Central Park Guillaume Musso (read along books .TXT) 📖

weak, just two bars. But who could she call—911? This story was too long to explain. Her father? Seymour? She no longer knew if she could trust them. One of her other Criminal Division colleagues? Yes, that was a good idea. Castelli? Savignon? She tried to remember their numbers, but nothing came to mind; she was too used to speed-dialing them from her own phone.

She closed her eyes to concentrate; the only number she could come up with was that of Olivier Cruchy, the youngest member of her team. Well, it was better than nothing. She quickly dialed his number, holding the phone below her seat. Gabriel kept looking over at the car, but the curtain of rain was thick enough to protect Alice from his prying eyes. She turned on the speaker. It rang once. Twice. Three times. And then went straight to voice mail.

Shit.

She left a brief message asking him to call her back at that number and hung up. Another idea came to her. She rummaged in the satchel at her feet and found the knife she had stolen from the café in the Bowery. The blade wasn’t as sharp as a steak knife, but the point would still go through flesh. She slid it inside her right sleeve just as Gabriel walked back toward the car.

“All right, it’s clear,” he said, satisfied. “We can go!”

sebago hospital

secure zone

slow down

Illuminated by a white light, the wooden sentry box manned by hospital security could be seen from a distance. A luminous halo shone in the night, as if a flying saucer had landed in the middle of New England’s cranberry fields. Gabriel drove the Shelby up the ramp to the security post, but when they reached it, they discovered that it was empty.

Gabriel stopped in front of the metal barrier and lowered his window. “Hey! Hello? Anyone there?” he shouted over the noise of the storm.

He turned off the car, got out, and moved toward the shelter. The door was open and banging in the wind. He poked his head in and decided to enter. No security guard. He looked at the wall of security-camera monitors and then at the electronic dashboard covered with a vast number of buttons and switches. He touched the one that lifted the barrier and got back in the car with Alice.

“No security guard—that’s not a good sign,” he said, restarting the engine. “I guess he must have gone inside somewhere.”

As he accelerated, Gabriel lit another cigarette. His hands were trembling slightly. The Shelby moved along a driveway edged with pine trees and came out on a wide gravel square that served as the hospital’s parking lot.

Constructed on the edge of the lake, the hospital building was both unusual and impressive. Under the hammering rain, its lit façade, punctuated with Gothic windows, stood out from the backdrop of black clouds. The ocher-brick manor retained its old character, but on either side of the original building rose two huge modern towers with bluish, transparent façades and geometric multilevel roofs. An audacious glass walkway linked the structures, a hanging hyphen between past and future, the two harmoniously bonded. In front of the main entrance, attached to an aluminum pole, an LCD screen provided real-time information.

Hello, today is Tuesday, October 15, 2013

It’s 11:57 p.m.

Visiting hours: 10 a.m.—6 p.m.

Visitor parking: P1–P2

Staff parking: P3

The Shelby slowed down. Alice slid the knife from her sleeve into her hand and gripped it as tightly as she could. Now or never.

She could feel her pulse pounding. A wave of adrenaline made her shiver. Her mind was a riot of contradictory feelings—fear, aggression, pain. Yes, pain most of all. She would not be content with merely arresting Vaughn. She was going to kill him. That was the only way she could purge the world of this evil, the only reparation possible to avenge the deaths of Paul and her son. Her throat constricted and tears rolled down her cheeks.

Now or never.

With all her strength, she stabbed Gabriel in the upper chest with the knife, driving the blade in hard. She felt the muscle in his shoulder tear. Caught by surprise, he screamed and let go of the steering wheel. The car veered off the gravel path and collided with a low wall, blowing out one of the tires. It stopped dead. Taking advantage of the confusion, Alice grabbed the Glock from Gabriel’s belt.

“Don’t move!” she yelled, pointing the gun at him.

She leaped out of the vehicle, checked the magazine, and wrapped her hands around the butt, arms tensed, ready to fire. “Get out of the car!”

Gabriel shifted down in his seat to protect himself but remained inside the Shelby. The rain was falling so hard that Alice couldn’t tell what he was doing.

“Get out now!” she repeated. “Hands up!”

Finally the door slowly opened and Gabriel put a foot on the ground. He had removed the knife from his shoulder and blood was trickling over his shirt.

“It’s over, Vaughn.”

Despite the rain and the darkness, Gabriel’s crystal-clear gaze pierced the gloom.

Alice felt an emptiness in the pit of her stomach. In all these years, she’d had only one desire: to kill Vaughn with her own hands.

But there was no way she was going to eliminate him before she’d gotten answers to all her questions.

Just then, she felt her phone vibrate in her jacket pocket. Keeping her eyes trained on Vaughn and the gun aimed at him, she took out her cell phone. Olivier Cruchy’s number appeared on the screen.

“Cruchy?” she said.

“You called me, boss?” said a sleepy voice. “Um, you know what time it is, right?”

“I need you, Olivier. Do you know where Seymour is?”

“No idea. I’ve been on vacation with my in-laws for the last week.”

“What are you talking about? I saw you in the office yesterday.”

“Boss…you know that’s impossible.”

“Why?”

“Come on, boss, this is—”

“Why?” Alice yelled.

A silence, then a saddened voice: “Because you’ve been on medical leave for the past three months. You haven’t even set foot in the office for three months…”

This answer