by Tim Stevens
His mind struggled to pull itself into a coherent whole, but his thoughts felt like sludge. It would be so much easier just to close his eyes, and sink into the warm oblivion of sleep...
Venn drove the knuckles of his fist into his thigh, hard, the pain dragging him back into the room.
Concentrate.
Remember what you’ve learned about her.
The woman was watching him intently. Studying him, in fact. Her eyes crawled over his face painstakingly, like a scientist examining a specimen in a jar.
A thought, seemingly random, flitted through Venn’s mind. Something he’d said to Fil.
So it’s about self-harm, in some way... abusing your body...
Yes. That was it. That was the key.
Venn said, “I understand. I know why you’re doing this. I’m pure.”
Her pale eyes took on a new look. One of wonder.
“Sure, I’ve taken a few knocks,” Venn continued, wondering distantly where all this was coming from, since he didn’t seem to have a lot of control over what he was saying. “I’ve got scars. But I’ve taken care of myself. I’ve respected what God’s given me. And I know how important that is to you, too.”
Now the wonder in the gray eyes segued into something else. Venn couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was... apprehension. As though she realized for the first time she was up against something she couldn’t quite believe.
“The disgusting wino in the alleyway,” said Venn. “The fat heap of lard, O’Farrell. Dale Fincher, who took a razor blade to his wrists. The Peters woman. She wasn’t kidding anybody. Once a dirty junkie, always one.”
A rim of white appeared around the pale irises as the eyelids flared. The face inched closer above the gun barrel. Venn noticed for the first time that the gun was a Beretta. His own.
Keeping his voice low for effect, Venn murmured: “And Rickenbacker. Hard-nosed, tough-talking. But she was poisoning herself. Breathing in toxins, deliberately. There was nothing tough about her. She was weak, just like all the others.”
The Beretta’s barrel lowered a fraction more. For the first time, Venn could feel the woman’s breath on his face, its rhythm quick.
“But you and I are different. We know, and appreciate, the value of the body. We’re better than all of them.”
All the while, Venn had been tensing the muscles of his arms against the straps that held them down, holding the contraction for a few seconds, and then relaxing again. Tensing and relaxing, over and over again.
He needed just one arm free. The right arm, nearest to her. If he could get that out, she was close enough to him that he might have a chance at driving her nasal bones up into her skull. It would need to be a perfectly-timed blow, but he’d done it before.
His voice had dwindled to a whisper. “You see, there are people who understand. Not many of us. Maybe nobody else but me. But I do. I understand.”
Venn felt his wrist slip against the material of the strap covering it. Just a couple of millimetres, but it was progress.
A minute more. If he could spin this out one minute more, he’d be able to free his arm.
The woman lowered the Beretta completely.
She stepped back, well back, and the frustration screamed in Venn’s head.
She reached her arm into the shadows.
When her hand came back into Venn’s field of vision, she no longer held the Beretta.
Instead, the light winking off its tip, he saw an icepick.
Chapter 36
He understood.
The awe broke over Sally-Jo like a waterfall, threatening to bowl her over and drag her under.
And he did understand. He wasn’t bluffing. It was there in his eyes, and in the words he was saying.
She felt tears trembling on her lower lids, threatening to spill over, and blinked them away.
She hadn’t needed to show him the photos. The pictures of Frank, before and during and after the butchery. The images of holy places: churches, synagogues, mosques.
He understood, deep in the fibre of his being, that the body was a temple. And that what had been done to Frank was a violation, a sacrilege, of monstrous proportions.
She twisted the icepick this way and that, watching the end gleam in the dull light from the ceiling bulbs.
He didn’t look afraid. His eyes weren’t even on the icepick, but on hers.
She expected to see acceptance in his gaze. But instead, she was unsettled to note an intensity there. An urgency.
He would be the last. She’d said that before, about Rickenbacker. But she’d been wrong about Rickenbacker, too. This man, Detective Lieutenant Joseph Venn, was the one she’d been looking for all along.
Fate had brought him to her.
She didn’t have the branding iron with the sigma symbol on her. It was out in the car, in the rucksack she’d stowed under the seat. But that didn’t matter.
After this, she’d never have to think about that hated symbol again. Ever.
She knew the man had been working one of his arms free. He was a cop, after all, and cops didn’t just lie around waiting to die. But she knew he was still sluggish from the propofol, and wouldn’t be able to free his arm in time.
Nonetheless, as a precaution she pulled the strap tight again with her free hand.
She lowered her face and the icepick in tandem, so that she was peering into his eyes around the upright sliver of metal.
“Thank you,” Sally-Jo whispered.
And he murmured back: “I know everything.”
She paused.
“I know about Sigma. And Franklin Gray. Frank, I guess you call him.”
She heard her own breathing in the silence, a counterpoint to the soft rumble of the hospital through the walls.
He said: “You don’t need Frank any longer. You need me.”
Her breathing stopped. When her body reminded her, she let out the air in a great, sighing gasp.
His eyes flicked sideways. “They’re coming. The cops. They’ll have noticed that I’m gone, and they’ll be calling my phone. I guess you’ve gotten rid of it, but they’ll find it sooner or later.” His eyes burned into hers. “We have to get out of here. You and me. Right now.”
Her eyes darted away from his, around the dim, dingy basement storeroom.
“What’s your name?” he said.
She stared at him.
Mouthed her name, so softly she didn’t think he’d hear.
But he said, “Sally-Jo. Yes. I like it. It fits you perfectly.” His gaze roved over her face, just as she’d studied him a few minutes earlier. “There’s lots I need to learn about you, Sally-Jo. I’m Joe, by the way. Sally-Jo. Joe. They’re similar. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you?”
She straightened, the icepick still in her hand but hanging down by her side. She felt utterly confused. Trapped, like a rabbit in a snare, with the hunters closing in.
“We can beat this,” Joe said, quietly but with urgency. “I’m the only one that knows about you. They’ll never find you, because they only have Frank’s fingerprints. His DNA. And Frank’s gone now. Forever. So they’ll never find him, either. Don’t you see? It’s perfect.”
Her head reeled, like it was taking a physical beating.
“But we’ll only do it if we get out now. Right now.” His gaze flitted around the storeroom. “I’m guessing we’re in the basement. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of exit routes. Once they come looking down here, it’ll be too late for both of us.”
A voice sounded in Sally-Jo’s inner ear, low and warning. Frank’s voice.
He’s tricking you. Don’t listen to him. Kill him, and get out of there.
On the gurney, Joe said, “Give me some more of that sedative, if you don’t quite trust me yet. But you have to act now, Sally-Jo. Wheel me out of here and up to the first floor. Take us out to the ambulance bays. Once we’re outside, we’ll have more options.”
No, said Frank.
“The hell with you,” Sa
lly-Jo whispered, possibly aloud.
She picked up the syringe from the shelf.
Chapter 37
The ambulance bay was a broad stretch of asphalt along the west side of the hospital building, located just beside the entrance to the Emergency Room. Sally-Jo had worked in the ER during her training, and she’d been out there to receive incoming emergency cases at all hours of the day and night.
She wasn’t prepared for it to be so busy, not at just after five in the morning. At least four ambulances sat outside the ER doors, while paramedics unloaded stretchers of tightly-wrapped bodies as if on a production line. The condensation from the ambulance crews’ breath in the freezing air formed a fug as thick as the clouds you saw when office workers congregated on a fire escape to smoke.
Some kind of traffic accident, she supposed, with multiple casualties.
It didn’t matter that there were so many people. In fact, it would take the attention off her.
She’d pushed the gurney, laden with its cargo, through a reception area, and had spotted an overcoat draped over the back of a plastic chair. Without breaking her stride, she swept up the coat and shrugged it on, heading for the doors, expecting an angry voice to yell after her. But none came. The overcoat was a man’s, and stank of stale booze, so perhaps it belonged to some drunk who’d gone off to pee.
Before leaving the basement storeroom, she’d found a length of bandage among the supplies crammed on the shelves, and had swathed Joe’s head in it until only his nose and mouth were visible. It wasn’t much, but it might prevent anybody she encountered – any cops – from recognizing him as she passed.
She’d shoved his gun inside her uniform, between her waist and her belt. As Joe had guessed, she’d disposed of his phone before going down into the basement, dropping it into the gap between the elevator and the floor.
Keeping her head ducked low once again, against the cold as much as to avoid somebody recognizing her, Sally-Jo pushed the gurney past the throng of people outside the doors. Nobody so much as glanced at her.
Seven or eight ambulances stood over in the bay, their engines shut off. A couple of personnel stood around, chatting, looking like they were coming to the end of their shift and winding down after a busy night. She steered the gurney in a wide arc around them.
As she reached the ambulances on the far side of the parked fleet, she caught something at the corner of her eye, and glanced round.
The two ambulance crew members were staring after her.
Sally-Jo knew she had to move.
She stopped behind the nearest vehicle and seized the rear doors and opened them. Nobody inside. She put the brake on the gurney and reached under the blankets covering Joe and undid the straps securing him. Then she hopped up into the back of the ambulance and grabbed him under the shoulders and slid him off the gurney, dumping him without finesse on the floor of the vehicle.
Sally-Jo leaped down. At that moment, one of the EMTs appeared, striding toward her.
“Hey,” he called. “What are you –”
Without pausing, she drew the Beretta from inside her uniform and shot him in the chest from ten feet away.
The blast bounced off the outer wall of the hospital building and came echoing back. The man took three rapid steps backward, his face contorted in shock, before he dropped to the asphalt.
Behind him, a woman screamed. The second EMT.
Sally-Jo brandished the gun in her direction, though she didn’t stop to take aim because she was running for the cab of the ambulance. The woman dove out of sight, behind one of the other vehicles.
Pandemonium was breaking out from in front of the ER as Sally-Jo climbed up into the driver’s seat. She saw the keys in the ignition, and uttered a silent prayer to a God she’d long ago lost faith in.
The engine started at once. Sally-Jo floored the accelerator and the ambulance leaped off the starting blocks with a judder of protest.
She had to swing left to aim in the direction of the hospital gates. In doing so, she had a view of the ER entrance through her window.
Cops, lots of them, maybe six or seven, were sprinting out across the lot, their guns emerging in their hands.
It spooked her, and she banked the wheel a little too sharply. The ambulance’s tires skidded on something – ice, maybe, though she’d seen pools of oil on the surface – and the vehicle fishtailed.
She fought to control it, veering close, too close, to another ambulance that was pulling away from the ER entrance, its lights flashing, no doubt on the way to some new emergency. She saw the driver’s face, his mouth stretched wide in horror, before the ambulance slammed into the side of hers.
The impact was glancing rather than direct, but it sent her vehicle yawing to one side. She heard clanging behind her, looked back, saw the other ambulance stalled with its hood buckled and steam pouring from underneath. Behind it, a couple of metal canisters had bounced out the open doors and onto the asphalt.
Sally-Jo oriented herself, saw the hospital gates over to her right. To her left, the row of cops was advancing, some of them kneeling, their guns leveled at her.
“Step out of the vehicle,” one of them yelled.
Sally-Jo’s ambulance too had stalled with the impact. She turned the key, heard the engine groan into life.
The cops opened fire.
Sally-Jo ducked as the window beside her shattered. She picked up the Beretta from the seat beside her with her left hand and raised herself up just enough to be able to peek over the window frame.
She fired, a sustained burst which sent the cops diving for cover.
The ambulance lurched forward, the wheels scrabbling for purchase on the icy ground, then stalled again. The cops were taking cover behind the other ambulances.
The oxygen canisters lay on the asphalt, scattered like skittles.
As she twisted the key in the ignition again, and pressed down hard on the accelerator, Sally-Jo fired again, not directly at the cops but at the canisters, the ground around them dark with oilstains.
Whether she got lucky, she never knew. She thought she probably had.
One of her shots took off the valve at the top of a canister. She didn’t hear the hiss of escaping oxygen over the crash of the guns. But she saw the spark, then the colossal sheet of flame as the oil on the ground caught fire.
The ignition caught, and the ambulance took off.
Sally-Jo steered it at the gates, hearing the screams behind her, glimpsing the silhouette of a man on fire. One of the cops, she assumed.
In the rearview mirror, one of the ambulances was burning. It was the one that had collided with her. Its fuel tank had evidently been damaged by the impact.
It went up with a thunderous whoomp, a fireball of orange and black and shattering glass and tearing metal.
And she was out, through the gates, and screaming down the street beyond.
Chapter 38
Venn had drawn himself up into an awkward position, half-lying, half-slumping against the wall abutting the cab of the ambulance. He’d done so in a daze, reacting instinctively after the crashing blow to the side of the vehicle had buckled one of its walls. Equipment – oxygen masks, packets of IV fluids, surgical tools – scattered across the floor.
He was trying to get his bearings when the vehicle took a sudden lurch to the left and he was flung against the side wall, almost somersaulting.
Nausea clenched at his gut and he vomited, the spew splattering the floor. His vision doubled, and for an instant he was sure he was going to pass out once more.
When the vehicle seemed to be following a more or less straight course, he steadied his hands against a stretcher secured to the floor and tried to haul himself up to look out the window.
He couldn’t do it. His arms felt too weak, his body too leaden. He sagged back down.
He knew he was in the back of an ambulance, and no longer strapped down. He knew it had to be the woman driving it. And he’d heard some kind of explosion back there.
He heard sirens, high-pitched and angry, far away. Then another one started up, shockingly close.
He understood that it belonged to the ambulance he was riding in.
On his hands and knees, his head not clearing but if anything becoming woozier by the second, Venn crawled down the length of the ambulance to the rear doors.
He saw the street behind, weaving crazily.
Even if he had the strength to fling the doors open, the ambulance must be going at close to eighty miles an hour. He’d never be able to jump out without getting killed. Probably wouldn’t even be able to put out his arms to break his fall.
He sagged back against the side wall in a sitting position.
They’d get her before too long. A rogue ambulance wouldn’t be able to travel very far, especially one that looked as beat-up as this one, judging by the massive dent in the wall from where something – another car – had struck it.
All Venn had to do was hang on, and wait, and hope that when the cops closed in they managed to take her down cleanly, and not riddle the ambulance full of bullets, Bonnie and Clyde-style. Because then Venn’s number would be up.
The ambulance took another sharp turn, this time to the right, and Venn tumbled across the floor once more.
He felt the jolt as the vehicle stopped suddenly.
Again, he began to crawl toward the doors. He doubted he’d be able to get the jump on her, but it was worth trying anything.
Before he reached the doors, they opened. The cold predawn air came rushing in.
She stood there, ‘Sally-Jo’, Venn’s Beretta in her hand.
“Out, Joe,” she said, beckoning.
Venn lurched through the doors on his hands and knees, and fell hard onto the surface of a sidewalk. She grabbed him by the collar of his orderly’s overalls and hauled him firmly to his feet. He was astonished to find his legs supported him, though they felt like they belonged to somebody else.
“Walk,” she said.