up and around. It was suspicious. Gregor flattened himself against the wall and held his breath.
The things he’d done must have been sufficient. He heard the figure beginning to move again. He moved forward, twisted with aching slowness, and put himself in a position to look in through the door. He must have done it all right, because the figure continued to move. It walked up to Robbie Yagger’s bed and picked up the IV line. It put the IV line down and reached into the pocket of its trench coat. The nightlight next to Robbie Yagger’s bed was still off, but Gregor and Hector hadn’t incapacitated it. The figure leaned over and turned it on. Surgical gloves, Gregor told himself, straining to see in the shifting shadows. A stocking over the head. Idiot.
Now that there was a light on in the room, the figure in the trench coat seemed to pick up a sense of urgency. It stuck its hand into its pocket and came up with a syringe. It stuck its hand into its other pocket and came up with what looked like a small perfume bottle. Gregor would bet anything that what was in that perfume bottle was strychnine dissolved in water. Murderers were so damned lazy, and so unoriginal. They wanted to do the same thing over and over again. They didn’t want to have to think.
The figure put the syringe and the perfume bottle down on the rolling tray at the side of Robbie Yagger’s bed. There wasn’t much time now. A real nurse engaged in giving a real medicine through injection would have to be careful. She’d want to make sure there wasn’t a bubble of air in the syringe. This dim figure would want only to make sure that it was fast. In and out as quickly as possible was the only advantage it had.
There was no need to go on being careful. Nothing could come of staying hidden now but Robbie Yagger’s murder. Gregor started toward the open doorway and the dim figure in the trench coat. He wondered what was keeping Hector from moving. He was just about to go through the door when he collided with the nun.
“Excuse me,” the nun said, in a very loud voice. She was the nun who had been on duty at the nurses’ station when Gregor and Hector came up to this floor, but beyond that, she was not a nun Gregor knew. She was small and old and she had a voice like frozen arrowheads.