Book of Cures (A Thomas McAlister Adventure 2)

by Hunt Kingsbury

  The apartment floors were luscious honey-gold wooden planks, each a different width. Elmo did not know what kind of wood they were made out of. He’d never been good at identifying wood types by looking at floors, leaves, or bark. But he had a deep knowledge of acoustics, having studied both communications and ballistics, and knew that the sounds being generated by the windstorm would’ve been dampened if Taylor’s apartment had had wall to wall carpet instead of hardwood floors.

  Wall-to-wall carpet was not allowed on the Upper West Side. Manhattanites used Oriental carpets almost exclusively. Taylor’s Oriental helped, but the storm was still noisy, too noisy.

  Lying in bed, sheet pulled up to his chin, Elmo quivered uncontrollably. He’d been nervous during his entire charade as Dr. Bertram, but never as much as tonight. Never had he shaken uncontrollably like this for so long. He took a deep breath and his body stopped vibrating for a moment. A tear rolled down his temple wetting his hair and the pillow below.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about the floor creaking loudly as he rose and walked across it toward McAlister’s bedroom. He knew it would creak loudly, and there was nothing he could do about it. The edges of his mouth curved down, and he stifled a sob as another tear trickled down his cheek. His legs began shaking convulsively.

  If McAlister woke up and found him trying to steal the Blue Beryl, he would torture Elmo until he confessed who he really was and who he was working with. He’d grown fond of McAlister and respected him as a scholar, but on a few occasions he’d witnessed a dark side he wanted nothing to do with.

  He turned his head and looked at the digital clock on the bedside table. Finally, after checking every five minutes in the last three hours, the little red digits displayed the agreed-upon time, 3:00 a.m. The wind outside screamed, vibrating the windows, and Elmo used the opportunity to sit up and slide his feet down to the floor.

  The apartment was drafty and he shivered as he reached down to pull up his pants. He’d deliberately taken the belt out earlier so there would be no noise from the buckle. He put on his shirt, slipped into his shoes, and eased his weight down onto the floor. The creak of the floorboards was muffled by the thick Persian carpet.

  Now that he was up and moving, he felt better. The shivering stopped. He took a deep breath and started stepping slowly toward the doorway. He paused after each step. Always analytical, after only four paces Elmo developed a system to rate the noise generated by each step. It allowed him to quantify how loud each step was. It was a scale from one to ten. Ten was a very loud creak, one was no sound at all.

  He continued walking, measuring each creak: three, six, two . . . eight! Elmo’s heart jumped and he froze, listening for any trace of sound coming from McAlister’s bedroom. He heard nothing, so he started walking again. Two. Five. Four. Two. The sounds of the windstorm outside were helping to mask the creaking of the floor.

  He made it to the door. All he had to do was get down the hallway, into and out of McAlister’s bedroom, and then simply walk out of the apartment. Once outside he could run freely, and run he would, taking long glorious strides and loud deep breaths.

  A thick Persian with padding underneath ran the length of the hallway. It got Elmo quietly all the way to McAlister’s bedroom door. He paused, then slowly peeked around the corner. McAlister was lying on his stomach, facing away from the door. The Blue Beryl was where he’d left it earlier, on the bedside table nearest the door. Elmo was six, maybe seven, paces away from it, but it seemed woefully far away.

  There was only a sliver of carpet jutting out from McAlister’s bed, none between the doorway and the bedside table. The cadence of McAlister’s breathing relaxed Elmo. Long smooth relaxing breaths.

  McAlister was always prepared for the unexpected, so Elmo scanned the room for booby traps, portable cameras or wadded up paper on the floor around the bed. He saw nothing. DJ had warned Elmo incessantly not to underestimate McAlister, but in this case, it looked as though there were no unforeseen obstacles. If he could get the book and get out of the room without waking McAlister, he would be home free.

  It was his fourth step that did it. He was just starting to extend his arm to reach for the book when he felt a board shift beneath his foot. The board released a long drawn-out groan, louder than anything Elmo had produced before. A ten-plus on his loudness scale! A large red number ten flashed in his head.

  McAlister, bothered by the noise, quickly flipped over in his bed. He was now facing the doorway, Elmo, and the book.

  McAlister’s hand flopped down beside the bed and Elmo saw that he was still asleep. McAlister took one deep breath and settled back into slow steady rhythmic breathing. Elmo could’ve reached out and touched McAlister’s hand.

  He stared at McAlister, trying to determine if there was any way he could be feigning sleep. It was a surreal moment, one he would remember for the rest of his life. There was so much tension in the room, so much energy swirling around Elmo, he was sure McAlister would wake at any moment.

  Then, in an out-of-body moment, Elmo saw an arm—his arm—reach out and confidently lift the book off the night table. He had it!

  He held it next to his chest with both hands and slowly backed out the room. He waited for McAlister to jerk awake, to lunge at him, in a final fanatical effort to retain the Blue Beryl, but it never happened. McAlister remained motionless, his breathing constant. In fact, as Elmo was gently shutting the apartment door, just before he hurried to the elevator, he thought he heard McAlister begin to lightly snore.

  Chapter 47

  For the past four hours DJ Warrant had been sitting in the back of a van across the street and half a block north of the Dakota. His left calf muscle was beginning to cramp. It was now 3:10 am and if the plan held, Elmo should be walking out of the front entrance any minute. DJ moved closer to the one-way surveillance window.

  In the past four hours he’d seen nothing out of the ordinary. Residents had come and gone, no one DJ recognized, and now sidewalk traffic had died down, with few people walking in either direction. Hours earlier, DJ had watched a decrepit, dirty homeless person take great pains to lay out a bed of newspaper and arrange his collection of plastic bags with practiced precision before settling down to sleep next to a fire hydrant thirty feet from the front of the Dakota.

  At the time DJ had whispered, “There but for the grace of God go I.”

  He surveyed the area again, with binoculars this time, once again pausing to inspect the sleeping homeless man. The man had not moved in two and a half hours.

  Finally, Elmo emerged through the front door! DJ smiled; he hadn’t seen his little partner since he’d gone deep undercover as Dr. Bertram.

  Elmo paused, looked both ways, and then started north in the direction of the surveillance van. DJ could see that he had something tucked under his left arm. It had to be The Book. That meant one thing: success!

  Smiling, DJ watched Elmo walk north. His steps were light and quick. In less than a minute he’d cross the street and be inside the van. DJ wouldn’t just shake his partner’s hand. This assignment had been a huge commitment. DJ would hug him.

  He watched Elmo, trying to remember the last time he’d hugged another man. DJ was wondering if he’d ever hugged his father, who’d left when DJ was still just a kid. He couldn’t remember. And suddenly he saw movement out in front of Elmo.

  Something was terribly, irreversibly wrong.

  As Elmo approached, the homeless man sprang up with the most amazing display of animalistic quickness DJ had ever seen. The man was so fast that DJ hadn’t even seen him rise. One moment he was lying perfectly still, as he had for the past two-and-a-half hours, and the next, he’d simply vibrated and was up, gliding toward Elmo.

  With ballet-like fluidity the man floated toward Elmo. He looked like a jolly homeless Santa but he moved like Nureyev, and DJ knew at once that his clothes must contain large amounts of weightless padding. Before DJ could move, the man had closed in on Elmo and swung one of his plastics bags above
his head like a lasso. Then, the homeless man expertly flicked his wrist and the weighted bag swung out like a whip.

  It had happened too fast for Elmo to adjust, and the bag met him head on, squarely in the face. A devastating clothesline attack. Elmo’s feet flipped up, even with his head, so that his body was parallel to the ground, and then he fell five feet, landing flat on his back on the concrete sidewalk. DJ saw Elmo’s head bounce. If the blow to the front of his face hadn’t killed him, the fall to the pavement would likely have broken the back of his skull.

  A millisecond after Elmo hit the ground, DJ was out of the back of the van running low behind parked cars on the other side of the street. He’d considered going directly for the homeless man, but something about the way the assassin moved frightened DJ. The man was a professional, and DJ preferred to use stealth when dealing with professionals. He wondered if somehow, some way, it was McAlister. But could someone without combat training be that good, that ruthless?

  He passed five cars, paused, then sprinted across the street when the man bent down over Elmo. Breathing hard, the image of the sudden vicious attack still plastered on his brain, DJ flattened out on his stomach and began to hastily screw a silencer on to his forty-five. Slowly, he peeked around the car. Elmo’s attacker was walking toward him, holding the book in his left arm just as Elmo had.

  Beyond the man DJ could see Elmo lying still on the pavement. He gently cocked the pistol. As always, there was already a round in the chamber. He closed his eyes and tried to take a deep breath. For the first time in his career, he was scared.

  It was hard to wait, but he’d forced himself to do it many times before. There’d been many times he’d wanted to prematurely pump an entire clip into a perp. But since his rookie year, he’d learned the benefits of waiting, and the dangers of excitability. So he waited until the man was directly in front of where he lay, and then he aimed and pulled the trigger.

  Thump.

  The round should’ve hit the man mid-thigh. Should’ve instantly shattered his femur, rendering him helpless. But he’d missed. Missed. He heard the bullet hit the stone of the building behind the man and saw fragments of concrete spray from where the bullet ricocheted.

  Somehow Elmo’s attacker had sensed his presence, his energy, and jumped straight up, preposterously high, to avoid the gunshot. DJ was surprised but calm. He knew he must kill this man quickly if he wanted to live through the next ten seconds. He still had the advantage. The man had jumped. He wasn’t a superhero. He had to land.

  When he came down, DJ was ready. Just as his first leg hit the ground DJ fired again, point blank. Something flew off the man’s knee, and DJ heard his slug hit the side of the building again.

  When his other foot came down, DJ heard him groan. That was all he needed.

  DJ flew forward, grabbed the assassin’s collar with one hand and hit him as hard as he could just above the chin with the forearm of his other arm. DJ heard the man’s jaw rip free of its hinges, cartilage and muscles shredding. There was a loud ‘tock’ as his temporomandibular joint dislocated cleanly.

  DJ felt the temporal bone disconnect from the mandible and knew the small piece of cartilage that keeps the temporal bone from rubbing against the jaw bone, usually called a ‘disc,’ had been torn. This meant the guy would be knocked out cold, either by the blow or the pain it would cause.

  It had been solid, perfectly perpendicular contact and DJ felt satisfaction. He’d won. This guy would be eating his meals through a straw for a long time to come.

  DJ let go and the man fell to the sidewalk like a rag doll. The blow had, in fact, knocked him out. The seams where upper lip meets lower were torn back toward his ears, and his jaw rested gruesomely low, down on his chest. Blood began to flow from the tears in his face.

  DJ glanced down to see where his bullet had hit, and he saw the man’s auricular cartilage exposed and dripping blood. His patella, or knee cap, had been blown off. That was what had flown off after the second shot. It was lying next to the building. A white, translucent, cylindrical piece of cartilage with bloody ligaments hanging off.

  Suddenly DJ heard people shouting at him. There were two men crouching over Elmo. They were trying to turn him over to look at the back of his head. DJ looked down at the attacker and then back at Elmo. “Don’t move him,” he whispered. “No.”

  Then he found his voice and yelled. “Don’t move him. Federal agent. Call 911. Now!” But they continued to fuss with Elmo.

  DJ reached down and tried to pull the beard off the man. It had to be fake, but he couldn’t get it off. He’d never seen the man before, but one thing was certain, it was not McAlister.

  The people hovering over Elmo were now yelling for him to help. He turned and roared, “Don’t touch him!”

  He picked up the Blue Beryl, noticing it was in a velvet sleeve, then ran to his friend.

  Elmo looked pale but he was breathing. Blood was seeping out from under the back of his head, and the left side of his forehead was caved in by whatever he’d been struck with.

  “Did you call 911?” DJ asked the two men who had stopped to help. One was the Dakota’s doorman.

  “Yes, they’re on the way.”

  DJ felt Elmo’s pulse. It was weak but present. He opened an eyelid. No response from the pupil. Not good.

  “Listen to me. I need to go to my van over there and get my cell phone and a first-aid kit. When the ambulance arrives, I want this man treated first. Understand me? This man is a Federal Agent and he gets attention first. The guy over there has a broken jaw and he’s missing a knee cap, but he’ll live. He’ll wish he hadn’t, but he’ll live. That man gets treated second.”

  The Dakota’s doorman gave him a puzzled look. “What man?”

  DJ said, “The man lying over there on the sidewalk. He’s a criminal and I don’t want him treated before this man.”

  “Sorry, sir, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t see anyone over there.”

  DJ swung and pointed to the spot where he’d left The Clone. “That man right . . .” He froze in mid-sentence. To his utter astonishment, the man was gone. He rose to look over the parked cars. There was no one.

  He walked back to the spot where the man had been lying. He was dumbfounded. It was superhuman.

  He felt fear mixed with respect. He’d met a very few hardcore special forces types that could possibly get up and run away after that kind of punishment, but no one he’d ever directly worked with could’ve done it. Later he would get chalk from the van and circle the kneecap so that a forensics team could analyze it.

  DJ instantly classified this guy as one of the toughest people he’d ever come across. If by some miracle the man ever recovered, and they were to ever meet again, DJ wondered if he might recruit him. The way he’d remained completely immobile for two-and-a-half hours while in disguise was one of the most impressive displays of undercover surveillance he’d ever witnessed.

  He scanned the immediate horizon. The man had to be nearby; he couldn’t have gotten far with those injuries, and it was possible that he was watching DJ at that very moment. A ghost. A goddamned tough ghost.

  DJ remembered where he was, remembered that he’d better retrieve the kneecap now before the rats smelled the blood and came for it, but when he turned to look for it, what he saw—or didn’t see—terrified him. The man hadn’t just left. He’d left without a trace. The son of a bitch had taken his kneecap with him.

  Chapter 48

  An eerie, dissonant whine inserted itself in to Lisa Goodwin’s dream. The whine was created by the friction of the brass hinges connected to her apartment door, the sound of the door being slowly opened.

  Suddenly she woke, clear-minded and fully aware of where she was, but unsure if the whining noise had been real or imagined.

  With eyes wide open she lay perfectly still, the only movement the rise and fall of the sheet that lay across her abdomen. The bedroom in her studio apartment was pitch black except for the digital
clock that allowed her to see the outline of the doorway. The clock read 4:30 a.m., exactly.

  She was naked and badly wanted to pull the covers up to her neck to cover her exposed breasts, but she was frozen with fear, and not willing to take the chance that whoever might have entered her apartment could hear the thin friction the sheets would make if she pulled them up.

  She turned her head slowly so that her left ear was more directly facing the door. The silence was interrupted by a floor creak she’d heard thousands of times. It was the creak one made when walking from the front door to her bedroom.

  The sound in the dream had been real. Someone was in her apartment and he was moving toward her bedroom.

  As the intruder came down the hallway, slowly, deliberately, unseen, Lisa forced her lips together to stifle a scream. She could hear her heart beating and feel the blood screaming through her body, and she felt more scared and helpless than she’d ever felt in her life.

  Why hadn’t she taken the shooting lessons Thomas had suggested? Why hadn’t she accepted the little black .32-caliber Berretta he’d offered?

  It was too late now.

  Her small clock illuminated the white molding that framed the doorway, but beyond that the hallway was deep and black as tar.

  The floor creaked again. Closer this time.

  Lisa began to hyperventilate.

  Oh god, oh god oh god, she thought. Why can’t I move? What should I do?

  She closed her eyes and prayed and when she re-opened them there was an apparition floating in the doorway. A large white head, no body, just a zombie-face with black holes for eyes and no trace of a nose or mouth. It was chilling and it made Lisa nauseous. She grabbed the sheet and pulled it up, bunching it under her chin and began to cry.

  The head moved toward her, featureless except for the large black eyes. It floated, swinging down as it moved toward her, then back up again. Down and then up again, each time getting closer until it was next to the bed. Please God let me be dreaming, Lisa whispered.