by Joe McKinney
“I’m sick,” he said, wheezing.
“Heroin,” she said, and even through his convulsions he could hear the contempt in her voice. She reached into her pocket and took out a wad of wax paper that held a black, sticky goo not unlike uncooked Mexican black tar heroin. She took it out and forced it into his mouth.
He sputtered at the bitterness of it, and tried to spit it out, but she wouldn’t let him.
“Chew it,” she said.
“What is it?”
“Not heroin. But it will help you. Chew it.”
He did chew it, and almost immediately felt a flood of warmth in his throat and belly. It felt good. Not like heroin, but good. He could feel the crazy urgent need for the drug growing quiet, like it was being forced down into a box somewhere deep inside him.
“What is that?” he said.
“Just put your clothes on. We have to go right now.”
“Okay.” He let go of her arm and stood on his own, both surprised and sobered to find the convulsions and the pain were gone. And his vision was clearer, too. He took a deep breath, expecting a fit of coughing, and found only air.
“Hurry,” she said. “Get dressed.”
***
Now they were standing in the shadows outside the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office, watching the darkened building.
“What are we doing here?” Everett asked.
Magdalena didn’t answer him. She was swaying, her eyes half-closed, the eyelids fluttering as she muttered what sounded like nonsense to Everett.
“Who are you? What’s your name?”
Again, nothing from Magdalena.
He gave up on her and went back to looking at the quiet building. It looked closed to him.
“They’re not closed,” Magdalena said.
Her voice startled him. Everett looked at her, wondering if he had asked the question aloud or not. He didn’t think he had.
“Tell me who you are,” he said.
“They’re not closed,” she said again. Her eyes were open now. She was staring directly at the building without blinking. “Inside, you’ll find three people—two women and a man. The man has a gun.”
“A gun? What are you talking about, lady? I’m not going in there.”
“Look at me,” she said.
A police car rolled by at a crawl on the road on the far side of the building, and Everett ducked down deeper into the shadows.
“Look at me,” she said. Her voice was flat but stern.
“There are cops all over the place,” he said.
“The police won’t bother us. Look at me.”
He glanced at her and started to say, “Fuck this, let’s get out of here,” but the look on her face stopped the words in his throat. Her face had changed. It was still her, but there was something else there with her, inside her. He stared into her eyes and felt himself slipping away.
“Look at me,” she said.
“Okay,” he said. But he may not have said the word out loud. He couldn’t tell, and his mind wasn’t paying attention to that now anyway.
“Use a large rock to break into the front door. The people inside will try to stop you. Don’t let them. There will be towels inside. Use the towels to hold open the doors leading down to the basement. Do you understand?”
He nodded, his mouth hanging open.
“Go,” she said.
***
Everett walked up to the front door and looked at it. The whole thing was made of glass. When he put his face against the glass he could see into the waiting room beyond. There was a table, a couple of small couches, a plant in the corner. On the far side of the waiting room was another door. It looked solid.
The door in front of him had no handle. Confused, he blinked at it until he realized it was one of those automatic doors meant to slide open when someone was standing in front of it. He looked to his right and saw a buzzer on the wall, a rock garden beyond that. He went to the rock garden, picked up a stone the size of a cantaloupe, and tested its heft. Good and heavy.
He went back to the door, lifted the rock, and broke out the glass.
***
They hadn’t had a call all night, and for that Melinda Sanchez was grateful. It gave her a chance to catch up on her reports, and after the mess at the Morgan Rollins Iron Works, there was still a stack of them standing about a foot high in the In Box on her desk.
The only trouble was she couldn’t make herself do it.
“Thinking about Wayne?” Julia asked.
Julia was Julia Culpepper, who had the desk across the aisle from her. They were both twenty-five, pretty, well-built. Julia was dating Dylan Hodges over at Bexar County Homicide, and the two of them introduced her to Dylan’s partner Wayne Taliaferro at a triple shooting the week before. She and Wayne had hit it off. There’d been a date, a couple of phone calls since, another date next weekend. Things were going well.
“You were, weren’t you?”
Melinda just smiled.
“You’re going out with him again, right?”
“Maybe.”
“Maybe. Jesus, Mel, spill the beans, would you? Did you guys…?” She looked around to make sure their other partner, Randy Sprouse, wasn’t listening. “You know?”
Melinda tried to sound sufficiently shocked when she said, “Julia! No, of course not. I just went out with him once.”
“Oh, lighten up, Mel. There’s nothing wrong with fucking a guy on the first date. If it feels right, you gotta do it.”
“Julia!”
But despite her best efforts, Melinda couldn’t keep the snicker out of her voice. It had felt pretty darn right, and it had almost come to that.
Randy muted the commercial that had just come on the TV and got up and stretched. He was older by far than the two of them—had actually been a cop longer than the two of them had been alive—and regarded just about everything and everybody with a weary, if not a little sour, indifference. He was nice, though.
He saw the conspiratorial looks on their faces and said, “What?”
“Nothing,” Julia said.
Melinda shrugged, and they both giggled.
“You girls are talking about dating cops again, aren’t you?”
“Why, Randy?” Julia asked, hitting him with her fluttering eyelashes. “You jealous?”
Randy laughed. “Yeah, right. Girls, Randy is too old to be feeling randy these days. I get all the sex I can handle just watching my wife do housework. Who’s the guy this week?”
“Same guy,” Julia said. “Smartass. It’s been the same guy for the last two months.”
“Oh, well, who can tell around here? You girls make me feel like I work in Peyton Place sometimes.”
Melinda arched a questioning eyebrow at Julia.
Julia said, “That’s like The O.C. for old people.”
“Cute,” Randy said. But before he could say anything else they heard the sound of glass breaking.
“What was that?” Julia said.
“It sounded like it came from up front,” Melinda said.
They were all standing now. Randy moved to the video monitors near the opposite end of the room, and Melinda and Julia followed him. The three of them looked at the monitor that showed the front door. The camera there was mounted on the outside and pointed down across the plane of the doors so that it would give a profile view of anybody standing there. Melinda studied the screen, but all she saw was a pile of glass shards on the ground.
“Call Campus Police,” Randy said to her. “Julia, come with me.”
“Okay,” Melinda said.
Randy and Melinda went out into the hallway while Julia went back to her desk and picked up her phone, but couldn’t get a dial tone. She punched another line, but that was dead, too.
“What the...?” she said, and picked up the phone on Julia’s desk. That one was dead. So was Randy’s.
“Oh shit.”
She grabbed her purse and took out her service weapon, a short-barreled Glock
27. Then she made her way towards the front.
On the nightshift, they left most of the lights off, and the hallways leading from the Investigations Office to the front lobby were dark. Melinda moved through them, wincing every time her heels clacked on the floor, trying to hear what was going on up front.
All she heard though was thudding of her heart against her chest.
“Randy? Julia?”
No answer.
“Randy?”
She was almost at the lobby now. It was around the next corner. She went to the wall and inched her way closer to the corner. Straining to hear any kind of sound at all, she took a deep breath and waited in silence.
A long moment passed.
Finally, unable to take it anymore, she called out, “Randy, answer me. Julia?”
Nothing.
Come on, girl. Get it together. You can do this. You can do this.
She took a deep breath, then slipped around the corner, gun up and ready for whatever was there.
Or so she thought.
Julia’s leg was sticking into the hallway, holding the door open. Beyond her leg she could see Randy slumped onto the floor. Neither of them was moving. Melinda’s breathing was coming fast and ragged now, her fear overriding her training. In her mind she kept telling herself to run. She had been to the schools, sure. She had a peace officer’s license, yeah, but she wasn’t a real cop. The closest she had ever come to a tactical building sweep was watching a video on it back in school. She wasn’t made for this.
Stop that. You can do this. You can do this.
She peered into the shadows of the lobby. From here, it looked empty, but her eyes kept turning back to the unmoving bodies on the floor. Then she caught a glint of light on the floor and saw a puddle of blood spreading away from Julia’s head.
“No,” she said, and lowered her weapon. “No, Julia.”
She knelt down next to her friend and searched her neck for a pulse. There was none.
“Julia, no! Wake up, baby! Please.”
Crying, she rocked back on her heels and covered her mouth. Her gun felt like it weighed a million pounds in her hands. She could barely lift it.
Glass crunched behind her.
She gasped as she spun around. There, in the shadows, standing perfectly still and watching her with the cold, dead eyes of a psychopath, was a bone-skinny man whose long, greasy hair hung over his face like a curtain. In his hands, he held a big rock, and even in the darkness, Melinda could see the blood dripping from it.
“What did you do?” she said.
He was on her then, and he moved fast. She put up her hands to block her face, but she never had a chance.
***
Everett dropped the rock and it hit the carpet with a dull thud. He looked at the three bodies on the floor without any real sense of what had just happened. It was almost like there were two David Everetts. One was in a red haze, full of strength and purpose. The other was a balloon floating in the air above the red one. Balloon Everett was barely conscious, and when the red Everett moved, balloon Everett was pulled along behind him, almost like there was a string tied to his belly. He felt the tug and he went. There was no fighting it.
The red Everett went down a hallway, opening doors and throwing rolled-up towels down as door stoppers to hold them open, until he reached a stairwell. Balloon Everett could feel cold air coming up from the stairwell, and maybe a smell as well, though it was faint.
Red Everett used a chair to wedge open the stairwell doors, then went down another hallway and into the morgue. Balloon Everett watched sleepily as Red Everett opened the freezer doors, and he continued to watch as naked corpses rose from the racks of tables, sloughing off their sheets and staggering out through the open doors.
When the last of them was gone, Red Everett turned and headed back upstairs. He stayed well behind the long line of dead men, and Balloon Everett bobbed contentedly in the air, watching the parade as it made its slow way towards the waiting night.
At last Red Everett reached the front room, and there he stopped amid the broken glass. He reached down and picked up one of the guns from the investigators on the floor. Almost like he was studying it, Red Everett turned it this way and that before jamming the muzzle under his chin and pulling the trigger.
As the sound echoed away, Balloon Everett felt the cord that held him to Red Everett let go, and he went floating, bobbing away into nothingness.
***
Magdalena watched the dead melt into the darkness. One by one they left the building and then dissolved, like soap bubbles riding the wind. They were headed for the Iron Works again.
“Travel fast,” she said. “There is much to do.”
Chapter 12
Anderson and Levy were in the car, headed for the Bexar County Medical Examiner’s Office. Anderson was driving. Levy was on his cell phone, talking with a detective named Carl Vince from the Night Utility Unit who was over at the Mulberry Green Mental Health Facility looking into David Everett’s escape. Whatever Vince was telling Levy wasn’t making Levy very happy.
Anderson said, “What’s going on?” Levy just held up a finger for him to wait.
Off to the east, the sky was beginning to lighten. A copper pool was spreading across the horizon, dappling the rooftops of the shallow east side. It was going to be another hot and cloudless day, one of those relentlessly hot summer days that smothered the city and made you feel like you were being cooked inside your clothes. The dawn wasn’t even here yet, and already the temperature gauge on the dash was reading in the low nineties. Anderson searched his memory, thinking back to the last time San Antonio had gone through a draught this bad. What had it been, five or maybe six years ago?
Beside him, Levy hung up his phone and tucked it back into his belt. He had to lean over almost into Anderson’s seat to do it, and even then he had to pull his stomach up and out of the way as he searched for the clip.
Anderson said, “Well?”
“Just a second,” Levy grumbled as he fought with his phone clip. “God, I’m getting so fucking fat.”
Anderson waited.
“There,” Levy said. He settled back into his seat, trying to get comfortable, then said, “They don’t know shit down there. Vince said from what they could see Everett just walked right out the front door.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” Levy said.
“Well, what did he say?”
Levy shook his head. “Apparently they had some kind of bug problem. A whole bunch of them got into the generator and it started a fire. The building filled up with smoke and the staff went around opening up doors. You know, standard fire drill. There were only two nurses working, I guess. They escorted their patients into a secure area behind the building and waited on the Fire Department. By the time Fire had the place secure, Everett was gone.”
“Just like that? Gone.”
“Apparently. Looks like he just walked off.”
“Jesus H. Christ,” Anderson said. “A bug problem?”
“That’s what Vince said. Crickets or cicadas, some kind of bug. They’re all over the place down there.”
“That’s just great,” Anderson said.
He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel and thought about the timeline for this fiasco. Anytime a Patrol officer was dispatched to an incident involving a dead body, he was required to contact the Medical Examiner’s Office so that one of their investigators could make the scene and decide whether or not the body would need to be taken to the County Morgue for an autopsy. The Communications Unit supervisor told them he had first tried to contact the Medical Examiner’s Office at three a.m. Patrol had been trying to raise the ME’s Office for two hours before that. When the Communications Unit supervisor was unable to raise any of the ME investigators, he dispatched an officer to their location to find out why they weren’t answering their phone. That officer had arrived at the morgue at thirteen minutes after three and found the murder scen
e Anderson and Levy were on the way to now.
“What time did Vince say this invasion of the crickets happened?” Anderson asked.
“Around eleven thirty. The Fire Department got there at eleven thirty-seven. Why? What are you thinking?”
“Just doing the timeline. Everett slips away sometime between eleven thirty and eleven forty. We know Patrol tried to raise the Medical Examiner’s Office at around one o’clock. That means Everett had less than an hour and a half to get all the way across town, kill three armed people, and steal forty-three bodies.”
“And kill himself.”
“Yeah, and kill himself.”
Levy made a deep sigh. “You’re saying somebody had to have picked him up from Mulberry Green and taken him to the morgue.”
“They would have to, don’t you think? The morgue’s what, about thirty miles away from Mulberry Green? Somebody picked him up and drove him to the morgue.”
“Yeah,” Levy said. “That makes sense.”
“But who? If it was the same people who stole the bodies from the morgue that raises kind of an interesting question.”
“What’s that?”
“How’d they know Mulberry Green was gonna get swamped by bugs? That’s not the kind of thing you plan for, you know? And it’s not the kind of thing you do yourself.”
Levy thought about that. “Yeah, I see what you mean,” he said.
“So, for some reason, the people who did this got Everett out of Mulberry Green, brought him up here, stole a whole bunch of dead bodies, and then left Everett to kill himself.”
“But why would Everett kill himself? If he did kill himself. I mean, we don’t know that, do we?”
“No, I guess we don’t. Not conclusively, anyway.”
“We could get that off the morgue’s cameras, though.”
“Yeah,” Anderson said, but he was lost in thought.
They exited the freeway and headed up Wurzbach to the main entrance of the University of Texas Health Science Center campus. The campus police department had three cruisers blocking the roadway, and when Anderson turned into the driveway, two officers stepped forward to flag him down.
