Head Wounds

by Dennis Palumbo

  I rolled down my window. Outside, all was silent, except for the gentle lapping of the river and the muffled creaking of the old dock’s pillars. The air was cold, damp.

  “I don’t see him,” I said aloud, for Gloria’s benefit. “I don’t see anyone. I’m getting out of the car.”

  “For Christ’s sake, be careful!”

  Without answering, I opened the door and stepped out onto the thick wooden planks of the dock. The wet darkness shrouded me almost instantly, and I involuntarily shuddered against the night’s chill.

  Looking to my left and right, I started walking toward the base of one of the loading cranes. I’d seen what looked like a flash of light just behind it, on the side facing the river.

  As the Ohio’s pungent, oily smell wafted up to meet me, I was brought up short by a sudden, rasping sound. A metallic whine, like that of a buzz saw.

  Coming from somewhere above my head.

  I stopped, swallowing hard, and looked up. It floated about a dozen feet overhead. The size and shape of a car tire, it was a beetle-like thing with a pair of lights for eyes, shining down on me. Four thin struts extended from its sides, propellers whirling at the ends.

  Quelling the panic that had risen in my chest, I realized what it was. A drone.

  Gloria’s muffled voice came from the cell.

  “Jesus, what’s that—?”

  “A goddam drone!” I shouted back. “Somehow he’s—”

  Another voice boomed down from above me.

  “Hi ya, Danny.” His voice. Tinny and unearthly, like aluminum foil crinkling, it echoed from the drone’s speaker. Obviously, the drone also featured a camera lens.

  I squinted up at the pair of blinding lights but didn’t reply. I instinctively backstepped, unnerved.

  “I know how much you like standing by a river,” Maddox said. “So you should appreciate what’s in store for you. The death of someone even closer to home than poor Harvey.”

  The drone rose unsteadily a few more feet in the air, buzzing like a great angry insect, and swept toward the river. Then banked and turned back, to hover overhead again.

  “Come on, Danny! Hurry, or you’ll miss it!”

  At first, still stunned by the otherworldly sound of Maddox’s voice, I stood rooted to the spot. My eyes tracing the drone’s lazy circles in the damp, night-shrouded sky.

  Finally, when the drone swooped off again in the direction of the river, I roused myself and followed along below. Maddox was leading me toward the base of that silent crane, behind which I’d seen the flicker of light. Though as far as I could see peering up ahead, now there was only unremitting darkness.

  It wasn’t until the drone paused and hovered high above the base of the crane that I realized it must have been the source of the light I’d seen. The crane stood well back from where the dock jutted out over the river, and suddenly the drone’s searing high beams were sweeping the waters below it.

  I hurried around the boulder-sized, steel-plated base and found myself at the dock’s weathered edge, feeling those same unwavering high beams pouring down on me like a shower of cold light.

  “Here we are.” Maddox spoke from high above me with an austere authority, as though from the heavens themselves. “Just like I promised. Up close and personal.”

  By now, I was squinting past the harsh overhead lights into the black waters below me. But it was hard to see anything. With the splintered dock planks creaking beneath my feet, I stepped to the very edge to get a closer look.

  It was then that I heard something—someone—splashing in the water. A frantic, sputtering voice piercing the mist.

  A voice I thought I recognized.

  Maddox’s rattling laugh rained down on me. “Time to say your good-byes, Danny!”

  Suddenly, the drone’s powerful lights, as though having been draped there, lifted from my shoulders and skimmed along the river’s surface until they came to a dock pillar, long ravished by a century’s immersion in the flowing waters. A thick, weary stanchion buried deep into the riverbed.

  In the blazing light, I could see there was someone lashed to the pillar with heavy ropes. Head lolling, shoulders slumped, drained by fatigue, and growing weaker by the second. From her jerky movements in the swirling water, I could tell she was listlessly kicking with her legs. Desperately trying to keep her head above the brackish, oily-green water, even as it spooned slowly, remorselessly, into the woman’s mouth…

  The woman was Angie Villanova.

  Before I could react, I heard the rasp of the drone as it lowered toward me. Then Maddox’s sonorous voice.

  “As Socrates said, ‘Doing philosophy is practicing for death.’ Think of all the practice I’m giving you lately—”

  He was still talking when I dove into the water.

  l l l l l

  Maddox had mistimed it. He’d led me here to witness Angie’s death by drowning, but I’d arrived while she was still clinging to life. Fighting for every last breath.

  As I knew she would.

  I also knew she only had seconds left. The Ohio River’s depth was regulated by a series of locks, but with the recent rains could swell to thirty feet, rising like an ocean’s tide.

  Swimming hard against the pull of the river, I’d covered half the distance to where Maddox had bound her when the drone’s blazing lights suddenly cut out, plunging Angie and me into a watery darkness.

  With visibility removed, I pushed myself toward the ancient pillar, guided only by the sound of Angie’s anguished cries.

  Maddox’s voice was a mechanic rasp, laced with rage, sounding again like an angry Old Testament God, railing from above.

  “You’re too late, Danny! The old bitch dies tonight!”

  I closed my ears against his words. I had to.

  Moments before jumping into the river, I’d grabbed my cell out of my pocket. Put it to my lips.

  “Ambulance!” Then I tossed the phone to the dock.

  I had to hope that Gloria had heard me, and was notifying the Port Authority, and that help was on its way.

  My eyes stinging, ribs screaming in pain, I plowed through the filthy water as fast as I could. Angie’s voice had grown faint. Choked with water. And resignation.

  I reached her at last and threw my arms around her stout form, hoisting her head above the waterline. By now I’d grown accustomed enough to the dark to see her slackened face, her stark white eyes. She’d stopped pumping her legs, and it took all my strength to keep her airways cleared of the water.

  “I’m here, Angie! I’ve got you—”

  She didn’t respond or give any sign of recognition.

  I shifted position until I had her supported with one arm, while I snaked my other one around the side of the pillar. Fingers anxiously searching for the ropes binding her to it.

  Luckily, between their time in the water and her frantic struggles, the ropes had been loosened enough for me to work my fingers against the knots. Pulling, stretching.

  As I did, I kept shouting her name. Trying to rouse her. But her only reply was the involuntary sputtering of her lips against the roiling waters. Her heaving, choking gasps.

  Finally, I felt the knots pull apart enough for me to wriggle Angie’s body free. Crying out from the effort, I put both arms around her again and lifted her out of the circle of ropes and onto my shoulders. Then, turning us both in the direction of the dock, I began pulling us toward it. Swimming with one hand, my progress was slow but steady.

  As the contours of the dock emerged from the mist carpeting the black waters, I made out a thin wooden ladder hung from just below its weathered edge. Emboldened, I swam harder, kicking my legs even more.

  Only a few more yards…only a few…

  My labored gasps were now the only ones I could hear. Angie, unmoving in my grasp, had ceased to make a sound.

&
nbsp; Finally reaching the ladder, I pulled Angie’s seemingly lifeless body up onto my shoulders and took hold of the first rung. Grunting under the strain, I managed to climb all the way to the lip of the dock. With a last explosive burst of effort, I hauled us both up and onto the damp planks.

  I lay Angie on her back, then scrabbled anxiously on the dock around me, trying to locate the cell I’d tossed aside. I’d just managed to find it when I heard the approach of the drone, returning to hover about twenty feet above.

  And then its searing lights flared to life, flooding the area around Angie and me. Exposing us to the drone’s lens.

  “Still playing the big hero, eh, Danny?”

  I ignored him, and instead used the sudden bright lights to scan Angie’s face and torso. To my horror, her mouth drooped on one side, and her body shuddered as though convulsing. Then her left arm seemed to stiffen.

  I knew what was happening to her. I’d seen it before.

  A stroke.

  l l l l l

  I barely registered Maddox’s mocking tone.

  “She isn’t gonna make it, Danny. You failed. I love it.”

  Crouching beside her, I knew I should try to keep her warm until medical help arrived. But all I had was my own jacket, as soaked with river water as were her own clothes.

  Absurdly, I found myself cataloguing them. Though she’d lost her shoes, I noted her no-nonsense sweater and slacks. The gold crucifix given her by her mother, wound by its chain around her neck. Her everyday watch with its simple black band.

  As though it mattered, I realized that these were the kinds of things she wore at the office. Which meant that Maddox had somehow spirited her away after work today, perhaps injecting her with a powerful paralytic as she bent to open her car door.

  Which meant, too, that Maddox had become even bolder, more reckless. And unusually lucky. Assaulting and kidnapping a high-level police officer in the Department’s own parking lot. Unless there had been a witness to the crime, and even now Pittsburgh PD was searching the city for one of their own…

  All these thoughts flooded my mind in a matter of seconds, probably as a way to distance myself from the reality of Angie’s condition. A kind of self-protective dissociation.

  Which, I also realized, I couldn’t afford. Not now. Despite my concern for Angie, my palpable grief, I had to stay focused. Think clearly. A madman’s mechanized avatar floated above me.

  “Time for you to go, Danny. And for her to die…”

  I rose to my feet and stared up at the drone. As though its blinding lights were in fact his own intense eyes.

  “No. I’m not leaving till an ambulance gets here.”

  “Think again, Doctor. If you’re here when it arrives, and you tell what you know about me—”

  “Fuck you, Maddox! I’m staying right here.”

  “Goddammit, I’m warning you—”

  His voice was cut off by the whine of an approaching siren. I turned where I stood and saw the red flashing lights of what looked like an ambulance. As I’d hoped, Gloria had alerted the Port Authority, which has emergency medical staff standing by in case of accidents on the loading docks.

  The drone suddenly dropped to within a dozen feet of me.

  “Remember, Danny, this stays between you and me till I decide to end it. Or else many more people will die. Random people whose blood will be on your hands!”

  Then, as easily as it had descended, the drone rose again. Flying quickly over the length of the deserted dock until it vanished from sight.

  The ambulance was less than a hundred feet away, the racing vehicle’s twin high beams now replacing the bright lights of the drone. I knew that, in a few seconds, the driver would be able to see Angie and me.

  Which meant I had no choice. With a last look down at her still form, I started running toward my car. Though draped in darkness, I could see the glint of its front grille in the passing headlights of the ambulance.

  Cloaked now by that same darkness, I got behind the wheel and hurriedly drove off in the opposite direction. In my rearview mirror, I saw that the ambulance had reached where Angie lay, and two EMTs were scrambling toward her.

  I tried reaching Gloria again, but by now my cell’s battery was dead. All right with me. I wasn’t up to talking.

  Heading out of the port and back along the main road into McKees Rocks, I felt a sickening mix of guilt and fear. I knew I had to take Maddox’s threat seriously, but it was wrenching to leave Angie like that with only the hope that the medical team could get her to a hospital in time.

  In minutes, I was back in the city. Wet and cold, my spent body wracked with pain, I made my way past the glittering lights of the Point and headed to the safe house.

  Though the rain had fully stopped, the clouds over the city rolled like flat, black waves toward the hills. An undulating shroud over the silver and glass heart of the new Pittsburgh.

  Meanwhile, I kept replaying Maddox’s words to me as I’d peered down at Angie’s body on the old, deserted dock.

  “You failed,” he’d said. “I love it.”

  Because he was right. On both counts.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Fortunately, the ever-resourceful Lyle Barnes had opened the pipes and re-lit the water heater after breaking into the abandoned safe house.

  Standing under the steaming hot shower, I vigorously scrubbed off what felt like a slimy, full-body film of river water. Then I let the nozzle’s jets play along my aching back, the heat and pressure soothing the stressed muscles.

  Nothing, though, could soothe my concern about Angie, and the bitter knowledge that yet another person close to me had been victimized by Sebastian Maddox.

  Then, by some weird mental alchemy, my thoughts turned to young Robbie Palermo, and our conversation about head wounds. In a way, it’s exactly what Maddox was doing to me. Delivering repeated wounds to my mind, my psyche…

  When I shut off the shower and stepped through the glass door, I found Gloria Reese standing there in the small bathroom. In one hand was a towel, in the other a roll of bandages. While her eyes shone with excitement.

  “Gloria? What are you—?”

  “Hurry up and dry off.” She handed me the towel, then reached past me to turn on the shower again.

  “To muffle our voices,” she explained. “Just in case. Bastard’s made me paranoid.”

  I quickly toweled off, after which she began wrapping the bandages around my ribs. Also quickly.

  “Has something happened?”

  “Yeah, we got a break. When you told me you were at the river port, I called my tech guys downtown and asked for an aerial recon of the area. Remember, they still think they’re helping me track a person of interest on another case.”

  “And—?”

  “The recon picked up a scattering of signals, and they just now analyzed the data. One was a bi-directional transmission from what turned out to be a drone.”

  She finished taping the bandages, then straightened, hands clasping my shoulders.

  “Danny, they traced the signal back to a location in Swissvale. Maddox was operating the drone from there. We got the son of a bitch!”

  l l l l l

  I threw on some clothes from my travel bag—jeans, a sweater, and fresh sneakers—and went out to the main lounge area. There I found Barnes and Gloria in the midst of a heated discussion about whether or not to bring in the authorities to deal with Maddox.

  “I’m a sworn Federal agent,” Gloria was saying. “Now that we know where he is, I should notify the Bureau’s tactical team. And, to be honest, Pittsburgh PD, too.”

  Barnes shook his head. “And tell them what? That we’ve been conducting a rogue investigation of some crazy bastard who’s off the grid? Meanwhile, wasting valuable hours explaining what’s been happening, securing a warrant…”

 
; I stepped between them.

  “Lyle is right, Gloria. Remember, this is Maddox we’re dealing with. He could have his Swissvale place booby-trapped. Hell, he could have bombs planted all over the city. Explosives he might activate remotely if he’s cornered. I don’t think we can take that chance.”

  Barnes grunted. “Yeah, and every minute we delay…”

  Gloria held her hands up in mock surrender. “Okay, I get it. Besides, I agree that we don’t have time for debate. Just remind me about this later, when I get kicked out of the Bureau.”

  “If you do, I’ll take you fly-fishing. You’ll love it,” Barnes said.

  Gloria gave him a skeptical look, but said nothing.

  Barnes grinned, then started checking a Glock handgun he’d brought with him. Given his arm sling, his movements were alarmingly awkward. I kept that observation to myself. I also took note of the fatigue pinching his red-rimmed eyes—the brutal cost of going days without proper sleep.

  If Gloria noticed this, she gave no indication. She just slammed a fresh chamber into her own regulation automatic and thrust it in her back pocket.

  Barnes frowned at me. “If the Bureau hadn’t cleaned out the armory station when they abandoned this place, I’d have a weapon for you. Maybe that means you should sit this one out.”

  “Yeah. Like that’s gonna happen.”

  Gloria arched an eyebrow at Barnes. “Told ya, Lyle.”

  He shrugged. “Well, that’s another argument we don’t have time for. We gotta get going. But remember, Doc, if you get your ass killed, I’ll have to find another goddam therapist. And just when I finally got you broken in.”

  l l l l l

  The FBI techs had tracked the drone signal’s location to an apartment building just west of Swissvale. It was a squat, ugly, three-story structure, circa mid-1950s, that shared the modest suburban street with small family homes and a mini-mart at the corner. Modest being the operative word with Swissvale.