by Thomas Laird
I cocked my piece, but before I could put a round through one of his green eyes, another batch of lightning pitchforks flared as the thunder reached a crescendo. A bolt of pure white electrical energy hurled itself toward the power lines that stood at the edge of the drive, and we all jumped at the resulting explosion. We saw the power line snap away from its couplings, and down it came, writhing and twisting like a furious snake about to strike whatever stood before it.
Theresa dove away from Anglin once she realized he’d released his hold on her neck, and she scrambled away from him with feral speed. Anglin tried to duck the thrashing power line, but he moved too slowly this time and the wild black snake sprang at his throat as if it were a real serpent. The force of the blow whipped Anglin down onto his back, and it was then that he screamed, just as blue arcs of high-voltage sparks came crackling out of his mouth and ears and eyes.
Anglin’s scream didn’t last long, but the stink of scorched flesh started to come at us almost immediately. Black smoke rose from his fried corpse as the rain continued to drench us and as arcs of lethal blue force continued to burst out of every orifice in his dead body.
I rushed over to Theresa, who lay in a sobbing heap about ten yards from the electrified remains of Anglin. I picked her up and hustled her back inside the hospital. I yelled for Doc and Jack to get out of the fury of the storm, but they stood there mesmerized, watching Anglin burn up in a coruscating blue blaze. Their guns were still pointed at him as if he might still escape from the cable that had wrapped itself around his throat.
‘Doc! Jack! For God’s sake!’ I yelled at the two of them.
But they just stayed there, watching.
I held Theresa tightly as the ferocious noise outside began to subside just slightly.
After a few more minutes the lightning had ceased altogether. Doc and Jack finally walked back inside the hospital.
I looked into their eyes as I continued to hold Theresa. They didn’t say anything, so we all simply stood there as I held our surviving witness with all the strength I had left in me.
The phones were still working, Doc found out. He dialed 911 and asked for several squads of paramedics to be sent out to this remote location. As he put the receiver down, we heard the approach of the Indiana state troopers.
I walked Theresa out to the lobby. All the lights were back on and the receptionist at the door had come round on her own. She was sitting behind her desk, looking distinctly groggy. When she saw Theresa and me, she screamed.
I showed her my badge, and then she began to sob.
‘We’ve got help coming. You just sit down and take it easy. We’re all safe now. Don’t worry.’
The receptionist leaned forward, lowered her head and sobbed into her folded arms.
I sat Theresa on a couch in the lobby next to admissions.
I hugged her tightly. She was the sibling I’d never had, I was thinking. She was the sister I might have had if the old man hadn’t been sterile. I felt like her big brother, although we were actually very close in age. Theresa had a family of her own, I understood, but it had just grown by one member. Emotionally, I’d adopted her as my sister. Hell, she wasn’t even Italian, but Mexican was close enough. We both spoke those Romance languages, I’d heard, so it was close enough.
‘I wish my father could see you tonight. He wrote about you in his files. He wrote about you so much, I felt like I already knew you the way he seemed to.’
‘Where will I go from here, Jimmy?’
‘I don’t know. Where do you want to go?’
‘I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to make people feel better.’
‘Why not go back to school and finish what you started? You’re not too old. You’ll never be too old. Hell, you’re younger than I am, and we just had a new baby.’
‘I’ll never have a baby of my own.’
‘Doc’s wife is fifty-something, just like you. She just adopted a little girl…Anything’s possible these days. Almost anything.’
She kissed my cheek.
The Indiana cops were all over the building then. The paramedics were rushing through the corridors, trying to revive all the hospital staff whom Anglin had decked one by one.
Doc came back to us with the good news that there were no fatalities in the place — other than Anglin.
Theresa was squeezing me so hard I was afraid she’d shut off my air. Then she relaxed her grip and let go.
‘How would you like to spend the night at my house?’ I asked her.
I wouldn’t let her argue.
I called Natalie from the front desk and told her we were having a visitor to stay with us until we could arrange things with Theresa’s family. Natalie said she was happy to help her out, especially after she heard about Anglin’s demise.
Jack came up to the three of us.
He smiled and walked off toward his copter. Doc told him we’d get a ride back in a vehicle borrowed from the Indiana state troopers. Jack waved farewell to the three of us.
I had to go to the shift supervisor, who was halfway coherent and conscious, and explain that I was taking their patient out of the hospital on my authority. The supervisor was dazed enough to go along with me.
We arranged with the state troopers to use one of their squad cars to transport Doc, Theresa and me back to the city. When we’d given our statements to the local coppers about Anglin’s death, we walked out to the car, the three of us, and headed home.
EPILOGUE
[August 1999]
I watched them cremate Carl Anglin’s meager remains. His mother was the only witness from his family. I and a few other coppers were present too. Cremation was the best way to finish things, as far as I was concerned. I knew that Catholics generally preferred burial, but me, I wanted to go out clean. Anglin got the consuming, cleansing fire that stopped his body rotting in the ground.
His mother said not a word to anyone present, and she scurried off somewhere as soon as it was over.
Renny Charles did not show up. I hadn’t reckoned he would. He’d either disappeared or he was deep under. Perhaps he was like the seven-year locust that emerged periodically to make everyone’s life just that bit more miserable. Wherever he was, I’d have liked to nab him on general principles.
He and Anglin had killed the President of the United States. I’d carry that powerful suspicion to my own cremation. I couldn’t prove it and I couldn’t even talk about it. So they were ghosts. All of them. JFK, Anglin, the Major, Special Agent Mason, his leggy blonde assistant. Seven nurses in 1968. Three more this year. History, all of them.
Doc didn’t want to rehash the past, and I couldn’t blame him. He was too busy trying to keep up with his daughter and Mari.
And I had my own crosses to bear. Maybe they were more like responsibilities than crosses. Three children at various stages of maturity, from infant to young adult. I had a young wife who could run me ragged because she was over twenty years younger than I was.
Nick, my biological father, came around sometimes. He said he didn’t want to intrude on us, but I knew he wanted to see me and find out what was going on. It was the pull of our shared DNA. I didn’t deny him. In fact, I tried to get him to come around more often. He was my children’s true grandfather. The two older kids had been told the truth about my roots. The baby would find out when she was old enough to understand.
It was a matter of coming to terms. With the private matters of my own past, with the public events of years gone by. I had to deal with evil. Less often with outright goodness. It was a matter of how much I could endure. Why Carl Anglin had to plague my father’s already painful life, I didn’t know anymore than I understood why Anglin was still hanging around when I took my tour of duty with the Chicago Homicide team. But there he’d been. Carl Anglin and all the other creatures like him were facts of existence. Another one just like him was waiting out in the weeds. I could count on it; I wouldn’t be surprised when the new guy emerged.
After all, he and al
l the others like him kept me in business. I found them. Someone else judged them and tried to figure out ‘why’.
Doc kept talking about retiring and getting familiar with the coeds at some college. And I reminded him he didn’t have the balls to cheat on Mari. He nodded at me, grinning ruefully. I had him pegged.
Theresa Rojas told me she was going back to school to finish her nursing degree.
I visited Jake Parisi’s grave from time to time. He was interred in the far southwest part of town, not too far from his favorite after-work tavern. The place was now owned by Jimmy Karras’s son, Jimmy Junior.
The afternoon after Anglin’s valedictory barbecue, I drove down to visit my father. I placed a yellow rose, one like those I’d kept giving Theresa Rojas, on his grave. I didn’t spend much time at his final resting-place. But I uttered a few Hail Marys and then I walked back to the car.
I headed over to Karras’s saloon where I ordered two beers. I drank mine slowly, but I left the other one untouched. When I got up to leave, Karras junior wanted to know why I’d left the extra draft.
‘He’ll be along in a while. He comes in after every shift,’ I told him.
I gave the Greek a grin. Then I walked out his door into the heat of the late afternoon.
BLACK DOG
BLACK DOG wags his tail at Krystyna Green, my friend and editor. Thanks also to John Jarrold for his excellent advice and commentary on this book.
This book is also dedicated to Rick and Harriet Espinoza, with much love.
Finally, to Kris Lindstrom. My agent, my bud, my number one reader.
Here’s looking at all of you kids.
Out — out are the lights — out all!
And, over each quivering form,
The curtain, a funeral pall,
Comes down with the rush of a storm,
While the angels, all pallid and wan,
Uprising, unveiling, affirm
That the play is the tragedy, ‘Man,’
And its hero, the Conqueror Worm.
Edgar Allan Poe, The Conqueror Worm
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
EPILOGUE
CHAPTER ONE
Doc’s problem was chest congestion, he said. Mine was the sinuses draining into my ears. But neither of us matched the problems of the corpse on the floor before us. She’d been gone for eighteen hours, Dr Gray the MD explained before he left. Cause of death was yet to be determined, which was not unusual, but the colour of the vic’s face was indeed a bit atypical for someone who’d been gone less than a day. She was white. And not a Caucasian white. White as in anaemic. Bloodless. There were also needle tracks on the inside of her left arm. Junkie? She didn’t look the type. Well-groomed. Apparently well dressed from the stuff in her closet. She was a flight attendant for International Air. In her early thirties, quite attractive — at least she had been some eighteen hours ago.
But the pallor was unnatural for a vic this fresh, Doc kept saying, and I had to agree. That was, I agreed when I could get him to talk loudly enough for me to hear him.
He wheezed and I just couldn’t hear with all this juice from my sinuses draining into my ears.
‘Someone’s been bleeding her, Jimmy P,’ Doc pronounced.
‘You think so?’ I grinned.
‘I mean for real bleeding her. The needle tracks. Crude, James. My nurse at the doctor’s doesn’t leave black and blue marks like these.’
They were noticeable to the untrained eye of two laymen investigators without Dr Gray’s expertise. But Gray wouldn’t comment on the discoloured punctures on Jennifer Petersen’s left arm. There were at least four such welts that I could see.
The body was bagged and tagged after all the Crime Scene business was attended to. The photographs had been taken, and yet another mystery had been thrown our way.
This city never ran out of dubious deaths.
*
We sat at the far end of the bar with our two Diet Sprites. Doc was coughing and wheezing, and I had to keep asking him to repeat himself.
‘I said, I’m going to retire this time for real,’ my partner declared.
‘You said that when you went off to finish your PhD. You were back on the job six weeks after you earned the doctor’s. You’re gonna die doing stiffs with me.’
He looked at me sadly. As if I just shot a nail into his soul.
‘And this time you’d be incorrect, Jimmy ... I’m not feeling right.’
‘Then why don’t you take some time?’
‘I am. I was going to tell you. I’m taking a month’s leave of absence.’
‘You’re going to leave me this white-faced stewardess on our plate? You’re going to leave me do all that work alone?’ I jabbed at him.
But he wasn’t firing back at me. This was not the partner I knew and loved.
‘I just don’t get back up as easy as I used to, James. I’m getting old. Too old.’
‘What?’
‘I’m getting too —’
‘I heard you, Doc. I just don’t believe you.’
‘Believe me, Jimmy P. Believe me.’
He had his grey-blue eyes aimed right at me. There was no mistaking what he was trying to say.
‘You mean you’re going to retire,’ I told him.
‘After the course of one month of down time, I’ll make it final. But that’s the way it looks from where the sun now stands. I am Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce: “I will fight no more forever.”’
I wanted to blow him off the way I had a hundred times before when he got into this retirement rant, but this time I sensed that he meant it. There was no joking around with Doc Gibron’s end of an era. There was nothing vaguely amusing about losing my mentor, partner, and best friend. I just had to hope that he would reconsider. Before I retired I thought I’d dry up and blow away like a spent November leaf. And I always thought it would be the same for Doctor Harold Gibron of Homicide.
*
Doc was true to his word. He went on one-month leave and I was paired up with Jack Wendkos, an old partner of mine. He worked with Gibron and me on The Farmer case — the guy who created his own supply of human organs for the black market and the Outfit, Chicago’s Mafia.
Jack was a much younger man than the two of us. He was in his late thirties and he’d been working Homicide for almost eight years. He was a solid investigator. Just recently married a near-victim of The Farmer’s. She was a science professor at a university about sixty miles from the city. They were now living in Geneva, another far western suburb.
Dr Gray had us, Jack and I, at the autopsy for the overly pale stewardess we recently became assigned to. I filled Jack in on the way to Dr Gray’s lecture.
I could see the frown form on Jack’s Gentleman’s Quarterly face. Wendkos would be perfect for that slick’s cover if he hadn’t had his nose squashed in Golden Gloves, back when he placed second, in high school.
‘Pretty lady at one time,’ Detective Wendkos whispered.
Cops always seem hushed, here in the autopsy room. It was like respect for the dearly departed, I imagined. But there was no
one here who’d be disturbed by any kind of noise.
Jennifer’s brains and internal pieces were lying inside stainless steel containers, near various parts of her corpse. Gray’d done the usual complete operation on her.
‘This young woman died of severe blood loss. Must have taken some time, Jimmy. Jack. This young lady’s down to her last quart of oil, if there’s that much left in her.’
Gray removed his latex and looked over at us, across the slab of the remains.
‘He did this with a needle?’ I asked.
‘He could have used a mortician’s tools, Lieutenant Parisi. These needle holes are larger than the typical syringe that a doper would use. This guy may know something about mortuary science.’
‘You mean a funeral mortician?’ Jack asked.
‘Could be,’ Gray countered. ‘It’s just speculation. He wasn’t very good with a needle, though. Or he just didn’t care how brutal he was about inserting it. Hence all the bruising, the black marks on her arm. A good nurse would never have been that awkward.’ Gray turned off his recording tape near the slab where we stood.
‘Anything else, boys? This girl was bled dry. Must have taken some days to do it. And the other remarkable item here is that there is no evidence of penetration. She hasn’t been sexually assaulted, I don’t think.’
‘So all he wanted —’
‘Yes, Jimmy.’
Gray walked away from Jack and me.
‘Was her blood,’ I finished when the good doctor was well out of earshot.
*
‘Svenghoulie,’ I told Wendkos.
‘Who?’ Jack asked.
We were seated in my office that overlooked Lake Michigan. The view was the only perk of this fraction of a cubicle.
‘The guy on TV. “Creature Features.” One of those cable horror shows,’ I explained.
‘Must be before my time,’ Wendkos grinned.
