Vicious Circle Read Online Free PDF

medium-size fortune to have the walls, floor, and ceiling lined with silver. I went up past the low-security wards, hearing sobs and shouts and swearing from inside each one as I passed: every loud noise at the Stanger stirs up a host of echoes. As I rounded the corner at a jog, I saw a whole crowd of people clustered about ten feet away from Rafi’s door, which seemed to be open. I was looking for Pen, and so I saw her first: she was tussling with two nurses, a man and a woman, and cursing like a longshoreman. Looking at Pen head-on, you always get the impression that she’s taller than she is; the vividness of her green eyes and red-auburn hair somehow translates into a sense of imposing height, but in fact she stands a little over five feet tall. The two nurses weren’t actually holding on to her, they were just blocking her way to the door and moving with her whenever she tried to slide around them—a very effective human wall.
    The rest of the scene was like a bar fight taking place under local rules I wasn’t familiar with. Webb, the director of the Stanger Home, sweating and red-faced, was trying to lay hands on Pen to pull her away from the door, but at the same time he was fighting shy of doing anything that might be construed as assault—and any time he got close she just smacked him away. The resulting ballet of twittery hand gestures and involuntary cringeing was strange in the extreme. Half a dozen nurses of both sexes jostled around them, none of them relishing a possibly actionable rumble with someone who wasn’t an inmate and might have the money to sue. Two other Stanger staffers were down on the floor, apparently wrestling with each other.
    I could hear the voices now—some of them, anyway, raised above the background babble.
    “You’ll kill him! You’re going to kill him.” This was Pen, shrill and urgent.
    “—have a responsibility to the public, and to the other residents of the home, and I’m not going to be intimidated into—” Webb, partway through a sentence that had clearly been going on for a while and wasn’t going to end any time soon.
    But just as I pushed through the edges of the group, it was ended for him as a body came sailing through the open doorway and hit the corridor’s farther wall with a solid, meaty sound before crashing to the carpeted floor. He was faceup, so I was able to recognize him as Paul, another male nurse, and probably the guy I liked best on the Stanger’s staff. He was unconscious, his face flushed purple, and the hypodermic syringe that rolled from his hand was sheared off short as if by a samurai sword, clear liquid weeping from the cleanly sliced edge of the plastic ampoule.
    Everyone stared at him with varying degrees of awe and alarm, but nobody made a move to help him or assess the damage. I took the opportunity to thread my way through the onlookers, heading for the empty stretch of corridor around the open door—no-man’s-land. One of the two nurses who was blocking Pen—the male one—immediately turned his attention to me, clamping a heavy hand on my shoulder.
    “Nobody’s allowed through here,” he told me, brusquely.
    “Leave him!” Webb snapped. “That’s Castor.”
    “Oh thank God!” said Pen, seeing me for the first time. She threw herself into my arms, and I gave her a reassuring hug. At the same time I looked down and realized that the two men on the ground weren’t wrestling after all: the conscious one was hauling the unconscious one away from the door, leaving a feathery-edged smear of blood on the carpeted floor from some wound I couldn’t see.
    Pen’s eyes were glistening with tears as she turned them pleadingly on me. “Fix, don’t let them hurt him! It’s not Rafi, it’s Asmodeus. He can’t help himself!”
    “I know that. It’s okay, Pen.” I put as much conviction into those words as I could muster. “I’m here now. I’ll sort this.”
    “One of my staff is still in there,” Webb told me, cutting