The Cutting (30 page)

He checked the Blackie Collins switchblade strapped to his leg. Nice to know it was there, though his two hands were all the weapons he’d need. He didn’t have the rifle. That was hidden in the truck, parked two blocks from the hospital and bearing a new set of license plates.

The shooter looked again in the mirror. Blew himself a kiss. Forced himself to breathe in. Breathe out. Slowly. Deeply. Once. Twice. Three times. Keep it cool. Not too edgy. Not too excited. A stealth op. Excitement causes fuckups.

Time for recon. If he was gonna get into the bitch’s room, he needed one of those plastic ID badges they all hung around their necks. He’d have to borrow one. That was job one. He exited the restroom, turned out the light, and quietly closed the door.

‘A lot of people suck Altoids, McCabe.’

Maggie and McCabe were heading back down the turnpike toward Cumberland Medical. There was more traffic on the road now, the forward edge of rush hour, and McCabe was weaving around cars, siren blaring.

‘Yeah, I know, but I knew there was something not quite right about that guy. I should have seen it. I should have recognized him from his body shape. Didn’t fit with an old drunk sailor.’

‘Well, don’t take it so hard. I know you sometimes see yourself as SuperCop, but, like they say, shit happens. We make mistakes. We all do, even you.’

‘Work homicide long enough and it becomes part of your DNA that mistakes kill innocent people. Even not so innocent ones like my brother Tommy.’

McCabe pulled off 95 by the mall and took the connector to 295. A couple of minutes later they were at the Congress Street exit heading to the hospital.

Sophie Gauthier was out of recovery and in a room on the third floor. Finding the room turned out to be easy. When the shooter spotted a cop carrying two cups of coffee and a bag of something out of the cafeteria, he just followed the jerk right to the room. Then he kept walking. No one asked any questions. No one even looked up. Not the cops. Not the hospital security guys hanging around outside the room trying to act like they, too, were the real deal. Assholes.

Okay, so he knew where she was. Now he just had to stop crapping around in the hallways and get the goddamn ID badge. It had to look at least a little like him. They’d for sure check the picture. It took the shooter a while, going up and down stairs, roaming the halls to find the right guy. Finally, on the fourth floor, a guy walking toward him looked close enough to work. Same shaved head. Same shape to his face. The shooter checked the badge as they passed each other. Charles Lowery, Radiology. Okay, Charles, let’s find somewhere we can be alone. The shooter did a quick 180 and followed Charles to the elevator bay at the end of the hall. Charles pressed the down button and waited. The shooter stood next to him. If the car was empty, he’d take Charles right away. When the body was found, it’d cause a commotion. Doctors, nurses, and the security guys, they’d all come running. Maybe the cops, too. Could be the opening he needed.

Charles Lowery glanced at the shooter. Nodded his head. The shooter smiled and nodded back. A little bell rang and the elevator doors opened. The car was empty. They got on. Charles pressed the button for the ground floor. The doors closed.

When the car began moving, the shooter turned to face Charles. In a single swift motion, he swung his right arm around Charles’s neck, pushing his head down and under his own left armpit. The shooter’s left forearm went under Charles’s throat. He pushed forward with his hip, made a quarter turn to the right, and jerked upward with his left arm, instantly breaking Charles’s neck. It all took less than three seconds.

With Charles’s head still under his arm, the shooter lowered the body to a sitting position against the back wall. He pulled off the plastic badge, put it around his own neck, and took a deep breath.

The elevator bounced to a stop on one. The shooter faced forward as the doors slid open. An elderly woman looked in with wide eyes. She looked down at Charles. Then up at the shooter. ‘Heart attack,’ the shooter said. ‘You stay here. I’ll get help.’

She nodded. Before leaving the elevator, he reached back and pressed a button. Then he slipped out through the closing doors, smiling at the woman, who still stood outside. The elevator, empty except for Charles, ascended to three.

The shooter walked to the nearest stairwell and stepped inside. On the landing he examined Charles Lowery’s picture. It wouldn’t pass close scrutiny. Charles was smaller, skinnier, but that didn’t matter. The badge only showed a head shot, and that was close enough. It’d do.

Maggie’s Crown Vic squealed to a halt at the main entrance just as the shooter started up the stairs. McCabe killed the engine and siren and bolted out of the car at a run, Maggie right behind. Comisky told him they were putting Sophie, who was heavily sedated, in room 308. She’d be there by now. They entered the hospital and sprinted toward the elevator bay down the hall to the right. An elderly woman with gray hair and a red face stood by the closed elevator doors, shouting, ‘He had a heart attack. He had a heart attack! He’s in the elevator!’ A hospital employee was trying to calm her down. McCabe glanced at the lights above the elevator doors. The car she was pointing to was stopped on three. The other was descending from seven. It could stop two or three times before it got to one.

McCabe scanned the area, looking for the nearest stairs. Spotting the sign, he ran toward them.

The shooter exited the stairwell on three and looked down the hall toward the open elevator doors. Pure chaos. Even better than he hoped. Doctors, nurses, and security guys all shouting and running toward the open elevator with Charles’s body in it. Even the cops left their posts. One ran from the door of Sophie’s room toward the crowd, then stopped ten feet down the hall, his back to the room, looking toward the commotion. The second cop stayed by the door but was out of his chair, watching the action, his back to the shooter.

From what he could hear, it sounded like Charles was still alive and they were treating him for a broken neck. Tough little bugger. That snap should have finished him off. The shooter grabbed an abandoned meal cart and rolled it toward Sophie’s room. He pulled to a stop at the door. As quietly as possible, he opened the door and pushed the cart in. As he closed it, he heard the cop outside the door shout, ‘Hey, where do you think you’re going?’ The shooter left the cart in the middle of the room and slipped behind the door, pulling the Blackie Collins knife from its ankle sheath. He snapped it open.

McCabe reached the third floor a full flight ahead of Maggie. He could see people milling around the elevator at the end of the hall. Midway down on the left, Comisky, in a crouch, gun drawn, was entering room 308. The door closed. McCabe sprinted toward the room, pulling his .45 from its holster.

He kicked open the door, holding the automatic in front of him. Kevin Comisky lay writhing on the floor, hands clutching at his neck, trying desperately to hold back gushers of blood spurting from a slashed carotid artery, his life running out. A man in scrubs stood over him, a short-bladed, bloody knife in hand. Surprise registered on his face at McCabe’s intrusion. Surprise turned to rage. ‘Too late, asshole.’

The man rushed for Sophie’s bed, driving the knife toward her comatose body. McCabe’s bullet struck the moving target high, hitting the right shoulder, shattering a bone, driving the shooter backward. Blood spurted out. Like an enraged bull, he turned toward McCabe, managing somehow to hold on to the knife.

McCabe slammed into him, grabbing the wounded arm and twisting it, pushing it back, away from Sophie and toward the wall. The man bellowed in pain. Even wounded, he was as strong as an ox. He turned his body into McCabe and chopped his left elbow hard into McCabe’s kidney once and then again. There was a startling explosion of pain and McCabe went down, unable to breathe. The man advanced, now sure of his prey. McCabe raised his arm to fire again and was surprised to find his gun hand empty. Somehow he’d dropped the .45 going down.

He looked around frantically. Left. Right. There. By the bed. He reached for the gun. The shooter was too fast. He kicked it away, turned, and with his good hand grabbed McCabe by the hair. He pulled his head back hard, exposing his throat to the blade. He raised the knife, barely able to hold it with the wounded hand. McCabe made a desperate grab and missed. He was sure he was going to die. Then a sudden explosion, deafening in the confined space, and, to McCabe’s amazement, a small black hole, like a ragged ink spot in a Rorschach test, appeared in the shooter’s forehead where there had been none an instant before. In the split second it took the shooter to die, a look of utter disbelief spread across his broad face.

A nurse and two white-coated residents ran into the room and began working frantically, kneeling by the still-breathing, bloody form of Kevin Comisky. McCabe’s eyes moved to the door, where Maggie was still standing, like Grace Kelly in
High Noon
, still holding her weapon in a two-handed stance, still pointing at the dead man sprawled in the middle of the floor, ready to fire again, as if she couldn’t quite believe he was really dead. McCabe fought off waves of pain.

As the medics worked, he felt a tremor of hope that Kevin Comisky might make it. That the doctors might have gotten to him in time. He even found himself praying for it – but his prayers weren’t answered. It only took a minute or two for the doctor, who looked to McCabe like he was fourteen years old, to look up, shake his head, and announce, ‘He’s gone.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘I’m sure.’

‘Shit.’

Sophie still lay silently on the bed, breathing evenly. She’d missed the whole thing. McCabe looked back at the body of the shooter. ‘Too bad we couldn’t have taken him alive,’ he said, as much to himself as to Maggie.

‘Fuck you,’ said Maggie, who’d finally lowered her outstretched arms. She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. ‘If you have anything at all to say right now, McCabe, just make it a simple thank-you.’ The words came out tight and controlled. He knew she’d never fired her weapon at a human being before. He knew it wasn’t easy.

‘Thank you.’

35

Outside there would be cars, trees, people, music, but for Lucinda, outside no longer existed. In the beginning she tried singing. College songs, camp songs, rock and roll. Anything she could remember, belted out as loudly as she could. The sound of her own voice was comforting, reminding her she was still alive, she still existed. I sing, therefore I am. Back then she hoped the singing might irritate her captor. It did. He hurt her for it. Once he burned her thighs and breasts. Little round burns that scarred and still hurt. He told her that the next time she made so much noise he would burn her face.

Now she lay silent, using memories, vainly, to drive back the numbing fear, to keep the silence from destroying all reason. She concentrated on reliving her childhood day by day, on remembering every detail. Today was a Sunday in summer. She was four, Patti was seven. They sat at the kitchen table in the white frame house on Keepers Lane in North Berwick. They moved from that house two years later, but that was later. Today, Poppy, always up before Mommy on Sunday mornings, was making blueberry pancakes for breakfast. She loved blueberry pancakes. Saliva formed in her mouth at the thought.

The eternal cigarette dangled from Poppy’s lips, an impossibly long ash hanging over the batter, the scent of burning tobacco filling the room. Patti warned Poppy she wouldn’t eat the pancakes if the ash fell in. He cupped his hand under it and walked to the sink, plucked it from his mouth, and held the tiny butt under the water to wash away the ash and extinguish the burning tip. The cigarettes would kill him a few years later, but not yet.

This was the year Poppy bought them the pony. She and Patti. ‘A small thing,’ he told them, though he looked big enough to Lucy. ‘Only thirteen hands high. Fifteen years old.’

Thirteen of whose hands, she’d wondered. Surely not hers, which were so small compared to his own. Not Patti’s, which were only a little bigger.

They named the pony Keener. Poppy said it was because he was always keener to go for a ride than any other pony he had ever known. Patti, who was wise in these things, said it was really because Poppy bought the pony from a farm near Keene in New Hampshire and considered him a Keener, just as they called people from Maine Mainers.

Keener was a leopard Appaloosa, gray with dark spots all over him. As the youngest, Lucinda got to ride him first. Poppy hoisted her up onto the shiny brown leather saddle. English. Not western. No pommel to hold on to, he told her, just the reins. He adjusted the stirrups so her legs would reach. Put a foot in each. Then off they went. Poppy held the pony’s harness. He walked alongside as she rode, talking gently all the while, telling her to hold her back straight, telling her to let Keener know who was in charge. After a bit, without her noticing it, he let go of the harness and she rode on her own for the first time. ‘Nothing to be afraid of,’ Poppy said. ‘Nothing to be afraid of.’

Nothing to be afraid of.

Only the blackness and the man who came to do things to her body and sometimes to hurt her. No food. Just some disgusting chocolate stuff in a can that gave her diarrhea. For the thousandth time she took an inventory of the things in the room. Things she couldn’t see but knew were there. The most important, the bottle of Gatorade on the wooden table by the bed. He told her where to find it. She’d knocked it over once, feeling for it and missing. She’d had to wash the sticky stuff from the floor. He hit her for that.

The only other thing she could find was the bucket in the corner she used as a toilet, and the roll of paper next to it. She supposed he emptied it when he came. The room didn’t seem to smell.

He’d led her to it, the first time. Held her hand while she squatted down and peed. So strange, peeing in the dark, her jailer clutching her hand to keep her from falling. He led her hand to the paper, showing her where it was so she could clean herself. The bottle and the bucket, the bed and the chair. All there was. Her entire universe. Beyond them, just the darkness, the memories, and visits from the man.