Chapter 6 - The Shadow at Sloan Kettering
|
On Friday morning, for the first time in nearly two years, the sun rising over the East River felt like a promise instead of a deadline.
When Clara and her nineteen-year-old sister, Lily, brought their fifty-eight-year-old father, Thomas, through the glass revolving doors of the Rockefeller Pavilion at Sloan Kettering at eight o’clock sharp, they weren't sent to the crowded third-floor waiting room with a plastic pager.
Instead, two hospital patient-liaison directors met them in the marble lobby with a private wheelchair and escorted them straight up to Suite 1604—a sun-drenched corner room overlooking the river with hardwood floors, a pull-out sofa for family, fresh white orchids on the windowsill, and Dr. Evelyn Vance herself waiting with the first dose of the targeted immunotherapy infusion that Thomas’s insurance had rejected for six months.
"Clara, honey, what on earth did you do to get the insurance company to approve this?" her father asked weakly from the plush bed as the nurse started his line, his tired hazel eyes—the exact match to Clara’s—shining with hope he hadn't had in a year. "This room looks like the Plaza Hotel!"
"It turns out the new owners of Bellini’s Chophouse have a corporate foundation attached to the hospital board, Dad," Clara said smoothly, kissing his forehead and exchanging a quick, protective glance with her younger sister Lily so neither of them would worry about what had actually happened with Richie Grasso the night before. "And even better—they promoted me out of the restaurant to manage their corporate executive dining and events at their headquarters on Park Avenue starting Monday. No more graveyard shifts."
Lily threw her arms around Clara’s neck by the window, whispering fiercely in her ear: "You are a miracle worker, big sis! I paid off my spring tuition balance online twenty minutes ago with the cash you gave me this morning!"
At noon, while Thomas napped peacefully under the warm quilt and Lily went down to the first-floor cafeteria to grab salads and textbooks to study for her Monday nursing exam, Clara stepped out into the quiet sixteenth-floor elevator vestibule to take a breath of air.
Sitting on the leather bench opposite the elevators, reading the Wall Street Journal in a dark navy suit, was Marco—the younger of the two quiet, broad-shouldered bodyguards who had walked into the basement with Julian the night before.
Clara paused in surprise. "Marco? What are you doing here?"
Marco folded his newspaper and stood up politely, inclining his head. "Mr. Vane’s orders, Miss Harper. Richie Grasso’s cousin, Tony Grasso, runs a loan-sharking crew out of Bensonhurst. Even though we put Richie on a boat to Sicily at dawn, the boss doesn't take chances until Tony Grasso comes to the table to kiss the ring this afternoon. I’m just here to make sure nobody bothers your father’s room."
A sudden, unexpected wave of warmth moved through Clara’s chest. Julian hadn't just paid the bill and forgotten about them—he had put one of his own trusted men outside her father’s door before she even woke up.
Just then, the service elevator at the end of the sixteenth-floor corridor chimed.
Out stepped a tall man in blue hospital orderly scrubs pushing a stainless-steel medication disposal cart—except as he turned down the hall toward Suite 1604, Clara’s eyes dropped automatically to his wrists and his footwear.
Wait.
Two years of managing five-star hotel staff at the St. Regis—and last night’s lesson with Julian’s Patek Philippe—had trained Clara to spot uniform details in half a second.
Every orderly at Sloan Kettering wore white rubber-soled orthopedic clogs and a hospital photo ID badge clipped to a retractable blue reel on their left collar.
This man was wearing black tactical military boots splattered with dried gray concrete dust at the heels, a generic visitor badge clipped sideways to his pocket, and tucked beneath the cuff of his blue scrub shirt on his right forearm was a faded jailhouse tattoo of a crowned serpent—and his right hand was resting beneath a linen towel on top of the steel cart!
"Marco!" Clara whispered sharply, backing two steps toward the guard. "That orderly by Room 1602—look at his boots and his hand under the towel!"
Marco’s eyes locked onto the fake orderly instantly.
Seeing the six-foot-four guard move toward him and draw a weapon from beneath his suit jacket, the man in the blue scrubs whipped a suppressed MAC-11 submachine gun out from under the linen towel on the cart!
"Down, Miss Harper!" Marco roared, shoving Clara flat behind the solid marble corner of the elevator bank just as a burst of subsonic rounds chewed across the plaster wall above their heads, shattering the glass fire-alarm box!
Marco leaned around the marble pillar and fired twice with his suppressed 9mm—Thwip! Thwip!—hitting the fake orderly high in the left shoulder and spinning him against the wall!
Instead of staying to fight a trained Vane bodyguard in a locked hospital wing, the wounded gunman abandoned the steel cart, kicked open the stairwell fire door ten feet away, and plunged down the concrete steps!
Clara scrambled up off the floor, checking on her father inside Suite 1604—who was completely unharmed behind the reinforced fire door—before stepping back out into the corridor where Marco had his boot planted on a burner phone that had fallen out of the gunman’s scrub pocket when he was hit.
Wait—why would Richie Grasso’s two-bit loan-shark cousin from Bensonhurst send a professional hitman with a suppressed submachine gun and a crowned-serpent tattoo into Sloan Kettering?!
"That wasn't Tony Grasso’s guy," Marco muttered grimly, picking up the burner phone and staring at the last outgoing text message on the cracked screen before looking up at Clara with sudden shock. "That serpent tattoo belongs to the Morelli syndicate in New Jersey—Julian’s biggest rival for the Manhattan port leases. And look what that shooter just texted his boss two minutes ago when he saw you in the hallway:"
Clara looked down at the glowing screen:
Confirmed target on Floor 16. The girl Julian Vane put under guard at Sloan Kettering is here. Waiting for second team to grab her in the stairwell.
May you like
They hadn't come to the hospital for her father, or because of Richie Grasso!
Someone inside the Vane organization had leaked that Julian Vane had just moved a mystery woman’s family into an executive suite under personal guard—and Julian’s deadliest enemies thought Clara was Julian’s secret weakness!
