Projection (30 page)
Authors: Keith Ablow
Tags: #Fiction, #Psychological, #Thrillers, #Suspense, #General
"Look at Satan's army," Lucas said. He shook his head. "So hungry to destroy us. They won't let us get five feet from the door."
Us
. If I had any doubt who deep into Lucas’ world I had traveled, that word erased it. I knew his dire prediction might be right, had known it ever since North Anderson warned me about friendly fire. With most of the hostages freed, Patterson and Rice were already heroes. They didn't need to take Lucas into custody or get me out of the hospital alive. Whether I took a bullet on the locked unit or on the green, I could be written off as a casualty of an assault on the building. I wouldn't rate two sound bites on New England Cable News. "Going back inside wouldn't stop them," I said. "Our only chance is to keep moving toward the truth, toward Michael."
Lucas looked down at his left arm.
I saw that his hand had begun to tremble. My stomach fell. The Marcaine was wearing off.
He looked out the doors again. "Michael," he whispered, not so much to me as to himself. He started forward.
I caught up with him. The doors slid open. A gush of icy air swept over us. We walked out into the light. The police aimed their rifles. Sharpshooters atop the State Police trailer knelt down. My eyes closed for an instant, but I forced them open and concentrated on keeping my legs moving — one foot, then the other, forward toward the past.
I noticed Lieutenant Patterson standing beside one of the Hummers. He had a clear shot at me if he wanted to take one.
When we had walked about ten yards, Michael, dressed in a brown barn jacket and jeans, emerged from the trailer and started toward us. Jack Rice appeared in the doorway. Then he stepped aside, and North Anderson joined him on the landing.
Shivers fanned over my back and up my neck. Anderson, himself an injured man, had brought Michael from Baltimore to Lynn. He had been the one to convince Michael to rise above his suffering, to try to heal his brother.
Lucas walked faster. I glanced at his hand, clenched into a fist.
Thirty seconds later Michael and Trevor Lucas stood in the center of the green, not five feet apart, staring at one another. Michael's layered flesh and patchwork hair still shocked me. I watched his eyes fall to Trevor's severed arm. Neither man spoke a word. I took a few steps back, to give them space to fuse the past with the present.
Trevor's arm rose slowly, fell, then rose again. His fist unfurled. His open hand trembled midair. Tears streamed down his cheek. He reached toward Michael's face.
Michael leaned back slightly so that Trevor's fingers just brushed his ragged skin. No one other than a burn victim really knows the horror of melted flesh, but perhaps a plastic surgeon, perhaps a brother, can begin to understand.
"I'm sorry," Trevor said. "Please forgive..."
My eyes filled up. When a man finally embraces his pain he ennobles all of us.
Michael's deformed lip quivered. "I've tried," he said, his voice breaking. "I want you to know that."
Trevor hung his head.
The rest happened so quickly that my mind replays it in slow motion, going over it and over it, sometimes in my sleep.
Michael reached behind his back. When his hand reappeared, it held a .44 Magnum. He aimed and fired.
The bullet blew off the right side of Trevor's face and the back of his skull. Blood sprayed over me. I fell to my knees next to him.
"Drop it," Patterson shouted.
Michael stood still, but held on to the gun. Another shot rang out. He crumbled to the frozen ground, a gaping hole through the base of his neck.
I looked up and saw a wisp of smoke drift from the muzzle of Patterson's rifle, still perched on his shoulder. He tilted his head away from the telescopic sight, smiled at me, then tilted his head back in line with it. I froze. He fired again. The bullet ripped into Michael's back. Patterson lowered the rifle. He raised his hand in the air and dropped it, signaling the other troopers to advance.
Hell broke loose. The Hummers scrambled over the green and perimeter road. The helicopter's blades whipped up to speed. The tank rolled forward, its gun craning skyward. What seemed like hundreds of figures in black stormed the building, some dropping from ropes on the roof, crashing through what was left of the windows.
* * *
Jack Rice and I stood together near the sliding glass doors of the hospital, waiting for the remaining hostages to be taken to safety. He'd gotten word on his walkie-talkie that the patients were found locked in their rooms. None of them had been harmed.
"You're a huge hero in this thing," Rice said. "You'll be flooded with cases. All over the country."
"I don't want another case," I said. "I'm through."
He looked at me with concern. "You say that now, but you'll be back. The phone will ring, and you'll answer. That's just the way it is."
I stayed silent.
Laura Elmonte, her chest still rising and falling almost imperceptibly, was wheeled out on a stretcher into a waiting ambulance. Nurse Vawn was next. Then I saw four troopers escorting Kathy down the corridor toward the lobby, Vawn's baby in her arms.
Rice had allowed a dozen television and newspaper photographers to record the moment. Their lenses spun in unison to focus on the scene. I knew all the horror of the last seventy-two hours would be distilled down to a few images. The obstetrician and the baby was sure to be one of them, partly because it spoke of life springing amidst death, partly because it would fit nicely on the front page of the
Boston Globe
and over the shoulder of Tom Brokaw on the
Evening News
.
As soon as Kathy walked into the night air she looked straight at me, let her eyes linger a moment, then looked away, giving me license to pretend I didn't know her, license to let her slip through the arms of the law again.
"There's your copycat killer," I said to Rice.
He whipped around. "What? What are you saying?"
"Singleton. You'll find her prints on the gun that killed Hancock and Trembley."
He squinted at me. "How can you know that?"
"Hancock and I were working the case," I said. "She had it solved."
Rice studied me several seconds, then waved to one of the troopers. He pointed at Kathy and grabbed each of his wrists, signaling for her to be cuffed.
I turned and walked away. I looked around the crowded green for North Anderson, but he was nowhere to be found. I climbed into my truck. The media was busy feeding on Kathy's arrest, so I had no trouble making my way off hospital grounds, down Jessup Lane and back to the Lynnway.
As I passed the right-hand turn to the Y, I thought fleetingly of Cynthia — that part of me still wanted to see her, that I ought to be able to forgive her. But I kept driving.
I had just made it home to my Chelsea loft when my body began detoxifying itself, shaking and sweating to reclaim its natural physiology. I lay down on my green velvet comforter and closed my eyes. Within an hour the symptoms of withdrawal had doubled. By midnight I was curled into a ball, my fists tight, my knuckles bloodless, my gut screaming.
The pain grew into something unspeakable, like some rabid beast ripping razor teeth into my flesh and soul at the same time, but I welcomed it, because I knew it was cleansing, and that it would end, and that, eventually, I would be restored.
* * *
By 4:00
A.M.
my body was battered, my mind a haze. I had slept in ten-minute respites from violent cramps and fits of nausea. And now I could not sleep at all. The image of Trevor Lucas dead at my feet haunted me whenever I closed my eyes.
I stood up quickly, which was a mistake. The room whirled around me so wildly that I lost my balance and fell back to the mattress. I righted myself again, this time very slowly. The room turned wavy, but stayed in one place.
I showered and rubbed myself pink with a towel, but never managed to get dry. The sweat kept coming.
I called a taxi and waited outside in the dark.
A gnarled man seventy or older who had driven through the night told me I was his last delivery, corrected himself by grumbling the word
fare
, then asked where we were going.
"Mass. General Hospital."
"Emergency?"
Now I knew for certain that I looked as sick as I felt. "Main entrance."
We shot through the Sumner Tunnel into Boston, the driver humming a rising and falling tune as I hugged myself to keep from shaking.
I walked through the Mass. General lobby and took the elevator to the thirteenth floor of the Blake Building. I had to hold up my medical license at the door to Labor and Delivery to prove I wasn't there to steal anyone's child.
I walked by the front desk. The ward clerk recognized me from television. "You're Dr. Clevenger," she said in that amazed way people react when televised and real life intersect.
I nodded. My gut twisted, nearly doubling me over.
"You're here to see the baby."
"Yes," I managed.
She escorted me down the hallway, stopping at a wall of windows onto the nursery. A half-dozen nurses tended to a dozen or more infants, some lying in bassinets, others cradled into swings that gently rose toward the window, then fell away.
"That's him," she said, pointing to a bassinet that held a tiny baby swaddled in a white blanket with pale blue stripes. His eyes were closed. His breathing was peaceful. His delicate hand gripped the edge of the blanket just under his chin.
"Does he have a name?"
"Isaac." Several seconds passed. "I have to get back to the desk. You can stay as long as you want."
I thanked her, and she walked away. Then I stood there, watching Isaac, catching the reflection of my own tired, cut, unshaven face in the glass from time to time. I shook my head at all the things that can happen to break a man as he grows up and away from the pure potential of infancy, all the things that had fractured inside me. And I prayed silently that this infant, born into chaos, might meet with kindness, experience joy and find passion in life.
Every one of us ought to be able to count on that much.
—
THE END
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