Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel)

by Laura Resnick

  “His heart’s stopped!” shouted one of the crouching men.

  And then I felt I’d been plunged into the East River, shockingly icy cold all over my body, a brutal awakening.

  “No!” I choked out. “No.”

  Suddenly everything was noise and color, sound and stench, light and blurred movement. Sharp, hard edges and sensations that scraped along my nerves.

  “He’s dropped a lung!”

  “Lopez!” I couldn’t move. Someone was holding me back and shouting in my ear. I didn’t hear any of the words.

  I struggled and stared in horror as someone ripped open his shirt in the cold, cold night and then plunged an enormous needle straight into his chest.

  “What are you doing?”

  “It’s all right,” someone said loudly in my ear. “They’re helping him breathe.”

  When they pulled the needle out of his lung, though, he didn’t look like he was breathing.

  When they stuck other needles into him, covered his chest wound, wrapped him up, and put a ventilator mask on his face, it still didn’t look like he was breathing.

  And when they rolled him past me on a gurney, taking him to the ambulance, it didn’t look to me as if his heart was beating again.

  • • •

  As I emerged from my shock, they had to tell me a dozen times that Lopez was alive. I had trouble believing it, remembering it.

  I remained at the scene after he was taken away in a flashing, wailing ambulance. I wanted to go with him, wanted to know where he was going—but I was confused and inarticulate, and so cold.

  A paramedic wrapped me in some sort of weird blanket that warmed me up quickly. She gave me hot tea, and she made sure that none of the blood that covered me was my own. It wasn’t—all of it had belonged to Lopez.

  When my breathing, heart rate, and temperature were all declared normal, I borrowed a spare EMT jacket, since my coat was now bloody and lying in the snow, and looked for Quinn.

  He was reviewing the crime scene with a bunch of cops, some in suits, some in uniforms. I realized after standing there for a couple of minutes that this was going to be very complicated and take a long time. The cops weren’t just interested in where Lopez fell, which was all I could remember now. They wanted to know about every shot that was fired that night, every movement taken, every single beat of the whole hideous event.

  I looked at Danny Teng’s mangled corpse, which I wasn’t allowed to go near now—as if I would want to. Uniformed cops were keeping the area secure while CSU officers prepared to go to work on the scene. More police vehicles were arriving.

  A detective told me he wanted to get a statement from me. I said I wanted to see Lopez. I had to make sure he was alive.

  Quinn noticed us talking and intervened. “She’s his girlfriend,” he told the detective. “Someone should take her to the hospital.”

  That worked, and the detective agreed. I was bundled into a squad car, still wearing my hooker costume and my borrowed EMT coat. My purse had been returned to me; I had left it lying somewhere in the park during the shooting, though I had no idea where. A couple of patrolmen took me to the trauma center where Lopez was being treated, got me some hot coffee, and told the staff there that I was with Lopez, the detective who’d just been brought in.

  Doctors spent much of the night operating on him. The waiting room filled up with grim-faced cops, some of whom kept each other company by telling detailed stories of terrible wounds that other cops had survived. Some of them knew the nurses here well, so we got detailed information as the surgery progressed.

  I was puzzled at first that his parents weren’t there, but then I remembered that they were in the Galapagos Islands, on a trip they had dreamed about for years.

  When I thought of them getting this news under those circumstances, it made me want to cry again.

  Twice more that night, while he was on the operating table, his heart stopped. Both times I heard this news, I thought mine stopped, too.

  • • •

  “They finished surgery about two hours ago,” I told Quinn when he arrived at the hospital a little before dawn. “He’s in critical condition.”

  I hadn’t slept. I felt like I would never sleep again.

  Danny’s bullet had traveled far, damaging multiple organs and nicking the heart. Most of the blood had come from an artery in the chest. Lopez might need a second surgery.

  “He’s in the ICU, and I can’t see him,” I concluded.

  This had been the most hellacious night of my life. I felt at moments as if none of this was really happening—and at other moments as if it had been happening for so long that I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever done before sitting in this relentlessly beige waiting room, unable to breathe or eat or think, unable to do anything but cling to hope and shrink from my worst fears.

  “They’ve very good here,” Quinn said quietly. “They handle a lot of wounded cops. If I were shot, this is where I’d want . . . I mean, he’s in good hands here.”

  After a while, I asked, “Where have you been all night?”

  “Some problems at the crime scene,” he said grimly.

  “What problems?” I asked, not interested, just trying to find something to think about besides the man who was lying in a hospital bed and trying not to die. “You were attacked by a murderous thug, you dealt with him, he’s dead, and Lopez is . . . is here.”

  Quinn looked around the room. There were a lot of cops there. “Can I talk to you somewhere else?”

  “I don’t want to leave. If something happens, I . . . I don’t want to leave.”

  “It’s important,” said Quinn. “Five minutes, okay?”

  I thought about it. “Okay,” I said after a moment. Maybe if I left, he’d wake up and I’d come back to good news.

  Quinn took me into the chapel down the hall, which was empty.

  “The problem,” he said, now that we were alone, “is that they found Danny’s body pumped full of a bunch of slugs from my gun, fired at close range, about six feet from where Lopez went down.”

  That was how I remembered it happening. “So?”

  “But they found Danny’s gun about twenty feet away from there. Near some of his blood, where he went down—the first time.”

  I didn’t understand. “So what?”

  “So it looks to Homicide and Internal Affairs like I fired repeatedly, at close range, at a wounded suspect who had dropped his weapon and was coming toward me, surrendering and pleading for his life.”

  I frowned. “No, he wasn’t surrendering or pleading. He was . . .” Then I realized the problem. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “We can’t exactly say that he was dead but his body was reanimated by an ancient demon who looked like it intended to eat our eyeballs if it got any closer.”

  No, that didn’t really seem like a story that the NYPD was going to accept from either of us.

  “So what have you told them?” I asked.

  “As close to the truth as I could get,” he said. “In the revised version of last night, I didn’t secure the scene and make sure Danny was dead, because Lopez collapsed before I could do that. So when you stood up to take off your coat, and you pointed and screamed, I assumed Danny had been playing possum, and was armed and attacking again, and I emptied most of a clip into him to put him down before he finished off my unconscious partner.”

  It sounded reasonable to me. “Will it fly?”

  “Well, it would if Lopez was the one telling this story and I was the one lying in a hospital bed.” He ran a tired hand over his face. “But like I told you at Antonelli’s, I had some bad incidents on my record last year. Nothing as bad as shooting an unarmed suspect, but sketchy enough that I’m getting some fishy looks now.” He shrugged. “Extenuating circumstances, though. Danny Teng was an aspiring cop killer who had just ambu
shed and gunned down my partner, and he took me by surprise while I was trying to keep Lopez from bleeding to death.”

  I didn’t like the use of that word, and I went back to the waiting room.

  • • •

  Lucky phoned during the day, deeply apologetic that he had not solved this problem before Lopez got hurt. He also let me know that, due to the role that Alan Goldman’s rhetoric had played in convincing Danny Teng to gun down a decorated police officer, the lawyer had just lost all interest in the Ning matter and was moving on.

  I sensed the fine Italian hand of Victor Gambello in that decision, but I didn’t ask any questions.

  I had washed off the blood in the ladies room, but I hadn’t slept. I was still dressed like a hooker, and I was probably on my tenth cup of coffee. My stomach lining felt like I’d need to replace it if I drank one more cup.

  “Anyhow, I’m sorry about what Danny did, kid,” said Lucky. “I should have stopped him in time.”

  “He acted so fast, Lucky. You didn’t have a chance to stop him.”

  I didn’t blame the old hit man. I didn’t even blame Quinn, a cop who’d let that thug tail him to find Lopez.

  I blamed Danny, and I was glad he was dead.

  He was ignorant, violent, stupid, and vicious, and so we had all underestimated what an opportunistic predator he was. He had paid for his predation with his life.

  I just didn’t want Lopez to pay for it with his.

  • • •

  John heard what happened, and he brought me some Chinese food, herbal tea, and a change of clothes that he’d picked up on Canal Street—making a pretty accurate guess about the right sizes.

  I hugged him tightly, grateful for all of these things, for his friendship, and for his sitting with me for a couple of hours to keep me company.

  It was a relief to change into trousers, sneakers, and a sweater. Finally the cops who entered the waiting room stopped asking each other why there was a hooker waiting on news of Lopez.

  Max and I spoke several times by phone throughout the day. I discouraged him from coming to the hospital to keep me company, though, because I wanted him to stick with his research.

  The one thing I wanted most in the world right now was for Lopez to wake up and start arguing with me about something stupid. And the next most important thing after that was for us to vanquish the demon that had attached to Quinn. This thing was too dangerous for us to let it linger here any longer. And it was getting stronger with every passing hour. It had taken too many bullets for Quinn to put it down last night. What was going to happen next time?

  I didn’t want there to be a next time.

  Approximately twenty-four hours after the shooting, a couple of detectives questioned me about it. I had watched enough episodes of Crime & Punishment to know that my story shouldn’t mesh too closely with Quinn’s—that would look like collusion. Since fear, shock, and confusion ensured that my memories of the night were pretty jumbled and vague, I played on that, contradicting myself a few times but never saying anything that would undermine Quinn’s version.

  And then, thirty-six hours after the shooting, Lopez was finally downgraded from critical condition and listed as “serious but stable.” Which were, ironically, words I knew he’d never use to describe me.

  He still wasn’t conscious, and I still wasn’t allowed to see him. A lingering dread of something going terribly wrong kept me in the waiting room for a few more hours after his condition stabilized. But finally, I went home, showered, and went to bed.

  When I woke up, it was evening, forty-eight hours after the shooting, and Lopez was still stable.

  He was also, we finally realized, demonically possessed.

  • • •

  Max, Quinn, Lucky, and I entered the hospital in the wee hours of the morning, in the dead of night, the time when people are quiet and spirits are restless.

  We had not brought Nelli with us, because there was no way she would fail to attract attention, and our plan required discretion.

  We had also not told the Chens what we were doing. This whole business had already caused considerable stress, trouble, damage, and expense to their family business. Since there was a possibility we’d get arrested for what we were about to do here, we decided not to involve any of them in this.

  “I’m just not very comfortable with this,” said Quinn. “I really think we should take a little more time to plan—”

  “We haven’t got more time,” I snapped. “We’ve got to exorcise this thing now, before it gets any more of a foothold in Lopez’s body!”

  While I had gone home to sleep after Lopez was declared out of danger, Quinn had gone to Max’s place to ask for help getting rid of his attached demon before any more people got hurt—or any more corpses walked and drooled and cackled. In his sleep-deprived stress over his partner’s shooting, he had forgotten about Nelli—until he entered the bookstore and saw her trotting toward him.

  But rather than attack him, or even growl and snarl a little for form’s sake at the demon that haunted him, Nelli had greeted him like a long lost friend, fawned on him, and asked him for a belly rub—something she only requested of her favorite people.

  Max followed up with some experiments that quickly confirmed his hypothesis that Nelli’s behavior indicated that Quinn was now demon-free.

  Which led to an obvious, inescapable conclusion.

  “That entity was too strong to just give up or get lost when it abandoned Danny’s body,” I said as we made our way along hospital corridors now, heading toward Lopez’s room. “If it didn’t reattach to you, then where did it go? To the fresh body lying right there. Someone who was dead, but just barely.”

  “Someone who could be revived,” said Max.

  “Who was revived,” I said. “Lopez died at the scene. His heart stopped. For a couple of minutes, probably. Long enough for a strong demon to enter that ‘empty house.’”

  “So that’s how it intended to ‘live again’ even though it can only possess a dead body,” Lucky said, impressed by the circle of life and death.

  “Well, it’s not taking over Lopez’s life,” I said firmly. “We’re banishing this thing tonight.”

  When we reached the unit where Lopez was being treated, Quinn flashed his badge and informed the desk staff that he was Detective Lopez’s partner, and we were an undercover unit assigned to protect the wounded cop. “We have reliable information that an associate of the dead shooter has made threats to ‘finish the job.’ I hope to receive confirmation by morning that the would-be assailant has been taken into custody. Until then, I am in charge of security for Detective Lopez.”

  As we went down the corridor to Lopez’s room, I said to Quinn, “You’re sweating. Try not to sweat.”

  “This is not a very good plan,” he said unhappily.

  Precisely because a gang leader had tried to murder Lopez two nights ago, there were two cops on guard outside his door. They knew Quinn and had no problem with his asking them to let three “specialists” into his partner’s room for a while. He didn’t explain what that meant, and they didn’t ask.

  Once Max, Lucky, and I were inside the hospital room, Max used a veiling spell on the door. From the corridor, this room would appear perfectly normal, even if exorcising a strong and opportunistic demon got a little messy.

  Based on the ancient accounts Max had found of a demon that possessed the dead in search of one who could live again, we had brought a variety of supplies. Christian symbolism had not worked during the previous exorcism, so now we had a whole collection of traditional ancient amulets and lucky charms with us. The key weapon in our arsenal, though, was the enormous water pistol I had smuggled into the hospital. I removed it from my daypack while Max completed the veiling spell on the door.

  Quinn stayed outside the room, partly to discourage people from entering while we were here, but m
ostly because there was a risk that the demon would reattach to him if he were present during the ritual.

  When I looked at Lopez lying on his hospital bed, my heart contracted. He looked much better than the last time I had seen him, but far from well. He lay perfectly still, unaware of our presence, with many tubes and devices keeping him stable. It would be a long time, I could see, before he was really whole and well again.

  And then? What about us?

  Well, we would see. What was important now was that he was alive—and that he must be freed of the demon which had quietly slid into his body when he briefly vacated it two nights ago.

  “Are we ready?” Max asked.

  “Ready as I’ll ever be,” I said, hoisting my water pistol. We had practiced this a dozen times at the bookstore tonight, to make sure I knew exactly what to do. Precision would be important here.

  “Let’s get this done,” said Lucky. “The boss sent a text saying he wants to see me before the night is over.”

  “Very well,” said Max. “You know what to do.”

  Max gingerly unrolled an ancient scroll, cleared his throat, and started chanting a three-thousand-year-old exorcism ritual—the one which, he believed based on his research, had last worked effectively on this entity.

  While Max did that, Lucky started placing various ancient charms all around Lopez on the bed, creating a circle of positive energy.

  I raised my water pistol, took aim at a blank wall, and pressed the trigger to start painting a steady stream of archaic Aramaic symbols high above our heads. Rather than holy water, we were using an elixir recommended by the ancients, made of two parts red wine blessed by a wizard and one part . . . the blood of a mystical familiar. (Nelli had been squeamish but cooperative.)

  If this worked, the amulets and chanting would draw the demon out of Lopez, and the enchanted red symbols on the wall would suck the demon out of this dimension and send it back to one where it could do less damage. It might well venture into our dimension again, but hopefully not in our lifetime—nor even Max’s.