by Jude Hardin
“And what if I don’t? Are you going to come and arrest me?”
Another pause. “No, I’m not going to come and arrest you.”
“Good. I’ll see you in the morning then.”
Ted disconnected. A few minutes later he steered into the driveway of his five-bedroom Tudor, a house he’d paid cash for and moved into several weeks ago. It was his new place, and he was having some work done. Today, the tree man was there.
The first time Ted saw the property, he knew the old sycamore in the front yard would have to go. It was a good shade tree, but the leaves would be a nightmare in the fall and the birds would be a nightmare year-round. Ted was already sick of the damn birds. They made a racket every morning, and every time he left the Beemer in the driveway one of them would leave a nice splatter of shit on the windshield. What a nuisance.
But the nuisance was gone now, thanks to Jim Kramer and Sons Tree Removal Service.
Jim Kramer’s sons, a pair of strapping young men in their early twenties, loaded the last of the debris into the back of a dump truck as Ted pulled into the driveway. They smiled and waved and then climbed into the truck and headed out.
Jim Kramer stood leaning against the driver’s side door of his scratched and dented Ford F-250 holding a clipboard. Waiting for his paycheck, Ted figured. Ted parked the BMW, grabbed his briefcase from the backseat, got out and walked to where Jim was standing.
“It’s like it was never there,” Ted said.
“Yep, we ground the stump and everything. All you got to do is lay down some sod, plant a flower bed there, whatever you want.”
“How much do I owe you?”
“A thousand even.”
“Your estimate was eight-fifty.”
“There were some tough surface roots we had to dig up. Took us longer than I thought it would, and the disposal fee’s going to be more than I figured on. You’re getting off cheap if you want to know the truth.”
Ted opened his briefcase on the hood of the truck, pulled out a check and handed it to Jim.
“I already wrote it out this morning,” Ted said. “Eight-fifty. Take it or leave it.”
“Come on, Dr. Bratcher. Be reasonable. Me and the boys got families to feed.”
Ted snapped the briefcase shut. “Not my problem. That’s the price we agreed on, and that’s the price I’m going to pay. Now if you’ll excuse me.”
“All right. All right. Yep, you’re right. That’s the price we agreed on. I’ll just have to be more careful with my estimates next time.”
“Have a nice evening,” Ted said. He picked up the briefcase and started walking toward his front door.
“Mind if I use your restroom real quick?” Jim said.
CHAPTER TWELVE
John Rock had started chest compressions on Sam Keller immediately following his collapse, and the paramedics had shoved an endotracheal tube down his throat a few minutes later, but Sam’s heart had stopped and there was nothing anyone could do to get it going again. The paramedics gave Sam a ride to the hospital, and from there the morgue.
John was still at the police station, sitting in Sergeant Richardson’s office drinking a cup of coffee brewed sometime during the Reagan administration.
“We need to go to Dr. Bratcher’s house,” John said.
“He’s not going to be home anyway,” Richardson said. “He has a tennis match. Said he’ll come by the station in the morning.”
“In the morning will be too late.”
“You sure about that?”
“Pretty sure. Call him back. I want to talk to him.”
Richardson crossed his arms and leaned back in his chair. “So you’re giving the orders now?”
“Call him back if you want him to live,” John said.
Richardson sighed. His expression said, “Why me?” He punched Dr. Bratcher’s number into his desk phone and handed John the receiver. Bratcher picked up on the third ring.
“This is Dr. Bratcher.”
“This is John Rock. I’m working with Sergeant Bryan Richardson, metro police. You spoke to him earlier.”
“I told him I would come down there in the morning. Look, I’ve dealt with those religious zealot types before. They don’t—”
“That’s not what this is about,” John said.
“Okay. What is it about, then? I’m all ears.”
“I’m a psychic medium, Dr. Bratcher. Your life is in danger, and the threat is not a human one.”
Bratcher laughed. “A psychic medium? You mean like séances and shit?”
“Sometime entities from the spiritual world speak to me. I don’t invite them, they just come. A very angry and violent one spoke to me earlier. She has already killed several people, and she told me that you’re next. Unless.”
“Unless what?”
“She’s the ghost of an aborted fetus. She wants you to stop.”
“Stop performing abortions?”
“Right.”
“Unbelievable. This is the damnedest thing I’ve ever heard of. I perform a medical procedure for women who choose to have it. There’s nothing wrong with what I do, and there’s nothing illegal about it. I’m going to file a complaint with your superiors, Mr. John Rock, and it’s probably going to cost you your job. You have no right to harass me like—”
“I’m not making any judgments about what you do,” John said. “I’m just passing on a message. Ignore it at your own peril. And FYI, I don’t work for anyone but myself. You can file a complaint with whoever you want to.”
“Is Sergeant Richardson there?” Bratcher asked.
“He is.”
“Let me talk to him.”
Before John had time to hand Sergeant Richardson the receiver, a series of red-hot laser beams pierced his eardrum and flooded his brain with boiling brightness. The entity was trying to make contact through the telephone wires.
“She’s there,” John said to Dr. Bratcher.
“Huh?”
“She’s there in the house with you. You need to say it now. You need to promise to never perform another abortion as long as you live.”
“This is bullshit,” Bratcher said. “Unbelievable.”
“Is someone there in the house with you?” John asked.
But by the time he asked, the phone had already gone dead.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Jim Kramer flushed the toilet, washed his hands with some fancy liquid soap and dried them with a fancy blue towel. Everything in Dr. Theodore Bratcher’s house screamed opulence, from the gold-plated faucets in the bathroom to the crystal chandelier in the foyer. These were things Jim would never be able to afford, no matter how many trees he cut down.
Dr. Bratcher stood at the front door waiting. He wore white shorts and a blue polo, and there was a red Wilson tennis bag slung over his right shoulder. In his left hand he held the controller for his keyless entry and alarm system.
“Call us again if you need any more tree work done,” Jim said. “No hard feelings about the price and all. It was my fault for underestimating.”
“Thanks,” Ted said. “I’ll be sure to call if I need anything.”
When Dr. Bratcher reached to open the door, Jim clobbered him on the back of the head with a platinum toothbrush holder. Bratcher staggered around for a few seconds, eyes bulging, and then crumpled to the floor. His skull might have cracked like an egg against the terrazzo if his tennis bag hadn’t cushioned the fall. He was out cold, but still breathing nicely. Jim was glad, because Jim had plans.
He grabbed the doctor by his ankles and dragged him into the theater room. He yanked off the LaCoste polo and the Adidas tennis shorts and the Tommy Hilfiger boxer briefs and the New Balance court shoes and the Nike socks and positioned Bratcher facedown and spread-eagle. He used an entire spool of dental floss to bind his wrists behind his back, and he used the shoestrings from the court shoes to secure his ankles to a cluster of theater seats bolted to the floor.
Dr. Bratcher’s house had been built
with the finest materials, and was well insulated, so Jim wasn’t worried about anyone hearing the inevitable screams. He walked to the kitchen, filled a saucepan with water from the sink, put the pan on the stove and turned the heat to high. He found a funnel and an oven mitt and a roll of duct tape and a butcher knife. On one side of the kitchen there was a door that led to the garage. Jim went out there and cut himself a six-foot length of garden hose with the butcher knife and then went back to the kitchen and used the duct tape to connect the hose to the funnel. He carried the funnel contraption and a bottle of extra virgin olive oil back to the theater room.
Bratcher was awake.
“Untie me, you son of a bitch.”
“I’m afraid we have bad news,” Jim said. “We’re going to have to operate.”
Jim screwed the top off the olive oil and poured some onto the sliced end of the garden hose and shoved the hose about twelve inches up Dr. Theodore Bratcher’s rectum.
“What are you doing? Ah! That hurts! Okay, okay, I’ll do whatever you want. I have lots of money. I can give you enough to retire on. Just let me go.”
“Everyone knows you have to have an enema before surgery,” Jim said.
Bratcher kept pleading as Jim walked back to the kitchen. The water in the saucepan was boiling furiously now, so Jim lifted the pan from the stove and carried it and the oven mitt back to the theater. There was a small puddle of blood between Bratcher’s legs. The jagged edge of the garden hose must have ruptured some delicate anal tissue. Every muscle in Bratcher’s body was tensed with agony and his ears were purple from straining against the pain.
“Please,” Bratcher said. “What is it you want from me? I’ll do anything.”
With the oven mitt on his left hand, Jim poured the entire pan of boiling water into the funnel. The water drained into the garden hose and then deep into Bratcher’s bowels. Bratcher screamed and spouted incomprehensible gibberish as the scalding liquid found its way to the deepest recesses of his gut.
“High and hot and a hell of a lot!” Jim said.
He pulled the hose out, and the effect was almost instantaneous. A steaming tsunami of blood-tinged excrement surged forth and coated the entire area between Bratcher’s convulsing legs. Animalistic moans emanated from somewhere deep in his chest, sounds a baby calf hopelessly twisted into a barbed wire fence might make.
“Please,” he finally managed to mumble.
“Don’t ever let anyone tell you your shit don’t stink,” Jim said. “Whew! I have to go prepare for surgery now. Be right back.”
Jim walked to the kitchen and gathered some dishtowels and a variety of knives and utensils and stuffed everything into a muslin sack that had once been filled with pistachios. He stood at the sink and scrubbed his hands and arms with antibacterial soap. He certainly didn’t want the good doctor to acquire a post-op infection. Those could be very dangerous, even deadly sometimes. He dried off and carried his bag of instruments back to the theater room.
The stench was horrendous. A thick black sludge seeped continuously from Dr. Bratcher’s asshole, the sphincter muscle rendered flaccid from the blistering hot enema. Jim wondered what this guy had for lunch. It smelled like he might have consumed a truckload of rotten pineapples or something. Totally gross, as Jim’s daughter Mila might have said.
Bratcher wasn’t moving. Jim felt his neck for a pulse. Rapid and thready, and his skin felt like uncooked liver. Perfect conditions for surgery.
Jim spread some towels on the floor and laid out his array of surgical tools. Since Bratcher had apparently been properly sedated and there wasn’t much danger of him putting up a fight, Jim cut the floss securing his wrists with a paring knife and moved his arms out of the way. With the same knife he made a deep incision along Bratcher’s left rib line. Blood oozed copiously, so Jim suctioned the wound with a turkey baster and dabbed it dry with the muslin sack. He spread the gash with his fingers and cut some more and suctioned some more and dabbed some more until he could finally see Bratcher’s left kidney glistening under the recessed ceiling lights. He clamped off the blood supply and the tube leading to the bladder with some twist-ties. After a few snips with the poultry scissors, he reached in with a set of tongs and unseated the organ intact.
Bratcher shivered uncontrollably, his face pale and his lips blue. He looked as though he had fallen asleep naked in Siberia or some other frigid and godforsaken place. Jim tossed the kidney into a stainless steel mixing bowl and then repeated the procedure on the right side.
Unfortunately, before he got started on the lungs, the damn doorbell rang.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
John Rock and Sergeant Bryan Richardson stood at the front entrance waiting for someone to answer the door. It had taken John a while to convince Sergeant Richardson to make the trip, and it had taken Sergeant Richardson a while to find Dr. Bratcher’s home address. There was a BMW convertible in the driveway and a truck with a Jim Kramer and Sons Tree Removal decal on the back window.
“I told you he was going to go play tennis,” Richardson said. “There’s nobody home.”
“His car’s here,” John said.
“Maybe he has two.”
“He’s here. And she’s here, too. I can feel it.”
Richardson rang the doorbell again. “I’m going to give him one more minute to answer the door, and then we’re out of here.”
The deadbolt clicked and the heavy wooden door creaked open. A man wearing white shorts and a green polo stood there with a Wilson tennis bag slung over his right shoulder. Mid-forties, salt-and-pepper hair, nice tan.
“Dr. Bratcher?” Richardson said.
The man stepped out and closed the door. He locked it with a remote control. “Hello, gentlemen. I was just leaving. Is there something I can do for you?”
“There’s something you can do for her,” John said. “Like I told you earlier, if you do what she wants, she’ll go away. If you don’t, she’ll kill you.”
He didn’t say anything. He walked to the BMW, started it, backed it down the driveway. Before speeding away, he shouted, “See you at Mom’s.”
“So much for that,” Richardson said. “Let’s get out of here.”
“Wait,” John said. “I don’t feel it anymore.”
“You don’t feel what?”
“The entity. She’s gone.”
“That’s a good thing, right?”
“She left in the car,” John said. “That wasn’t Dr. Bratcher.”
“You mind telling me what the fuck’s going on?”
“Let’s go in the house.”
“I can’t go in there without a warrant, and I’m doubting any sane judge is going to count a goddamn ghost as probable cause.”
“Maybe you can’t go in there,” John said. “But I can.”
He stepped back and kicked the door with the bottom of his boot. The doorjamb splintered and the door swung open and the burglar alarm howled like a bitch in heat. John walked inside. The house smelled like a sewer. He followed the stench to a room with a huge plasma television and surround-sound speakers and a popcorn machine and a naked man with two gaping holes in his back lying facedown in a pool of blood and shit.
“Hey!” John shouted.
Richardson came running. His jaw dropped when he entered the theater room. “Mother fucker,” he said. He pulled out his cell phone and called for an ambulance and requested an all-points bulletin on the BMW.
“He’s still breathing,” John said. “We need to help him. He might be dead by the time rescue gets here.”
“I ain’t touching that,” Richardson said.
John ran to the kitchen, found a pair of rubber gloves and a roll of paper towels, ran back and cut the shoestrings binding Dr. Bratcher’s ankles. He dragged him by the shoulders to a cleaner part of the floor and packed his wounds with paper towels to stop the bleeding. He found a blanket in a closet and covered him with it.
“You think he’s going to make it?” Richardson said.
“I don’t know. He’s lost a lot of blood, and I think those are his kidneys in that bowl over there. If he does make it, he’s probably going to wish he hadn’t.”
“Those are his kidneys?”
“I think so.”
“Maybe we should put them on ice.”
“Good idea.”
John carried the bowl to the kitchen, covered it with foil, stuck it in the refrigerator.
“I feel like I’m going to puke,” Richardson said. “I’m going outside.”
“I’m right behind you,” John said. “There’s nothing more I can do for him.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Six police cruisers, blue lights flashing, had rushed to the scene and were now parked at various angles on Dr. Bratcher’s lawn. A LifeFlight helicopter had flown in and landed in the sycamore’s old spot. Bratcher was still alive. The flight nurse and the paramedic wrapped him in a warming blanket and intubated him and hooked him up to a mechanical ventilator. A liter of saline and a unit of O negative blood dripped steadily as they loaded the stretcher into the air ambulance. They placed the kidneys in plastic bags marked BIOHAZARD, and then put the bags in a cooler on dry ice.
John spoke to the nurse before the copter launched. Her nametag said Kim Journey, RN. Late-twenties/early thirties, short brown hair, slim and attractive.
“What are his chances?” John asked.
“I wouldn’t want to speculate,” Kim said. “He’s going to need a lot of surgery and a lot of blood. If you want to know the truth, it’ll be a miracle if he ever regains consciousness.”
She climbed aboard the helicopter, and thirty seconds later the crew and their patient were airborne.
“This has been one hell of a day,” Richardson said. “I’m going to go home and have a six-pack and a late supper and make love to my fiancé and fall asleep in front of the television. Where do you want me to drop you off?”
“We’re not done yet,” John said.
“Huh?”
“The guy who drove off in the convertible, who I’m assuming is Jim Keller of Jim Keller and Sons Tree Removal Service, said, ‘See you at Mom’s.’ That can only mean one thing.”
