by Paul Cleave
“Shut up,” Caleb says.
He only has to wait a minute until the cars start arriving.
“Move,” he says, and he pushes Stanton toward the door. Stanton stumbles, but he moves, reaches it, and stops. He turns them both around so his own back is to the door and Stanton is facing the hallway.
“Now what?” Stanton asks.
“Now it’s time to beg for your life,” he says, and he cuts through the binds on Stanton’s wrists.
The doctor immediately brings his arms in front of him and starts rubbing them. “I’m going to kill you, and then your other daughter,” Caleb says. “Now turn around.”
Stanton turns around. There are a few feet between them, nothing more. Cole steps toward him, and as he does, he drops the knife. It thuds onto the carpet maybe a little closer to Stanton than to him.
Both men pause as they stare at each other. Caleb waits for Stanton to react. And then he does, swooping toward the knife. Caleb reaches out and kicks it, it goes behind Stanton and further down the hallway. Stanton goes after it. Caleb smiles. He reaches behind for the door handle and opens the door. It’s all perfect. Just perfect.
Stanton gets the knife and points it at him. “I’m going to kill you,” he says triumphantly, shaking his head. “I’m going to fucking slice you apart.”
Caleb steps through the doorway. He steps onto the porch and faces the street. There are two vans, and standing in front of them are people with cameras. He raises his arms in the air, palms facing front, hands well away from his body. On the footpath coming toward him is the detective and Tate. He keeps his back to Stanton and he waits, he waits for the fucker to stab him, he waits for the death that comes with it, and in front of the cops, in front of the media, Dr. Nicholas Stanton is going to kill an unarmed man. He’s going to kill a man who he thinks killed his daughters. He’s going to have to answer for that, and there’s going to be a trial. He’ll be found guilty, the same way Caleb was guilty fifteen years ago. And then he’s going to go to jail and he’s going to get beaten and raped and he’s going to get his fingers broken over and over by those same assholes with the aversion to symmetry, and then Nicholas Stanton is finally going to know what it’s like to walk in Caleb Cole’s shoes.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
“How the hell did they figure it out?” Schroder asks.
We step out of the car. There are media vans behind us. We don’t know if Cole is in there, who’s dead and who’s alive, we don’t know if Cole is going to come quietly. As if on cue the front door to the house opens. Cole comes forward four steps, and then he raises his arms. He stares toward us, but there are lights in his face from the vans and the cameras and I can see he can’t tell us apart from the journalists. People start moving forward. Cole’s shoulders are shrugged up around his neck as if he’s cold or expecting to be shot.
Schroder raises his gun. I move off to the side. Cole doesn’t turn toward me. He doesn’t take another step forward. He keeps his eyes forward, squinting hard to see.
“Don’t move,” Schroder yells at him.
“I’m unarmed,” he shouts back. “I am turning myself in. Don’t shoot.”
“Detective,” one of the reporters yells, “what right do you have to be here?”
I glance back to make sure Schroder isn’t about to open fire on the reporters before running onto the lawn. I reach the front of the house out to the right, out of Cole’s line of vision. I stay against the side and start closing the distance to the front door. Then Dr. Nicholas Stanton comes through it. He’s staggering, taking long strides. He’s wearing pajamas similar to Schroder’s, only his have splotches of blood and vomit down them. His eyes are large and wild and his face is in a tight grimace. He’s holding a very large knife in his hand, which comes into view when he raises his arm to shield his eyes from all the light. The light is helping to spotlight him, making him look like a madman. He flinches a little at all the commotion, at all the people, and he seems unsure of himself. Then he sees Cole, focuses on him, his face gets even tighter, and he moves forward. His feet land heavily on the ground. Cole must be able to hear him, yet Cole doesn’t look back, he doesn’t move, just keeps his shoulders shrugged up around his neck as high as they will go.
Then it hits me. The endgame. Cole wants to be stabbed. He wants Stanton to kill him in front of all these people. He wants Stanton to go to jail for killing an unarmed man.
Schroder is still yelling at Cole not to move. From Schroder’s angle, Cole is blocking his view of Stanton. I keep moving forward. All of us are in the lights of the cameras. We’re all being recorded for history. Schroder has to yell to be heard over the gaggle of reporters. My head is throbbing but I know in another minute this will all be over.
“Don’t do it,” I yell out to Stanton.
“Keep your hands in the air,” Schroder says to Cole, and Schroder is moving forward now. So are the news crews, they’re providing the lights and the cameras and the rest of us are providing the action.
“Your children are alive,” I tell Stanton, and there’s only about ten feet between us now.
Cole throws me a look, frowns at me, then looks back at the cameras.
“I killed them,” Cole says, loud enough for Stanton and me but not for the media, “and one of them I raped.”
“He hisent shirt them,” I say, hearing the wrong words coming out. Fuck.
“You killed my children,” Stanton says, not hearing me, only looking at Cole.
“And I enjoyed it.”
Stanton takes the final step. I try to cover the distance, but I can’t, not in the time it takes for Stanton to bring the knife down. If it’s the middle of Cole’s back he’s aiming for, then it’s almost a bull’s-eye. If he’s trying to put enough force into the blade that it sinks right down to the hilt, then that isn’t quite as good-because it snags on a bone somewhere and only goes halfway. He pulls the knife out as Cole drops to his knees, giving Schroder a clear view of Stanton and of what’s going on.
“Drop the knife,” Schroder shouts, changing his aim from Cole to Stanton, back to Cole, then back to Stanton again.
I get within two steps of Stanton. I shout, really focusing on the words to tell him his children are fine, and I hold my arms out, palms up, and he turns toward me, this wild man with wild hair and eyes bugging out of his skull. “Shure susshen are thine,” I tell him.
He looks at me with absolutely no comprehension of what I’m trying to say.
He raises the blade and this time his aim is the back of Cole’s neck. I cover the final step, I get my left hand around Stanton’s wrist, and I pull him forward and we both crash to the ground. I feel the stitches in my leg popping. I feel the pressure inside my skull building, the doctor’s warning floating around in there on a sea of pain. Stanton pushes me off him and I roll to my side. He half sits up and sees the knife is still in his hand. He looks at Cole, then at me, then crawls toward Cole again. I get onto my feet and try to grab hold of him. He looks at me, then slashes the knife in my direction. I don’t see it in time and there’s no way to avoid it.
Schroder shoots him.
The gunshot sets off a whole lot of chain reactions in my head. The first one is that for a few seconds the nerves between my eyes and my brain stop working. I’m standing in the dark with no idea what’s happening. Then a switch is thrown and my vision comes back, and with it a whole lot of pain. I stumble sideways, clutching my head as if I’m the one who’s been shot. The lights from the news crews all point in different directions as everybody ducks and reacts. I lean against the side of the house.
Cole twists toward us. “No,” he cries out, still on his knees. “No,” he repeats, and this time a blood bubble grows and pops between his lips. He loses balance and falls forward. The back of his shirt is soaking with blood. He tilts down the porch steps and comes to a stop with his face on the path and his legs still on the porch.
Stanton, however, is trying to get to his feet, only he’s not having
such a great time of it. The front of his pajamas over his right shoulder have turned red. I’ve got one hand over my eye because somehow it eases the pain from whatever the fuck my brain is doing. He tries to lift the knife again, but his arm won’t work. I can see in his face that he can’t figure out the mechanics of it all. He keeps trying, and then he uses his good arm to take the knife out of the good hand attached to the bad arm. He looks around and starts swinging the knife, pointing it in the direction of the media, at Schroder, and then at me. He can’t seem to spot Cole. He swings it toward me and Schroder takes a second shot. I can’t see where this one hits Stanton, but it stops him in his tracks. He looks down at his body, then at me, and his eyes start to clear.
I try to talk to him, to tell him his children are okay, but the words just don’t come out, they’re all too heavy and the ones that do finally come out just don’t make sense. The lights are getting brighter as the news crews come forward. Schroder reaches us. He kicks the knife further, then helps me out from beneath Stanton.
“You okay?” he asks me.
I nod.
He grabs his cell phone and calls for an ambulance. Two of them. He doesn’t let go of the gun. There are lights on him, lights on me, lights on Cole and Stanton. There is blood everywhere, all of it making for good TV footage.
“He was never going to hurt them,” Schroder says, talking to Stanton once he’s hung up.
“I don’t. . don’t understand,” he says, and he looks like a man waking from a dream.
“They’re fine,” Schroder tells him.
“And Katy?”
“I’m sure Katy is fine too.”
“He. . he cut off her finger.”
“I know, but that’s all he did,” Schroder says, saying it as though cutting her finger off is nothing.
“He. . he didn’t kill them?” Stanton asks.
“No,” I say, and it’s the first word to have come out clear.
“I should have. .” he says, and then he starts to cough. He keeps coughing, and when he finally stops he starts to smile. “Should have known,” he says, and then he doesn’t say anything else, just stares up at us with that smile on his face, and it’s still there when the ambulance arrives five minutes later.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
“You sure you’re okay?” Schroder asks.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, knowing that if he’d heard me speak earlier he’d know I wasn’t.
“Okay,” he says, and climbs into the back of the ambulance with Caleb Cole.
I drive Schroder’s car. I asked one of the paramedics for the strongest painkillers they had and he handed me two tablets but the headache isn’t going. My ears are still ringing from the gunshots. Some of the media stay at the house, some follow, more media vans show up as the story gathers momentum. We get to the hospital. I pull in behind the ambulance with Cole in it and see it unloaded in the opposite order I saw it loaded. They rush him into an emergency room. The second ambulance pulls up and they do the same for Dr. Stanton. His daughter is carried out and rushed in too.
Seeing Katy I remember I have her finger at home. I pull out of the parking lot and head back to the house. All the boy-racers seem to have gone home. The only traffic now is made up from people finishing the graveyard shift, or those with an early start. I see a fluffy tail, two back legs, and not much else of the cat as it races away from the back door of my house. I grab the finger from the fridge. It’s cold and feels solid and I tuck it into my pocket before deciding that’s a bad idea, that the body heat may only damage it. I grab a drink of water and stand by the sink with my eyes closed willing the headache to disappear, but it’s not listening to me, the thing living in there no longer willing to be ignored. My ears are still ringing. I head back to the hospital with the finger on the passenger seat, the same sights as before only in the opposite order and lighter too.
I can’t find a parking space when I get back to the hospital. Cop cars and media vans are everywhere, and I have to park on the other side of the road by Hagley Park, the huge park in the middle of the city that even at this time has a few people jogging slowly around it. I get buzzed in by the same nurse I spoke to when I came here to see my wife. I hold up the finger and show the first doctor I come across and tell him who it belongs to. He takes it and rushes off. I find the waiting room I was in earlier. Schroder is sitting down in it. So are a bunch of other cops. I sit next to Schroder. We don’t talk to each other. Others are chatting away. Schroder stares ahead and I can tell he’s replaying the shootings over and over, first Mrs. Whitby, then Dr. Stanton, and I’m replaying them too, wondering if there was anything different we could have done. An hour goes by. Nobody comes, nobody goes. The replays don’t get any prettier but the headache fades. I don’t come up with any other scenarios that might have worked. Schroder just keeps looking at the wall. Eventually I check my cell phone for missed calls, and there are a few, most of them from the police station, one of them from Dr. Forster. My heart sinks seeing that one. The way the week has gone, I don’t see it being good news. I don’t call him back. I can’t. Whatever he has to say, no matter how bad, if I don’t hear him say it then it doesn’t need to have happened.
After another hour a doctor comes out. By this point I’m pacing the room, every few minutes reaching for my phone and reminding myself there’s no point, that there is only going to be pain in the message waiting for me. There’s blood on the doctor’s scrubs but not much of it. He looks at us and there is nothing in his face to suggest one thing or the other.
“Caleb Cole is in serious condition,” he says, addressing all of us, though it’s Detective Kent he looks at the most, and who could blame him? “But it looks like he’s going to make it.”
I don’t know how I feel about that. Schroder says nothing. Kent nods at the doctor, and the doctor glances at her chest for a second before looking at the rest of us. When the doctor sees nothing else is going to be added, he turns and heads back through the same doors he came from.
“How long do you think he’ll get?” I ask Schroder.
“What?”
“Cole. You think he’ll ever come out of jail?”
Schroder shakes his head but doesn’t answer. He gets himself comfortable and stares at the wall again. For the first time he finally looks tired. I think about Cole’s game plan, and how angry he’s going to be when he wakes up to find out he’s still alive. He’s going to go back to jail. He’s going to go through the beatings he took all over again. He didn’t kill himself last time-will he this time? And in twenty years, if he’s released, what then? I can’t see him making it twenty years.
Another hour goes by. I spend most of it with my eyes closed and my head tilted so far back it touches the wall. A different doctor from before comes out to see us, showing up from the corridor behind us. He shakes his head. “We couldn’t save her finger,” he says, “but aside from that, Katy is fine. We’ll be able to discharge her tomorrow.”
“Okay,” Kent says, and we go through the same routine as the last doctor-he stands there waiting for us to add something else and nobody does, so he walks back the way he came. I wonder what will happen to the finger.
Some of the detectives start to disappear. Soon there are only five of us. Nobody is talking. Then Dominic Stevens comes along. He steps into the room and scans everybody’s faces. Detective Kent finds a reason to take the others out into the corridor, leaving me and Schroder behind. Before Stevens can start in on us, a third doctor shows up, this one coming through the same doors as the first.
“Nicholas Stanton’s shoulder wound isn’t the problem,” he says, “but the second bullet went under his armpit and into his right lung. He lost a lot of blood. We’ve patched the damage, and barring nothing unforeseen, he should pull through.”
“Good,” Stevens says, slowly nodding. “That’s very, very good.” He puts his hand on Schroder’s shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk,” he tells him.
Schroder and Stevens step into the
corridor and I’m left alone with the doctor. When I try to get up I lose my balance and fall back into my chair. I need sleep. All of a sudden I can barely keep my eyes open.
“Are you okay?” he asks.
“I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. Thanks,” I tell him. “Thanks for saving him.”
He nods. “He’s not saved yet,” he says, “but it’s looking good.”
“Okay,” I tell him, but he stays there looking at me.
“Your right eye,” he says, “is blown.”
“What?”
He kneels down in front of me, then suddenly he points a flashlight into my eye and my brain does a somersault, but I stay in control.
“It’s not dilating. You got a headache?”
“Yeah.”
“When did it start?”
“About six weeks ago.”
“What?”
“It comes and goes,” I tell him. “I was hit in the head.”
“How hard?”
“Very,” I say, rubbing the dent. “I have a prescription,” I tell him, then reach into my pocket, but I’m just too sleepy now to find it. My hand falls out. It falls down my side and hangs over the side of the chair.
“Wait here,” he says, and disappears.
I do the opposite and I walk out of the waiting room, my right arm swinging by my side. Dominic Stevens is in the hallway talking to Schroder. Stevens is in a pair of jeans and a shirt and I’ve never seen him looking so casual. He also looks calm. They are keeping their voices low, and I lean against the wall and watch them. For the first half of the conversation Schroder is shaking his head, and for the second half he’s nodding. Then Stevens acknowledges me with a nod, says something else to Schroder, and leaves.
“What’s the verdict?” I ask, knowing the conversation had to be about Mrs. Whitby.
“I’m not being fired,” he says.
“But?”
“But I’ve been told to step down.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry too even though it’s what half of me wanted.”