“We took Noelle off the antibiotics this morning and her temp’s holding steady; all other signs are good, including neurological tests. It’s like a miracle.”

Harry jogged to the window of the ICU. Yesterday the kid had been third in a row of five hose-studded Plexiglas boxes. But the box was empty and the two in front of it were askew, as if they’d been pushed out of the way.

“Where is she?” he called to the nurse.

“Who?”

“Noelle.”

The nurse tossed aside the FunYums and padded over. She looked into the station, gasped. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.” I saw that beside the empty baby box were tubes and wires hanging limp from bottles and monitors. An IV line ended with a needle and tape, like the kid had been ripped from its lifelines.

“Oh my God,” the nurse said. “Oh my God.”

Harry sprinted to the nurses’ station and picked up the phone, telling hospital security to lock down the building. He ran back to us.

“If the kid’s inside, she’ll stay inside.” He turned to the nurse, voice firm but gentle. “When was the last time you checked on Noelle?”

“N-not long,” she stammered, about to burst into tears. “Maybe five minutes.”

“Did you see anyone near?”

“I…wasn’t looking this way.”

Harry pulled his cell. “I’ll call it in and get an Amber Alert in process in case the kid’s on the street.”

An Amber Alert was an urgent bulletin in child-abductions cases. An acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, it was named for nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, abducted, raped and murdered in Texas in 1996. After the horrible crime, it was discovered local law enforcement agencies had information that might have led to the girl’s rescue if only they’d had the means to widely disseminate the info. Thanks to changes inspired by the ’96 horror, Harry’s call would get the kid’s description on radio, TV and other media outlets, as well as to all necessary agencies in a wide area.

Bam! Bam!

Gunshots. Harry abandoned his call, grabbing the nurse, pushing her inside the room with the babies. “Get the kids safe and don’t come out,” he growled. She nodded, eyes wide, and went to work rolling the baby boxes and attendant machinery to the rear of the unit. I grabbed my weapon, ran to the connecting hall and looked down. The shot had sounded muted and I was thinking it had been fired in a closed room.

Bam. Bam. Two more shots. Each from a different gun.

Harry was calling for backup. I looked down the hall. Past the central bank of elevators was a whole other section of building, a recently added wing. I heard a fusillade of connected shots, brrrrrrrrp, a weapon on automatic fire echoing from somewhere in the other wing. Cold fear flooded my spine. I ran to the junction of the wings and peered around the wall past the elevators. I smelled the raw bite of cordite in the air and I heard screams from a distance. I ran in that direction. Someone, a woman, was shrieking for help.

I slowed at a nurses station, the hub of four spoking halls. Spilled coffee and cups were on the floor alongside paperwork abandoned when staffers fled. I leaned cautiously into the near hall and saw a guy in a security uniform lying on the floor three dozen feet distant, his head held up as two nurses and another security guard bent over him, working furiously. Judging from the man’s wounds and the blood flow, they were wasting their time. Glass was strewn everywhere. The walls were pocked with a dozen holes. I looked at the guy performing CPR.

“Where’s the shooter?” I yelled.

He pumped the downed man’s chest while trying to talk to me, nodded to the staircase at the other end of the hall.

“Male, bearded, tall. He ran there…to the stairs.”

“He ran down, right?” I asked, figuring the abductor was headed for the street.

“No, man. He ran up.”

Up? No one escaped a hospital by going up. “Did he have a baby?” I asked.

“He had something…in his hand, I couldn’t tell…what it was. All I really saw…was the freaking machine gun.”

I ran to the stairs, checked, saw nothing and stepped inside, running up to the fifth and final floor. Looked around the corner. A tall bearded guy in an outsized white jacket at the end of a brief hall, fifty, sixty feet away. Motorcycle boots with chains stuck out of his white pants. His sleeves were pulled up to reveal forearms blue with tattoos. A wide window was behind him, the skyline of Mobile in the distance. A heavy steel door was in front of the guy and I figured it went to the roof, the only level left. A security camera was perched atop the door and the guy was yelling into the lens, an angry rant in a tinny nasal whine.

“SCARED MOTHERFUCKERS COULDN’T DO THE GIG, BUT I DID! WHO HAS THE BALLS NOW?”

In one hand I saw the weapon, a machine pistol with a long clip. In the other hand he had the kid clutched by the front of its gown. It was screaming.

“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” the guy roared at the kid. He thumped his chest with the weapon. Shrieked at the camera. “LOOK AT ME! FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME!”

I slipped the door open. There was no way to get a clear shot as long as he had the kid close. He kept screaming at the camera, getting louder.

“…always treating me like I was FUCKIN’ HALF THERE!”

When he turned a half-step away to peer out the window into the night, I slipped through the door, scooting across ten feet of floor to a cleaning cart pushed against the wall. There were no rooms off the hall and I figured this section of the top floor was where the roof systems like A/C and drainage joined the building.

“TERRY LEE IS A FUCKING HERO!” the guy howled. “Yeeeee-hah!”

No patients or staffers. Just me and a raving lunatic with a stolen kid and an automatic weapon. With nothing between me and him but the medical version of a dessert cart.

“Psssst!”

I heard the hiss, turned to see Harry crouched in the staircase. We had no chance to shoot for fear of hitting the kid. If we tried for a leg shot the perp would probably lift his weapon and blast Noelle. The guy was on the back edge of a bad nightmare.

“I dedicate this day to ADOLF…” the guy railed, sounding like he was approaching a violent orgasm. “And GEORGE, and JAMES AND JOHN AND BUFORD AND PASTOR BUTLER…”

“I called for a hostage negotiator,” Harry whispered.

“He’ll never get here in time,” I said, skinnying between the cart and wall. “The guy’s falling faster than a Manhattan crane.”

“Hey!” Harry’s big voice boomed from the hall. “Hey, Buddy. Let’s talk for a minute.”

The guy wheeled and squeezed the trigger of the freaking Uzi or whatever. A one-second burst filled the air with about thirty slivers of angry lead. I tightened into a ball, heard two slugs bing into the cart, more thump the wall. The recoil had kicked his hand back and most of the bullets jumped high, sending puffs of acoustic tile falling from above, a yellow snow on my shoulders. I looked back at Harry. He was grimacing, tucked tight in the stairwell. I heard the dead clip fall, a live one jacked into place.

“My talking’s OVER for fucking EVER!” the guy screamed. I watched from a corner of the cart as he paused, shot a glance at the camera, added, “DIE, YOU FUCKING PIG!” and punctuated it with another fusillade. I ducked. The rounds were closer, thudding into the wall above my head, piercing the stair doors at chest height. Harry was behind mason-block wall, but I knew ricochets were zipping through his space.

I peeked past the edge of the cart, saw the guy shake the kid at the camera like it was a rag doll. “DO YOU WANT THIS MUTANT TO BE THE FUTURE?” he roared. “A FUCKING CLONE?”

He rotated the screaming baby to look into its face. For a second he looked about to slam it into the wall. But the camera seemed to call to him and he jammed the kid back under his arm. “I’M BAD TO THE FUCKIN’ BONE!” he screamed at the lens, then turned to our end of the hall, eyes wild. “SHOOT ME!” he howled, pulling Noelle to his chest, hand around her neck. “GO AHEAD AND SHOOT ME! I DARE YOU!”