Stirred (48 page)

“Hey, boys.”

I walked in, hugged them each in turn.

“Hey, Jackie,” Harry said. “Herb didn’t know I had club box seats at Wrigley Field. We’re going to a game next week.”

“Who is?” I asked.

“Me and Herb.”

I eyed Herb. “You’re going to a Cubs game with Harry?”

“Yeah. We’ve put our differences aside and realized we have a lot in common. We both like baseball. And hot dogs. And Neil Diamond. And microbrew beer. Harry’s actually a pretty cool guy.”

I glanced down at Herb’s chart, looking for mention of a head injury.

“We’d invite you to come along,” Harry said, “but it’s a guy’s night out. Bros before hoes. Right, big dog?”

“You know it.”

I watched, astonished, as they bumped knuckles.

“Explode it!” Harry said.

They touched fists again, and then each made a
POW
sound as they opened their hands in a mock explosion.

I felt like rolling my eyes but didn’t want to be the gray cloud in their sunshine parade. “Where’s Phin?”

“ICU,” Herb said. “His surgery took longer than ours.”

“I got fifteen stitches,” McGlade said, smiling proudly. “Herb got thirty. Fo’ knucks, big dog! Holla back!”

They bumped fists again.

“Explode it!” Harry said.

Once more, with a
POW
.

I thought I liked it better when they hated each other.

Scratch that. I was positive I liked it better.

“Phin okay?” I asked.

Herb nodded. “They saved his kidney. Six hours under the knife, but he’s doing fine.”

“It’s okay,” Harry said. “He’s got a spare one. Apparently he’s some kinda genetic freak who was born with two kidneys. Phin’s the man, dog. Bust the rock!”

They tapped knuckles again.

“Explode it!”

POW
.

I would have told them to get a room, but they already had one.

“I’m going to check on him,” I said, leaving them alone with their guy love.

My cop escort tailed me to the ICU, which required an elevator ride up to the seventh floor. Phin also had a guard in front of his door who wouldn’t let me through until I lied and said I was Phin’s wife.

Phin was asleep, a tube up his nose, his color pallid.

When I kissed his forehead, he opened his eyes.

“Hey, you,” he whispered.

“Hey. How you feeling?”

“Groggy. But strong. Did they find…?”

I shook my head, a tear raining down my cheek. “Not Luther, or our daughter.”

I reached down, held his hand, squeezed it. He squeezed back.

“Harry and Herb?” he asked.

“I think they’re going to start dating.”

“How are you, Jack?”

I pursed my lips together, because I was afraid I’d start sobbing if I spoke.

“That man,” Phin said. “The one Luther had chained up. Maybe he knows something.”

I nodded, wiping away a tear with the back of my hand. “I should go be me?” I said.

“No one does it better, babe.”

I gave Phin another kiss, this one on the cheek.

Then I shuffled off to talk to Andrew Z. Thomas.

Earlier

S
he walked into the waiting room of the ER.

Eyes instantly upon her, and why shouldn’t they be?

Her housedress practically shredded and reeking of dried sewage from her romp through Luther’s playhouse. And she looked like…

Well, she looked like what she looked like.

She limped up to the admit window and waited for the nurse to notice.

The older woman behind the glass didn’t even look at her, just said, “Fill out the intake form, bring it back to me.”

Lucy leaned in close to the glass, stared at the woman with her single, functioning eye, said, “Hey. Emergency here.”

The old nurse finally obliged her and registered a beat of shock and horror at Lucy’s hideous visage.

Already, blood was running down Lucy’s skinny legs and pooling at her feet.

Lucy held up her three-fingered claw and then lifted her dress over her head, exposing the skin-graft seams she’d ripped out in the parking lot, figuring her only sure shot at an admit would be copious amounts of blood.

She heard an “Oh my God,” from one of the other patients in the waiting room.

Heard the nurse pick up the phone and call for a gurney, stat.

Lucy had thought she’d have to fake losing consciousness, but she apparently had done too good a job, possibly ripped out too many seams, the blood flooding out of her faster than she’d planned or anticipated.

A swirling dizziness sapped the strength from her legs, which buckled.

She was out before she even hit the floor.

R
ichie led me down past the nurses’ station to a room at the end of the wing, where another guard stood watch in front of a room I knew must belong to Andrew Z. Thomas.

The guards must’ve known each other because they bumped knuckles but thankfully restrained themselves from exploding. What was up with guys and doing that? Maybe I didn’t get the memo because I didn’t have testicles.

My guard said, “What’s the hap-hap, Tone?”

“You know, just pulling the door duty. All’s quiet.”

“Same here. And I like it quiet. This is my last day, man. Retirement, here I come.”

“You and the missus buy that beach house in Florida?”

“You betcha. Gonna spend my golden years fishing for hammerheads and drinking rum punch.”

“Who’s this, Richie?” Andrew’s guard motioned to me.

“I’m Jack Daniels,” I said, extending my hand.

“Officer Tony Satori. Pleasure to meet you.”

“Is he up?” I jerked a thumb over my shoulder. “I’d like a few words.”

“Doc said no one goes in.”

“It’s okay, Tone,” Richie said. “She’s the one who saved him.”

Tony sized me up. “Yeah. You used to be that cop, outta Chi-town.”

“Used to be,” I said.

“Sure. Go on in. You want us in there with you?”

“I outweigh him by fifty pounds. I think I’ll be okay.”

Richie nodded, and I entered the room, closing the door behind me.

Andrew was lying in bed, the covers tucked under his bony arms. They’d given him a haircut and shaved off the Rip Van Winkle beard, but that only made him look even more like a corpse. His eyes were closed, and I immediately felt like I was attending a wake rather than visiting a live patient.

“Mr. Thomas?”

He opened his dark eyes. “What year is this?”

I told him.

“I’ve been gone a long time,” he said. Not a trace of self-pity or bitterness.

“I’m sorry about what he did to you.”

He made a small motion that might have been a shrug. “You reap what you sow.”

“Do you know who I am?”

He nodded, so slowly I figured it must have hurt him to do so. “I overheard some of the police talking. They filled me in. I have you to thank, they tell me.”

But he didn’t thank me. He didn’t say anything.

“He has my baby,” I finally said.

“I heard that as well.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No.”

I tried a different tract. “You know him. Probably better than anyone else. What do you think he did with her?”

“I don’t know. I’ve seen him do terrible things. Many of them to me. He has no empathy. No mercy. He’s the perfect killing machine. I have a pretty active imagination, but I could barely comprehend the depths of depravity he reached.”

Thomas wasn’t helping me. In fact, he was creeping me out.

I wondered if the years of abuse and captivity had destroyed his mind.

What was I thinking? Of course they had. This guy actually knowing something was beyond a long shot.

But a long shot was better than no shot at all.

“If you have any ideas about what he did with my little girl, I’d like to hear them.”

“I have some ideas. Like putting your baby on a skillet, the stove turned on low. A newborn couldn’t flip out of the pan. Just slowly cook, screaming, wondering why this terrible thing was happening after nine months of floating in bliss.”

I was so revolted, so outraged by the suggestion, that I almost struck him. I had to remind myself that this guy was insane, had endured things no one should have ever been forced to endure. It wasn’t his fault.

“I’m…” I pushed it back. “I’m sorry to disturb you, Mr. Thomas.”

I turned, ready to get the hell out of there.

“Hold on,” he called to me.

I stopped. Waited.

“Try to think like him,” Thomas said. “He wants to hurt you. Right?”

I nodded.

“What would hurt you more? Him killing your baby? Or him keeping your baby alive?”

I had no idea. They were both too horrible to comprehend.

“If he kills her, it’ll be a one-time pain. But if he keeps her alive…sends you photos every once and a while…perhaps photos of the terrible things he’s doing to her…wouldn’t that hurt more?”

I felt the tears coming. “Yes.”

Thomas spread out his palms.

“Then that’s what he’ll do.”

I was about to reply when I noticed Thomas’s fingers for the first time.

The tips were missing.

And I knew what that meant.

H
e shuts off some moronic game show playing on the television and climbs out of bed, padding to the bathroom. The mirror reveals the truth.

He’s hideous.

A swollen, discolored, scabby face. Split lips. A nose packed with cotton.

The contact lenses and the black wig are gone, and for good measure he also shaved his head in a gas station bathroom a few miles outside of Detroit.

Luther opens his mouth, wincing at the missing teeth, the black and scarlet gums.

He looks like a Halloween jack-o’-lantern.

But it’s the perfect disguise, ideal for hiding in plain sight. He almost wants to thank Phin for it.

Perhaps he will. Phin is just one floor above him in the ICU.

Luther was admitted into the hospital in the wee hours of the morning. He had to endure a clumsy doctor’s attempt at stitches, a CT, and an X-ray, and after three hours of waiting and testing was diagnosed with a concussion.

That’s courtesy of Jack. He plans on visiting her as well.

Earlier, with the use of a wheelchair the helpful nursing staff provided him, Luther found Jack’s room, along with Herb’s and Harry’s, Phin’s, and Andrew’s. Each had an armed cop guarding their door. It had taken Luther a few late-night phone calls to find out which of Detroit’s many hospitals they’d been brought to, but he’d hit the jackpot on the fourth try.

He isn’t concerned about being spotted—his own dead mother wouldn’t recognize him with all the swelling. And the best thing about wearing a memorable outfit—cowboy boots, black jeans, long hair—is that people tend to remember that more than actual features.

Being the object of a statewide manhunt, Luther figures the safest place to be is hiding right under their noses.

Besides the four cops on guard duty, there are two more downstairs, and various cops and Feds are constantly coming and going. On one of his excursions, Luther overheard one of Jack’s doctors talking to the Sheriff’s Department, explaining she wouldn’t be fit to answer questions for at least another day.

The doctor was wrong.