Ted stood in the corridor watching the doors long enough to feel a bit pathetic. He was being paranoid. The only other visitor on the floor was the mother of a young man who’d been in an auto accident. She was asleep, despite the purposely designed discomfort of the easy chair in which she was sprawled. There was the right idea. Ted needed to relax. The guard might be missing, but the perimeter is safe. Time to chill. He returned to Kenzie’s room.

A cleaning cart was blocking the entry, keeping the room’s sliding glass door from automatically closing. The soothing twilight of the room instantly became dark and menacing. Ted pushed the cart away and stopped in midstride.

The man had his back to Ted and was wearing the one-piece dark green overalls that Ted had seen on all the cleaning staff. But the rest of the picture made no sense. Ted registered that the man was broad shouldered and tall and moved like a predator. And he was doing something with the saline bag hanging over Kenzie’s bed.

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“Hey!” Ted yelled, instantly regretting it. The man had not known Ted was there, and he whirled around and went into a fighter’s crouch. Whatever benefit of surprise Ted might have had was gone. “What are you doing?” Ted demanded, putting as much authority into his voice as he could summon at that late hour.

It was the Russian. The man with the nose of a boxer. He rushed forward, stopping suddenly and swinging his leg in a roundhouse kick aimed at Ted’s thigh, a blow that could have ended the altercation immediately.

But Ted reacted. He fell backward, landing on his hands bent kneed. The kick passed over him, and Ted pushed up onto his feet. In the split second that the Russian needed to rebalance from the kick, Ted closed on him, coming in low.

The guy recovered quickly and landed two left-handed jabs on Ted’s head before Ted connected. Ted grabbed the man around his thighs and pushed forward with his shoulder. They crashed into the cleaning cart before both tumbled to the ground.

Having lost his fleeting advantage, Ted rolled away and up onto his feet. The Russian also came up quickly. In the moment before the next attack, Ted saw why the man seemed to be fighting one-handed. In his right hand, he held a large syringe with a needle that looked as big as a pencil.