Savage Rage (23 page)

“10-4, 5103. Apartment 712, hysterical female on the phone. No further details. Use caution. Is there anyone who can back up 5103 on the unknown trouble call?” No answer. “5103, no one to back you up at this time. 10-4?”

“10-4, dispatch. We'll advise.” Jack hung up the mike. No surprise on the backup, not when they only had seven people on the road. “I heard a story once that manpower wasn't always this short.”

“Do tell.”

“Apparently, there was a time, long long ago, when coppers were so plentiful that on night shift the sergeant would ask on parade who wanted T.O. because there weren't enough cars for everyone. If you didn't take the time off, you were walking until the evening shift came in at three.”

“Dude, that's unreal.”

Jack snorted. “Now we think it's a bonus if we put more than half a dozen out.”

285 Shuter was the middle building of the three high-rises that made up Moss Park. It was shaped like a wide V and, like Regent Park, it was a mixture of decent people and shitheads. Manny parked the car a short distance from the building; the shitheads had a tendency to throw things off their balconies using the police car as a target. Jack kept a wary eye skyward. Sometimes the shitheads preferred the challenge of a small moving target.

Getting through the inner lobby doors proved to be no problem as the locks were broken, as usual. If the locks were ever fixed, they didn't stay fixed for long. After all, you can't run a successful crack house or whorehouse out of your apartment if your customers can't get in the building. As they waited for the elevator, they slipped on their gloves. Inside the elevator, they turned off their mitres; the radios lost reception in elevators and whined annoyingly. They'd turn them back on as soon as they were back in a hallway.

The elevator jerked to a halt at the sixth floor and they headed for the stairs. Fewer surprises that way. The seventh-floor hallway was clear. Jack really disliked the building's design: because the building was shaped like a V, he couldn't see the whole hallway at one time.

“Is 5103 on the air? 5103?”

“Hang on, Manny.” Jack freed his mitre. “5103, go ahead, dispatch.”

“Is 5103 on the air? 5103, call radio.”

Jack grunted his annoyance and tried again. “5103, go ahead, radio.”

“Is that you, 5103? All I'm getting is static. Try changing your location.”

“For fuck's sake,” he grumbled. “Piece of shit radio.” He backtracked to the windows opposite the elevator doors. “5103, is this better?”

“Not by much.”
She sounded as frustrated as Jack felt.
“Further information on your call. The call taker is still on the line with the complainant, who is still hysterical, but the call taker heard something that sounded like ‘cutting herself.' Unknown if anyone else in the apartment. 10-4?”

“Got it, dispatch. Thanks. We're almost at the apartment.” Jack joined Manny down the hall. “You hear that?”

Manny nodded, never taking his eyes off the hall and its multitude of doors. Just because the call had originated from a certain apartment didn't mean it couldn't move.

“Gun or stick?”

Manny considered his options. “I'll go gun,” he decided and tugged his Glock from the holster.

Jack slipped his baton free, keeping it in the collapsed state, tucked up along his forearm. Out of sight, out of mind. Until he needed to use it.

A hysterical woman was one thing. She could be calling about anything. The diaper domestic from the other day proved that, but add in references to cutting herself and Jack would rather err on the side of caution. If the weapons weren't needed, they could be put away. He already had one souvenir from underestimating the seriousness of a situation and wasn't in a hurry to add to it.

Frantic shouting, almost shrieking, reverberated through the metal door. Jack tried the knob and found it unlocked. He looked at Manny, nodded and shoved open the door. It banged against the wall.

“Police!” Jack stepped into the apartment, Manny to his right, gun held in a double grip, pointed at the floor.

“Hurry! She's in the bathroom! Please help her!”

The bathroom was at the end of a short hall off the living room. Jack gave the living room and adjoining kitchen a quick glance. Empty.

“Hurry! She'll kill herself!” A woman, her face a mask of panic and concern, flung herself at the closed bathroom door, hammering her fists on it, leaving bloody smears across the wood. “Babe, open the door! Please!” She slumped against the door, her head cradled in her arms. Her phone slipped from her fingers and exploded on the floor.

Jack pointed to the single bedroom door as he knelt in front of the woman. Manny darted into the bedroom and returned seconds later, whispering “clear” as he holstered his gun.

In the sudden silence, Jack could hear a noise from the bathroom. A hissing but not quite. Heavier than that. It sounded familiar, but he couldn't place it. He turned his attention to the woman on the floor.

She was young, no more than a teenager, he thought, and very thin, almost to the point of malnourishment. Strawberry blonde hair hung limply around her face, a face ravaged by anguish. Whoever was in the bathroom meant a great deal to this young woman.

“Miss, who's in the bathroom?” Jack gripped her by the shoulders when she didn't answer. He shook her firmly but gently until her eyes focused on him. “Who's in the bathroom?”

“My girlfriend. She's cutting herself.” Her voice was hoarse from screaming, weak from the abrupt loss of strength. “Please help her.”

“We need you to move.”

Jack lifted her to her feet, shocked at how little she weighed. He passed her to Manny, who deposited her on the bed. She curled up into a fetal position, sobbing quietly.

“She's already given up on her friend.” Manny glanced at the floor as if he expected to see blood seeping ominously beneath the door.

The door was locked, but bathroom doors tended to be flimsy things and this one was no exception. A quick kick and it slammed open on a nightmare.

At first, Jack couldn't believe what he was seeing. No one could lose that much blood and still be alive. The woman was in the tub, crumpled near the faucet. Only by the fluttering of her eyelids and the ragged hitching of her chest could Jack tell she still lived.

My God, the blood.

The walls of the shower stall dripped crimson as if someone had flung cans of red paint on them. She appeared to have bathed in blood; no clean skin showed anywhere and she sat in a half inch of blood. She wore jeans and they were saturated. The smell of blood, sharp, metallic, hung heavy in the air and Jack's stomach rolled as he breathed it in.

But he had no time to vomit; that she was still alive was a miracle.

Jack lunged for the tub and Manny shouted a warning. “Watch out for the torch!”

So focused on the woman, Jack missed the propane torch on the floor, hissing out its blue flame into a puddle of blood. He snatched it up and thrust it blindly behind him for Manny to take. He had to get to the woman. He wasn't going to let someone else bleed to death. Not this time. His feet slipped in the slick blood and he crashed to his knees beside the tub.

Her throat. She must have cut her throat.

She was slumped next to the tap. As Jack reached for her, he slipped again. His stomach slammed the edge of the tub and his hands slapped the bottom of the tub by the woman's legs. Blood, warm and slick, splashed his face. Cursing, he pushed himself upright and jumped into the tub with her.

His hands went to her throat, searching desperately for the cut. Nothing.
What?
He wiped at her throat, baring it of blood as best he could, but still no cut, no wound.

Dimly, Jack heard Manny on the radio. He had to find the wound. He moved back, frantically scanning her naked upper body. She was a big woman, muscular like a man and he knew it would be hard to lift her, heavy as she was and on blood-slicked porcelain.

“Oh, my God,” he breathed, not believing, not wanting to understand, what he saw.

She had cut off her breasts.

The left breast was completely gone and it passed through his mind that it was in the tub with him, that he could be kneeling on it. The right breast was a mangled flap of meat hanging from her chest by threads of flesh.

She cut off her breasts. The torch was for
— He slammed that thought away.
No, please, God, no.

“Manny! Get me a towel!”

Manny thrust a towel into his arms and Jack shoved it against the woman's chest. She arched her back, groaning feebly, but Jack bore down, pushing her hard against the tub. Gentleness would kill her. In seconds, blood was seeping around his fingers, the fluffy white towel quickly turning dark with her blood.

“More towels!”

Manny disappeared and was back in seconds, dumping an armload of towels by the tub.
He must have gone to the linen closet,
Jack thought as he heaped another towel on top of the soaked one. The second towel reddened almost immediately; the third still held most of its blue colour. The fourth, miraculously, thankfully, stayed dry. For now.

“Where's the fucking ambulance?”

Something smashed in the bathroom, loud and sudden, then Manny was tearing at Jack's radio. Jack asked no questions, just lifted his left arm out of the way. Manny yanked the mitre free.

“5103, we need a rush on that ambulance!” Static. “Fuck!”

Manny fled the bathroom. The woman's life depended on an archaic technological piece of shit.

“Hang on. Don't you die on me. Don't you fucking dare.”

Jack knelt beside her, twisting to apply pressure. “Fuck it.” He carefully shifted, felt blood squish from her jeans as he straddled her thighs. He leaned in, adding his body weight to the pile of towels. His face was inches from hers. With her short haircut, strong jaw and muscular physique — a detached part of his mind noted how large the quads were that he was sitting on — she could probably pass for a man.

Is that why she did this? To be a man?

“Hang on. Hang on. Help's coming, Sy. Hang on.”

Shadows rippled at the edge of his vision and suddenly Jack was back in that alley and Sy was dying beneath his hands. His blood soaked impossibly into the asphalt and Jack knew the stain would remain forever. It would always be there to remind him of the night he failed, the night he let his friend die.

Not again, never again.

Then her hysterical girlfriend was in the doorway, clawing at her own cheeks, overrun by the horror in front of her.

“Manny! Get in here!” The last thing Jack needed was a panic-stricken girlfriend trying to get to her lover. “Manny!”

But Manny was there even before Jack's second yell was fully voiced. He wrapped his arms around the frail girl from behind. Talking soothingly into her ear, he plucked her free of the floor and carried her into the bedroom.

More screams but, thankfully, the screams of sirens.

“Hang on.” The sirens rose to a fury before choking to silence. “They're here. They're here.” The towel beneath his hands was still clean. He smiled. “I won't let you die.”

“It doesn't look like you got any in your eyes,” the paramedic declared, shining a light at Jack's eyes. “The blood seems to have hit you on the cheek and chin.” She clicked off her flashlight and tucked it away. “Did you get any in your mouth?”

Jack shook his head.

“You sure? Did you spit at any time? No? Then you're good to go, although I would recommend getting a new uniform.”

Jack nodded mutely. Every piece of his uniform had blood on it. His pants were soaked from mid-thigh down and when he had stripped off his leather gloves in the apartment they had hit the floor with a wet splat.

He was sitting on the rear bumper of an ambulance, exhausted. Wrung out. The victim had long since been rushed by emergency run to Sunnybrook Hospital, the nearest trauma centre. The last he had been told, she was going into surgery and her chances weren't looking good.

“You've had one hell of a week.”

“Hm?” Jack tried to focus on the paramedic. Fuck, he was tired.

“First the guy killed by the truck, now this. They should be giving you some time off to de-stress.”

Jack looked at the medic, really looked at her for the first time. “Oh, sorry. I didn't recognize you.”

She was the pretty blonde who had shushed him while she and her partner were dealing with the truck driver at the Mr. Big and Tall.

“No problem,” she said with a smile. “After this, I'd be surprised if you recognized yourself in the mirror. And I'm sorry about snapping at you the other day. I didn't realize until later that you didn't know about the other guy.”

Jack waved off her apology. “No big deal. I've snapped at my share of people this week.”

“You know, I'm serious about taking some time off. This is the shit that post-traumatic stress is made of.”

Jack chuckled. She had no idea. “Not likely. We're too short as it is. Hell, I'll be lucky if this is the last call I have to do today, depending on how long the report takes.”

“Yeah, we're in the same boat. Here.” She handed him some wipes. “Clean up your hands and face so you don't end up ingesting any of her blood. Hope you have a towel at the station.”

He nodded as he accepted the wipes. A shower — a very hot shower — sounded ideal. But . . .

“What about the girlfriend?”

The medic shook her head, setting her blonde ponytail bouncing in the sunlight. It looked so clean. Blood-free. In fact, the whole parking lot in front of the apartment building looked clean, the colours sharp, fresh. Which was good, considering that whenever Jack closed his eyes he saw red. So much red.