No one would believe anything they said, and Edgar would be tortured and killed.
Think. She had to think.
“There’s another way, but we have to hurry,” Aiden said, giving her a wild flash of hope.
He handed her a lab coat, scrub pants and a cap, then stuffed her makeshift sack into the gym bag.
They went down the hall as briskly and discreetly as they could, with her changing along the way. She ripped off the gowns, handed him her vest, which he stowed in the bag, and she put on the white coat.
As she finished shoving her legs into the pants and put on the cap, a nurse came through a set of double doors. If the woman hadn’t been looking down at her cell phone, she would’ve caught Charlie in an awkward position that would’ve been difficult to explain.
Charlie pushed the balled-up hospital gowns into the trash, and they passed the nurse, who was still preoccupied with her phone.
Aiden led her through a mini maze of hallways. They moved with confidence, acting like busy people who were supposed to be there.
They strode past a small elevator toward an unguarded door.
“That elevator goes directly to the maternity ward. This is a separate entrance for people with newborns, so the babies aren’t exposed to germs. I overheard a nurse escorting a family through here.” Aiden winked at her.
Warm pride filled Charlie’s chest. He was brilliant. She wanted to hug him tight and kiss him. On the cheek only and not all over, she had to remind herself.
She was so attracted to him that it scared her. Attracted to the point where she worried that it distracted her on the job sometimes.
The moment they had first met, there’d been off-the-charts chemistry. Not a simple spark but a lightning bolt. And she knew he posed an indefinable threat. Whenever they’d got close to kissing or anything romantic, instinct cautioned her to keep away, the same sense of self-preservation that warned someone not to get too close to an open flame.
There was a line that she’d never cross. The problem was that the line with Aiden was drawn in sand, easily washed away by waves and redrawn. Sometimes it inched forward; sometimes it was pushed back. While knowing she couldn’t have him made it worse.
The automatic door swooshed open. They stepped out together, breathed fresh air. The door sucked shut behind them.
“Now what?” Aiden asked.
“Leave that to me.” Charlie gestured for him to follow her. “I’m going to hot-wire a car.”
“What?” The surprise in his voice matched his expression. “Why am I just now learning that you even know how to hot-wire a car?”
She shrugged. “I guess it’s the first time I’ve needed to do it.” As an adult. “We’ll need to find an older model.” Those were easier. “Ten years at least, but the older the better.”
“If we wander around, checking vehicles, we’ll look like car thieves.”
“We are car thieves.” She’d never thought the day would come when she’d say such a thing, and definitely not to Aiden Yazzie, the most upstanding, principled man she knew.
There was a parking lot to the left, across a wide expanse of blank blacktop, in full view of several police officers. They rounded the corner to the left.
Ahead of them was the smaller parking lot for employees. A guy got out of a luxury sedan and hit the key fob, locking it. The lights flashed and he tossed the keys in the right pocket of his suit jacket. Looking frazzled, the man jogged toward an entrance, where one police officer was busy on his radio.
“Better idea,” she said. “Head to that sedan. I’ll meet you.”
They separated. Aiden quickly disappeared among the other cars in the lot.
Charlie picked up her pace, putting herself in the man’s path. As he was about to pass her, she bumped into him, slipping her hand into his pocket and grabbing the keys tight in her palm, without letting them make a sound.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
“No, excuse me.” He gave her a hurried look-over, but kept going, none the wiser.
By the time Charlie had reached the car, the man had already cleared the cop and was in the medical center. She hit the key fob button. The car lit up inside, turn signals flashed once and the door locks clunked open. They climbed inside, and he threw the bag in the back.
She pushed down on the brake, pressed the start button, got the engine going and pulled out of the lot.
Charlie went west on the side street, at a speedy but not suicidal pace, as if they were late for an appointment, past a market and veterinarian and eateries. At Mission Gorge Road, she made a left, going south.
A thwopp, thwopp, thwopp sound had them both peering low through the windshield and up at the sky. A police helicopter was inbound, heading to the hospital.
Farther down the road, on the opposite side, a string of police cars raced north. Lights flashing. Sirens blaring.
At least ten squad cars flew past them.
The police would have the entire medical center locked down and under aerial surveillance within minutes.
They’d made it out in the nick of time.
“We need cash,” Charlie said. They wouldn’t be able to use credit cards since those left a digital trail anyone could follow. “Then we need to get a car that won’t be reported stolen.”
She drove to Seaport Village. A fourteen-acre waterfront complex of shopping, dining and entertainment. The meandering walkways and beautiful plazas attracted tons of tourists and locals. It also had one of the few banks in the city with ATMs inside that allowed up to a three-thousand-dollar cash withdrawal.
The police would eventually monitor the activity of their credit and debit cards, but for right now, the cops thought they were pinned down somewhere inside the hospital. On the off chance that they were already plugged into their financial transactions, it would be easy to hide in the crowd and disappear. It wasn’t as if they were going to hang around the area waiting for the police to arrive.
She parked the sedan as close to the bank as she could while staying away from CCTV cameras. It was impossible to avoid all the cameras between the parking lot and the bank, but every little bit of prevention helped.
In case the car was reported stolen sooner rather than later, they decided to ditch it. Aiden grabbed the bag from the back. They hustled to the bank and both made withdrawals, not knowing how much money they might need.
Better to have too much than not enough. This was their one chance to get cash.
On the way out, she spotted the Green Line trolley pulling to a stop.
“It’ll take us where we need to go.” She pointed to it.
Aiden nodded and they ran, hopping on board just before it pulled off.