Raney & Levine

by J. A. Schneider

  “Audio on,” said the first man in earphones, and the other flicked a switch.

  “…really sorry to wake you. Want me to leave?”

  “No…” Weak. Muffled.

  “I’m so sorry about what happened.”

  Silence.

  “Hey, don’t cry. Lemme wipe those tears. You and your baby are gonna be okay. The doctors told you that, didn’t they?”

  A long, feeble sigh. “Yes.”

  “Aww, that’s what I want to see, a smile. Try to consider this behind you…except for them to catch the bastard who did it. Do you know what happened?”

  Silence.

  “Did you see who did this to you?”

  “It was dark. I…think I saw…” A sudden moan. Sound of a sheet thrashing.

  “Hey, easy. It’s over and you’re safe. Stay calm for the baby.”

  Long, confused silence. “For…the baby.” Voice weak again. “They’re sure…it’s okay?”

  “Absolutely. So did you see-“

  “Pray with me, Rick.”

  “Huh?”

  “Hail Mary… full of…grace… The Lord…is…with…”

  Silence. “Dara?” Silence. “You asleep, Dara?”

  More silence. Then the scrape of a chair, footsteps.

  In the van a female officer called in on the police radio. “Got it? Subject questioned. Vague, fell back to sleep.”

  “Stay,” a voice said on the other end. “I like that ‘I think I saw…’ We’ll get him back.”

  38

  “Can you get him back in there?”

  “Hope so. This is good, she was talking to him?”

  “Yes. Get him back.”

  Jill had stayed close. Was crossing the hall between one patient’s room and another’s when Rick caught her eye. He stood, looking uncertain, outside Dara’s room three doors down.

  Jill went to him.

  “She fell back to sleep,” he said, peering back into the room again, shrugging well I tried at the cop stationed feet away.

  The cop smiled tightly back.

  “Her meds have almost worn off, I checked her chart,” Jill said, reaching to close Dara’s door. “Would you try again in a bit?”

  Burrell looked down at his bowling bag. But he didn’t bowl until evening! Think of something.

  “Are you hungry? There’s homemade Danish down in our coffee shop. Oozing with icing, cinnamon, raisins…”

  His eyes lit. “Oh, I’m there. Skipped lunch. How long before she wakes?”

  It was 1:10. “Twenty minutes, max. Figure 1:30.”

  Jill saw the cop’s eyes check the wall clock.

  “Okay, be back then,” Burrell said. “I see now I can help.”

  “Definitely. So far she’s only talked to you.”

  He looked pleased with himself and pulled his bowling bag to the elevators. Pressed the button, patted a police dog while he waited.

  Wag, wag.

  Nash was on Thorazine, but you wouldn’t know it. He looked alert, bitching about his restraints and hollering about his transistor. “I need God. He can’t speak to me without my transistor!”

  David passed the cop stationed near the bed, and Nash looked pleased to see him. White jacket and scrubs. A new doctor to cajole?

  “I hate these straps, and they won’t give me my transistor,” he whined.

  “Maybe they’re afraid you’ll throw it at someone,” David said.

  Nash’s eyes turned angry, not suspicious. He’d never seen David.

  “Throw God? That’s blasphemy! Just the sort of thing Erik would say.”

  “Who’s Erik?” A new name… What’s this?

  Ralph Nash sulked. His expression changed from reproach to slow, bitter resentment. “He’s someone who betrayed me. It was supposed to be our secret.”

  You didn’t have to be a shrink to see that Ralph Nash wanted to talk. David stepped closer to the bed, looked sympathetic, even nodded encouragingly.

  “It hurts to feel betrayed,” he said.

  “Hurts?” Nash yelled, yanking violently at his restraints. “For something like this? You science types think it’s all fun and games until you get thrown in hell with Satan and his demons because you won’t repent and turn from your sins!”

  The psych resident who’d been watching, yards behind David, came up and said softly, “He’s getting agitated.”

  David turned to him and whispered, “Scram.” The resident looked worriedly from David to the cop, who stood next to the bed with his arms folded, his narrowed eyes saying the same.

  The psych resident backed off.

  Nash was still pulling at his restraints. “Erik said it was God’s will even more than the work I’d been doing to put up that web site - to reach more believers to our cause! When I woke in the morning he said it was God who put the writing on it. But that site lost me my transistor – so he must have lied!”

  “Did Erik give you a list of women’s names?”

  “List? What list?”

  “Did Erik commit those murders?”

  “What are you talking about? Murder is a mortal sin! A mortal sin! A mortal…”

  He was still hollering and for the psych residents it was upping the Thorazine as David moved away and got out his phone.

  He’d already seen Jill’s text about Burrell coming right after lunch. He speed-dialed, and when she answered he asked, “Burrell arrived?”

  “Yes,” she said low, her free hand checking a sleeping patient’s chart. “Dara fell asleep so I sent him down to the coffee shop.”

  “Okay, so who’s Erik?”

  “Erik?” Jill frowned. “Wait.”

  Out in the hall she said low, “That’s a new one.”

  He told her fast about Nash’s ranting. “Said someone named Erik told him God posted that text on his site while he was sleeping. He woke to find it there, sounds like he’d presumed Erik a friend, co-believer.” A pause. “Was Burrell carrying anything?”

  “Yes. Flowers and a bowling bag …” Something horrible dawned. Jill stared wildly up at the ceiling, as if she could see through it to David and the psych floor he was on.

  “Bowling balls are made of thick layers of plastic, hard resin,” David said. “Glass and plastic, polymers, sniffer dogs can’t detect through them. Think Erik’s anyone we know?”

  “Oh God. I’ll check.”

  Officer Terry Smith in his size fourteen boots crashed his battering ram through the door. As it splintered open, the smell knocked them all back, with groans of “Oh shit,” and “Jeez I hate this.”

  But in they went to Brian Walsh’s apartment, gloved and grimacing, stepping carefully around the entrance perimeter and neat living room.

  No sign of forced entry or violence. Walsh had admitted his visitor. Knew him.

  In the little kitchen, in a thick pool of clotted blood, they found Walsh’s body. It had been stabbed in the back and its throat was slit, with a long, dead black snake tied tightly around it. Smeary red trails ran this way and that. There were live snakes there too, writhing, their bloody tracks left under chair legs, the table, the little counter. More groaning, swearing, hollering for Animal Control.

  Someone had sneaked past the cop cars guarding that church. It had been a dark, cold night. Maybe that someone had been watching, saw his chance when reinforcements were handing out fresh coffee?

  “You need fuckin’ boots!” someone yelled at the CSU bunch just arriving. Minutes later Joe Miranda, who headed the unit, looked grimly up from the body and estimated the time of death at least sixteen hours ago.

  Before the attack on the victim’s wife.

  “That rules him out for that one,” Miranda said into his phone. “Maybe for the others too? We got snakes here. Lotsa snakes. He got past the cars watching. Left bloody footprints too. First time he’s left evidence. That’s it, he’s outta control. Gonna hit again faster.”

  He listened, nodded, hung up and got back to work. Outside, the medical examiner’s morgu
e van had just arrived.

  Gregory Pappas called David, told him fast about Walsh.

  Then David told him about Nash. “Just now,” he said, breathing hard. “Ranting about someone named Erik who filled in that website while Ralph was asleep. Told him God wrote the text.”

  “An insider,” Pappas said tightly.

  “Named Erik. Think Rick could be a nickname?”

  “Yeah. We gotta find Burrell.”

  “He’s in the hospital now.”

  Seconds later David was pounding down the stairwell.

  “It got confusing,” Sister Meg said. “You see, Eric – that’s spelled with a ‘c’ – is really Greg’s first name, and the patients got it mixed up with Rick’s name, which is Erik spelled with a ‘k,’ so we decided to use Eric Gregory Clark’s middle name, which made it easier. Greg actually prefers his middle name.”

  “So Rick’s first name is really Erik?” Jill’s voice was shaking.

  “Yes,” Sister Meg said. “By the way, I’m just so bewildered by him. He just…left this morning, sometime after ten it must have been. No explanation, no request for permission, he just rushed out and left Greg and me terribly short-handed. I’ve tried to be patient, but he’s been…different, sometimes erratic since his mother’s death.”

  “When was that?”

  “Last March. She was just eighteen when she had him, and his childhood was awful, off and on in foster homes…oh, I really should stop there. Luckily, Doctor Sweet showed up today – they have no schedule, these volunteer doctors - so thank goodness God sent him and he stayed on to help.”

  “That’s wonderful. I have to hang up now, Sister. Thanks for clearing up my confusion.”

  “You’re most welcome. Any way I can help, just call, dear.”

  It was twenty-five past one.

  Adrenaline surged. Barely using the crutch, Jill raced into Dara’s room and saw…Dara’s face. It was blue. Jill’s heart dropped. On leaden feet she moved closer, felt Dara’s carotid out of habit.

  Nothing.

  Dara was dead. No pulse. No heartbeat. Nothing.

  A sound startled her, and she wheeled.

  Burrell stood there, his back to the door he’d slipped closed.

  “I pillowed her face and turned off her monitor,” he said, smiling. “Couldn’t have the code going off, could I?”

  39

  Between his feet was his bowling bag, as if he were protecting it.

  In a sickening flash it all fit. He killed Dara, so it had to be him who’d stabbed her too and unwittingly left explosive particles on her wound. That affable act of his. How well he’d played it.

  Dynamite in the bowling balls. Layers and layers of plastic and resin. Oh God…

  “W-why’d you kill her?” Jill’s voice shook uncontrollably. She should have screamed, but she wanted to know if he’d acted alone. She backed away from him, around the foot of the bed.

  He left his bag by the door and stepped closer. His eyes burned. “Brian and Dara started guessing what I was really doing with their lists, and it wasn’t urging and counseling, ha. They got scared. Wanted to run to a priest.”

  She’d reached the other side of the bed. He followed, eyeing her with his hands clenched. Jill’s eyes darted and she froze. He’d exposed the medallion when he placed his flowers.

  Why hadn’t she thought of that? But where else could she have told him to put them?

  “Surrogates are worse than prostitutes.” His stare was pure venom. His voice was creepy-quiet, but spittle formed at the corners of his mouth. “My mother was a prostitute who I hated – even after death - until I was saved, discovering Ralph’s obsession, discovering there were even worse women who birth monsters with no souls.”

  He sneered. “Oh stop looking at me like I’m crazy. I’ve been on Haldol since I was seventeen. It has worked fine, no one knows about my past, juvie records closed.”

  He laughed.

  “Haldol? You’re schiz too?” She blurted it unintentionally, backing closer to the bed table.

  “Only intermittently,” he leered. “My doctor says there’s a broad spectrum of schizophrenia. My secret doc, he knows nothing about the real me. And I’m nothing like poor Ralph, so easy to manipulate, make him think that was God in his transistor instead of me. I rigged his clunker like a walkie-talkie.” Another ugly laugh. “And wasn’t I smart to get Dara back into the hospital? So I’d have an excuse to visit? I even played coy with you too. Oh so reluctant-”

  He saw her throw the briefest, urgent glance back at the medallion, and his face froze.

  “That’s what you wore yesterday with the cops.” His eyes narrowed in suspicion. “Lying whore bitch, is that-”

  She swung the heavy end of her crutch at his head. Crack! But not hard enough because he grabbed it, yanked her to him before she could let go, and threw her to the floor. Stomped hard where her head had been a millisecond before, but she’d slid under the bed.

  From there she saw his feet rush around the bed. He seized his bowling bag, and opened the door.

  They’d heard in the van. Had cops converging on the room from which “bowling bag” had never been mentioned. Even passed a bored-looking guy pulling such a bag and reassuring the cop outside that that thump was just him dropping the darn thing. He sauntered away as they burst into the room.

  Jill was sliding out from under the bed. He’d thrown her down but her hip hurt less than she’d feared.

  “You okay?” the first arriving cop said, helping her up. Then David burst in and she fell into his arms.

  “It’s Burrell, he killed Dara,” she gasped to him, and looked at the others. “That guy who just left. That bag he’s pulling is a bomb.”

  David’s eyes turned frantic. “You okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  He pulled her out with him behind the running cops, who covered just sixty feet of hall and then stopped short.

  There was Burrell, just yards away, looking casual, even. Busy before the long glass looking into the newborn nursery, removing his jacket, kneeling and fiddling with his open bowling bag. Around him, pressed close to the glass, were the babies’ thrilled parents and relatives, talking joyously to each other. “Oh, she’s beautiful! ... What a big boy!”

  Burrell stood. Smiled at a woman holding a pink-ribboned, gift-wrapped present.

  “Pretty!” he said loudly, his back to the glass. “Is your precious newcomer one of those little IVF monsters?”

  The crowd around him recoiled, their eyes wide with shock. Several started to move away.

  Then Burrell saw cops moving toward him. Looked the other way down the hall and saw more cops, closing in. All had their guns drawn. Dogs pulled at their leashes, barking, going crazy.

  Insanely, he ignored them.

  A grandmotherly-looking woman screamed. “It’s him! He’s the one!”

  Chaos, terror as he grabbed the woman and yanked her to him. “Yes!” he yelled happily. “I’m the one! And you’re all going to burn in hell for condoning” – his free hand holding something indicated the glass – “what’s going on in there.”

  A woman fainted. Her husband and others bent to her.

  “I just opened my two bowling balls,” Burrell said triumphantly, his arm squeezing the older woman’s neck. “When I press this” - his free hand held up his cell phone - “the dynamite in them will blow up this whole floor, including delivery rooms, patient rooms, probably the floor above too.” He glanced up beatifically and said, “Do you see what I’m doing for you, God? Make the fires spread. Destroy this whole Devil’s Workshop.”

  Cops circled closer through more cries and dogs barking and people clutching at each other. A second woman sank to the floor, and another screamed, “Please, my baby!”

  “Shut up, whore!” Burrell yelled, flinging the grandmother to the floor. She lay there whimpering, her head bleeding. Someone reached to her and pulled her away. The crowd was paralyzed with terror.

  Near doors opened. Wo
men in pastel robes looked out, horror-struck.

  “There’s a bomb!” one told the other, and both started to scream. More doors opened. More cries. Keri Blasco and Alex Brand were there, trying to calm, getting the women back into their rooms.

  “Please,” Keri was saying. “Let the police do their job.” Jill, seeing them, realized that if she’d screamed in Dara’s room Burrell would have triggered his bomb there. She fought nausea, looked frantically around. Pappas was loudly on his phone with the SWAT team.

  And David, squinting by Jill, saw that Burrell’s hands looked darkened. From the explosives he’d been handling? He saw Burrell wipe his free hand on his shirt, which looked darkened, too.

  “Stay,” he whispered to Jill, starting to move forward through the cops. She shook her head no and followed him. Around her police radios crackled quick, urgent exchanges. Her eyes darted through the newborn window. Nurses were in there, frantically evacuating babies, starting with the ones closest to the glass. The PA above them must be issuing soft, controlled directions. A first nurse hustled infants, one in each arm, to the exit, and from there, Jill knew, down the stairwell.

  Her wildly trembling hands got out her phone and checked Jesse. He was crying and alone, still in his isolette at the rear. No!

  She couldn’t move. Saw Burrell ranting to the crowd and waving his cell phone. “Do not move or I’ll blow you up this instant!”

  Then Jill’s heart leaped. Others were arriving behind the glass to help the nurses. Tricia! Gary! Holloway, Mackey and pediatric residents! Running in from the other exit to help.

  Risking their lives.

  Burrell didn’t see the evacuation. His back was turned to the glass, furiously scolding.

  “I don’t see one of you condemning that devil child in there! Or the arrogance of taking the place of the Creator! Or the evil of women prostituting themselves to bear the child of a man not their husband’s. You condone violating the sanctity of marriage? Of flaunting God’s will?”