Projection (5 page)

"No?"  He grinned and nodded over my shoulder.

I had the feeling I might be talking to someone crazy.  "No," I said.

He nodded again.  "Take a look."

I turned around and saw Lucas standing inside the glass doors to the hospital lobby.  He was still wearing his scrubs and his cast.  Several other figures were beside him, but the panes of glass adjacent to the door were fogged up, and I couldn't quite make them out.  Lucas took a step forward, and the doors slid open.  He barely poked his head out to look left and right, then stepped back inside.

"You have nothing to be afraid of," Winston blared.

A moment later, Lucas and four others walked out the door.  He was in the middle of the first row of three, arm in arm with two nurses dressed in white who looked petrified.  Each woman's outside arm was held aloft by a man behind her, and each had a large knife at her throat.  The five of them looked like a bizarre bird with steel fangs.

Winston let his bullhorn drop to his side and took a step back.

"Come talk with me," Lucas called to him.

Winston backed up another step.

I heard Rice's police radio crackle.  "No clear shot," a voice said.

"Damn," Rice said.

"I don't recognize the big one in back on the left," Hancock said, "but the one on the right, the black man, is Zweig."

"One doctor to another, like you said," Lucas baited Winston.  "Face-to-face."

Winston turned and looked at the three of us watching him.

"We have nothing to fear from one another," Lucas said.  "We're both men of honor."

"Don't do it," I said, just loud enough, I hoped, for Winston alone to hear.

Maybe it was my telling him what to do, or not to do, that made Winston take the chance.  I can't say.  Maybe I could have helped him more by staying silent, giving him a little quiet time to remember data from some obscure journal article that would justify a retreat in the name of science.  As it happened, he looked back at us once more, then walked slowly toward Lucas.

The two men stood about ten yards from the front door of the hospital, only a few feet apart, staring at one another.  Winston said something I couldn't make out.  Then Lucas smiled, and I saw his mouth from a single word: 
Harpy
.

I knew from a college course in Greek mythology that a Harpy was a voracious monster with the head and trunk of a woman and the tail, wings and talons of a bird.  "Get out of there!" I yelled to Winston.

Winston took a step back.  The bird advanced on him.  He turned to run, but its two wings — each fashioned of a man and a woman — closed around him.  He fell to the ground with the bird on him.  I heard his muffled screams and saw his fingers scraping the frozen earth as he struggled, in vain, to crawl away.

Rice fumbled for his radio.  "Nail that fucker," he sputtered into it.

"Still no shot," a voice answered.

"Nothing clear and clean," another voice responded.

"No go," a third barked.

Winston's screams died out in ten, fifteen seconds that passed like an hour, and Lucas and the others stood up, striking the same strange pose as they had before.  Winston lay in a fetal position, motionless.  The two knives dripped blood — Winston's blood, I was sure — down the necks of the two women hostages.

Lucas’ face was blank, but his eyes were wild.  They locked on mine.  "My life!" he screamed.  "Give me my life!"  Trickles of blood ran from the corners of his mouth, down his chin.  His face went blank again.  He and the four others slowly backed up toward the hospital, the doors opened for them, and they were gone.

Chapter 3

Rice exploded toward Winston like a missile on tiny legs and was the first to reach him, just ahead of Hancock and me.  He crouched down and rolled Winston onto his back, then shot immediately to his feet again.  We all stood there, transfixed with horror.  Twenty or more stab wounds to Winston's neck, chest and stomach oozed blood.  One eye was punctured, the other wide open, staring at the sky.  A hunk of his lower lip was missing.  Blood streamed down his chin and neck and fed a crooked rivulet running on the pavement.

Two paramedics — one female and one male — arrived, but stood a respectful distance behind Rice.

Hancock made the sign of the cross and started whispering a prayer.  Just as she did, a pink bubble formed at Winston's nostril, then disappeared.  We watched it happen two more times.  Then nothing.

"My God, he was breathing," Rice said.  He shook his head, no doubt thinking the same thing I was — that Winston was most of the way on his journey out of this world and better off finishing the trip.  "We have to try," he said quietly.  He knelt down and listened at Winston's nose for breathing.  Apparently hearing none, he gently tilted Winston's head back, then grabbed his chin and pulled his lower jaw down to open his mouth and start resuscitation.  As soon as he did, blood poured from the corners of Winston's mouth.  The rivulet on the pavement swelled to a puddle.  Rice's hands started to tremble.  "His tongue's gone," he said.

I saw another pink bubble advance and recede.  I was certain Hancock and Rice saw it, too, but none of us mentioned it.

"Get a stretcher," Rice shouted up at the paramedics.

The male paramedic ran toward the ambulance.

"Go help him," Rice ordered the woman.

She looked confused.  "It's right near the door, not buried under anything," she said.

"Go!" Rice barked.

She turned and jogged away.

Rice moved his hand, which I now noticed was too big for his body — a mitt of a hand — and covered Winston's nose and mouth, sealing his fate.  Hancock and I exchanged glances, but didn't try to stop him.  He kept his hand there until the paramedics had almost reached us with the stretcher.  When he stood up there wasn't a hint of breath left in Winston.  "Bring him over to Stonehill Hospital," he told the two of them.  "No rush."  He walked away.

*            *            *

I waited until after 2
A.M.
to start the drive back to Chelsea.  I felt the same strange rootedness to the spot where Winston had died as a murder might to the scene of his crime.  Or perhaps what I felt was closer to the connection of a general to a battlefield.  I had held fast to my principles, or what I thought them to be, which meant holding back certain facts about the killings.  My heart had told me it was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, and now two more people were dead.  I didn't want to leave Lynn State at all, but Hancock suggested I go home to rest and keep my beeper on in case she needed me.  I worried she would wonder why I felt responsible for what had happened, but I was so full of guilt I imagined anyone could sense it surging through me.

I rolled down both front windows and let the cold morning air whip across my face.  I tried to convince myself I was justified letting Lucas sit in prison and be tried for crimes he had not committed.  His hands were far from clean, after all.  He had known who was responsible for the murders long before I had, yet had done nothing to stop the carnage.  On the contrary, he had relished his connection to the violence, violence that had ultimately taken Rachel from me.

At least I had put a stop to the killing.

The trouble was I didn't believe I had the right to condemn anyone, not even Lucas.  I remembered feeling revolted during the murder investigation when he suggested the two of us were alike.  Now, with the deaths of Grace Cummings and Lawrence Winston, my hands were bloodied, too.

The Schooner Pub rose up on the left-hand side of the road.  You need a drink, I told myself.  That's how it starts. 
You need
.  And the need was real, always is, real enough for me to stop the car and wait for the red arrow to turn green and make the U-turn back to the Schooner lot.  Because I did need something — not a drink, even my brain could register that much.  I needed the courage to face what I had to do next.  And I didn't have it.  The booze makes you forget that you're a coward, for a while, until a while runs out, and whatever you needed to face has grown claws and become a monster you don't ever want to meet.  And then the monster starts pissing out the booze faster than you can pour it in, and then you
need
something else, like cocaine or speed or, Go help you, heroin, first up your nose, then in your lungs, then into your veins, to scramble your neurotransmitters enough to keep the beast off balance.

I didn't turn the engine off.  I sat in the Schooner lot seized by a memory of myself lying in bed with Kathy not a year before, my nasal passages caked with dried blood, my left arm numb to the elbow, wondering whether I would make it through the night or die, then remembering another stash of coke in the armoire, stealing out of bed and feeling for it between folded towels and blankets in the dark, reassured that my fingers could still twist off the wire tie around the tiny Baggie, then inhaling the powder in short, sweet blasts that made my heart quicken and my chest tighten and my mind freeze mercifully between thoughts.  And that image, frightful because it was not only revolting, but strangely seductive, got me screeching back on to the Lynnway.

"You're completely alone," I whispered, hearing the words half as an indictment of my lifestyle, half as a comfort.  I had no family to check in with.  There would be no message on my machine from someone making sure I hadn't gone off the deep end once and for all.  My friends were bartenders and bookies and cops and the city coroner.  Good people, every last one of them.  And I loved them, but I didn't know whether that was because we were close or because they knew enough (or had been through enough hell themselves) to keep their distance.  Maybe a light touch and the gift of space are the greatest things you can give a man like me, cornered too many times by a father raging through the night, a bottle in one hand, a belt in the other.

I had let Rachel in close.  Then I had lost her.

I saw the round tower of West Lynn Creamery coming up, across from Webster Avenue, which starts with a boarded-up Pizza Palace and ends with the Lynn Y.  I swerved to make the hard right on to Webster, guessing that Cynthia would have headed back to her place when I hadn't come home within a few hours.

I stayed in my truck a minute or two deciding whether to go inside. What was I there for, after all?  If it was sex, I could have it delivered.  A different girl every time.  If I was trying to bury my grief over Rachel's death or escape my guilt over the deaths of Grace Cummings and Lawrence Winston, then I was just drugging myself again.

I ground the heels of my hands into my eyes.  I was thinking too much — my chief defense against feeling too much.  I wanted to see Cynthia.  I got out of the truck.

The Y had been a Comfort Inn for about a year in the early 90s, until whoever had been betting on Lynn's revitalization realized the city wasn't coming back from the grave, and donated the building for a tax credit.  Over the years that followed, the place became a way station for schizophrenics, addicts and prostitutes coming from someplace worse or going someplace worse, but together enough for the time being to turn their welfare checks into $380-a-month or $22-a-day rent, instead of drink, dope or lottery tickets.

The staff's attempt to keep up the lobby had resulted in a surreal combination of Paine furniture and pained people.  On my way to the reception desk I passed a crumpled man and woman, past middle age, seated on separate love seats in front of a knotty pine false fireplace.  The love seats faced one another, but the man and woman made no eye contact.  He stared up at the mirror over the mantel, she, into the empty hollow where a fire would burn.  I couldn't tell whether or not they were a couple, whether or not they were on their way up in life or down, whether this was a pit stop or their last stop.  But even in my burnt-out state, those questions were enough to make me want to plant myself in one of the armchairs near them and burrow into their story.  The impulse was no surprise to me.  I have always felt an undertow of humanity pulling me into desperate lives, probably because I grew up in desperation myself.

The desk clerk, a young man who suffered what looked like cerebral palsy, informed me there were no visitors allowed after midnight, then rang Cynthia's room after I slipped him ten bucks.  She told him to send me up.

I took the stairs to the third floor.  The door to room 305 opened with one knock, and Cynthia stood there in a white T-shirt that barely reached her thighs.  She tilted her head, and her straight, light brown hair cascaded to one side of her face.  "I waited a while, then left," she said.  "I figured something bad must have happened at the hospital."

I swallowed hard.  "Things went wrong."

She held out her hand.  I took it and followed her into the room.  The only light came from a set of sconces on either side of the bed.  Only half the bulbs worked, but they showed what I expected — an economy hotel room part of the way to disrepair, with stained wall-to-wall carpeting and faded, floor-to-ceiling floral draperies.  I was surprised to see what looked like a pretty competent oil painting of a winged woman in a flowing violet robe hanging over the bed.

"Two people were killed," I said, not knowing why I was confiding in her.

Cynthia turned around.  She had the rare ability to say nothing.  And she had those eyes that seemed to understand everything.  Rachel's eyes.

I let go of her hand and just stood there in front of her.  I looked out the windows into the darkness.  "One of them was a patient.  A woman close to seventy.  The other one was a psychologist who was there trying to help."

"How did they die?"

"Do you follow the papers?"

"Not much."

"There's a doctor named Trevor..."

"Well, everyone follows
that
," she said.

"Right."  Sometimes I forgot how much media attention the case had generated.  "Trevor Lucas took over the psychiatric unit where he's being locked up during the trial.  It looks like he threw the woman out a fifth-story window.  She'd been cut up badly.  The psychologist was killed — stabbed to death — trying to negotiate with Lucas face-to-face."