“Gee, thanks,” he said with tired sarcasm.
“My pleasure. And I did see Joy today when I was ticketing early this morning. She caught a cab up at the corner. She had a bag on her shoulder, like she was going somewhere,” the woman said, giving him a significant glance.
“Thanks,” he said, meaning it this time.
“You’re welcome, Mr. Hughes,” the woman said.
Everett watched her while she moved on to leave her cheerful little greeting on the windshield of the next car. He’d already called Seth a half hour ago to clarify what he’d told him earlier: Joy wasn’t supposed to go in for her procedure until tomorrow morning. Why wasn’t she at home? He replayed his conversation earlier by the lake with Seth.
I don’t have complete faith that she’s telling the truth about this procedure she’s having done in Chicago. I think things could be worse than she’s letting on.
The meter maid glanced up, watching him as he backed up the car a foot, swung it into a tight U-turn and accelerated down the dark street.
* * *
A half hour later, he leaned against the circular information desk at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. The security guard behind the desk was elderly, his snowy white hair a bright contrast to his dark brown skin. Everett had learned that his name was Nathan.
“We got some of the spillover from the traffic from that premiere of yours over here by the hospital the other night,” Nathan said, giving Everett a condemning glance.
“That’s terrible,” Everett said. “They should control traffic flow better around a hospital.”
“Especially when we’ve got the busiest ER in the city,” Nathan added pointedly. “Imagine how bad you’d feel if all those crowds got in the way of your sister—what’s her name? Joy Hightower?—getting treatment as quick as she needed it.”
“Yeah. All because of a stupid movie.”
“It wasn’t stupid, though,” Nathan said, his sudden amiability suggesting he’d admonished Everett sufficiently for being inconsiderate enough to plan his premiere near a hospital. “The missus and I saw it the other night. She wants to see it again.”
“I’ll send some tickets here to the hospital. Which theater would you like to see it at?” he asked, resisting a strong impulse to check his watch out of impatience.
“That’d be mighty nice of you! Margaret will be over the moon when I tell her about meeting you.”
Everett jotted down the name of the theater along with the security guard’s name.
“It’s a real shame about your plane getting in late and your missing out on visitors’ hours,” Nathan said offhandedly as he plucked at his computer keyboard.
“Yeah. Rotten luck,” Everett said, gazing longingly at the bank of elevators behind the security desk.
“I saw you in the spy movie—Killer Instinct. You reckon you learned anything about being sneaky in that movie?”
Everett blinked. “Tons. I may look clueless, but that’s just an act.”
Nathan hid a grin. “You’d have to be slick to avoid the night nurse on the eighth floor. Name’s Edna Shanoy, and she’d scare the daylights out of a real CIA agent if she ever caught him on her floor past visiting hours.”
“Thanks, Nathan,” Everett said earnestly.
“For what?” Nathan asked mildly, turning his attention to his monitors.
* * *
Everett took the stairs instead of the elevators, not having ever learned enough skills while playing a spy to know how to muffle the sound of an elevator door opening. He was glad he had, because the hall he stepped into on the eighth floor was amazingly hushed, dim and inactive at midnight. He saw no one as he hurried down the hall, peering into several doors and realizing he wasn’t on the medical unit proper. These weren’t patient rooms. He stayed in the shadows of a door recess and stuck his head out. Ahead, he saw a bright light and a young nurse with a sweet, round face and short auburn hair rise from her seat at the nursing station and walk into a room behind it. This close, Everett could see the patient rooms were straight ahead of the nursing station.
Ideal location for a nurse to see her patients’ rooms; less than perfect for an interloper.
He plunged down the hallway before the young nurse returned, dipping into the first patient room on the right. Four times, he struck out miserably, his only saving grace that all of the patients were sleeping when he snuck up to look at them. He checked the nursing station before he reentered the hallway again and held a curse. The nurse had returned. He waited until her back was to him as she returned a chart to the cart and darted into the room directly to the right of him.
The bed closer to the door was empty, the bed neatly made. The privacy curtain had been partially pulled, making it impossible for him to see the identity of who was in the other bed. He pushed the door closer to the “shut” position, but still left it open enough not to raise suspicion. How was it that hospital patients were granted no privacy whatsoever? he wondered irritably.
He knew he’d found Joy. He had no idea how. Maybe her singular scent somehow lingered in the air. Maybe he knew because of the way his already pounding heart started to do a battle-like drumbeat in his ears.