I’m so tired and so weak, and so much blood is gone.
Who is that? A monster in the glass. I’m hallucinating. I need to find something, anything to break the window with. There has to be a phone inside. Over there. Rocks. I get one and throw it.
It shatters the glass and my own grotesque reflection.
Everything goes black again.
NONONONONO. WAKE UP. Wake up. You can’t lie here and die. Get in there and find a phone. I prop myself up on my forearms. Now. Pull yourself through the door. I crawl inside. Ignore the glass in your leg wound. Find the phone. My fingers close around it. Call 911.
“Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
“I’m dead. I’m dead. Police. Police.”
“Ma’am, are you all right?”
“No, I’m dead. Police. He’s coming.”
“Ma’am, please stay on the line.”
“Please help me. He’s coming. Get him.”
“Ma’am, are you with me?”
Get him. Raymond Gibson. Please. Please.
“Ma’am, stay with me.”
No, I can’t. I can’t.
ALL THAT STUFF PEOPLE say about their lives flashing before them isn’t true. There is no return of those indelible moments I thought I would always remember, the ones I hoped would play like old super-eight movies in my brain. Me with my brother and sister when I was little, running along the lakeshore, happy. Me having a barbecue with my friends at a Fourth of July party. Playing my first gig. My professional triumphs. Personal ones. Falling in love for the first time, the second, the last. There is no final glow as I take my last breath, no warm white light, no omnipotent God waiting there for me. There is no swirl of rainbows. There is no one there to record my last words, my profession of undying love for someone who couldn’t make it to my end. There are no dead loved ones there on a warm sandy beach, extending their arms as I run toward them, telling me that everything is okay now. There is no total comprehension of the answers to all of my existential questions.
There is only me, breathing one minute and not the next.
My heart beats until it stops.
It just goes black, and that’s the end.
AND THEN, WHAT A CLICHÉ: voices. Men talk. A woman hovers over me with a penlight, saying something about a pulse, a weak pulse.
My pulse? She rolls me over, and the pain reminds me: Yes, I’m alive. Alive. Not dead yet. Breathing, heart beating, a weak pulse.
Someone puts a plastic mask over my face. A voice tells me to breathe, that it’s oxygen, that I’ll be okay now, help is here. They cover me with a blanket. “Get her on the board,” someone says, and someone else stabilizes my neck with a hard plastic brace.
I blink and try to talk.
“Don’t talk,” someone says. “Don’t try to talk. Just breathe.”
But I have to tell them. Ray Gibson. Get him, please.
“Pupils responsive,” the woman says.
“We got him,” a man says. He wears a black shirt and a gold star—a sheriff’s uniform.
Right. I’m out here in Geauga County, in the middle of nowhere.
“He’s in custody,” the man says. “We apprehended him as he approached this location. You called just in time, and good job. You got out. I think he would have killed you.”
“It’s Gibson. Ray Gibson. Gibson.” I struggle with the mask. He can’t hear me through it.
He holds the mask in place. “Shhh, you’ll be okay.”
“It’s Gibson. Tell Fishner.”
“Don’t talk, just breathe. You’re going to the hospital.”
“I’m a cop. CPD.”
“Don’t talk.”
“Do a rape kit,” I whisper.
“Shhh, just breathe.”
I black out again in the ambulance. I’m pretty sure they have to shock me back to life once, maybe twice, maybe more. At some point, I hear a siren coming from above me.
Please, just let me die.
Please, don’t let me die.
CHAPTER 30
The verdict at the hospital is that I have a punctured lung, along with lacerations to my left leg, chest, wrists, face, and scalp. Major blood loss, contusions of various sizes and shapes, burns from the Taser, and a bruised kidney. Seven broken ribs, two broken fingers, a sprained wrist, and a severe concussion. I’m lucky that my major organs are intact and lucky not to have shattered vertebrae, not to be in a wheelchair.
Lucky.
I have minor surgery on the leg because they have to sew the muscle as well as the skin. The smashed bones in my left middle and ring fingers, they pinned and screwed and tethered with some kind of overly complicated splint to the good fingers on either side. I guess they couldn’t wait for me to wake up, or I might have lost the fingers. Screws stick out. I can’t really look at them, even though they’re in a splint practically right under my face.
For the rest, there wasn’t a lot they could do. They gave me blood, I guess. They cleaned me up, bandaged everything, pumped me full of IV fluids and antibiotics. They taped my ribs and sewed me closed with a lot of stitches. They reinflated the lung, which did its thing afterward without incident.
Lucky.
I’m not dead. I’ll survive. If this is the worst thing that ever happens to me...
The doctor is holding up an X-ray and explaining all of this to me, but I’m in and out. I don’t know what the hell she’s talking about, and I wince in pain when I try to sit up straighter.
“Get me off of these painkillers,” I think I say. I can’t think straight. I look around, but only the doctor and a nurse are there.
I ask her if I’ll ever play guitar again.
She says I’ll have to talk to the hand surgeon.
I ask her if I was assaulted.
She looks at me like I’m insane, and for the first time, I notice how young she looks. Obviously. I was obviously assaulted. “You were beaten very, very badly.” She sounds as if she’s talking to a child.
“That’s not what I mean,” I say. “I need to get out of this bed. Is everyone else okay? I have to pee.”
“I’ll call the nurse to remove the catheter,” she replies. “But you need to be careful. That—”
“No, I want to hear it. Before anything else.” I steel myself, bracing for the worst thing I can imagine. “Is anyone else hurt? Did he rape me?”
I fill in the silent space with horrible, horrible thoughts.
“No,” she says after too many seconds go by. “No, he didn’t sexually assault you. And as far as I know, no one else was involved.”
That magic word. No. I never really liked it before, but now it sounds like hallelujah.
I try to get out of bed. She tells me to stop, to be careful with my leg, and to watch that IV and the catheter. She says the lung is going to take some time to heal, and until I have PT, I need to use that cane, and be careful with the hand, and this and that and the other thing. I keep trying to get out of bed, but then it’s too hard and I fall back, defeated, feeling small and impotent against the pillows.
I start to feel woozy and strange. I need to eat something. I need to get off these painkillers.
Goran appears in the doorway, looking like he’s been crying.
That can’t be real.
“Liz, holy shit.” He approaches the side of my bed.
“Are you real?”
He squeezes his eyes shut and gently takes my good hand. “When you’re back from this, I am going to kick your ass into next week for not telling me what was going on.”
I manage a chuckle. “What happened?”
He knows what I mean. “We think Gibson, Mattioli, and Maxwell were all working together. We’re trying to figure out motive, but method and opportunity are clear as day. It’s too soon to tell for sure, but we’re holding both of those shitbags and working it as hard as we can. The FBI is involved now because of what happened to you.”
“We did it.” My eyelids are just so heavy.
“Liz
, I—”
But then I’m asleep again.
After he’s gone—was Goran really here?—a nurse clad in hot-pink scrubs brings me some weird yellow soup, red Jell-O, and a big jug of water. I devour the tasteless soup and the Jell-O, chug the water, and fall asleep again after muttering that I want to go home.
IT’S STILL DARK, AND I can’t tell how much time has passed. I need to call someone to pick me up. I feel all right now, other than the throbbing. Let’s get these tubes out of me so that I can walk around. I can’t lie here forever. I press the button on the side of my bed to call the nurse, but the shadow that appears in the doorway isn’t a nurse.
“You’re awake,” Fishner says. She smiles, but I can tell I don’t look good. That thing that pulls at the corners of her eyes as she crosses the room—that’s concern.
She comes closer, drags the chair over, and sits next to me.
“Hey, boss,” I say. “I didn’t die.”
She chuckles, but it’s for me, not her. “No, you didn’t. And you did a great job, Boyle. Really great job. We got them. We got Mattioli, Gibson. You did it. Incredible work.”
“I want to go home. Someone needs to feed my cat.”
When I look at her, I see tears on her cheeks.
“Hey, don’t do that,” I say. “I didn’t die. Was Tom here, or did I dream that? Was I—”
“Goran was here for two days. And technically, you did die,” she says.
Oh, right. The ambulance.
“You died twice.”
The gas station and the ambulance? I can’t remember. Everything is so addled in my throbbing, swollen, sunburned brain. I reach for my water, and Fishner hands it to me then helps me get the straw between my lips.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Heights received a nine-one-one from one of your neighbors. She called when she saw him shove you into a van. It was too late. You—”
“Ah, shit. Right, he smashed my phone. I lost all my pictures. Maybe they can recover them from the cloud.” The weird things we say, the things we think right after we die twice. I lick my lips and taste metal, but I can’t tell if it’s blood.
Neither of us talks for a couple of minutes. I want to know what happened. Maybe I’ll remember eventually. The black baton.
“Were they working together?” I ask. “Gibson and Mattioli?”
“Sims got some tech evidence suggesting that Gibson was communicating with Grimes and Householder,” she replies. “It’s unclear whether Gibson was involved with the Heather Martin murder, but we’re tracing the connections. So far, we don’t see a direct connection to Maxwell, other than Mattioli, which is circumstantial at best. Gibson said a few things when we recovered him from Geauga County about avenging Grimes and maybe himself, given Mattioli’s book. He came after you because of Grimes.” She runs a hand across her head. “It’s twisted.”
“Yeah, he and Mattioli seemed to hate each other.”
“They still could have been working together—and we’ll find out if they were. But Gibson gave us a bunch on Mattioli’s misbehavior years ago. The FBI is taking over and opening a full investigation.” She laughs sadly. “Carrothers hasn’t come out of his office for two days.”
I nod, but it hurts. “Let the feds have it. Get it the fuck away from us.” I swallow, and it’s too dry. “Holy fuck. But why? Why go to all these extremes?” Why beat me within an inch of my life? I close my eyes and drift off for a minute but snap back pretty quickly, all things considered. “How long have I been here?”
“Four days,” she replies.
I let that sink in for a minute.
“Did they recover my gun, my shield? Where are we now? What day is it?” A wave of panic overtakes me. My gun—he pistol-whipped me with it. I remember that now. Maybe I’m dead, and this is some kind of, I don’t know, some kind of death thing. Or maybe I’m still hallucinating and no one has been here and I’m in the dark woods, alone. Why don’t I know? I start to get up, but my lieutenant holds me back with a firm but gentle hand against my good shoulder. That basement. Gibson laughing as he brought the gun and the baton down on me, again and again, saying something about not wanting to break my pretty face. Fuck this. Fuck him.
I have to get out of here.
“Liz, stop. The nurse will come in and unhook some of this, okay? Your friend Josh will be here to take you home tomorrow, assuming the doctor clears you. He was here yesterday with your other friends and family. He says you’re in good hands.”
I sit back and breathe. My ribs ache like hell, and I try not to wince. “What other friends and family?”
“Cora Bosch brought you some pajamas,” she says. “Your mom and brother were here too. And Gillian Swift wants you to call her when you’re able.”
Everything hurts. Friends and family. I only remember Goran. “Gun and shield?”
“Yes. In evidence right now but recovered. You—”
A different nurse comes in and asks Fishner to give us a few minutes.
Once he’s taken out all of the tubes and needles, he shows me how to use my cane, which is hard because my shattered hand and mangled leg are on the same side, so I have to use my right hand to help my left leg. He guides me to the bathroom and instructs me to pee while he waits outside. I do as I’m told, and no, there’s no blood in it anymore, so thanks, now please leave me alone. Then he helps me out of my sling and tells me not to get my left hand wet. He hands me a toothbrush, toothpaste, a bar of soap, a washcloth, a towel, and the T-shirt and pajama pants that Cora brought for me. I set them on a shelf next to the sink.
I hesitate in front of the mirror. I wash my face and my right hand, the one that’s not in the splint, without looking. I dry everything without looking. I brush my teeth twice, without looking. But then I can’t help it.
Oh. Okay, then. Wow.
The theme is swollen and vivid violet. My face is ghoulish—the left side is purple all the way from the eyebrow to below my cheekbone, where it fades to yellow, which stretches to my jaw. I have a vertical cut through my eyebrow with what looks like five or six stitches holding it closed. My lips are dry and cracked and swollen. There are bruises on my neck from the choke hold.
The fingers on my good hand search through my hair. I feel three staples in the back along with a big knot and a thick scab. My body is doing what it can to heal itself.
Bruises line my arms. My wrists are bandaged. When I remove the pathetic hospital gown, I gasp. My entire torso is purple and red, angry and mottled, and bisected by a bright-white bandage that I peel off to reveal the long gash between my breasts. It’s not stitched—it looks like they glued it. Maybe the scar won’t be too bad.
Another bandage covers the hole where the chest tube was. There’s bright-white tape on my ribs and a cut on my hip that I hadn’t noticed, with three stitches there. My left leg, save for the white gauze covering the pulsing wound—I don’t mess with that bandage, not yet—is purple and red to the knee. I turn around and strain my neck to look at my back, where there’s more of the same. Horizontal bruises cross my spine, where he must have beaten me with the black baton that broke me.
Lucky.
I wash my face, bend over the sink, and run water through my hair until it’s clear. I bathe my battered body as best I can, trying to erase the stink of my own blood and tears and fear, trying to remove the rusty, musky stench of it all. I’d pay a million dollars for a shower, but I’m not allowed to do that right now. So I just do my best with the sink then dry myself off. I wash my face again, just because, then gingerly don the soft, clean-smelling clothes, feeling grateful for them and for Cora.
I limp out of the bathroom and back to my boss, who’s still all teary-eyed and serious-looking next to my hospital bed. The nurse is gone.
“Hey, I’m okay,” I say. “I’ll be okay. What’s the status?”
She looks up at me and tries to smile. “Boyle, don’t worry about it anymore. It’s done. Goran just texted to tell me he fed your cat. He
hates that he’s not here right now.”
I ease myself into bed. But he was here. He was here for two days.
The nurse comes in with three gigantic pills in a paper cup. “You have to take these,” he says.
No BS, that one. I perch on the edge of the bed and take them all at once with the rest of the water.
“I’ll bring you more water,” he says. “You need to drink all of it.” He casts a glance at Fishner. “Make her drink all of it.”
“Shit. Fine, I’ll drink it all,” I mutter.
“Boyle, I can’t tell you enough. What you did. I knew they were bad guys. I knew it back when they were playing those games in the nineties. I knew Gibson had lost his shit—if I’d known you were going to talk to him, I would have stopped you... I was just a dumb little rookie who thought she meant a lot more than she did.” She rubs the side of her neck, searching my face. “There was nothing anybody could do about it then, anyway. And I almost wanted to stop you. But there’s no stopping you, I guess.”
“Which one hurt you?” I ask.
She grimaces.
“But they did. They hurt you,” I say. “Gibson and Mattioli and Grimes and their boys. They were the guys. The ones that did that shit to women cops. Was it Gibson?” I don’t ask whether Carrothers was involved. I’ll find out eventually.
She looks down at her lap and nods. “Forgive me for this, but I’m glad he beat you instead of raping you,” she whispers. “I regret with every fiber of my being that I didn’t report them twenty years ago. None of this would have happened.”
I regret it, too, but I don’t say it. I blink several times.
“But he’s going to prison now,” she says, sitting up a little in her chair. “For what he did to you. We’re going to look at him for Anna Mattioli, too, and my guess is that the FBI will uncover that Gibson was solidly involved in Heather Martin’s homicide.”
“But not for what they did to you. No one is going away for that.”
“It doesn’t matter now.” We both know she’s lying.
The Heights Page 33