Perish

by Lisa Black

  Small pieces of the cat’s favorite food rained onto her face as the bowl made contact with his left temple. Caldwell’s hot breath exploded in her face and the blow forced him to the side, enough to lift most of his weight from her diaphragm. The bowl slipped from her fingers and landed against the back of her sofa.

  She should be able to breathe now, with her lungs temporarily able to expand and draw air into the clusters of alveoli, to then let oxygen flow into her starved arteries and muscles. But somehow that didn’t work. Her lungs expanded, but her throat bottlenecked.

  Caldwell took longer to recover than she expected, but still righted himself back onto her torso, before she could draw more than a tiny stream of air into herself. He raised the knife but his right hand shook, and his left tried to staunch the blood where she had broken the skin on his left temple.

  Maggie tried to think what to do next. She wasn’t sure if she still had her left hand protecting her throat. Her right seemed to be lying uselessly on the floor. His weight pinned her above her hips, so she could bring her legs up and wrap them around his neck, pulling him backward—she had seen that in a movie. But simply to get her knees to bend seemed to take a long time and she needed air to get them any higher, to get her muscles to respond. There didn’t seem to be any in the room. At least Caldwell, wobbling slightly, could not move very quickly either. Her vision darkened to a hazy gray.

  She heard a far-off bang and some white light pierced the gray as her apartment door banged open, striking her foot hard enough for her to feel it while the rest of her body was going numb. A large figure loomed. Caldwell gave a startled jerk, shifting on top of her again, but again, this did not help her to breathe. Her lungs wanted to expand but the air wouldn’t flow to them.

  Jack stood in her doorway.

  Caldwell leapt to his feet, unfortunately planting one of them on her stomach. More air went out without any to replace it. Not even the hallway lights could keep her atmosphere from turning gray again. Caldwell jumped or was pulled across her, and she heard, or rather felt, a series of thumps and exhalations of breath and the rush of air that comes when two bodies are locked in a frantic struggle, but she didn’t pay much attention. Her lungs burned as if the tissue had melted, and she managed only to turn to one side, her body still trying to go fetal, when she heard a distinct snap! break the air. Then, what seemed to be a long time later, a sliding, falling thump shook the wooden planks underneath her. The cells of her brain knew this to be somehow significant but her body didn’t care. She was dying. She might already be dead.

  Then it seemed that, without much effort, her limp form was scooped up and moving. A vague impression of moving lights—the ceiling illumination of her apartment building’s hallway—and of floating weightlessly along. A pause outside a dark door.

  Of course, she wasn’t really weightless, to judge from the small pants of effort Jack gave out now and then. She could hear his heart beating to keep up, her ear pressed to his chest, though she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t her own she heard, her arteries screaming for help as her body shut down for good.

  She knew she should try to hang on, put her arms around his neck to distribute her weight to help him out, but moving even her unbroken fingers had become impossible. One arm slipped off to dangle by her side, and she couldn’t even do anything about that. All sensation began to leave her. Before her body shut down completely she looked up at him, a vague gray figure against the shiny square ceiling, and wondered when it was that buildings stopped playing music in elevators.

  Chapter 34

  She had fought them, long and hard, but they called in reinforcements in the way of orderlies, and the cowards had strapped her arms down with nylon and Velcro so they could continue stabbing her in the throat. Then she couldn’t breathe at all and the world went gray again.

  When her vision cleared they had removed the straps and she had a tube in her throat, gagging her. She reached up to pull it out but a nurse caught her hand and pressed a small plastic box into it.

  “I know it’s uncomfortable,” she began.

  Uncomfortable? They had cut her throat open.

  “But we have to leave it in until the swelling goes down. This is your morphine drip controller. You can control it your—”

  Maggie pressed the button that the nurse had thoughtfully positioned under her left thumb. Awkward with two of those fingers in a cast, but still workable.

  “—self. It will help you relax and sleep.”

  Maggie pressed the button again, held it down.

  “But it only dispenses once every ten minutes.”

  Bastards.

  “So don’t worry about pressing it too much or accidentally. The tube should come out tomorrow. In the meantime it will allow you to breathe, which I think you will agree is pretty important.”

  A comic.

  Huh, Maggie then realized. She could breathe. Air in, air out. Her lungs could expand at will.

  That was pretty great. It almost made up for the sewer pipe in her throat.

  Almost.

  Now that Maggie’s panicked pulse had calmed, the nurse tried to amputate her arm with the blood pressure cuff. She clucked at the result. Maggie didn’t know whether that was good or bad and didn’t much care. A little hypertension seemed a small worry at that point.

  “Are you up to visitors? There are two gentlemen in the waiting room who want to see you.”

  Maggie wondered who the two were. Denny and Rick? Jack and Riley? Jeremy Mearan and Anna’s boyfriend? It didn’t matter. She made a writing motion in the air.

  The nurse had been prepared for this and gave her a half-used-up student’s spiral notebook and a pen. Maggie brought up one knee and propped the paper on her thigh to write. So her legs still worked, too. Cool.

  Outside rain dashed against the windows. The heavens had finally opened, releasing the pent-up volumes. Maggie handed the notebook and pen to the nurse and hit the morphine drip button again. But the first ten minutes hadn’t yet expired, and the cycler didn’t give the telltale churning sound that meant it was actually dispensing something.

  Maggie cursed it to the electronic scrap yard as her eyes began to close.

  *

  Jack rested his head against the wall behind the thinly cushioned chairs and stared at the fluorescent lights in the ceiling. All that money floating around and it had come down to a guy who simply liked killing good-looking women. Riley was already checking to see if the stabbing victims from prior months had frequented Totally Fresh! But three at one firm—perhaps the shark tank atmosphere at Sterling had gotten his blood going in some way. He must have seen their home addresses when they opened their wallets to get a credit card, or, perhaps like Joanna, they ordered home delivery. Or he simply could have followed them there at the end of the day.

  Rick Gardiner had entered the waiting area without a word. Now, after several minutes of watching TV news with no sound on the flat-screen in the corner, he asked why Jack was there.

  “I found her. And the guy. What are you doing here?” Maggie was the guy’s ex-wife. He also wondered why Gardiner annoyed him so.

  “I tried to get a hold of her to tell her our trip is off. Your partner answered her phone, told me what happened.”

  “Trip?” Maggie was going to take a trip with him?

  “To see a witness. Little girl who might have seen our guy. But the kid couldn’t ID the sketch, said it wasn’t even close, so the captain won’t approve the travel.”

  “Oh.” Jack had no idea what all that meant and didn’t much care. He leaned his head back again, closed his eyes.

  “So that’s the end of that lead. Now I gotta come up with something else to keep the captain off my back about that damn case. I always wind up with the unsolvables.”

  Jack didn’t respond to the whining, and the waiting room grew quiet for half a minute.

  “There might be brain damage,” Rick said, apropos of nothing. “If she couldn’t breathe for a while.” />
  That was why.

  “If she’s going to need help I’ll have to call her brother. I can’t do anything. We’re divorced, for chrissakes.”

  Definitely why.

  “This guy got into her apartment building without anyone seeing him?”

  Jack raised his eyelids without moving a single other muscle. He felt as if he could sleep for a week, maybe two. “Don’t know. He wouldn’t have pulled on the jumpsuit at least until her floor, in the elevator or the stairwell. The lobby door and back door both lock, Riley said. But you know how apartments are. All he had to do was wait until someone went in or out and then catch the door before it shut.” Jack had broken one of those locks to gain entry, would be turning over part of his paycheck to 740 West Superior.

  “Anyone admit to that?”

  “Nah. Once they found out Maggie was all right, her neighbors scattered like coues.”

  “I guess it doesn’t matter. We’ve got the guy now.” Something seemed to occur to Rick and he turned to look directly at Jack. He opened his mouth to say something, but a white-clad woman approached them.

  “She’s settling in just fine and needs to rest now. I asked her about visitors and she wrote this.”

  The notebook page read, in Maggie’s clear block letters: “TUBE IN THROAT. TUBE IN ARM. NO VISITORS.”

  She had added several exclamation points after the last phrase, and underlined it twice. Jack felt oddly comforted. It sounded like pure Maggie to him. No brain damage there.

  “Huh,” Rick said. “But I need to talk to her about something.”

  Jack made his escape, leaving Gardiner to argue with the nurse. He had no doubts about who would win.

  Chapter 35

  The tube didn’t come out the next day but it did get removed the following morning, and in another day after, the doctors released Maggie to the ministrations of Carol and the luxury of her own apartment. So when Jack stopped by the ex-patient sat in an armchair by the window, the sunlight turning her eyes to aqua, Anna’s cat on her lap. She looked wan to him, bundled in an ivory blanket, the only color present in the bright red cast that held her two broken fingers steady and the deep swirling purples across the front of her neck. Wan and tiny and vulnerable as hell, which gave him a surge of very uncomfortable feelings, and he felt his fingers curl into fists. He didn’t want her wan or tiny and especially not vulnerable.

  Because, of course, vulnerable people talk too much. If she felt alone or that a near-death experience provided the perfect reason to reexamine one’s conscience or PTSD surfaced and put her in a therapy group … then secrets might come to light. Hers. And his.

  Bizarre, he thought. Each of us is nervous around the other. But even more nervous when not around—because who might she be talking to, when out of my sight?

  He didn’t have a particular purpose for the visit. Riley had insisted, then begged off for a daughter’s soccer match. He itched to get a look at the unlucky eighth grader who had dared to make eyes at his Natalie. But Jack had come anyway.

  Maggie was right, Jack thought, though she hadn’t said a recent word about it. He needed to leave town. Pack up and move on, pick a new hunting ground where no one would be looking for a vigilante killer. Let her get on with her life. Let them both be able to breathe a little easier.

  She watched him hover uncomfortably, and the corners of her mouth turned up slightly, which made her look significantly less vulnerable. In fact, she looked, for the most part, annoyed, especially when he asked how she felt.

  “Like someone crushed my windpipe.” Her voice came out as a hoarse croak, which he hoped would not be permanent. “Worst sore throat ever. Like it’s my whole body being stabbed when I swallow.” She gestured with her hands, even the one with the broken fingers, to illustrate the waves of pain that traveled up and out of herself.

  “You look better,” he said politely, lowering himself to the other end of the sofa. He always kept a physical distance between them, but with her voice so damaged he had to stay close in order to hear her. “I see your new friend is sticking.”

  She stroked the tabby. “The boyfriend’s apartment won’t take pets and it turns out mine will. He said his name is Keynes. After the economist.”

  “Of course.”

  “He’s dead,” Maggie said. She didn’t have to specify. “Denny told me.”

  “Yes.”

  Another death at his hands, but no reason for concern over this one. He couldn’t fire his gun for fear of hitting Maggie, so he’d tackled the guy and broke his neck with one quick twist. That might look a bit odd to the inevitable review board. Nothing to reprimand, but they’d start watching him.

  Definitely time to move on. Forget waiting the six months he’d arbitrarily assigned himself.

  Maggie said, “Carol’s running his DNA against those other two stabbings from earlier this year. Rick is checking to see if they were customers at Totally Fresh!”

  “They might have been a warm-up act for Caldwell, but maybe not. The Patricia Caldwell Sterling screwed over in Nebraska did indeed turn out to be his mother, so he had a reason to pick his victims from that particular office. Whether he came to Cleveland to get to Joanna or just found himself here as a karmic coincidence, we’ll never know, but it turned out the same.”

  “What goes around …” Maggie said, her voice barely audible.

  Silence descended for several minutes.

  Jack had warned her not to admit things but as usual couldn’t take his own advice. “I’m sorry. About Graham.”

  Maggie and the cat looked at him.

  “You’re right. I didn’t need to interfere and I did anyway. I shouldn’t have put you in that position.” He didn’t tell her that he had been prompted largely by concern for her. Anna had not been targeted by a bunch of disgruntled home owners, and Caldwell had not been interested in death from a distance. He believed the CIs who said Maggie had been shot at by one of Graham’s protégés. He didn’t tell her that because he didn’t think she’d believe him. He also didn’t tell her that he would eventually take care of this man because he didn’t think she needed to know.

  She spoke. He had to lean in to hear her words: “Meaning you shouldn’t have killed him or you shouldn’t have told me you did?”

  “Both.” Mostly the latter, but he wouldn’t say so. Enough full disclosure for one day. Maggie believed in right and wrong as completely as he did, but her interpretations varied slightly. Putting her in turmoil only worked against him. “It won’t happen again.”

  She eyed him, apparently aware of what he was, and was not, promising. But all she said was, “Thanks for the help.” She didn’t have to add that if he hadn’t arrived when he did her neighbors would have found her dead on her apartment floor. Maybe that had made her willing to give him a pass on Graham, but Jack didn’t think so. Maggie didn’t work that way. She would make her decisions independent of personal reasons.

  Then she abruptly croaked, “Jack.”

  “What?”

  “Who did play in the Super Bowl this year?”

  “I have no earthly idea.”

  She gave a strangled cough that startled him, and he grabbed for his phone to call an ambulance.

  But she was laughing, cheekbones popping as the edges of her mouth turned up. “I suspected as much.”

  Acknowledgments

  For most of my life I was the type of person whose eyes would instantly glaze over when someone said “business.” Yet somehow I listened to the advice of critics and read Barbarians at the Gate, and that opened those same eyes to how fascinating nonfiction can be, even when no one gets murdered.

  Though we were lucky enough to be spared by the financial meltdown, I lived in ground zero of the housing crisis, in a town that routinely appeared on lists of “highest foreclosure rates in the country,” so it could be said that I had a vested interest.

  I always try to do plenty of research and, thus, it would be remiss not to mention the fine books that helped me
understand why the whole world shook in 2008: Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown, by Edmund L. Andrews; The Courage to Act: A Memoir of a Crisis and Its Aftermath, by Ben S. Bernanke; House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, by William D. Cohan; Stress Test: Reflections on the Financial Crisis, by Timothy F. Geithner; Dumb Money: How Our Greatest Financial Minds Bankrupted the Nation, by Daniel Gross; The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—And Spawned a Global Crisis, by Michael W. Hudson; The End of Wall Street, by Roger Lowenstein; All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis, by Bethany McLean and Joe Nocera; On the Brink: Inside the Race to Stop the Collapse of the Global Financial System, by Henry M. Paulson Jr.; Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System—And Themselves, by Andrew Ross Sorkin; The Housing Boom and Bust, by Thomas Sowell; Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President, by Ron Suskind.

  As usual, I had the help of several family members to round out parts of the story: my nurse sister, Mary; my husband, Russ; and countless other people who I’m sure I’m failing to mention.

  I could not have accomplished much of anything without the help and support of my editor, Michaela Hamilton; the staff at Kensington; as well as my fabulous agent, Vicky Bijur, and everyone in her office.

  Photo by Susan M. Klingbeil

  About the Author

  New York Times bestselling author Lisa Black introduced the characters of Maggie Gardiner and Jack Renner in her acclaimed suspense novel That Darkness and continued their story in Unpunished. She is the author of seven novels in the Theresa MacLean mystery series and two novels written as Elizabeth Becka. As a forensic scientist at the Cuyahoga County Coroner’s Office, she analyzed gunshot residue on hands and clothing, hairs, fibers, paint, glass, DNA, blood, and many other forms of trace evidence, as well as crime scenes. Now she is a latent print examiner and CSI for the Cape Coral Police Department in Florida, working mostly with fingerprints and crime scenes.