The Pain Nurse

by Jon Talton

  He had always known Cindy would leave him for good. He was such a fool. Last night he had cried for her, for what they briefly had, for what he briefly hoped they might have again, when she had flown to his side after the tumor had been diagnosed. One last time he had melted into his ideal of Cindy, rather than the frozen reality. When they had first met, she was a vulnerable young woman who had been left adrift by the father of her child, and Will had vowed that he would never abandon her. That vow, and the time when they had seemed to glow together, those fleeting, joyful moments early on, had kept him going so long. It was like an addiction.

  But after the cry, he had returned to the odd mental box he had been in since surgery. One side of the box was his gratitude at being alive. Things had looked so grim when the tumor had first been diagnosed: it might be malignant; there might be more; he might never walk again. Another side was oddly calm, where he was a good, self-sufficient patient, working hard in rehab, foiling the dark expectations of Lauren the shrink. The third side was his periodic bouts of claustrophobia—he had to get out of this hospital, just to sleep for one night—this one he concealed, and then it receded. And the fourth was the doctor’s murder, which brought it all back. That side was unfinished business, and, sure, he was also probably using it to distract himself from his life ahead: disabled, handicapped, crippled, dreading every new pain or change of feeling. Did the box hold anything?

  “Pig.”

  The voice behind him made him start, but his adrenaline, didn’t go down once the surprise was gone. He wheeled around, forcing himself to be calm. The man who stood before him was taller than Will; in fact, he knew that the man was exactly six feet five and, at one time, had weighed 250 pounds. Now he looked heavier, with a pronounced gut straining at his leather jacket. His face had always seemed ordinary except for the dramatic thick brown eyebrows that nearly met and the slight dimple in his chin that broke the monotony. Now, it looked puffy and his features seemed too small for that face. He had taken to shaving his head, which had long made Will imagine a malevolent Pillsbury doughboy.

  “You’re the only police officer I’d call pig,” Bud Chambers said. “Or should I just say rat?”

  Will said nothing. He had never felt more vulnerable. He vainly glanced at his lap for any weapon, seeing only the small fanny pack that held a few dollars, Kleenex, and his wallet.

  “I’ve seen you look better, Borders,” the man continued, pacing around him in a small arc. “Like when you got my badge.”

  “You did that to yourself,” Will said. “You lied on your logs.”

  “Yeah,” he said quietly. “Right.” He folded his arms and looked down at Will. “So I hear you’ve been looking for me, so I thought I’d come looking for you.”

  “Where’d you hear that?” Will controlled his voice, used his calm peace officer voice.

  “Oh, you know, the old cop grapevine. You know how that goes.”

  “Sure.”

  “Like I know your wife left you. Who couldn’t a seen that coming from ten miles away? You know, I fucked her once…”

  The atrium and two converging hallways were utterly empty save for the two men and the display boards with their historic photographs and newspaper clippings. Even the normal noise of the hospital didn’t make it this far away. Will studied Chambers’ hands, thick and pale, balled into heavy fists.

  “Well,” Will said, “at least you didn’t murder her.”

  Chambers smirked with his thin, small mouth.

  “Where were you on the night of December 6th?”

  “What, aren’t you going to Mirandize me? Oh, I forgot, you’re not a cop anymore. You’re just another jerkoff in the hospital.” Chambers started to walk away but suddenly turned and came toward Will, moving his heavy body with quick strides. He grabbed the sides of the wheelchair and bent forward. His breath was foul.

  “I didn’t kill her! Got that? I didn’t kill her or any of those girls. Craig Factor was convicted! The DNA was his!”

  Will met the furious gaze, pushed all his fear down into his useless legs. At least they could be good for something. He said calmly, “DNA evidence can be tampered with.”

  Chambers pushed off the chair and stamped back. Will used his hands to brake the wheels, stopping himself from rolling backward.

  “You couldn’t prove a thing,” Chambers said. “You wrecked your own career, trying to frame me. You left homicide to go to the rat squad.”

  “I want bad cops off the street.”

  “Fuck you. You know what that makes you in the eyes of every Cincinnati cop? The only thing you could do was run me out on some chickenshit thing. So fucking what? The brass still let me retire, take my pension.” He stabbed his chest with his hand. “I’m doin’ fine. Doin’ private work now, corporate security. Consulting. It’s easy money. I don’t have to deal with the niggers and the bullshit and the rat-fuck cops like you, Borders. I’m doin’ fine. Better than you.”

  It occurred to Will that the meds must help tamp down anger. They must even dampen thoughts and reactions, even ones that had taken millions of years to be stamped into the species: “danger” and “flee.” It softened the fact that no other person was in the lobby or surrounding hallways. For the first time since his surgery he felt free of his body, projected instead into the charged space that separated him from Chambers. Will said, “You beat her, Marion, we know that.”

  His face reddened on hearing his given name. “I could beat you! God, I wish you could stand and fight like a man.”

  “She was afraid you would kill her.”

  Chambers’ head dropped slightly as if a supporting cord in his neck had snapped. He looked at Will strangely. His tongue flicked out like a lizard’s.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Will said nothing. Chambers stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. “She had a lot of ideas.” He stared past Will. “She was paranoid, fucking nuts. I put up with that for years. I wouldn’t hurt her.”

  “You did hurt her. You beat her. The cops responded to a domestic at your house. They let you off. Then she got a restraining order against you.”

  “That was just being married, give me a break. Now all these bitches are counselors and lawyers and they tell gals to ‘get a restraining order,’ and the husband’s always guilty. How many domestics did we respond to as uniforms that turned out to be nothing.”

  “How many where the husband came back and killed the woman.”

  Chambers leaned against the wall, pulled out a cigarette, and stuck it in his lips. He wanted to light up, but seeing a smoke detector overhead thought better of it. He stuck it back in the pack.

  “We used to be friends, I thought,” he said. “You were a righteous cop on the streets, Borders, back in the day, when we worked District One together. We’d all get together. We were all family. I was nothing but happy for you when you aced the sergeant’s exam and then went to homicide. What’d I ever do to you?”

  Will ignored him and wheeled six feet away and to the side, making Chambers turn to see him. Then he turned the chair toward him again and advanced. “I always wondered why you did it.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Not why you killed Theresa, because we knew about your temper.” Chambers’ left eyelid flickered when Will said the woman’s name. “And motive. You had a girlfriend you wanted to be with. And Theresa had $500,000 in life insurance, still payable to you. I didn’t even wonder about the knife. The more I learned about you, Chambers, the more it made sense. No quick gunshot for Bud Chambers. That would take away the fun, the fear. I just wondered why you killed those other women.”

  “I didn’t!” His voice was a mechanical hiss.

  “I guess you got scared when we looked at the logical suspect, the estranged husband. Pretty dumb for a cop, if you ask me, because we always look at the husband first.”

  “I was on duty…”

  “That was your first lie to us.”

  “Well, shit, so I was with Darlene. It wouldn’t be
the first time a married cop saw his girlfriend on his dinner break. She told you I was there.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure your little white-trash girlfriend was as afraid of you as your wife was. Or was she an accomplice? But we caught you in a lie about where you were the day your wife was murdered. I hate cops that lie. If they lie about one thing they’ll lie about the important things, too.”

  “I was a good cop.” Chambers swallowed the words.

  Will said, “I just never understood the others.”

  “What?”

  “The other women. Jill Kelly. Lisa Schultz.”

  He moved up to Chambers, making him dance his toes away from the wheels, vaguely aware of his foolhardiness. “I mean, if you were going to tamper with the DNA and implicate Factor, why kill those other women? Why turn the beef with your wife into a serial killing that had the whole city terrified?”

  “Factor raped her and killed her. He killed all those girls. It was his semen. A jury said so.”

  “It was his semen with Theresa. That’s the only one he was convicted for. Craig Factor had a rap sheet as a Peeping Tom. He’d never even been arrested for a violent offense.”

  “Who the hell knows what makes a psycho snap.”

  “Yeah, you should know, Marion. Two other women all killed the same way. Their clothes neatly folded. Very violent knife attack. The knife wiped clean of prints and hidden in the same room. They had been raped, the same as Theresa. Only, the funny thing, there was no semen. You made them take showers before you killed them? And the mutilation. You especially liked that, right? Got your dick all hard, that sense of power.”

  “You say. Nobody believed that.”

  “Don’t kid yourself. Who else could have done it? By the time the second murder happened, we were all over Mount Adams with stakeouts. Everybody was locked in their houses after dark. But the killings went on. Who else could do that but a cop, somebody who knew how we worked and could monitor our radio frequencies. Somebody who could get a woman to open her door.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.” Chambers sidestepped him and stood at a distance.

  “I’m just a guy in the hospital, remember? Just a curious guy. For awhile I wondered how you got Factor’s semen. How’d you do that, Marion? Or did you get one of your corrupt buddies in the evidence room to tamper with the DNA?”

  Chambers’ eyes were bright with hate. His hands beat a silent tempo at his side. “You’re out of your mind, Borders. This is over, done.”

  “No, Marion. We wish it were, but it just can’t stop, can it? You can’t stop. What was your connection to Dr. Lustig?”

  “I don’t know who the hell you’re talking about now. All I know is I was exonerated. I always said a nigger broke in and raped her and killed her, and who’d it turn out to be? Nearly had a riot in Liberty Hill, I hear, when you and Dodds chased Craig Factor down in the street and arrested him. Somehow that wasn’t good enough for you. But the killings stopped when Factor was busted.” Chambers stepped aside and moved five paces away.

  “I always wondered if you had a hard-on for me because I fucked your wife,” he added. “But I didn’t think you ever knew.”

  “We’re talking about you. Why you killed those other women. Why you started again. You came down into the hospital basement on Friday night and did the same thing to Dr. Christine Lustig. Did you even know her name?”

  “What are you talking about?” Chambers refused to look at him.

  “Did you pick her like you picked the other ones? Remember, anything you say can and will be used against you. You also have the right to an attorney.”

  “Eat shit!”

  “Christine Lustig. It was your style, Marion. The whole thing, right down to how the knife was stashed. It was you, all over again.” Will studied his face for any telltales, seeing a moon of rage. But he was breathing deeply and sweating, even though the corridor was chill. It was just like those hours after the first homicide when Will and Dodds had tried to break him. Before command had told them to back off, and then the other killings had started. Will let silence fill the space between them for one minute, then two.

  “She even looked like Theresa.”

  His eyelid. That involuntary flutter.

  “You’re done, Borders.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s reality, asshole. Look at yourself.” He spat on the floor in front of the wheelchair.

  “But we never answered that why. The criminal mind, you know? Why the other women, when you could have just tampered with Theresa’s sample and gotten off.”

  “You tell me, Sherlock.”

  “I just figure you got a taste for it…Marion. That happens with some killers. Some are full of remorse the minute the killing is done. And some, well, they get a taste for it.”

  “Well you have all the answers.” His voice was low and gravelly, yet it echoed strangely through the hallway.

  “Wrong again,” Will said, wheeling the chair again and moving so Chambers was forced to turn his head to follow him. “I don’t even know what you did with those fingers you cut off, with the rings still on them. I think you’ve still got them.”

  “You…”

  “Trophies. You still have them, don’t you, Marion? You started out as a bad cop and you turned into a serial killer. Just another scumbag who could only get it up when he was hurting a woman, who can blame it all on his childhood and find Jesus before he gets the needle. And you will get the needle, Marion.”

  Chambers shook his head and laughed. Turning, he walked past Will. Suddenly Will was falling and the floor came up hard and cold, as the wheelchair clattered harshly against the tiles. His hips and ribs shuddered from the impact. A wildfire of pain broke out in his lower back. Chambers studied him from an even higher vantage, making a clucking sound with his tongue and teeth.

  “I know about you, Borders. You don’t have clean hands. And now look at yourself, cripple.” He studied Will a moment longer, then walked away with a slow, confident saunter.

  Chapter Twelve

  Cheryl Beth rounded the corner into the old atrium and saw the man sprawled on the floor, his wheelchair on its side. One of the wheels was still turning. She ran to him and was relieved to see he was conscious.

  “I’m all right.”

  “What happened?”

  “Spill on aisle one.”

  She laughed loudly and told him to not move while she checked for any possible broken bones. Fortunately, he looked to be about her age, a dark-haired tall man. He wasn’t one of the elderly patients that seemed to find every opportunity to get over the railings of their beds or lose hold of their walkers. The nurses called them falling stars. He had sutures in the middle of his back, an incision about nine inches long, but they were in good shape, probably overdue to come out. It looked like the handiwork of Dr. Goldstein. A spinal cord tumor, she guessed.

  “I told you I was okay.” He pulled down the sweatshirt that had ridden up on his back and belly.

  “We need to get you up. Can you stand?”

  He shook his head. He was on his side with his legs still drawn up against one arm of the upset wheelchair. He raised himself to an elbow but couldn’t get any higher. She would need help. She glanced into the chapel but it was empty. No one was coming toward her from the main part of the hospital.

  Suddenly she smelled it. He must have lost control when he fell from the wheelchair. The noxious, all-encompassing odor of feces seemed at odds with the man’s handsome, lived-in face and his full head of lush wavy hair. Her well-trained gag reflex didn’t react. He started coughing and stared over her shoulder. She turned and saw Lennie.

  He must have just stepped out of the stairwell. His gray pants and blue workshirt were smeared with shit. An old green parka looked little better, turned brown with age and dirt. As always, Lennie greeted her with a rotten-toothed smile beneath the large crimson nose and its ever-expanding map of broken veins. His hair was long and wild, spiked out like the images s
he had seen of Medusa. It was just Lennie. His eyes were different, though. His stare was fixed and uncomprehending, looking into a dimension that existed only in his mind.

  “Lennie, what are you doing?”

  He didn’t immediately respond. Then, “Gotta, gotta, gotta, stop. No. Fuck, fuck, fuck…why are you doin’ this to me? Why are you doin’ this? No! No! Fuck! Fuck!” His voice rose with every word. He stared back at the fire door, then over his head.

  “Get out of here, Lennie or I’m going to have to call security. And no crapping in the hallway!” She said the last with a laugh in her voice, but he screamed at her.

  “Don’t you see him! He’s right there!”

  He seemed to be looking in the direction of the patient on the floor.

  “He’s right there, the devil!” Lennie’s eyes were huge and puffy as he stared first at the fallen man, then at her. His eyes changed with a fresh thought, as if a new reel of his private movie had been started. He licked his lips with a fat, dark tongue. “I get it, you’re one of his demon-angels. You want to confuse me!”

  “Nobody’s the devil or an angel, Lennie. You know me.” This was new. She had never seen him like this before.

  “I know! I know! Oww!” He snapped his head around, first to the right, then straight up. “Ayyyyyyyy! I hear. Yes! Yes!” His eyes focused on her anew, something primal in them. “Can’t fool Lennie, no you can’t…” His voice trailed off in a mumble. “I saw the devil kill right here…right here…” Then, “Kill the devil!”

  He said it with such a drawn-out shriek that Cheryl Beth felt a chill spread with infinite slowness across the back of her neck.

  “It’s the devil from hell, he’s coming out of the floor! Fuck fuck fuck fuck! I hear! I hear!”

  He reached into the parka and his filthy hand returned with a knife. The handle itself seemed huge and the blade was longer and black. Lennie held it out like a cross to ward off vampires, then started jabbing and swinging it against unseen phantoms. He flapped the sleeves of the parka, the movement sending out fresh waves of foul odors.