Projection (14 page)

The combination of methadone and adrenaline coursing through my system left me feeling dizzy and wired.  I glanced at Simons, then at  the pregnant nurse bound at her station, then at the scalpel.  I took deep breaths, fighting the impulse to grab the blade and drive it into Lucas.

"Why don't we carve her up some more and have her jump like Cummings?" Craig Bishop smirked.

I turned to face him too fast, and the room started to spin.

"C’mon, c’mon, c’mon," he singsonged, like some crazed eight-year-old.

I felt my terror and revulsion flipping into rage.  It steadied me, as it does all violent people.

"Cut her.  C’mon, c’mon..."

Every charged emotion in my being leapt in his direction like lightning to a steel rod.  I grabbed the scalpel with one hand and took hold of his hair with the other.  I dragged him out of his seat, falling to one knee and bringing his neck across my thigh.

Gabriel Vernon started toward me from the door, but Lucas waved him off.

I placed the tip of the scalpel where I could see the pulsation of Bishop's carotid artery.  "What would you carve into her?" I asked him through clenched teeth.

He didn't answer.

"Tell me how you would cut her," I insisted.  "
Say it
.  What would you carve into her?"  I pressed down just hard enough to compress the artery without puncturing it.  A millimeter deeper, and his life would start draining out of him.

"Whore," he whispered.  Then, more boldly:  "Whore.  Whore..."  He kept repeating the slur, louder and louder.  "Whore, whore, whore..."

I thought of Bishop beheading his victims.  I etched the first stroke of the W over his carotid, barely cutting the skin.  The track of the blade turned white for an instant, then red.  A horrific feeling of power surged in me.  I etched the second stroke.

Bishop looked directly into my eyes.  "Fuck you," he said flatly.  He grabbed hold of my wrist and pulled the scalpel hard across his neck.  His carotid pumped blood over both of us.

The patients who had been lined up on their knees behind us scattered to the far corners of the room, cowering, wailing, cheering.  Cecelia Gladstone buried her face between her knees.

"Christ!" I yelled.  I tried to tamponade the severed vessel with my free hand.  But before I could put any real pressure on it, Bishop drew the scalpel across his neck again, cutting the carotid that ran up the other side.  I struggled to break away, crawling a few feet toward Lucas.  Bishop's grip on my wrist was too strong.  He slashed himself again and again until, too late, I managed to think clearly enough to relax my fingers and let the scalpel drop to the floor.  By that time, his neck was carved up beyond anything I guessed Lucas could repair — especially with his left hand.

My heart pounded painfully as I watched his body try to cling to life.  His eyes bulged, as if desperate to hold on to a view of this world.  His mouth opened wide and his chest heaved, struggling in vain to get oxygen to vital organs cut off from the circulatory system.  I wanted to look away, but I was transfixed.  Ten seconds later he lay perfectly still.

The patients fell silent.

"Murderer!" a deep voice bellowed.  I looked up.  A dark, muscular man about fifty, his head shaved, his arms and neck covered with spiderweb tattoos, was pointing menacingly in my direction.  He started toward me.

The dark power surged in me again.  I picked up the scalpel and sprang to my feet. I felt the saliva running thick in my mouth.  Sweat poured off me.  I wasn't ready just to defend myself.  I was ready to kill.

Lucas moved in front of him.  "Go to your room," he demanded.  He didn't wait for a response.  He looked past him at the other patients.  "Everyone. Thirty minutes in your rooms."

The man started to walk around him.

I took a step forward.

"Another inch, Mr. Kashoor, and you'll spend the night in the quiet room," Lucas went on.  "And I can assure you you'll be praying for light of day."

Kashoor stopped, weighing options.  His eyes told me he wanted to get at me very nearly as much as he wanted to avoid whatever punishment he might receive.

"Gabriel," Lucas said, "Mr. Kashoor needs an escort."

Kashoor waited until Gabriel was within a few feet, then turned around and followed the rest of the patients, including Cecelia Gladstone, out of the Day Room.

Gabriel and Gray Kaminsky stood together, looking down at Craig Bishop's body.

"Make certain the others do as they were told," Lucas instructed the two of them. "Medicate anyone in distress."

They hurried to the task.

Lucas walked over to the body.  He placed the tip of his shoe on Bishop's forehead, applying enough pressure to tilt his head back and expose the severed carotid arteries.  "He's been suicidal for some time," he said, a note of pleasure audible in what sounded like manufactured grief.  "I suppose you couldn't have known."

My legs went even more rubbery than before.  I shook my head, not wanting to believe I had pushed Bishop over the edge.  I felt like a vice had been clamped to my temples.

"Rumor had it you stopped seeing patients after a young man's suicide," Lucas went on.  He nodded at the scalpel in my hand.  "I guess you really are done with talk therapy.  You were hot to put Mr. Kashoor away, too."

Tears choked me.  I thought again of Hollander's warning about the emotions Lucas would project onto me.  Whose demons were taking possession of me?  Lucas’ — or my own?

Lindsey Simons began moaning behind me.

I turned toward her and lost my balance, nearly falling.  Lucas grabbed me with his one hand, his fingers wrapping tightly around my upper arm.  I managed to stay on my feet.  Simons was still lying in the fetal position.  Without planning to or wanting to I focused on her naked bottom.

"What to do with Miss Society?" he said.  "That's the question."  He paused.  "Why not take her to your room?"

I thought of the four-point restraints buckled to the corners of my bed.  Then, God help me, I thought of
her
in the restraints — open, supremely vulnerable.  I ground my fists into my eyes, trying to stuff the images back inside my skull.  "She's cured," I managed.  "We have to let her go." 
We
.

"Through the door or the window?  What's your pleasure, partner?"

I moved away from him, but he kept his hand locked on my arm.

"Mr. Bishop's idea wasn't entirely without merit," Lucas went on, "except for the fact that he ended up dead over it."

"Satan was in her tongue.  She's cured," I repeated.

He took his hand off me, glanced at it suspiciously.  "One never knows."

I realized Lucas wasn't even certain amputation had exorcised Satan from his own body.  And I wanted desperately to convince him to let Simons go free, partly to prove to myself that there had been some purpose to the blood I had spilled.  I decided to try another tack.  I remembered Jack Rice from the State Police telling me that hostages would have to be released soon after I entered the locked unit in order to hold off Lieutenant Patterson's assault on the building.  "If we don't release someone soon they're going to send SWAT teams up the walls.  They didn't give me much time."

He looked at me, still considering.

"Let her go home," I said simply.

"Home," he said with disgust.  He paused.  "Can I count on your help on the next case?"

"The next case..."

"The neurosurgery.  The amygdala."

I needed to buy time.  Or did I?  I could tell Lucas I'd have no part of his insanity.  I could try to stand firm against Satan, no matter the consequences.

"Shall we let her go, move on together?" Lucas asked.

I looked as Simons.  I was no longer certain whether I was fighting darkness or whether it had consumed me, but I was certain of her suffering and of my ability at that moment to relieve it.  I grabbed onto that.  "I'll scrub in," I said.

Lucas walked to the door of the Day Room and called for Gabriel Vernon.  He got no response.  He started down the hallway shouting his name.

I scanned the floor for the chunk of Simons’ tongue.  I saw it under the conference table.  Keeping an eye on the door I crawled underneath the table and picked it up.  It felt lighter and less solid than I would have imagined — a little like gelatin, but still warm.  I hurried back to Simons, trying not to look at Bishop's corpse.  I helped her sit up.  Her face was blank, her skin gray and damp.  I showed her what was in my hand.  She turned in horror.  I caught hold of her wrist and held her firmly as she tried to wriggle away.

"Open your mouth," I whispered.

She glanced at me.  Her jaws were clenched.  Tears began streaming down her face again.

"They might be able to reattach it after you leave.  Open your mouth."

She shook her head.

"Now," I said sternly.  My head was swimming.  "Do it."

She didn't so much open her mouth as relax her jaws.

I pulled down on her chin.  Blood poured onto her neck and dripped over her breasts and abdomen.  I placed the piece of flesh behind her lower teeth, then pushed up on her chin to close her jaws again.  As I did, I noticed she was looking up with new panic on her face.

Gabriel Vernon was standing halfway across the room.  He had to have seen what I had just done.  He walked toward us, stopping just a few feet away.

I looked into his eyes.  I was going to plead with him to keep quiet.  "Gabriel...," I started.

"The doctor saves all specimens," he broke in.  He bent down and picked up the scalpel I had dropped.

"Where?" I asked.  "For what?"

He didn't respond.  "I need another specimen."

Simons pedaled frantically against the linoleum until she had run out of floor and was backed against the wall under the windows.  She held her knees and began rocking like a child.

I stood up.  "Let her alone.  She's no more possessed by Satan than you are."

For a spit second his features softened to a kind of confusion.  The his affect went flat again.

I was rifling my mind for a psychological route past Gabriel's devotion to Lucas when he stepped over to Bishop's body, crouched down and sliced a three-inch piece of Bishop's tongue off.  He inspected it with no more emotion than I imagined he had displayed harvesting the genitals of the man he had castrated.  Then he flicked it under the conference table.  He stood up.  "Time for you to go," he said to Simons.

I couldn’t tell whether Gabriel had willfully disobeyed Lucas in order to help Simons or whether he was demonstrating the concrete thinking typical of the schizophrenic patients.  Did he care about Simons or did he consider one tongue specimen as good as the next?

Simons seemed too terrified to move.

Gabriel walked over to her, put one hand under each of her arms and lifted her to her feet.  Then he bent down and picked her up in his arms.  He carried her from the room.

I followed them, pausing at the conference table and then at the doorjamb to keep from falling myself.  I leaned to look down the hallway and saw Gabriel, Lucas and Kaminsky talking at the locked door.  I couldn’t make out what they were saying.  Several seconds later Kaminsky opened the door briefly to let Gabriel and Simons out, then slammed it shut.

I walked back to the windows and waited for something to happen.  A minute or two passed before I saw commotion on the green, with police taking shelter behind their cruisers, rifles ready.  Jack Rice, Lieutenant Patterson and Emma Hancock emerged from the State Police trailer.  Patterson was screaming into what looked like a walkie-talkie.  Then I saw Lindsey Simons stagger onto the grass.  She was alone.  Several officers in black jumpsuits, carrying plastic shields rushed to her and whisked her behind a black SWAT van.

"I'm a man of my word," Lucas called to me.

I turned and saw him at the door to the Day Room.

"How about you?  Ready to scrub in?"

"I'll never be ready to butcher anyone."

"You didn't seem to have much of a problem ten minutes ago."  He nodded at Bishop's corpse.  "I've told you before that we're a lot alike."

I closed my eyes.  Nietzsche's words came to me.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it

that in the process he does not become a monster.

And when you look long into an abyss,

the abyss also looks into you.

How different, really, was what I had done to Craig Bishop from what Lucas had done to Grace Cummings?  He had carved a sentence into her body and made her jump five stories.  I had carved the beginning of a word into him and driven him to cut his own throat.

"Maybe you'd like a little methadone before we start," Lucas said.  "I could use some myself.  Or better yet, I found a vial of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine."

If I was going to be any good to anyone on the unit, I needed to be more alert.  Cocaine could bring my nervous system back from the cloud of opiate intoxication.  It would also bring it closer to ultimate collapse.  "The vial might do the trick," I said.

He smiled.  "Done."

I followed Lucas to the medication room midway down the hall.  He made certain no one was nearby, then covered the combination lock as he punched in a four-digit code.  I assumed he was the only one who had access, which gave him exclusive control over who got which drugs on the unit — and when.  During my years in practice I had seen my share of heroin addicts in opiate withdrawal.  Six hours without the drug and without methadone, and muscles and joints began to tighten up like a diver's with the bends.  The stomach heaves mercilessly.  Skin turns to clammy gooseflesh.  Blood pressure, pulse and body temperature skyrocket.  At that point a true addict will do anything, steal anything, sell anyone out for a fix.  Being able to bring him back from it makes the power nearly absolute.

The door clicked open.  We walked inside.  Lucas shut the door and checked twice that it was closed securely.

The room was only about five by eight feet.  A stainless steel sink and countertop, with a row of glass-front cabinets hanging above it, ran along one wall.  The opposite wall was taken by a huge, double-doored stainless steel refrigerator.  The cabinets were crammed with plastic and glass bottles, brightly packaged samples of Haldol, Mellaril, and Xanax, boxes of surgical masks and latex gloves, and every variety of nursing said — oxygen masks, hypodermic needles, nasogastric tubes, IV bags.