She was still asleep when a commotion woke her. “All medical staff report to room seventeen immediately!” the intercom blared.
Audrey stiffened in her chair as a herd of doctors and nurses stampeded down the hallway. “Room seventeen!” she heard them shout. Joshua’s room.
Fearing the worst, Audrey rushed after the doctors, trailing them to her son’s room, where it seemed the whole hospital was funneling in.
A nurse stopped her at the door to room 17, saying that she needed to wait outside until the doctors could stabilize her son. Audrey angled for a view through the window. She was horrified to see Joshua convulsing violently on his bed.
“What is going on!” she cried. “What happened?”
Before the nurse could respond, a doctor called out in a panicked voice, “Get me twenty cc’s of phenobarbital!”
Audrey felt a sudden wave of nausea as the doctors rushed to save her son’s life. What had she done?
“Ms. Lam, we need you to wait outside.”
Audrey covered her mouth, feeling the sudden urge to vomit.
“Ms. Lam! Please! You can’t be in here right now!”
But Audrey couldn’t get her feet to move. A nurse placed his arm around her, sensing she might pass out. “I’ve got her.” He escorted her out to the waiting room, where she sat catatonic in a chair, rocking forward and back with her hand still cupped in horror over her mouth.
The nurse lowered his face to hers, trying to get her attention. “The doctors are doing everything they can in there. Is there anything I can get you? Are you going to throw up?”
But Audrey couldn’t hear the words coming out of his mouth. All she could hear were the four words running over and over in her mind: I killed my son. I killed my son. I killed my son. I killed my son. I killed my son. I killed my son. I killed my son.
CHAPTER 21
THE TOURIST
macau
As Knight drove his luxury rental car across the bridge into Macau, he was struck by the scale of it all. He had been to Las Vegas many times to meet with clients who were interested in the most exotic and expensive pets one could decorate their homes, casinos, and magic shows with: giant designer mixed-breed cats like “ligers” and “tigons,” large sharks that were accustomed to roaming thousands of miles in the open ocean, and all manner of albino serpents. But Knight had never had occasion to come to Macau. Up close, with its colossal high-rise casinos jammed together on a tiny swatch of land in the South China Sea, it made Vegas look quaint.
The insurance man had been eager to break into the Chinese market for some time. Since the explosion of China’s middle class, thousands of private zoos and safari parks were popping up all over the country of 1.4 billion people. These market dynamics represented a tremendous opportunity for a man with Knight’s skill set, but he had so far been unable to make any inroads into the insular Chinese market. Now seeing all that wealth up close in bright neon relief only made him hungrier to get in on the action in China once he wrapped up the SafariWorld case.