Oh, God, I can’t breathe. What’s happening? I can’t get my breath. It’s horrible. I’m not fine.
Tossing her head from side to side, Jessie swept the darkened hospital room with her eyes. Then she seized on a figure at the far edge of her vision.
She knew the face.
“Oh, th-thank God,” she gasped. “Help me, please. It’s my heart.”
She stretched out her hands, clutched feebly at the air, but the figure stayed in the shadows.
“Please,” Jessie pleaded.
The figure wouldn’t come forward, wouldn’t help. What was going on? This was a hospital. The person in the shadows worked here.
Tiny black specks gathered in front of Jessie’s eyes as a crushing pain squeezed the air from her chest. Suddenly her vision tunneled to a pinprick of white light.
“Please help me. I think I’m—”
“Yes,” said the figure in the shadows, “you are dying, Jessie. It’s beautiful to watch you cross over.”
Womans Murder Club 5 - The 5th Horseman
Chapter 2
JESSIE’S HANDS FLUTTERED like a tiny bird’s wings beating against the sheets. Then they were very still. Jessie was gone.
The Night Walker came forward and bent low over the hospital bed. The young woman’s skin was mottled and bluish, clammy to the touch, her pupils fixed. She had no pulse. No vital signs. Where was she now? Heaven, hell, nowhere at all?
The silhouetted figure retrieved the fallen call device, then tugged the blankets into place, straightened the young woman’s blond hair and the collar of her gown, and blotted the spittle from her lips with a tissue.
Nimble fingers lifted the framed photo beside the phone on the bedside table. She’d been so pretty, this young mother holding her baby. Claudia. That was the daughter’s name, wasn’t it?
The Night Walker put the picture down, closed the patient’s eyes, and placed what looked to be small brass coins, smaller than dimes, on each of Jessie Falk’s eyelids.