by Thomas Laird
“Are you dizzy right now?” she asks when she gets me on the table.
“I think I need to use the bathroom.”
“Are you nauseated, sir?”
“Yeah, I think I’m going to be sick.”
“It’s right outside to the right. Do you need help?”
“I’ll make it.”
When I get out of the room, I see the signs for “Main Hospital.” I hurry down the long hall until I pass through the two automatic doors. I can’t keep avoiding cops, so I look for a dressing room or a doctors’ or nurses’ lounge. I’m hoping if I see a nurses’ room first that they have male nurses at St. John’s.
But I find a doctors’ restroom first, and I walk right in. There’s a man on a cot in front of me, but he’s asleep. I can hear his regular breathing, and he doesn’t awaken.
His doctor’s attire is hanging from a hook, along with a stethoscope and a blue surgical hat. I must have come upon a cutter of some kind, and I don’t waste any time stealing his garb. I leave my jeans and tee shirt for him, but I’ll have to live with the gym shoes I’m wearing. Until I see the pullover footwear that this surgeon is using. I stuff the lightweight covers in my pockets. I figure I’ll need something with tread on it if I’m going to make a full bore sprint out of here after I pull the trigger on Tommy.
The doc on the cot turns over with a grunt. Must’ve been a tough operation, it sounds like. The guy’s exhausted.
I put the cover on my head. The stethoscope is around my neck. The .22 is now lodged in the back of these blue doctor’s pants.
His ID reads Philip Cranston. I don’t look anything like the photo on his ID card that dangles from my neck, but I couldn’t ask for the convenience of the physician being my twin.
It’ll have to do. A few people, nurses and physicians, pass me in the hall, but no one is paying attention.
And then I run into a gaggle of cops. Three uniforms. They glance at me momentarily, but they don’t stop me and check me out and they go on with their conversation about who’s got the best thin crust pizza on the south side.
I head to an information desk. The nurses are currently busy with files. I see the book that has the room listings, and I turn it around and look for him while the women continue to be focused on their paperwork. I see his name—Room 436. They didn’t bother to use an alias. Then I see the clipboard with dismissals for this morning, and they’ve got Tommy going out at 6:15.
Just an hour from now. Early, the way I figured it would happen.
But I’ve got to stay loose for sixty-three minutes, as I look at the clock on the wall above the nurses’ station.
I turn the book and the clipboard around the way they were and I continue on down the hall. I see where the main elevators are, and when I step inside one, I see this set goes to the fourth floor, the top floor. I figure Costello will emerge from these lifts.
But he’s got an hour to go before he pops out, and I’ve got to stay free until those doors open.
I see a sign for the cafeteria. I took my wallet out of the jeans, of course, so I figure I’ll eat something. It might be a bold enough move to keep the gendarmes off my ass until I can greet Tommy at the elevators at 6:15. I walk into the café, and I get in line, although there’s no line because no one’s here yet. Then I get a tray and I take a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon and a cup of coffee, and I pay the Hispanic woman at the cashier’s spot.
I find a booth that is fairly remote from the food line, and then I sit down. But I can’t eat because I’m too wired, and I just take a sip at the coffee. The coffee is volcanic, and I spit it back into the cup. I’m also worried the brew might make me have to piss, and I don’t really have time for a potty break.
Then four uniformed policemen enter the cafeteria, get in line, and fill up trays with food and beverages. They decide to amble right in front of me; about three tables separate us.
Two of them shoot a stare my way, but I guess my new Outfit is successful because they don’t keep looking at me. They start in on their food and drink, instead. This time the topic of conversation is the Cubs and the Sox and which team sucks worse. They laugh and screw around, and I suppose they’re bored with their detail, but they’re likely just a little edgy, knowing why they’re here and who the other guest of honor is supposed to be—namely me.
I try to eat some of the scrambled eggs so I won’t appear too suspicious. The food tastes like ashes in my mouth, but I swallow some of it and then wash some down with the slightly less hot coffee. The coffee is strong and overpowering and I almost feel the caffeine kick in to wire me even more electric than I already was.
The cops next to me keep stuffing themselves and laughing when they have the air to laugh, and I look at the clock on the wall over the cashier who took my money.
It’s 5:45. There’s still a half hour before I approach the elevator down from the fourth floor.
I begin to think about Diana, waiting in the parking lot, and I’m almost hoping that she gets cold feet and gets the hell out of here and goes home to Orland Park and forgets she ever knew me.
But she seems to think there’ll always be a reminder of me, for her. She wasn’t trying to dissuade me by repeating that she thinks she’s with child. I believed her. She wasn’t trying to talk me out of this. She just wanted me to know about the life inside her that I was not going to be a part of, once the clock hits 6:15.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
6:00 a.m.
The cops have filtered out of here, and I’m alone. The way it always seems to be, even sometimes with Diana. There were those solitary moments when I was with Li in Upstate New York. It’s as though I tunnel inside myself and there’s no one near me, although there might be dozens of people in my immediate vicinity.
I was known as a loner all my life. In grade school I didn’t have many friends, maybe one or two. They were gone by the time I entered high school, and my high school acquaintances were just that—acquaintances. You’re supposed to make close ties with the soldiers you fight with in a war. That’s what my father, Earl, always said about his experience in World War II. It never happened with me. I suppose the closest I ever got to anyone was with the Hmong in the few months I stayed with them, living from camp to camp while we avoided the Vietnamese after the war.
*
6:05 a.m.
I’ll have to clip him with the first shot, maybe the first two. I might catch them by surprise with the Outfit I’m wearing, but I’m guessing Parisi will be right next to Tommy Costello, and he won’t get caught off guard—at least not for more than a second.
If there’s a crowd of reporters at the elevators, I might have a chance to use them as a shield. I don’t want them getting hurt or killed. I just want Costello to die. And I don’t want to shoot Parisi or any other cop. I’m just here for one man. I might be able to get away in a crowd of bystanders because Parisi won’t be looking for a blood bath, and if I can keep some of those media people between him and me, I might just be able to get out of this hospital.
Diana is waiting for me in the parking lot, just outside Emergency. We could make it away. The odds are indeed ridiculous, but with all the confusion, we just might make it out of here, and maybe make it all the way to that tiny hamlet by the Gulf of California in Sinaloa.
*
6:13 a.m.
I walk out of the cafeteria and head toward the main elevators where I assume Tommy Costello will appear shortly. If the police are anything like the military, he’ll be on time. They’re very anal about the clock in the Army.
I’m thirty feet from the elevators. There are at least a dozen media assholes, most with cameras—TV or otherwise—and I see the numbers moving downward above the doors of the lift. It’s at three, then two… And there’s a hesitation.
Shit, is Parisi walking him down from the second floor, just to foul everything up?
But then the number two darkens and it’s moving toward the first floor, toward the media geeks and toward me.
I walk slowly toward the doors and stand behind the reporters, who are unusually quiet. They must not have thoroughly awakened yet.
The sound of the elevator ceases, and then the doors swoosh open, and I see Tommy Costello, flanked by two plainclothesmen. The shorter one, I figure, must be Parisi, and the taller and older one must be his partner. There are six uniforms in the circle behind the media people, and none of them has even looked my way yet.
Tommy is dressed very dapperly, as I expected, and then the flashbulbs start popping and the TV cameras start recording, and I reach to the back of my blue surgical pants and I pull out the .22. No one has seen me or the gun because they’re all focused on capturing the image of Tommy Costello.
Then a female journalist turns and looks at me and sees the .22 and she screams, “Gun!”
The crowd of media parts like that sea in Exodus, and then I have a clear line at Costello, and I aim at him for a head shot and I squeeze off two rounds and I see Parisi’s arm outstretched and I hear the boom of his .38 just after the report of my small caliber gun and it’s a popping noise, and then I hear two more booming rounds explode, and then I’m punched in the chest as if a heavyweight champion socked me twice in the breast, and I’m hurtled backwards and onto the tile of the hospital floor, and the last thing I hear is a female high-pitched scream, and then it becomes very quiet, and the lights are dimming.
*
Jimmy Parisi
“Hold on,” I tell the ex-Ranger. “You’re in a hospital, so just hold on.”
He looks at me with blank eyes.
“I know you,” he whispers hoarsely.
“Just stay here with me, Evan. The gurney is coming right now.”
I try to press tightly on his two chest wounds. The holes are the ones that I made in him.
The gurney finally arrives, and all the uniforms have cleared the area.
“Costello’s dead,” Doc says softly. “Two taps to the head.”
Azrael’s eyes are going dimmer as Doc says the words about Costello’s demise.
“You still here?” I ask Azrael.
He tries to nod, but it’s too painful.
“Earl,” he whispers.
He’s almost out of gas.
“Your father, you mean?”
“Yeah.”
He tries to smile but he hasn’t got the strength.
“The hell with him,” he grins.
The medics make me move and they hoist him on the gurney and rush him off to surgery, I presume.
*
Evan Azrael dies, twelve minutes later. They didn’t have time to cut into him and remove my two slugs. The surgeon comes out in twenty minutes and verifies he’s gone, to Doc and me.
“Shit,” is all I can come up with.
“There must have been a half dozen cops standing there, watching, and no one looked at the guy in the doctor’s garb,” Doc declares. “They were all eyeballing that famous punk from San Francisco.”
“How’d he get here?” I ask aloud. “How did he get in the damned doors?”
The guard at Emergency says he came in through there, at his station, and the guard goes on to say that he directed him to the girls at the front.
“Did you see a car, or a cab? How’d he arrive?” I ask him.
“I saw a little car… You know, one of those VW things. A Bug, I think they call them. She dropped him off, and then I think she went to park the car in our lot.”
Doc and I bolt out the door of Emergency and start looking for a VW with a female inside. It takes us just two minutes or so to locate her. She opens the window and looks right at me.
“He’s dead,” she says.
Her face is almost like Azrael’s when he was dying—empty.
*
We take her to our Headquarters, and we book her for aiding and abetting a felon, and then we talk to her in the interview room on the second floor.
I tell her her rights and ask her if she wants a lawyer, but she says she doesn’t.
“Did he suffer?” she wants to know.
Doc looks away from her.
She’s an attractive woman, somewhere around fifty, I’m guessing.
“No. I don’t think so. He died pretty quickly.”
“Did you shoot him?” she asks abruptly.
“Yes, I did.”
Doc looks over at her angrily, but he doesn’t say anything.
“I suppose you had to.”
“Yes. He had a gun.”
“Everybody has guns, and here I am.”
“Were you with him long?” I ask.
Doc sits down now, opposite her and next to me at the rectangular, pale yellow table.
“We were together for a few weeks. I don’t know. It wasn’t very long.”
Then she tells me about her apartment building in Orland Park and about how he came there looking for an apartment.
“You didn’t recognize this man?” Doc asks. “He was in the papers, on television. He was a serial killer.”
“I loved him. I don’t give a damn what you do to me. I don’t give a damn.”
“What were you planning to do?” I ask her.
“I was planning to wait to hear you tell me he was dead. That’s all that could’ve happened, wasn’t it?”
“Didn’t you talk about getting away?” Doc queries.
She looks at him and smiles sadly. It’s the saddest smile I’ve ever seen.
“You can’t get away. Ever,” she replies.
“You need to get a lawyer. Maybe he can keep you from doing any serious time in jail,” I remind her.
“There is nothing but serious time, and I don’t need any bars in my face to remind me of it.”
She looks down at her fingernails. They’re painted blood red, and they’ve been well taken care of. They’re pointed and perfect.
“We were going to go to Mexico. Some little town in the central part, near the Gulf of California… He lost that Asian girl. Her name was Li and she was carrying his baby… And now I’m carrying his child, too, but this one’s alive. He’s alive in me and I know it’s a boy. I know it. He wasn’t a monster, Detective Parisi. He killed all those soldiers because they massacred a town in the war and he couldn’t live with the fact that no one called them on it. He was just trying to do justice. That’s all. And it was the same for this Costello gangster. He was the monster, some kind of creature. He was evil, and Evan was not. I don’t care how many men he killed, he wasn’t evil. Do you understand me?”
“Do you want me to call an attorney for you?” Doc asks.
“Yes. I don’t want to be in jail when the baby comes, but I probably will be, won’t I?”
If it were up to me, I’d let her walk, but it isn’t up to me and she is an accessory. It just feels wrong, even though I’m very aware of what the law demands.
She just might get a judge who isn’t a total hardass. I know several good criminal lawyers.
“Call Max Ameche,” I tell Doc.
He nods and leaves the interview room.
“First guy I meet in twenty years who’s worth a damn and he’s a hitman. That’s very, very funny. Don’t you think?”
“You’ve been very cooperative. I’ll tell the prosecutor you were.”
“Do you think I’ll be in prison for a long time?”
“I really don’t know, but Max Ameche is a fine lawyer. He’ll do his best for you. Can you afford him, do you think?” I ask.
“I’ve got money, yes.”
“You don’t have a criminal record, do you?” I smile.
“No. But I’ve had criminal impulses.”
Then she begins to cry. She took a long time to let it flow, and I hand her a box of tissues.
“Do you have many more questions?” she asks.
“No. We’re done. I’ll just wait with you until Max gets here. You’ll like him.”
“Why are you being so nice to me?” she wants to know.
“Did you think I was going to shine bri
ght lights into your eyes?”
Now she stops weeping, and she tries to upturn her lips. She’s a very pretty woman. I think I might be smitten by her myself.
“Are you married, Detective?”
“No. My wife died of cancer, a while ago.”
“Do you have children?” she wants to know.
“Two.”
“I’m sorry about your wife.”
“I’m sorry we have to do … all this.”
Doc re-enters the interview room.
“Max will be here in about thirty minutes,” he says.
“That fast?”
“I persuaded him to make it fast,” my partner says.
“Thank you,” Diana Kaserides tells us.
She studies those perfect fingernails once more.
“We were going to go to Mexico and disappear. Isn’t that the craziest thing you’ve ever heard in your life? We were going to live near the Gulf of California and wade in the warm water, he told me. He said no one would ever find us and that we’d finally be happy there. Isn’t that the most insane thing you’ve ever heard?”
EPILOGUE
July 1985
Doc has his aches and pains, but he’s still at physical therapy, getting his pins in better shape. He keeps up the rap about leaving the police, but I don’t see it happening any time soon. He’s too good a detective. He’s married to the job, as the cliché goes. Most of all, I think he’d miss the action.
Earl Azrael requested the ashes of his son, and they were sent to him to dispose of. Arlington was not an option for burial, naturally, so the father took care of the remains. I never talked to Evan’s father, so I have no idea what he’s going to do with what’s left of his son.
Diana received probation and community service, courtesy of Max, her very fine attorney. I haven’t seen her since we talked in the interview room, and I don’t know that I’d have anything to say to her because there really is nothing to add, from me. She’s hurting, and she gets through it or she doesn’t. Evan was a murderer in the eyes of the law, and I suppose I have to concur, but something inside me is hesitant to condemn him.