The Euthanist (31 page)

“Are you operating of your own free will?”

I had to think about that. “I believe I am.”

“Understand—so long as you’re associating with someone from federal law enforcement, I can’t see you. Or be seen with you. Ever. And I can’t imagine it will end well for you.” For the first time since I’d met him, I couldn’t tell whether Jeffrey was more concerned for me or for himself. “You need to really think about what you’re going to do next.”

“It’s all I’ve thought about,” I said, disconnecting before he could upbraid me.

Chapter 14

The sun was out at San Sebastián, but the wind was strong, and the few clouds in the air swam overhead like white whales. I’d driven there alone in a new rental, a black compact.

Midmorning, the scrub jays didn’t have any competition as they picked through the trash in the parking lot. I shuffled through the lot in clogs and green scrubs, a packed canvas duffel under my arm. My lanyard felt too crisp between my thumb and forefinger, too fresh from the laminator. According to the ID, my name was Kali Helms, and I was a registered nurse.

Leland had rigged all of this, but he couldn’t walk into the prison with me, not with all those cameras swiveling around on the rooftops. We’d gotten away with coming there together once, but he couldn’t be seen with me again. Not when I was in costume.

We’d planned out my visit over several nights. Tesmer joined the sessions, but Veda stayed in his bedroom. I hoped he’d appreciate all of this once it was over.

Whoever was watching the feeds from all those swiveling cameras could see my plain, natural hair. The chestnut bob. No wigs for me that morning. Prison guidelines prohibited hair extensions—anything the inmates could tear off and use. I hid my face as much as I could with geriatric reading glasses. Fake tattoos covered most of my forearms—detailed steampunk clock gears, what were referred to as “biomechanical” tattoos, a fantasy of cybernetic works underneath human skin. Without being able to dress in full costume, I hoped those details would distract guards in case someone wanted to track me down later.

Leland assured me that Leonard Royce knew how to fry the security footage, but with so many people to size me up when they checked me in, I worried whether they’d remember me. They’d remember how tall I was. Prison guards made their living by being able to size up an opponent, but my XXL scrubs fit me like a tent and hopefully hid the muscle. Still, I’d never felt so exposed. If something went wrong today, I would be supremely buggered.

I proceeded toward the two turrets that dominated the entrance. As I walked toward the front door, a heavyset woman toddled out of it. She was dressed in a bright dress, something you’d wear to church. Prison guidelines requested that visitors not wear anything red, because it matched inmate jumpsuits. This woman hadn’t paid attention. Amid the tropical muddle, she snuck in a little crimson with a flurry of tangerine. Her lipstick stuck out like a plastic pout on a Mr. Potato Head.
Leland
, I cursed to myself. I was staring at Helena Mumm.

She hadn’t factored into the plan. Leland might have arranged for Helena’s visit without telling me, or Walter might have reached out to her, desperate for some human connection before I came for him. Regardless, she walked right out the front door and down the walkway, just as I approached the building.

She looked at me. I couldn’t dive behind a car, not without attracting attention from her and the cameras. I would need to walk past Helena Mumm. I wore the same set of scrubs as when I’d visited Helena, the shade of faded AstroTurf, but had enough props that I hoped she wouldn’t recognize me.

For the first time, I noticed how she moved, back and forth like a metronome at
adagissimo
. She’d mismatched her shoes—one high heel and one flat sole. One leg might have been shorter than the other.

I kept my face down. Although the concrete promenade cut through a wide, trimmed lawn, the path itself was as narrow as a corridor. As we came closer, I saw her face change. She eyed me with pointed curiosity. I’d hoped my goggles and the tattoos would throw her, but no luck. Her face pinched as we drew near. She knew me. My best bet was to walk fast enough that she wouldn’t stop me.

When we passed close enough to breathe on each other, it struck her. “Nursie.”

I should have kept my eyes forward, but I couldn’t help myself. I looked over as she spoke to me. My eyes jogged up to meet hers. I couldn’t hide my revulsion. She read the contempt in my face as our eyes locked, and there was that moment of familiarity where we understood the connection between us.

We stopped.

“You’re here for him.” Her voice sounded uncertain, even fearful. I wondered how much Walter would have told her, or if she just remembered me and pieced it together. She’d expected me to kill her during that visit, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to figure out why I was there.

Helena wanted a response, and when I didn’t give one to her, she insisted, “Answer me.” I needed to get the hell away from this woman, but I couldn’t run, and I couldn’t fight her in front of the cameras.

It felt strange being so close to her again. Back in her lounge chair, she’d seemed harmless as a beached seal. But now she was ambulatory. She stood a head shorter than me, but her girth made her intimidating.

“I’m late.”

Helena, quicker than someone her size should have been, tried to slap me with a gigantic arm. Daunted by the cameras and wired tightly from the tension, I surreptitiously knocked her hand away. It didn’t stop Helena. She swung a balled-up fist. I leaned back and the blow landed on my shoulder. Now we were fighting, with cameras recording us.

She closed in on me fast and pounded me in the ribs and breasts. Helena was strong. It hurt. I could see how she would terrify someone much smaller than her. She grabbed my shoulder to steady herself while she hit me, and I kept thinking about what that arm, now touching me, had done—plunged forks into children, sawed off legs. My blood was hot. Images from Leland’s files flickered in my head. I remembered a “missing” poster with Veda’s photo, posed with a naïve, openmouthed smile.

Cameras be damned.

I swung from the hip and smashed my knuckles into the bridge of her nose. Helena yelped and tumbled back onto her ass. Both hands muzzled her nose to stop the bleeding. Blood ran through her fingers. I cocked my arm for another, elbow at my ear, but didn’t throw it. Once she hit the ground I remembered how exposed I was.

In the lighthouse tower, the first guard I’d seen on the catwalk coughed into a two-way radio.

Helena wailed like a child. Like someone who’d never been hit and didn’t know what pain was. The fall had knocked off the high-heeled shoe. Her bare foot was bruised and swollen, with gout at the big toe. Still anchored in its shoe, the other foot was out of alignment with the leg. And I realized the foot was plastic.

I hadn’t noticed in her home, because she’d worn baggy sweatpants and thick stockings. In daylight it was plain. If I’d paid more attention to her feet when she walked, it would have made sense. I’d chalked up her gait to the obesity.

Behind me shoe soles slapped pavement like applause. Over my shoulder I glimpsed the shadows of two men charging me. Amped up from the fight, I pivoted with my hands in the air.

Royce and Kearns. Their two shaved heads gleamed like ample breasts in want of a nipple. I dropped my fists.

Royce drew close, his eyes darting around to the tower guard and the swivel cameras. He muttered, “Are you fucking serious?” I’d expected him to be all throbbing temples, but Royce was calm as a surgeon as he admonished me. “Fighting outside a prison? Do you know what people have gambled for this?” He swept a wave to the tower guard to signal the all clear. The guard didn’t stop studying us but seemed less hawkish. “Don’t ruin it.”

Kearns had been silent, but piped up to his partner. “Let’s get her in or get her out.”

Royce placed an arm over my shoulder and leaned into me. From a distance, it might look as if he were comforting me. He said, “You’re a nurse who got into a smackdown with a crazy. For the sake of everyone watching, act like you’re shook up.”

I rolled my shoulders forward and pretended I was in shock from the violence.

Kearns inclined his head toward Helena, and Royce stooped to put her shoe back on and help her up.

“Arrest her,” she demanded.

Kearns spoke with the same exasperated composure as his partner. “Go home, ma’am.”

“I’m bleeding,” she moaned, clinging to his arm.

“Go home and we won’t arrest you.”

She took her hand away. The blood below her nose looked like she’d won a pie-eating contest. “Arrest me? I’m the one hit! I need a doctor.” She sneered. “You’re taking the pretty white girl’s side? She’s on her feet and I’m down here. Who do you think needs arresting?”

Royce leaned in and dropped his voice. “Ma’am, we know who you are.”

She pointed to me. “And I know who she is.” The tower guard took an interest in us again. The cameras had stopped rotating. At least two lenses aimed at us and only us.

Kearns stood and loomed behind her. Both guards specifically chose their positions to intimidate her by bookending her front and back sides. Just as softly, Kearns said, “And who’s that?”

“She’s some kind of assassin.”

“You realize how that sounds?” Royce might have made a good therapist.

“I don’t give a goddamn how it sounds, if it’s the truth.”

Royce crouched down so his head was at her level, leaning forward on his fingertips. “All right, get this. Say you’re right, and she is some kind of
assassin
. Why would you pick a fight with this person?”

Helena explained, “She’s after my Walter.”

“And if she is?”

That stunned her. “Then arrest her.”

“It’s like this. We have one holding cell in there for this kind of thing. We honestly don’t pay much attention to what happens in there—we’ve got the rest of these inmates to worry about. If I put her in cuffs, I have to put you in cuffs too, because you hit first. Then we’ll throw you in the same room together. Do you really want to be alone with this person?”

Helena’s eyes widened. Kearns amplified her fear by resting a heavy hand on her shoulder. Helena babbled in protest as she ran out of options.

“Go home, ma’am,” said Kearns, releasing his hand.

Kearns helped her stand and escorted her to her car. On her way, she coughed up a little blood from the punch.

Royce and I walked toward the entrance. Up on the roof, the guard lost interest in us. The cameras began rotating again.

I talked to myself about what I’d just seen. “She’s missing a leg.”

“Focus now.” Royce steered me away from the front door. He led me around the turrets, around the corner of the building where a rusted steel door was plugged into the middle of a massive wall. Around it, paint flecked off in patches as big as dinner plates. “Service entrance,” he said.

I didn’t ask questions. When he pounded on the door it sounded like he was clanging an empty oil drum. Hinges shrieked when the door opened.

Another guard squinted in the sunlight, as if we’d freed him from a cave. He wore the same park ranger uniform as the others. A bushy white moustache swept over his wind-burned cheeks, and his stomach distended over his belt line. He didn’t look at me. “This her?”

“Who else would it be?”

Moustache escorted us through a checkpoint full of steel mesh and concrete. Two guards at a console looked at me with interest but no suspicion. To be friendly, a handsome beefy boy asked, “First time?”

Royce replied for me. “Visiting staff. She’s just here for the day.”

Our escort signed a registry for me, and then several doors opened in succession. We tunneled through a labyrinth of long hallways and right angles. Fluorescents reflected in recently mopped linoleum. Cameras dotted the corners, more obvious than outside the building.

It struck me that I didn’t know where we were headed. “Am I going to his cell?”

Royce kept his eyes forward. “No.”

“Prison clinic?”

“Somewhere else. Try not to talk until we get there.”

Our escort abruptly stopped at a door. It had been painted to blend in with the hallway, and I might have walked by without noticing. He fluidly unlocked it. The corridor behind it was black as a mineshaft without fluorescent tubes to cast a dim glow.

Royce nudged me. “Walk through it like you belong here.” My heart quickened. Along the flame-seared slabs we trod into Gehenna.

Moustache gave us both flashlights, and three narrow beams bounded across the floor and walls as we pushed on. In the absence of light, the sound seemed to resonate more. Breathing seemed louder in the dark. Our footsteps clomped like horse hooves. I tried to guess where we were—maybe a service walkway for janitors and off duty guards. We kept at the same deliberate pace set by the man in front, following the light beams. Soon we approached a riveted door. Royce said, “We’re here.”

Our escort told Royce, “Don’t make a mess.” He turned and walked off.

“Gretsch is in there?” I asked.

Royce nodded.