On the far side of the double doors, Carson and the doctor exchanged victory smirks. “I often don’t like police officers,” Ahmed said.

“He was only doing his job the best he knew how,” Carson said, surprised at her own maternal tone. If Lespasse had been there, he would have been shocked to hear such forgiveness.

Lespasse. She’d seen too many friends die over the years to mourn them one at a time anymore, but she wished him well on this next leg of his Great Journey.

“Doctor, I need a telephone,” she said.

Their shared moment collapsed in his expression to more confusion. “Excuse me?”

“A telephone. It’s an urgent matter.”

“Your health is the most urgent matter at the moment,” Ahmed said.

Carson grabbed the hem of his scrub shirt with her good arm, igniting a lightning bolt of pain from her bad one. “Doctor, please stop.” The gurney glided to a halt. “It’s really not,” she said. “I love my own health as much as the next person—probably more, in fact. But in this case, it’s nowhere near as important as the phone call I need to make.”

Gun Bitch and the driver spoke with each other again and Felicia knew that the crescendo was about to begin. It was their manner of speaking, the conspiratorial tone. When Gun Bitch looked at her at the end of their exchange, Felicia knew that it would be bad for her.

The driver clicked the turn signal and started drifting toward the left—a shift in the natural order of a right-handed world to which she didn’t think that she could ever truly adjust—and as they slowed, Gun Bitch reached into her purse, looking for something. Felicia’s heart rate quadrupled. What could she possibly pull out?

It turned out to be a pair of clippers that looked like pliers and for a moment she thought she was looking at the instrument of her upcoming torture. When her captor leaned forward, however, and reached toward Felicia’s zip-tied ankles, she sensed that the bad ending to this adventure was at hand.

Felicia heard a snip and instantly her feet began to regain sensation that she hadn’t even realized they’d lost. She thought about kicking out at her captor, but then what? With her wrists bound to the man seated next to her, what would her next move be? Even if she knocked the bitch out with a kick to the head, she still wouldn’t be able to save herself.

“Don’t be stupid,” Gun Bitch said in English. She leveled her pistol an inch from Felicia’s forehead. “Move, I shoot.”