The Power to Live

by Thomas Porter

  "What's this about?" the woman asked.

  "He may know where my sister is. I'm really looking for my younger sister. It's very important I find her."

  "Maybe you should try the police," the woman told Elizabeth, a look of concern creeping into her expression.

  "I think I will, just as soon as I finish looking for her on this street," Elizabeth told her.

  "You should do that. Is she missing? Your sister?"

  "Not really missing, but I need to find her," Elizabeth said. Why am I telling this woman so much, she asked herself. If the police come here they'll just take me. They'll probably put me in jail and then what happens to Lozen? "Thank you very much for your help," Elizabeth told her, then conjured a lie to put the woman's mind at ease. "She's not missing, really. There's no problem. I've got her homework. Mr. Groghan is her teacher. Thank you anyway." Not a very good lie but it will have to do, Elizabeth thought.

  "Okay, dearest. If you need any of my help, I'll be here," the woman told her. With some effort, she returned to her knees and picked up her garden trowel.

  "Thank you again," Elizabeth said and walked away, forcing herself to slow to a normal pace to avoid raising suspicion.

  The street sloped up slightly and Elizabeth leaned forward imperceptibly as she walked toward a three story house with fieldstone siding and a lawn that looked like the 18th green at St. Andrews. A Range Rover was parked on the left side of the double-wide driveway. The driveway sloped up and Elizabeth entered it. At the top, Elizabeth stopped at the garage door bathed in direct late morning sunlight. It had a horizontal row of windows and she cupped her hands on one on the right. Inside she saw a Chrysler 300 with Utah license plates, nose in. On the bumper was a small green sticker which read, "Enterprise/National/Alamo". The trunk was open and she could see into it. Near the back, with one end hanging out, was a white cotton rope, about 1 inch in diameter. She recoiled from the window as if it were too hot to touch. Her stomach tightened, her breathing quickened, and she involuntarily glanced sideways to the front door. Her legs screamed "RUN!" but instead she squatted down and paused to think, keeping her eyes trained on the front door. Why would they bring them in the trunk of that car? Weren't they taken in a van yesterday? But that rope. I'd know that rope anywhere. She pulled up on the bottom edge of the garage door. It slip up about a foot before it started to squeak loudly. She laid flat on the cement and shimmied herself under, pulling her purse under the door last. The inside of the garage was warm and smelled strangely. The odor jolted loose memories of dissecting frogs in high school biology class.

  Once standing, she lowered her face to the rope. Definitely the stuff that was used on her countless times at The Taurus. A six panel white door at the top of three wooden steps in the back right corner was closed but at this moment frightened Elizabeth more than the rope. She reached into the purse and pulled out the revolver. Again her legs screamed “RUN!” but the gun fortified them and they stood firm on the smooth cement floor. She awkwardly pointed it at the door and walked toward it. When she was near the steps, but still standing on cement, she heard two voices, a man's and a woman's, approaching the door from inside. She lowered her purse to the floor and doubled up her grip of the gun just as the door swung into the garage.

  Chapter 24

  A short man with a close cropped beard and wearing a red velvet smoking jacket swung the garage door open and gasped when he saw Elizabeth below him, pointing a snub nose revolver at him. The fingers of his left hand, tipped with white lacquer fingernails, involuntarily gripped the door knob tighter.

  Elizabeth stammered, “Who? What? Don't. Don't move.” Despite holding the heavy metal revolver with both hands, it shook violently.

  From the top of the stairs, Von Broughton's eyes took in the scene. The girl was in her late teens or early 20s with long wavy black hair covering her shoulders, with dark complexion and high cheek bones. Despite looking like she slept on a bus, underneath her dishevelment he saw a beautiful, healthy girl. A female. Approximately 20 years old. Unconsciously, his mind started dictating a medical report, as if he were doing an initial physical exam.

  “Lovely young native American female, approximately 20 years old, 5'7”, presents in the garage with snub nosed revolver and complaining of acute fear manifesting in loose bowels, cold sweats, tremors at distal upper bilateral extremities and...”

  This exercise, so familiar to him after decades of quickly assessing the unknown, calmed him and he spoke evenly and confidently, sounding more like an emergency room doctor than a man with a gun pointed at him.

  “Is that your sweater, young lady?” he asked. The words “your sweater” slurred together slightly.

  “My sweater?” Elizabeth asked. A confused look swept involuntarily over her face and the barrel of the revolver dipped a couple inches until it pointed at the short man's feet, which were spotlighted in sunlight streaming through the garage door windows.

  His position on top of the stairs, and his superior years and experience, spoke to von Broughton. A confident grin formed on the corners of his mouth and he asked, "How can I help you today?”

  After a few seconds, the shaking gun in Elizabeth's hands spoke to her too. She raised back to von Broughton and asked, “Is that your stupid smoking jacket?”

  The grin took over his face.

  “Very good. Very good. Yes, this is my smoking jacket. Are those your checked pajama bottoms?”

  “What are you, some kind of court jester?”

  “Yes, I'm a jester. An operating room jester, you might say.”

  “Where's my sister,” Elizabeth said firmly.

  “Is that who you are? Samantha's sister?”

  “Samantha?” Elizabeth's fear notched up a level. Omigod! Did I get that lucky and find MacGroghan's lair? Unlucky? This has to be it. She clenched her teeth and breathed through her nose, trying not to reveal her fear. Who is this short man looking down on her, she thought. Groghan? He was not as she imagined him.

  "Mr...." she said through tight lips but stopped.

  "Yes?"

  "Mr. MacGroghan?"

  "MacGroghan?" von Broughton said and laughed loudly.

  Drunk, Elizabeth realized finally. She was all too familiar with the signs.

  "You are not him?"

  The short, laughing, drunk operating room jester, still holding on to the door knob, yelled back in the house, "She thinks I'm 'MacGroghan'! Ha ha ha. As in, MAC Groghan." He turned back to Elizabeth and said, "No, I ain't him."

  "Get her inside," came a far more menacing voice, but not from inside the house. It came through the garage door, from the driveway. It was calm and cold, spoken smoothly so the words ran pleasantly together as if they were lyrics from a song. Elizabeth irrationally put them to music as she stood there in a cold sweat, "Getherinside, getherinside, for God's sake almighty, getherinside."

  "You got it," von Broughton said loudly. "Would you like to come inside, young lady? I think we, I may be able to help you find what you're looking for." He held the door wide and stepped back. Elizabeth sidestepped twice until she could see through the door. Inside the house, in the hallway leading to the garage, Elizabeth saw a middle-aged fat woman wearing what reminded Elizabeth of nurse's scrubs. The fat woman saw Elizabeth looking at her and said reassuringly, "Come in, young lady. I think we can help you find your Mr. O'Groghan," emphasizing the "O".

  "O'Groghan?" Elizabeth asked. “You have my sister? Lozen?” She hoped they could not tell how badly her voice shook. At that moment, with sudden clarity completely absent until then, was the realization that she didn't know what she would do once she found Lozen and Napolita. Shoot the men who held them? They won't be alone. Even if she could shoot them, then what? And how would she deal with O'Groghan? If those stories she heard were true then he'd shoot her for interrupting his dessert.

  She took a small step toward the three wooden steps when th
e garage door opened in an instant. It rolled up so quickly Elizabeth's first, irrational thought was that it disappeared. The sunlight which was held outside suddenly flooded into the garage and momentarily blinded Elizabeth. She blinked, opened her eyes wide, and blinked again. Before her vision returned, a large, rough, battleship gray right hand clamped down on her right wrist, just below the end of the black sweater sleeve, and pulled so hard she wondered if her arm would stay attached to her body.

  Chapter 25

  O'Groghan ignored the gun that had fallen to the garage floor and effortlessly dragged Elizabeth into the house. Shock, brought on by the ease at which he took total and unquestioned control of her, quieted her and she allowed herself to be dragged along the smooth cement garage floor, up the three wooden steps, and across the dark wood floor boards of the hallway just inside the house. She instantly recognized the sound of Chase's snoring, who was asleep on the couch in the living room at the end of the hallway. Her feet caught a braided rug and dragged it until it was stopped by the marble threshold leading to the green ceramic tiled kitchen.

  When her feet felt the one-foot square granite tiles, she started kicking, slowly at first but when O'Groghan opened the finished wood door leading to the basement her kicks became frenetic. She didn't know exactly who this man was who held her, although somewhere in the muddle of fear and shock that filled her mind was the realization that it was O'Groghan. And one other rock solid realization crowded out most other thoughts: she did not want to go into the basement. Her kicks slipped against the granite and hit painfully against the wall. They narrowly missed the large white plastic cooler, covered with dark scuff marks from heavy use, that was sitting on the kitchen floor near the door. Von Broughton moved toward the cooler but stopped just outside range of Elizabeth's feet.

  To safeguard the cooler, O'Groghan lifted his right arm above his head, leaving nothing but air for Elizabeth to kick. Von Broughton, crouching near the floor and ducking his head to avoid her feet, grabbed the handle on the side closest to him and quickly pulled it along the tile floor away from Elizabeth's onslaught.

  At the same time O'Groghan, with his left hand, grabbed a stainless steel sauce pan suspended above the island in the center of the kitchen. He raised it above his head and swung it down, with some restraint, onto Elizabeth's head. Despite softening the blow, Elizabeth screamed in pain and blood began to flow through her hair and onto her forehead. She lifted her left hand to the injury and then held it in front of her eyes. The sight of the blood startled her. She balled her hand into a fist and lashed out at O'Groghan's face. He used the saucepan as a shield but Elizabeth did not hear the sickening noise her fist made as it struck the stainless steel. Instead she kept awkwardly hitting, left and right, attempting to avoid the pan.

  O'Groghan quickly glanced at von Broughton, who now stood on the wooden floor of the hallway with an amused expression. Nancy stood next to von Broughton but looking very shocked.

  “She is a wild one,” O'Groghan said and laughed. The laugh visibly loosened Nancy's tension and she smiled with him. At that moment, one of Elizabeth's blows caught O'Groghan square in his right eye and his head flinched back away from the onslaught.

  “Damn!” he said, swinging his full attention back to Elizabeth's left fist. “She caught me! Okay, that's enough fun for now.” He swung his right arm, still held over his head, back away from the open cellar door, then swung it into the opening and opened his hand. She hit no stairs beneath her until halfway down the wooden staircase. The framed photos of Ursula Andress, Daniela Bianchi, Honor Blackman, and several other actresses, all shown in their Bond girl roles, flew past Elizabeth's head. Her flailing right arm, freed from O'Groghan's iron grip an instant before, pulled the photo of Shirley Eaton, as Jill Masterson in Goldfinger, from the wall. The glass in the frame broke as it hit the wooden stair. Momentum and gravity pushed Elizabeth into a roll until she hit the wall at the staircase landing. From there, the stairs took a 90 degree turn and descended five more steps to the basement. After a moment of blackness, she brushed her dark hair from her eyes and opened them. She sat on the landing, facing back up toward the kitchen. Some of the smashed glass from Jill Masterson's broken frame settled nearby. Three faces, the two of the men grinning widely and the woman's bearing a shocked expression, looked back at her. The woman, Nancy, was the first to descend the stairs. When she reached the landing, she squatted down and unconsciously glanced, very briefly, to Elizabeth's right, down the second set of stairs leading to the lower level. Elizabeth instinctively followed her gaze. At first she noticed a wet bar. Her trained eye recognized several bottles of Old Raj dry gin, Chopin single wheat vodka, various bottles of vermouth, and a single unopened bottle of Macallan 50 Year Old Single Malt Scotch Whiskey. Despite her circumstances, she wondered who among these people drank martinis. On the opposite side of the room was a wall-mounted television. The sound was off but the television show Emergency flickered in strangely vivid colors on the screen. The firemen and rescue workers sat around a table as Paramedic John Gage stood nearby. Elizabeth pulled her eyes away from the television until she saw a chair with brown leather cushions. Next to the chair was a strangely out of place stainless steel table with tubular metal legs. Despite the shock of being dragged into the house, assaulted with a saucepan, and tossed down the staircase, a confused look spread on Elizabeth's face. She looked into the eyes of the woman squatting next to her. Nancy returned Elizabeth's questioning look with a look of fear and a shake of her head.

  Shaking her head no? Elizabeth wondered what this woman meant. With her now-free right hand, she felt her scalp again. The blood continued to flow, now channeling down the left side of her head and passing close to her left ear.

  O'Groghan, still standing at the top of the stairs but no longer grinning, told Nancy, “What are you two ladies doing down there? Get her picked up and secured or I'll have to do it.” His voice was accompanied by Chase's snoring, who had slept through the struggle.

  “Alright, Mr. O'Groghan,” Nancy replied up the stairs. Turning to Elizabeth, Nancy said in a gentle, practiced voice developed naturally during decades of nursing others, and which she could muster even in times of medical crisis, “Ok, sweetie. I'm Nurse Nancy. Let's get you on your feet. Are you okay to stand?”

  “Ok to stand?” Elizabeth asked. This sudden shift in tone, from being thrown down the stairs like a product in a warehouse to the gentle tones of this nurse, confused Elizabeth even more than the initial shock she felt when grabbed by the man in the garage. “What do you mean, 'ok to stand?'”

  “We're going to move you, ok?” Nancy said in the same gentle way. She then turned her head to the left and said loudly up the stairs, in a commanding tenor that was also developed during those same decades of dealing with other nurses and doctors, “Dr. von Broughton, throw down a kitchen towel.”

  At the top of the stairs, Elizabeth saw the short man with the close cropped beard and red velvet smoking jacket, who she first encountered in the garage just minutes before, quickly and silently disappear.

  Unmoved was the 6'2” man wearing the perfectly white T-shirt spotted with her blood. He stared into Elizabeth's eyes. She tried to meet his stare but saw nothing but blackness. They reminded her of a doll she had in Sinaloa. Its face and hands were porcelain and the eyes were glass with empty black pupils. He glanced down at his wide chest. He raised his right hand to his mouth and wet his thumb with spit, simultaneously raising a portion of T-shirt off his chest with his left thumb. For several seconds, while holding it tight with his left thumb, he used his right thumb to intently rub at a small round spot on the shirt. During the next two or three minutes, with Elizabeth and Nancy watching silently from below, he rubbed at the spot, repeatedly returning his right thumb to his mouth to replenish the spit.

  Nancy, who was still squatting next to Elizabeth, said in a low voice while gently gripping the upper portion of Elizabeth's arm
, “Are you ready to stand up, sweetie?” But at no time did either woman take her eyes off the man at the top of the stairs rubbing at the small spot.

  When O'Groghan finally gave up, Elizabeth thought she detected a slight quiver in his lower lip just before he said, “You got blood on my shirt.”

  Elizabeth felt Nancy's hand tighten on her arm. Elizabeth pulled her arm away but Nancy's grip tightened even more. Did this woman also fear this vicious man, Elizabeth wondered.

  Dr. von Broughton reappeared next to O'Groghan and said, “What's the matter, Paddy? You gonna cry?”

  O'Groghan turned his head and, in a whisper so low Elizabeth could not hear, said, “If you weren't making me so much money, I would snap your neck here as we stand.”

  “But I am making you so much money,” von Broughton cheerfully said, loud enough for Elizabeth to hear, as he tossed the linen kitchen towel down the stairs to Nancy. It landed two steps above the women. Nancy leaned forward and picked it up, then turned back to Elizabeth and said, “Now let's take a look at your scalp.”

  To give Nancy a better view of her injury, which still bled down the left side of her head, Elizabeth turned her head to the right, back toward the brown leather chair and television, still flickering with Emergency, although now the men were at a rescue site and talking by radio with Nurse Dixie McCall.

  For the first time since crashing against the wall at the staircase landing, Elizabeth noticed the body lying on the stainless steel table, thick auburn hair flowing off the edge. The body's midsection was completely opened by a massive Y-incision. From the staircase landing, Elizabeth could see into the abdomen but it was strangely empty, like a gutted fish. Next to the table on which it lay were three smaller stainless steel tables. One was scattered haphazardly with surgical instruments. The other two were covered with bloody rags and red lumps of flesh.

  The scarred face, although ashen gray with death and with empty eye sockets, was instantly recognizable to Elizabeth.

  Samantha.

  Chapter 26

  Napolita pulled the car into the Mi Pueblo Market parking lot in downtown Denver and turned off the engine. She reclined the seat back as far as it would go and shut her eyes.