Free Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4) by Michael Kerr

shadow-filled corner.  Inspecting her work, she smiled.  The end of the handle had split and now looked like a pointed stake.  She had a homemade weapon of sorts, which she could utilize as a long club or a spear.
    Time crawled by.  Her cell was on vibrate but remained as still as a rock.  She was cold, tired, had smoked at least five cigarettes, and was losing her belief that Joe Logan would come to her aid.  The mind could play tricks when almost all stimuli were removed.  Of course Joe would come, and soon now .
    The noise was faint, but she knew that it was footsteps above her.  A floorboard creaked and she gripped the broom handle tightly and stood up.  Someone was in the house, and if it had been Joe, he would have phoned.

CHAPTER EIGHT
     
    Dr. Perry Gifford took the chart from the holder hooked over the end rail of the bed and studied it.  He had been about to end Arnie Newman’s life hours previously, but a nurse had entered the room and asked him to attend another of his patients in the main unit, who had survived a major abdominal surgical procedure but was now hemorrhaging copiously from his anus and had suffered a seizure.  The patient subsequently expired on the operating table and, after a break to grab a shower and a coffee, Perry was once more at the side of Arnie’s bed, all set to inject him with nothing more subtle than a large syringe full of air, to occlude the coronary arteries and cause a massive cardiac infarction, that in his present critical state the patient would not survive.
    Perry did not want to do it, but had no choice.
    The two men had knocked at his apartment door in Yorkville earlier in the day, just minutes after he had returned home following a round of golf at Randalls Island Golf Center.
    On answering the door, Perry was pushed back into the entrance hall, and one of the men pressed the muzzle of a handgun against his forehead.  The other man stepped around him, went through to the lounge and trained his pistol on Perry’s wife and daughter.
    “Here’s the deal,” the man threatening Perry said.  “We need for you to do something for us when you go to the hospital later.”
    The deal had been simple.  They, whoever they were, knew that he was the surgeon that had saved Newman’s life.
    “We want the cop dead,” the man said to Perry.  “Your wife and kid are going to be taken and held till it’s done.  If Newman is still breathing in the morning, you’ll get them back in pieces, delivered by FedEx.  You’ll be followed and monitored.  The ball’s in your court, pal.  How you play it is up to you.  Give me your cell phone number, and keep it switched on.”
    As Perry now reached into the pocket of his coat for the syringe, his cell rang.  He backed away from the bed and took the call.
    “Is it done?” Max said to the doctor, having poured a large measure of Jack Daniel’s over ice as he considered the current situation.
    “I…I was just about to do it,” Perry said.
    “You just got a lucky break, Doc,” Max said, having decided that whether the cop in the coma lived or died was now irrelevant.  It was some guy by the name of Logan that had information which could prove harmful to Patrick Fallon’s political future.  “Things have changed.  Do nothing.  Your wife and daughter will be returned to you unharmed.  Just forget that any of this ever happened, because you really wouldn’t want to meet my associates again.”
    Perry left the room almost on the run and only just made it to the bathroom, where he threw up in the pan.  He would obviously never tell a living soul that he had been on the brink of murdering a patient to protect his family.
     
    Lennox picked the lock of the kitchen door at the rear of the house, but there was a bolt on at the top.  At least that showed that someone was at home.  He used a cutter to remove a circle of glass from one of the small upper panes in the top half of the door, put his hand through, felt for