Sigma Curse - 04 (21 page)

Rickenbacker was watching her closely. She didn’t say anything. Didn’t plead.

Sally-Jo brought out the icepick.

For the first time, something else came into the woman’s eyes. It wasn’t fear, because fear was a symptom somebody like her would have long ago learned to mask. Instead, it was something more primal, more reptilian.

A look that suggested a drive to survive. To preserve the organism at all cost.

“There’s help,” said Rickenbacker. “Help available for your kind. I’ve known people like you, normal people who have...
regrets
afterward. I can get you that help.”

Sally-Jo stared into her eyes.

Your kind.

She didn’t like that. Didn’t like it at
all
.

Sally-Jo didn’t bother putting the ball gag back in before she took out the branding iron and the lighter. She heated up the end, twisting it this way and that in the flame, and pressed it onto the center of Rickenbacker’s forehead.

The woman screamed, for the first time, and jarringly.

Sally-Jo finished it off with difficulty. Instead of slipping the icepick in and pressing it home smoothly, she encountered a resistance from the base of Rickenbacker’s skull which she hadn’t experienced with the others. She had to steady the head with a fist clenched in the hair at the nape of the neck and ram the pick several times before she felt the tip crack through the bone.

She pushed it upward and inward, and held it there for fifteen seconds, twenty, pulling it out at last when the woman’s jerking and writhing had dwindled to an intermittent twitch.

That was when she stepped out of the car, and raised her arms heavenward, and the beautiful snow began to fall.

Bliss.

Rapture.

––––––––

T
he call came in at twenty after one in the morning.

Venn had left the FBI office an hour ago and headed down the East Side to Revere Hospital. Beth met him on the second floor.

“Hey,” she said.

She hugged him. He returned her embrace, hard, until he realized he might be hurting her.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, gazing into his face.

“Yeah, well.” He tried to glance away, but found he couldn’t. “Those are the knocks.”

He immediately wished he hadn’t said it. Beth said, “You mean those are the risks a cop takes? Yes. Don’t I know it.” But she wasn’t mad.

She’d left her ward for a few minutes to meet him, and together they rode the elevator up two floors to the post-surgery recovery unit. On the way, she said, “I told you Katz was good. The surgeon. They took the first bullet out of her neck. It was lodged just behind her collar bone. As everyone’s saying, she was real lucky. It was a matter of millimetres, not even inches. No damage to major blood vessels or other structures.

“The second bullet?” asked Venn.

“That was trickier,” said Beth. “I don’t know the exact details, but it passed through her right lung and the diaphragm. That’s the sheet of muscles which separates the chest from the abdominal cavity. There was some bleeding into the abdomen, so they had to open her up and clean that out. Her lung bled like a geyser.” She glanced at him as they stepped out the elevator. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be flippant.”

“It’s okay,” said Venn. He knew doctors often used language when talking about medical matters that sounded outrageously throwaway to other people. Cops were the same.

“But as I say,” Beth continued, “Dr Katz and his team pulled her through.”

“For now,” said Venn.

“Yes.”

The nurse in charge of the ICU came bustling over as soon as she saw Venn – visiting hours were long past – but she recognized him and Beth, and nodded them through. “Don’t make it too long,” she said.

The ICU was like the deck of some futuristic spacecraft, all harsh artificial lighting and monitors and a variety of competing sounds: beeps, clicks and hisses. Venn thought of it as God’s waiting room, and shivered inwardly.

Harmony’s bed was in a corner. She was almost unrecognizable. A ventilator pumped jerkily by the side of the bed, feeding its air into a tube protruding from her throat. Her chest was swathed with dressings, and the rest of her was hidden under a thin hospital-issue bedsheet. Tubes of assorted thicknesses snaked from her arms and her chest. Below the bed, a bottle of watery blood bubbled intermittently like a witch’s caldron.

“That’s for the hemopneumothorax,” said Beth. “Blood and air in her pleural cavity. But it’s swinging nicely.”

Venn stepped in close, though he hung back a few inches as if he’d contaminate Harmony by getting too near. Her eyes were closed and covered with pads.

“Harm,” he said. “You’re gonna make it. They patched you up real good.”

There was no response but the gentle rise and fall of her chest beneath the cover as the ventilator breathed for her.

Venn looked at Beth. “Can she hear me?”

Beth shook her head. “She’s deep under, Venn.”

He turned back to Harmony and said, anyway: “You did great, though. Things have moved along. We’re closing in on the killer.” He wished he could sound more confident.

Venn watched her for a few minutes while Beth checked the charts at the foot of the bed and conferred quietly with the ICU resident, who’d wandered over. A few times, Venn thought his words were getting through to Harmony. Her face twitched, and there was a flicker of movement under the cover where her hand would be. But he knew he was kidding himself.

“Oh, and by the way,” he said. “When you get out of here I’m kicking your ass for disobeying me.”

That was when his phone rang.

*

H
e took the call in the corridor outside the ICU. It was Teller.

The Camaro had been found. A long-haul truck driver in New Jersey on the other side of the George Washington Bridge noticed smoke coming from a field, just off a side track. At first the thought nothing of it, but then he wondered if there’d been an accident, if somebody had been caught in the sudden descent of snow and had lost control. So, against his better judgment, he swung his eighteen-wheeler down the track to take a look.

The preliminary report from the Jersey cops said the car had been torched, probably after being doused in gas. By the time they got there the flames were out, and it was nothing but a blackened shell, the tires melted right away.

There was one body in the remains of the car, propped in the passenger seat. Well, not so much a body as a charred skeleton, the flesh almost completely burned away, the teeth outsized and grinning. The hair was gone, as were the clothes. The cops could see it was an adult, but couldn’t tell if it was male or female.

But the blackened license plate was still legible enough to confirm that the car was Rickenbacker’s.

Teller was on his way to the scene. He sounded different than usual, Venn thought. His voice was flat, carefully neutral. Venn knew he was holding his emotions in deliberately, and with great effort.

“Ah, man,” said Venn. “I’m sorry.” He looked at his watch. “Meet you there in an hour.”

*

T
he stench hit Venn’s nostrils first, and punched all the way up into his reptile brain, making him gag.

He parked some distance away, because the number of vehicles clustered along the track and by the edge of the field made the area look like the parking lot of a football stadium. Venn ran the gauntlet of people who tried to stop him, flashing his shield, until he reached Teller. The snow was coming down steadily, everybody was wrapped up, and he had a hard time identifying the FBI man at first.

Teller’s face was set, and hard. Without looking at Venn, he said, “They found a necklace on the body. I took a look. It’s Fran’s.”

Once again, Venn wondered if Teller and Rickenbacker had had a thing going, maybe in the past.

“I guess we can’t tell if it’s the same MO as before,” said Venn. “The Sigma symbol.”

“No,” said Teller. “But the autopsy will show us if the base of the skull has been fractured, and maybe if the brain’s been penetrated. Assuming there’s anything left of it.”

They continued to gaze at the frame of the car, the team of CSI people swarming over it like excavators around a newly discovered fossil. After a time, Teller looked at Venn.

“How’s your friend? Harmony?”

“She’s out of surgery,” said Venn. “Stable, but it’s touch and go. Early days.”

“That’s good,” said Teller. “That’s she’s come through the surgery, I mean.”

They stood in silence for a few moments more.

Teller said: “You still want to go through with your idea?”

“More than ever,” said Venn, his voice grim.

––––––––

I
t took Sally-Jo two hours to reach Manhattan once again. two hours of almost hallucinatory trudging through the freezing landscape, transformed eerily by the sudden snowfall.

She’d anticipated the change in the weather, and had stashed an extra-thick fleece-lined coat in her rucksack. But, even so, the cold gripped her like a vise, threatening to crush her into a singularity. Her hands, encased in wool mittens, were just on the painful side of numb. Her feet felt like blocks of frozen meat, heavy and knobbled.

But she didn’t care. She was
free
, and she exulted in her new-found liberty without regard for her surroundings.

She would have gotten back to the city quicker if she’d hitchhiked. Numerous cars and trucks had passed her by, many of them slowing. She was a single female, and however uneasy a driver might be about picking up any hitchhiker, most people would probably feel more uncomfortable leaving a woman to trudge through the snow on her own.

But she couldn’t hitchhike. She couldn’t allow anybody to identify her afterward, which was why she turned away and pulled up her scarf to hide the lower half of her face whenever a car came by.

Besides, she might get picked up by some psycho. Some serial killer trucker.
Wouldn’t
that
be ironic
, she thought, almost smiling.

Sally-Jo had worked quickly after she’d gotten out of the Camaro. She’d siphoned the gas out of the tank using a length of rubber hose she found in the trunk, and used a jumbo bottle of windshield-washer fluid, emptied of its contents and refilled with the gas, to douse the car systematically until it was reeking. When she was satisfied that it was covered, she fashioned a makeshift fuse from the shirt she stripped off Rickenbacker’s body, lit the end with the lighter she’d used to heat up the branding iron earlier, and walked rapidly away.

She hoped the snow, which was starting to pummel down with increased relentlessness, wouldn’t tamp down the fire before it could get going. But she heard the soft whoosh behind her, and turned, and saw the flames limning the car, turning its silhouette black against the whiteness that was settling on the field around it.

By the time she heard the first sirens of the police cars and the fire trucks, and saw the distant strobing lights, Sally-Jo was well on the way back to New York.

*

S
he’d never given much thought to what she would do after she was free. In the long run, she had grand plans of moving to another part of the country, maybe even overseas. Seeing some more of Europe, or the Far East, or even Australia. Going somewhere she knew she’d never, ever be recognized, somewhere she could turn her mind and her heart to the riches the world held but which she’d always felt cut off from before.

Cut off because of who she was.

What
she was.

She had money. It was fragmented, squirreled away in various bank accounts and funds and investments. Sally-Jo had been careful to hide it, to spread it far and wide so that even if some of it was tracked down, it would never all be taken from her in one go.

Wherever she went, whatever she did... she knew she’d be doing it on her own. Without Frank.

Finally, for the first time, she’d be free from him.

She didn’t hate him. He was part of her life, and in a crucial sense always would be. But he wouldn’t be with her, ever present.

But she knew she had to go back to him now, in New York, and face him. One last time.

That was what she hadn’t been considering before now. She’d thought about the long haul. Had dreamed about it. But Sally-Jo hadn’t turned her mind to what she would do immediately. Because she was now a wanted criminal, the subject of one of the biggest federal manhunts in years. Even more so now that she had shot one law enforcement official, and abducted and killed an FBI agent. She’d be a fugitive for the foreseeable future, and even though nobody had a clear description of her, and she was in any case able to modify her appearance with relative ease... she’d need to keep the lowest of profiles.

Sally-Jo dodged a snowdrift which had already formed by the side of the road. Her boots were heavy, with thickly ridged treads, and she had little difficulty keeping her footing.

Her thoughts wandered to the woman she’d shot on the sidewalk, after she’d subdued Rickenbacker. She still didn’t know if the woman was a fellow FBI agent, or a plainclothes cop from the NYPD. Even on the drive out of Manhattan into Jersey, she’d kept the Camaro’s radio turned off. Sooner or later, though, she was going to have to listen to the news. To take a measure of what the cops and the FBI knew, and how tightly the net was closing in.

*

S
he crossed the bridge and plunged into the nighttime lights of the city. The snow had steadied now, still coming down hard but no longer building in intensity. By morning, the streets and the sidewalks and the rooftops would be blanketed in three or four inches.

It was easier to hide in cold weather. You could bury yourself beneath layers of clothes  without attracting suspicion.

Sally-Jo trudged along an almost empty street, starting to feel the cold seriously now, and feeling a peculiar lightheadedness which she knew was dangerous. It signaled fatigue, the onset of hypothermia. She needed to sit down someplace warm, flood her belly and her veins with hot coffee, get a bite to eat. Suddenly, she felt ravenous, in a way she hadn’t for as far back as she could remember. Was this a sign of freedom, she wondered? The willingness to indulge the simple needs of your body, without layers of doubt and worry getting in the way? She could probably afford to gain a few pounds, in any case. It would help disguise her appearance.