Projection (11 page)

She smirked.  "Tell me, anyhow."

"I feel like I can turn things around."

"Even if you're the only one who sees it that way."

"I think Lucas feels it, too.  That's why he's asking for me.  And Rice warmed up to the idea, even after Patterson had him ready to launch the assault."

"Lucas also feels his arm is Satan's.  I'm not putting a lot of stock in his view of things," Hancock said.  "As for Rice, he has nothing to lose."  She averted her eyes.  "I do."

I knew Hancock still dreamed of being mayor one day.  I figured she was referring to the bad press she would net if I botched things.  "If I screw up, call a press conference.  Tell the reporters you disagreed with the strategy from the word ‘go.’  They know the State Police are the ones calling the shots.  You'll come off looking OK."

Her eyes fastened back on mine.  "I don't care how I come off looking," she said.  "I care about..."  She caught herself.  "You know what?  I'm not going to waste my breath."

I didn't need more than a fragment of a sentence to hear a whole volume about the distance toward one another Hancock and I had traveled since we'd started working together.  "You gambled on me when no one else would," I told her.  "I'll never forget that.  You sure you can't bet on me one more time?"

She studied me three, four long seconds.    "I hope you beat the odds, Frank.  You always seem to," she said.  "But this time I can't stomach them."  She turned and walked away.

*            *            *

12:28.  Rice and I braced against the raw winter air as we watched the entrance to the hospital, the last seconds of my freedom melting away like drops off an icicle, falling to the blood-stained grass at our feet.  Winston's blood.  "Remember," he said, "if you think things are going wrong, bolt to your right.  Dive, if you have to.  Patterson has enough fire power trained on this spot to vaporize anyone following you.  And we'll do our best for the hostages."

I nodded.  Hearing Patterson's name connected with my survival didn't reassure me.  Not that anything could have.  I knew if I didn't die in the next few minutes, I would face another kind of hell on the locked unit.

"Just over a minute to go.  How do you feel?"

I wasn't certain what to answer.  I wasn't terrified.  Nor was I feeling courageous.  I would have said ‘numb,’ but that wasn't quite right, either.  I felt as if my whole life, every single action and emotion up to that instant, had led me to stand where I stood, waiting for Lucas.  "I'm... all set," I said finally, then shrugged.

Rice pressed his lips together, nodded.  "My commanding officer used to ask me how I felt before I dropped into one of those tunnels.  I could never come up with the right words, either.  ‘All set’ comes as close as anything."  He glanced at his watch, then extended his hand.  I took it.  "Sorry you have to take this trip alone," he said.

Alone
.  A familiar word in my life.  I winked.  "Me, too."

We shook hands.  I watched him walk away.

"See you on the other side," he called over his shoulder.

Maybe stress had distorted my perspective, but I swear that in that instant, against he backdrop of military vehicles, lofty pines and a crystalline winter sky, Rice looked tall to me.  Giant.  I had a memory of my father walking out of my bedroom after taking his belt to me, leaving me in tears on the floor.  He had towered over me, but I had never thought of him as anything but unsteady — a circus clown on rickety stilts.  Shivers spread through me as I smiled at the power of the heart to see the truth.  Then, without another thought, I turned back toward the hospital and saw Lucas standing dead center inside the sliding glass doors.  The sun's glare made it hard to see his face, but I could tell he was still wearing scrubs.  He took a few steps backward into the lobby, then marched through the doors, arm in arm with the same entourage that had accompanied him before — Peter Zweig, Craig Bishop and the two nurses.  The Harpy.  Zweig and Bishop, in white orderly's outfits, held knives to the women's necks, just like they had before Winston had been killed.

My certainty about the moment fractured.  Part of me wanted to run.  I wondered whether Hancock had been on the right track; maybe what I was really looking for was a chance to do myself in under cover of heroics.  Maybe guilt over letting Lucas stand trial for murder was driving me to serve myself up as his next victim.  I tried comforting myself by recalling that every moment of insight I had achieved with patients had been preceded by an impulse in me to back off.  The truth always felt like a barracuda on the line, at once beckoning and demanding to be cut loose.  Finally I had cut everyone loose, closing down my practice, then myself.

What truth, I wondered, would be told now — something about Lucas’ suffering or my own self-destructiveness?  I felt my chances of escape dwindle with each of the Harpy's steps forward.  The beast closed to ten yards.  I noticed red spots appearing on Bishop's white pant leg.  At five I could see the ruby droplets falling through the air.  I squinted at the knives held to the nurse's throats, but saw no trace of blood.  Four yards, then three, and the Harpy stopped.  I looked at Lucas’ face.  His jaws were clenched.  His pupils were tiny black dots.  Pinpoints.  I noticed that the blood dripped from between him and Bishop, but the two men stood flush against one another, and I couldn’t see exactly where it was coming from.  I buried my fear by focusing on the details of the exchange we had planned.  "You agreed to release three hostages," I said.

Lucas swallowed hard.  He was sweating.  "You doubt my word?"  He closed his eyes, as if overwhelmed with pain, then fastened them on mine again.  "Lies are your domain."

"I took you at your word.  That's why I'm standing here."

"Unless you're a fool.  Or a madman driven to your own demise."  He leaned slightly forward and thrust his neck out.  His eyes grew wider.  I focused on his lips and glistening white teeth, my heart pounding as every cue told me he was about to call out the word that had tripped the explosive assault on Winston.  I glanced at the hospital roof and saw sharpshooters kneeling at each corner.  But it was too late for me to run.  Too late even to dive.  Lucas raised his face skyward.  The muscles in his throat stood out like iron struts.  "Satan must be vanquished!" he shouted, his voice echoing off the building, then trailing off in a pneumonic gasp.

Sweat dripped down my own brow.  "Three hostages," I repeated, clinging to the words as an anchor to keep me from drifting into sheer panic.

Lucas stared at me, his face blank.  "One, two, three."

The Harpy advanced another few feet.  Its arms lifted skyward.  Zweig and Bishop bared their teeth like Rottweilers.

At that instant I was convinced I would die.  I had a single thought, really more a vision, of Rachel.  She wasn't propped on fluffy clouds or draped in flowing white robes.  She was naked, standing before me on a stretch of jet black, steaming asphalt that did not burn her feet.  Her arms were outstretched, palms up, and I could see that the scars from when she had slashed her wrist as a girl were gone.  Her skin was pristine again.  She said nothing, but her eyes told me she was at peace.  And as my throat tightened with wonder at that healing I realized that more than a few seconds had gone by.  Rachel disappeared.  I was still standing before the Harpy.  I looked at Lucas, then past him at three figures — two black men and an old woman — advancing from the sliding glass doors to the hospital.  Each was dressed in a hospital gown.  They were patients.

"Three for one," Lucas said flatly.  The Harpy's arms relaxed.  "You're a valuable commodity."

"You agreed to release the pregnant—"

"Three lives," Lucas sputtered, grimacing in pain.  "Can we count any one more than any other?  Is anyone expendable?  Human refuse?"

I heard the question as a reference to my letting Lucas stand trial in place of Kathy.  Or perhaps another person had brokered Lucas’ life before I had.  I wanted to know, hungered to know.  The barracuda beckoned.  "Let's go inside," I said.

"Come closer."

I took a few steps.

"Here.  Closer."

A few more steps.  I was within a yard of Lucas, literally in his shadow.  I noticed that the red droplets were pooling on the hard ground now, instead of being absorbed by Bishop's pant leg.  I looked up to find their source and lost my breath.  I took a step back.  My legs were weak.  I had to concentrate to avoid stumbling and triggering Patterson's arsenal.

"Don't let this bother you," Lucas said.  He held his right arm straight out.  It had been severed midway up the forearm, then sutured with at least two hundred haphazard blue nylon stitches.  Parts of the wound still oozed blood.  "Not what I would call an elegant job, nothing to rival Halsted or DeBakey, but given that I was forced to use my left hand..."  He regarded the wound with detachment, then let the stump fall back to his side.  "If thine arm offends there, cut it off."

The ghastliness of what Lucas had done chased away my fear.  Resonating with the suffering of others has always, for better or worse, steadied me.  "I wish it were that easy," I said.

"If what were easy?" Lucas bristled.

"To be rid of your demons."  I paused, unsure how hard to press him.  "They weren't in your arm."

"
Satan's
arm!" Lucas glared.  "I have proof."

"Show me."

"In there."  He threw his head back at the hospital.

"Show me."

Lucas chuckled.  Sweat dripped off his chin.  "My pleasure."  I held my breath as the Harpy closed in on me.  I could feel Lucas’ breath on my face.  I gritted my teeth as the monster embraced me.  The sun disappeared.  I felt us moving together toward the hospital and — I knew in my heart — nearly unspeakable horrors.

Chapter 6

With the Harpy still surrounding me, I walked in silence through the lobby and down a long corridor.  Zweig, Kaminsky, Lucas and the nurses were positioned in such a way that made it hard to see where we were going, but I had visited Lynn State before and remembered the basic layout of the place.  We were headed toward the service elevator at the back of the building.  I remembered the odor, too — a cocktail of institutional antiseptics that never quite covered up the mustiness.  A building can absorb only so much desperation before it starts to reek of it.  Too much sweat in the mattresses.  Too much urine in the grout.  Drywall stained by leaks and cracked by time, full of screams.  We turned, then stopped.  Elevator doors clamored open.  We moved inside.  A bell chimed at each floor en route to the fifth.  The doors opened again.  We marched out, then down a short hallway.  I heard dead bolts sliding and got a glimpse of the thick iron door to Ward 5B.  It swung open for us.  As we took our first steps onto the unit, a few drops of Lucas’ blood landed on my arm and ran down to my fist, tight with fear.  I instinctively opened my hand and tried to flick the blood away, but more drops were feeding the stream.  It flowed onto my palm and between my fingers.  I wiped the blood onto my pant leg.  Just then, Zweig and Bishop broke off from the Harpy, taking the two nurses with them.  I was alone with Lucas.  I couldn't help staring at his severed arm.

He pointed down the hallway with his stump, dragging my gaze with it.  "The battlefield."

I forced myself to look around.  I had expected chaos on the unit.  The order I saw was more terrifying.  The Day Room, about twenty by thirty feet, had been emptied of furniture.  Two rows of a dozen male and female patients, all of them dressed in white orderly's uniforms, knelt in the middle of the floor, their backs to me, their faces tilted up toward the grated windows.  They were chanting, but I couldn't tell what they were saying.  When I had visited Lucas in his jail cell after his arrest on murder charges, he'd been chanting the same way.  I closed my eyes to focus and barely made out their words.

I have no life.  I have no death.

"The Samurai warrior's prayer," Lucas said.  "Readying the spirit for combat."

I glanced at him, then looked down the hallway in front of us.  Ward 5B was a twenty-bed unit, ten rooms on either side.  Patients were standing at attention at the doorways to several of them.  The quiet room — a euphemism for a padded cell — was at the end of the hallway.  The door was ajar.  A large ring of keys hung from the lock.

I turned to see the nurses’ station.  My chest tightened.  A young woman sat perfectly still in one of the chairs overlooking the Day Room, her eyes vacant.  She was naked and gagged.  Her hospital identification badge was clipped to the skin just above her left breast.  Her wrists were bound behind her.

"Satan in her uterus," Lucas said.  "She was bleeding, yet insists it isn't her time of the month."

I took a few steps toward her, focusing on her swollen abdomen.  I heard my own breathing over the constant chant coming from the Day Room.  I turned and looked directly into Lucas’ eyes.  "She's pregnant," I said as calmly as I could.  "If she was bleeding she needs help right away."

"Of course she needs help.  She's infested."

"She needs an obstetrician."

"She needs to be purified before God!" he shouted.  "Satan chews at her womb!"

I didn't respond.

Lucas seemed shaken by the surge of madness in him.  He struggled to regain composure.  "You'll see.  You'll see what pure evil can do."  He stared down the hallway.

I followed him, but stopped at the first room to the left.  It was empty except for a conference table and a set of stainless steel shelves designed to hold plastic food trays.  The table and floor were streaked with blood.  Puddles had collected in places, some of them congealed to mounds of ruby-black jelly.

"My OR," Lucas called back to me from further down the hall.  "I had to make do."

I noticed a few of the food trays had been pulled halfway out of their metal sleeves.  They held an assortment of perfectly aligned hypodermic syringes, sutures and bloodied razor blades.  My heart was pounding.  I glanced back at the door to the unit, instinctively checking whether escape was possible.  The door was bolted shut.  I recognized Craig Bishop standing against the wall next to it, peering out through the plate glass window, crowing his neck now and then to make sure no one was trying to approach the unit.  Despite my terror I was taken aback by that.  Lucas had recruited a cold-blooded killer, a man who had beheaded his victims, as a security guard.  I wondered how he had won Bishop's confidence.