SURVIVORS (crime thriller books)

by T. J. Brearton

  Heilshorn pushed past the girl. She stood still, staring into Brendan’s eyes, panic-stricken. Brendan felt a surge of guilt that he had dragged her here – that he had pulled her into the middle of all of this.

  Heilshorn stepped in front of him. He was shorter, so he looked up at Brendan.

  Brendan had never been more aware of who – or what – he was. This man with his dead children, Rebecca and Kevin Heilshorn. This man who had once confided in Brendan how he felt God’s presence in his life though he was a man of science. This man who had a young girl – five years old – at home, his granddaughter, Leah, Rebecca’s little girl, who Heilshorn himself had delivered.

  Heilshorn had managed to hide in plain sight, and then his daughter – maybe even in an unconscious act of rebellion – had gone and jeopardized the whole thing. Because when you thought about it, this whole thing had begun with that poor dead girl in the farmhouse outside Remsen. If it hadn’t been for her – or for her brother, Kevin – he wouldn’t be here right now, would he? And who knew; Argon might even still be alive.

  But Argon was dead, and this man was to blame.

  Brendan’s wife and child were dead – and, if he were to be believed – Heilshorn was to blame for that, too.

  Heilshorn looked at the bodyguard. He jerked his head towards the office. Once inside Heilshorn’s den they would kill him. The bodyguard would break his neck, Brendan had no doubt.

  He felt pinpricks of sweat form on his forehead and temples. His fingers were growing numb as the blood was cut off to his pinioned arm. The bits of confetti turned to a snow-storm of the stuff, chrome and silver twinkling, swarming everything in his vision as he began to lose consciousness.

  Then Heilshorn turned and took the girl by the shoulder, trying to push her back inside.

  But Sloane, who had been standing there in a kind of shock, immobile, expressionless, regained some life.

  She slapped Heilshorn’s hand away and jumped away from him.

  Unable to turn his head, Brendan tracked her with his eyes as Sloane ran down the hallway and toward the elevator.

  “Goddammit,” said Heilshorn. He started after her, but he was slow.

  Sloane saw him coming. She gave up on the elevator and headed towards the stairwell door, past the doctor and woman still crouched on the floor. The woman had her arms wrapped over her head, but the doctor was stealing furtive looks at what was going on. Heilshorn stiffly pursued Sloane.

  The phone rang in Heilshorn’s office.

  Brendan heard the first ring clearly, but the second ring seemed different, as if someone had submerged the phone in water. His consciousness was turning dark. He had only a few seconds left.

  Mercifully, he felt the grip of the bodyguard loosen. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to draw a ragged, much needed breath, in a long, slow gasp.

  Brendan heard the unmistakable bang of a heavy fire-exit door as Sloane entered the stairwell. Heilshorn stopped pursuing her near the corner of the hallway. The bodyguard’s grip gave way a little more, and Brendan took in another shuddering, grateful breath. His arm was numb behind his back. One more ounce of pressure and it would break. The pain was excruciating, but the air was ecstasy.

  “You want me to . . . ?”

  Heilshorn returned. His head was down, his eyebrows knitted together, his mouth silently working, as if chewing. “No,” he said, and raised a hand as he walked.

  The phone continued to ring in his office. It started to sound more like a phone again, that low office-phone-tone, a kind of bluhluhluhluh. Brendan figured that the orderly had reported what he’d seen and someone was calling to check in, maybe even on their way.

  Heilshorn shot a look at the people crouched on the floor. “Alright, alright,” he said, and he beckoned with his palms up, telling them to get up.

  Brendan felt like laughing. The oxygen filling his starved lungs was making him high.

  Brendan watched the people in the hallway tentatively start to rise, and he felt the arm around his neck tightening again, like a boa constrictor around its prey. The sense of giddy relief disappeared.

  Heilshorn swept past, and back into his office. The bodyguard shoved Brendan forward into the same room. A clattering noise indicated the bodyguard was kicking Brendan’s revolver away. Then he closed the door behind them with a heavy thud.

  * * *

  Heilshorn snatched up the phone, catching it mid-ring.

  “Hello.”

  He was silent for a moment, listening. Brendan noticed that every line on the man’s face, every fold in his skin was showing. “Uh-huh,” he said into the phone. “No, we’re fine. My personal assistant has him subdued.” Heilshorn’s eyes found Brendan again, boring into him with bitterness and hate. “His name is Brendan Healy. Uh-huh. That’s correct. A private investigator; he showed me his ID before he took out his gun and put it to my head. He was with someone else – Sloane Dewan. Right. On her way down the stairs. She made some crank call to 911 while she was in the office. I think they’re both drunk or on drugs. Okay. That will be fine.” Heilshorn hung up.

  The old doctor gave him a hawkish look. “We’ll deal with him,” he said, as if still talking to the person on the other line.

  As Brendan’s vision swam again, his hearing becoming muffled, he found himself hoping for Sloane, hoping that she had gotten away. She was a smart girl, and she was resourceful. Still, Brendan didn’t know how many other goons Heilshorn had around the building. He was probably the most prominent doctor here, no doubt giving generously to the hospital’s charitable funds each year, smiling at all the glitzy ceremonies where the wives wore pearls around their wrinkled necks, and everyone sat around huge saucer-shaped tables in places like the Sheraton and Waldorf Astoria banquet rooms, with someone holding up a plaque, shiny and gold beneath the incandescent lights.

  This was virtually his hospital, Brendan thought with a sinking feeling. Sloane might not get anywhere, and Heilshorn could do with Brendan whatever he wanted. Kill him right here in cold blood and claim it was self-defense and no one would argue. He even had eyewitnesses – the two people in the hallway would be able to testify that they’d seen a man come out of the office wielding a gun, and that Heilshorn’s “personal assistant” had been there just in time to subdue him. But, he wriggled loose, Heilshorn would say, and went for his gun again, and that’s when we had to stop him for good.

  Brendan’s eyelids fluttered as his consciousness waned. Maybe the end was meant to come like this, with the life literally choked out of him. Or, maybe Heilshorn would shoot him, just because the old man wanted to feel the steel kick in his hands, watch the blood soak into his expensive carpet.

  As the darkness closed in this final time, Brendan thought back to all the mornings of the past two years. Mornings he’d woken up with nothing to live for. Remembering the smell of the exhaust, that sharp gasoline scent, that metallic odor of the carbon monoxide. That smell somehow lingered each morning as he finally got out of bed and made coffee without sparing a glance at those goddamned snowcapped peaks of the Medicine Bow Mountains.

  But then Argon had died. Goddammit, then everything had changed. She had changed things. That smart young woman with her boiling rage and her huge heart, who’d been disposed of in a storm drain.

  Dammit.

  He loved her. He wanted to live.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE / Monday, 4:35 PM

  The police sirens sank into the distance. They weren’t coming for her.

  Jennifer’s hopes collapsed. For a moment, she was transported to Cotuit where she’d spent the summers of her youth; on a clear day you could see Martha’s Vineyard across the water. She needed to be there now, far away from the madness around her.

  He was standing over her again, and she was on her knees. If he was enjoying himself in some psychopathic way, Apollo didn’t show it. His dark skin was smooth and taut, with a constellation of blemishes high on each cheek, almost like war paint.

  “Don’t kill me,” s
he said. Some silly part of her had always wondered what a person really said in a life-or-death situation like this, but it had been in the way earthbound people thought about walking on the moon. There was no way to envisage the experience or the visceral reaction. She was reduced to a few basic survival instincts. There was no shame in begging; it was a necessity, a matter of course. “Please. I will do anything. Don’t shoot. Just let me die? Let me die. I’m already toxic. All you have to do is walk out the door. Just leave me here.”

  A ripple of something might have crossed his features, or she might have imagined it. Over the past few minutes, the effects of the poison were intensifying. Her breathing was becoming constricted. And she was terrified to reach up and run her fingers through her hair – there was an unkind tingle to her scalp as the hair follicles died and were rejected by the skin.

  “You don’t want that,” Apollo said.

  Time had melted. It felt like she had been there for days. How long had it been, really? Six hours? She tried to wrap her mind around something reasonable, something sane, like the ticking of a clock, the passage of time. Her mental grip was slippery. She decided she had been there for days. Maybe a week. Even a week made no sense. What was a week? Days named for the Moon, the Sun, Norse deities, and then Saturn – the Roman god. How did people go about their everyday lives in a world with such arbitrary structures? Unquestioning, uncaring. Jennifer had always marveled at the units of time, the calendar, the names of the months and days of the week. Why twenty-four hours in a day? Why not ten? Why not one-hundred-second minutes? Who had determined the beat of a second? The human heart? She’d studied it all; she’d sought answers for countless questions. In the years before Google, she’d spent an inordinate amount of time at the library, or so her mother said, when she should have been playing with other girls, thinking about boys. Her mother, wringing her hands together, in her apron, always wearing that same flower-print shirt, it seemed. And then there had been John Rascher, who left her hollow, alone – and alone she had stayed.

  “I do want that,” she said. “Just leave me. Please.”

  Who determined the duration of the first second? Heart beats sent waves, like those hitting shore along Dead Neck Island, the water flushing into the Cotuit bay. The waves traveled throughout the body, to all the organs, to the brain. Then the heart’s energy commingled with the energy of other people, other hearts. We were all entwined with one another, each of us emanating this protean aura of electromagnetic energy. There were reasons why lovers had the same thoughts at the same time, found each other’s keys, finished each other’s sentences. Some of it was familiarity and the learning of habits, the aggregation of the minutiae of everyday life, all stored in the brain. That’s what the brain was, storage and access. And hers was deteriorating. Under siege from the thallium. Turning to hot, chaotic pulp. But the heart, the heart did not forget.

  “Leave me here and go. Let me be alone to die. Let me come to peace.”

  “This is more humane.”

  Humane. Humane? He was crazy, that’s all there was to it. Crazier than she was in this moment.

  In training, they had made her watch a twelve-minute video compilation of senseless acts of violence the world over, a standard video used to shock new members in many different types of law enforcement – probably Brendan Healy had seen it too. Car wrecks, improvised exploding devices, people beating the shit out of each other in convenience stores, shooting one another in the head on the street. It was nothing new – graphic images had filtered in even through the mainstream media since the Second World War. Now there was simply more, and it came in easy-to-access media. The audio-clip of a gunner on a helicopter gunship talking to the pilot about the crowd of innocent people his artillery had just sliced through – that had been one of the first WikiLeaks. The gunner had sounded as though he were describing sheep that had gotten in the way of a tractor-trailer. Or playing a video game at home. And the whistleblower had described hundreds or even thousands of gunship videos out there depicting similar destruction of innocents.

  And at last she found the piece of information, the one that they wanted really, the thing that made Lebenslüge what it was, no doubt – a word that described the ability to live despite the guilt and shame of human atrocity. It floated up from the depths to the top of the tower of Babel. And wasn’t that where she was?

  “It’s my request, my final request, as a human being. Please, Ewon, just give me these last few hours.”

  He stepped back when she spoke his name.

  She had no choice now. It would blow her cover, it could blow everything she’d been working on, everything that the Agent Petrinos of the world didn’t even want to know, that most anyone wouldn’t want to know, because behind it was fear, behind it was a kind of end to things.

  Apollo stared at her. “How do you know my name?”

  “I know who you are, Ewon Parnell. I know who all of you are.”

  CHAPTER FORTY / Monday, 4:44 PM

  Staryles pulled into the underground parking lot at Roosevelt Hospital and quickly exited the Cutlass. As he moved through the shadows of the concrete space, his footfalls echoing, the smell of exhaust and tires filled his lungs. He pulled his phone out and made a few quick movements with his fingers over the screen. He was calling in the rest of his team.

  The risk of exposure was high, and beyond what he would have wagered by killing Healy and Dewan before.

  The mainstream media was rarely a concern – he personally knew as many media stockholders as guys he’d served with in the Middle East – but there were more leaks happening every day. Still, he was confident. You could always count on the average American to plug up the dyke. Revelations caused fear; fear bred denial, which engendered ignorance, which led to passivity. It didn’t even matter how much information was out there. Milton Friedman monetarists considered the wealth gap motivation for the lower classes, pointing to China’s emulation of the United States. If BP’s own scientists declared Peak Oil was upon us? It didn’t matter. The United States was a world power for one reason, and one reason alone – the resilient, unshakeable state of denial that its citizens maintained. So powerful were the memes of limitless growth, “freedom” and all the rest, that any information that contested the American Dream was quickly labeled deviant, false, part of a Left Wing conspiracy, an agenda to bloat the government, tax the people to death, and control their lives.

  The irony, of course, was that their lives were already controlled. Left, Right, it didn’t matter. Three hundred million people, helpless, afraid, unable to cope with the seemingly insurmountable problems of the day. No, bringing out his team wouldn’t set off any alarms. The denial was too strong. The fear was too powerful. What bigger government was there than the one who listened to your phone calls, censored your textbooks, put itself in charge of your pregnancies, tried to dictate who you could marry, what you could eat, and could detain you indefinitely without charge?

  Staryles was on the correct side of things. There was no other play than to be on board with the monumental power surging now around the globe, dominating all.

  Feeling better, he slipped into the stairwell along the edge of the parking garage. Within a few minutes, he would have Roosevelt hospital surrounded.

  For one fleeting moment as he passed into the cool stairwell, he thought of his father – almost wished his father were still alive to see him. But then something passed over his heart, as it often did whenever his father’s ghost found his way into his thoughts, and Staryles decided it was better that the man was in the ground, rotting there with the maggots boring through his flesh.

  * * *

  She came through the door of Heilshorn’s office like some kind of banshee. Brendan’s whole body had been vibrating with the fear, the nerves and exhaustion of the past few hours, days, weeks, months. When she burst in she was like a wild animal. It was the manifestation of something he had glimpsed in her before.

  She had something over her head, o
nly suspended there for a brief instant, then a red blur as she hurled it through the air, over the desk, towards Heilshorn’s head. Or at least, that was where she was aiming. It struck him square in the chest.

  There was a heavy thud as it connected with Heilshorn, and then it bounced away, producing a different, hollow metal sound, metal clanging off of metal as it impacted a file cabinet, and the red object – a fire extinguisher, Brendan realized – hit the ground beside Heilshorn’s desk where it gushed white foam in a frantic spray.

  Brendan felt fresh, burning air penetrate his lungs. It was as if the lights had suddenly snapped on inside his head. He realized that the bodyguard had let him go, and Brendan fell forward onto the side of Heilshorn’s desk.

  Heilshorn had been driven back by the airborne fire extinguisher and into his large desk chair. The chair rocked backward, then forward, and dumped him onto his desk. The two men were both momentarily sprawled across the burnished oak, their heads inches apart from each other.

  Brendan assumed the bodyguard was going for his gun. The extinguisher poured out, hissing, spattering the bookshelves and framed diplomas with white foam. Sloane stood in the corner, her chest heaving, her eyes wide and her dirty blond hair wild around her head. Brendan saw her look at the bodyguard, who was directly behind Brendan, surely moments from firing a round into her, this girl who had escaped death as an infant, who had self-medicated her way through a painful adolescence, who made regular trips to visit an aging woman in a nursing home and was all of twenty-eight years old.

  Brendan kicked out with his legs. One foot hit nothing – the other made contact with the bodyguard’s calf. It wasn’t enough to do any damage, but might at least redirect the big bastard’s attention for a moment.