Blood Avatar

by Ilsa J. Bick

  Kill her. She was a whore, going to hell anyway. Yet as much as he yearned to throttle the life out of her, he needed her alive. One dead Underhill was all he was allowed.

  He found Troy’s insulin easily enough. Flicking out a pocket knife, he pried away the metal seal. Nothing left to chance: Troy would have no choice. Then he pulled out the doctored vials from his back pocket, wiped all five vials with a kitchen towel then replaced the vials in the fridge and wiped the handle.

  He went back into the living room. He’d been very careful to avoid having a drink or using a glass but, of course, he’d touched her and she’d touched him. No way to avoid it. He stood for several seconds, thinking. Things hadn’t escalated to actual, well, sex, a relief because he’d leave even less of himself behind. The beauty of the amnestic was she wouldn’t recall anything from two hours preceding unconsciousness. She’d never remember him—and if, by some remote chance, she did, the last thing Sandra Underhill would want was for everyone to know she was whoring around while her kid died in his sleep.

  * * *

  Troy flinched awake at the sound of a car’s engine revving. He’d fallen asleep at his desk. He fingered apart his blinds and watched the car’s brake lights flare as the car slowed before making a left.

  “Hunh,” Troy whispered to no one. “Betcha you ain’t gonna sound your old siren about this, are ya, ya asshole?”

  From the top of his stairs, he heard his mother snoring: a loud, nasal, snorting noise. Once in the kitchen, he opened the fridge, and frowned. Four new vials, about a month’s supply. He dragged out a vial and inspected it. The vial was warm, but it was his insulin all right. A good thing, because his last vial was ruined. He tried to remember if the seal had been broken before, and couldn’t. But his mother had remembered him after all.

  Once he’d changed out his insulin and thrown away the ruined vial, he went to stand over his mother. He removed the black pump that dangled from her toes.

  “I hate you,” he whispered, tucking a crocheted comforter under her chin. Hot tears rolled down his cheeks. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.”

  * * *

  At the end of the Underhills’ drive, Gabriel turned left. The car’s high beams swept a wide, very bright swath, cutting the night in two like a gleaming scimitar, and Gabriel watched, without really seeing, a blur of images winking in and out: a length of wire fence, the dip of a culvert, and now, a patrol car on the shoulder . . .

  What? Gabriel jerked to full alertness, his eyes wide, white-knuckling the wheel. Holy God, what was a patrol car doing out here? What could he . . . ?

  Slow down, just slow down, boy. You just might get out of this.

  He was in a patrol car, too. That was good. But he had a problem. He couldn’t stop or afford to be recognized. Easing his right hand off the wheel, he tapped in the code for the glove box—thankful now that he’d insisted, just in case—and the glove box sighed open. Clicking off the safety, he laid the gun—his cannon—on the seat. There was a round already jacked in the chamber because he liked to be prepared.

  Then he realized something else. His headlights were on, but the other patrol car’s were not. Why not? Maybe the car wasn’t there in an official capacity. But he could get a good look at the driver while whoever was in there couldn’t see him.

  Rolling closer, closer . . . And he saw who it was.

  Tension drained from his limbs like water. The other man was already ducking his head, trying to keep his face out of sight because he wouldn’t want to be seen.

  “But I see you,” Gabriel whispered, “I see you.”

  The other man, even though he didn’t know it yet—he was dead.

  41

  Monday, 16 April 3136

  0345 hours

  They’d finished their statements at the courthouse. Amanda had walked out ahead, but Ramsey hung back, turned to Ketchum and said, “I know this is a bad time to mention this, but with the med-evac and me involved, the news people might show up again. That’ll create complications. Maybe best if I left town.”

  Ketchum was already shaking his head. “No, then it’d look like you’d done something we’re ashamed of. Now it would be better if you didn’t go rearranging people’s faces, but those guys didn’t deserve any better. Besides, Limyanovich got killed on my watch. That makes me mad, and I want to get the son of a bitch who did it.” Ketchum jerked his head. “So go on, get out of here. Get some sleep.”

  Ramsey left. There was an awkward moment in the parking lot, with Amanda looking waiflike in her too-large scrub top and Ramsey’s jacket, and Ramsey, his right hand still wrapped in lukewarm bio-ice, freezing his ass off but not wanting to leave. He was desperately tired, feeling the pain in his hand now. He knew better than to bare-knuckle fight like that. It had also dawned on him that maybe, this time he’d scored a KO on his career. McFaine was a monster. But this was different.

  Too much to think about.

  Amanda said, “Well . . .” Her breath steamed, and the word hung like a balloon.

  “I’m so tired I can barely see straight. But I really don’t want to leave. I mean, leave you alone.”

  “I know what you meant.” She tucked a shank of her long hair behind her ear: an oddly touching, almost girlish gesture. “So, don’t leave me alone.”

  “Uhhh . . . well, I only got the one bed at the hotel. Maybe they got a roll-out—”

  “I have a guest bedroom with its own shower. Besides, I have your jacket, and I’m not taking it off until I get home.”

  She had a point. “Okay.”

  “Good.” Her lips wobbled into an imitation of a smile. “Don’t forget your socks.”

  * * *

  She led, and he followed in his loaner. Amanda’s place was south of the hospital, and at her drive, they turned left, heading east for the lake. The drive curled in an elongated S, and a smear of light appeared, resolving into the overhead light of a wraparound porch with white balustrades and wood railing. A wood swing, big enough for three, dangled on linked chain to the left of a wide bay window. Two verdigris fan-back rockers stood by a low end table to the right and just off a double window edged in white. He pulled to the front of the house while Amanda continued to the right and disappeared into an attached garage. Lights winked on; the front door opened, and she was waving him inside.

  She took his laundry, disappeared, and in two minutes, he heard the hum of a sonic washer. Then she reappeared, clutching an insulated satchel, and led him through a two-story foyer with hardwood floors and into a sitting room. A deep, overstuffed couch, bracketed at acute angles by two upholstered wood-slat recliners, stood before a freestanding, gray and slate blue fieldstone fireplace. The far wall was shrouded with floor-to-ceiling beige draperies.

  He said, “You know, I’m dog-tired, but I’m too cranked to sleep. I need to come down. If you want to show me where the bedroom is, I’ll—”

  “No, that’s all right.” She placed the insulated bag on a low knotty pine coffee table and then eased herself into a recliner. “Just turn on the fire before you sit down—that little switch at the base of the hearth.”

  He flipped the switch, and instantly, orange-yellow and blue flames bloomed around a stack of artfully arranged ceramic logs. She sighed, said, “That’s better,” and hunkered into Ramsey’s jacket. She gestured at the satchel. “Bio-ice for your hand.”

  “Thanks.” Ramsey slid onto the couch, dug out a packet, massaged it to start the chemical cooling then laid the bio-ice over his hand. The knuckles were puffy and turning purple, and he was having trouble bending his fingers.

  They were silent a moment then Amanda said, “I never thanked you.”

  Ramsey looked at her. The bruise under her left eye was livid and a high collar of blue-black thumb- and finger-shaped bruises ringed her neck. “You don’t need to. I’m just sorry I couldn’t let you kill the bastard.”

  Her skin, where she wasn’t bruised, was very pale. “I wanted to kill him. I’ve never been that an
gry before. What I wasn’t prepared for was this moment of total shock, and then I felt real, personal fear for the first time in my life. But then I went ballistic.” She paused, looked at the fire. “I understand now.”

  “Understand what?”

  She looked him in the eye. “I read about what you did to McFaine. My first reaction was . . . revulsion.”

  “You don’t have . . .”

  “No, no, let me finish. On an intellectual level, I understood. Who wouldn’t? But, emotionally, I thought you were some kind of sadist and maybe worse than McFaine because his victims died. You made sure that wouldn’t happen for him.”

  The words hit him harder than he expected. In his own mind, he’d accepted that he had acted with a clear-eyed, pitiless certainty because he knew exactly what would happen. Had known the moment right before it happened: when McFaine was down, stunned, and he’d straddled McFaine’s back, felt the space between McFaine’s fourth and fifth cervical vertebrae with his thumbs—and bore down.

  She was watching his face. “Would you do it again?”

  “McFaine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Yes, I would,” he said.

  She nodded. Then she got up, slid onto the couch, gently draped his left arm over her shoulders and laid her head against his chest.

  “I hear your heart,” she said.

  42

  Monday, 16 April 3136

  0905 hours

  Her link shrilled them awake. Ramsey jumped, had a disorienting moment, then realized he was still slouched on the couch, the room toasty from the fire. Bright sunlight diffused through the drawn curtains. His neck was stiff, the fingers of his left hand were cold, his arm was numb, and Amanda had slumped over sometime while they slept, her long sable-brown hair spilling over his lap. At the link’s second scream, she jerked, nearly clocked his chin scrambling to get up, said, “Sorry,” and then staggered to a hall link that promptly stopped screaming when she told it to shut the hell up.

  Ramsey stood, working out the kinks in his back, scrubbing eye-grit with the heel of his left hand. What time was it? He checked his watch. After nine? They’d been out for maybe four hours, though he felt as if he’d slept for fifteen minutes. His brain felt the way half-coagulated gelatin looked, and lack of sleep reared up as a headache trying to bleed out of his ears.

  Amanda came back. Her skin was pale, her hair disheveled, the bruises on her neck and cheek a bright purple, and there were blue-black smudges under her eyes. “We have to go to the hospital,” she said, finger-combing hair from her eyes. “Hank will meet us there. The ambulance crew just brought in Noah Schroeder.”

  “Isaiah’s kid?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “What happened?”

  “All I know is that when the nurses were putting a call to Carruthers, Sarah Schroeder became kind of, well, hysterical.”

  “Why?”

  “Apparently, her brother not only needs a doctor,” she said, hurrying down a near hall. “He needs the police.”

  * * *

  Hammering the accelerator, Ramsey made the trip in three minutes thirty. He came to a rolling stop just long enough for Amanda to jump out, and then he continued around the breezeway, nosed the loaner into a parking spot, and pushed out. He spotted Ketchum’s cruiser pulling in, and they jogged across the parking lot and breezeway into the emergency room. Ketchum’s stubble was gone, and he smelled like aftershave, but his blue eyes were sunken and fatigue had carved deep hollows under his cheekbones.

  The lobby was empty except for a strained, anguished-looking woman sitting along the far wall to the right, and a young girl with mussed blond hair and puffy eyes. The woman started up when she saw Ketchum, but the receptionist waved them down.

  “Dr. Slade said you should come on back.” The receptionist’s eyes were so wide her iris looked like a piece of coal in a snowbank. “She said you’d better hurry.”

  In the back bay, there was that sense of barely controlled chaos Ramsey knew from experience meant that things were just this side of totally out of control: shoes scuffing linoleum, the clatter of metal trays bouncing on casters, and from behind a yellow gauze curtain, a gabble of urgent voices, and Amanda’s, barking out orders.

  They ducked behind the curtain. A cluster of nurses were gathered around a metal gurney festooned with two IV poles and bags of intravenous fluids with snakes of clear tubing. Amanda stood with her back to him and left of the gurney. A medical scanner hung suspended from the ceiling and off to Amanda’s left. All he could see of the boy on the gurney were a pair of tennis shoes attached to feet jutting from jeans.

  A nurse spotted them, said something, and Amanda craned her neck around. She waved them over with a heavy pair of surgical scissors. “It’s pretty terrible,” she said, as another nurse dropped back and Ramsey squeezed in, Ketchum at his left elbow.

  The boy, Noah, lay on his back, his eyes closed, face shiny with sweat. Besides the jeans, he wore a crew-cut light gray sweatshirt with blotchy sweat stains around the neck and under his armpits. The boy gave off a gassy smell, like half-boiled garbage. A light green, two-pronged nasal cannula delivered additional oxygen, but his skin was white as salt, his lips and nail beds were blue, and the black circles under his eyes looked painted on. IVs dripped fluid into veins along either wrist, and he could see and hear from the scanner that Noah’s heart rate was hectic, rapid and irregular. Noah’s temperature was elevated—40° C—and Ramsey knew that was bad. A red digital readout with a capitalized BP showed a set of numbers, both low, meaning shock.

  “Why’s he dropping his pressure? Is he bleeding?” he asked, and then added, “And what’s that smell? It’s like . . . Jesus, it’s like rotted meat.”

  “We don’t know,” Amanda said. “We were just going to cut off his clothes.” They did that, Amanda and three nurses, their scissors flashing, and then Amanda stared. “What the . . . ?”

  A gauze bandage covered half Noah’s right biceps. The coag-gauze might have been white once, but now the bandage was sodden and colored a greenish-yellow. The bandage was secured with surgical tape, and as Amanda teased that off, the rotten-meat smell got worse. Then Amanda peeled away the bandage. “Oh, God,” she said.

  The wound was putrid: a fist-sized crater of viscous green-yellow pus, blackened dead skin at the margins edged with inflamed, still-living flesh and a spidery filamentous web of red streaks running into his armpit.

  “This is bad,” Amanda said. “This is worse than bad.” She was already irrigating the wound with huge syringes filled with sterile saline. A gloved tech held a basin beneath Noah’s shoulder, and the fluid that ran into it was sludgy and greenish-gray. “It’s definitely infected, and the infection’s dissecting along the soft tissues, might even be in the bone. If it’s in the bone or seeded the brain, then we might lose him. He’s septic, but maybe we’ve got it in time. Maybe this is the worst . . .”

  The shriek of an alarm told the lie because things went, suddenly, to hell.

  “It’s his BP, he’s crashing,” Amanda said urgently. “Open up his IVs. Craig, intubate him now. Sheryl, get me a CVP tray. With that wound there, I’m going to have go for a right internal jugular stick. And somebody page Dr. Carruthers from ICU, I need another set of hands down here pronto. I want an initial bolus of eight hundred mills of saline, and I’m going to draw off blood for cultures. Let’s go, let’s go, people, now!”

  Then Amanda turned, ripping off her soiled gloves and plucking up another packet. “Sorry,” she said, snapping on first her left glove and then her right. She moved to a tray of instruments a nurse wheeled over and began sloshing a brown antiseptic rinse over Noah’s neck. “We’ll get pretty busy here, Jack, Hank. Better wait outside.”

  They ducked out without saying anything, just trying to keep out of everyone’s way. But Ramsey turned back in time to catch a glimpse of Amanda jabbing a needle on a massive syringe into Noah’s neck.

  * * *

  Noah’s mother and
sister were where they’d left them. Noah’s mother fisted a wadded tissue to her mouth. “How is he, Hank?”

  “Noah’s bad, Hannah. Dr. Slade says there’s shock because he has an infection. Up here.” Ketchum touched his right biceps. “Infection’s poisoned the blood.”

  “An infection? But how?” Hannah Schroeder’s eyes ticked from Ketchum to Ramsey and back again, jittering like a terrified bird. “He hasn’t been anywhere since Friday afternoon after school! You remember, that day he came in so late, and I got so worried. But he never said anything!”

  “The way I heard it, Sarah here pitched a fit when the ER people wanted to call Dr. Carruthers. You want to tell us what that’s about, Sarah?”

  The girl spoke through sobs in little hiccups. “He-he showed m-me on Friday. This was while you were still ou-out,” she said as Hannah turned an astonished look on her daughter. “He got hurt on-only he did . . . didn’t want anyone to kn-know.”

  “Know about what?” Ramsey asked.

  “That he’d been shot,” she said.

  43

  1200 hours

  Before they left, a nurse ducked out and said that Noah had gone into surgery. “Doctor says she’ll try to save the arm,” the nurse said.

  “Will he make it?” Ketchum asked.

  “That will depend on how extensive the infection is, whether it’s seeded his brain. If his brain is involved, there could be neurological problems. It’s just too early to tell.”

  “Tell her that we think Noah was hit with some kind of bullet,” Ramsey said. “We’re going to go check it out now.”

  “I’ll tell her.” The nurse shook her head. “Such a shame, that family, first Isaiah, then Scott and now Noah. Some families are just born for heartache.”

  * * *

  Outside the ER, in the parking lot, Ketchum said, “I should call Kodza. If Sarah’s right, then the man who shot Noah probably killed Limyanovich.”