Near Death (2 page)

Through the cloudy plastic he had a fleeting glimpse of Thomas looking as wild-eyed and panicked as he. He heard distant shouts but the words didn’t register. He was close, he could feel it coming.

Stay strong
.

There was a fade to gray as if a dimmer switch was being turned and then the terror receded.

Blackness. Pure blackness without a photon of light.

It enveloped him, he floated in it. He was a fetus again and the blackness was his amniotic fluid.

He was aware of breathing, of light. He reached up and touched his forehead. His face and hair were wet. The bag was gone. He was on his back, his long legs dangling off
the table. He felt utterly lost, confused, and then he saw Thomas, sitting on a stool beside him, distraught, tearful, an oxygen mask in his lap.

“Did you get the samples?”

Thomas was silent.

“Did you get them?” He sat up. His head was pounding. His mind shouldn’t have been as blank as it was. Something was wrong.

“No.”

He was incredulous. “What do you mean
no
?”

Thomas was crying. “I couldn’t go through with it. I thought you were going to die.”

“How long was I out?”

“Forty seconds, maybe fifty.”

“That’s all?”

“I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I cut the bag off, I gave you oxygen.”

He stood on shaky legs, towering over the slight man.

“Are you telling me I went through this hell for nothing?”

“I thought you were going to die!”

He felt the greatest surge of rage he’d ever experienced: overwhelming, murderous rage. He’d never struck a man but he felt his fist automatically balling up
and his arm arching backward. His fist swung forward with all his weight behind it and caught Thomas on the side of his face, square on the cheek. The pain of impact shot up his arm and brought him to his senses.

What have I done?

Thomas let out a sick sound of surprise as he toppled from the stool, surrendering to gravity. The opposite side of his head was the first body part to hit. It caught the rounded corner of a lab bench hard. There was a nauseating sound of bone letting go, he uttered a simple
Ugh
, then crumpled to the floor. He convulsed for no more than ten seconds then lay motionless.

Alex knelt beside him and called his name, then shook him by the shoulders. The body was lifeless. One of his pupils was already fully dilated, a cold black saucer. The other was following suit, an expanding mass of blood choking his brainstem.

The pulse at the neck was thready. He could start CPR but he’d need help. He had his cell phone. His thumb hovered over the 9 in 911. Then he saw the clock and found himself subtracting off the approximate number of seconds since the head blow. His anger returned. He hated this pathetic creature dying at his knees.

He rose and found the spinal needle on the cart, still glistening with his own fluids. He drew up a syringe of saline, flushed the needle twice then collected his unused specimen tubes, all the while keeping the clock in his sight lines.

One minute gone, one minute to go.

He turned Thomas on his side and pulled up his shirt. His backbones were spiky like the tail of a reptile. He felt the space between two vertebrae and pushed the needle through the skin.

He promptly hit something hard. Bone. He tried again—and again. He couldn’t get the lifeless body into enough of a curl to open up the intervertebral space. He tried again. Another dry tap. His hands started to shake.

The second hand was approaching the two-minute mark. He desperately tried again then gave up in disgust.

There
—a plastic case on one of the benches. He opened it. The stainless-steel tool with its battery pack was heavy in his hand.

He stood over Thomas, thinking ferociously, at war with his emotions.

Two minutes ten seconds. He was running out of time.

He pulled the trigger of the surgical drill and it whirred to life, making his hand vibrate and feel vital. He
lowered himself onto his haunches and let the drill bit hover an inch from Thomas’s skull.

Do it
.

He closed his eyes and pressed down hard.

Two

Cyrus O’Malley felt like a stranger. It wasn’t his church. He sat in a rear pew at the aisle so he could make a gentle exit if he had a change of heart. It was an older crowd, pale wrinkled ladies in veils and well-fed men with bellies spilling over their belts. There were very few children. This was old school: medieval old.

He still wasn’t sure what instinct had grabbed hold and made him find a church that did a Tridentine mass, rare these days. Vatican II had all but nailed that coffin shut. Now Sunday mass was a progressive thing done in the local vernacular to the strains of folk guitars; too watered down. He needed stronger medicine.

Sitting there, the Latin echoing around the old church, the woodwork perfumed with age, he felt plugged into the ancient religion and it soothed his nerve endings like butter on a burn. The priest was surprisingly young, his voice almost womanly, his body ample and round. “Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum: adveniat regnum tuum: fiat voluntas tua, sicut in coelo et in terra panem nostrum quotidianum da nobis hodie; et
dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris: et ne nos inducas in tentationem.”
(Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name: thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread: and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive them that trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation.)
And Cyrus and the congregation intoned as one, “Sed libera nos a malo.”
(But deliver us from evil.)

Deliver Tara from evil
, he thought.
Deliver her, Lord. Deliver her
.

Outside, the crisp autumn morning was suffused with the orange of an ascending sun. He lingered, unconnected to the parishioners but nonetheless taking comfort being in their midst, listening to old-folk conversations about lunch plans. He had no such plans. The rest of his empty Sunday lay before him. His thin-walled apartment sickened him. He supposed he’d try to read but the Pats were playing and the game would be filtering in from both sides. No point asking his neighbors to tone it down; for them it was the big event of the week. Headphones only helped to a point. Their foot-stomping and shouting came through anyway. It would have been a good afternoon to take Tara to a movie and get ice cream but it wasn’t his weekend. He’d
probably just climb in his car, pick a compass point and burn some gas. Maybe stop in a bookstore then find a quiet coffee shop.

The priest looked up and broke away from a knot of congregants. He had noticed the athletic stranger, a man close to his age, late thirties, forty at most, too handsome and well-hinged to be drifting alone on the stairs of an unfamiliar church. Yet there was also a melancholy about him that beckoned the priest to missionary work.

Though Cyrus was a large man, he seemed smaller than his physical presence, compacted by mood, his heavy shoulders drooping in a tan blazer, hooded brown eyes cast down, mouth curled in a half-frown. The priest approached him with an open-faced curiosity, his white chasuble billowing in the breeze.

“Hello there, I’m Father Donovan.”

“Cyrus O’Malley, Father. Pleased to meet you.”

The priest leaned in, in a friendly way, his breath smelling of sacramental wine. “Any relation to Bob O’Malley from Needham?”

“Not that I know of.”

“We haven’t seen you here before.”

“It’s my first time.” He hesitated and found a two-word explanation. “The Latin.”

“I’m glad you appreciate it. It’s not for everyone.”

“Forsitan non, tamen ego utor Latin,” Cyrus answered.

The priest was taken aback. “I haven’t met someone with a conversational knowledge of Latin since seminary. Are you a scholar?”

Cyrus smiled at the question. “Hardly. I’m an FBI agent.”

“Well, I confess that surprises me. Our first encounter and I’m confessing to you! Do you regularly attend somewhere else, Cyrus?”

“I’m in between. I used to go to St. Anselm’s in Sudbury.”

“Father Bonner. He gives a good sermon. So you like the Latin mass. You seem awfully youthful for that.”

“Childhood memories.”

“From where?”

“In Brighton. St. Peter.”

“A local boy. Well, we’d love to see you here again, Cyrus.” He waved his arms at his departing flock. “You’d bring our average age down considerably.”

Cyrus’s phone chirped.

“You get that,” the priest said, touching him on the shoulder. “It was good talking to you.”

The caller ID read
AVAKIAN
. He pictured Pete’s hairy forearms bulging from the sleeves of his golf shirt.

“How’re you hitting them?” Cyrus answered.

“Long and left. Fairways hit: zero. Where are you?”

“Praying.”

“Me too. Over my putts.”

“What do you want?” For them, blunt equaled friendly.

“Just a heads up. Stanley’s got something new for us. He’s rolling it out tomorrow.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I told him you wouldn’t. He’s a shitty golfer but he’s not a bad guy. He’s sympathetic.”

“But …”

“But, it’s a done deal, Cy. He said he’s been protecting you but he’s got no choice. Our number’s up.”

Cyrus sighed loud enough for Avakian to hear it over the clamor of his foursome ordering breakfast burritos at the half-way canteen. “How bad is it?”

“It looks like it could be a big case.”

Three

“
What’s it going to be tonight, honey?”

She delivered the question as if she were taking an order from behind a deli counter. The man in the car looked back at her with a blank expression. “I don’t know … the usual.”

“There’s no such thing,” she said impatiently. “I’m not a mind reader.” She was a white girl, early twenties, a little overweight, a lot of foundation makeup filling in burned-out acne craters. Both stockings had ladders disappearing up her skirt. Her cologne had dissipated hours earlier. She smelled of cigarettes.

“A blow job maybe.”

“It’s fifty dollars. You okay with that?”

He wavered, a few beats too long for her comfort. “Yes.”

“What?” she demanded. She gave her john another once-over. She’d judged him safe enough to climb in after leaning into his car window and studying his face for signs of trouble as she purred her rote introduction in a faux-sexy voice. He was clean-looking, a big handsome face with
prominent landmarks: arching cheekbones, high forehead, large hazel eyes and a smooth jutting jaw, long brown hair pulled into a ponytail. Then his hands: dirt-free, not a brute’s. He looked brainy, not her standard street trade. She had a habit of checking out backseats. Nothing good came from a backseat littered with fast-food wrappers and old clothes, greasy tools, hidden lumpy things under blankets. His was barren.

“Nothing, no problem,” he insisted, pulling away from the curb after checking his mirrors and signaling with the caution of a kid taking his road test.

At 2
A
.
M.
Mass Ave was traffic-free. The streets were slicked from an evening shower. She pulled her jacket around herself for warmth. He seemed to notice and like a gentleman, turned up the heater. “Where’re we going?” she asked.

“I don’t want to park on the street. A friend of mine has a lock-up garage in Cambridge. I don’t want to pull a Hugh Grant.”

“Who’s he?”

“A British actor. Caught in the act in his car.”

“You sound like you’re from there. Or at least not from here.”

“Yeah,” he answered. “People tell me that.”

“I know places to park that are safe,” she said. “We don’t need to go all the way to Cambridge.”

“It’s not far. It’s just over the bridge.”

She screwed up her mouth defiantly. “I don’t like the sound of a lock-up garage.”

He stopped at a light and smiled weakly. “I understand. The thing is, I’ve got an important job and I can’t risk getting busted. I’ll do a hundred. But if you’re uncomfortable, I’ll let you out here, no harm, no foul.”

She fumbled for a cigarette and didn’t ask for permission to light up. “Okay, but don’t get weird on me. Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

He pulled money out of his shirt pocket and politely handed it to her. “You can trust me.” He opened his window to let out smoke then drove toward the river.

She noticed his knuckles. They were white from gripping the steering wheel too tightly. She’d seen that before. Some of the johns were coiled springs, only letting their guard down a few moments before coming.

Soon, they left Memorial Drive for the tight, protected grid of Cambridgeport. Cars with pasted-on overnight parking permits lined both sides of the narrow streets. The residential neighborhood was a claustrophobic jumble of triple-deckers, single-family houses, and low,
squat apartment blocks, mostly dark except for the students and insomniacs whose lights were still blazing. He made a couple of lefts and a right then slowed to a crawl in front of a two-story house with white siding. The windows were black.

“This it?” the girl asked.

He nodded, pulled into the stubby driveway, and told her he’d be back in a second.

He left the car idling and slid open the garage door. When he returned, the girl said, “You couldn’t do that where I live.”

“Do what?”

“Leave a garage unlocked.”

“It’s a safe neighborhood.”

It was more of a shed than a garage, too narrow to park at the midline if you wanted to open the driver’s side door without bumping. She noticed right away that the wall was hugging her passenger side and there was no way out. While she nervously lit another cigarette, the john wriggled out his side, flicked an overhead light switch and shut the garage door.

When he got back in he said, “There.” He seemed more relaxed.

She rested the cigarette in the ashtray.

“You smoke a lot,” he said.

She ignored him and reached for his crotch.

He told her to wait.

“Why?”

“I want to talk first.”