Left to Kill (Adele Sharp #4) - Blake Pierce Page 0,72

Adele. She touched her and didn’t recoil. She rested her head against Adele’s arm, still sobbing. Her hands bound in front of her. Delicately, Adele withdrew a utility knife from her belt and began to saw at the ropes.

The dread began to fade as the girl cried into her shoulder. Adele could feel tears in her own eyes. She turned away from the empty cages, her eyes on the living, breathing, beautiful creature in front of her. Despite the gashes, the cuts, the dirt, the stains, she’d never seen anything so marvelous. She inhaled a shaky breath which became steadier as the girl continued to cry into her shoulder.

“You’re going to be okay,” Adele murmured. Her voice felt fragile at first, but then, as if treated with a backbone of iron, she said again, “All of you are going to be okay.”

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

Adele listened to the rhythmic whine of the sirens above from where she sat buckled sideways on the aluminum bench. The flashing red lights reflected off the windshield and then off the glass of the hospital as the ambulance pulled forward. There was a screech of tires. Then the paramedics emerged from the vehicle and hurried to the rear.

Adele leaned back, keeping out of the way as the paramedics grabbed the stretcher with the young girl. They didn’t even acknowledge Adele as they lifted the survivor and carried her onto the sidewalk, and rushed, wheeling the stretcher toward the sliding glass doors.

In the distance, Adele heard more ambulances coming closer.

Adele swallowed, her hands clutched tight in her lap. She hadn’t been able to release her own hands the entire journey back to the hospital. The same hospital where Amanda was recovering.

Every time Adele let go of her hands, they would start trembling uncontrollably. And so she kept her grip tight, unyielding.

Now, though, the back doors of the ambulance were left wide open, the sirens had been turned off, but the flashing lights still pulsed.

As the paramedics passed through the hospital doors, Adele watched as the young girl’s head seemed to lift for the faintest moment from the stretcher. Her eyes were wide, a look of panic in her expression. Adele quickly unbuckled and stepped out of the vehicle, looking toward the door. She finally let go of her own trembling hands and gave a small fluttering wave.

The survivor on the stretcher spotted her, stared, and then seemed to relax, leaning back down and lying on the stretcher as she was carried through the hospital doors. The glass doors shut, sliding behind them.

A second ambulance came up quickly, following the path of the first. More rapid movements, more slamming doors and another stretcher. Adele spotted more ambulances following as well.

She turned away and moved toward the parking structure, putting the hospital behind her. She had wanted to drive with the girl. She didn’t even know the girl’s name. Didn’t recognize her from any of the missing people they’d found. And yet, the girl had clung onto Adele, from the base of the well, up the wooden stairs, and then to the pulley system rigged by the paramedics to help the victims out of the well. When Adele had tried to separate, the girl had started crying, and Adele had hurried back. The paramedics had reluctantly allowed her to ride in the back of the ambulance with her. Now, though, she was on her own. The doctors would take care of her. They would have to.

Adele sighed, no longer looking back. She could hear more slamming doors, more scurrying footsteps, more shouts of urgency.

But her job was done. It was someone else’s duty now.

This consoled her very little as she moved along the sidewalk, heading for the parking structure where she had agreed to meet John.

As she walked in the chill air, moving away from the hospital much to her relief, she felt the unsettling sense of the day descending on her shoulders.

“Adele?”

She paused, glancing along the sidewalk, toward the edge of the street beneath a single streetlight, bathed in the yellow flicker from the illumination; she spotted a police vehicle.

In the front seat, she recognized the slouched, thick form of the Sergeant. Joseph Sharp was peering out the window, one arm pressed against the metal through the open glass.

“Adele,” he said again, “what happened?”

Adele frowned and approached the parked squad car. “How did you know where to find me?”

But then she approached and heard the chatter of the radio extending from the cabin. “Oh,” she said. “Never mind.”

Her