Final Stroke (38 page)

The next stop was somewhere dark. They had driven only a few min
utes from the car wash before the lights faded and the road becam
e

bumpy. At first she thought they might be back in the field at the end of the road where they had caught her. But then she heard something scrape along the side of the van and caught a glimpse of wet leaves.

When the van stopped and the lights went out, Dino made his way forward, going between the front seats. Although she could barely see him, she could tell from shadowed movements and sounds that he was in the front passenger seat. As she stared toward the front of the van, she saw the shadows of both the driver’s and Dino’s heads against the scarcely perceptible light coming in through the windshield. The sky was overcast, and below the sky she could see the outline of bare tree
tops that looked like thin arms appealing to God for help.

Dino spoke softly to the driver in his deep voice.

“You still hungry?”

“I’m always hungry,” said the driver, his voice phlegmy.

“Eating all that fatty food’s not good. You should have more fiber.”

“I get enough of that at home.”

“Vegetables and grains?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then, I guess you’ll live a long and healthy life.”

“Yeah. I only eat junk food when we’re out like this. Instant en
ergy, I guess.”

“You don’t need that much energy to drive.”

“I know, but I might need it for something else.”

“Could be. But if you don’t, be sure to go to the gym in the morn
ing and burn off some of that cholesterol. You don’t want to have a stroke and screw up your retirement. That’s what happens to lots of guys. They work like dogs all their lives, and when they finally get into position for that golden parachute, wham, blood clot in the brain.”

“You’re right. Can’t be too careful. Especially guys. Why is it women live longer?”

“Less stress. Not out there hunting for food all day for the clan back in the cave. I gotta take a piss. You mind?”

“Be my guest.”

After Dino left the van and the door slammed shut, the only sound was the thud of drops on the roof of the van, large drops apparently blown from trees by the wind. But then she heard another sound, a phlegmy breathing sound, and realized the driver had turned toward the back of the van. She could see the shadow of his head against the dull light of the sky. He was moving himself slowly into the narrow space between the front seats. At first she thought he would catapult himself into his wheelchair like he’d done before. But instead of cata
pulting into his chair, she heard the chair bump the side of the van and saw the driver had lowered himself to the floor and was making his way into the back of the van.

A terrible chill ran through her. At first she thought the rear door of the van had been opened. But then she realized it had not been opened, the van was simply becoming cooler because the engine was off and the heater had stopped. Perhaps she was chilled because she
wanted
the rear door of the van to open, she wanted the door to open and someone to take her out the back because the driver was obviously on the floor, coming in her direction.

His breathing became louder as he moved closer. He was mak
ing his way slowly over the apparatus for the wheelchair lift. She saw a vague shadowy movement before her, heard the sound of the driver dragging himself closer and closer until he was at her feet.

She pressed her knees together tightly and thought she could feel his warm breath just below her knees through her slacks. There was more movement and something jarred the seat. When he vaulted onto the seat beside her, she tried to scream, felt the tape tear at her lips, and tasted her own blood.

The smell of onions on his breath washed over her as he came close and whispered in her ear. “Be my guest, sweetie.”

She tried to twist away when his bearded face rubbed against the side of her face.

“Be my guest, sweetie.”

When she felt his hands caressing her breasts she pushed herself forward against the shoulder belt fastened beneath her arm. There was no way to get away from him. He worked on the buttons of her blouse patiently, not stopping until he had pulled the blouse out from the waistband of her slacks and unbuttoned the last button.

“Be my guest, sweetie.”

Then he waited. Not touching her, not saying anything, simply breathing in her ear. She knew this was part of the plan. She knew this deliberateness was meant to terrorize her. For some reason they thought the location of all the safe deposit boxes would be revealed when Tony Gianetti and his attorney opened that first box. And, thinking that, they had done away with them.

“Wanna see my scanner, sweetie?” he whispered. “It’s better than etchings, one of the latest eight-hundred megahertz trunked systems with decriptor. Paid a bundle for it.”

He continued breathing in her ear, then whispered, “Wanna know what happened to my legs? Eggplants, that’s what happened. Wood
en crates full of ‘em fell on me and I was turned into one of them eggplants.”

He laughed a raspy, guttural laugh.

“Naw, that’s just a line I use with the ladies. Actually, I was in
jured in ‘Nam when I was a kid. In a way it’s good I was injured. Got me this job because the boss likes to help us folks. I wish more of you gals felt sorry for us old ‘Nam vets.”

Without taking the tape from her mouth, he kissed her, his nose
fleshy and oily against her nose. He kept his face close to hers while he continued.

“Sorry Dino had to tape your mouth. Usually he’s not such a bad guy. But this is real important. I can help you get through this. It’s all about money. Isn’t everything? How do you think we can afford an eight-hundred megahertz trunked system with decriptor? We’ve got all the technical stuff just like the cops. Well, maybe not every
thing. Like fingerprints, for instance. We don’t have access to those files. Anyway, look at it this way. You tell Dino what you know, we get our money, and everyone’s happy, especially you and your husband when we let you go.”

He was talking too much, telling her things he shouldn’t. The captor identifying with the captive because he knows they plan to kill her no matter what she says or does.

When she felt him reach across to her opposite shoulder and turn her toward him, she wished she could work the tape off her mouth so she could bite him. Maybe if she rubbed the tape against his sleeve the edge would come up. Maybe then she could …

She stopped rubbing the tape against his sleeve when she felt cool steel between her breasts. She held perfectly still and did not breathe as he used an unseen blade to cut the facing between the cups of her bra.

“Be my guest, sweetie.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Going through the main exit was out of the question
because the guards at the front desk would know he was a resident. There’d be calls upstairs and counseling and delay after delay. But worst of all, if the guards stopped him, the man watching his room from the television lounge would discover his attempt to leave because news about the patient who’d gone nuts and tried to bust out would travel fast.

So, instead of going out through the lobby, Steve went back to where it all started, back to the first floor nursing home wing. It was a little late for visitors to the nursing home wing to be about, but it wasn’t that late. And if someone on staff questioned where he was going, he’d try to act as if he was on his way back to his room on the third floor.

He took off his White Sox cap and tucked it in next to him on the chair. Then, when the elevator doors opened and one of the guards glanced his way, he smiled and slowly rolled across the lobby toward the double doors that led to the nursing home wing. He hoped the
guard did not notice he was a bit overdressed. He knew it didn’t mat ter to the guards that it was a little late as long as he didn’t try to go out the front door.

Two residents, both women he didn’t know, sat half asleep in their wheelchairs near the nurses’ station. The aides were apparently busy in residents’ rooms, putting residents to bed, the pair at the nurses’ sta
tion waiting their turns. Even if an aide did see him, he’d figure out a way to stall the aide until he could get away. He took his time, passing the two women near the nurses’ station who looked up as he slowly made his way toward the end of the wing.

As he headed down the hallway, he wasn’t sure what caused it, per
haps the forlorn looks he got from the two women at the nurses’ sta
tion, but a great wave of fear came over him. The smells in the nurs
ing home wing—smells he was certainly familiar with—became the smells of death. He began sweating like a horse and felt he would pass out. Somehow he kept going, but the squeak of the rubber wheels of his chair on the polished floors became rhythmic, and that rhythm, combined with the beating of his heart and the heat in the place, had a strange effect on him. He wasn’t so concerned that the squeak of his wheels would give him away. What concerned him was that Jan was in serious trouble and he was as helpless as the two women waiting at the nurses’ station to be put to bed.

Despite his confusion and doubt he kept going. He had to do what he had to do, and if confusion and doubt came, tough.

When he finally got down to the end of the wing and ducked around the corner, he wiped his forehead with the sleeve of his sweat shirt. Then he gave the chair a shove with his good hand and headed for the door to the loading dock. If a nurse or aide had come out of a resident’s room in time to see him duck around the corner, it didn’t matter now, because when he opened the door the alarm sounded,
beeping away inside its box on the wall above the door.

The door opened inward so he had to back up and wedge his chair into the opening. He pushed through quickly, the door banging closed behind him, and though the door was closed, the alarm con
tinued its sickening peal. Even though the short hall parallel to the kitchen was noisy with the sounds of blowers and what sounded like a huge dishwasher that vibrated the walls, he could still hear the alarm.

The outside door was ahead at the end of the short and noisy hall
way. He was going fast when a side door to the kitchen opened and a fat kid holding a dishrag and wearing soiled kitchen whites stepped in front of him. The kid couldn’t have been more than nineteen, face pasty, head sides shaved but hair long on top. The kid held out a chub
by palm for him to stop.

“Where you goin’?” shouted the kid above the noise in the hallway.

No use trying to explain, but he didn’t want to hurt the kid.

“To hell!” he shouted back, catching the kid off guard.

The kid apparently saw something in Steve’s face that frightened him because the kid stepped aside as he flew past.

At the outside loading dock door, struggling to get it open, he glanced back and saw the kid standing like a sad lump of flesh, like the kid who’s always made fun of in school, the kid who always gets beat up, the kid who has power nowhere but at his lousy noisy night job in the Hell in the Woods nursing wing kitchen. And now this guy in a wheelchair has even denied him that. This made tears come to Steve’s eyes as the loading dock door slammed behind him and he sailed down the concrete ramp into the cold wet night.

Compared to the hallway where he’d confronted the kid, the night was dead quiet. Even with warm air blowing out a couple of vents in the side of the building it seemed quiet. After turning to make sure no one had followed, he felt the cold rain on his scalp and put on his
White Sox cap.

He was in the back parking lot. Darker here than the front lot overlooked by the windows of the television lounges on each floor. But he had to get to the front lot in order to leave this place. He knew the grounds of Hell in the Woods were completely fenced in except for the main entrance road. He also knew the main lot was lit brightly and that a guard outside the main entrance having a smoke, or an aide sent out to look for whoever had set off the alarm, might see him. Even the man in the third floor television lounge might look outside and wonder why a guy in a wheelchair was wheeling his way across the lot from the direction of the access road that went around to the back of the complex.

And so he stayed close to the building and found a sidewalk that wound its way through bushes along the side of the nursing home wing. As he rounded the corner of the wing, the lights of the main lot shown brightly through the thin leafless branches of the bushes. Several times his wheels were stopped by something in the path and, before he could continue, he had to back up and reach down to clear dead branches that had fallen during the winter. When he did this, rain chilled the back of his neck.

The sidewalk came out of the bushes near a set of benches at the side of the main entrance. A young couple stood huddled together near one of the benches smoking. Both boy and girl wore jackets but no hats. Their hair was dark and long and wet and wind-whipped as they made the tips of their cigarettes glow. First the boy, then the girl saw him. They stared at him and he stared at them as he wheeled from the bushes past them. They were in their late teens and the girl had on dark lipstick and eye shadow. They looked like death. As he approached the main entrance from the side, the smoke from the two followed him in the wind. The smoke was stale as if it had been inside
them a long time before being exhaled.

He paused beneath the shelter of the lighted portico at the en
trance, but behind one of the portico supports so the guards would not see him. He could see the exit road and the main road beyond. Traffic rolled past out there, where he must go. A lighted city bus came along the main road and stopped at the entrance road. As the bus drove off he could see through the lighted windows that someone was walking down the aisle.

When a door to the side of the main doors opened, he felt the heat from the place. Two women walked past and out to the parking lot. He felt weak and insignificant as he watched the two get into a car and drive off. He knew that when he went out into the parking lot he would be visible from the entrance if one of the guards should look outside.

Just then, the two teenagers who had been smoking walked in front of him. Lit up by the lights in the portico they looked like vam
pires, their skin white and wet, their hair in vein-like rivulets on their foreheads as if their brains were being nourished from the outside.

For a moment this made him think of his brain, how part of it had been deprived of nourishment. But he fought against this thought, realized this was his chance, and wheeled away into the parking lot as the teenaged ghouls went inside. There, the guards, or anyone else who happened to be in the lobby so late at night, would glance at the ghouls, perhaps curious, or perhaps jealous of their youth and willful indifference.

Once away from the building, the parking lot and entrance road were downhill and he had some trouble steering. Downhill left turns were okay because he could grip the push rim with his left hand. But to turn right he was unable to use his hand and had to lean to his right and drop his elbow onto the right wheel, which made for a jerky turn.

After negotiating the parking lot, it began raining harder, and during the ride down the dark entrance road he put up the hood on his outer sweatshirt.

At the bus stop where the entrance road met the main road, a large woman made room for him in the small Plexiglas-walled kiosk so he could get out of the wind and rain. She wore a black overcoat and a black brimmed hat. In one hand she held a satchel, in the other she held a long umbrella with a dangerous-looking pointed tip. She looked somewhat familiar. At first he thought she might be an occupational therapist he once had. How appropriate because she could help him relearn how to take a bus. But if she had been one of his many thera
pists, would she remember him and question his being here? Then he realized he had seen her in the first-floor cafeteria when the strokers occasionally went down there for dinner on weekends. She worked be
hind the counter, dressed in white instead of the black she now wore.

The way she glanced at him, he knew she was thinking he was probably a resident. It was a look of appraisal, and when she turned away to look down the street he knew she wondered whether she should take time on this cold rainy night to push this guy on back to Hell in the Woods where he belonged. He decided not to take any chances. If he said something intelligible, maybe he’d set her mind at ease.

He concentrated, had to get subject and verb in the right order or it could be all over. He put down the hood on his sweatshirt. Then he clenched his fists, imagined he was in Georgiana’s rehab room on an ordinary day of rehab, and managed to say, “Bus coming soon?”

She lifted the umbrella tip toward him as if to skewer him with it. But then she let her overcoat sleeve slide back and looked at her watch. She said, “Fifty-fifth Street bus should be here any minute.”

“That’s mine,” he barely managed to say, realizing her motherly look of concern had almost made him stumble.

As they waited in silence, he wondered if he should say something more. But he decided against it and instead practiced the sentences he knew he would have to say after the bus dropped him off on Cicero Avenue just north of Midway Airport.

He thanked God and his Honor the mayor and all the aldermen and women for buses equipped with handicapped lifts. The inside of the bus was warm and dry and he didn’t have to speak with anyone else during the ride east on Fifty-Fifth Street, not even the driver who came back to get his fare and make sure his chair was locked in place. And when it was time to get off near Midway Airport, he simply held his hand up toward the reflection of the driver in the large rearview mirror as if he were a child raising his hand in school.

But when he wheeled his chair off the bus he had a setback. He was alone on the sidewalk, yet the street was busy with traffic. He had taken the bus to the area around Midway Airport, but the reason for having done this eluded him. An airport? Where would he fly? The sound of a jet taking off reminded him of overhead jets at Hell in the Woods. He looked up at the jet as its lights disappeared into the over
cast. Jets on takeoff passed over Hell in the Woods during weather like this. If he closed his eyes would he be back there in his room star
ing out his window? No, the jets that passed over Hell in the Woods were from O’Hare Airport to the north. He was at Midway Airport and the reason …

After the bus was gone, traffic flowed past steadily like blood flow
ing through arteries. The mist from tires settled on his face. Here and there a face in a vehicle stared at him as they drove past, wondering if this man in a wheelchair has any idea where he is going.

A battered Chevy Blazer drove slowly past. A ragged bumper sticker contained part of a name. The left half of the old red, white, and blue political sticker was gone. But the right half said, “Edwards.”

A Vice Presidential candidate from some time back. He recalled see
ing the guy’s smiling face in one of Jan’s magazines but did not recall the year of the election. And as he sat there in his chair within the spray of vehicles he could not even recall what year it was now.

Wait. That’s not why he was out here. Even though Marjorie had said things in rehab about votes, things about waiting for all the Illi
nois votes to be counted, his main reason for being out here was to find Jan. His job now was to keep his mind from wandering.

Waiting for votes. Politicians in business suits. Won’t see them waiting at bus stops. Won’t see them worrying about their wives. Their wives are safe at home while his wife …

“Jan!”

His shout into the night startled him. But it also forced him to concentrate. He needed a car. He had taken a bus to Midway Airport and gotten off at this stop for a reason. He’d known there would be plenty of places to rent a car on Cicero Avenue near the airport. After getting off the bus, his right leg began to burn with pain. But he didn’t have time for pain. And so, finally, he wheeled himself to the car rental agency nearest the bus stop.