Chapter 12 - The Evidence Locker at St. Vincent
The roadblock opened just enough for two SUVs to accelerate away.
They headed east.
Toward St. Vincent Medical Center.
The remaining tactical officers closed around the bus.
Harris pressed the accelerator while I pulled the wheel hard left. The bus mounted the curb fully, clipped a newspaper box, and squeezed between a parked car and the building line.
Metal screamed against metal.
The tactical team scattered.
We broke through the narrow gap and rolled into the next block.
No one cheered.
The danger had only divided.
“Turn toward the hospital,” Claire said.
Harris looked at me in the mirror.
The safest choice was the opposite direction. Reach a crowded police district. Find news cameras. Get the passengers off.
But the police network was compromised, our phones were jammed, and Mara’s team had access to city transit systems.
Safety was becoming theoretical.
“What’s in the locker?” I asked.
“Original medication logs. A blood sample. Elias’s handwritten notes. Maybe Cole’s wristband.”
“Maybe?”
“He moved things without telling me.”
Cal stood near the front doors, listening to the scanner.
“Units are converging on St. Vincent.”
“How many?”
“Four vehicles.”
Mason looked at him. “You can still hear them?”
“They forgot to cut my channel.”
“Or they want us to hear it,” I said.
Cal’s face tightened.
A lure.
Mara knew Claire would try to protect the evidence. She may have expected us to return.
Claire understood.
“We still have to go.”
“That’s what she wants.”
“So we let Elias die?”
Her voice cracked.
I looked at the passengers.
The teenage boy’s mother had called through another passenger’s emergency satellite app, but the message had not gone through. Harris was injured. Several people were coughing from the vapor.
They had not chosen this.
I addressed them.
“We’re approaching a fire station two blocks north. Anyone who wants off gets off there.”
The older woman who had struck Mason’s hand shook her head. “And then those people follow us?”
“They may.”
“Then keep driving.”
Others murmured agreement.
Fear had bound them to the bus, but so had the camera card locked beneath Harris’s console. They understood that dispersing would make each of them easier to silence.
Claire stared at me.
“We go back?”
“We go near the hospital. We don’t enter until we know the trap.”
She nodded.
Ranger leaned against my leg as the bus turned.
I checked his eyes and breathing. No sign the gas had affected him beyond irritation.
His torn ear shifted toward the rear.
Vince was gone, but the rear door remained ajar.
Something lay on the floor where he had exited.
A folded piece of paper.
I picked it up.
It was a photocopy of my Navy personnel file.
Most of the page had been blacked out. My name and service number remained visible, along with a mission code I had not seen in eleven years.
NIGHT HARBOR.
Beneath it, someone had written by hand:
RANGER WAS NOT THE ONLY SURVIVOR.
I read the sentence twice.
Claire stood beside me.
“What does it mean?”
“I don’t know.”
But I did know one thing.
Night Harbor was the mission Mara had sealed.
Ranger’s original handler, Lieutenant Aaron Pike, had supposedly died during that operation.
I looked at the German Shepherd beside me.
Ranger stared back.
The scanner crackled.
“Hospital team has reached evidence level.”
Cal raised the volume.
A man said, “Locker located.”
Another voice answered, “Biometric seal requires Mercer authorization.”
Everyone looked at me.
I had never been inside St. Vincent’s evidence wing.
Yet somewhere beneath that hospital, a locker was waiting for my authorization.
Then Mara spoke.
May you like
“Bring Ranger to the scanner.”
📖 Discover why a hospital evidence locker can be opened only by Noah or Ranger—and what Night Harbor secretly brought back to Chicago in CHAPTER 13. 👇
