“Maybe half an hour after Jimmy and Frige came by here,” Carol answered before he finished the question. Then her eyelids drifted shut. She nodded to herself. “About five or ten minutes after the guy walked past me, I heard a couple of pops.” She swallowed. “Pretty sure it was a gun.”

Leetch glanced over to Cohen meaningfully. Cohen returned the gesture and then turned to Carol. He held his left hand out to her, offering to help her up. “Why don’t you come with us, Carol?”

Her eyes popped open. She leaned away. “Whoa, whoa, you said if I cooperated …”

“You’ve been a big help.” Cohen smiled and nodded at her arm. “I want to take you to the hospital. Get your arm looked at.”

She shook her head. “I’ll be okay. I’ve had worse.”

“Have you?” Cohen asked, still holding his arm out to her.

She wavered a moment. Then she reached out with her left hand and grabbed his. Cohen pulled her to her feet, amazed at how little effort it took.

She let go of Cohen’s grip and used her left hand to splint her other arm against her body. “You know, he did this to me,” she said impassively.

“The new guy?” Cohen asked.

“Yeah.” She swayed on her feet. “A day or two after shooting his eightball, my arm began to swell.”

She lurched to the side and Cohen shot out a hand to her shoulder to steady her.

“Thanks,” she said with a gulp.

“Carol, you okay?” Cohen asked.

When she looked up at him, her eyes misted over. “You know, I’ve shot a lot of crap into this arm, but it’s never been near this bad before.”

8 - Vancouver, Canada

8

Vancouver, Canada

With Thomas Mallek’s chart open in front of him, Dr. Kilburn sat amid the commotion of the ICU nursing station scratching a note in his barely legible scrawl. He fought the impulse to impale the chart with his pen and hurl it across the nursing station, for all the good his or anyone else’s notes had done.

Twenty-four hours earlier, they had moved Mallek to an isolation room in St. Michael’s ICU. None of the potent antibiotics infused into his system had alleviated his pneumonia. Mallek had slipped into a delirious state of semiconsciousness, mumbling nonsensically and unable to recognize his wife or children through the room’s sealed windows. His respiratory status had deteriorated. His blood oxygen percentage—a vital measure of the lungs’ ability to absorb oxygen from the air and transfer it into the bloodstream—hovered in the seventies, a critically low level. Kilburn knew Mallek would soon require life-support. Corroborating his theory, an open tray stood ominously at the head of the bed, fully prepped for a physician to intubate—slip a tube down Mallek’s windpipe—and attach him to a ventilator.