Chapter 17: The Service Door

Joaquin hung up the phone and said, "I'm going alone."

"No," I said. "He's our father."

"You're out on bond. If you leave Beto's tonight and they catch you, you go back inside until the hearing."

"The hearing is tomorrow morning," I said. "If I'm in a cell, she wins."

He stared at me.

"If he stays in that room, she wins," I said. "Drive."

The clinic stood alone on a dark hill, white and low, with a gate and a guard hut.

Joaquin parked the truck behind a laundry van on the service road.

Beto stayed at the wheel with the engine running.

I pulled up my hood.

A woman in blue scrubs was waiting beside the loading door, hugging her elbows against the cold.

I knew her from the courtroom.

She was the nurse who had pushed my father's chair.

"The housekeeper called me," she said. "I'm on the night shift."

Her voice shook.

"I did what Mrs. Aldecoa told me at the house for three weeks. Double doses, no visitors, no phone."

She held out a key card.

"Tonight I rode here behind him, and I stopped. Third floor, east wing, the last door. There are two men in the hall."

Joaquin took the card, and he looked at her face.

"Thank you," he said.

"Don't thank me," she said. "Just get him out before the morning count."

We took the stairs.

The third floor was dim and smelled of floor wax.

At the end of the east wing, two men in black polo shirts sat on folding chairs under the exit sign.

One of them looked up from his phone.

I walked out of the stairwell toward him in my hood, with my hands visible and slow.

"Visiting hours are over, miss," he said.

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