Abracadaver (Esther Diamond Novel) (20 page)

“Pressure!” Quinn shouted at me. “Put pressure on it!”

I nodded and did as he ordered, though this made Lopez groan.

Then Quinn was on his feet and on his cell phone, shouting numbers and words into it. The only phrase I really understood was, “Officer down! Officer down!”

“No, no, no!” I pleaded, tears streaming down my face.

He couldn’t be taken from me. Not now, not like this.

“No!”
I wailed, pressing down harder on the wound, willing him to survive.

In the faint glow of the overhead light, I could see that Lopez’s eyes were still open, but he looked dazed and confused. He also looked alarmingly pale.

Officer down! Officer down!

Quinn dropped to his knees again and leaned over to speak loudly into his partner’s face. “They’re coming. They’ll be here right away. Hang in there! Don’t you die on me.”

I glared at him, angry he had used that word.

Ignoring my look, Quinn took over the task of keeping pressure on the wound and said, “Give him your coat. Try to keep him warm. He’s losing a lot of blood.”

I rose to my feet, tore open my coat, and as I lifted my chin to remove the garment, I looked straight ahead—and saw Danny Teng’s fresh corpse rise from the dead and turn toward me, its eyes glowing with demonic green fire, its lips curled back in a snarl, and its bloody hands reaching for me like claws as it came staggering toward us.

I
didn’t manage to scream, but my horrified stare, inarticulate gagging, and rigidly pointing arm were enough clues to warn Quinn to look over his shoulder.

“Holy shit!” Like me, he was so shocked he just stared for a moment.

The thing was gaining speed as it adjusted to Danny’s body. In a few more steps, it would be able to touch us.

And so I screamed, needing to break Quinn’s paralysis, as well as my own.

His arm shot forward, gun in hand, and he pumped bullet after bullet into the reanimated corpse as it came toward us. Explosive shot after shot, the thing kept coming. When the body fell down, rather than give up, it
crawled
toward us.

Barely conscious now, Lopez turned his head sideways—and his dazed eyes widened as he saw Danny Teng’s dead body, eyes glowing green and bright yellow drool pouring from its mouth, crawling toward him, its cackling laughter echoing through the night. Lopez made a faint, startled sound, but he couldn’t move.

Quinn dropped the empty magazine out of his gun, reloaded, and fired again. Two, three, four times.

And finally the animated cadaver stopped coming toward us. It quivered, froze for a moment, then collapsed onto the ground as the demonic entity abandoned it, leaving behind only Danny Teng’s bloody, mangled corpse.

I grunted out inarticulate sounds of revulsion and fear while tears streamed down my face. Feeling as if it took a great effort to move, I retrieved my fallen coat, knelt by Lopez, and tried to wrap it around his head and shoulders and arms.

Quinn was pale and shaking as he returned to Lopez’s side and again applied pressure to his partner’s blood-soaked chest. After a few moments during which I heard only our agitated, panting breaths, Quinn looked at Lopez’s face and said, “He’s unconscious.”

“What else do we do?” I asked. “I don’t know what else to do.”

“Shh.” Quinn lifted his head, listening for a moment, then said, “Oh, thank God.”

I listened, too, finding nothing reassuring for a long moment—and then I heard it, too.

Sirens.

I was shivering and crying, kneeling in the snow next to the bloody, unconscious body of my dying lover when the ambulances and squad cars pulled up. I saw and heard everything that was happening through a dazed fog as uniformed men and women rushed toward us, carrying heavy equipment, all high energy and loud voices and rapid movement.

I was roughly shoved aside, then hauled to my feet. I stared numbly down at Lopez, noticing how black his hair looked against the snow and the ice. There were four strangers crouching around him now. I didn’t know where Quinn was. Someone put something warm around me, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Lopez, lying in the snow, so pale and still that he seemed unfamiliar to me.

“His heart’s stopped!” shouted one of the crouching men.

And then I felt I’d been plunged into the East River, shockingly icy cold all over my body, a brutal awakening.

“No!” I choked out.
“No.”

Suddenly everything was noise and color, sound and stench, light and blurred movement. Sharp, hard edges and sensations that scraped along my nerves.

“He’s dropped a lung!”

“Lopez!” I couldn’t move. Someone was holding me back and shouting in my ear. I didn’t hear any of the words.

I struggled and stared in horror as someone ripped open his shirt in the cold, cold night and then plunged an enormous needle straight into his chest.

“What are you
doing?
”

“It’s all right,” someone said loudly in my ear. “They’re helping him breathe.”

When they pulled the needle out of his lung, though, he didn’t look like he was breathing.

When they stuck other needles into him, covered his chest wound, wrapped him up, and put a ventilator mask on his face, it still didn’t look like he was breathing.

And when they rolled him past me on a gurney, taking him to the ambulance, it didn’t look to
me
as if his heart was beating again.

 • • • 

As I emerged from my shock, they had to tell me a dozen times that Lopez was alive. I had trouble believing it, remembering it.

I remained at the scene after he was taken away in a flashing, wailing ambulance. I wanted to go with him, wanted to know where he was going—but I was confused and inarticulate, and
so cold.

A paramedic wrapped me in some sort of weird blanket that warmed me up quickly. She gave me hot tea, and she made sure that none of the blood that covered me was my own. It wasn’t—all of it had belonged to Lopez.

When my breathing, heart rate, and temperature were all declared normal, I borrowed a spare EMT jacket, since my coat was now bloody and lying in the snow, and looked for Quinn.

He was reviewing the crime scene with a bunch of cops, some in suits, some in uniforms. I realized after standing there for a couple of minutes that this was going to be very complicated and take a long time. The cops weren’t just interested in where Lopez fell, which was all I could remember now. They wanted to know about every shot that was fired that night, every movement taken, every single beat of the whole hideous event.

I looked at Danny Teng’s mangled corpse, which I wasn’t allowed to go near now—as if I would want to. Uniformed cops were keeping the area secure while CSU officers prepared to go to work on the scene. More police vehicles were arriving.

A detective told me he wanted to get a statement from me. I said I wanted to see Lopez. I had to make sure he was alive.

Quinn noticed us talking and intervened. “She’s his girlfriend,” he told the detective. “Someone should take her to the hospital.”

That worked, and the detective agreed. I was bundled into a squad car, still wearing my hooker costume and my borrowed EMT coat. My purse had been returned to me; I had left it lying somewhere in the park during the shooting, though I had no idea where. A couple of patrolmen took me to the trauma center where Lopez was being treated, got me some hot coffee, and told the staff there that I was with Lopez, the detective who’d just been brought in.

Doctors spent much of the night operating on him. The waiting room filled up with grim-faced cops, some of whom kept each other company by telling detailed stories of terrible wounds that other cops had survived. Some of them knew the nurses here well, so we got detailed information as the surgery progressed.

I was puzzled at first that his parents weren’t there, but then I remembered that they were in the Galapagos Islands, on a trip they had dreamed about for years.

When I thought of them getting this news under those circumstances, it made me want to cry again.

Twice more that night, while he was on the operating table, his heart stopped. Both times I heard this news, I thought mine stopped, too.

 • • • 

“They finished surgery about two hours ago,” I told Quinn when he arrived at the hospital a little before dawn. “He’s in critical condition.”

I hadn’t slept. I felt like I would never sleep again.

Danny’s bullet had traveled far, damaging multiple organs and nicking the heart. Most of the blood had come from an artery in the chest. Lopez might need a second surgery.

“He’s in the ICU, and I can’t see him,” I concluded.

This had been the most hellacious night of my life. I felt at moments as if none of this was really happening—and at other moments as if it had been happening for so long that I couldn’t remember anything I’d ever done before sitting in this relentlessly beige waiting room, unable to breathe or eat or think, unable to do anything but cling to hope and shrink from my worst fears.

“They’ve very good here,” Quinn said quietly. “They handle a lot of wounded cops. If I were shot, this is where I’d want . . . I mean, he’s in good hands here.”

After a while, I asked, “Where have you been all night?”

“Some problems at the crime scene,” he said grimly.

“What problems?” I asked, not interested, just trying to find something to think about besides the man who was lying in a hospital bed and trying not to die. “You were attacked by a murderous thug, you dealt with him, he’s dead, and Lopez is . . . is here.”

Quinn looked around the room. There were a lot of cops there. “Can I talk to you somewhere else?”

“I don’t want to leave. If something happens, I . . . I don’t want to leave.”

“It’s important,” said Quinn. “Five minutes, okay?”

I thought about it. “Okay,” I said after a moment. Maybe if I left, he’d wake up and I’d come back to good news.

Quinn took me into the chapel down the hall, which was empty.

“The problem,” he said, now that we were alone, “is that they found Danny’s body pumped full of a bunch of slugs from my gun, fired at close range, about six feet from where Lopez went down.”

That was how I remembered it happening. “So?”

“But they found Danny’s gun about twenty feet away from there. Near some of his blood, where he went down—the first time.”

I didn’t understand. “So what?”

“So it looks to Homicide and Internal Affairs like I fired repeatedly, at close range, at a wounded suspect who had dropped his weapon and was coming toward me, surrendering and pleading for his life.”

I frowned. “No, he wasn’t surrendering or pleading. He was . . .” Then I realized the problem.
“Oh.”

“Yeah,” he said. “We can’t exactly say that he was dead but his body was reanimated by an ancient demon who looked like it intended to eat our eyeballs if it got any closer.”

No, that didn’t really seem like a story that the NYPD was going to accept from either of us.

“So what have you told them?” I asked.

“As close to the truth as I could get,” he said. “In the revised version of last night, I didn’t secure the scene and make sure Danny was dead, because Lopez collapsed before I could do that. So when you stood up to take off your coat, and you pointed and screamed, I assumed Danny had been playing possum, and was armed and attacking again, and I emptied most of a clip into him to put him down before he finished off my unconscious partner.”

It sounded reasonable to me. “Will it fly?”

“Well, it would if Lopez was the one telling this story and I was the one lying in a hospital bed.” He ran a tired hand over his face. “But like I told you at Antonelli’s, I had some bad incidents on my record last year. Nothing as bad as shooting an unarmed suspect, but sketchy enough that I’m getting some fishy looks now.” He shrugged. “Extenuating circumstances, though. Danny Teng was an aspiring cop killer who had just ambushed and gunned down my partner, and he took me by surprise while I was trying to keep Lopez from bleeding to death.”

I didn’t like the use of that word, and I went back to the waiting room.

 • • • 

Lucky phoned during the day, deeply apologetic that he had not solved this problem before Lopez got hurt. He also let me know that, due to the role that Alan Goldman’s rhetoric had played in convincing Danny Teng to gun down a decorated police officer, the lawyer had just lost all interest in the Ning matter and was moving on.

I sensed the fine Italian hand of Victor Gambello in that decision, but I didn’t ask any questions.

I had washed off the blood in the ladies room, but I hadn’t slept. I was still dressed like a hooker, and I was probably on my tenth cup of coffee. My stomach lining felt like I’d need to replace it if I drank one more cup.

“Anyhow, I’m sorry about what Danny did, kid,” said Lucky. “I should have stopped him in time.”

“He acted so fast, Lucky. You didn’t have a chance to stop him.”

I didn’t blame the old hit man. I didn’t even blame Quinn, a cop who’d let that thug tail him to find Lopez.

I blamed Danny, and I was glad he was dead.

He was ignorant, violent, stupid, and vicious, and so we had all underestimated what an opportunistic predator he was. He had paid for his predation with his life.

I just didn’t want Lopez to pay for it with his.

 • • • 

John heard what happened, and he brought me some Chinese food, herbal tea, and a change of clothes that he’d picked up on Canal Street—making a pretty accurate guess about the right sizes.

I hugged him tightly, grateful for all of these things, for his friendship, and for his sitting with me for a couple of hours to keep me company.

It was a relief to change into trousers, sneakers, and a sweater. Finally the cops who entered the waiting room stopped asking each other why there was a hooker waiting on news of Lopez.

Max and I spoke several times by phone throughout the day. I discouraged him from coming to the hospital to keep me company, though, because I wanted him to stick with his research.

The one thing I wanted most in the world right now was for Lopez to wake up and start arguing with me about something stupid. And the
next
most important thing after that was for us to vanquish the demon that had attached to Quinn. This thing was too dangerous for us to let it linger here any longer. And it was getting stronger with every passing hour. It had taken too many bullets for Quinn to put it down last night. What was going to happen next time?

I didn’t want there to
be
a next time.

Approximately twenty-four hours after the shooting, a couple of detectives questioned me about it. I had watched enough episodes of
Crime & Punishment
to know that my story shouldn’t mesh too closely with Quinn’s—that would look like collusion. Since fear, shock, and confusion ensured that my memories of the night were pretty jumbled and vague, I played on that, contradicting myself a few times but never saying anything that would undermine Quinn’s version.

And then, thirty-six hours after the shooting, Lopez was finally downgraded from critical condition and listed as “serious but stable.” Which were, ironically, words I knew he’d never use to describe me.

He still wasn’t conscious, and I still wasn’t allowed to see him. A lingering dread of something going terribly wrong kept me in the waiting room for a few more hours after his condition stabilized. But finally, I went home, showered, and went to bed.

When I woke up, it was evening, forty-eight hours after the shooting, and Lopez was still stable.