Marrity slammed open the door to the second floor and raced past the nurse's station to Daphne's room; and then he sagged in re -lief when he saw her sitting up in bed and blinking at him in alarm.
"You're — all right?" he said breathlessly. "Nobody's been in here?"
"I'm fine," she said hoarsely. Then she whispered, "Was a woman shooting at you, or did I dream that? No, nobody's been in here."
"Daph," he said, "I think it's time you checked out." He turned to the closet and began yanking her jeans and blouse off the hangers. His face was cold with sweat.
"Right now?" she whispered. "I've got an IV!"
"We'll get a nurse to take it out. Or I will. If I can do a tracheotomy, I can — but we're not—"
Footsteps slapped on the hallway linoleum, and Marrity stepped back to stand in front of Daphne, but it was his father who strode into the room.
"They'll have moved her—" the old man began, and then his eyes focused on Daphne.
"I don't understand," he said clearly.
And then Marrity turned and threw himself across Daphne, for his ears had been concussed by a deafening bang, and his father had collapsed against the door frame and begun to slide to the floor.
No further explosions followed, though over the ringing in his ears Marrity thought he heard a crisp roar, like a TV set on a blank channel with the volume turned way up.
Marrity looked fearfully over his shoulder — but though his father had tumbled apparently unconscious onto the linoleum floor, nobody had appeared behind him. The roaring had stopped, if it had ever been a real external noise. His father's slack face was pale and old.
With trembling fingers Marrity peeled the tape off Daphne's forearm and drew the IV needle out of her wrist. She was probably deafened too, so he just shoved her clothes into her hands.
She started to sit up, then winced and said, "Ribs! Help me up!"
He got an arm behind her shoulders and lifted her to a sitting position, and she quickly slid out of her hospital gown and scrambled into the jeans and blouse with no further hindrance from her cracked ribs. She knelt by the closet to pick up her shoes in one hand, and then nodded at Marrity.
Nurses were shouting questions, but Marrity held Daphne's elbow and marched her toward the far-stairway exit door.
"I'll fetch the truck," Marrity said loudly as they scuffed down the steel-edged cement stairs. "You wait by the door and hop in when I pull up."
Daphne was ahead of him, nimble on her bare feet. In something like her normal voice she asked, "Shouldn't we do something about your father?"
"Like get him to a hospital?"
At the bottom of the stairwell, Marrity pushed open the door and peered out; no one was in sight along the brightly lit carpeted hall, so he led Daphne to the exterior door at the near end of the hall.
"One minute," he told her.
He stepped outside and glanced in both directions, but he didn't see the woman in sunglasses, and so far there were no police or security guards in sight. There were no shadows yet, but the sky was bright blue over the mountains in the east. He took a deep breath of the chilly air and then ran across the parking lot to the Ford pickup truck.
It started on the first twist of the ignition key, and without giving it a moment to warm up he banged it into reverse and swung out of the parking space; then he had pulled the lever down into first and gunned the truck across the empty lanes to the door, and only when Daphne had burst out of the door and hopped up into the passenger seat did he realize that he had been holding his breath.
"What's going on?" asked Daphne, slamming her door.
"Somebody tried to shoot me, a few minutes ago," Marrity said as he made a right turn out of the hospital parking lot. His hands were trembling again, and he gripped the steering wheel tightly. He was panting. "You didn't dream it. Put your seat belt on, and keep it away from your neck. A woman, with sunglasses—"
"The one you told Mr. Jackson about." Daphne pulled the spring-loaded strap across her chest and fumbled beside her for the buckle. "He said don't talk to her. Headlights?"
Marrity pulled out the headlights knob, though it made no difference in visibility. "That's the one. I didn't say a word to her, she just started shooting. And then my father said you were dead, and he was — you saw — real surprised to see that you were alive. He saved my life," he added. "Knocked her gun aside."
"I hope he's not dead."
"I do too, I guess."
"Where do we go?" Daphne hummed a few rising and falling notes. "My voice seems okay."
"I don't know." Marrity looked into the rearview mirror as he made a third right turn, onto westbound Highland Avenue now, and saw no cars at all in the shadowed lanes under the brightening sky, just a couple of big grocery-delivery trucks receding away ahead of him. "Nobody's following us. Yes, you sound like your usual self."
"Maybe home?"
"Maybe. Or — I'm gonna turn south now, and see if that new car back there turns left too."
The light was red at D Street, but he turned left into a doughnut-shop parking lot, drove diagonally right through the lot and made a left onto D Street. The truck rocked on its springs.
Daphne was twisted around under her seat belt, kneeling on the seat to look behind them through the camper shell's back window.
"He turned south too, Dad," she said quietly as she sat down again. "I think there's two people in the car."
"Yes," agreed Marrity, forcing himself to speak calmly. And the passenger, he thought, is wearing sunglasses.
His father had said, She's blind if you don't look at her.
"Don't look at them, Daph," he said tightly.
There was a police station five or six blocks ahead, he remembered.
He could see now that the car behind was a tan Honda — it was gaining on them, clearly meaning to pass. Marrity could believe that the person in the passenger seat would have some kind of full-automatic gun this time. He tromped on the gas and the truck surged forward, but the Honda was still gaining, edging to the left.
There was no way that Marrity would be able outrun it to the police station.
"Daph," he said quickly, "can you picture the radiator of a car?" The truck's engine was roaring, but he didn't want to shift to third because in that gear it tended to slack off for a few moments before regaining power.
"Sure. Are they going to shoot us?"
"Yes. Can you grab the radiator of their car, without looking at it, the way you grabbed Rumbold on Sunday?"
Daphne frowned and screwed her eyes shut, then after a moment opened her eyes and peered uncertainly over her shoulder.
The Honda was nearly even with them, but swinging out wide into the empty oncoming lanes — to prevent Marrity from side-swiping them, presumably, and to have a clear shot even if Marrity braked hard.
Which he did. In the same instant that he straightened his leg to force the brake pedal all the way down, the hood of the Honda exploded up in a huge starburst of white steam.
Marrity had to concentrate on his own vehicle. The truck was shuddering and fishtailing as the tires screamed on the pavement, and even in the confusion Marrity remembered to pull the gearshift lever down into first, so that he was able to let the brake up and steer quickly through the cloud of tire smoke into an alley on the right, and then speed down the alley with his exhaust battering back from a row of closed garage doors.
He glanced sideways at Daphne, but the sudden hard pressure of the seat belt didn't seem to have hurt her ribs, and the stitches in her throat weren't bleeding.
"They had a gun!" she said shrilly. "I had to look! It was pointed right at both of us!"