Chapter 4 - The Ticking Clock
Dr. Vance moved with incredible speed, slipping the empty syringe back into his hard case and snapping it shut before Maya could fully process the sight of the needle.
I immediately stood up, smoothing down my shirt, forcing my face into the calmest expression I could manage. I walked over to the doorway, knelt down to Maya’s eye level, and placed my hands gently on her arms.
“Hey, baby,” I said, my voice trembling slightly despite my best efforts. “Everything is okay. This is… this is Dr. Vance. He’s a special doctor who came to give Mommy some medicine.”
Maya didn't look at Dr. Vance. She looked past me, at her mother, who was rapidly pulling down her sweater sleeves while wiping the tears from her face.
“Why does the doctor come in the dark?” Maya asked. Her voice was too quiet, too perceptive for an eight-year-old. “Doctors work in hospitals with big white lights.”
“Because Mommy’s medicine has to be given at a very specific time,” I lied, hated myself for lying to her. “And Dr. Vance had to work late today. Go back to bed, sweetie. I’ll come tuck you in in two minutes.”
Maya looked at me for a long, agonizing moment. She didn't argue. She just gave a single, slow nod.
“Okay,” she said. “Don't forget to check under the bed for the moon.”
It was an old game we had played since she was toddler—checking under the bed to see if the moon was hiding there.
“I won't,” I promised.
She turned and walked back down the hallway, her bare feet making soft slap-slap sounds against the floorboards before her bedroom door clicked shut.
I turned back to the room. Dr. Vance was already zipping up his jacket, his hard case securely in his grip.
“She’s too smart for her own good,” Vance said grimly, stepping toward the window to check the street. “You need to manage her. If she mentions a middle-of-the-night doctor to a teacher or a school counselor, Child Protective Services will be at your front door within forty-eight hours.”
“I’ll handle my daughter,” I snapped. “Now tell me how I contact this 'Curator'.”
“You don't,” Vance said flatly. “He contacts us. Once a month, a disposable burner phone is left in a drop-box behind a dry cleaner's on 4th Street. He texts me the drop location for the next month’s batch of AP-9, and he texts your wife the instructions. That’s it.”
“When is the next drop?” I demanded, stepping into his path.
Vance hesitated, his eyes darting to Sarah, then back to me. “Tomorrow night. Midnight. At the abandoned railyard near the river.”
My heart did a slow, heavy roll in my chest. Tomorrow.
“I’m going with you,” I said.
“No,” Vance said immediately. “If he sees you, he cuts the supply. Your wife dies.”
“He’s using my name on a Cayman Islands bank account!” I hissed, grabbing Vance by the lapel of his jacket. “He’s setting me up to take the fall for half a million dollars in illegal pharmaceutical smuggling! If the Feds come down on this, I go to prison and my daughter ends up in foster care! I am going to that railyard, Vance. Either I go with you quietly, or I call the police right now and we all go down together.”
Dr. Vance stared at me through his rimless glasses for five long seconds. He saw the absolute desperation in my eyes, and he knew I wasn't bluffing.
“Midnight,” Vance growled, pushing my hand off his coat. “You sit in the back of my car. You don't make a sound. You don't step out unless I tell you to. If anything looks wrong, we drive away.”
“Fine,” I said.
Vance walked out the bedroom door, stepping silently down the stairs and slipping out the front door into the pouring rain.
I stood in the silent bedroom with my wife. The shattered pieces of the lamp still lay scattered across the floorboards.
Sarah looked up at me from the bed, her face drawn and pale. “Mark… please don't go tomorrow. What if it’s a trap? What if he hurts you?”
I walked over to the bed and sat down beside her. I reached out, gently taking her hand, feeling the thin, faint flutter of her pulse beneath her bruised wrist.
“Sarah,” I said softly, looking into her eyes. “Someone is spending a fortune to keep you alive, but they are framing me to do it. Why? Why would anyone care enough to save your life, but destroy mine in the process?”
She shook her head, tears filling her eyes again. “I don't know, Mark. I swear to God I don't know!”
I pulled the small white sleeping pill out of my jeans pocket and held it up between my thumb and index finger.
“And why,” I asked, my voice dropping into a cold whisper, “were you giving me these sleeping pills every single night for the last four months? Did he tell you to drug me, Sarah?”
Sarah flinched as if I had struck her across the face. She looked down at the white pill, her lower lip trembling violently.
“He… he said you couldn't know,” she choked out. “He said if you woke up and caught him, you would stop the injections out of fear of the law. He said… he said the sleeping pills were the only way to protect you from making a choice that would kill me.”
She looked up, her eyes wide with terror.
“I didn't want to drug you, Mark! But every night, I had to choose between lying to you… or dying and leaving Maya without a mother!”
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I closed my hand over the pill, crushing the soft chalky tablet into powder between my fingers.
“Tomorrow night,” I whispered, “this ends.”
