Repairman Jack [07]-Gateways by F. Paul Wilson Page A

and grabbed his father’s hand again. “Dad, was that you?”
    He squeezed the fingers—gently at first, then harder. His father winced, but Dr. Huerta had said he was responsive to pain. After shaking his father’s shoulder and calling to him, all with no response, he backed off. Nothing happening here.
    He went out to check on that nurse. Something wrong about her…besides looking sick.
    At the nursing station he found a big, brawny, gray-haired nurse who seemed to be in charge. Her photo ID badge read R SCHOCH, RN.
    “Excuse me,” he said. “A nurse just came into my father’s room, then turned and ran out. She looked kind of sick and I was wondering if she was okay.”
    Nurse Schoch frowned—or rather, her frown deepened. It seemed to be her only expression. “Sick? No one said anything.” She looked around at the assignment board. “Three-seventy-five, right? What was her name?”
    “I didn’t get a look at her badge. Come to think of it, I don’t think she was wearing one.”
    “Oh, she had to be. What did she look like?”
    “Slim, dark, maybe five-three or so.”
    Schoch shook her head. “No one like that here. Not on my shift, anyway. You sure she was a nurse?”
    “I’m not sure of a lot of things,” Jack muttered, “and that’s just been added to my list.”
    “She could have been from housecleaning, but then she would have been in gray instead of white—and she’d still have to have a badge.” She picked up a phone. “I’ll call security.”
    Jack wished she wouldn’t—he didn’t want rent-a-cops messing into this—but couldn’t think of a reason he could tell Schoch.
    “Yeah, okay. I’ll be back in my father’s room.”
    He’d been keeping an eye on the door, making sure no one else went in there. When he returned, he checked his father to see if he’d moved—he hadn’t—then went to the window and looked out at the parking lot. He saw a slim woman in white walking away through the lot. Heat from the late-morning sun made her shimmer like a mirage.
    It was her. Couldn’t mistake that long braid. And now she was climbing into the passenger side of a battered old red pickup.
    Jack dashed into the hall in time to see the elevator doors closing. Too slow anyway. He found the stairs and raced down to the first floor. By the time he hit the parking lot, the pickup was gone. But he kept moving, running to his Buick and gunning out to the street. He flipped a mental coin and turned right, telling himself he’d give this ten minutes and then call it quits.
    He’d traveled about half a mile when he spotted the truck, stopped at a red light two blocks ahead.
    “Gotcha,” he said.
    When the light changed he followed the truck out of town and into the swamps. Somewhere along the way the pavement ended, replaced by a couple of sandy ruts flanked by tall, waving reeds. He lost sight of the truck for a while but wasn’t going to worry about that unless he came to a fork. Better to stay out of sight. Luckily there were no forks, and before too long he was pulling into a clearing at the edge of a small, slow-moving stream.
    The red pickup sat there, idling, while the woman in white rode downstream in a small, flat-bottomed motor boat piloted by a hulking man in a red, long-sleeved shirt. Jack jumped out of his car and ran to the bank, waving his arms, calling after them.
    “Hey! Come back! I want to ask you something!”
    The woman and the man turned and stared at him, surprise evident on their faces. The woman said something to the man, who nodded, then they both turned away and kept moving. He saw the name on the stern: Chicken-ship .
    “Hey!” Jack shouted.
    “Whatchoo wanner for?” said a voice from behind.
    Jack turned and saw a man with a misshapen head leaning out the driver window of the pickup. With his bulbous forehead, off-center eyes, and almost non-existent nose he reminded Jack of Leo G. Carroll from the opening scenes of Tarantula . This guy made Rondo Hatton look