The Last Word (31 page)

“Who are they?”

“If I tell you,” Mark asked, “will you kill them?”

“Eventually,” Elias said. “After they’ve begged me to do it.”

“Then I can’t tell you,” Mark said.

“Don’t you want to see these people punished for what they did to Jack?”

“Punished, yes. Tortured and killed? No. I don’t think Jack would have wanted that either.”

“I could make you tell me,” Elias said.

“You probably could,” Mark said.

“But you were family to him,” Elias said. “I don’t hurt my family. So I will have to do this without your help.”

Elias got up.

“Wait,” Mark said. “Please.”

Elias sat down.

“We both want the same thing, to see that the people who killed Jack are punished,” Mark said. “I’ll help you if you agree to do things my way.”

“Your way got Jack killed,” Elias said.

“I know,” Mark said. “But I need them alive. It’s the only way I can save my son.”

“And live with yourself.”

“I don’t much care about that anymore,” Mark said.

“Then we are more alike than I thought. If that’s how you feel, why reject my methods?” Elias said. “They are very effective in matters of this sort.”

“I’m all for employing your methods,” Mark said. “Within limits.”

“I’m not a man who has ever lived within limits,” Elias said.

“And I’m a man who has lived within them all his life. Maybe we could meet each other halfway and accomplish our goal.”

“I presume you would be the one setting these limits?” Elias said. Mark nodded. “Give me an example of one of your limits.”

“No bloodshed,” Mark said.

“That’s like me asking you to perform surgery without a scalpel.”

Mark shrugged. “Sometimes it’s necessary for me to explore alternative forms of medicine.”

Elias considered Mark’s proposal for a long moment. “If I agree to this arrangement, how do you know that you can trust me not to slit the killer’s throat?”

“Because if you’re anything like Jack,” he said, “you’re an honorable man who stands by his word.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Elias said.

“I’ll take my chances,” Mark said, and then he told Elias everything that had happened, who he believed was involved, and why they had killed Jack.

“It seems to me that there may be more to this than you think,” Elias said.

“What do you mean?”

“Sweeney is out and, presumably, in some debt to the murderers who are still in prison,” Elias said. “Like Malcolm Trainor and the Ganza family.”

“I don’t see what you’re getting at,” Mark said.

“Killing Jack may have served two purposes. It may also have been a message to me not to see your downfall as an opportunity to increase our business interests in the Southern California market.”

“This isn’t about you.”

“It is now,” Elias said. “He killed my nephew.”

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

“It doesn’t matter why Sweeney did it,” Elias said. “The end result is going to be the same. I can see an easy way to resolve this.”

“But it won’t get my son and Amanda, Jesse, and Susan out of jail.”

“Why should I care?”

“Because Jack did,” Mark said.

Elias grimaced, and Mark saw a flash of anger in his eyes. Mark could see that using the memory of Jack against Elias would have diminishing returns and that he should use such leverage only sparingly.

“Okay, we’ll do it your way.” Elias stood up, took off his jacket, and draped it over the back of his chair. “But it’s only going to work if there’s some blood spilled.”

“I won’t allow you to hurt anyone.”

Elias grinned, like Mark was a child who’d amused him. “It’s not going to be anyone, Doctor. It has to be you.”

It took Mark a moment of thought, but then he saw Elias’s point. Regardless, Mark knew that according to the rules that Elias lived by, at the minimum he deserved to be beaten for the misery he had caused.

In a way, it would almost be cathartic for them both. Mark’s only fear was that once Elias tapped into his rage, he wouldn’t be able to stop. And Mark couldn’t clear Steve, Amanda, Jesse, and Susan from the grave.

Elias studied Mark’s expression and seemed to read Mark’s mind.

“Don’t worry, Dr. Sloan,” Elias said, rolling up his sleeves. “I’m like a surgeon. This is an operation I’ve performed many times and I haven’t lost a patient yet.”

“You might as well call me Mark.”

Elias walked into the bathroom, got a towel, and wrapped it around the knuckles of his right hand.

“You can call me Elias,” he said. “When you’re conscious again.”

Noah Dent’s home was tucked up against a barren hillside and surrounded by tall palm trees. It was his oasis in the desert. His yard was landscaped with cactus and rock around a waterfall that spilled into a black-bottom pool.

He was reclining on a chaise longue in his swimsuit under the shade of an umbrella, sipping a Bloody Mary and browsing the
Wall Street Journal
. It occurred to him, as it often did at times like this, that he’d come a long way from Toronto.

It hadn’t been easy to get where he was, but he never once regretted his decision not to go into his father’s lucrative bathroom fixture business. The ubiquity of Dent toilets and urinals had made Dent the brunt of jokes throughout his childhood (“I piss all over you every day,” “Dent was born pissed off,” “Hey, Noah, you look a little flushed,” etc.).

The idea of hearing those comments for the rest of his life was his vision of hell. But the same comments that embarrassed and stung Noah Dent actually amused and flattered his father, who took tremendous pride in the fact that, in Canada, Dent was a household name. When Noah bought the Scottsdale house, his father shipped him a toilet as a housewarming present. Dent would have smashed it with a sledgehammer but for the fact that his dad came to visit once a year. The last thing Dent wanted was any of his friends making the same tired jokes he’d spent his life running from.

Dent was so preoccupied with basking in his own success that he wasn’t aware of the two men until they showed up on either side of his chaise longue.

At first he thought they were the pool guys. But they weren’t Julio and Eduardo. They were muscled, grim-faced men who wore polo shirts that clung too tightly to their bodybuilder frames and sunglasses that balanced unevenly on their misshapen noses.

They grabbed Dent by the arms and lifted him off the chaise. He opened his mouth to protest, but one of the men slammed a fist into his gut, knocking the wind out of him. He almost passed out. The other man slapped a strip of duct tape over his mouth. They dragged him around the side yard to a black Lincoln Navigator that was idling in his driveway.

They lifted the cargo hatch, flung Dent inside like a piece of luggage, and then rolled him over, binding his wrists behind his back with duct tape. They slammed the hatch closed, and he felt the car start to drive away from his house.

Who were these men? What did they want with him? Was he going to die?

It took a few minutes for the pain to fade and for him to get his breath back. He was on top of plastic sheeting and his head was up against the handle of a shovel.

Plastic sheeting and a shovel. Not very good signs as far as his life expectancy was concerned.

He wanted to cry.

That’s when he became aware of someone else lying in the trunk beside him.

Dent rolled on his side and found himself looking into the bruised and bloody face of another man.

There was duct tape over the man’s mouth and his arms were pinned behind his back. Blood was spattered on his shirt and caked in his hair. The man looked at him with one eye, the other swollen shut. His gaze was unfocused, showing no recognition, no emotion, and barely any spark of awareness.

It was Dr. Mark Sloan.

Dent looked into Mark’s eye and screamed, the sound muffled by the tape over his mouth.

 

The two musclemen dragged Dent out of the Navigator and let him fall onto the hard, hot asphalt before lifting him to his feet. He could see now that they were at a public storage facility in a desolate area somewhere outside of Phoenix. There was an open unit in front of them, the floor lined with plastic sheeting. There was nothing else in it except for a stool and a single lightbulb dangling from the ceiling.

They led Dent inside the storage unit, sat him down on the stool, and then walked out, pulling the rolling corrugated-metal door down behind them.

Dent was left in total darkness. He heard the car drive off. He got up off the stool.

“Sit down,” a voice said evenly.

Dent did as he was told.

The lightbulb came on, revealing a man who must have been standing in the dark recesses of the storage unit all along.

The man was casually dressed and leaned on a baseball bat.

“My name is Elias Stewart. I’m a very bad man. I make my living off drugs, gambling, and extortion. And when I get mad, I hurt people. My nephew Jack was a doctor. He chose a different life for himself. I respected him. And I was proud of him. But most of all, I loved him. Jack’s mentor was Dr. Mark Sloan. Because Jack was a stand-up guy, he’d do anything for his friends, especially someone who meant as much to him as Dr. Sloan did. You know what happened to my nephew? He was killed by a car bomb shortly after agreeing to help Dr. Sloan free his friends from prison.”

Elias paced in front of Dent, who was shivering, and not because he was cold.

“When I heard the news, I was so hurt and so angry that I beat my dog to death with my bare hands. Besides crapping all over my yard, my dog never did anything wrong to me. I liked my dog. But I was angry, Noah, and I lashed out. I am still angry. So I found Dr. Sloan and asked him some questions. Dr. Sloan was reluctant to answer them, so I had to use some persuasion.”

Elias swung the bat at Dent’s head, barely missing him. Dent whimpered.

“Dr. Sloan has principles, even when it comes to the people he hates. He knew what I’d do to whoever was responsible for killing my nephew, and he couldn’t live with that. I told him he wouldn’t have to. He wouldn’t have to live with anything anymore. See, I blamed him for what happened to Jack. It’s not very rational, I know. But that’s me.”

Dent shivered again as he considered the meaning of that last statement and realized that the plastic sheeting and shovel probably meant there was a shallow grave in Mark Sloan’s immediate future.

And his own.

“After some persuading, Dr. Sloan told me who he thought killed Jack and why,” Elias said. “I hope you don’t need persuading too. Since I killed my dog and beat Dr. Sloan, my arms are sore.”

Elias ripped the duct tape off of Dent’s mouth. Dent whimpered.

“This is a terrible mistake,” Dent said.

“I have to agree with you there. Whoever thought that killing Jack was a good idea is going to discover just how wrong he was. So tell me, who was that person?”

“I don’t know.”

Elias swung the bat close enough to Dent’s face that he could smell the wood.

“Wrong answer,” Elias said. “Let me try a different approach. How did you meet Mercy Reynolds?”

“If I tell you,” Dent said, “will you promise not to hurt me?”

“I promise that if you don’t tell me I will hurt you. Very badly. I doubt your mother will be able to identify what’s left of you. How’s that?”

Dent couldn’t stop shivering.

“Mercy came to see me and asked for a job. She said that she and I shared something in common, a hatred for Mark Sloan and Community General Hospital,” Dent said. “She told me that Mark was responsible for her boyfriend’s death.”

“What did she want from you?”

“She wanted to work for me long enough to learn our procedures and so that I could recommend her for a nursing position at Community General.”

“Did she tell you that she intended to work with funeral homes to steal body parts and frame Dr. Bentley for it?”

Dent didn’t answer. He just shivered. Elias sighed, stood as if preparing for a pitch, and raised his bat.

“Yes!” Dent shrieked.

Elias lowered his bat. “You went along with the scheme even though it would cost your company millions?”

“It’s not my money,” Dent said. “I’m just a hired hand. Besides, they can afford it.”

“What about infecting organ donors with West Nile virus? Was that your bright idea, too?”

“I didn’t know anything about that,” Dent said. “I would never harm another person.”

“You don’t think sending Dr. Bentley to prison for a crime she didn’t commit is doing her harm?”

“It’s not physical harm,” Dent said. “There’s a difference.”

“Of course there is. Completely destroying someone is much more noble and pure than beating a man to death with a baseball bat. You aren’t a man—you’re a worm. You took the coward’s way. A man faces his enemies.”

Dent cowered, still shivering with fear. He was afraid he might soil himself.

“You said you wouldn’t hurt me.”

“No, I said that I
would
—unless you gave me a good reason not to. So you knew about Mercy’s body-parts scheme but not that she was going to inject organ donors with West Nile virus. But you figured that as long as Dr. Sloan’s friends were suffering, it didn’t matter who died, right?”

“I felt terrible about the murders. But what could I do? If I reported what I knew, I would have gone to prison myself as an accessory. I had to keep my mouth shut. They knew that.”

“They?”

“Whoever Mercy was working for,” Dent said.

“Who were they, worm?”

“I don’t know,” Dent said with a whine.

“You better think of someone, because if there’s no one else I can punish for Jack’s death, it’s going to be you.”