Precious Blood (30 page)

He couldn’t tell if Garcia was alive or dead; his face was
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pale, and as the world began to move away from him, Jenner saw that there were beads of sweat on him, like fake dew on wax fruit.

The sirens grew louder, and there was shouting, “Drop it! Drop it!” then he heard more screaming, Kimi, maybe, maybe even himself, no, not him, his breath, he couldn’t get his breath, ALHR, he wasn’t breathing, and then everything went black.

Ana woke in darkness, pain roaring across her chest as if her breastbone had been split with an ax. She was partially suspended. Her head hung forward, her arms angled back and up, her shoulders straining as if they were about to pop out of their sockets. Above the rope chafing her wrists raw, her hands were numb and her fingers wouldn’t move.

She started to retch, the spasms that racked her chest tearing at her arms. The retching subsided, leaving her hanging, shivering. Her whole body was icy. She straightened her legs, and the pain in her wrists and shoulders eased as she took some of the weight off.

She tried to stay calm and think clearly.

What did she know?

She was still dressed, and it didn’t feel like anyone had messed with her clothes. Jeans, panties, a bra, T-shirt. Her new sweater.

Okay, she was clothed, she was okay so far. Socks, no shoes. Okay so far.

Where was she? One step at a time. Think. Okay, she was in a room, but it had no windows, or else the windows were heavily shaded.

She was bound. Wrists behind her back, pulling upward.

By what? Rope, not handcuffs. Coarse natural rope, not smooth synthetic.

What else? She was close to a wall. She wished she could
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see more. There was no light.

Where was she? She was against the wall in a room. The room was cold. She concentrated. The room was colder toward her left than her right. Was there a window there?

Door? Fireplace?

She couldn’t tell. She leaned back. The wall was icy cold; brick, she thought. It smelled of burned charcoal. She felt the floor with her feet. Planks, wood planks. Wide.

So. She was tied up in a brick room with broad floorboards. A loft? A warehouse?

She tested the bonds of her wrists; her hands were tingling.

She straightened up as best she could, then leaned to her side as far as she could, until her face pressed against the brick. It smelled of damp and mildew, and she felt an oily smear on her face. She kept rubbing; in some parts of the wall, the plaster was missing.

She slid one foot out, balancing on the other leg, sweeping it slowly across the floor again. In some areas, the wood was spongy, splintering softly when she pressed hard.

So. An old warehouse. Damp. In the basement? Near a river or pond or lake?

Wait—was she still even in the city?

She listened hard, straining to catch city noise. Traffic, sirens, yelling, loud music—all of the things she’d complained about when she first moved to New York, she was desperate for them now.

She could hear nothing.

She breathed deeply. It smelled wet, and it smelled moldy.

Dank
.
Dank
was the word, she thought. It smelled dank.

And she had figured out that she was in an old, probably abandoned, warehouse, in a room where all light had been blocked out, and the warehouse might be near water. Maybe outside the city.

Okay. Good, she was thinking, she was using her wits.

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That was good. She could feel her nerves jangling, but she was keeping it together. Just by thinking about things, by being rational, she’d made herself centered in this place.

And she’d done it all just by thinking about what she smelled and what she heard.

Then she heard something else: a thrumming noise that gradually grew louder into a crescendo, then was abruptly interrupted by a high-pitched shrieking sound.

And
that
sound she knew instantly.

And she had figured it out: she had been trapped by the monster who had drilled her friend’s flesh and then nailed her to a wall, and torn apart three other girls for kicks, and killed Joey Roggetti and Rad Garcia, and he was sharpening a knife outside her door. She was in a room in the middle of nowhere, where no one would hear her scream when he began to hurt her, and no one would help her when he started to cut her, and no one would find her body unless he wanted them to see what he’d done to it.

wednesday,

december 18

ALHR.
When Jenner woke, it was light.

He was in a bed, a hospital bed. There were three other beds in the room. One with a young black man in it, asleep, the other two old Hispanic men, also sleeping.

He turned his head. Through the window, he could see the East River beneath him: a tugboat pulling a barge heading upstream, a Circle Line tourist boat sliding slowly out of its path toward the Brooklyn side of the water. The crumbling piers and factories along the riverside urban neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg across the way.

Bellevue Hospital. He was in Bellevue.

He moved to sit up, but the left side of his chest felt like a slab of crushed meat and mangled bone. He caught his breath sharply, and waves of pain spiked from his belly through to his back. He lay still, gasping.

On the monitor next to the bed, he watched his heartbeat, regular, sinus rhythm ninety beats per minute.

He could feel layers of tight cloth beneath his blue hospital shift. He slowly raised his right hand, tugged the gown open: under a clear film dressing, a rubber tube entered his chest, partially hidden by a piece of gauze lightly stained with blood and Betadine. How odd to be seeing his own chest tube, after removing hundreds from the battered and bloodied dead over the years.

A Filipino nurse came into the room holding a clipboard and a pen attached to a lanyard around her neck. She noticed him awake and gave him a sympathetic smile.

“Good to see you awake, Mr. Jenner.”

He nodded, mouth dry. “What day is this? How long have I been here?”

“Don’t you worry about that now,” she said, smiling. “You just rest and get better now.”

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“Nurse, please, I need to know: what day is this today?”

“Well . . . this is Wednesday. You came in yesterday afternoon.”

She pulled the top blanket up, saying, “You’re a lucky guy!

You had rib fractures, and a tension pneumo. You know what that is?” as she tucked it tighter around his waist.

He nodded, but she continued.

“That’s when there’s a hole in the lung, and so air gets out and fills up the chest and the lung collapses so you can’t breathe. So yesterday in the ER, they put a tube in your chest to suck out the air.”

She inspected the suction bottle next to his bed. Then she lifted his gown. On his solar plexus, there was a rectangle of gauze taped down with bandages.

“Just checking for bleeding. They were worried you had an injury to your spleen; that’s a little organ like a sponge filled with blood, just below your ribs on the left. So they did a laparotomy. That’s when they make an incision to look inside to see that you’re okay. And you were fine, no laceration or rupture.”

She smiled brightly down at him. “And no bleeding from the wound. I think you’re a lot better now!”

She jotted some notes onto the clipboard and again told him he was a lucky guy, a very lucky guy, then put a thermometer in his mouth. “You ready to eat something?”

He pulled the thermometer out. “Do you know anything about my friends?”

Her face clouded. “Oh, I think you have to speak to Dr.

Kahn for that.”

“Please, tell me.”

She hesitated.

“Please. I think one is dead.”

She shook her head sadly. “I’m sorry. I read in the papers today that two men died.”

His head sank into the pillow. Rad, Joey, dead.

“And the girl?”

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“Oh, Mr. Jenner. You really need to speak with Dr. Kahn.

And some policemen are here to talk with you. They’re waiting for you.”

He caught her wrist with his hand.

“Please tell me: did they find the girl?”

She looked around quickly, then leaned in.

“The Hutchins student?”

He nodded. She shook her head. “They don’t know where she is. She’s gone. The newspaper said a man in a white van took her.”

He let her go and lay back. She fluffed his pillows and started to leave, then turned to him.

“Dinner isn’t until four thirty p.m. I could bring you some fruit salad, if you like.”

He closed his eyes.

Jun was standing by his bed, face pale, dark shadows sagging underneath his eyes.

“Hey, Jenner. How you feel?”

“Okay. Any news of Ana?”

He shook his head. “From what they’re saying on the TV, they’ve got no leads. They found the van over in Queens, parked by a cemetery near the Kosciuszko Bridge. It was stolen in Williamsburg that morning.”

Jenner nodded.

Jun looked awkward. “You need anything, Jenner? I would’ve been here sooner, but they only just let me out of jail.”

“
What?
”

“It was nuts yesterday. I swear to God, they came
this
close to shooting me, because I had the gun.

“I kept telling them what happened, but they wouldn’t listen. So I went through the whole thing—on my knees, handcuffed. They roughed me up a bit.

“It was insane. FDNY arrived first, and they’re looking
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at the detectives, and they pronounced Detective Roggetti dead at the scene, and then there’s almost a fight when the cops show up, so they end up taking him to the ER

in an ambulance, but he was just pronounced dead when they got him to the ER. But at least they got Garcia in okay.”

“What do you mean?”

“They got him to the ER, and then to the OR really quick.”

“But he’s . . . he died. The nurse said he died . . .”

Jun looked confused. “No. I mean, he was in the ICU. On the news they say he’s critical, but Detective Santiago said the surgeons said he would be fine.”

Jenner thought for a second. Two men died. Then he understood.

“Pete?”

“Yeah,” Jun said. “They found his body in the basement.”

Jenner turned away. Joey was dead. Pete was dead, killed for his work clothes and passkeys. Rad nearly killed. Ana gone.

He looked up at the ceiling and put his hand to his forehead. It was his fault. If only he’d been quicker. There were probably many things he’d overlooked.

Jun ignored Jenner’s tears.

“Kimi was screaming at them, telling them I wasn’t involved. But they busted me for unlicensed possession of a firearm. They let me go early this afternoon, but they kept my gun.”

“I’m sorry, Jun.”

“No worries, Jenner—you think I’d only have one?”

Someone came into the room; Jenner turned to see Pat Mullins standing there. He looked awful—unshaven, the same clothes Jenner had seen him in the morning before at coffee.

“Hey, Doc. How you doing?”

“Okay, Pat.”

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“Look, I have to ask you some questions, okay?”

Jenner nodded, then asked about leads on the abduction.

Mullins shook his head no.

“How’s Rad doing?”

“He’s pretty banged up, but they think he’ll be okay. Guy cut his throat, he lost a lot of blood. It took them eight hours in the OR, but they patched up all the jugular veins and the carotid arteries and all. They have to do tests to see if he has nerve damage when he comes around, but the surgeons said to be hopeful.”

Mullins looked quickly at Jun, then back at Jenner. “Okay, Doc. Questions; I’m afraid your friend can’t stay.”

Jun asked again, “Anything you need, Jenner?” then disappeared when Jenner shook his head.

Mullins had Jenner describe what happened as a continuous narrative, then questioned him on the details.

It wasn’t easy, but Jenner was surprised by how much he remembered; it had all happened in two, three minutes at most, from the moment he saw the movement in the garbage bags to when he passed out. He was quite lucid up until the killer put Ana in the van; after that, his recollection was vague.

By the time he was done answering Mullins’s questions, he was exhausted. He lay there while Mullins finished his notes.

There was talking in the hall. Jenner saw what looked like a ward round—probably a surgical fellow and a couple of the trauma surgery residents.

Mullins stood and said, “I’m sorry about all this, Doc.

Really I am.” He paused. “I’m glad you made it through.”

He stood there.

Jenner said, “Pat, is there something else?”

The detective glanced into the hall.

“Actually, Doc, there sorta is.”

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He moved closer to Jenner, and sat down again in the chair by the bed.

“This is hard for me to say, and I’m guessing it’ll be harder for you to hear. I respect you, Doc, you know I do. And I know you were trying to help. But you can’t be involved in this case anymore.”

Jenner struggled to pull himself up, wincing as he sat straighter.

“Pat, I’ve been with this case since the beginning. They’ll be letting me out soon. There must be some way you can use me? I don’t want to help, I
need
to help.”

Mullins sighed. “Doc, I’ll level with you. There’s a lot of

. . .
emotion
in the department right now. You know how it is after a cop gets killed. And I think what’s happening is, because we don’t have a suspect, and we don’t have clues, a lot of people are blaming you.”

Jenner lay his head back on the pillow and looked at the ceiling.

“Now, I know you were only trying to help. But people are saying that if you hadn’t been mixed up in this, if you hadn’t

. . . hooked up with that girl . . . none of this would have happened. Everyone says that girl should have left town. But she stayed with you.