Kill Switch

by Neal Baer

  “Are you taking care of him?” Nick asked.

  “Yes, I am,” Lester replied. “We’re trying to stabilize him for surgery.”

  “Will he make it?” Nick managed, afraid to hear the answer.

  “If we can get the brain swelling down, he stands a chance.”

  Nick let out a breath.

  “But that’s the good news,” Lester said, as if he’d said the same words too many times before. “His right fibula and tibia are shattered.”

  “Which means what, Doc?” Nick asked, hoping it wasn’t what he thought.

  “We’ll pin his leg back together, but he’ll never be the same.”

  His days as a cop are over, Nick thought.

  “Thanks, Doc,” was the only reply Nick could manage.

  Lieutenant Wilkes now looked in their direction. Nick could see him whisper to Wessel’s wife that he needed a moment. He walked the few feet over to them, all business.

  “What’d the doc say?” asked Wilkes.

  “Just that they’re trying to get him up to surgery,” said Savarese.

  “I need you back at the scene,” Wilkes told Savarese, gesturing over to Debby. “She’s a mess and nobody’s been able to reach Tommy’s parents, so I have to stay here.”

  “On my way, Boss,” Savarese said, looking at Nick.

  “I’m okay,” Nick said, reading the look. “I’ll get myself home.”

  Savarese nodded, then headed off. Wilkes glanced over toward Debby.

  “You want me to introduce you?”

  It was the last thing Nick wanted. “I don’t think I’m up to it,” he said.

  “You been looked at yet?” he asked Nick.

  “I’m not hurt, Lou,” Nick said.

  “Have the doc check you out anyway,” Wilkes ordered. “Then go home, shower up, and get back to the office. I want to know every place this guy Quimby could be hiding. And we finally got hold of Catherine Mills’s parents. They live somewhere in the middle of Nowhere, Ohio, and they’re driving into town, should be here by tomorrow morning—”

  “I’m taking tomorrow off,” Nick said, cutting him off, the words out before he even realized he’d uttered them.

  Wilkes cracked his crooked jack-o’-lantern smile. “Now’s not the time for comedy, Nicky.”

  “It’s not a joke. I won’t be in tomorrow.”

  Nick’s boss gave him a long look. “Really?” retorted Wilkes. “We got a nut job running around town murdering blond women and burning their eyes out—one who almost put your partner in the ground—and you’re taking a day off?”

  “I need a personal day,” Nick said simply. “If you got a problem with that, send me back to Central Booking.”

  Wilkes read the expression on Nick’s face. “Look, Nicky,” he began, “if all this is too much for you and you’re not ready—”

  “I didn’t say I couldn’t handle it,” Nick interrupted. “I just need a day. Is that too much to ask?”

  Wilkes remembered what Nick had been through the past year. “If it means that much to you, I’ll cover your ass myself.”

  “Thanks, Boss,” Nick said.

  “Don’t ‘thanks, Boss’ me, Nicky. I already stuck my balls in the paper shredder getting you your job back,” Wilkes chastised him. “You won’t make me look like a schmuck, will you?”

  “I won’t, Lou. I promise.”

  And as he walked out, Nick hoped he could live up to that promise.

  Twenty hours later on Tuesday afternoon, Nick Lawler was on the southbound platform of Boston’s Back Bay railroad station, having just gotten off an Acela Express train from New York.

  He was tired, more exhausted than he could remember. Yet he knew now that he was right to make this trip. Still, his sense of duty and guilt over taking the day off at such a critical time had overcome Nick long before he reached Boston.

  Nick’s cell phone rang. It was Lieutenant Wilkes.

  “You resting up, Nicky?” Wilkes asked with a forced friendliness.

  “Yeah, Lou, I’m just hanging out at home,” Nick replied, trying to sound nonchalant.

  “I got good news. Your partner’s up and yakking a mile a minute. Blames himself for going into the subway tunnel without backup.” Wilkes waited for a response from Nick, but none came. “He’s going to retire on three-quarters pay. Says he got hurt because he screwed up and lost Quimby.”

  He saved my life. He didn’t screw up. I did, Nick thought. “I got to go, Lou. Someone’s at the door. See you tomorrow.”

  Nick clicked off. He had someplace to go and he was late.

  The light from Dr. Mangone’s ophthalmoscope bore into Nick’s eyes, so bright that it hurt.

  “Is it getting worse?” Nick asked.

  “I’m afraid so,” said Dr. Mangone, peering through the large machine deep into the dark pupils of Nick’s gray-blue eyes.

  “How much longer?”

  “A year. Maybe a little more if you’re lucky,” said the doctor in his thick Boston accent. “You’re not driving at night, are you?”

  “No,” Nick lied.

  Dr. Mangone looked him over. “I have to ask you a question, Mr. Barton. Who are you hiding your condition from?”

  Mr. Barton. He could never get used to the doctor calling him that.

  Nick first noticed something was wrong five years ago when, late one night at home, he tripped down a flight of stairs. He shrugged it off as being tired, but when he hit a parked car the next week, he got scared. It was dark and the car suddenly appeared out of nowhere. Nick made an appointment with an eye specialist who worked with the NYPD, thinking maybe he needed glasses.

  But before he went in for his exam, he looked his symptoms up on the Internet: night blindness and loss of peripheral vision—these were signs of retinitis pigmentosa, an incurable disease that ended in blindness. If that’s what Nick had, his police career would be over the instant he was diagnosed. He couldn’t take the chance, so he’d canceled his appointment with the police department doctor and sought out Dr. Mangone, an expert in treating RP. He practiced in Boston, far enough away that no one would find out. Mangone had quickly confirmed Nick’s self-diagnosis.

  But now, Nick couldn’t even think of an appropriate way to answer the doctor’s question. He was hiding his condition from his boss, his friends, from everyone, including himself. Instead of lying, he said nothing. Dr. Mangone got up and pushed the ophthalmoscope out of the way. Nick sat back, moving his chin off the chin-rest.

  “Look,” the doctor began, “what you do with your life is none of my business until it either affects your condition or puts you or others in danger.” He shook his head. “I almost want to ask you your real name.”

  Nick was glad Dr. Mangone cared enough to be interested in him and the effect this insidious disease would have on his life.

  “You pay me in cash, no insurance,” he continued. “Your address is a post office box. And I don’t know a lot of accountants who carry guns.”

  Nick looked down at his leg. The bottom of the ankle holster was just sticking out from the cuff of his pants. Christ.

  “It’s complicated, Doc,” he said.

  Dr. Mangone sighed. “You’re not gonna tell me, are you.”

  “I can’t,” said Nick.

  “Then listen to me. Carefully. There’s no way you can clearly see what you’re aiming at—especially at night. If you find yourself having to shoot someone, there’s a better than average chance you will hit the wrong person.”

  If you only knew, Doc.

  Nick stared out the train window into the dark night as the Acela raced back to New York. The bright streetlights of the towns along the tracks whizzed by like flashbulbs bursting in Nick’s eyes. He closed them, as if that might delete today—and yesterday—from having happened.

  Nick could see himself running through his apartment, past the family photos lining the walls. Running through the subway tunnel. Finding Wessel. Running into his bedroom. Seeing the blinding flash from
the gun muzzle as if it were right in front of his face . . .

  “Police, sir. Wake up.”

  Nick opened his eyes. An Amtrak police officer stood in the aisle beside his row of seats, his hand on his holstered Glock.

  “Yes, Officer?”

  “Put your hands on the seat in front of you.”

  Nick now saw cops at both ends of the car and that he was the only passenger. He realized they had evacuated the train. Like I’m some kind of terrorist.

  “I’m NYPD,” Nick told the cop, “if this is about my weapon.”

  “Where’s your ID?” asked the cop.

  “Inside coat pocket,” Nick replied. “Can I reach?”

  The cop nodded. Nick took out his wallet and handed the cop his shield and ID card. The cop relaxed, giving him back his creds.

  “Sorry, guy,” the cop apologized. “Someone saw your gun and complained. We had to check it out.”

  “You’re doing your job,” Nick said. “No apology necessary.”

  “Thanks for understanding,” the cop said, walking away.

  Nick slumped in his seat as the cops began to let the passengers back into the car. Then the train started off again.

  Nick stared out the window for the rest of the trip, not wanting to see the passengers looking at him with disgust because he had made them late. The train was crossing over the Harlem River now; the lit Manhattan skyline filled the window.

  At least I can still see that.

  And though he knew the time when he wouldn’t be able to see was creeping closer, Nick breathed a sigh of relief. He was home.

  It was just after midnight when Nick walked through the door into the ancient duplex he grew up in and now shared with his mother and two daughters. His parents had snagged the place decades earlier, the beneficiaries of once-in-a-lifetime luck combined with the city’s financial ruin of the mid-1970s. Nick’s father, a beat cop in the Upper West Side’s 24th Precinct back then, helped evict a heroin dealer from the expansive five-room apartment. In return, the owner offered the place to Nick’s father for the rent-controlled sum of $250 a month, a mere pittance for what most Manhattan apartment dwellers then and now would consider an urban mansion. Now, nearly forty years later, the rent was only $1,200, more than affordable on a detective’s salary.

  Nick made his way into the kitchen and went straight for the refrigerator. He hadn’t eaten since before his visit to Dr. Mangone, and he was famished. He opened the door and shoved a couple of slices of cold-cut turkey down his throat, wondering why his mother hadn’t saved him any dinner.

  And then he felt guilty. His wife Jenny’s sudden death not only left him bereft of a life partner and the girls of a mother, but it also presented a huge childcare problem. It was why Nick sold his attached house in the Queens hamlet of Whitestone and moved the girls back to Manhattan with his mother. Helen Lawler was in her early seventies, still vibrant but lonely since the death of Nick’s father fifteen years earlier, and she welcomed Nick and the girls with open arms. Thus far she had kept her promise to look after her granddaughters.

  “How’d it go?”

  Nick turned. His mother stood in the kitchen doorway in a light green terry-cloth bathrobe.

  “The girls okay?” he asked her.

  “Jill got an A on her math test. Katie had a sore throat, so I kept her home.”

  “Did you take her to the doctor?” Nick asked, concerned.

  “It’s only a cold, Nick. No fever. She’ll be fine.” Helen knew that even a minor illness of one of his girls set him off, so she tried not to worry him.

  “Thanks, Ma, for taking care of them,” Nick replied. “I’m going to bed.”

  “You didn’t answer my question,” his mother chided. “How was Boston?”

  Nick couldn’t help but think his mother should’ve been a cop. “It didn’t go well,” he confessed.

  “Then what are you going to do?” she asked him, frustrated.

  “Now’s not the time, Ma,” he said, feeling like a child. “I’m exhausted.”

  “You got your twenty in. Every day after that is like you’re working for half pay. That’s what your father always said.”

  “Ma, stop. Please.”

  “You can do a million other things.”

  “Guys who see can do a million other things. Not guys who’re going blind.”

  “Nicky, you gotta face facts.”

  Nick sighed. The conversation had become a tiresome daily occurrence since he shared the secret of his deteriorating eyesight. And he’d long since learned the only way to win an argument with his mother was not to get into one in the first place.

  “Can we drop it for tonight?” he pleaded.

  “The girls already lost their mother. They can’t afford to lose their father, too, and I won’t be around forever.”

  “I got another chance, Ma,” he argued. “To prove those rats on the job were wrong about me.”

  “You know you didn’t do anything wrong. So don’t be like your father,” she said as she headed for the stove. “I’m scrambling you some eggs.”

  That was the thing about his mother. She always had an answer and she was always right. “Don’t bring Dad into this,” Nick said as he sat down at the kitchen table. Nothing had changed in the apartment for years, and Nick liked that. Same place mats, same bowl of plastic fruit on the table. He found comfort in his mother’s predictability.

  “Your dad, God rest his soul, was always trying to prove he was a good cop and look where it got him—dead of a heart attack before he could retire.” She sighed as she took out three eggs.

  Nick liked how she cooked them real slow so they were soft and moist.

  “Dad was a good cop who got stuck with a bunch of bad apples,” Nick now schooled her. “He never took money like the rest of them, and he never ratted them out. He had nothing to prove.”

  “Neither do you, son.”

  She looked at him a second longer and turned back to the stove.

  In silence, Nick ate his eggs and three slices of white toast almost burnt, the way he liked it. He grabbed a bottle of water from the fridge and kissed his mom on the cheek good night, just like when he was a little boy. After checking on his sleeping girls and giving each a peck on the forehead, he went into his room and closed the door. As he did every night, he removed his gun and locked it in the safe that was built into the table beside the bed. His mother and daughters had no idea where he kept his guns and never asked. And he’d told only one other person the combination, which had ended in disaster.

  He switched off the light, plopped down on the bed in his clothes, and shut his eyes, waiting to succumb to exhaustion. But it didn’t take long for him to realize he was in that ironic state of being too tired to fall asleep.

  Nick found himself reaching under the bed, pulling out a large envelope.

  Why am I doing this? Why now?

  He couldn’t answer his own question as he opened the flap and reached in. When his hand emerged, it held a series of newspaper clippings. He turned on the lamp on his night table and began reading the headlines, written eight months ago:

  The Daily News: MURDER COP ACCUSED OF KILLING WIFE

  The New York Times: NYPD DETECTIVE CHARGED IN WIFE’S SHOOTING DEATH

  The Post: HUBBY HOMICIDE COP WHACKED WIFE

  All three sported the photo that would make Nick cringe for the rest of his life: There he was in handcuffs, being led away from his Queens home in the middle of the night as his daughters watched from the doorway. The Post was the only newspaper that bothered to print a picture of Jenny, snapped by a neighbor whose backyard barbecue they had attended the previous Labor Day. Nick stared at the photo of his deceased wife.

  Why? Why? He ran up the stairs. Down the hallway, past the family pictures on the wall. Don’t do it, Jenny . . . I’m coming . . . Pop! The muzzle flash cut through the blackness. He ran into the bedroom. Her eyes were wide open in instantaneous death. Blood poured from the exit wound in her back, sp
reading across the white sheets. . . .

  Ringing. Ringing . . .

  Nick sat bolt upright. He’d fallen asleep. The ringing phone on his night table wasn’t part of his recurring nightmare. He picked it up without checking the caller ID.

  “Yeah.”

  “Wake up and get dressed,” came the unmistakable voice of Lieutenant Wilkes from the receiver.

  “What is it, Lou?” Nick asked groggily.

  “You had your day off. Quimby did another girl.”

  Nick was suddenly wide awake, a pen in his hand. “Where?”

  “Central Park,” said Wilkes. “Ninetieth Street and the lake.”

  “On my way, Boss.”

  “You better be.”

  Nick hung up the phone.

  He killed again. While I was gone.

  Nick reached for his wallet. Fumbled for the piece of paper he knew was still inside. He unfolded it, hesitating just briefly. A year ago, he never would have considered doing what he was about to do. But too much had happened since then, almost none of it good. And Nick couldn’t help but think he was responsible for Quimby killing again.

  Slowly, he picked up the phone and, still not wanting to, dialed Claire Waters’s phone number.

  CHAPTER 11

  Claire stared out the windshield as Nick maneuvered the unmarked Impala through the throng of emergency vehicles cluttered beside the Central Park Reservoir. A horde of news vans was setting up nearby, their microwave masts high in the air, preparing no doubt to beam whatever gruesome story awaited them back to their stations and out to the tristate area.

  A serial killer is on the loose. He’s struck again. And he’s my patient.

  Was my patient, Claire corrected herself.

  Curtin had told her to take the previous day off, and she’d spent it at home, not leaving the apartment, catching up on some pleasure reading, finally relaxed enough to fall into a deep sleep spooned into Ian’s warm body. Then Nick Lawler’s middle-of-the-night call woke her up, reminding her that she would never really be able to relax or forget until Quimby was caught.

  On the phone, Nick had been polite to the point of apologetic. He thanked Claire for giving him Quimby’s address and explained how Tommy Wessel was critically injured. Claire felt sorry for Nick, appreciating how uncomfortable it was for him to break the bad news while waiting for the request she knew was coming.