Scent of Evil (14 page)

“Dummy, stay out here and be quiet. Do you understand?”

He was breathing hard, the sweat literally pouring off his nose. He nodded as I parked him in a corner of the landing.

“One thing. Did you see or hear anyone when you found him, either in the apartment or out here?”

“I don’t know.” He put both his hands in his hair, as if holding himself down. “I don’t remember.”

“All right, all right. Stay put, okay?”

I stepped over Milly’s threshold, pushing the door back until it banged against the wall. I ignored the body stretched out before me, despite the wet gurgly breathing emanating from it, and scanned the small room. Empty. I quickly went around the periphery, checking a closet and behind the couch. The bedroom door was open. I poked my head around it and ducked back fast, waiting for some response.

Silence. I checked again, slower this time, and then entered the room, searching it and the bathroom. Satisfied the apartment was empty, I pulled my radio from my belt and announced the fact. Through the open windows, I could hear a growing orchestra of sirens converging on the building.

Milly Crawford—all three hundred pounds of him—lay flat on his back in the middle of the floor like a beached walrus, with what looked like the lower half of his face blown away. I holstered my gun and knelt by his side in the pool of blood that surrounded his upper torso. Large pink bubbles foamed from his mouth and poured down both sides of his face. Now that I was closer to him, I could see his mouth and chin were intact; the blood had made me think the damage was greater. Nevertheless, he was obviously drowning in the stuff. I grabbed his shoulders and strained against his weight to roll him toward me and drain his airway; as I did so, I saw the cause of his bleeding: There was a ragged hole in his cheek. I lifted his head and checked the other side. Sure enough, there was another hole—the entrance wound of a bullet that had passed clean through. I put his head back on its side and heard the breathing clear up a bit.

But I was baffled. A shot through the cheek doesn’t kill a man, but by the looks of him, Milly didn’t have long for the world. I checked the rest of his body and found that one side of his T-shirt was also saturated with blood. I tore it open to find a small, neat hole about halfway down the left side of his rib cage.

I tried to remember what I could of the first-aid classes we took every year. The blood was still flowing, as far as I could tell, and there was that snore-like gurgling, but it was sounding less and less like breathing and more like a death rattle. I felt for a pulse on the side of his neck. Nothing. Probably doing it wrong. I swore at my own laziness in maintaining only the minimal medical requirements set down by the department.

I knew he needed mouth-to-mouth. The ABCs, that’s what they drummed into you—airway, breathing, circulation. They’d never mentioned his face would be covered with blood. I pulled out my handkerchief and wiped at Milly’s mouth, then I made a doughnut out of it and placed it around his lips to form a barrier of sorts, so we wouldn’t actually touch. My stomach was already beginning to turn over as I flopped him back the way I’d found him and bent forward to try to resuscitate him. My head was encircled by the stench of sweat and of alcohol-tinged bad breath as I placed my mouth over his, feeling his whiskers stab my chin and upper lip through the handkerchief. I blew a single breath. Blood sprayed from both holes in his fat cheeks, and a large red bubble grew from his chest, along with a small hissing sound.

I pulled back abruptly, my head swimming with nausea, fighting the urge to retch. I could hear the pounding of feet on the wooden stairs below. I rolled Milly back onto his side with considerable effort just as two cops and three white-shirted members of Rescue, Inc. burst through the door.

I lurched to my feet and turned to the policemen, wiping my mouth repeatedly with the back of my hand. “Check the rest of the building, up and down, and seal the block. Whoever did this can’t be far.”

Just moments ago, I and my handkerchief had been feeling so utterly alone; now, the room was suddenly jammed with equipment and people who knew how to use it. A drug kit was opened, a heart monitor turned on and electrodes attached, an oxygen tank appeared from a small duffel bag and was hooked to a bag-valve mask. John Huller, the tall, blond paramedic I’d met at Charlie Jardine’s grave, put down the radio with which he’d been talking to the hospital, paused briefly to look at my blood-spattered face, and dug out a combination face and eye shield that he quickly slipped on before getting down on his hands and knees by Milly’s head. There, holding a long plastic tube in one hand, he paused to consult with the other two EMTs, checking on Milly’s vitals. He also searched his patient’s back for an exit wound. There was none.

“You have the gun? Know what caliber?” he asked me.

“No.”

Huller bent low and looked into Milly’s mouth with a small flashlight. He let out a little grunt and reached in with the gloved fingers of his free hand, pulling out a yellow, blood-streaked tooth.

“There’s got to be two more in here somewhere,” he said quietly, groping around.

The hand reappeared with another tooth and some fragments. Huller muttered, “I guess we can forget the laryngoscope,” to himself and reached for a portable suction machine with which he vacuumed Milly’s mouth. I could see several more small fragments go chasing up the suction tube. Satisfied, Huller put aside the machine and reached deep into Milly’s throat, feeling presumably for the trachea. As he did so, his mask was showered with a fine red spray. He quickly inserted the plastic tube along the passage opened by his fingers and attached the end protruding from Milly’s mouth to a bright blue “ambu” bag—an artificial lung. Another of the medics, a slim, dark-haired woman with incredibly long fingers and a name tag reading “Brenda Merritt,” pressed a stethoscope to the dying man’s chest and nodded. Huller compressed the bag several times as his colleague listened to both sides of the chest.

“Nothing on the left,” Brenda said.

He nodded. “Lot of resistance. Must be a tension-pneumo.”

While this was going on, the third member of the team had tied a tourniquet to Milly’s biceps and was examining the lower arm for a vein. I stood transfixed, fascinated by the cold chaos of it all, the seeming randomness of actions that quickly coalesced into a recognizable unified effort, all with very few words spoken.

“Get another line going. I’m going to decompress the chest.”

Brenda tied a tourniquet around Milly’s other arm and began mimicking what her male counterpart had been doing earlier, looking for a vein.

Huller, in the meantime, had pulled a long, fat, over-the-needle catheter out of one of the kits, along with an extra latex glove. He quickly cut one of the fingers off the glove and nicked the closed end of it, forming a small slit. He felt along Milly’s left ribs, below his armpit, poised the needle to make sure of his landmark, and then stuck it in. Nothing happened for an instant as the needle buried itself deeper and deeper into the fleshy skin. Huller’s face was absolutely calm and still. Abruptly, he withdrew the needle, leaving its enveloping catheter in place. There was a loud hissing sound and again blood came spraying, this time out the end of the catheter. After the hissing ebbed, Huller attached the finger of the glove to the end of the catheter with some tape.

He glanced up at my perplexed expression. “Flutter valve; lets the air out, won’t let it back in.” He listened to Milly’s chest as the male EMT worked the ambu bag, and nodded with satisfaction. He didn’t look happy with what the monitoring equipment was telling him, however. “Let’s put the MAST on him.”

Both colleagues looked at him quickly. Brenda asked quietly, “With a chest?”

“I think we’ve got volume problems somewhere. We have little to lose anyhow, especially if he codes.”

While Huller went back to his radio to give medical control an update, Brenda cracked open a square plastic box, the lower half of which had three dials with stopcocks, the upper half a cumbersome pair of inflatable nylon-coated trousers. A foot pump and three colorful rubber tubes also sprang out like jacks-in-the-box. The Medical Anti-Shock Trousers, or MAST, were quickly slipped over Milly’s legs and abdomen, velcroed shut, and inflated with the foot pump. The principle, I knew from seeing the pants used before, was to restrict the patient’s blood flow to where it was most needed. The slight disagreement I’d noticed must have stemmed from the obvious fact that if Milly’s fluids were restricted to his upper body, then they would obviously add to the leakage in his chest, possibly further compromising the lung. Apparently it was a judgment call, and nobody was arguing.

By the time they were loading Milly onto a wooden backboard, therefore, he had two large-bore IVs in his arms, had been intubated and encased in pneumatic trousers, and was being given one-hundred-percent oxygen. I didn’t know what to make of the erratic squiggles on the heart monitor’s small green video screen, but I figured that any signs there meant the heart was doing something.

That changed on the first floor. Milly’s enormous weight hadn’t made getting him downstairs an easy thing, especially with several bags of IV solution to juggle and an ambu bag that needed constant deflation. Six of us had struggled, risking the collapse of the staircase, to deny gravity’s excessive interest in our load. The trip had been jarring and clumsy, interrupted by long pauses during which we’d fumbled for better positions, our hands as wet with perspiration as if we’d just plunged them in salt water.

At the bottom, Brenda had announced in a calm voice, “We have asystole.”

That was double-Dutch to me, but it had an electric effect on her colleagues. Milly’s backboard was slammed flat on the floor, and the male EMT prepared to administer sternal compressions. Asystole meant Milly had flat-lined on us.

Huller just watched and waited, breathing hard from his exertions, his uniform soaked and sticking to him, but his face forever quiet and reflective. From the start, his expression had never shown more animation than that of a passenger staring out the window of a bus. He, however, was staring at the heart monitor.

“That’s not right. Check the leads.”

The EMT froze above Milly’s chest. Brenda ran her hands over the three electrodes stuck to Milly’s body. The one that was supposed to be attached to his waist was half undone and went dangling. She quickly reattached it.

Huller paused, waiting for the green squiggles on the screen to settle down. “We have V-tach. Prepare to defibrillate.”

He hit a switch on the monitor, a loud whine escaped from the machine, and a bright red light turned on. He took two paddles which were wired to the machine, spread some goo on them and applied them to Milly’s chest.

“Clear. All clear.”

There was a moment’s pause, then Huller hit the buttons on the paddles. Milly’s chest twitched, sending fat shock waves across his enormous white belly.

Huller watched the screen. He shook his head. “Again.”

The machine wound itself up, Huller placed the paddles, shouted “clear,” and again Milly spasmed.

“Okay. We got something here. Let’s move him fast.”

The cluster of us carried the backboard out into the street and deposited it onto the waiting ambulance stretcher. Klesczewski was standing on the porch and began walking next to me.

“Ron, find Dummy Fredericks and empty his pockets. I had a buy planned for a hundred dollars that didn’t go down. Get him to tell you what he saw or heard when he found Milly—he couldn’t have been lying there more than a couple of minutes. If he cooperates, give him this.” I reached into my wallet and handed him the allotted money plus another twenty of my own. “I told the patrol boys to search the area; I don’t expect much, but see how they did and report back to me at the hospital. Whoever plugged Milly did it fast and dirty, probably to stop us from talking with him. I want to find out why, if I can, so I’m going to stick to him like glue till he talks or he dies.”

Milly had already been loaded into the back of the ambulance. I could see Huller, now wearing a pair of headphones with a microphone, inject something into the IV line, presumably on orders from the hospital.

“Mind if I ride along?”

Huller glanced over at me. “Nope. I thought you would anyway.”

I pulled myself up and looked back at Ron. “You better send someone to get a search warrant for Milly’s apartment. I don’t know what we’ll find up there, but I don’t want some lawyer making us eat it later.”

Klesczewski nodded, gave me a thumbs-up, and slammed the door.

The ride to the hospital was short and nerve-wracking. Even with my ignorant eye, I could see something was going seriously wrong. As Huller continued watching the monitor intently, simultaneously holding his stethoscope over Milly’s exhausted heart, I could see the fat man physically changing before me. He began to turn blue from the nipples up, large veins loomed on his engorged neck, and one of the other monitoring machines they’d hooked up once they were on board started beeping dismally.

Huller spoke into his headset. “BMH from Rescue One. I think we have cardiac tamponade.”

He glanced out the window in response to some inaudible query. “We’re ten-seven your facilities right now.”

Indeed, the ambulance lurched slightly as it climbed over the small hump marking the hospital’s driveway. Whatever plans Huller might have had up his sleeve to deal with this latest crisis were obviously put on hold. Rather than dealing with Milly’s heart, he and his team began unhooking the IV bags and the oxygen tubing from the walls of the ambulance, preparing themselves for a quick exit.

Huller addressed me as he worked. “When we stop, as soon as those back doors open, jump out and clear away. We’ll be moving fast.”

“What’s happening?”

“Cardiac tamponade. The sac around the heart has filled with blood and is squeezing the heart so tight it can’t beat. We’re going to have to drain it as soon as we get inside.”

I stared at the subject of all this attention: deaf, dumb, and beyond my reach, perhaps permanently. I was half tempted to slap his cheeks, to wake him up for an instant only, just long enough to get a name out of him at least. But it was looking increasingly doubtful that Milly would chat with anyone ever again.