Gamma Blade

by Tim Stevens

  Beth put her phone away, and went to make her apologies to the colleagues she’d been planning to have lunch with.

  Chapter 13

  She arrived at the hospital at a little after ten past one, paid the cab driver, and went in through the main doors.

  There was an atmosphere of dynamic calm in the entrance area, one Beth recognized well from her years at the hospitals in New York City. A Saturday afternoon calm. The lull before the storm. Staff on day shift were winding down, thankful they were going off duty. Visitors who hadn’t managed to come and see their sick relatives during the working week were bustling in to make amends.

  And the doctors and nurses and paramedics who were rostered to work through the evening, and the night, were gearing up for the approaching carnage of Saturday. The carnage every health-care professional who’d ever worked in an acute hospital setting was all too familiar with.

  Beth stopped to consult a board on the wall, identified the ward Harris had been admitted to, and set off for the elevators.

  On the way up, she debated calling Venn, or texting him. She felt a little guilty for not doing so. But he’d gotten so overprotective recently, that he was sure to tell her not to go anywhere near Harris. He’d point out that the man was a potential target, seeing how Venn had interrupted his attacker before he’d been able to do even more damage to him. And that meant Beth was putting herself at risk.

  Beth, and the tiny life growing inside her.

  Reflexively, she laid a hand on her belly. She fancied, sometimes, that she felt tiny nubs of feet and fists pressing against her palm. She knew it was ridiculous at this stage. But she’d spoken with other expectant mothers over the years, and many of them swore blind that they felt the baby moving long before science said it was possible.

  The elevator doors opened and Beth stepped out into a corridor. She found the ward at the end, to the left, and pushed through the doors.

  Heads looked up from the nurses’ station as she entered. One of the staff touched the arm of another, a man. He stood up and put down the phone receiver he’s been talking into and said, “Dr Colby?”

  “Yes.”

  “Craig Sanders.” He came out from behind the station and extended a hand. She shook. He looked around fifty years old, tired but self-assured. “Thanks for coming down. He’s still unconscious.”

  Sanders led her down the ward toward a row of side rooms. Halfway down, he peered in through the glass window in one of the doors. Then he opened the door and held it for Beth to enter.

  As she stepped through, she caught a movement off to her side, and glanced over. An orderly, who’d been stacking dirty linen onto a trolley, had turned his head toward her.

  Their eyes met.

  She recognized that look of appraisal, the way he was evaluating her without taking his gaze from her face. She recognized it because it was the way Venn had looked at her, on that first terrible night they’d met in Manhattan three years ago.

  It was a cop look.

  Beth didn’t have time to think about that, because Sanders followed her into the side room and closed the door and she looked down at the man in the bed.

  *

  “Guy’s got scars like you won’t believe,” said Sanders.

  He was lifting the prone man’s eyelids in turn with his thumb, shining a pencil light into each pupil.

  Beth said, “Scars?”

  “On his chest and abdomen.” Sanders put the flashlight in the pocket of his white coat and drew back the blanket. The unconscious man was in a hospital gown, which Sanders deftly lifted away above his waist.

  Beth saw the thin white scars criss-crossing the taut abdomen, like aircraft contrails across a pale sky. Most of the injuries had been expertly repaired by a surgeon’s hands, but there were one or two which had healed raggedly. There were also a couple of puckered puncture wounds, as if caused by a blade. Or a bullet.

  “Also some on his legs,” Sanders said. “Plus, his CAT scan showed a possible old fracture of his skull over the right parietal region. This guy’s been in the wars.”

  “A soldier?”

  Sanders glanced at her. “I didn’t mean literally, but yes, it’s a possibility.” He pulled the blanket back over the patient. “The cops want to talk to me again later. I’ll tell them all of this. Right now, I need the name of somebody who knows him, who’s connected to him, so the bureaucrats can bill them.”

  He sounded disgusted. Beth knew exactly how he felt. The minute a John Doe turned up for treatment, the pen-pushers and bean-counters started putting pressure on the clinical staff to establish exactly who was going to pay for the care.

  She moved to the right side of the bed, near the window, and gazed down at the man lying there.

  James Harris. If that was his real name.

  His eyes were closed, his face peaceful in repose. Quite a good-looking man, really, with his thin nose and sharply defined jawline, his full head of black hair threaded only sparsely with gray. Very different from Venn, whose attractiveness was rawer, less refined.

  As was her custom with her patients, Beth took hold of his hand.

  For an instant, she felt the squeeze, the minutest exertion of pressure against her fingers.

  She looked up quickly at his face. It didn’t reveal anything.

  Beth decided she’d imagined it.

  The monitor by the side of the bed told her that his blood pressure was fine, his pulse strong and steady. He appeared to be in top physical condition, and as Sanders had said, the chances were good that he’d wake up and suffer no long-term consequences.

  Beth watched him for a full ten minutes before Sanders said, “Well, I guess it was worth a try.”

  He ushered her out. Back in the ward, she looked around for the orderly who’d stared at her, but he was gone.

  She said to Sanders: “Call me if he wakes up, okay? Or if you need anything else.”

  “Will do.” Sanders paused, frowning. “Say, you here for the AMA conference?”

  “Yes.”

  “Damn. I couldn’t make it, even though I work here. Couldn’t swap out my duties.”

  Beth said, “I’ll get you a copy of the conference abstracts, if you like.”

  Sanders beamed. He shook her hand again. “And they say New Yorkers are jerks.”

  “They do?”

  *

  On her way back down in the elevator, Beth thought about the man upstairs. James Harris.

  She thought that his behavior, his asking after her, and his scars, were significant. How, exactly, she didn’t know.

  But she reckoned Venn ought to be informed.

  She took out her phone and dialed his number.

  It went to voicemail.

  Beth said: “Hey. Only me. I got called to see our guy in the hospital. He’s still unconscious, but he woke up briefly. There’s stuff about him you might be interested in. Call me when you have a moment, ’kay? Love you.”

  She found a taxi outside the front entrance, and headed back to the conference.

  Chapter 14

  Venn was up, showered and shaved and dressed, by eight-thirty. After Beth had left, he’d dozed off once more, and it was only a clatter in the corridor outside the room that had woken him.

  He considered having breakfast in the hotel restaurant - the smells of fresh bakery and bacon lured him in that direction like a siren’s song - but he recalled that Estrada had said she’d swing by around nine, and he didn’t want to miss her. So he settled for a cream cheese and lox bagel and a pint of coffee from a kiosk in the lobby, while he watched the entrance.

  The young intern from the night before had been right. Venn’s neck, and the back of his head, hurt like hell. Beth had left him a tiny plastic bottle of ibuprofen tablets and he crunched some with his breakfast. If they were going to help, they were taking their time, because when he stepped out through the grand glass doors of the hotel into the Florida sunshine he felt the pain pierce his eyes like a lance.

 
As if on cue, while Venn was blinking against the glare, trying to orient himself, a car pulled up onto the sidewalk, stopping a few inches away from the tips of his boots.

  It was a beat-up old Chevy station wagon, with rinds of rust lacing its edges and a rear door that had a sizable dent in it. Through the lowered window nearest to him, Venn saw Detective Lieutenant Estrada’s thin face peering out.

  “Jump in,” she said curtly.

  Venn got in the passenger side. He winced slightly as the door groaned shut.

  “This your regular car?” he asked.

  Estrada swung out into the traffic.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I mean, your detective’s car?”

  “Uh-huh.” Her tone was belligerent.

  Venn felt something rustling against his feet. He looked down, saw empty potato chip packets, a rolling Starbucks cup.

  He said, “You ever see that TV show Columbo?”

  Estrada didn’t look at him, just glared though the windshield. “Everybody knows Columbo. What’s your point?”

  “I dunno,” said Venn. “Just that this whole slob schtick seems more suited to LA, or New York. Not Florida. I thought you guys were all Miami Vice down here. All sharp suits and designer stubble and attitude. And hot rods to drive around in.”

  He glanced over at Estrada. She had her lower lip gripped between her teeth, as if she was reining in a stream of invective.

  “You got kids, Venn?” she said.

  He kept his smile to himself. “Not yet.”

  “Well, I have. So when you get them, you’ll learn some life lessons. You’ll learn that all this posing that we buy into, all this image, is worth jack shit. You’ll start wearing home-knitted sweaters, because that’s all you’ll be able to afford, and because they’re comfortable. You’ll learn that a home-cooked meal is worth far more than a fancy dinner at a high-end restaurant. You’ll discover that a car that seats three in the back, and won’t cripple you financially every time you fill up its tank, and can tolerate the occasional knock and scrape, beats the pants off a candy-ass midlife-crisis-mobile. In other words, Venn, when you have kids, you learn to grow up.”

  Venn looked through the windshield, letting the silence balloon.

  He said, at last: “Lecture over?”

  “You son of a bitch.” But she said it mildly.

  “So how many kids you got?” he asked.

  “Two. Girl and a boy. Aged twelve and nine.”

  “Worth it?”

  He expected Estrada to glare over at him and say, hell, yes. But instead, he saw the hint of a smile playing about her lips.

  “You think you’re smart,” she murmured. “And I guess you are. But you’re not as smart as me.”

  “How so?”

  “That woman of yours. Dr Colby. Beth. Either you’re planning to have kids, soon, or else she’s got a bun in the oven already.”

  Venn faced forward again. He felt a little flustered.

  “How in the hell would you presume to know that?”

  Beside him, Estrada sighed theatrically. “No man I’ve ever known, who isn’t already married with a family of his own, has ever asked me about my kids. None of them. A guy your age, who’s engaged, and who takes an interest in that kind of thing, is looking to pop out one of his own.” Now she did look across at him. “Am I right, or am I right?”

  Venn thought: Touché.

  They settled into a few seconds’ silence, as she took the car onto a wide boulevard heading south. To their left, the sea glimmered under the morning sun, tranquil, beautiful.

  Venn said, “So where are we going?”

  “To the boat,” said Estrada. “The Merry May. The guy who owns it, O’Reilly, hotfooted it down from Orlando last night, as soon as we called him. He’s waiting for us there.”

  *

  Estrada parked the station wagon in a side street and stuck a Police sign on the dashboard. They headed across the main road toward the marina.

  In the daylight, the boat looked even more sleek, more impressive, than it had last night. The brilliant white of its hull reflected the morning sun like light off a finely honed blade.

  Like last night, there were people moving around in the cabin, and on deck.

  As Venn and Estrada approached the boat, a man on deck turned to look at them. Estrada held up her shield.

  “Mr O’Reilly’s expecting us,” she said.

  The man nodded and disappeared into the cabin. A few seconds later, a second man came out. He was small, wiry, in his early fifties or possibly a little younger, Venn thought. He had the kind of face that was weathered by the wind and the sea. His thinning hair was still fair, and his reddish-gold beard was only flecked here and there with gray.

  “Detectives,” he called. “Come on up.”

  They walked up a gangplank and stepped onto the boat. The man offered his hand and they both shook. His palm was callused, as hard and rough as a rhino’s hide.

  “Mark O’Reilly,” he said.

  Venn sized him up. He was dressed casually in chinos and an open-necked shirt, with boating shoes and no socks. His accent had a harsh edge, though his tone was friendly enough. Venn thought he recognized it as Northern Irish.

  O’Reilly led them down into the cabin. Two men looked up as they entered. O’Reilly nodded to them and they disappeared upstairs.

  The lounge was plushly furnished in leather. O’Reilly gestured.

  “Take a seat, please. Coffee? Water?”

  They both declined. O’Reilly poured himself a glass of water from a decanter and sat in an armchair opposite the two detectives.

  “How may I help you?” he said.

  Estrada said, “You’re aware there was an incident here on the marina last night.”

  “Yes. Something about a man getting attacked on the street, and a police chase.”

  “And you know why we called you?”

  O’Reilly looked unfazed. “I gather around the same time there were some men watching my boat.”

  “They weren’t just watching,” said Venn. “I saw them. They were waiting for something.”

  A slight frown creased O’Reilly’s tanned brow. “Sorry, Detective, but I might be missing something here. People look at my boat all the time. She’s a beauty.” His eyes narrowed. “Do you mean these men might have been planning on boarding the boat? Invading it?”

  “Possibly,” Venn said.

  Estrada said, “Do you have any enemies, Mr O’Reilly?”

  O’Reilly gave a half-smile. “Who doesn’t, these days? But these men could have been strangers. Criminals looking to steal my boat. There’s always a risk of that.”

  “There were people on board the boat last night,” said Venn.

  “Yes. My two assistants. I leave them here whenever I’m away. Security, for just such an event as apparently played out last night.” He shrugged. “Or didn’t, as it turned out. Thankfully.”

  Estrada said: “Those two assistants. Were they the guys who were in here just now?”

  “Yes. I’ll call them for you, if you like.” He started to get up.

  Estrada held up a hand. “We’ll talk to them separately in a minute.”

  O’Reilly studied her for a moment. “Mind if I ask you a question, Detective?”

  Estrada waited.

  “Do you have any idea who these men might be? You seem unusually interested in a crime that didn’t happen.”

  Venn said, “We believe the men may have been connected to a local gangster.”

  O’Reilly looked at him curiously. “Gangster?”

  “Ernesto Justice Brull,” said Estrada. “Ever heard of him?”

  O’Reilly paused for a second, as if considering. “No,” he said. “But if you’re right, if gangs are involved in this, then I need police protection.”

  “Why?” asked Venn. “What have you done that would make gangsters want to target you, or your boat?”

  If O’Reilly was rattled, he didn’t show it. “Pardon
me, Detective, but that’s just another version of the question: how long is it since you stopped beating your wife? I haven’t ‘done’ anything.” He transferred his gaze to Estrada once more, as if recognizing she was the leader of the pair. “To go back to my last point. If I’m at risk from these people, then I don’t want to take any chances. I have private security, as I’ve said. But I have a right to police protection, if you’ve identified a threat.”

  “But we haven’t identified a threat,” said Estrada. “We’ve just noted that the men watching your boat may have had links to organized crime.”

  “Like you said, Mr O’Reilly,” said Venn. “Maybe those men were just admiring your beautiful boat.”

  O’Reilly locked eyes with Venn. There was a slight irritation there, but it was far less intense than Venn expected, considering how they were baiting the guy. Venn got the impression of a man capable of supreme control.

  “If that’s all, Detectives?” he said. “I came all the way down from Orlando for this interview. I must say, it’s proven to be less than edifying. And I have things to do.”

  He stood up.

  Estrada and Venn remained seated.

  Estrada said, “It’s probably best that you don’t venture too far, Mr O’Reilly. Stay within traveling distance of Miami. We may need to speak to you again.”

  O’Reilly actually laughed. “Spoken like a TV cop.”

  Venn stood. He towered over O’Reilly, and although he didn’t step toward the man, the discrepancy was obvious.

  “You’ve got a smart mouth,” Venn said. “Not always such a good idea, when you’re talking to police officers.”

  O’Reilly grinned at him. He had the bearing of a man confident and secure in his own environment.

  “You’re reading me all wrong,” he said easily. “I fully support the law, and I’m eager to do whatever is necessary to assist you fine people in the execution of your duties.”

  He walked past Venn to the door of the cabin and opened it, standing aside.

  Venn went up first, followed by Estrada. On the deck, the two men from down below turned immediately. One was Hispanic, one white. The first man was small and tight and hard-looking, the second burly and with an odd blankness in his eyes.