Alpha Kill - 03 (4 page)

He talked to Drake and his fellow inmates about the need to love yourself before you could love other people. He suspected the six prisoners were, deep down, unhappy people who’d done things that were very wrong, yes, but who hadn’t in the end
chosen
to do those things. The past couldn’t be undone, Luke said, but if every man in that room looked inside himself, he could discover who he truly was, and learn to make peace with that person, and make the future a better place for himself and for society.

Drake’s first urge was to launch himself across the room and knock the guy out of his chair. But the guards were just beyond the door, armed with batons and prods, and they’d be well aware of the potential for violence in this kind of situation. One suspicious move from Drake or any of his fellow inmates, and the guards would be on them and beating them into submission.

Instead, Drake and the other five played a little ‘joke’.

They attended the weekly sessions and actually paid attention to what Luke was saying. At first they were sullen, but gradually as the sessions went on they began to show an interest, to ask questions, to go along with the exercises the counselor set for them. Drake recalled sitting on the floor at one point with his arms wrapped tightly around himself, his eyes shut, murmuring over and over again, “Come out. Don’t be scared. Come out. Don’t be scared,” to his inner being. He’d never fought so hard before to keep a straight face.

Luke was delighted at their progress. At the end of each session he summed up what they’d achieved, with the help of a whiteboard on which he charted their collective ‘journey of discovery’. The journey was a rocky, hazardous one, with mountains and rivers and ravines along the way, all of them drawn by Luke in loving detail. But Drake and his peers had built bridges along the way, developed ‘creative solutions’ to overcome the numerous obstacles, and were proving themselves stronger for it.

Luke never mentioned anything about their sentences. He didn’t have to. They all knew good behavior during these sessions would have no bearing on how quickly they got out. The authorities weren’t dumb, even if Luke was. The criminal justice system wasn’t looking to rehabilitate any of them, just to keep them away from decent folks for as long as possible, in some cases for life.

So Drake and the other five cons had no obvious vested interest in cooperating with Luke. It wasn’t going to reduce their sentences. Which made their progress appear all the more genuine.

One week before the final scheduled counseling session, Drake and the other five guys went berserk. They did it in an apparently random but actually coordinated way, each in a different area of the prison to spread the chaos maximally. They set fires, stabbed and slashed other inmates non-fatally with homemade weapons, destroyed furniture. The guards got everything under control with relative ease, and Drake received one of the hardest beatings he’d taken since he’d come to Horn Creek.

But it was worth it.

He, and every one of the other five guys, said afterwards: “Luke made me do it.”

Drake never saw or heard from Luke again. But he heard, a couple of weeks later, that the counselor was no longer working at the prison.

After that, there were no further anger-management sessions. There was no more touchy-feely crap. The way Drake liked it.

Despite all of this, despite Drake’s contempt for people who spent so much time trying to understand and explain that they disappeared up their own asses, he couldn’t help wondering sometimes just what the hell was going on in Skeet Hoxton’s head.

Skeet sat up front in the SUV, alongside the driver, Walusz the Pole. After Drake had told them they weren’t going to the welcome-home party that had set up for him, that they were in fact going to head straight for New York, Skeet had lapsed into a silence that was interrupted from time to time by angry mutters. But it wasn’t words that were slipping out of his mouth. It was unintelligible sounds, tiny whoops and barks. Drake watched the man’s head give little twitches and jerks every now and again.

He and Skeet went way back. They’d met in Chicago’s Southside twelve years earlier, when Drake had been getting together a gang to knock down a branch of Wells Fargo. It wasn’t the kind of job you could exactly advertise with a flyer tacked to a lamppost, so Drake had put the word out through the underworld channels he had access to.

Hoxton had turned up in an acid-washed denim jacket and matching jeans, his lank yellow hair filthy, his eyes rolling and his teeth grinding. Drake had thought to himself,
You gotta be kidding
. He didn’t need junkies and crankheads with him on this gig. But, surprisingly, Skeet had proved himself remarkably lucid, and with a shrewd working knowledge of the security arrangements at the bank they were planning to rob. Drake took a chance and hired him.

The job had gone down with the minimum of mess. Drake had lost only two members of his fourteen-strong gang, shot dead by cops, and while Drake had to take a couple of hostages and of course kill them afterward, there were no dumb heroics on the part of the bank’s staff or customers, so Drake hadn’t had to create a mini-massacre just to get the situation under control. During the raid Skeet had shown himself both physically fearless and mentally fleet of foot. They’d gotten away with a smaller haul than Drake had been hoping for, in the area of one point two million dollars, but all in all it was a success. To this day, the heist had never been pinned on Drake or any of the others, which left Drake with a feeling of immense satisfaction.

Drake one, The Man zero. Although The Man had gotten his revenge since then, in spades.

After that, Skeet had become Drake’s sidekick and second in command. He continued to pump his body full of shit, which Drake didn’t like, but he remained dependable and often original in his idea, so Drake let the drug abuse slide. But there was something else about Skeet, something deeply wrong with him that had nothing to do with the meth and the speed. Sometimes, unexpectedly, his eyes would roll away and his lips move silently, his face contorting in a smile or a grimace. He was prone to inexplicable rages, during which he’d punch and bite anything he could get his hands on, animate or otherwise. Sometimes Drake and a bunch of other guys would have to restrain Skeet during these episodes, before he broke his teeth or smashed every bone in his hands.

Drake asked Skeet once what his problem was. Skeet was evasive, muttering something about a head injury as a kid and a titanium plate covering up a gap in his skull. Drake didn’t inquire any further.

Now, driving southeast though the night and away from Winnebago County, Drake turned his thoughts to the immediate future. Although there’d be no partying, there were a few things to take care of before they reached New York. He needed a shower to get the blood off him, that was for sure. They needed to meet up with the others, and pick up the guns.

Skeet calmed down a little, took out his phone, and began to make calls. Afterward he turned to Drake in the backseat.

“Okay. The others are headed for a motel fifty miles from here. You can get cleaned up there. the guns are further south, so we’ll go get them next.”

“Good.” Drake thought for a minute. “We’ll need at least one more car.”

“Got two more. Rosenbloom and the twins are making their way there separately.” After a pause, Skeet said, “So we all coming to New York?”

Drake considered it. Six of them. It was probably overkill, for what he had planned. But he wanted to make sure he did this properly, so a little extra insurance was a good idea.

“Yeah. All of us.”

“Road trip, man,” Skeet chuckled. “Like Jack London.”

“Kerouac,” said Drake.

“What?”

“You’re thinking of Jack Kerouac.
On The Road.
”

Skeet’s fingernails rasped over his unshaven jaw. He looked genuinely distressed. “No, man... you sure? Pretty certain it’s Jack London.”

Drake shrugged, letting it go. He didn’t feel like dealing with one of Skeet’s rages, not now they were driving.

Walusz was an excellent driver, fast and smooth. Drake let his head rest back against the seat and allowed some of the adrenalin to ebb, the tension to flow from his limbs.

He closed his eyes, and thought about the man in New York City he was going to kill.

––––––––

V
enn’s breath caught in his throat when Beth walked in.

She’d been working all day, he assumed, and the responsibilities she carried were enormous. And even across the shop, he could see stress knitting the muscles of her brow and around her eyes.

But she still looked breathtaking.

Long auburn hair tied back, pale skin, blue eyes. A trim figure even her overcoat couldn’t conceal. That assured walk.

She’d already spotted him, and headed straight over. He stood.

“Beth,” he said, as if they’d happened to bump into one another.

She tried a smile but it didn’t fit. Shrugging off her coat, she dumped it on one of the chairs.

“You want coffee?” he said.

Her eyes dropped to the table. Venn had already bought a latte for her, the kind she liked. Beside the cup sat two sachets of Sweet ‘N Low and a stirrer, arranged neatly.

This time she did smile.

They sat, awkwardly, like a couple on their first real date.

“You smell of fish,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose.

Venn sniffed his hands. “Damn. Sorry.” And he was.

He waited for her to make the first move, watching her patiently. Beth didn’t exactly cast her eyes down, but she was clearly ill at ease. Venn glanced around the coffee shop. Maybe half the tables were occupied, and there was a four-strong queue at the counter. A low buzz of conversation ensured that they could talk quietly without being overheard.

At last, Beth murmured, “There’s something wrong at work. At the hospital.”

She took a sip of her coffee.

“You remember I’ve talked about M&M meetings?”

Venn nodded. The letters stood for Morbidity and Mortality. “Where you discuss patient deaths, things that went wrong, and your superiors bawl you out.”

Beth gave a half smile. “The idea is that it’s a
mutual learning experience
. But yes, everybody who presents a case there dreads it.” She drank more latte. “Anyhow. For the last three weeks, all of the M&M cases have been from three of the four teams. Mine and two of the others. The way it works is, each attending physician is encouraged to put forward at least one case each week for discussion, assuming there are any worthy of discussion. Most of the time, it means the four teams have approximately similar numbers. It varies from week to week, of course, but tends to average out.”

Venn studied her. “You said
three
of the four teams,” he said.

“Yes. It’s highly unusual for a team to go three weeks without having a single case to discuss. I got curious. Mostly because, if the other team was doing something exceptionally well, and avoiding screwups, then I wanted to learn from them.”

“Which team was it?” asked Venn.

“The attending is Olivia Collins.”

Venn searched his memory, then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t believe you’ve mentioned her before.” He had a fair understanding of what Beth’s work entailed, or as much of an understanding as a lay person could grasp. He knew a number of her work colleagues, either because he’d met them at social events outside the hospital or because Beth had told him about them, but Dr Collins was a new name to him.”

“I haven’t had a great deal of contact with her, relatively speaking,” said Beth. “She’s been there a few years, but is a bit of a lone wolf. Not a team player. Runs a tight ship, and a good ward, as far as her reputation goes. Her interest is renal pathology, and most of her patients have kidneys disorders of one kind or another. Anyhow, a few days ago I decided to approach her, to congratulate her on not having any M&M cases recently and to ask just what she was doing differently than the rest of us.”

“And?”

“And, I recalled that she was away this week, attending a conference in San Francisco. So I found her head resident, Raj Pillay. I asked him.”

Beth paused again.

“His reaction wasn’t what I was expecting. He got defensive.”

“Defensive?”

“Yeah. His body language, for a start. He crossed his arms across his chest, half turned away from me. He muttered something about having had a lucky streak lately. Then excused himself and disappeared in a hurry.”

“Maybe he felt uncomfortable discussing his boss’ work while she was away,” Venn suggested.

“But why?” said Beth. “He ought to be proud of it. Besides, I
know
Raj. He was a junior resident back when I was a senior. We always got on well together. It’s not like him to be this tight lipped.”

“So what did you do next?”

“Next, I decided to do a little searching myself. It wasn’t anything underhand – the department’s statistics are on the network openly, for all of us to look at. So I pulled up all the stats I could find on our four teams for the past six months. Numbers of patients treated, death rates, cases referred on to the coroner. Those are ones where the cause of death is unclear, or negligence is suspected. And I discovered a major discrepancy. Dr Collins’ team has a significantly lower mortality rate among its patients than any of our other teams. Not just in the past month, but over the last six.”

“Does she pick patients who are more likely to survive?” Venn knew of cops who massaged their successful arrest and conviction figures by choosing to take on assignments where a favourable outcome was more likely.

Beth said, “I considered that. But we operate a strict duty system. Whichever team is on call on a particular day accepts all patients who come in. So you can’t really game the system all that much. Sure, there are some transfers between teams, for various reasons. But, for the most part, each team handles a similar workload in the long run.”

“You said this Dr Collins has a special interest in kidneys,” said Venn. “Do those patients have a better outcome?”