Read Online The Night Season by Chelsea Cain - Free Book Online Page A

The sound of clogs on linoleum, curtain rings sliding on metal rods, distant TV chatter. Shapes moved by in the hallway at the same pace. It was self-contained—its own ecosystem. There was a labeled compartment for everything; every action was recorded in a chart; life moved at a predictable pace.
    Until it didn’t.
    Archie could feel the shift. The building’s pulse quickened. The tone of conversation outside his door darkened. The ambient hum of unnecessary movement ceased.
    An orderly rushed a crash cart by Archie’s door.
    The boy, Archie thought. He still had no idea how the boy had ended up in the river, how long he’d been in the water, or how he’d even managed to stay afloat. He was barely responsive when Archie had gotten to him. As soon as Archie had hooked his arms under the boy’s, the kid had gone limp. If he’d fought Archie at all they would probably both have drowned out there. Archie had saved that boy’s life, sure. But the boy had also saved Archie.
    They couldn’t let him die.
    Archie pushed the rubber blankets off, sat up, and swung his legs off the bed. He was cocooned in even more blankets, these white flannel, and it took him a minute to unwrap himself. Then he pushed himself off the bed and padded out of his room in his gown and hospital socks.
    “What’s going on?” he said.
    A nurse trotted toward him, arm outstretched. “You need to get back in your room, sir,” she said. There was a whooshing sound of hydraulic doors opening and both Archie and the nurse looked to their right as a gurney was rushed in.
    Not the boy.
    The boy was fine.
    This was someone else.
    Someone who was really hurt.
    Even from twenty feet down the hall, Archie could see that they had an oxygen mask on him, and someone was squeezing a bag. An EMT was running beside the gurney doing chest compressions, headed Archie’s way.
    The person on the gurney wasn’t breathing.
    Archie didn’t move.
    The EMTs had been met by two doctors and two nurses, who now joined in resuscitation efforts.
    Archie saw the top of his head as the gurney raced closer. A big head. Shaved.
    He reached behind, found the doorjamb he’d just stepped through, and steadied himself.
    They rolled Henry right by him.
    The medical staff working to save him spoke in clipped, urgent medical jargon, but Archie could make out words he knew. Respiratory arrest. Intubate.
    Archie stumbled from the doorway after them.
    They were moving fast—five feet away, then ten. Archie couldn’t make out what they were saying anymore.
    “Sir,” he heard someone say. “Step back, please.”
    “I need to see his hand,” Archie said. A nurse stepped in front of him, blocking him from continuing down the hall and reaching the corner room directly ahead where they’d parked Henry. Archie tried to get around her, but someone was gently pulling him away from behind.
    “Please,” he said, trying not to sound like a madman, “I’m his partner. He’s a detective. He might have been poisoned. I need to see if there’s a brown spot on his hand.”
    “There is,” said a voice behind him.
    Archie turned to see Susan Ward. “It’s there,” she said. “On his left palm. I told them everything. They’re going to run tox screens.”
    Archie looked back down the hall through the open door a dozen feet away where Henry lay dying. They were jamming a metal shoehorn into his mouth, and then guiding a tube down his throat. The oxygen flowed. Henry’s chest rose and then fell as the machine on the other end of the tube began to breathe for him. It almost made him look like he was alive.

CHAPTER
    13

    Susan, Claire, Archie, Robbins, and Portland’s chief of police, Robert Eaton, were hunkered down in Archie’s ER room, where Archie had been ordered back under his heating blanket.
    Every time the nurse came in to check on Archie they all had to shift their position to make room.
    Susan was eating a packet of saltines that she’d found in one of the supply drawers