Final Stroke (45 page)

The Flat Nose who was supposed to have exploded was a lump of flesh doing all he could to breathe through his spit and blood. Flat Nose’s baseball cap, which he’d turned backward moments earlier, was nowhere to be seen.

Before Tyrone could react, the guy with the gun poked the barrel hard into Tyrone’s back and said, “He fuckin’ knows somethin’! We’ll take him to the van and get it out of him! Kills two birds because the bitch’ll think it’s Babe if we keep him wrapped in the blanket.”

After they put the tape back on Tyrone’s mouth and the blanket over his head and arms, he was lifted over a shoulder. As he was car
ried, the guy in charge, who wasn’t the one carrying him, moved in close and said, “Go easy, man. None of that kicking like before or I’ll shoot your balls off right through this thing.”

Then to the other guy, he said, “I’ll get Jimmy to help. Keep him this side of the van ‘til we get her out. One way or another, we’ll get what we fuckin’ want!”

“Like in the old days?”

“Yeah, like in the old days.”

CHAPTER

TWENTY

Under normal circumstances she might have felt pity for
him and not thought of him as a beast. Under normal circumstances she might have thought it cruel that his cohorts had nicknamed him Legless. But these were not normal circumstances.

Legless, who had earlier roughed her up and broken her ankle, kissed her, walking his slimy lips over her cheeks and nose and fore
head and eyes. If not for the tape she would have bitten him, and even though she could not bite him, he seemed to sense this and steered clear of her mouth. Perhaps he didn’t want to feel the tape on his face. Perhaps that would destroy the fantasy. The button Dino had fastened on her raincoat was still fastened, and as Legless kissed her face he mumbled something about being sorry for the way he had acted earlier and that he would make it up to her.

As Legless began fiddling with the button holding her raincoat together, the tailgate behind the rear seat suddenly opened and the cold wet air of the night came inside the van. When she turned to look back she saw the outline of a bald head. Max Lamberti came in
through the tailgate, stepping up into the narrow space behind the seat and cuffing Legless away from her.

“Fuck off on your own time,” growled Max, a shadowy hand at his scalp as if expecting to find hair to straighten. “You and Jimmy take her in the car. We got someone else to put in the hot seat and there’s not enough room in here to do what we got to do.”

When her shoulder belt was off, Max leaned close to her ear and whispered.

“Who knows, Mrs. Babe. Maybe if things go right and we get what we want, you and hubby might even be able to go back into that hell-hole and finish out your fuckin’ lives.”

In a louder voice meant for Legless, Max said, “Take her out the side door. Keep her with you guys while we get hubby ready for ther
apy. And if therapy don’t work, fuck it, there’ll be more food in the world for those less fortunate.”

Although this final statement had been meant to sound like an aside, or to sound as if it contained some kind of upside-down ethical princi
ple, Jan knew what it meant. There was no way Max would let them go whether they told him what he wanted to know or not. And, even though he’d had a stroke, she knew Steve would feel the same way.

After Max was gone, Legless and the guy named Jimmy, also wearing a knit cap, hustled her out of the van. It was still windy but the rain had stopped. Although her ankle exploded with pain when ever she put weight on it, she felt unfettered compared to inside the van. If she dropped to the ground, maybe she could roll to one side and trip the one named Jimmy who was smaller than Max or Dino or even Legless. Maybe she could stand up and run. Ignore the pain and run like hell. Or maybe in the process of falling she could rub her face against one of them, dislodge the tape, and scream loud enough and long enough to be heard clear across to the other side of the building,
or even inside the building.

As she thought about this, Max and Dino came out from behind the van. Dino carried a bundle over one shoulder. Although it was dark in the parking lot, her eyes had grown accustomed to the dark
ness and she saw legs dangling and realized the bundle was someone wrapped in something. When a barely audible moan came from the person being carried, she knew it must be Steve. If she was going to make a move, now was the time. But something stopped her.

It was a voice, Steve’s voice. Not his voice coming from the bun
dle, but his voice coming to her from the distant past, back when they first met. She had been telling Steve about her past, about her life as a stripper. She remembered the way he had looked at her for a long time before saying, “Nothing in life is ever what it appears to be. When you were working in those places, you weren’t at all what you seemed. Although the men watching you had thoughts about who you were, we both know those thoughts were simply illusions. Just as illusions change from moment to moment, people also change from moment to moment. Who we were a moment ago is not who we are now. When it comes to time, we’re all wandering Gypsies.”

Recalling Steve’s words made her want to plead that she be al
lowed to embrace him. But recalling these words from the past also stopped time. And in that instant of stopped time, she felt as though she had absorbed into her mind some of the precious thoughts that had been lost to Steve when he had his stroke. Details not only from their lives together, but details from every case he’d ever had. Among these details was the strong impression that the bundle being carried by Dino was not Steve at all, but someone with much longer legs.

And so she did not struggle when they led her to the car and put her into the back seat. Jimmy crawled in first and dragged her in behind him, then Legless vaulted in beside her, folding his wheel
chair and dragging it in so that it rested on the floor in front of him. From inside the car she watched as the bundle was loaded into the van, Dino and Max climbing in after it and activating the mechanism that brought the lift back inside. The transfer into the van had been done carefully, like transferring someone in pain from wheelchair to bed. Or like transferring someone so as little as possible could be seen of him.

As she sat between Jimmy and Legless in the back seat, watching and listening as Legless lowered the window, she was convinced the man carried into the van was not Steve. If they wanted them to talk, wouldn’t they have kept them both in the van? And if they had them both, why stay here instead of driving somewhere else? But, no sooner had these thoughts consoled her for the decision not to act, and she began to have doubts. What if it was Steve in the van?

Between the headrests of the front seat of the car she could see the red and green lights of a scanner mounted high in front of the dash. But, although the scanner was on and sometimes flashed its lights in
dicating it was moving to a new signal, no sound came from it. Then she began to hear noises coming from the van, dull thumping noises followed by long, deep moans. As the moans that might or might not be coming from Steve drifted in through the car window with the damp cold air, Jimmy and Legless began running their hands over her body, quickly finding places to go inside beneath her clothes.

The moans from the van became louder. The cold, cold hands searching her flesh absorbed whatever warmth was left in her. She began trembling uncontrollably.

Because of the turn of events that led him to Orland Park, and th
e

radio call that brought him back to Hell in the Woods, Steve knew Jan’s investigation of Marjorie’s death had touched a sensitive nerve. Jan was missing, and regardless of his condition he was determined to find her.

As he drove through the main parking lot he saw Jan’s Audi, its red finish glowing wet beneath the overhead lights. A squad car was parked next to the Audi with only its parking lights lit. He drove down the aisle slowly and could see that the Audi’s driver’s side was dented and scratched and the driver’s side window was open. No, smashed in, the radio call had said the window was smashed in. Mud was spattered on the downslope of the rear fenders, and as he contin
ued down the aisle away from the Audi, he tried to reconstruct the damage to the side of the Audi in his screwed-up brain so he could garner what he could from the details.

The image was still there, glowing beneath the overhead lights in his brain. Not a clean sweep, not scratch marks going in one direc
tion. Zigzag scratch marks as if someone had driven into the side of the Audi. And then there were the tires. Not rain tires with the deep center groove the way he’d expected. But wait. Jan hadn’t said any
thing about buying rain tires. His brain had created that. But there was something about rain tires.

Suddenly he recalled a brightly lit tire store, the strong smell of rubber tires and a particular tire in a display stand as he ran his finger down its deep center groove. A discussion comparing the grooves in the tires to arteries had taken place in his room at Hell in the Woods while he and Jan looked at an illustrated magazine ad for rain tires. But it was not Jan’s Audi that had rain tires. It was his old Honda.

The train of thought was moving too fast, moving away from where he wanted it to be. The rain tires were important because he had seen rain tire tracks at the dead end. The dead end was important
because that’s where the police calls and the trail of discarded maga zines had led him. The trail of magazines was important because they must have come from inside Jan’s Audi. And if they had come from inside the Audi, then Jan must have thrown them from the Audi as she was being pursued.

One of the obvious things he could do tempted him. He could turn down the next aisle in the lot and approach from the other direc
tion. He could pull into the vacant spot facing the squad car that was parked next to Jan’s Audi. He could flash his lights and one of the of
ficers in the car would come to his window and he would struggle to tell the officer his dilemma.

But there was danger in this train of thought. Down the line, after the struggle to explain—first to one officer, then to the other, then to a detective who would be called—he could visualize his being taken back into Hell in the Woods where one of his therapists—or even one of the crack Hell in the Woods psychological interns—would have made the drive in to assist with the questioning. He could see it all, an endless night of not being able to explain, while the possibility of finding Jan becomes more remote. He was a stroke victim, the in
side of his brain like a snake eating its tail, especially if it has to think of too much at one time. During the questioning, as the possibility of finding Jan faded, his attempts to logically explain the situation would become more and more futile.

Even thinking about being questioned was dangerous because he imagined a man in shadows questioning him, and this man became the one from the past, the one who could be his father, or Joe Friday, or a grown-up Dwayne Matusak, or even Sandor Lakatos who would at any moment reach behind him for his violin, put it beneath his chin, close his dark eyes, and begin playing. Or it could be Jimmy Carter. What was there about Jimmy Carter that kept dipping into the soup?

Was it Marjorie’s mention of her husband’s distain for Carter? Was every crazy thing ever told him by Marjorie simply adding to the jum
ble in his head?

He kept driving, circling the huge parking lot, pausing only to glance down at the notes he’d written and remembering to look for cars or vans that matched the descriptions and plate numbers he’d got
ten from Tamara. But even though he looked for vehicles and plate numbers, he could not help thinking about the magazines he’d seen strewn on the road, and about the rain tire tracks he’d seen in the mud at the dead end, and about the Audi’s dented side and broken window and the mud on the downslope of its fenders.

As he approached the section of the lot adjoining the long nursing home wing that stuck out into the woods, he saw the narrow road that led around to the back lot where staff parked and where trucks made deliveries to the loading dock, the same loading dock onto which he’d emerged when he escaped from Hell in the Woods earlier that evening. Out through the delivery entrance because there were no guards there. And if one or more of Marjorie’s relatives, or whoever else might have killed her, had reason to take Jan, then they might have come back here to get him, to take him out through the delivery entrance where they would not be stopped.

That must be it. He knew something they needed kept quiet, some
thing to do with family secrets. Or maybe he knew something they needed to know, something to do with the keys Marjorie referred to. If either of these possibilities were true, Marjorie’s killer, or killers, would come after him by going into Hell in the Woods the back way, the same way they went in when they killed Marjorie in the first place.

When he turned onto the narrow road leading to the back park ing lot, headlights blinded him. A tall vehicle, a truck, came at him, going fast, bouncing up and down on the uneven pavement so that the
blinding caused by the headlights was complete and he had to pull the Lincoln to the side and stop.

As the truck roared past, he glanced up at the boxy shape of it and saw something that made him pause, something that brought back re
cent words spoken to him harshly while he lay in pain on the floor of his room. Stenciled on the white side of the truck box in huge black letters were the words, “Christ Health Care Supplies.”