Raney & Levine (3 page)

“Just that Beethoven,” they heard her say. “I’ve got my iPod
in case he wakes up.”

3


J
enna Walsh tried to open her eyes. She couldn’t. Her
head was exploding. Her belly too. The pain,
the pain…

Grit from the cold ground dug into her cheek. Bits of glass,
too, it felt like.
She had to get out of here;
got her eyes open a slit.
The light was suddenly different. Darker, the shadows longer.
How long had
she been here?

She had to get help. Her body trembled, but she managed to
reach one hand out. Her fingers dug into the ground and she struggled, then
clawed her way forward, inching toward the alley entrance. How stupid she’d been,
to take a shortcut through here. Someone…who?...had attacked her from behind,
punched and kicked her when she was down and curled into a ball with her eyes
shut tight in horror. Oh God,
why?

Her belly was so heavy, but she scrabbled forward, on her left
side mostly, her elbow and knee helping her to push herself. She was inching
closer. Just yards ahead, she saw people on the sidewalk. Traffic out there,
horns blaring.

“Help,” Jenna cried in a feeble rasp. No good, too weak.
They’d never hear her.

It was
moving
, the thing her attacker had put under
her sweater. It was writhing and snapping against her chest as if it, too, was
trying to escape. Oh God…

Whimpering in horror, with her head hurting more, she
struggled past a green Dumpster.

Then her vision blurred, and something sharp sliced through
her left palm. She cried out and tried to focus on her hand, dripping red from
a glinting glass shard.

“Noo…” Shaking, on both elbows, she tried to pull out the
shard, but her vision dimmed further, and suddenly it was hard to breathe. She
heaved her shoulders up, her mouth open, and managed to pull in a gasp.

“Help!” she cried again with her last strength, her voice
ragged and desperate.

She thought she saw someone glance her way, but a second
later her vision quit. The alley around her flipped, and a high, queer ringing
started in her ears. She gave up. Lay her head down on cold ground, struggling
to breathe.

There was a shout, and another shout. She was dimly aware of
sudden footsteps around her, hands on her, voices shouting “9-1-1!” and
“ambulance!”

A gentle voice, bending close. “Who did this to you?”

“Don’t…know.” Her gasp was inaudible. The ground beneath her
swung crazily. Her eyes opened but she couldn’t see. All was black.

“Can you describe your attacker?” The voice came closer to
her face. Strong hands cupped her cheeks.

“Didn’t see…” she managed.

“You didn’t see your attacker?”

“No. Came from…behind.”

From far away she heard other voices.

“No sign of rape.”

“Found her purse, doesn’t look like robbery. Name’s Jenna
Walsh.”

“Jeezus! Oh God, what’s this under her sweater?”

“Holy hell. Don’t touch, it’s evidence. Looks half dead
anyway.”

Please…get it…off…me…

Her shoulders heaved desperately from air hunger. Her eyes
squeezed in pain, her head hurting worse. Was that a siren she heard? Or the
ringing in her ears? She felt hurried hands lifting her, voices babbling, a
mask with new, cool oxygen placed over her mouth and nose.

So kind, the people helping her.

She wanted to tell them to be careful, oh please save
yourselves, there’s a bomb in my head.

It’s going to go off…

4


I
n Jill’s on call room, he leaned against the closed
door with his arms folded tightly.

“What’re you doing?”

“Changing into jeans.” She had her pants around her knees.

“What for? Your scrubs look like running pants.”

Jill looked down. It was true, the navy scrubs both of them
wore didn’t look like scrubs. Okay, they’d do. She pulled her scrub bottoms
back up.

“Who says I’m running anywhere?” She whipped over to her
chest of drawers for oversized sunglasses. Peeked into the mirror at her
intense, big green eyes as she put the glasses on, then pulled on a baseball
cap low.

“You look like a female Unabomber.”

“That zealot’s hollering about Jesse! Outta my way.”

She made for the door. He stopped her, putting both hands on
her slender shoulders. “Lemme go!” She squirmed angrily, getting nowhere.

“Maybe it’s the ones yelling with signs you
don’t
have to worry about,” he said, grappling with her. “Oof! Please stop. There’ll
be plain clothes cops in the crowd, security cams-”

“I want his ugly pic on
my
phone.”

“We’re back on duty in twenty minutes.”

“It’s enough!” She yanked away and stomped around the little
room. Her hands raised helplessly and tears came, she couldn’t help it. “Okay,
I’m a mess.” She pulled the glasses off and swiped angrily at her glistening
cheeks. “I’m just…worried about Jesse. What’s going to
happen
to him?”

“I’m worried too.” David’s voice softened. He left the door,
exhaling, and took her in his arms. She slumped, melted into his hug, and felt
comforted…for seconds. Then pulled away and resumed her stomping.

And last night’s argument.

“I found him and I love him,” she said.

“He’s not a puppy.” David sank onto the chair by the bed and
leaned forward tiredly. Their argument last night had lasted till one and
they’d had to get up at six. Upset, neither had fallen right to sleep.

“The problem,” he said slowly, “is us
.
We’re
magnets for weirdos.
Our faces have sold tabloids, blanketed the media. If
you…” A hesitation. “…or we adopted him it would mark him for life, make him a
target for every bully and whack job. If we went into
hiding
we’d still
be recognizable, and he’d be tagged as that…freakazoid kid like July’s killer
called him. Have you forgotten?

“How could I?” She’d stopped, breathing hard, and stood
glaring at the closed door.

David stared unhappily at the floor. “Picture Jesse at age
five, or fifteen. How will he feel knowing he was conceived in a lab and
grown
in a fish tank?
That’s what mean kids will call it. Assuming religious nuts
like your pal out there -
who call him evil
- don’t do worse to him.” A
resigned gesture. “But if he gets adopted and grows up anonymously… Ow! What
are you doing? My arm doesn’t bend that way.”

She was pulling off his white jacket. “It’s chilly out,” she
said, tossing it onto the bed, getting his camouflage jacket from a hook on the
wall and pushing it to his chest.

“Put this on. We can argue about the big thing later. For
now it makes me crazy to hear
any
child called evil
- a baby, for
God’s sake!
Don’t you just want to see?
What if the cops and cameras
miss something?”

“They won’t.” David patted the bed. “Let’s just lie down for
twenty minutes. Maybe we won’t get called right away and we can - ow, my arm
doesn’t bend that way.”

She was yanking on a sleeve of his camouflage jacket, and he
let out a resigned breath. Jill was Jill, he knew. Relentless yet vulnerable,
worried about everyone, and eerily smart. Saw and sensed things that others
didn’t. Got into trouble too, sometimes bad trouble. Could be headed for a
shouting match out there.

He pulled on his other sleeve and a Denver Broncos cap.

“No,” she said. “The whole world knows you’re from Denver.”

He muttered something under his breath and switched to a
Yankees cap.

She wriggled into a long, striped poncho and pulled her
shades and cap back on. Minutes later they exited the hospital not via the
ambulance bay, but from its teeming front entrance.

They blended. Passed TV vans and busy reporters,
approached the rear of the crowd and edged into it midway. Excited spectators
pushed against the yellow barriers cops had up to protect the E.R. entrance.

The Zealot had taken a position away from other signs,
stiff-backed to his stretch of barrier, facing the jammed sidewalk and yelling
into his megaphone. He had wild, graying dark hair and was on the scrawny side.
Mid forties maybe, red-faced and in a tan jacket. Sounded even angrier than
before, probably because onlookers were hassling him.

“That child up there is evil!” he hollered, pointing. “He
has no soul! He isn’t even eligible for baptism!”

“
You
go take a bath,” someone said, heading back to
the pro-IVF signs.

“Skip the bath,” someone else said. “Go to hell!”

The crowd cheered. Zealot glared, redder-faced, just
furious. Jill and David got out their cameraphones and snapped pictures.

“Doesn’t God love all children?” asked a woman. Another
woman in a sari cried, “What about Hindu children?” And a gray-haired man said,
“What would you
do
with that baby if you got hold of him?”

“That’s no baby!
He’s the spawn of the devil!
The
world must be saved from him!” Zealot turned and jabbed his finger up to the
hospital.
“AND the devil’s workshop that created him!”

His wheeling hand brushed a woman, whose husband had had it
and lunged at the guy, raising his fist. It was caught by two uniformed cops
protecting the peace and the First Amendment. They calmed the couple, who left
muttering and shaking their heads. Gawkers came and left. Watched the Zealot
like they’d watch any New York sidewalk performance, then edged away to watch
the reporters, the cheering IVFers, or the SAVE AN EMBRYO bunch.

Seeing people leave infuriated Zealot even more.

“So you are in league with the devil?” he shouted at a
departing back, eyes bulging in fury as he got the finger. “And you and you?”

Jill leaned uneasily to David. “The hospital is the devil’s
workshop?”

“Maybe just obstetrics,” he said absently. She looked
quizzically at him, then followed his gaze to one of the onlookers, a wiry man,
maybe forty, with long, curling dark hair in a brown corduroy jacket. He was
the only one really listening to Zealot, his intent, small-featured face taking
in every word. The corners of his small mouth turned up as Zealot dealt with
his detractors, turned down when Zealot went overboard.

“Is that a fan or do they know each other?” David said low.
He snapped a picture. Jill subtly snapped several. “Maybe both,” she whispered,
watching as the wiry man stepped forward, smiling, to talk to Zealot; then
smiled again as a young blond woman, very soccer mom, came forward too to hand
Zealot a pamphlet, which he looked positively thrilled to autograph.

They snapped Soccer Mom too, got her in profile as she
turned and saw them. Checked out their faces, their navy scrub pants, and edged
closer.

“I’m a cop,” she said low.

Jill was surprised. “Oh! What’s your name?”

“Keri Blasco.”

“What’s the pamphlet?”

“Picked it up in a church. Stay cool.”

She spoke quickly and moved away, joined two men in plain
clothes at the edge of the sidewalk.

“She wore leather gloves,” David said. “Handled her pamphlet
by its edges.”

Jill nodded. Experience with their murderous stalker last
July had taught them about fingerprints. “Professional.”

She was watching the man in the corduroy jacket. He seemed
to be trying to persuade Zealot it was time to leave, even took the megaphone
from him. Zealot frowned and resisted at first, then finally looked tired and
gave in. Together they gathered up Zealot’s things and headed out, onto the
sidewalk and toward the downtown subway.

“I’d so like to follow them,” Jill said.

David checked the time. “We have to get back.”

Jill’s phone buzzed. She answered, and for a second her face
lit. “Hey!”

She listened. Then frowned.

“Be right there.”

5


S
he hugged Hutch, her lab professor not so long ago. He
and David knew each other and shook hands. David had gone to a different med
school.

Carl Hutchins never changed. He still wore a colorful bow
tie (today, blue paisley) with an oxford shirt under his lab coat, and his office
was its usual debris of piled-high journals and specimens in jars. His desk was
encircled by stacks of folders, and in front of the folders was…a snake. A
coiled black snake.

“Relax,” Hutch said. “It’s fake.”

Jill dropped into a chair. “Gaa-a, I even hate fake snakes.”

David picked up the snake and stood turning it in his hands.
Hutch told them what had happened. The whole anatomy lab horror-struck by a
snake seeming to jump out of a cadaver. Said he’d called the cops who’d come,
two uniforms who took a report and pronounced it a crude prank, at worst
desecration of a human body.

“Criminal mischief or a class B misdemeanor,
whatever that means,” Hutch said with a grimace. “But I’m worried. It
could be something else. I called hospital security after the cops left.”

“What’s with the six heads sewn on?” David said.

“That’s what bothers me. Have a seat.” Hutch took the snake
back, laid it coiled on his desk and stared at it unhappily. His eyes blinked
nervously behind his wire rims.

“I see this a lot,” he said. “Seven-headed snakes scrawled
on graffiti - not that the kids have any idea what it means.” He shook his
head. “If this hadn’t happened today, I’d be
maybe
less worried.
Security said the same.”

They looked at him.

He glanced out the window. It was nearly dusk. Reporters had
left and the crowd with their signs was dispersing. Lights had come on in the
emergency bay.

Exhaling, he looked back and pulled open a lower drawer.

“Y’know what was my hardest part of growing up?” he said,
pulling out an old clothbound Bible. “It wasn’t life in the projects. It was my
grandmother, a mean ol’ polecat who actually
left
the Baptist Church
because she thought they’d become too liberal. She’d hit me and scream at me
because I was studying
science
…devil teachings, she called it. And
called me The Beast.”

His brow arched at Jill and David. Two blank expressions.

Then he opened to a Bible page he’d bookmarked, and read out
loud. “Revelations, Chapter thirteen, verse one: ‘And
I stood upon the sand of the sea, and saw a beast rise up out of the sea,
having seven heads, and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.’”

Silence. Then Jill said quietly,
“Oh damn.”

“My feelings exactly.” Hutch put
the bible down. “It bothered me
befor
e I saw a sign in that crowd
reading SPAWN OF THE DEVIL.”

“We saw it,” David said. “Just came
from there.”

“Ah. That loon yelling into his
megaphone? With today being Madison’s big announcement…the baby…”

“We call him Jesse,” Jill said. Her
heart was thudding.

David reached for the snake and
resumed studying it.

“Weird,” he said. “It’s just a fake
garter snake. They’re harmless. You can probably get fake snakes anywhere, toy
and science stores…online. So why not something scarier like a rattler? Or a
real garter snake?”

Hutch raised his shoulders. “Afraid
a real one would’ve climbed out?” He switched his gaze to Jill and smiled a
little. “I had an uncle named Jesse. It’s a great name. Means ‘gift of God’ in
Hebrew.”

She smiled tightly; wiped her
suddenly clammy hands on her scrub pants. “I just…liked it, then googled it and
found out what it meant.”

Her glance brushed the snake David
held. “So…” She shuddered. “Is this someone’s disgusting joke? Or a horrible
scary message?
We thought we were done with horrible scary.”

Hutch picked up his remote and
turned on cable TV. Floods in Malaysia. He watched for a second, tapped his
finger, lowered the sound. Looked back to see David fingering the snake’s
attached fake snake heads.

“Someone went to a lot of trouble.”
David brought the gruesome thing closer to Hutch. “Each of these is sliced off
an inch behind the head and sewn on with black thread. It must have been hard
sewing through this rubber.”

Hutch nodded, taking the snake
back, recoiling it on his desk. “Too much work for your ordinary cruel joke.
This could be a message. That’s why I called you. I still hear of Baptists and
fundamentalists who are violently against IVF, and
Jesse’s sure taken it
further
.”

David said, “There were some angry
Catholics out there too.”

A heavy sigh. “Two extremes of what
should have been one faith,” Hutch said. “Can’t believe Jesus had any of this
in mind. He just wanted to heal.”

“Every religion has its
extremists,” David said thoughtfully. Then frowned. “Who could have gained
entrance to the lab?”

On the TV, a bridge collapse in Ohio.
Hutch glanced over at it, still keeping the sound down, then turned back,
looking tired.

“Lots of people,” he said. “Besides
the med students, there’s now physician assistants, EMTs in training and our
maintenance people. Residents come too to restudy at all hours.” Hutch gestured
with a hand. “Put on a white coat and you blend. Who pays attention at two in
the morning?”

Cable news finally caught his
attention. There, no surprise, was coverage of the conference with Madison
Memorial Hospital officials. Willard Simpson, Acting Chief of the hospital’s
Genetic Research Committee, was at the center of other white coats lining a
table with microphones.

Hutch turned up the sound.

“He’s just a baby,” bespectacled
Simpson was saying, his round, heavy features trying not to frown. “A normal
baby with normal development, no sign whatsoever of anything different about
him.”
Babble babble
from some reporters, and thin, scholarly Bill
Rosenberg next to Simpson said, “No, we don’t know how this was done. We are
studying the, ah, deceased Doctor Arnett’s notes, but they are…incomplete.”

Reporters shouted more questions.
Was this the wave of the future? Were women going to choose this method of
having babies now that they had a choice?

“Again,” droned Bill Rosenberg,
sounding too professorial to be interesting. “We don’t entirely know how this
was done. Further studies will have to be-”

A male voiceover interrupted,
taking us now to the taped-earlier crowd, panning signs and faces – “excited,
emotional, some angry” - then stopping on “this frightening SPAWN OF THE DEVIL
sign,” zooming in for an even more shocking close up. Megaphone Man railed and
hollered. A shot then caught his awful sign at an upward angle, with the
hospital’s fifth floor in its background, “the neonatal unit where this
miraculous child is now…”

Jill muttered, “Draw a map, why
don’t ya.”

Then came file footage of David
fighting on a steep old roof with now-in-hell Clifford Arnett, then footage of
Jill and David, after three days of recovery from their trauma, approaching the
hospital last July, then a tight close up of “Doctor Raney’s lovely, anguished
face.”

“Enough,” Hutch said, turning off
the TV.

Jill and David kept staring at the
blank screen.

“I can’t breathe,” Jill said.

Neither of the other two answered.
David leaned forward with his fist pressed to his mouth. Hutch stared
sorrowfully at the thing on his desk.

“I had to tell you this,” he said.

“Right, absolutely,” David said
softly, looking up.

At that moment there was a knock on
the door, and Allie Dodd stuck her head in. Sort of like a frightened kitten
peeking around a corner.

She smiled a bit timidly at Jill
and David, then said to Hutch, “Well, I’m done. Caught up and didn’t throw up.”

He grinned, invited her in, and
introduced her. She blinked at the poncho and camouflage jacket and said, “Oh!
You’re
them?
Oh…wow.”

David cracked a little grin, and
Jill smiled sympathetically. “We heard about what happened. You’re brave to
have stuck out the day.”

Allie sank to the chair David
pulled out for her, and blew air out her cheeks. “Thanks,” she said, a little
dispiritedly. She was pretty, with short, curling brown hair, but her hands
clutched each other nervously. “I’m really not brave,” she sighed. “Today’s
stress on top of the usual, plus…sleep? What’s that?”

They nodded in sympathetic
agreement, and Allie studied them. David’s face was strong and kind, but Jill
looked as vulnerable as she felt. It was as if Jill’s big, emotional eyes were
already reading her.

“How did med school go for you?”
Allie asked.

“Very hard,” Jill said. “I had
extra problems. Big ones.”

“So how’d you get
through
it?”

“Dunno. Just kept trudging, I
guess.”

Allie straightened. Anxiety
lightens if you find a kindred spirit. “Could I talk to you sometime? I so
need…” She floundered and raised her hands helplessly.

“Sure, call me, please.” Jill gave
Allie her cell number. “Leave a voicemail if I’m in a delivery or something.
I’ll get back to you.”

Allie thanked her. Smiled more
easily at David and rose, looking out the window at the lights in the ambulance
bay. “Is it safe to go out?” she said facetiously. “The yowlers seem to have
gone.”

Jill gave an unhappy shrug. “Any
excitement over Jesse sets off the crazies.”

“
New
excitement,” David said
half-heartedly. “After last time it died down for three months, didn’t it?”

A ray of hope lifted them all,
feebly.

David’s cell phone buzzed. He
answered, listened, and said, “Okay. We’re coming.”