Chapter 8 - The Skybridge in the Blizzard
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Above them in the dark elevator shaft, the fifth-floor hoistway doors screeched open, and the red laser beams of two submachine guns lanced down through the open ventilation grille in the roof of the cab!
"Now, Tessa—push!" Roman roared from the hallway floor below.
With every ounce of strength in her hundred-and-fifteen-pound body, Tessa shoved the heavy hospital gurney forward off the edge of the stalled elevator floor while holding the IV pole steady against the side rail!
As the three-hundred-pound bed tipped out into empty air over the thirty-inch drop, Roman Vane and Matteo caught the steel undercarriage frame squarely on their shoulders and forearms—absorbing the bone-jarring impact with a muffled grunt before setting all four rubber wheels down smoothly on the third-floor linoleum without jarring ten-year-old Chloe’s chest line by a single millimeter!
Tessa leaped out of the elevator gap right behind the bed just as a burst of automatic fire tore through the ceiling of the elevator cab behind her, showering the hallway in sparks!
"Plug the pump into my ambulance inverter pack!"
Standing ten feet down the third-floor Teaching Annex corridor, waiting beside the glass skybridge doors with a portable lithium medical power pack and a trauma stretcher, was Dr. Rossini—the Vane family physician who had stitched Tessa’s hand two hours earlier, whom Roman had called from the car before they even reached the hospital!
While Matteo bolted and welded the third-floor fire doors shut behind them with an emergency magnesium flare to stall Victor’s men for five minutes, Dr. Rossini plugged Chloe’s cardiac pump directly into his high-capacity portable battery pack. Instantly, the shrill low-battery alarm died, and the steady, life-saving green light resumed its rhythmic pulse.
"Across the skybridge into the University parking deck!" Dr. Rossini urged, helping Roman guide the gurney at a brisk jog through the enclosed glass walkway suspended forty feet above the blizzard-swept alley between the buildings.
Halfway across the glass skybridge, Tessa looked down through the snow-streaked glass into the alley below.
Two black SUVs belonging to Victor’s South Side crew were skidding around the corner from Harrison Street to block the University garage exit—and leaning out the passenger window of the lead truck, aiming a long-barreled rifle straight up at the glass skybridge overhead, was a man wearing a camel-hair coat!
"Down!" Roman shouted.
Instead of ducking himself, Roman threw his body completely over the top of Chloe’s gurney and knocked Tessa flat beneath the steel side-wall wainscot of the bridge just as three high-velocity rifle rounds punched through the upper glass panels overhead, showering the walkway in tempered glass crystals and freezing snow!
"Keep moving—we’re inside the concrete deck!" Matteo yelled, kicking open the heavy fire doors at the far end of the skybridge and pulling them into the reinforced concrete shelter of the University parking garage, where an unmarked gray Mercedes Sprinter medical van—owned by Dr. Rossini’s private clinic—was idling with its rear ramp down.
Within thirty seconds, Chloe’s bed was locked into the floor tracks inside the heated, soundproofed medical van, Dr. Rossini was monitoring her vitals on the wall console, and the van was gliding smoothly out the lower faculty exit onto the Eisenhower Expressway before Victor’s SUVs even figured out which level of the parking garage they had entered.
In the back of the moving medical van, illuminated by the soft blue glow of the diagnostic monitors, ten-year-old Chloe finally drifted back to sleep under the mild sedative, her tiny hand still resting on her one-eared corduroy bear.
Tessa sat on the steel bench beside her sister’s bed, shivering violently now that the terror of the elevator shaft was over.
Roman sat across the narrow aisle from her. The shoulder of his bespoke charcoal coat was torn where the elevator steel had scraped him, a dark bruise was forming along his cheekbone, and there was a three-inch gash across the back of his right knuckles from catching the undercarriage of the three-hundred-pound hospital bed to save her sister’s life.
Without saying a word, Tessa reached into Dr. Rossini’s open supply drawer, pulled out an alcohol wipe and a sterile bandage, and reached across the aisle to take Roman’s large, scarred right hand in her uninjured left palm.
Roman went very still, watching her face in the dim blue light as she gently cleaned the blood away from his onyx wolf ring and pressed the bandage over his split skin.
"Two hours ago at the hotel," Tessa whispered so softly Dr. Rossini up by the cab partition couldn't hear, "you offered me a handkerchief without grabbing my wrist. And back there in that elevator shaft, you caught a three-hundred-pound bed on your bare shoulders for a ten-year-old girl you met twenty minutes ago."
Her hazel eyes lifted to meet his dark, turbulent gaze.
"I'm sorry I accused you of knowing what your cousin did to my father, Roman," she whispered. "And whatever is on this drive... we open it together."
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Roman turned his hand over in hers, his warm fingers closing around her smaller hand with a gentleness that made her chest ache.
"Nobody touches your sister again, Tessa," Roman murmured, his thumb brushing across her knuckles. "And by tomorrow night, both Victor and Arthur Sterling are going to wish they were the ones buried under Pier 4."
