Then he opened the door and, with his chin touching his chest, walked right past the FBI guard stationed outside, who sat in a folding chair, typing a text message. Henry made his way down the hall to the right, aping his mother’s painful stoop with an ache that he didn’t have to fake. With his mother’s purse hanging on his arm, he brushed back the hair of the wig with what he fancied an authentically feminine gesture and padded slowly toward the hospital’s side exit. The pain wasn’t as bad as he’d expected, thanks to the Dilaudid still coursing through his system, no doubt. But soon that cushion would vanish. All the way down the hall, he waited for the cry of “Halt!” like a POW trying to escape from some prison camp. But the FBI agent never called out. Nobody did.

When Henry reached the side entrance, the man standing post outside scarcely even registered one more woman walking out after the night shift—especially one who ignored him like she owned the place.

It took Henry quite some time to make his way around to the front parking lot, where his mother had left her old Impala. With a prayer of thanks on his lips, he unlocked the door, then very carefully slid behind the wheel and waited for his heart to stop pounding. Once it did, he opened the pill bottle she’d given him and crunched an OxyContin between his back teeth. The bitterness surprised him, but he swallowed the fragments gratefully.

Two men who looked like FBI agents stood talking in the light of the hospital’s porte cochere entrance. Henry shut his eyes for a few seconds, wondering if they were real. When he opened them, the men were gone.

Wiping tears of confusion from his eyes, he craned his neck over the front seat and looked down at the floor. His mother’s 12-gauge Winchester pump shotgun lay there, just as he’d requested. His father had bought the gun in 1957, the last year they’d made that model, and it was one of the few of his possessions that Henry’s mother hadn’t given to the Goodwill or burned in the backyard. Encouraged to have come so far, Henry slid her key into the ignition, started the Impala, then put it in gear and drove slowly out the of hospital lot. Barring unforeseen complications, he would arrive at his destination before the pain became too intense to bear. After that …

What would be, would be.

CHAPTER 90