Loving Time awm-3

by Leslie Glass

  The wind picked up, whipping the fine, stinging snow into Bobbie’s eyes. The storm whirled inside him, too, as he tried to make sense of all the bad things that had happened to him. The dumb old bitch had ruined his life, but God had raised His hand against her and now she was punished. With this analysis made, Bobbie tried to calm down and focus on survival. He told himself that if he could just go back to where he used to be safe, he’d be safe again.

  Habit propelled him to the Centre, where he’d gone year after year, day and night—where the patients liked him and he’d been in control. At night no doctors were anywhere near the north dorm on the sixth floor where he used to work. Behind the glass wall in the nurses’ station sat just one nurse. There were maybe two or three aides for the whole floor. From midnight to seven-thirty or eight all the patients would be heavily medicated and asleep. Nobody would go in there; there he’d be safe.

  As Bobbie moved quickly through the snow, he began to feel better. He had some time. Hours and hours to collect himself, to think. He didn’t have far to go and kept his thoughts on the sixth floor, the community-service area, where he’d worked for so many years. He needed to sit on a chair in the fourteen-bed ward in the north dorm and feel the patients sleeping all around him. They had always liked and responded to him, even the really crazy ones. He’d taken care of them. Now he’d see them again, and they would protect him for a little while, give him the space he had to have to think things over and get himself together. He knew he couldn’t go home again, and couldn’t go back to the basement room where the two cops had found him this morning. He kept thinking of that chair in the middle of the unit, where his silent, crazy family would be sleeping, and no cop or FBI asshole would ever find him.

  Bobbie entered the hospital complex through the loading dock at the morgue. The guard in the tiny office with the windowed door had seen him before and didn’t even bother to wave him through. He traveled the musty corridors two stories under the ground that twisted and turned and sloped downhill into the basement of the Psychiatric Centre.

  No one ever challenged anyone at night There was no security on the graveyard shifts. Still, Bobbie played it safe and dropped into a supply closet to change into hospital whites. As he took his jacket and pants off, he noticed spots of blood on them. He changed, then buried the tainted clothes deep in a garbage can that was still full from the previous day’s waste. He checked his watch and came out of the closet. He felt fully in command of the situation. The halls were empty and silent; so was the elevator that took him up to the sixth floor.

  The sixth floor was the community-service catchment area, the place where anyone could be admitted. People on welfare, homeless, beggars—all those who couldn’t pay for treatment or their stay in the hospital. They were admitted, stabilized with medication over a period of days or weeks. Then they were released. Out on the streets again, they stopped taking their medications and soon spun out of orbit again. Many of them had to be admitted over and over.

  In Community Service they sometimes had people who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t speak a language anybody knew. Once they had some kind of illegal alien. No one knew where he came from or what language he spoke. No one could talk to him, and he didn’t even have a name.

  Bobbie had chosen the last elevator on the bank, the one that wasn’t visible from the nurses’ station. He got off and saw a bent, graying head. He checked his watch. It was just after eleven. The nurse was probably going over the M.D.s’ order book. Eleven-thirty was the latest they gave medication. Most everybody was already juiced by then, but sometimes the doctors left special orders for problem patients. Before the nurse lifted her head, Bobbie ducked and turned left. He streaked past the small elevator hall. Then he straightened up, took another left, and strolled down the long, dim hallway, jubilant at being back where he belonged, safe and sound.

  Bobbie had always liked the unearthly quiet of night on the wards. There were rules here. No TV, no radio after ten P.M. On either side of him, doors were closed on silent double and triple rooms. Everyone had to follow the rules. Bobbie felt ever more confident as he headed down the hall.

  The north dorm was a large circle with no doors at the very end of the long hall. There, too, the lights were low but not off. Bobbie could see everything clearly. He checked his watch again and assessed the situation. Several patients were up, but only one was on his feet. An angry-looking guy paced a five-foot area. He was wearing only pajama bottoms, and even in the dim light, Bobbie could see this one was trouble. The patient had a web of scars on his chest. His eyes burned in what looked like a death’s head; half of one ear was missing.

  That was the only bad one, though. Most of the other patients were in their beds, staring at the ceiling or snoring. Two were playing a silent game of checkers. One guy was reading a nudie magazine, fondling himself under the covers. Bobbie pulled up a chair and sat down facing the pacer. He wanted to keep an eye on him.

  As soon as Bobbie sat down, the guy stopped pacing and bunched up his fists. As if hit by an electrical force, the man in the next bed sat up. Then the one next to him rolled over onto his back and sat up. Bobbie ignored them. The man with the scars started punching at the air in his direction. Bobbie sat in the center of the dorm and watched him. He checked his watch. As he expected, at 11:20 a nurse came in.

  At first she didn’t see Bobbie. She walked over to the patient punching the air. “Seamus, how are you feeling?”

  The man stood still, his eyes on Bobbie. “I’m feeling … tense.”

  “Really? What’s bothering …?” Slowly the nurse turned around. She saw Bobbie and looked confused. “Seamus, excuse me for a minute. I have to find out something.”

  The nurse headed across the ward toward Bobbie, her brows knit in puzzlement. Bobbie ignored her. The two checkers players started chattering in Spanish.

  “I need to pee—” A short bald man got out of bed and started crying.

  “Get back in bed, Alberto.… Excuse me.” The nurse stood in front of Bobbie, a puzzled expression on her broad face.

  Bobbie ignored her.

  “Who are you?” she asked softly.

  Bobbie couldn’t think of a good answer, so he looked the other way as if she wasn’t there.

  “Excuse me, I don’t remember having a need for anybody here tonight.” The puzzlement turned into a frown. “Do you speak English? I need some clarification here.”

  Bobbie didn’t move. He wanted to stay frozen in time until the nosy bitch left. She didn’t seem to get it. He didn’t want to talk to her. He didn’t have anything to say.

  She persisted. “Are you specialing somebody?”

  Without meaning to, Bobbie snorted and spoke. “Yeah, I’m specialing. That’s it.”

  “I got to pee!” Alberto cried.

  “No, you don’t. Get back in bed.” The nurse spoke automatically, her eyes narrowing on Bobbie. “I’m sorry. I don’t know you. Who are you?”

  “I said I’m specialing, so you can beat it.” Bobbie was getting really upset. He’d worked on this floor for almost fifteen years. And this nosy nurse had to humiliate him by demanding to know who he was.

  The nurse flushed at his tone. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “I don’t need this, okay? I don’t want trouble, so just go away.” Bobbie bit off the words.

  “I’m in charge here. I have to know.”

  Bobbie tried to keep the pressure down, tried to think of something to say to make the bitch go away. Seconds passed and then she spoke again.

  “Look, where do you work? Who do you report to?”

  Bobbie made an angry noise. He’d warned her. He didn’t want to have to warn her again. He didn’t answer. Alberto shuffled over to where she was standing and raised his hand to her arm.

  “Alberto, please get back into bed.” The nurse had her hands on her hips now. She didn’t want to be bothered by the senile man. Her face was red and angry. “What’s your schedule?” she dema
nded of Bobbie. “Show me your identification.”

  For the first time in his life, Bobbie didn’t have one. He didn’t have any ID at all, not for any department. The nurse’s insensitive treatment of the senile patient and her humiliation of him joined forces. He lost his concentration.

  “Fuck you.” Bobbie half rose, then slammed his butt down on the chair. None of them needed this shit. Finally he made up his mind and stood up. He was a good eight inches taller than the nurse. “Get out of my face, you hear me, bitch? Get lost.”

  The nurse gasped. “I’m in charge here. You’re in the wrong place. You get lost. Now!”

  That was it. There was no negotiating with this bitch—no way was he leaving. Bobbie raised his arm. In one quick motion, he backhanded the nurse, knocking her down. Alberto just missed getting knocked down with her. The old man backed away from her still form, whimpering. Then he dropped his pajama bottoms and peed on the floor beside her.

  Seamus stopped punching the air. In two catlike leaps he was across the floor, pummeling Bobbie, kicking him, biting whatever he could reach with his teeth, and tearing at his ears.

  seventy-three

  April and Mike stayed in Gunn’s apartment until there was a response to their call for help. It took less than six minutes to secure the area and explain the situation to the uniforms who arrived on the scene.

  Mike phoned the squad room three times to see if Daveys had called in with his location, but there was no message from him. At eleven-ten, there was a call from Andy Mason. Daveys left a message at the station that Bobbie had gone into the Stone Pavilion and disappeared in the basement. So had Daveys.

  Four blue-and-whites were on the street with their lights flashing when Mike and April left Gunn’s building at eleven-twenty-five. The snow had stopped, but the temperature was still dropping.

  Mike checked his watch and sighed. “How many Feebs you figure Daveys has in the hospital by now?”

  April shook her head and tossed him the keys to her car. He took the driver’s seat, turned on the engine and the lights without comment.

  “I don’t think any,” she said to Mike after the heat started to come up.

  “No other Feebs. How do you figure that?”

  April shivered, thinking of Daveys’s interview with Boudreau. “Some of what he said was the usual bullshit. But some of it was personal.” April studied Mike’s profile. “Like what you did was personal with you, know what I mean?”

  Mike pulled away from the curb. “No,” he said curtly.

  “Daveys kept talking about his family with us, remember? His big brother died in ’Nam. His little brother is a cop. He’s a big family man, an all-American racist.”

  “So?”

  “So he hates guys like Boudreau, really hates them. It wasn’t just a line to get the guy to squawk when he said he’d get him. It was personal.”

  April studied the side of Mike’s face. She’d seen his profile a thousand times. His right ear was scarred from the burns he’d received in the fire. She, too, had some scars that would never go away. They were connected by those scars, by the ghosts of the victims whose deaths they’d investigated, by the cases they’d cleared together.

  “It was personal when you lost it, Mike. But afterward it was over. You didn’t want to kill the guy. Daveys wants to kill him, and he can’t have a bunch of buddies with him. I’d guess there won’t be any team. He’ll be alone.”

  Mike sneaked a look at her. “Is this your way of telling me you love me, querida?”

  April stared out the window. “I’m telling you Daveys went alone. We have the advantage here.”

  “Oh, yeah, what’s that?” Mike ran the red light at Riverside, headed south to the hospital.

  “We know where Boudreau went.”

  “No, he wouldn’t go back to that room in the basement. He knows we know about it.”

  “That’s right. So where would he go?”

  “The Medical Center is a big place. He could go anywhere. If he really wanted to get lost in there, we’d need an army to find him.”

  “Uh-uh. Think about it. Guy worked in the Psychiatric Centre for a lot of years. He’d go there.”

  “Thanks, querida, that’s a big help.” Mike passed the Stone Pavilion. The Centre was on the next block.

  “Oh, come on, amigo, you’ve been staring at his file all day. What did it tell you?”

  “It said they tried to move him to another unit several times because of his hostility to the community-service patients … but he——refused to——leave——the——sixth——floor.”

  Mike braked in the white lines outside the door of the twenty-story building. The car skidded sideways on a patch of ice, then stopped. They jumped out into the freezing night and headed for the revolving front door. It was locked. They went in through the wheelchair-access side door, their shields already out for the guard. But no one was around to challenge them, so they traded glances and headed for the elevators. It was eleven-forty-five.

  seventy-four

  At eleven-forty-five, Ellen McCoo, the beefy middle-aged nurse who had discovered Bobbie on her floor and been knocked unconscious after confronting him, groaned and tried to open her eyes. Ellen had crumpled in the middle of the ward, oblivious to the chaos made by all fourteen patients of Six North, out of their beds and deeply into their own crazy behaviors.

  Joe Penuch, a thirty-year-old delusional-aristocrat street beggar, gestured wildly, muttering curses as he approached and retreated from the melee. Roberto, a forty-five-year-old Puerto Rican who had been lobotomized because he had the compulsive habit of ripping and tearing gaping wounds in his body, and Cesar Garcia, a young man who had tried to commit suicide many times, most recently by cutting his wrists and injecting air into his liver, chased each other around a bed, arguing violently in Spanish.

  Peter Austin, a friendly twenty-five-year-old disordered artist who drew happy landscapes in oils but couldn’t make sense when he spoke, wept as he saw Seamus tear some of Bobbie’s hair out, then copied Seamus by ripping out some of his own.

  Terry, a short, fat man of indeterminate age and origin, who had recently amputated three of his fingers, was beating on the back of the Haitian known as Herbert, an HIV-positive patient who had raped his wife and then tried to hang himself after she became HIV-positive, too.

  And Seamus had started it all. He’d seen Bobbie backhand the nurse who took care of him, saw her fall, and let loose with everything he had. And Seamus had a lot to let go. He was born with the XYY chromosomal abnormality associated with the most violent of criminals, was a hyperaggressive alcoholic and heroin addict. He’d become the object of extremely detailed Psychiatric Centre and police negotiations after his last release, when he’d slashed his boss’s throat with a knife while working in a vocational-rehab halfway house. Readmitted to the hospital instead of going to jail, he was presently contained with massive doses of Thorazine and Haldol.

  When the throbbing began to ease a little and Ellen registered what was going on, she feebly tried to call for help. No one came. She struggled to a sitting position and was horrified to see Seamus try to bite off one of Bobbie’s ears.

  “Stop that!” she screamed. But she might as well have asked a tornado to calm down and stop twisting.

  The interloper in Seamus’s territory had attacked someone he knew. Seamus was going after the intruder with the force of a natural disaster—punching, kicking, tearing at Bobbie’s nose and hair and ears, growling, spattering blood.

  He had sent the other patients into a frenzy. They had become a troubled school offish, vicious and hungry. Seamus himself seemed unaffected by the one milligram of Haldol he was on orders to take every hour in the evening until he was out cold. His opponent was bigger and heavier, but Seamus had the advantage of a chemical imbalance in his makeup that—in spite of all efforts—was not adequately tranquilized. He was all violence and no restraint. Bobbie fought just as hard and began to gain momentum as his own anger mounted. W
ith the little finger of his right hand sticking straight out of his hand sideways and blood all over his face, Seamus abruptly backed off.

  Bobbie shook himself like a wet dog, thinking it was all over. A cut on his forehead had filled his eyes with blood. He’d been fighting blind. Blood also spurted from his already-swollen broken nose. He wiped the blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand. For a second he saw his opponent’s eyes burn as Seamus retreated. Bobbie turned away, figuring he’d won.

  Then suddenly Seamus circled and leaped on him from behind. He wrapped his legs around Bobbie’s waist and his arms around Bobbie’s neck. Bobbie made a choking noise as the crazy man crooked his arm, trying to bend Bobbie’s head back and snap his thick neck. Not a chance of that. Bobbie swung around, then bent forward, throwing Seamus to the floor with a loud crack. Then he picked up the chair he’d been sitting on.

  Ellen dragged herself to her feet. “Hey, stop that.… That’s enough.… ” She pulled at the chair in Bobbie’s hands. “Stop … it.”

  Bobbie swung at her. Ellen McCoo was a heavy woman, but tough, and now very angry. She ducked, screaming for help. This time her voice carried and two nurse’s aides rushed in. A third went to the phone to call for help. Doors started opening up and down the hall.

  The whole ward was fighting when Special Agent Daveys ran into the brawl with his snub-nosed pistol held out in both hands.

  “FBI,” he croaked, then found his voice. “FBI! Freeze!”

  No one froze. At the sight of the gun, the screaming in Spanish and English, the curses and imprecations, the wild gesticulations only got louder and wilder. The school of fish had been frenzied; now it was terrified. Daveys pointed his gun at Bobbie, who still held the chair over his head in his hands. From the hall came sounds of people screaming and wailing.