It was empty, the bed rumpled and beige sheets on the floor.
"No." I turned and feeling a hit of nausea, hurried back to his side. "What happened? Did—?"
"Fat Hispanic guy. Spic bastard. He had a couple of young punks with him. Mrs. Reilly had just left and I went to the door, thinking it was probably you ringing my bell. He flashed a knife and they shoved their way in. Then one of his thugs went into the bedroom and carried her out. When I tried to stop them, the SOB knifed me. I guess I . . . swooned cause the next thing I remember is waking up here on the floor."
It sounded garbled and probably didn't occur as quickly
as he thought. But I knew immediately what had happened Ramos—of course that's who it was—had come to take Sarah. It was his one sure way to stop me from mentioning Children of Light in my film. She was a hostage. My first instinct was to kill him.
"What else can you remember?" I was already dialing 911. Time to get an ambulance. And after that, the cops.
After about ten rings I got somebody and, following an explanation that was longer than it needed to be, a woman with a southern accent told me the medics would be there in fifteen minutes. I took another look at Lou and ordered them to hurry, then hung up. I was going to call the police next, but first I needed to hear exactly what had happened before he got quarantined in some emergency room.
His eyes were glazing over again, as shock and blood loss started to catch up with him. Clearly he would pull through, but right now, sitting there in a pool of blood, he could have been at death's door.
"Look . . . at that." He was pointing, his rationality beginning to fail. For a second I didn't realize what he meant, but then I saw a fax lying beside the phone. I picked it up. The time on it was 9:08 P.M. and it was from somebody named John Williams. Then I remembered. Wasn't that the FBI computer whiz he'd talked about the other day at the hospital, after we'd deconstructed Sarah's waterlogged passport?
There was no message, just a sheet with a date—two years old—and a list of names accompanied by numbers and a capital letter. Then I noticed the letterhead of Aviateca, the Guatemalan national airline, and it dawned on me I was looking at a flight manifest.