The Society (40 page)

“How much more you got on you?” Biggs asked Will.

“Ten dollars.”

“Hand it over. I find you got any more, I’m gonna shoot off one of your fingers. You, how much?”

Moving with deliberate slowness, Gold slid the money clip from his pocket and tossed it over. Biggs counted the remaining bills, which Will thought might add up to as much as a thousand, and stuffed them in his deep pants pocket.

“You jus’ bought yourself some serious consideration, my man.”

“I’ll leave him and the X-rays here with you while I go and get some more,” Gold said. “Twice that much. Then I want them both.”

“I wonder what it is about you that I just don’t trust. What you all think, guys? You think we should let him just take off?”

“Bogus.”

“He sucks.”

“You can throw him farther ’n you can trust him.”

“We ain’t standin’ around here in the rain.”

“The will of the Cobras has spoken,” Biggs said. “We ain’t waitin’ around for you or anyone. You want this dude, Mr. Tough, you gotta catch him. Chris, will you feel you kept your part of the bargain if we give this hangdog, say, a minute’s head start?”

“A minute’d be fine, Biggs.”

“A minute it is, then. Give him that envelope, Mr. Tough.”

“You’re costing yourselves a lot of money.”

“We’ll decide what we’re costin’ ourselves. Now give it to him and lay down on your face.”

“But—”

“Down! . . . Okay, now, hangdog, you got a minute. Ready, go!”

“Wait, I—”

“Fifty-five seconds. No, no, not back up that alley, down that way. Fifty seconds. Now get going. . . . Forty-five seconds.”

With Biggs’s voice echoing behind him, Will sprinted off down whatever street they were on, which he believed ran parallel to Spruce.

“Forty seconds!”

Frantically, he searched for an alley crossing over to Spruce. Instead, the street began sloping upward and curving to the left—away from where the Jeep was parked.

“Thirty seconds!”

Biggs’s voice still seemed to be coming from just a few feet behind him. Will’s legs felt as if they were moving through molasses. He looked in better shape than he was, and countless nights on call hadn’t helped matters. The muscles he needed for standing at the operating table or prowling the wards of the hospital were strong, but aerobically he wasn’t much of a specimen. Already he was breathing heavily, and a sharp stitch had formed in his side. Gold had perhaps five or six years on him, but he was also fit. With the X-rays tucked against his body, Will’s stride was choppy and unbalanced. In addition to the dagger in his side, every step sent a railroad spike hammering into his battered jaw.

A right turn. Where in the hell is a right turn?

Initially, he had been grateful they left him his car keys and certain he could make it to the Jeep before Gold caught him. Now he debated whether it was worth abandoning the notion of the Jeep and instead trying to find a place to hide—a Dumpster, perhaps, or a doorway into a building. His minute was over, he felt certain of that, but the bend in the road made it impossible to see if Gold was closing on him.

Ahead on the right he spotted a street sign fixed to the side of a building like the one for Dennis Way.
Alley 122
. A right here, then maybe two more rights and he might find Spruce. It seemed like a better bet than trying to hide someplace. Maybe just the turn would be enough to lose Gold. Still sprinting full bore, trying to ignore his mounting discomforts, he charged into the alley, which was cleaner and less cluttered than Dennis. Ten yards in, he caught his toe in a pothole and fell, sprawling face first onto the slick pavement. He cried out as skin tore off his knees and palms. Air exploded from his lungs. The envelope of films skidded out of his grasp. He glanced back as he retrieved it and scrambled to his feet. Nothing yet.

Ignoring pain in half a dozen different places, he sprinted ahead. He was nearing the end of the alley when he heard a gunshot from behind him. A piece of brick to his left shattered off. Silhouetted against the dim light at the far end of the alley, still a good distance away, Gold appeared to be on one knee, steadying himself for another shot. Will lurched to his left as the second shot ricocheted off a wall not far from his head.
Damn!
Biggs would never have given Gold back his gun. He must have had a second one hidden somewhere. No surprise. The man was a pro.

The end of the alley was just a few yards away. A car splashed past on what seemed a much wider street than Spruce. Right, then maybe another right, Will guessed, realizing at the same time that he might have gotten completely turned around. Even if he could put a little more distance between him and Gold, would he have a chance to reach the Jeep, jump in, and get it out of a tight parking space? Doubtful. Even if his sense of where he had parked was right on the money, it was extremely doubtful he could make it out in time. Still, however remote, there was a chance.

He pushed himself even harder, blocking out the aches and the hopelessness of his position. Charging around the corner, he narrowly avoided colliding with a man walking toward him. It was Lionel, still on his evening constitutional. Gasping for air, Will grabbed him by the arm and roughly pulled him into the shadow of a brick tenement.

“Lionel, Lionel, listen,” he heard his desperate voice plead, “I’m in big trouble. Here, take this and hold it for me. Wait in here until it seems safe, then go home. I’ll find you.”

“Who—”

Panicked beyond waiting for any reply or working through the potential consequences of what he was doing, Will thrust the envelope into the old man’s hands and pushed him into the rear of the unlit, recessed entryway to the building. Then, praying Gold wouldn’t realize that his initial move had been to the right, he hunched over as if he were a running back with a football and sprinted across the rain-swept street to the left. Another shot snapped off from the alley, then another. Both sounded much closer than had the previous ones. He was across the street now, pounding past a beauty parlor, then a tax office, trying to keep his speed up as pain in his hands, jaw, and knees and the horrific stitch in his side slowed him down. A block passed, then most of another.

“Grant! Give it up!” Gold called from behind. “Those were warning shots. I can kill you right now, but I won’t. Just give me the films!”

The killer was gaining rapidly now. Will knew that, barring the sudden appearance of a patrol car or police station, it was almost over for him. Ahead and to his right was the entrance to an old, unlit cemetery. From what he could tell, none of the headstones seemed large enough to offer a place to hide. Still, the route would take him even farther from Lionel, and if he made it through, maybe there was more activity on the other side.

With no plan other than to keep moving, he cut sharply to his right, between two shoulder-high granite steles and into the graveyard. He hadn’t gone more than twenty or thirty feet when he tripped over a low stone nearly obscured in the long grass and pitched forward, slamming shoulder first into a marker that looked to be centuries old. At that moment, part of him wanted to quit, to just roll over and wait. Instead, he scrambled to his feet and stumbled ahead. The far side of the small cemetery seemed to border a fairly busy street. Two cars sped past, then a third. If he could just make it there, he sensed he had a chance.

What little remained of his hope lasted only a few more seconds. Before he reached the low hedges marking the far border of the graveyard, he was tackled from behind with stunning force. His face narrowly missed a stone as he pitched forward into cold, wet mud with Gold’s full weight upon him. Another instant and he was on his back, his attacker straddling him, looking furiously about, his dirt-stained face a mask of rage. Squeezing Will’s cheeks inward until his mouth involuntarily opened, Gold thrust his pistol to the back of his throat.

“Okay, you son of a bitch,” he rasped, “where are the frigging films?”

CHAPTER
30

There was no way Will could tell what was first to work its way into his fragmented consciousness—the free-floating, disconnected images of the hours, perhaps days, just passed, the distinctive odors of animals and disinfectant, or the intense pain. The room was quite long and fairly narrow, with a high ceiling illuminated by two rows of fluorescent tubes and the light from three windows along the wall to his left.

He was naked, lying faceup on a hard, thin mattress. Whether out of pity or anger, someone had thrown a moldy brown army blanket over him. He flashed on the similar sensations of waking up on a respirator in the ICU following his fentanyl overdose. He was absolutely helpless then and terrified of the tube down his throat. This time he was simply miserable.

There was swelling about his eyes that made it difficult to see clearly. His face felt as if it were caked in cement. He could open his mouth, but only at an agonizing price. His nostrils admitted only thin streams of air.

Shakily, he reached up a puffed, abraded hand and confirmed that the cement was, in fact, thick layers of dried blood covering his nose, lips, chin, and chest. Bits of memory continued to drift together, then flutter apart like windblown leaves. He knew that at some point he had been drugged, then hurt, then drugged again. A wiry little man with bad skin and yellowing teeth had cut him or burned him in some way, asking over and over about the X-rays.

Had he told them about Lionel?

Given that he was alive, it didn’t seem likely. He had always had a well-documented stubbornness and bull-like obstinacy. Could those traits, so often a source of problems for him, possibly have been enough to resist torture and, at least for the moment, save his life?

Again, the smell of animals worked its way past his swollen nostrils. A farm of some sort? He struggled to focus. He was in a virtually bare room in what seemed to be a house—possibly a farmhouse. Little by little, the fog shrouding his senses and his memory began to lift. The rain . . . the Cobras . . . the guns . . . the envelope . . . Marshall Gold hunched over him, his face pinched with rage, the muzzle of his pistol jammed so hard against the back of Will’s throat that it seemed ready to tear through to the other side. There, abruptly, the memories ended. Had he passed out? Had the drugs and the pain ablated the final pieces of his ill-fated trip into the city?

The questions kept coming. How had Gold gotten him out of Roxbury to this place? Who was the little man who had tortured him? When they were ready for him to die, how were they going to do it? Would the kids ever know for certain that he was dead, or would he simply become a missing person—a photo in a thick binder or one of many flyers on the bulletin board of a police station? And perhaps most baffling, what were the thick collection of X-rays in the envelope all about?

Gingerly, he tested first his fingers and hands, then his arms, feet, and legs. None of them was pain-free, but none brought the sharp, boring discomfort of a broken bone. It seemed strange that Gold hadn’t bothered to tie him down in some way. He rolled uncomfortably to one side and squinted into what might have been morning sun, filtering through the gauze curtains that covered each of the three windows. The unadorned walls of the room were painted light blue, the door and trim around the windows white.

To his right was a small, gouged wooden table, with no chairs. Piled by one of the legs were his clothes. The notion of trying to retrieve them brought a wry, painful smile. Given the agony of even minute movements, the clothes might just as well have been lying on the floor of his closet at home. Still, his nakedness felt unpleasant and demeaning enough to push him to try. It wasn’t until he had propped himself on one elbow that he first noticed the burns—small black discs of seared flesh, a dozen or more of them, half an inch or so in diameter, covering his chest and arms in a more or less random pattern. He shuddered. These same burns dotted much of Charles Newcomber’s corpse. Whatever instrument was responsible had apparently been more than the radiologist’s heart could handle. Will was relieved that the fingers of his own memory seemed unwilling to fully grasp his experience with it.

He rolled off the mattress onto the chilly hardwood floor. Doing his best to ignore the stabs of a thousand daggers, he pulled his way across to the pile of clothing and began arduously pulling on his underwear. As he finished, he noticed that beneath the nearby gauze curtains, the windows were unbarred. He scanned the room, but saw no obvious cameras. If they weren’t watching him through some sort of monitoring, and if the room wasn’t any higher up than the second floor, he had a chance. He could use a table leg on the window and strips of blanket tied to the table to get to the ground. He leaned against the wall and inched into his jeans, which were filthy and sodden. Apparently he hadn’t been in the room long enough for them to dry.

He was turning back to inspect the window when the single door to the room opened. Marshall Gold entered, accompanied by the slightly built man with the pencil-thin mustache and pockmarked face. Gold, handsome and fit in a button-down dress shirt and tan slacks, looked rested and refreshed. He was pushing a well-used, high-backed wooden armchair. His unpleasant-looking companion, dressed all in black, clutched a scuffed leather briefcase to his chest as if it were an infant.

Will had little doubt that the contents of the case had everything to do with the burns on his body.

“Don’t bother, Doctor Grant,” Gold said. “Those windows are half-inch-thick Plexiglas.”

“Is that why there are no cameras?”

Will’s voice was sandpaper. He tried unsuccessfully to clear away the raspiness.

“Do you think we need them?”

“I think you’re sick.”

“Maybe . . . maybe so,” Gold replied thoughtfully. “I think I’ll take that as a compliment. Well, now, my friend, you’ve given us quite a night.”

“Fuck you.”

“I believe we’ve heard him say that before, don’t you, Dr. Krause?”

Krause nodded.

“A tough nut, Mr. Gold,” he said, his formality sounding like Wint or Kidd, the hand-holding killers in James Bond’s
Diamonds Are Forever
. “A tough nut, indeed.”