The Manhattan Hunt Club by John Saul Read Free Book Online Page B

about anything.
    “They want him downtown for evaluation,” JoAnna had been told an hour ago, as her captain handed her the orders transferring Jagger from the prison to a hospital. “Don’t know why they’re bothering—if they want to know if he’s crazy, all they have to do is ask me.”
    Or me, JoAnna had thought. But she hadn’t said it. Instead she’d looked at the clock—it was after midnight, but nowhere near four A.M., when they usually woke up the prisoners that were being taken downtown. “Why now?”
    The captain shrugged. “I figure they’re just trying to make him disappear—get him out before anybody has a chance at him. Everybody liked Breen—everybody hates Jagger. So what are you gonna do?”
    So now JoAnna Gartner stood in front of Jagger’s cell on the second tier of the Central Punitive Unit.
    “Time to go.” Though her voice was low enough not to waken any of the prisoners who might be sleeping, Jagger’s eyes snapped open. Sitting up, he locked his eyes on to hers, and, as always, JoAnna had to resist an overwhelming urge to step back from the burning fury that glowed inside the man.
    “Stand up and turn around, back to the door, hands behind your back,” she ordered.
    Jagger’s eyes flicked toward JoAnna’s backup, Ruiz, who was standing a few yards away, silently using a video camera to capture every second of the prisoner’s transfer. Saying not a word, Jagger obeyed. As he unfolded himself from the bunk, his six-foot-five-inch frame—bulked up to nearly 250 pounds of heavily tattooed muscles—loomed over JoAnna, and once again she had to resist the urge to back away from him.
    Only when Jagger’s hands were shackled behind him did JoAnna open the door. He started to turn around, but JoAnna reached out and grasped the chain between the manacles on his wrists, lifting his arms just enough to let him know how much it would hurt if she raised them any higher. “Let’s just take this nice and slow,” she told him.
    With Ruiz keeping the camera trained on them, she steered Jagger out of the cell and down the steps to the main floor.
    They paused at the pen just inside the entrance to the CPU while two more officers fitted Jagger with leg irons and waist chains and moved his hands to the front of his body, where they were locked to the waist chains. Then they began the slow progress toward the main entrance, waiting for each barred door to close behind them before the one in front opened.
    It was twenty past midnight when they emerged from the building. A black van was already waiting, with a captain and an officer from the Emergency Services Unit ready to receive the prisoner.
    Twenty minutes later the van pulled into a hospital emergency entrance. Four men in orderlies’ uniforms were waiting with a gurney. Both officers got out, one glancing up and down the deserted sidewalk while the other unlocked the padlock on the back door of the van.
    A minute later Jagger was out of the truck.
    “Get on the gurney,” one of the orderlies said.
    When Jagger made no move to obey, one of the officers nudged him with the butt of the MP-5 cradled in his arms. “You heard the man.”
    His eyes smoldering, Jagger lay down on the gurney.
    The orderlies strapped him tight.
    With two of the orderlies at the front of the gurney and the other two at its rear, they moved Jagger quickly through the doors, down a hall, and into a waiting elevator.
    The doors slid closed, but instead of pressing a button that would take the elevator up to the floors housing the patients, one of the orderlies slipped a key into a lock, turned it, and punched a button that sent the elevator down.
    In the second subbasement, they emerged into a long hallway. The orderlies quickly pushed the gurney to the far end, through two dark rooms, and finally into a third, lit only by a single bulb hanging in a metal cage in the center of the ceiling.
    At its far end was another door, covered in metal.
    One of the orderlies