Stirred (49 page)

Jack would
never
answer any questions.

“Goodbye, Luther,” he tells his reflection. “It was fun being you.”

Luther climbs into his wheelchair, drapes a blanket over his lap, and once again sets off prowling through the halls. It doesn’t take him long to find a janitor’s closet, and when he’s made sure no one is looking, he pops in and quickly finds what he needs.

Next stop is locating a laundry cart.

He waits for an orderly to pop into a room to change sheets, then helps himself.

Finally, it’s a quick elevator ride to the ICU floor.

As he hoped, there are new cops on duty. There’s been a shift change, which means there won’t be another for a few hours.

Perfect.

Unfortunately, along with Phin’s guard, Andrew now has two. Luckily, they’re on opposite sides, not within each other’s line of sight. From eavesdropping on fifteen seconds of their banter, he picks up on their names.

Tony and Richie.

Luther rolls slowly past Andrew’s room, taking a surreptitious glance through the window of the closed door, and realizes the reason for the double guard.

Jack is in there with him.

He continues to roll down the unit, stopping at the men’s restroom door. He makes a pathetic show of trying to open it, then casts a glance at the cops to see if they’re watching.

They are.

“Can I get a little help here?” he calls out.

After a brief discussion, one of them, the larger, older one—Richie—walks over.

Luther slides his hand under the blanket, opening the Harpy folder.

The cop pulls the door, and Luther says, “Thanks, Officer. Look, this is really embarrassing, but I’m going to need some help getting out of this chair.”

“I can call an orderly for you.”

“I don’t need you to undress me or set me down, just a quick pick-up under the armpit. Please. This is an emergency. I don’t want to have a code brown in my chair, if you know what I mean.”

For a moment, it looks like the crusty son of a bitch is going to refuse to help a desperate, injured man, but then he holds up a finger to his partner and pushes Luther into the bathroom.

It’s empty, as Luther had hoped. Richie the Good Samaritan pushes Luther to the handicapped stall and holds the door open for him. He positions the chair next to the toilet.

“Okay, just grab me under the arms,” Luther says. He reaches up around the cop’s shoulders, palming the Harpy with the blade pressed flat against his wrist.

As soon as the cop lifts, Luther jams the hooked blade into the back of his neck, tearing hard to sever the vertebrae.

The effect is immediate. Richie falls, instant quadriplegia, the blood spurting away from Luther.

Abandoning the cop and the wheelchair, Luther wipes off the blade with some paper towels, and then sticks his head out of the bathroom door.

“Your buddy fell over!” he calls to the cop standing in front of Andrew’s room.

Tony hurries over, unsnapping his holster on the way.

Luther ducks behind the door as the cop bursts in.

This one is less trusting than the first, and immediately swings his pistol up to where he thinks Luther would be.

But Luther expected the move and is crouching below the arc of the weapon. He slashes upward with the Harpy, under the cop’s groin, severing the femoral artery so deeply the blade grazes bone.

He’s a dead man walking, but he’s still a threat until he bleeds out, so Luther drops the knife and puts both hands on Tony’s gun, trying to twist it from his grasp.

The cop is strong, and for a few seconds Luther worries he might lose.

Then shock begins to set in, and by the time the cop decides it’s time to call for help, Luther has both his gun and the knife and he silences the call with a slash across the throat.

Moving quickly now, fearful someone will walk in, Luther hurries to his wheelchair and takes the yellow stand from the seat, the one he liberated from the janitor’s closet. He places it outside the door and then peels off his spattered gown and goes to the sink to clean up the blood on his hands and arms.

Suitably blood-free, he dons the cop’s utility belt and then slips on the hospital gown he pinched from the laundry cart.

Luther has no plan to get Jack or anyone else out of the hospital, because he doesn’t plan on getting out himself.

Breaking Jack hasn’t worked.

His years of careful planning, ruined.

If he gave it too much thought, the disappointment would crush him. But he can either bitch and moan or relish the last ten minutes of his life.

All that’s left to do is kill everyone and go out in a blaze of glory.

He picks up the cop’s fallen gun, a .40 SIG Sauer. Checks the magazine.

Thirteen rounds.

Luther goes back into the stall, checks the other dead cop’s gun. A 9mm Beretta.

The .40 is better.

More stopping power. And he can’t shoot for shit lefty. Much better to have the Harpy in his free hand.

For detail work.

T
hey redid her skin-graft seams and transfused a couple pints of blood, and now Lucy rested comfortably in her room.

There was a psych consult scheduled to happen within the hour, based on her reported inability to recall her name or anything further back than waking up in front of the automatic doors to the ER.

But she wouldn’t be here for that.

There were a few old friends up in ICU whom she just couldn’t wait to see.

She climbed down out of bed and limped out into the corridor.

A quiet afternoon on her floor. Reminded her of the prison hospital, those days with D which she’d now—so strange to think—remember fondly, with a tinge of sadness even.

Lucy wandered down the hallway toward the elevators across from the nurses’ station.

No one noticed her, the nurses buried in chart work.

She punched the UP arrow and waited for the doors to split.

Stepped inside when it arrived, glad to see the car empty.

She hit number seven, the ICU floor, heard footsteps coming quickly out in the hall, a man’s voice asking for the elevator to be held.

“Too late,” she said, as she jammed her deformed finger into the CLOSE DOOR button.

She was just exiting the elevator when she saw a cop run into the washroom. Lucy watched for a moment, wondering what was happening.

A minute later, a patient stuck his head out and placed a stand outside the door.

DO NOT ENTER, RESTROOM BEING CLEANED.

Lucy had a hunch what was going on. Could she really have gotten this lucky?

Her hunch was confirmed a moment later, when the patient strolled out of the bathroom by himself.

His face was badly swollen, but Lucy knew who it was.

She knew it deep in the bones she still had left.

T
he door opened, and I turned, expecting to see Richie and Tony, but stood face-to-face with a monster instead.

I didn’t recognize him at first—his face so swollen and distorted.

But the eyes revealed him. The color had inexplicably changed from black to bright blue, but the intensity remained.

They’d contained some element of play in the few horrific moments we’d shared previously, but now they were all rage.

Luther Kite stepped over the threshold and came into the room, closing the door softly behind him with one hand as he pointed a gun at me with the other.

For a long moment, no one spoke.

Luther’s breathing was accelerated, from what I could only imagine was the exertion it had taken him to get past the two cops. I yelled for them.

“Hello, Jack. Tony and Richie aren’t going to answer.”

“Where’s my daughter?”

“You’re going to die not knowing.”

He was twitching, and I recognized the look. His calm demeanor was gone. This was a man on the edge, ready to plunge over.

I held up my hands, trying to buy some time. If he’d killed the cops outside, replacements would come. “You need me, Luther. You want me. You think I’m going to—”

“I’m over you, Jack. We could’ve been amazing together, but you and your friends screwed everything up. My God, how I’d love to spend several weeks killing you, but we’ll just have to make our brief time together count.”

He pulled a knife out of his pocket.

I thought quickly. Like all of the serial killers I’ve known, Luther was a grandiose narcissist, his ego off the charts. He chose me because he thought, in some warped bastardization of logic, that I’d appreciate his genius.

“You took his fingerprints,” I said, spreading my hands. “So the evidence had both your prints and Andrew’s prints on them. To make it look like you were killing together.”

Luther paused. “How’d you figure that out?”

“His are gone. You must have snipped them off. What did you do with them?”

Luther smiled. “Tanned them and then glued them on a pair of leather gloves. Important to keep them oiled, so they didn’t crack and dry up.”

Keep him talking, Jack.

“Why?” I asked. “Why frame Thomas?”

“Horror writer turns from writing about murder to actually doing it. Interesting story, don’t you think?”

“Were you ALONEAGAIN as well?” I asked, thinking back to the Andrew Z. Thomas message board and the reviews of his books on Amazon.

“You saw those? I hoped you would. But then, you don’t miss much, do you, Jack? But you did miss something. Maybe even the biggest secret of them all. Unfortunately, you’re going to die without ever finding—”

The door busted in.

I turned, expecting cops, but it wasn’t the police.

Instead, a horribly disfigured woman stood in the threshold clutching a gun in a three-fingered hand.

I’d never met her, but I knew this was Lucy. Donaldson’s partner.

For a second, it looked like she and Luther were going to shoot each other. But neither made a move.

“There’s another cop on the ward,” Lucy said. “We fire, no one gets out alive.”

“What makes you think I want anyone to get out alive, Lucy?”

“Don’t be stupid, Andrew. You’re too self-absorbed to want to die here.”

Andrew?

And then it hit me.

The pieces all coming together at once.

Andrew’s
missing fingerprints.

Luther’s
contact lenses and wig.

The odd ALONEAGAIN comments.

How he’d lured the agent, Cynthia Mathis, to Michigan.

The reason for putting Thomas’s books in the bodies.

The maniacal obsession with Dante.

Holy shit.

The man I’d known as Luther Kite was really Andrew Z. Thomas.

I looked at the bed. At the emaciated man lying there.

That wasn’t Andrew Z. Thomas.

That was…

“Hi, Luther,” Lucy said to the man on the bed. “Been dieting, I see.”

“Do we know each other?” he asked.

“I’ve had some cosmetic work done since I last saw you back at that convention. I’m Lucy. Remember? You got me out of that jam.”

The man on the bed—the real Luther Kite—smiled a hellish, toothless smile. “I remember, angel. Good to see you again. Is Andrew here responsible for your appearance?”

“Mine and yours.”

I turned and stared at…what was I supposed to call him?

“You’re the writer,” I said to the man pointing a gun in my face. “You’re Thomas.”

“That was a lifetime ago. I don’t write anymore. I pursue different forms of artistic expression. As you so well know, Jack.”

“How?” I asked. “How did this…?”

“Luther,” Andrew said, pointing his knife at the man on the bed while the gun stayed on Lucy. “He broke me. Just like I was trying to do to you, Jack. That was seven years ago. There was torture, of course. But the thing that changed me was what he made me do to Violet.”

I recalled Violet King. The burn scars on her arms.

“You did that?”

Andrew nodded. “Luther told me if I did, he’d free her. But then I got the upper hand. I gave as good as I got, didn’t I, Luther?”

“Yes, you did, Andrew. And then some. You’ve become quite accomplished. You’re a better me than me.”

I chanced another nervous glance at the door, wondering where the hell the cops were.

“It’s so strange, Jack,” the real Andrew said. “Suddenly realizing you have these…appetites, but not knowing how to satisfy them. I didn’t have the benefit of starting young, learning as I went along. I had to take a crash course in becoming a predator.”