by Jack Kerley
“I’m no good. I should have died long ago.”
Tears continued to flow from her closed eyes. I held tight to her hand. “As a cop I’ve seen every possible kind of relationship, Mrs Scaler. I think you were trapped in a marriage that had become loveless. But I suspect you stayed because you thought leaving would hurt your husband. That’s not a failing, that’s devotion to an ideal. You performed a great kindness at a terrible price.”
Her eyes fluttered open. She stared at me for a long moment. “Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you so much for that.”
“May I ask for your help over the next few days, ma’am? Could you think about people you might have seen with your husband. People he didn’t usually associate with. Can you think about that for me?”
“I’ll try, sir. But I, uh…”
“But what, ma’am?”
Hands fluttered beneath the blankets. She swallowed hard. Her head turned away with shame.
“I stopped thinking a long time ago, sir. I believe it was part of my job as Mrs Richard Scaler.”
Chapter 12
Harry was waiting at the nurses’ station down the hall, talking to an intern. Fossie was on a couch outside the door, reading a book on herbal supplements. He saw me and set the book aside.
“How’s Patricia?” he asked.
“She’s feeling guilt at not being the perfect little wife. She thinks she didn’t contribute enough to holding the relationship together. What kind of life did she and her husband have, Mr Fossie?”
Fossie shook his head. “The marriage was like a play, I think. But like almost everyone, I only saw the performances, not what was happening behind the scenes.”
I nodded, started toward Harry, stopped.
“You’re a nutritionist, sir?”
“Nutritionalist is the actual term. I have a practice on the southwest side of town. And, of course, I advise several institutions.”
When I was in college I dated a woman who was studying nutrition. Some of what she said about vitamins and whatnot seemed over the top, but a lot of it made sense and, I’d noted, it had been borne out by subsequent research. My then-girlfriend had used the word holistic like a mantra, but now medical doctors used the word; score one for her.
And just maybe I needed a little holism or whatever. “Are you taking any new patients?” I asked Fossie. “Is that what they’re called?”
“Clients. And I’m actually seeing fewer and fewer clients – my glide path into retirement. Are you talking about yourself, Detective Ryder?”
“I’ve been feeling a bit off,” I confessed. “Just recently.”
He studied me for a moment, the blues eyes moving from feet to hair. He took my hands and studied my nails. Put a thumb against my neck and felt my pulse.
“Where do you live, Detective?”
“Dauphin Island.”
He smiled, clapped my shoulder. “You’re in luck. I have a private patient on the west end of the island, an invalid, we go back years. I’m due to see her this evening. How about I stop by and give you a little work-up?”
I gave him my address and he returned to Mrs Scaler’s bedside. I briefed Harry on the interview, said not to depend on much from Patricia Scaler, the woman about as beaten down as anyone I’d ever seen, except maybe for my mother. I started back to the car.
Harry said, “Gimme a couple minutes. I want to see the kid.”
“She’ll look just like she did yesterday.”
“Which is fine with me.”
I jammed my hands in my pockets and lumbered toward the PICU a few feet behind my partner. Harry nodded to the nurse at the station, a heavyset young woman with a country-singer mane of artificially red hair that needed a prettier face to pull off the rural-hip statement. She was penning information on charts, sucking a can of Mountain Dew, and nibbling from a bag of FunYums. She’d seen us there before and gave a wiggle-fingers wave.
“We took Noelle off the antibiotics this morning and her temp’s holding steady; all other signs are good, including neurological tests. It’s like a miracle.”
Harry jogged to the window of the ICU. Yesterday the kid had been third in a row of five hose-studded Plexiglas boxes. But the box was empty and the two in front of it were askew, as if they’d been pushed out of the way.
“Where is she?” he called to the nurse.
“Who?”
“Noelle.”
The nurse tossed aside the FunYums and padded over. She looked into the station, gasped. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh my God.” I saw that beside the empty baby box were tubes and wires hanging limp from bottles and monitors. An IV line ended with a needle and tape, like the kid had been ripped from its lifelines.
“Oh my God,” the nurse said. “Oh my God.”
Harry sprinted to the nurses’ station and picked up the phone, telling hospital security to lock down the building. He ran back to us.
“If the kid’s inside, she’ll stay inside.” He turned to the nurse, voice firm but gentle. “When was the last time you checked on Noelle?”
“N-not long,” she stammered, about to burst into tears. “Maybe five minutes.”
“Did you see anyone near?”
“I…wasn’t looking this way.”
Harry pulled his cell. “I’ll call it in and get an Amber Alert in process in case the kid’s on the street.”
An Amber Alert was an urgent bulletin in child-abductions cases. An acronym for America’s Missing: Broadcasting Emergency Response, it was named for nine-year-old Amber Hagerman, abducted, raped and murdered in Texas in 1996. After the horrible crime, it was discovered local law enforcement agencies had information that might have led to the girl’s rescue if only they’d had the means to widely disseminate the info. Thanks to changes inspired by the ’96 horror, Harry’s call would get the kid’s description on radio, TV and other media outlets, as well as to all necessary agencies in a wide area.
Bam! Bam!
Gunshots. Harry abandoned his call, grabbing the nurse, pushing her inside the room with the babies. “Get the kids safe and don’t come out,” he growled. She nodded, eyes wide, and went to work rolling the baby boxes and attendant machinery to the rear of the unit. I grabbed my weapon, ran to the connecting hall and looked down. The shot had sounded muted and I was thinking it had been fired in a closed room.
Bam. Bam. Two more shots. Each from a different gun.
Harry was calling for backup. I looked down the hall. Past the central bank of elevators was a whole other section of building, a recently added wing. I heard a fusillade of connected shots, brrrrrrrrp, a weapon on automatic fire echoing from somewhere in the other wing. Cold fear flooded my spine. I ran to the junction of the wings and peered around the wall past the elevators. I smelled the raw bite of cordite in the air and I heard screams from a distance. I ran in that direction. Someone, a woman, was shrieking for help.
I slowed at a nurses station, the hub of four spoking halls. Spilled coffee and cups were on the floor alongside paperwork abandoned when staffers fled. I leaned cautiously into the near hall and saw a guy in a security uniform lying on the floor three dozen feet distant, his head held up as two nurses and another security guard bent over him, working furiously. Judging from the man’s wounds and the blood flow, they were wasting their time. Glass was strewn everywhere. The walls were pocked with a dozen holes. I looked at the guy performing CPR.
“Where’s the shooter?” I yelled.
He pumped the downed man’s chest while trying to talk to me, nodded to the staircase at the other end of the hall.
“Male, bearded, tall. He ran there…to the stairs.”
“He ran down, right?” I asked, figuring the abductor was headed for the street.
“No, man. He ran up.”
Up? No one escaped a hospital by going up. “Did he have a baby?” I asked.
“He had something…in his hand, I couldn’t tell…what it was. All I really saw…was the freaking machine gun.”
&nb
sp; I ran to the stairs, checked, saw nothing and stepped inside, running up to the fifth and final floor. Looked around the corner. A tall bearded guy in an outsized white jacket at the end of a brief hall, fifty, sixty feet away. Motorcycle boots with chains stuck out of his white pants. His sleeves were pulled up to reveal forearms blue with tattoos. A wide window was behind him, the skyline of Mobile in the distance. A heavy steel door was in front of the guy and I figured it went to the roof, the only level left. A security camera was perched atop the door and the guy was yelling into the lens, an angry rant in a tinny nasal whine.
“SCARED MOTHERFUCKERS COULDN’T DO THE GIG, BUT I DID! WHO HAS THE BALLS NOW?”
In one hand I saw the weapon, a machine pistol with a long clip. In the other hand he had the kid clutched by the front of its gown. It was screaming.
“SHUT THE FUCK UP!” the guy roared at the kid. He thumped his chest with the weapon. Shrieked at the camera. “LOOK AT ME! FUCKIN’ LOOK AT ME!”
I slipped the door open. There was no way to get a clear shot as long as he had the kid close. He kept screaming at the camera, getting louder.
“…always treating me like I was FUCKIN’ HALF THERE!”
When he turned a half-step away to peer out the window into the night, I slipped through the door, scooting across ten feet of floor to a cleaning cart pushed against the wall. There were no rooms off the hall and I figured this section of the top floor was where the roof systems like A/C and drainage joined the building.
“TERRY LEE IS A FUCKING HERO!” the guy howled. “Yeeeee-hah!”
No patients or staffers. Just me and a raving lunatic with a stolen kid and an automatic weapon. With nothing between me and him but the medical version of a dessert cart.
“Psssst!”
I heard the hiss, turned to see Harry crouched in the staircase. We had no chance to shoot for fear of hitting the kid. If we tried for a leg shot the perp would probably lift his weapon and blast Noelle. The guy was on the back edge of a bad nightmare.
“I dedicate this day to ADOLF…” the guy railed, sounding like he was approaching a violent orgasm. “And GEORGE, and JAMES AND JOHN AND BUFORD AND PASTOR BUTLER…”
“I called for a hostage negotiator,” Harry whispered.
“He’ll never get here in time,” I said, skinnying between the cart and wall. “The guy’s falling faster than a Manhattan crane.”
“Hey!” Harry’s big voice boomed from the hall. “Hey, Buddy. Let’s talk for a minute.”
The guy wheeled and squeezed the trigger of the freaking Uzi or whatever. A one-second burst filled the air with about thirty slivers of angry lead. I tightened into a ball, heard two slugs bing into the cart, more thump the wall. The recoil had kicked his hand back and most of the bullets jumped high, sending puffs of acoustic tile falling from above, a yellow snow on my shoulders. I looked back at Harry. He was grimacing, tucked tight in the stairwell. I heard the dead clip fall, a live one jacked into place.
“My talking’s OVER for fucking EVER!” the guy screamed. I watched from a corner of the cart as he paused, shot a glance at the camera, added, “DIE, YOU FUCKING PIG!” and punctuated it with another fusillade. I ducked. The rounds were closer, thudding into the wall above my head, piercing the stair doors at chest height. Harry was behind mason-block wall, but I knew ricochets were zipping through his space.
I peeked past the edge of the cart, saw the guy shake the kid at the camera like it was a rag doll. “DO YOU WANT THIS MUTANT TO BE THE FUTURE?” he roared. “A FUCKING CLONE?”
He rotated the screaming baby to look into its face. For a second he looked about to slam it into the wall. But the camera seemed to call to him and he jammed the kid back under his arm. “I’M BAD TO THE FUCKIN’ BONE!” he screamed at the lens, then turned to our end of the hall, eyes wild. “SHOOT ME!” he howled, pulling Noelle to his chest, hand around her neck. “GO AHEAD AND SHOOT ME! I DARE YOU!”
He lifted the weapon. I pulled as tight into myself as possible. Heard muttered cursing. I peeked around the cart in time to see him banging the gun against the wall, then pulling the trigger. Still nothing.
A jam.
“FUCKING CHEAP-ASS SHIT!” he roared, throwing the weapon to the floor. “FUCKING JEW GUN!”
“STOP!” Harry yelled. He stepped out into the hall, his gun aimed, hands quivering, unable to do anything with the baby tight to the man’s chest.
The guy’s wild eyes turned to Harry. “Oh, wouldn’t you just know it,” he said, almost to himself. I stood from behind the cart, my weapon double-gripped.
“It’s over,” I said. “Set the kid aside and you get to live.”
For a moment, the guy seemed to retreat inside himself. For a couple of seconds the madness in his eyes was overtaken by sadness. He seemed, in that moment, almost sane, almost human.
“No, I don’t,” he said.
“Come on, partner,” Harry said, taking a step down the hall. “Put the kid on the floor now, and you end the day breathing. Whatever’s bothering you, we can get it fixed.”
“No,” he said. “Nothing fixes what I got.”
The guy crouched lower and kept Noelle before him like a shield. He snuck a glance at the window behind him. Five stories up. He studied the window again and started giggling, like he’d had a great thought.
“Oh Jesus,” Harry whispered, “not the window.”
The man pulled Noelle even tighter. He looked behind him again, gauging the steps to the glass.
“Let’s see if your goddamn mutant can fly.”
“NO!” Harry yelled. “DON’T DO IT!”
The guy yelled “EIGHTY-EIGHT!” then spun and launched himself at the center of the window, a screaming baby beneath his tattooed arm. We froze in horror as the scene unfurled in slow motion: the laugh, the spin, the lunge toward the center of the glass…
The dull thump as the man bounced backwards to the floor, scrambling on the white tiles. He recovered instantly, wrapping his hands around the kid’s throat, lifting her in front of him, half of the madman’s grinning face hidden behind the child.
Harry squeezed the trigger.
Chapter 13
Dr Lee Hsiung, professor emeritus of Biology, University of Hong Kong, creaked in his office chair. Hsiung’s walls were a photo gallery of the professor with preeminent scientists from around the world. Highlighted was a black-and-white photograph of a young Hsiung receiving a hand-shake and a plaque from Francis Crick. Beside it was a photo of an older Hsiung beside Dr Kurt Matthias. Hsiung was smiling, Matthias, dour and distracted.
Hsiung leaned forward, smiling at his visitor. “Markets are everywhere in Hong Kong, Dr Matthias. They’re a potent stew of humanity.”
Matthias sat on an ornate teak and silk couch, briefcase at his side.
“That was what I was looking for, Dr Hsiung,” Matthias said. “A potent stew.”
“I don’t recall you as interested in travel, Doctor. You were always a man of the laboratory. It was a big event when you’d leave the US for a symposium. Of course, given your reputation, the world’s geneticists came to you. May I ask why you’ve become such a seasoned traveler?”
Matthias waved the question away. “New projects, new horizons. I have, in the past few years, become very interested in fieldwork.”
Hsiung lifted an eyebrow. “The past eight years, perhaps?”
Matthias’s eyes turned dark. “Something like that.”
Hsiung shook his head. “Your views were not much accepted, old friend.”
“Not accepted?” Matthias’s eyes tightened to slits. “My views were misread. Spat on. Misused by the most disgusting creatures. A moronic Afrocentric politician in New York used his opposition to me to run for Congress. He won.”
“You never managed to elucidate your –”
Matthias’s hand slapped the desk in anger. He stood and walked to the window, silently watching a hundred students walking the commons below.
“I don’t explain myself to the
gibbering masses. Certainly not to liberal spearthrowers, self-appointed centurions of political correctness. Damn them all.”
“You were vilified, Kurt,” Professor Hsiung said quietly. “I’ve not beheld such an uproar since The Bell Curve.”
“What does not kill us makes us stronger, Lee.”
Hsiung reached in his desk and produced a stack of computer readouts, the research Matthias had asked for. Hsiung studied his visitor with sad eyes.
“Yes, Dr Matthias. I would expect you to say something like that.”
The kid was gone; the screaming, terrified child had been handed off to Doc Norlin, summoned as soon as we kicked the weapon away from the abductor’s hands. We figured he was dead – Harry had aimed as far from Noelle as he could, tagging the perp on the outside rim of his eye socket. The slug had taken the inside track, removing a handful of head meat as it exited the rear of the skull at the end of its brief but potent visit.
People had started arriving. Hospital security. EMTs. Terrified staffers peeking around the corner before moving in our direction. Harry and I were still catching our breath. I stepped over the body to the window. Looked down five stories to the parking lot.
“He ran at the window like a rabid gazelle,” I said. “Dove into it full force. What happened?”
Harry tapped the pane with the muzzle of his .40. It didn’t tick like glass but thonked.
“Hurricane glass,” a security guard behind me said. “In all the windows. You might as well try to jump through steel plate.”
Forensics arrived to process the scene. Harry put uniforms to work taking statements. Before the upper-departmental types arrived for our own statements, Harry and I hustled to the paediatrics unit where Doc Norlin had just returned from the kid’s body scan and was getting her re-hooked to the various tubes and monitors.
“How is she?” Harry asked.
“Outside of abrasions and contusions, she appears unharmed, thank God. Not a bone out of place. I’m about to have the blood work updated, but she seems fine.”
Harry let loose a sigh that sounded like a dam breaking. He leaned against the wall for support. The doc started drawing blood for work-ups and we returned to the murder scene. The air smelled like a shooting range. We found the guard who had been furiously trying to save his colleague’s life. It had been, as suspected, futile. The guy, young, dressed in a blue uniform, looked beat down, eyes red, knees unsteady. The body had been collected but the floor was bright with blood.
