Under Pressure: A Lucas Page Novel

by Robert Pobi

  Erin turned back to the room behind the glass.

  Kehoe decided that he wasn’t doing any good by being here. “It’s okay,” he said, and stood up. “I was just leaving.” And with that, he walked away, leaving Erin staring at her husband beyond the window.

  65

  Bleecker Street

  Michael MacDougal, known to his YouTube subscriber army as MightyMikey, considered himself the Charlie Chaplin of his day. All three Marx Brothers rolled into one. Larry, Curly, and Moe in a single package. Jerry Seinfeld conjoined to Chris Rock. He was a YouTube sensation and made a little more than a quarter of a million dollars a month by pranking authorities. MightyMikey was—in the parlance of his time—a First Amendment auditor. He pushed the boundaries to see how those in positions of authority reacted. He liked pranking cops the most because America wasn’t a police state, and he wouldn’t let it become one.

  His brother, David, was his cameraman; he was known to MightyMikey’s followers as McFly, because he was able to film the sickest situations without losing the shot.

  Today MightyMikey was going to see how close he could get to the cops with what looked like a suicide vest. It was nothing more than a fly-fishing outfit from Walmart, eight road flares, a broken digital clock, and a controller from a Nintendo console, but it looked legit. Or at least it would to your average cop.

  It was dark now, which would help if they needed to run; MightyMikey’s video exploits often ended with his making a dash for it. It was amazing how cranked people got with a little foolishness—twenty-first-century Americans were wound way too tight. Especially the cops, who were not known for their patience or sense of humor—which was precisely why they needed to be exposed as the crypto-fascists they were. Besides, his cop videos got the most views. MightyMikey sold three thousand T-shirts a month with his catchphrase on the front: Better the cops get pissed off than I get pissed on!

  There were a few television appearances after his last one—when he had tried to confiscate babies from Latino mothers, claiming he was with ICE. None of the women had pressed charges. And a little SJW outrage on Twitter notwithstanding, it had cracked a lot of people up.

  McFly was behind a pile of cardboard boxes and some office chairs that were heading off to a garbage barge. MightyMikey stripped to his underwear, put on the vest, then crossed the street and put himself on a trajectory straight past a parked cruiser where two uniformed cops were drinking coffee. Probably having doughnuts.

  McFly had a hard time not laughing while he zoomed in on his brother. The guy was a comedic genius—his body language was Jim Carrey on Molly. People loved shit like this. YouTube was a gold mine; they both drove 911 GT3s and next year they were moving up to Lambos—everyone wanted to be them.

  McFly kept the camera steady as MightyMikey, internet impresario and virtual star, pranced right by the two cops in the cruiser, shaking his tighty-whities.

  The doors flew open on cue.

  The cops were both big guys and blocked the shot, so McFly came out from behind the boxes. But he kept low.

  MightyMikey had a mic on the vest, and he wore a small button camera that they’d never see—it saved everything to an onboard SD card.

  MightyMikey was doing great. Acting all nuts and pointing at the sky and talking about the voices in his head. It was a classic example of a man with mental illness facing down cops. They had done shit like this enough times that they knew they’d get more slack than a black dude; the cops couldn’t do anything to him—he wasn’t touching the control—his hands were reaching for the sky as he ranted. He was no danger to anyone. And if the cops tried to mace him, MightyMikey had them cold. This was America, and they couldn’t get away with—

  The cops had their guns out.

  MightyMikey screamed something about knowing his rights, then lowered his hand and pointed at one of the cops.

  And that’s when they shot him.

  Ten fucking times!

  MightyMikey stumbled back in a few jerky strides before tumbling through the coffee shop window.

  McFly popped up and yelled.

  The cops spun.

  McFly called them fascist pigs. But kept the camera rolling.

  Their pistols came up.

  McFly kept the camera on them; they would never shoot him on film. They wouldn’t shoot an innocent white—

  But they did.

  66

  Columbia University Medical Center Fort Lee, New Jersey

  Lucas didn’t look incomplete; he looked destroyed. His chest was bruised and bloody and stitched back up—offset with burn marks from the explosion. His hair was singed. The right side of his head had been peeled open, the skin from the top of his skull—both the auricularis anterior and auricularis superior—had been yanked back, tearing behind his ear, all the way down to the occipitalis, like a gore on an antique globe. They had stitched it back together, his right ear in the middle of the sewn-back flap, but they hadn’t even bothered with the pretense of aesthetics. His prosthetic eye was gone, lost somewhere in the conflagration on the parkway. If they found it, they’d deliver it to the house in a little evidence bag; her husband’s ceramic eyeball, dropped off like a pair of cuff links. The people delivering it—FBI agents? Cops? FDNY?—would look embarrassed. They’d place it in her hand and leave without ever looking her in the eye. Things like that made people uncomfortable.

  His arm and leg were gone; she was the only one who ever saw him like this. It wasn’t modesty; most people simply got the heebie-jeebies when facing someone missing parts that their mind told them should be there. Lucas said it was a brain thing—that particular piece of biological machinery was able to function only because it ran on certain directives, mostly in the fill-in-the-blank department. He tried not to let the kids see him without his prosthetics. It was a little vain, but he said they would stop seeing him as Mr. Can-Do soon enough, and he didn’t want to accelerate the process.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, Luke,” she said, and reached out to touch the stub of what used to be his right arm.

  She didn’t want to cry.

  She had promised herself that she wouldn’t cry.

  And now she was fucking crying.

  Why had he crashed the car into that man? But she knew. He had done it because someone he cared about—had a responsibility toward—had been in trouble. And there were a lot of things you could call Lucas Douglas Page, but selfish was not one of them. Not when it came to the people he wanted to protect. And he had most definitely wanted to protect Whitaker. Even if it was a lost cause.

  And now here he was, in the hospital after playing a game of chicken with Mr. Death. How was she going to explain this to the children?

  “Would you stop crying?” His voice sounded like it had been generated at the far end of the world, then shipped over in tin cans, one syllable at a time.

  Erin wiped her eyes. “If this had happened to me, wouldn’t you be crying?”

  “Is it bad?”

  “You look like a Sebastian Krüger painting of yourself. You look…”—she paused—“lived in.”

  “Something tells me that I look died in.”

  She said, “You, Mr. Man, are one lucky dude,” through the tears.

  “Only because I landed on my brain.”

  “How do you feel?” She wiped her eyes with her cuffs.

  “There are people out there having autopsies performed on them who are in better shape than I am.”

  “You almost nuked the fridge this time.”

  The doctor came back in, carrying his chart. “Okay.” His name was Joseph Levine, and he had worked with Erin during her internship at Mass General. He had the no-nonsense delivery of the terminally occupied along with the lousy bedside manner to match. “You’ll need a couple of days here and then you need to take it easy for a while. Except for the scarring, you’ll be as good as new.” He looked down at Lucas and smiled; there was nothing convincing about it.

  They had already gone over the damage he
had sustained in the crash, subsequent explosion, and flying-monkey trip through the windshield. He had broken three ribs going over the dashboard, and his head had done battering-ram duty on the laminated safety glass, which had peeled the side of his noggin off on the way through. The explosion had sent a ball of fire into the sky that singed his eyebrows and clothing as he passed through it. But the silver lining was that the broken ribs had stopped his breathing for a few seconds and he hadn’t seared his lungs when he went through the flames. And the whole circus display had ended when he hit a tree off the shoulder. A retired schoolteacher put out his burning clothes, CPRed him back from the land of nuts and cake, and called 911.

  “And the hearing in my right ear?” he asked a little too loud. His ear canal was packed with something.

  “The damage to the side of your face is all aesthetic—your ear was peeled off and it tore the canal in the process. We’ve reattached it, but it will take some time to heal. The eardrum is fine. You’ll have reduced sensation until the capillaries and vessels regrow a work-around, but I think you have a pretty good understanding of what to expect. We’ll have to change the bandages daily, but we should be able to take the packing out of your ear in a week.” He looked down at Lucas. “You’ve got more character now.”

  Erin rolled her eyes. “He already has enough character.”

  It took all of his energy, but Lucas smiled over at her. “What can I say? The omnipotent narrator in my life is occasionally given to hyperbole.”

  The doctor double-clicked his iPad. “All right. The orderly will take you back to your room. I understand you’ve brought him new prosthetics,” he said to Erin. The ones Lucas had been wearing were mangled and probably irreparable.

  “They’re up in his room.”

  Lucas went to hold up his hand, but he wasn’t wearing it and the stub of his right arm pulled at the sheet. “I don’t want to go to the room. I want to see Whitaker.”

  He didn’t like the way Erin and Levine exchanged looks.

  “Now,” he added, and even with mono hearing, he couldn’t miss the panic in his own voice.

  67

  Whitaker’s arms were across her chest. Her eyes were closed. She was swathed in bandages and looked like an ancient Egyptian princess in the process of being prepared for the afterlife. Except that she was alive—theoretically speaking.

  She had the prime bed in the surgical ICU, where Humpty Dumpty’s doctors had reassembled all the damaged women and men—none of whom had come in with less of a chance of making it off the table than Special Agent Alice Whitaker.

  That she had lived until the EMT people arrived on the scene was in itself a minor miracle. That she had survived the various medical catastrophes that befell her in the ambulance on the way to the hospital—including a myocardial infarction—could be considered more of a mid-level miracle. And that she had made it through five hours on the table—where they had kick-started her heart three more times in between rebuilding damaged organs and repairing shredded arteries—nudged her into divine intervention statistics. If she lived, there would be no reason for her to buy a lottery ticket ever again; no one wins that kind of jackpot twice.

  But the doctors believed the lottery question to be purely academic—they were certain that she would die.

  There was a woman at her bedside. She looked a little like Whitaker, but smaller and rounder. When she saw Lucas in his chair at the foot of the bed, she snapped out of whatever faraway place she had been in.

  She looked at him and tried out a smile that didn’t make it to her tear-filled eyes. “You must be Page.”

  Lucas tried to sound jovial when he said, “How did you know?”

  The smile almost made it into her eyes at that one. “Angie said I had to watch out for you.”

  He was about to ask who she was, but she said, “I’m Toni—with an I. Al’s sister.” Evidently Toni had the same witchy thing as her sister when it came to questions.

  Lucas tilted his head back, indicating Erin. “This is my wife, Erin.”

  The two women shook hands. And once again Lucas noticed that instant sister thing that all the women around him effortlessly plugged into.

  “Any updates?” Lucas asked. He was going on fifteen-minute-old information.

  Toni dropped back into the chair. “They said to prepare for the worst. Which is about as vague as you can get. I cornered one of the nurses and she was kind enough—or mean enough, I’m not sure which—to tell me that no one here expects her to make it. And if she does, she was without oxygen for a long time. Maybe the EMTs should have left her alone. I don’t want her ending up a crip—” And she stopped herself.

  Lucas held up his hand. “It’s okay.”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean … it’s just—” And she stopped. “I’m just sorry.”

  Lucas tried to smile, something that in the best of times never really worked out. Toni’s reaction said that it was better if he didn’t try. “Look, I don’t do greeting cards all that well, and if the doctors say that she’s probably going to die, then there’s a chance that’s true. But I also know that if anyone has the mojo to kick probability in the nuts, it’s your sister. She’s special.”

  Toni’s eyes rimmed with tears and she nodded and they shook loose and ran down her cheeks and she wiped them away. “She never said you were nice.”

  He let loose with his imitation smile again. “I’m not. I just hate doctors.”

  Toni looked up at Erin. “Aren’t you a doctor?”

  Lucas said, “She’s only a doctor to her patients. With me, she’s just my wife. The rest of them? Dullards and quacks.” He felt Erin squeeze his shoulder.

  Toni tried to smile. “You know what she calls you behind your back?”

  “No.”

  “The Tin Man.”

  It was Erin who said, “Why?”

  “She said he’s still looking for his heart.”

  “What about her kid?” he asked. “Stan, the little man?”

  “Her ex brought him by this morning. Willy’s a good dad, no matter what Al says. They just had one of those bad marriages that all the counseling in the world couldn’t save. He’s a good guy, he just wasn’t good for her.” She put her hand on her sister’s arm. “Not everyone can be married to an FBI agent. It takes a special kind of denial.”

  Erin’s hand tightened on Lucas’s shoulder. “No shit,” she said.

  68

  Lucas said, “I’m sorry about Kehoe.”

  “Me, too.” Erin didn’t look like she was buying whatever he was selling.

  “He’s not what you would call a people person.”

  “You’re not what I would call a people person; Kehoe’s not what I would call a human being.”

  He shifted in the bed, and he was grateful that she had brought his spare prosthetics from home—he was always uncomfortable without them and it was worse out in the world. And after the flashback package of the explosion, they were better than comfort food and a security blanket rolled into one. He wanted his old ones back, no matter what shape they were in; they weren’t just scrap metal and carbon fiber, they were his arm and his leg. Even if they were destroyed, he didn’t want them simply going in the dumpster. If they couldn’t be repaired, maybe he’d turn them into table lamps. “It’s what he does—gets people to do what he needs from them. It’s never personal, it’s a Big Picture thing.” The leg was fine—it wasn’t torquing anything and it helped him from falling over in the bed. But he couldn’t put the arm on yet; the broken ribs on that side couldn’t take getting thumped by pointy aluminum parts.

  Erin pretended to be busy filling a glass with water and Lucas wondered if it was going to hit the wall or him. But she placed it on the wheeled dinner tray and did her best to sound like she didn’t care. “I don’t want to talk about Kehoe.”

  “That doesn’t mean we don’t have to.” He reached out, put his hand on her arm. The movement hurt his whole body, and he wondered if the ringing in his ears w
ould ever subside.

  She pulled away, like a wave rolling off the beach, and crossed her arms. “So talk.”

  “What did Kehoe say?”

  “That me and the kids need to go away. He said something about the people in Witness Protection handling logistics.”

  “He’s right.” Lucas tried not to look worried, but judging by Erin’s expression, his acting chops were lousy.

  “Luke, we went through this last winter. I’m not doing this to the kids again. Besides, you killed the guy.”

  He held up his hand as if he were auditioning for a Diana Ross video. “I killed a guy. Not the guy.”

  She gave him one of her patented wife faces. “So you’re killing random dudes now?”

  That was her second dude of the day. “What are we, Bill and Ted?”

  “Don’t do that to me. You know what I mean. That man you killed, the one you drove the fucking SUV into, the one you blew up—that asshole—wasn’t he the guy?”

  Lucas had had plenty of time to put things together in the little spaces of black that had been part of his life since the impact. “It’s the guy who put Frosst in motion that I need to put in a box.”

  All the color drained from Erin’s face, leaving the freckles on a pale background. “But Kehoe’s been on the television telling everyone that they know what happened and that they’re putting the case to bed.”

  Lucas shook his head, and it knocked his gyroscope out of whack and he got dizzy. He paused and waited for things to normalize. “Unless Kehoe’s come up with something I don’t know about—which is possible—he’s wrong.”

  “Can’t you just stop? Please? For me?”

  “Stop what?”

  “Having to be right all the time. It’s exhausting. They think they got their guy, let them. You don’t always have to be the smartest person in the room, Luke. It’s all right to be wrong every now and then. No one will hold it against you.”