The Killing Harvest

by Don Donaldson

  Hearing the urgency in Lee-Ann’s approach, Greta Dunn turned and looked up. Without hesitating, Lee-Ann brought the ice pick down in a looping overhand stroke, burying the pick to the handle in the top of Greta Dunn’s head.

  Eyes wide with surprise, her mouth open, Dunn stared into Lee-Ann’s face.

  Fearing that the pick might not have done enough damage, Lee-Ann rocked the handle from side to side, horribly scrambling Greta Dunn’s brain. She then raised her foot and kicked the woman down the stairs.

  When the body came to rest at the door to the next level, Lee-Ann could tell from the odd angle of the head that Greta Dunn’s neck was broken.

  Lee-Ann’s training told her to make sure, to check for a pulse. But she’d already pressed her luck too far. Afraid that at any moment someone might find them, she fled.

  Later, driving home through the rain, Lee-Ann felt so close to Latham. Even though he didn’t know it, they now shared something very special. The only blemish on the moment was that she’d had to carry a straw bag out of season.

  2

  JACKIE TELLICO PULLED into the Immaculate Heart Academy parking lot in midtown Memphis and found a slot providing a good view of the playground as well as Alicia’s car a half block away.

  Tellico was the name on Jackie’s birth certificate, but he had fifty other names, each with a driver’s license, credit cards, and passport. Fifty names and fifty faces. Whenever he worked this operation, he was Jake Drum. For some jobs, it was best to look gentle and good-natured. In others, you had to let people know you wouldn’t take any shit. For Jake Drum, he’d chosen a lean face with high cheekbones, a combination of Jack Palance and Danny Lucchesi, the guy who’d turned stoolie on John Masserano. It was better not to look too much like Lucchesi, or he might get whacked by mistake. He removed the last apple from the plastic sack on the seat next to him, took a bite, and waited for events to unfold.

  In the car down the street, Alicia looked at the clock on the dash. “They should be out in about ten minutes,” she said to the child sitting beside her.

  “I told you we’d make it,” the boy said, shrugging out of his jacket.

  The woman looked at him pointedly. “And God knows, you’re never wrong.” She reached back between the seats for her bag and opened it in her lap. She removed a small plastic case from the bag, flipped down the visor mirror, and slipped a pair of contact lenses from the little case into her eyes, changing their color from green to brown. Eye color was something most people never noticed, but it was better to be extra careful. At least that was Jake Drum’s opinion. She then added a mouth appliance that much more drastically changed her appearance, another trick she’d learned from Drum.

  While Alicia was doing all this, the boy put his jacket in his lap, pushed his left sleeve up as high as he could, and folded the cuff under. Satisfied that the sleeve wouldn’t slip, he opened the glove compartment and removed a small Styrofoam box. Inside the box, nestled in formed depressions that held them snugly, were a rubber-stoppered bottle filled with a clear liquid and two clear plastic boxes, one containing a half dozen disposable 1-cc syringes, the other, the same number of 27 gauge needles.

  The boy opened the box with the syringes, removed one, and stripped off its paper wrapping. He did the same with a needle and fitted it to the syringe. He then drew six tenths of a cc of liquid from the bottle and looked at the woman, who always found this part so distasteful she couldn’t do it herself.

  “Well, come on,” the boy chided.

  She had already unbuttoned her coat. Now, reluctantly, she pulled up her dress, revealing a smooth shapely leg that parched the boy’s mouth to look at it. The dress went higher . . . to her thigh. And it was almost more than he could bear.

  She looked straight ahead, out the windshield. “All right. Just do it.”

  It was more than he could take. He put the syringe carefully on the open glove compartment door, leaned over, and thrust his hand along her thigh under her dress. He’d barely felt her panties when her fingers bear-trapped his arm. She yanked his hand from under her dress.

  “You little fuck,” she said, her eyes ripping him. “You want to lose that hand, just keep it up.”

  “You think because I’m small I couldn’t satisfy you?”

  “You want to satisfy me, do your job. Otherwise, stay the hell away from me.”

  “You’re a narrow-minded bitch, you know that?”

  “We’re running out of time, pissant.”

  Victor, the midget dressed as a child, picked up the filled syringe, leaned over, and plunged the needle into Alicia’s thigh. As he emptied the contents into her, he emitted an orgasmic sigh.

  “Pig,” she said, looking out the windshield.

  Victor returned the syringe to the Styrofoam box and assembled another, which he used to inject himself with two-tenths of a cc, a smaller dose due to his smaller size.

  They arranged their clothing and waited for the drug to find its way into their blood.

  “They’re out,” Alicia said a few minutes later, looking through the windshield.

  “Not yet,” Victor replied, as if she didn’t know the drill.

  When it was time, Victor reached into the glove compartment for the water pistol safely contained in two zip-top plastic bags, and they got out of the car. Victor slipped the bags into his jacket, and they walked toward the playground where twenty children from the Immaculate Heart kindergarten were making use of the brightly colored outdoor equipment.

  Seeing his team move into position, Jackie sat straighter in his seat. There hadn’t been a slip-up in months. But that didn’t mean it couldn’t happen.

  A few moments later, Alicia and Victor entered the playground. Alicia headed for the playground supervisor. Victor wandered toward the children, looking for the boy they’d seen a few hours earlier leaving home with his mother, a woman so beautiful she’d made Victor’s heart ache.

  As Alicia walked toward the children’s supervisor, she noted that the woman didn’t look particularly intelligent. “Good morning. My son and I are new to the neighborhood, and I was wondering if your kindergarten has any openings?”

  The supervisor leaned to her left and looked at Victor. “Isn’t he too old for kindergarten?”

  “He’ll be five in March,” Alicia said, sliding a step sideways so she blocked the other woman’s view.

  “I don’t handle admissions,” the supervisor said. “You’ll have to talk to Mrs. Wilson. She’s probably in her office. It’s . . .”

  Victor spotted the boy over by the slide and walked toward him, his hand reaching into his jacket for the water pistol. “Hey, Drew, want to play?”

  The target turned, wearing a curious expression.

  Victor pulled out the pistol and pumped the trigger, aiming for the boy’s eyes. The incubation medium from the gun drenched Drew’s face, and he took a surprised breath. Then he began to howl.

  Alicia and the supervisor hurried over.

  “Shame on you,” Alicia said, smacking Victor a couple of times on the rear. “You go onto the sidewalk and wait for me.”

  Keeping his face turned from the supervisor, Victor left the playground. Alicia remained behind and apologized profusely while the supervisor dried Drew’s face with a tissue.

  “I am so embarrassed. I couldn’t blame the school at all if they wouldn’t even talk to us about my son coming here. Please, don’t think he’s always this badly behaved. Under the circumstances, I just can’t face Mrs. Wilson now. I’ll come back another time. I’m so sorry.”

  From the parking lot, Jackie saw his team come out onto the sidewalk. Because he was too far away to see exactly what had taken place on the playground, he watched Alicia anxiously for the sign. She brushed an imaginary piece of lint from her shoulder.

  Jackie relaxed.

  Th
e pair walked to their car and got in. A few minutes after they pulled out of their spot, Jackie left the parking lot and drove to the quiet, tree-lined street a quarter mile away where they were waiting. He pulled in behind them, and they got out and walked to his car. Knowing that Victor hated the rear seat and not wanting to argue about it, Alicia got in the back without comment.

  Jackie took two envelopes from his jacket pocket and gave one to each member of his team. “We work again a week from today.”

  Alicia put her envelope in her purse without looking inside.

  Victor opened his and pawed through the contents. He counted his money and looked at the destination on his plane ticket. “Why the hell didn’t we do this one while we were in Albany?”

  “That’s none of your business,” Jackie said.

  Victor clenched his jaw. “I’m really gettin’ tired of you talkin’ to me like that.”

  Jackie glanced up and down the street. Satisfied that no one was watching, he slipped his left hand into the molded pocket in his door and grabbed the plastic sack that had held his apples. Moving with animal quickness, he pulled the sack over Victor’s head. Before Victor could react, Jackie yanked him across the seat and turned him so he was facing the passenger door. In that position, it was easy to reach across Victor’s chest and grab his right arm, a move that also pinned his left. With his free hand, Jackie wrapped the mouth of the sack around Victor’s neck.

  Behind them, Alicia leaned forward to object, then, thinking better of it, sat back and kept her mouth shut.

  Victor kicked and squirmed in Jackie’s grip like a hooked trout. Jackie was a good judge of these things and could soon tell by the diminishing strength of the midget’s movements that his brain was close to shutting down. He held on for a few seconds more, then, at the very last moment, pulled the bag off Victor’s head and pushed him back in his seat.

  Victor reclaimed his life without dignity, gasping and sucking air so obnoxiously that Jackie felt like slapping him. When the blood had risen in his death pallor, and Jackie was sure he could hear, Jackie said, “Tell me what that was about.”

  “My big mouth,” Victor replied, his voice strained.

  “Exactly.”

  Jackie had two rules about murder: Never kill anyone in front of a witness, and never kill someone you still need. Victor had gotten his reprieve on both counts.

  “I believe we’re through here,” Jackie said. “I’ll see you in a week.”

  Alicia and Victor got out and went back to their car. When they were gone, Jackie drove to the target child’s house where, seeing a woman letting her black Scottish terrier sniff the home’s shrubbery, he kept going.

  Returning a few minutes later and finding the area deserted, he pulled to the curb, got out, and went up the walk. He stepped onto the porch, added a stamped manila envelope to the other mail the postman had left at the house, and went back to the car.

  3

  THE HOSPITAL . . . IT seemed there had always been the hospital. She could remember little of her life before she’d passed through its doors. Even her first two years of medical school, the basic sciences, seemed a blur. The hospital had become her father, mother, lover . . . and master.

  As she took the elevator to the neuro ward, Sarchi Seminoux shook her head at this melodramatic train of thought. Jesus, if she was in this state of mind only twelve hours into her thirty-six hour shift, what lay ahead?

  The problem was actually Gilbert Klyce, the one patient on her service she dreaded dealing with. When she had checked on the boy a few hours before, he had been doing fine, or at least his pneumonia seemed well on the run. Beyond that, Gilbert would never be fine because his brain had been largely destroyed by what was presumed to be viral encephalitis four years ago. Now, as long as he lived, he would be in a vegetative state. The best doctor in the world could do nothing for him but send him back to the Brunswick Developmental Center with clear lungs, still blind, still deaf, still out of touch with the world. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right, and it hurt to have that thrust in her face.

  When she arrived at Gilbert’s bedside a minute later, the nurse who’d paged her, a large, raw-boned woman with small, gentle hands, was waiting. So was Gilbert, his little body permanently contracted into a fetal position, his perpetual smile belying his terrible condition. At times, Sarchi almost believed the smile meant that Gilbert lived in a state of continuous, if misguided, bliss. But then her training would always ruin the illusion, reminding her that it was only some sort of brainstem reflex.

  Sarchi’s eyes left Gilbert and looked at the nurse. “What have we got?”

  “His oxygen alarm went off a few minutes ago, and I had to increase the mix to thirty-five percent. He’s also running a hundred and two temperature.”

  Sarchi bent over Gilbert and put her stethoscope to his chest. At the bases of both lungs, where the pneumonia had settled, she heard sounds like crunching snow, so-called crackles and rales, noises not found in normal lungs. But Gilbert’s abnormal sounds were slight and no different from those of the day before, when he had no fever. He was also still on the antibiotics that had beaten back his pneumonia, so those bugs were out of the picture.

  “It’s criminal if you ask me,” a voice said from the doorway.

  Sarchi turned and saw one of the other floor nurses. “What’s criminal?”

  “The resources being squandered on him. What’s the point? He doesn’t know where he is, or who he is, and never will. And who’s paying for his care? We are. Money I could use for my own kids is being taken from me and given to him. It’s absurd.”

  Sarchi’s anger flared at this reminder that her best efforts would have no impact on Gilbert’s quality of life. “How about getting out of here and letting us do our jobs,” she snapped.

  “Well, pardon me for having an opinion,” the nurse said, leaving them.

  Sarchi removed the oxygen tube from the tracheostomy they’d installed when pharyngitis had closed Gilbert’s throat, and she directed the beam from her penlight into his trachea. “I don’t like the looks of his tracheal secretions. Would you send a sample down to the lab for a culture?”

  “I’ll get right on it,” the nurse replied.

  “And let me know if anything changes.”

  Sarchi stopped by the nursing station and jotted a few notes in Gilbert’s chart. She turned the dial on the spine to red—indicating she’d entered lab orders—and was just putting the chart back in the rack when her pager went off. The number displayed indicated a call from outside the hospital. She picked up the phone behind her and discovered it was Marge Harrison.

  “Sarchi, it’s Drew,” Marge said, her voice filled with dread. “He’s on his way there in an ambulance.”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t know. It was weird. One minute he was fine and the next . . . Sarchi, I’m so scared. Can you meet me in the emergency room and make sure he gets seen right away?”

  “Of course. I’ll go down there now.”

  Before she could quiz Marge any further on what had taken place, Marge said, “I’ll be there in a few minutes myself,” and hung up.

  Sarchi hurried to the elevator, praying that Drew’s situation merely appeared serious. Riding down to the ER, a telephone call she’d never forget came flooding back.

  “It’s for you.”

  Sarchi looked up from her pathophysiology notes. “Who is it?”

  “Your father.”

  Sarchi threw her notes on the sofa and went to the phone. “Dad? Is anything wrong?”

  He didn’t answer. “Dad?” Sarchi’s heart fluttered. Something was terribly wrong. She could feel it. “Dad, is it Carolyn?”

  He began to sob, and she knew her older sister was dead. “Dad, tell me what happened.”

  Sobbing and choking, he put it into words.
“Carolyn and Bill . . . they’re gone . . . car accident . . .”

  Sarchi’s tidy academic world was ripped to pieces. Tears flowing, she choked out another question. “Was Drew in the car?”

  “He was with a neighbor.”

  Now Sarchi was the senior resident on call. That also made her the hospital’s admitting physician, so Marge’s request that she watch out for Drew had actually not been necessary as she would have been notified of his arrival by the ER as a matter of procedure.

  There was no discernible rhythm to patient traffic in the ER. Sometimes, in an entire night only a handful of kids would come in. Other nights, when the moon or something else was out of kilter, the place would be a madhouse, and they’d have to open another ward to house all of the patients. So far tonight, it had been quiet . . . a six-year-old asthmatic around five o’clock and an hour later, an eleven-year-old diabetic whose blood sugar was off the meter. So as Sarchi walked up to the ER nurses’ station, Bernie Kornberg, the physician in charge, was sitting down, hands folded behind his head, talking to a nurse about University of Memphis football.

  “Five games, four losses—three of those by just three points each. They’ve got talent, they just don’t know how to win. I may have to go out there and take over.”

  In the chair opposite him, the nurse was making no effort to hide her lack of interest. Seeing Sarchi and recognizing escape when she saw it, her eyes brightened. “Doctor Seminoux, we’re always glad to see you, but at the moment, we don’t have any patients.”

  “You will any minute,” Sarchi said.

  “A psychic pediatric resident,” Kornberg said, amused. “Do you have a hot line?”

  They heard the distant sound of an ambulance.

  “That’s probably him now,” Sarchi said.

  In short order, an ambulance pulled up outside.

  “Oh, I get it,” Kornberg said, standing. “Somebody called you. Too bad. I could use some advice on my investments.”