Season of the Assassin

by Laird, Thomas

  He pulled up a sleeve and showed Doc the marks of her teeth. The flashlight beam revealed little droplets of blood.

  Lightning shocked the green sky outside alive, and the blooming pressure of a thunderclap burst Theresa’s window open. All of us jerked in shock. But Anglin never let go of her, and he was still clutching the razor tightly.

  ‘Yeah. I’m going to skip out on all those charges you’re getting ready, Lieutenant. My friends will make sure that I don’t pay for too

  long because of what you might throw at me on account of tonight’s little get-together. You aren’t wired, are you, Parisi? No. You were in too big a hurry to haul ass down here and save your favorite witness…Her roommates were good, Lieutenant. They fought a little, and I always liked fight in a woman…You ever choked a bitch almost to the point of killing her when you were both about to come? No? Too bad. You could see the come in their eyes when I squeezed them almost to the point of dyin’. It sure is some kind of rush…’

  ‘What were their names?’

  Anglin loosened his grip on her neck.

  The voice belonged to Theresa Rojas. Lightning spiked the green sky with yellow pitchforks. The thunder hit just seconds later.

  Doc pointed the flashlight beam at Anglin’s face. We could see the green of his cat’s eyes raging back at us.

  ‘I’m walking this little lady right out the front door, Lieutenant. You and your boyfriends there blink, and I cut her throat. And there goes your sole witness.’

  ‘And you die the second she bleeds,’ I told him.

  ‘I ain’t afraid to die, Parisi. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to go into a cage over the likes of this cunt. I’m hoping you really would pull the trigger. You’d be doing me a favor. But she’d still be dead and you don’t want that to happen, now do you?’

  Anglin began to back out of the room with Theresa in tow. He held the razor precariously close to her jugular vein. He would cut her just the way he’d cut the other nurses, and he knew that we knew it.

  The lights were still out in the hospital. Only the flashes from the electrical storm outside illuminated our way toward the hospital’s entrance. All I could see of Anglin’s face were his eyes as the lightning flashed outside. The razor never moved from its place against Theresa’s exposed throat. We had our guns pointed at Anglin’s head, but I never felt so powerless as I did then as we followed him and Theresa toward the entry.

  A lightning flash lit up the reception area. Anglin pulled open the glass door, and then he snatched Theresa violently backward through it.

  We followed them along the concrete driveway. Anglin was headed toward an old Jeep that sat in the circular drive in front of the hospital entrance. He was reaching into his pocket for the key, I supposed, as another booming jolt of lightning struck not far from where we stood.

  ‘I won’t let you leave here,’ I shouted through the rolling thunder of the storm that was pelting us with a mixture of heavy rain and pea-sized hailstones. The hail felt like little stabbings on our faces and heads. Doc and Jack and myself were drenched by the downpour, but we managed to keep our weapons pointed at the man struggling to get Theresa Rojas into that Jeep.

  Another boom shook the five of us standing on that drive. Yet another concussion followed. Then the sky lit up in a ghastly flickering yellow and green flash as pitchforks of lightning pocked the sky.

  Just for a moment Anglin let his attention wander from the razor that nestled against Theresa’s vulnerable throat, and he dropped the hand that held the blade as he peered skyward.

  I cocked my piece, but before I could put a round through one of his green eyes, another batch of lightning pitchforks flared as the thunder reached a crescendo. A bolt of pure white electrical energy hurled itself toward the power lines that stood at the edge of the drive, and we all jumped at the resulting explosion. We saw the power line snap away from its couplings, and down it came, writhing and twisting like a furious snake about to strike whatever stood before it.

  Theresa dove away from Anglin once she realized he’d released his hold on her neck, and she scrambled away from him with feral speed. Anglin tried to duck the thrashing power line, but he moved too slowly this time and the wild black snake sprang at his throat as if it were a real serpent. The force of the blow whipped Anglin down onto his back, and it was then that he screamed, just as blue arcs of high-voltage sparks came crackling out of his mouth and ears and eyes.

  Anglin’s scream didn’t last long, but the stink of scorched flesh started to come at us almost immediately. Black smoke rose from his fried corpse as the rain continued to drench us and as arcs of lethal blue force continued to burst out of every orifice in his dead body.

  I rushed over to Theresa, who lay in a sobbing heap about ten yards from the electrified remains of Anglin. I picked her up and hustled her back inside the hospital. I yelled for Doc and Jack to get out of the fury of the storm, but they stood there mesmerized, watching Anglin burn up in a coruscating blue blaze. Their guns were still pointed at him as if he might still escape from the cable that had wrapped itself around his throat.

  ‘Doc! Jack! For God’s sake!’ I yelled at the two of them.

  But they just stayed there, watching.

  I held Theresa tightly as the ferocious noise outside began to subside just slightly.

  After a few more minutes the lightning had ceased altogether. Doc and Jack finally walked back inside the hospital.

  I looked into their eyes as I continued to hold Theresa. They didn’t say anything, so we all simply stood there as I held our surviving witness with all the strength I had left in me.

  The phones were still working, Doc found out. He dialed 911 and asked for several squads of paramedics to be sent out to this remote location. As he put the receiver down, we heard the approach of the Indiana state troopers.

  I walked Theresa out to the lobby. All the lights were back on and the receptionist at the door had come round on her own. She was sitting behind her desk, looking distinctly groggy. When she saw Theresa and me, she screamed.

  I showed her my badge, and then she began to sob.

  ‘We’ve got help coming. You just sit down and take it easy. We’re all safe now. Don’t worry.’

  The receptionist leaned forward, lowered her head and sobbed into her folded arms.

  I sat Theresa on a couch in the lobby next to admissions.

  I hugged her tightly. She was the sibling I’d never had, I was thinking. She was the sister I might have had if the old man hadn’t been sterile. I felt like her big brother, although we were actually very close in age. Theresa had a family of her own, I understood, but it had just grown by one member. Emotionally, I’d adopted her as my sister. Hell, she wasn’t even Italian, but Mexican was close enough. We both spoke those Romance languages, I’d heard, so it was close enough.

  ‘I wish my father could see you tonight. He wrote about you in his files. He wrote about you so much, I felt like I already knew you the way he seemed to.’

  ‘Where will I go from here, Jimmy?’

  ‘I don’t know. Where do you want to go?’

  ‘I wanted to be a nurse. I wanted to make people feel better.’

  ‘Why not go back to school and finish what you started? You’re not too old. You’ll never be too old. Hell, you’re younger than I am, and we just had a new baby.’

  ‘I’ll never have a baby of my own.’

  ‘Doc’s wife is fifty-something, just like you. She just adopted a little girl…Anything’s possible these days. Almost anything.’

  She kissed my cheek.

  The Indiana cops were all over the building then. The paramedics were rushing through the corridors, trying to revive all the hospital staff whom Anglin had decked one by one.

  Doc came back to us with the good news that there were no fatalities in the place — other than Anglin.

  Theresa was squeezing me so hard I was afraid she’d shut off my air. Then she relaxed her grip and let go.

  ‘How
would you like to spend the night at my house?’ I asked her.

  I wouldn’t let her argue.

  I called Natalie from the front desk and told her we were having a visitor to stay with us until we could arrange things with Theresa’s family. Natalie said she was happy to help her out, especially after she heard about Anglin’s demise.

  Jack came up to the three of us.

  He smiled and walked off toward his copter. Doc told him we’d get a ride back in a vehicle borrowed from the Indiana state troopers. Jack waved farewell to the three of us.

  I had to go to the shift supervisor, who was halfway coherent and conscious, and explain that I was taking their patient out of the hospital on my authority. The supervisor was dazed enough to go along with me.

  We arranged with the state troopers to use one of their squad cars to transport Doc, Theresa and me back to the city. When we’d given our statements to the local coppers about Anglin’s death, we walked out to the car, the three of us, and headed home.

  EPILOGUE

  [August 1999]

  I watched them cremate Carl Anglin’s meager remains. His mother was the only witness from his family. I and a few other coppers were present too. Cremation was the best way to finish things, as far as I was concerned. I knew that Catholics generally preferred burial, but me, I wanted to go out clean. Anglin got the consuming, cleansing fire that stopped his body rotting in the ground.

  His mother said not a word to anyone present, and she scurried off somewhere as soon as it was over.

  Renny Charles did not show up. I hadn’t reckoned he would. He’d either disappeared or he was deep under. Perhaps he was like the seven-year locust that emerged periodically to make everyone’s life just that bit more miserable. Wherever he was, I’d have liked to nab him on general principles.

  He and Anglin had killed the President of the United States. I’d carry that powerful suspicion to my own cremation. I couldn’t prove it and I couldn’t even talk about it. So they were ghosts. All of them. JFK, Anglin, the Major, Special Agent Mason, his leggy blonde assistant. Seven nurses in 1968. Three more this year. History, all of them.

  Doc didn’t want to rehash the past, and I couldn’t blame him. He was too busy trying to keep up with his daughter and Mari.

  And I had my own crosses to bear. Maybe they were more like responsibilities than crosses. Three children at various stages of maturity, from infant to young adult. I had a young wife who could run me ragged because she was over twenty years younger than I was.

  Nick, my biological father, came around sometimes. He said he didn’t want to intrude on us, but I knew he wanted to see me and find out what was going on. It was the pull of our shared DNA. I didn’t deny him. In fact, I tried to get him to come around more often. He was my children’s true grandfather. The two older kids had been told the truth about my roots. The baby would find out when she was old enough to understand.

  It was a matter of coming to terms. With the private matters of my own past, with the public events of years gone by. I had to deal with evil. Less often with outright goodness. It was a matter of how much I could endure. Why Carl Anglin had to plague my father’s already painful life, I didn’t know anymore than I understood why Anglin was still hanging around when I took my tour of duty with the Chicago Homicide team. But there he’d been. Carl Anglin and all the other creatures like him were facts of existence. Another one just like him was waiting out in the weeds. I could count on it; I wouldn’t be surprised when the new guy emerged.

  After all, he and all the others like him kept me in business. I found them. Someone else judged them and tried to figure out ‘why’.

  Doc kept talking about retiring and getting familiar with the coeds at some college. And I reminded him he didn’t have the balls to cheat on Mari. He nodded at me, grinning ruefully. I had him pegged.

  Theresa Rojas told me she was going back to school to finish her nursing degree.

  I visited Jake Parisi’s grave from time to time. He was interred in the far southwest part of town, not too far from his favorite after-work tavern. The place was now owned by Jimmy Karras’s son, Jimmy Junior.

  The afternoon after Anglin’s valedictory barbecue, I drove down to visit my father. I placed a yellow rose, one like those I’d kept giving Theresa Rojas, on his grave. I didn’t spend much time at his final resting-place. But I uttered a few Hail Marys and then I walked back to the car.

  I headed over to Karras’s saloon where I ordered two beers. I drank mine slowly, but I left the other one untouched. When I got up to leave, Karras junior wanted to know why I’d left the extra draft.

  ‘He’ll be along in a while. He comes in after every shift,’ I told him.

  I gave the Greek a grin. Then I walked out his door into the heat of the late afternoon.

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