by Alex Gilly
Pulling into the parking lot, he recognized the hospital as the one he’d tailed Linda to, where her sister worked. The car started beeping at him when he backed into a parking space. He put the car into park and killed the ignition. In the center console he noticed an employee swipe card on a lanyard. It had the same logo on it as the big neon one over the hospital’s entrance. He figured it was a spare card belonging to Linda’s sister. Finn slipped the lanyard over his neck. It was ten at night. Visiting hours were long over. A swipe card around his neck would open doors, literally.
He walked into the hospital. Ansel Adams prints decorated the walls. Nurses and doctors in blue smocks and white coats walked purposefully along the linoleum floor. A huge oil painting of Ronald Reagan hung on a wall. It was one of those paintings where the eyes follow the viewer, and it left Finn feeling found out, as though the Gipper, with his wily smile, was looking right through his shirt at the semiautomatic pressing into the small of his back. He scanned the big hospital-directory board nearby until he found what he was looking for: nephrology, seventh floor.
In the elevator, he needed the swipe card to get access to the seventh floor. The doors opened onto a long corridor, the floor lined with the same linoleum as on the ground level. A waist-high roll of heavy-duty rubber matting covered the walls, protection against gurneys banging into them. No black-and-white landscapes of mountain peaks and lakes here. Instead, Finn walked past a poster with a caption that read: DIABETES—KNOW THE WARNING SIGNS.
A ward nurse was talking on the phone at her station by the elevator. Finn gave her a friendly smile and walked purposefully past her, like he knew where he was going. She nodded, glanced at the card around his neck, and continued her conversation. He walked down the corridor, glancing into each room he passed. Toward the end, he heard a pair of TV sportscasters calling a football game. The 49ers at Seattle. Something dark and thick and nameless mushroomed in his heart.
Cutts was lying on a hospital bed, above the sheets. The arms of his hospital gown were too short, and decades-old, coarsened tattoos snaked down from his shoulders to above his wrists. The top half of the bed was tilted up. The white hair on the back of his head was pressed flat against a pillow. Clear liquid dripped through a tube from a plastic bag on a stand, through a machine and into Cutts’s left arm. There was an adjustable-height table on the other side of the bed with a tray and cell phone on it, a glass and a pitcher of water on the tray. Cutts was watching the football game, the TV attached high on the wall opposite the bed.
There was no one else in the room.
Finn shut the door behind him. He pointed the P7 at Cutts’s head. It was a small room: a mere six feet separated the barrel of his gun from the space between Cutts’s eyes. Finn put his fingers to his lips. He took a moment to let the blackness in his heart ebb and to enjoy the dumbfounded look on Cutts’s ravaged face. Then he said, “Call for help and you’re dead. Understand?”
Cutts nodded.
“Navidad. Where is she?” Finn said.
“Who?” Cutts looked genuinely surprised.
Finn couldn’t believe it. The guy was playing games even now. He kept the gun pointed at Cutts’s head while he moved around the bed to the IV stand.
“I got to hand it to you, Cutts, you’re pragmatic. You’re confronted with a problem, you don’t dawdle, do you? You get the job done. Professional. I’m the same way myself. That’s why I couldn’t figure out why you stuck by Linda. An amateur like her, cracking under pressure, crying all the time? I mean, she almost brought you down once already, telling me about Diego.”
Finn tilted his head to read the name of the drug in the bag hanging on the stand. “‘Zenapax.’ Sounds serious. What’s it for?”
“It’s an immunosuppressant,” said Cutts in a low voice. His face was very pale.
“Huh,” said Finn, his tone conversational. “So anyway, that’s what I asked myself: why is Cutts sticking with Linda? Then I get it: he thinks she’s the perfect cover. She’s a woman, a veteran, a widow, a mother. Everything a smuggler’s not, basically. Even if the Belle does get intercepted, she’s not going to raise any red flags. But maybe you also realize, after she tells me about Diego, she’s unstable. She’s not thinking clearly. So you decide you need to reassert control. Really get into her head, make it clear to her what her priorities are. And how do you do that?”
Cutts looked like he was about to speak, so Finn shook his head and said, “That was a rhetorical question, Cutts. I know damn well how you did it. You take her most precious thing. You kidnap her daughter.”
With his spare hand, Finn started toying with the plastic tube that ran into the cannula in Cutts’s arm. “An immunosuppressant. That’s a drug that shuts down your immune system, right?”
Cutts nodded wearily. “What do you want, Finn?”
“Let me finish my story,” said Finn. “We head south, we get you your narcotics. But Linda’s mental state is fragile. She’s on the brink. We get to Escondido, they’re celebrating the Day of the Dead. She sees this kid being pretend-sacrificed in this folk play, and she comes apart, mentally. She ‘rescues’ the girl from the orphanage, ranting about how Aztecs sacrifice children—I mean, just outright crazy talk. I could see she was going out of her mind, but what could I do? It wasn’t like we could take the kid back to Escondido.”
Finn yanked the tube out of the cannula. Cutts gave a little cry. The machine started beeping. Finn found the volume knob and turned it all the way down.
“You noticed how everything beeps at you these days? Bugs the hell out of me.”
Finn held up the end of the tube. Liquid dripped from it.
“Linda told me you took Navidad from her. She’s somewhere safe now, her and her daughter, somewhere you’ll never find them. No one knows I’m here. Serpil won’t be coming through that door with a gun behind my back. It’s just you and me, and, I suppose, a piece of Espendoza.”
He poked the barrel of his gun into Cutts’s side. Cutts arched his back in pain.
“Where’s Navidad?” said Finn.
Cutts clenched his fist. Sweat filmed his forehead. “I’m telling you, I don’t fucking know, Finn.”
Finn jabbed him in the side again. Not particularly hard, but more than Cutts could stand. The Irishman’s eyes bulged. He looked twenty years older. Spittle appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“Jesus Christ, Finn, if you’re going to kill me with that thing, just shoot me and get it over with.”
At exactly that moment, the 49ers scored a touchdown. The roar of the crowd blared from the TV. Finn grabbed the remote and turned it up. Then he leaned over Cutts and pointed the gun right between Cutts’s eyes.
“Last week, you gave me a choice, then you counted down till I decided,” said Finn. “Now it’s your turn. Five…”
“Jesus Christ, Finn! I don’t know where the girl is!”
“Four…”
“I never even laid eyes on her! Linda has her!”
“Three…”
“I swear to God, Finn!”
“Two…”
“Her daughter is sick! Lucy! She’s right here in the hospital!”
“One…”
“Linda bought the child from the Caballeros because her own daughter needs a kidney!”
Finn’s mind did a hand-brake turn and spun wild. “What are you talking about?” he said.
Cutts’s breathing was short and shallow. “Just what I said. Linda’s daughter is dying, renal failure, like me. She’s here in the hospital, waiting for a transplant. That Mexican girl … what’d you call her?”
“Navidad.”
“Navidad. She’s the donor. Get it? Linda’s been screening for her for months.”
Finn bristled. He waved the gun at Cutts. “You better start making sense very soon, Cutts.”
Cutts sat up and raised both hands defensively. “Just hear me out, okay? I’ll tell you everything. Just take it easy with that thing.”
Finn dropped his arm
but kept the pistol in his hand.
Cutts settled back into the pillows.
“They diagnosed me with kidney disease just after the New Year,” he said. “Both of them failing. They put me on the organ-donor list. Then they tell me I have to attend the support group here at the hospital.
“I walk in, sit down, and this woman starts staring at my tattoos. When it’s her turn to talk, I find out she’s not a patient: she’s there for her little girl. The counselors tell us we should have faith and live in the day. But I know I’m going to die if I don’t get an organ, lad. Linda knows it, too, about Lucy. The kid has less chance than me, even. It’s depressing. I never go back.
“Then one night a few weeks later, Linda walks into my bar. She says she knows a way of getting us both donors, but she needs my help.” Cutts laughed an ugly laugh. He had Finn’s full attention now. “She says she knows a doctor living in France who can help us. Trouble is, she can’t get him into the country because Homeland Security has him on a list. She thought maybe, with my IRA background, I could help.”
“How could she have known you were in the IRA?” asked Finn.
Cutts pointed at the tattoos of the Kalashnikov and the Celtic knot on his arm. “You make a statement like that when you’re young, you’re still making it fifty years later.”
“Linda tells me her plan,” Cutts went on. “She says she knows where to get donors. She says her sister’s a nurse here at the hospital, she can get the kidneys into the organ network and make sure they’re allocated to us, as well as to whoever else is willing to pay.”
At the mention of Linda’s sister, Finn automatically reached for the security swipe card hanging around his neck. He took it off and put it in his pocket.
“The only thing she needs is someone to harvest them from the donors,” Cutts continued. “I still have a few contacts from the old days. I call some people I know, Serpil arrives. We set him up on Catalina because we figured no one patrols the island—not you guys in the CBP and not the coast guard. Perez brings up the donors and the product in La Catrina and takes them to Serpil at Two Harbors. Serpil harvests what he needs. Then Linda brings the narcotics and the organs across, and dumps the bodies in the channel.”
Finn’s stomach churned.
“But the donors Perez is bringing up, they’re unscreened. None of them are a match for Lucy. Turns out, the kid has a rare blood type. She can only have a kidney from another kid with that exact same blood type. Meanwhile, she’s deteriorating fast. That’s when her mother comes up with the malaria idea.”
“Malaria idea?”
“Linda sets up a charity at an orphanage down there to screen kids for malaria. Testing their blood.”
Finn’s eyebrow twitched. He remembered Linda’s visit to the orphanage. “You’re making this up, Cutts. I just saw Lucy, asleep in her bed.”
But even as he said it, the seed of doubt germinated in his mind. What had he seen, really? A shape under a duvet?
Cutts shrugged. “I’m telling you, lad, Linda’s kid is right here in the hospital, in the children’s ward on the fifth floor. Go see for yourself.”
Finn took several hard, shallow breaths through his nose.
Mona.
With his spare hand, he pulled out Linda’s cell and dialed Mona’s number.
Straight to voice mail.
He raised his gun again at Cutts’s head. “This is a bunch of bullshit, Cutts. You’re trying to save yourself. You kidnapped Lucy and terrorized Linda into submission. I was there. I saw it myself.”
“Pure fucking theater, lad, for an audience of one. Open your eyes. What we should’ve done, after you found Espendoza, we should’ve laid low and waited for things to die down. But that’s not what Linda did. She had to put to sea. And she duped you into helping her.”
“Why? Why would she do that?”
“The same week you found Espendoza, she got word from the orphanage that they’d found a compatible donor. Right age, right blood, everything. She said she couldn’t afford to wait for things to die down. Lucy couldn’t afford to wait. I pointed out that Perez was dead and La Catrina impounded, and she said she’d just have to go down herself on the Belle. I told her, you and Diego in the bar, you’d mentioned the Pacific Belle specifically. I said CBP Interceptors would be on the lookout for her. She said she’d just have to take extra precautions.”
Cutts gave Finn a piercing look.
“It had taken her months to find that donor. Lucy had weeks to live. Linda knew she had to get through. You and Diego, you were a threat. So she waited for you outside the bar with a couple of fishermen friends of hers. It was Linda who took your gun and sent that text to Diego.”
All the time Cutts was talking, Finn was holding a gun on him with one hand and frantically redialing Mona’s number with the other.
“Who pulled the trigger?”
Cutts sniffed. “Linda,” he said.
Finn wanted to throw something through the window.
“Why just Diego? Why not me, too?”
“She wanted insurance—someone to take the fall if she got busted. That’s you, Finn. Her husband was a drunk, too, so she recognized it in you. She figured she could play you, and she was right. Did you even hear what her sister said to her on the phone that night? For all you know, she was giving her a recipe for cake. The whole thing was staged, lad. All that wailing around on the ground—all of it. The child was asleep at home, in her aunt’s care, next to her fucking teddy bear, probably.
“Once Linda got the Mexican girl across the line, she didn’t need you anymore. You stopped being insurance and became a liability. She decided to make you disappear the same way she’d made all the others disappear. Open your goddamn eyes.”
In his mind’s eye, Finn saw a dark vision. He saw Linda holding Navidad, stroking her hair. Almost as an afterthought, his voice soft, he said, “You killed Espendoza and stole his kidney.”
Cutts shrugged wearily. “It’s a cannibal world we’ve fashioned for ourselves, Finn. If you’re not eating others, you’re getting eaten. For what it’s worth, I bought his kidney, I didn’t steal it. I paid him a small fortune. He wasn’t supposed to die. Serpil stitched him up. But he’s forgotten how to keep patients alive. The wound got infected. Espendoza died out there on the island, a few days after my operation.”
Mona’s phone kept going straight to voice mail. A terrible sense of dread took hold of Finn. Stay calm, he told himself. Do what you have to do, one task at a time, and focus on that. He stopped dialing, pulled out the handcuffs, and slapped one onto the old man’s left wrist. He closed the other around one of the bars of the safety rail on the side of the bed. Then he pulled the IV stand closer to the bed, within Cutts’s reach. But the old man just lay there, not bothering to reinsert the tube into his arm. An uncharacteristic expression had slipped onto his face: remorse. He looked at Finn, his eyes old, rheumy, contrite.
“You don’t want your medicine?” said Finn.
Cutts shook his head. “I spent the eighties fighting the British army,” he said, a tremor in his voice. “In the nineties, I saw things in Central Africa and in Kosovo that no one should ever see. I spent a decade running guns into Mexico. I’ve met some bad people in my time, Finn, but Linda Blake…” He turned away, his sentence unfinished.
“I’m tired of this world. I’m ready to go,” he said to his reflection in the window.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Finn left Cutts’s room feeling polluted to his very core. In the corridor, nothing seemed real. The linoleum floor, the fluorescent lights, and the posters encouraging people to “know the signs” felt sketchy, and if the walls and ceiling had suddenly disappeared to reveal a vast and hostile sky, he wouldn’t have been surprised. He went to the nurses’ station. It was empty. He glanced both ways down the corridor, then hurried around the counter and sat down in front of the computer. He toggled to the hospital’s patient-management system, typed “Lucy Blake” into the search tab, then selecte
d the “search by patient” filter.
A new window popped up.
Name: Blake, Lucy
Sex: F
DOB: 12/27/2005
Blood type: O-
Diagnosis summary: end-stage renal disease
Treatment: Kidney transplantation
Scheduled: 11:00, November 10
Just two days away.
Next to the word donor, Finn read: “dead, unrelated.”
For a moment, all he saw were those two words. He refocused, then toggled to the staff directory and typed in “Rhonda Blake.”
Rhonda Blake, RN
Transplantation Services
Transplantation Procurement Coordinator
The woman in the picture was the woman he’d seen wearing a nurse’s uniform outside the house in Palos Verdes, strapping Lucy into the car. He typed “Brian Wilson,” the name Linda had given him, into the staff directory. The message read: “This search has zero results. Try again?”
Finn breathed hard and fast through his nose and remembered his father’s words: The world doesn’t care if you live or die.
But that wasn’t true, thought Finn.
He cared.
He cared about Mona.
He cared about Navidad.
Navidad had saved his life that night in Two Harbors. Time to return the favor. He made a mental note of Lucy’s room number. In the elevator, he swiped Rhonda’s card and he pressed the button for the fifth floor—pediatrics.
The children’s ward was decorated in a nautical theme. The linoleum floor was an underwater-green-blue color covered with stylized sea creatures. Finn walked over a friendly-looking octopus, a dopey-looking turtle, and a shark with a surprisingly menacing smile. Desert islands with palm trees and treasure chests decorated the walls. Between two of them, someone had painted a cloud with a human face, his cheeks puffed like balloons, blowing a sailboat across the surface of the sea. A couple of nurses were busy talking to each other at their station.
