by John Case
When the chair came, they still had to wait for Pisarcik to call, saying that the wagon was waiting.
Dwayne’s part in the transfer would be to escort the prisoner to the main floor, where Pisarcik would meet them. There, the release papers would be signed, and the Fairfax County Police Department would take official custody of the prisoner.
Dwayne would ride with the prisoner in the wagon, providing an armed presence; Pisarcik would follow in a squad car. That was the procedure. At Fairfax they’d put Doe in another wheelchair, after which Dwayne and Pisarcik would escort him to the strong room. Then and only then would the prisoner be allowed to get to his feet. They’d put him in the strong room, and that would be that: the last he’d ever see of John fucking Doe.
Dwayne was heartily glad that this prisoner was finally being moved. It meant an end to his stint at what had to be the most boring assignment he’d ever had in his short career. For more than three weeks now he’d been sitting – just sitting! – for eight hours a day outside the guy’s door. His biggest excitement consisted of checking the credentials of every nurse and doctor who walked in. Checking them in. Checking them out. If he needed to relieve himself, he had to beep the floor nurse – which was embarrassing. He found himself cutting back on liquids. To top it all off, he didn’t even get lunch! They brought it to him. Hospital food, and he had to eat it sitting right there in his chair. Balancing the tray on his knees.
Of course, there was that one little nurse. Juliette. He was going to miss her.
The doctor did some kind of final check, Dwayne had to sign a floor release form, and there she was – little Juliette – helping John Doe into the wheelchair.
‘So how do you do this, exactly?’ the doctor asked him. ‘You take him in a paddy wagon?’
‘Actually, Doc, we don’t call ’em “paddy wagons” anymore,’ Dwayne said. ‘That’s, uh . . . racist to the Irish.’
The doctor laughed. ‘So what do you call them? What’s the politically correct term?’
Dwayne shrugged. ‘We just call it . . . you know, “the wagon.”’
The doctor laughed again. ‘Well, in that case, do you take him in the wagon?’
‘Depends. This guy? Yes. But sometimes – they go in the am-bu-lance.’
‘Looks like he’s ready.’
‘Rock and roll,’ Dwayne said, and pulling out his walkie-talkie, called Pisarcik to tell him they were on their way. Then he followed Juliette as she pushed the wheelchair toward the elevator. She was real sexy-looking from the back, Dwayne thought, but one of the other nurses said she was some kinda religious nut – so he could just forget about that.
Even so, when they reached the elevator, he pushed the Down button, turned, and gave her a little wink. You never knew. He just might get lucky.
The traffic was worse than Lassiter thought, and when the Acura pulled into the hospital parking lot, it was already a quarter of five. Lassiter left the car in a space reserved for ‘Hospital Administrator,’ and walked around to the side of the building. Outside the entrance to the emergency room, a tall policeman stood next to a large van with barred windows, smoking a cigarette.
‘Excuse me,’ Lassiter said. ‘You know an Officer Pisarcik?’
‘Inside,’ the cop said.
He hurried in through the automatic doors. The E.R. was busy and crowded, as it always was in the evening, and it took a while for Lassiter to get the nurse’s attention. ‘I’m looking for a police officer? Pisarcik?’
The nurse rolled her head toward the east corridor. ‘All the way down,’ she said.
He went the way she’d indicated, and found Pisarcik – who couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old – standing near the elevator with a walkie-talkie in his hands.
‘You can’t be here,’ Pisarcik said, ‘we’re moving a prisoner.’
‘I know.’
‘There’s another elevator on the south side.’
‘I’m Joe Lassiter.’
‘Oh,’ Pisarcik said. ‘How do you do?’ He hesitated a moment, and added, ‘You aren’t gonna . . .’
‘Do anything stupid? No. I just want to get a look at the guy.’
‘Gee, I don’t know, Mr. Lassiter. This area’s supposed to be cleared.’
‘Well, what if I –’
A burst of static crackled through the walkie-talkie, and Pisarcik turned his attention to it. ‘Pisarcik,’ he said.
‘I got the subject, ready to move. You clear down there?’
Pisarcik threw a wary glance at Lassiter, and said, ‘Yeah, we’re clear.’
‘Okay, we’re on our way.’
Pisarcik turned to Lassiter. ‘Would you mind standing over there?’
‘No,’ he said, moving away from the elevator. ‘I don’t mind.’ For what seemed a long while, the elevator light remained on 9. Lassiter leaned against the wall as Pisarcik paced back and forth with the walkie-talkie.
‘I got a meeting,’ the policeman said.
‘You mentioned that.’
‘I think I’m gonna be late.’
‘It’s not your fault. You’re working.’
Pisarcik spoke into the walkie-talkie. ‘Yo, Dubbayuh – what’s goin’ on?’
‘They had an emergency. Dude going down to radiology.’
‘We got a meeting.’
‘Here it comes back. We’re on our way down.’
Pisarcik turned to Lassiter. ‘They’re on their way down,’ he said. Lassiter nodded, his eyes on the elevator lights that indicated the floors.
8
7 ‘Dubbayuh says this is the most boring assignment he’s ever had,’ Pisarcik remarked.
6 ‘Really.’
5 ‘Yeah, he’s been sitting outside that room for almost a month. If he wanted to take a leak, he had to beep the floor nurse.’
4 ‘Huh,’ Lassiter said.
3 ‘I hope I don’t get an assignment like that. I’d be embarrassed – even if it was a nurse.’
3 Lassiter nodded, but the hairs were rising on the back of his neck. ‘Why’s the elevator stopped?’
Pisarcik glanced at the indicator lights. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s not supposed to, but –’
The light blinked off, the elevator lurched into motion, and they waited for the 2 to light up.
4
5 ‘What the fuck,’ Lassiter said, coming away from the wall. Pisarcik’s eyes were bigger now, and he almost shouted into the walkie-talkie.
‘Hey! Dubbayuh! What’s going on? Dwayne! Where are you, man?’ A burst of static was the only reply, and then the elevator reversed field for the second time.
4 - 3 - 2 - 1. The two men breathed a sigh of relief as the elevator shuddered to a halt in front of them. Then the doors parted.
A policeman was sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. His mouth was open in surprise, and gouts of blood rolled down the right side of his face. The wall was spattered. His gun was gone. And a ballpoint pen was buried to the hilt in his right eye.
Pisarcik took a step toward the body, hesitated for a moment, and, ever so slowly, sank toward the floor in what Lassiter realized, too late, was a dead faint. In his peripheral vision he saw the cop’s forehead smack into the tiles, but even then he couldn’t take his eyes off the dead man and the pen. With a ping! the elevator doors rattled toward one another, and Lassiter reached out, reflexively, to block them. Down the corridor, and from what seemed like a long way off, people began to shout. The elevator doors shuddered dramatically, retracted into the walls, and then shot forward a second time; and for the second time Lassiter shoved them back. Again. And again.
Somewhere, a woman screamed, Pisarcik moaned, and people started to run.
15
MUZAK.
Lassiter paced back and forth in front of the window in his office, trying to ignore the treacly sound that came at him through the cell phone at his ear. Riordan had him on hold, and –
Suddenly, the Muzak cut out. ‘We found her,’ Riordan
said.
‘Who?’
‘The nurse. Juliette-whatshername.’
‘She’s dead?’
‘No, she isn’t dead. She’s shaken up. Shakin’ like a leaf –’
‘So what happened?’
‘She says he whispered something – like he couldn’t talk? And the cop on guard, he comes closer, ’cause he can’t hear. Well, he wasn’t meant to hear, was he? The next thing, Grimaldi’s got him by the tie. Jerks him forward, and . . . suddenly there’s a lot of blood. Dwayne’s on the floor with a pen in his head and Grimaldi’s takin’ his gun. So says Juliette.’
‘Where’d he get the pen?’
‘Who knows? It’s a hospital. There’s pens all over the place.’
‘Then what?’
‘She takes him out in the wheelchair.’
‘Why the fuck –’
‘He’s holding a Glock! He’s got a blanket over his legs and a semiautomatic in his lap! You want her to argue with him? I don’t think so. She does what he says. She hits the override button, and they go to the third floor. Next thing, she’s wheeling him down the corridor to a second elevator. No big deal: they look like . . . what they are – a nurse with a patient. So they get in the elevator and go to the basement. Right about then the first elevator opens on the first floor and Pisarcik hits the deck. Next thing: Grimaldi’s in the parking lot.’
‘Just like that.’
‘Yeah. We even found the wheelchair.’
Lassiter dropped onto the couch in front of the fireplace. ‘Then what?’ he asked.
‘Then? Then she drove him where he told her to go. Which makes it federal. Armed carjacking. So now the Bureau’s involved.’
‘The more the merrier. Where’d they go?’
‘Toward Baltimore. Back roads. Only they never got there. He dumped her on a country road, five miles from Olney. Sheriff found her, walkin’ on the shoulder. We’re still lookin’ for the car.’
‘He can drive?’
‘I guess. From what she says, he can walk pretty good, too.’
‘Then why the wheelchair?’
‘Hospital policy. You roll in, you roll out.’
Lassiter fell silent.
‘You notice,’ Riordan said, ‘I’m not even askin’ what you were doin’ there.’
Lassiter grunted. ‘What about your partner? Pizarro?’
‘Pisarcik. Hey! He’s embarrassed! He’s got a concussion, everyone thinks he’s a pussy. But y’know what? He’s a good kid. He’ll be okay.’ Riordan paused and, even over the phone, Lassiter could hear the gears shift in the back of his head. ‘Lemme ask you something,’ Riordan said.
‘What?’
‘You sure you don’t have something for me? I mean, maybe you said something – to somebody else – inadvertently . . . about the prisoner being moved?’
‘. . .’
‘Hello?’
‘I’m not even going to answer that.’
‘Look, it’s not like movin’ him was a state secret,’ Riordan said. ‘We got people on the force, people in the hospital, people at Fairfax. A lotta people knew. Maybe one of them said somethin’. Maybe you did.’
‘Right,’ Lassiter said, his voice coagulating with sarcasm.
‘Anyway . . . the doctors say this guy’s gonna need help.’
‘What kind of help?’
‘He needs treatment. And antibiotics. Some kinda special ointment they use for burns – lots of that. We’ll get the word out. Maybe we’ll get lucky.’
‘He could be anywhere by now. He could be in New York –’
‘Doesn’t matter where he is. With an officer murdered, you’re gonna get a whole different level of cooperation. Plus, you got the feds involved. And it’s not like this sonofabitch is going to blend in.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because he’s Italian – really Italian – and his face is a mess. And it’s always gonna be a mess. People look at him? They look away. But they look. Y’know?’
‘Yeah. Like an accident.’ The two men lapsed into silence for a moment. There was something nagging at Lassiter, in the back of his mind, and finally it became a thought. ‘How come she had the keys to her car?’
‘What? Who? What are you talkin’ about?’
‘The nurse. Why’d she have the keys to her car? The women I know don’t keep keys in their pockets. I mean – she’s on duty, right? Women keep keys in their purse, a desk, whatever they have in a hospital – a locker.’
‘Maybe her shift’s over, maybe she’s on her way out to the car to get something. Probably, she just had them.’
‘You’ll ask?’
‘Yeah, sure.’
‘I just don’t think a nurse, on duty, would carry around a bunch of keys all day.’
Riordan was silent for a moment, and then: ‘I don’t know. It’s an interesting question. So we’ll ask her, but – she probably just had them, y’know?’
‘Yeah. I know. I’m sure it’s just . . . one of those things. But don’t forget to ask her. Because, what happened is: your case just unsolved itself.’
Lassiter stayed in the office until late that night, eating Thai takeout straight from the carton, sitting at his desk. A button beside his knee controlled a panel in the wall that concealed a bank of three television monitors – an architectural modification of the previous tenants, who’d made campaign ads for Dan Quayle. Lassiter touched the button with his knee, and the panel slid to the side.
The news at eleven began with a burst-transmission of frenetic music. Grimaldi’s mug shot flashed onto the screen and the anchorman declared that ‘a daring escape leaves a police officer’s family in mourning – and a killer among us.’ The pronouncement was followed by an ad for the Washington Post (‘If you don’t get it, you don’t get it!’), and finally ‘the lead story.’
This consisted of a series of stand-ups. A perky blonde (one ‘Ripsy’) did her bit from the vantage point of the hospital parking lot, looking terrific next to an overturned wheelchair. Then it was ‘Over to you, Bill,’ and the camera segued to a middle-aged white guy with bloodshot eyes and too much hair; he was standing on a darkened road ‘not far from Olney.’ He talked about the nurse’s ‘harrowing ordeal,’ after which the lens moved to Michelle, a soft-spoken black woman, who sat in a Reston town house with the barely composed mother of Dwayne Tompkins – a woman who regarded the camera with a terrible blank stare and seemed unable to speak.
Lassiter watched the segment with chopsticks in one hand and a beer in the other. He found it hard to pay attention to what was being said. There was something about television that drained just enough reality from catastrophe to make it palatable at dinnertime. His sister’s death, his nephew’s serial cremation, Grimaldi’s escape – somehow, television processed these calamities and turned them into a kind of entertainment. Or, if not entertainment, then ‘grist for the mill,’ background noise, something other than what it really was, which was . . . personal.
He was thinking about this in a distracted way when he noticed that each of the reporters was wearing the same scarf, or the same kind of scarf – a black and tan plaid that had a peculiar, homogenizing effect on their dissimilarities. It occurred to him that, however different the reporters looked, they were all a part of the same tribe: the Burberry Nation. The Wa-Burberrys.
He smiled at the thought, but the smile quickly faded when he realized that this was exactly the kind of smart-ass observation that Kathy used to make. Irritated, he switched off the television, turned out the lights, and drove home, thinking, At least Riordan’s back on the case. And that depressed him even further: Jesus, he thought, talk about a search for silver linings . . .
He found it hard to get to sleep. He couldn’t shake the sound of Pisarcik’s head hitting the floor, or the image of the pen in the dead cop’s eye.
Worse, he tossed and turned with the knowledge that Grimaldi might not be caught a second time – which meant not only that the killer would go unpunished, but that he
would never know why his sister and his nephew had been slaughtered.
Ciao.
Eventually he fell into a fitful sleep, and when he did, he dreamed about Kathy and, in particular, about something that had happened when they’d been kids.
Kathy was maybe twelve, and he was seven. They were in Kentucky, out on the lake in the rowboat, more to stay away from Josie than anything else. Kathy was sunk down in the bow of the boat, reading a magazine. She had new prescription sunglasses, white frames picked out two weeks before her birthday, the finished product delivered on that date. She’d loved those sunglasses, wore them all the time, even inside, and even at night.
In the boat the glasses were pushed up on top of her head while she read; she stood up and somehow knocked them overboard. He could still hear her scream; he could still see the glasses swaying down through the water. It seemed the easiest thing in the world to retrieve them. But despite the fact that Kathy jumped right in after them, and both of them returned with snorkels and masks – and spent hours searching – the glasses were gone.
In the dream, he was swimming underwater, and he spotted the sunglasses, sitting on the bottom of the lake, stems crossed, as if Kathy had put them down on a table. He dove and dove, but the gleam always turned out to be a chunk of quartz, a can of Bud, a trick of the light. In the end he always came up to the surface with nothing. And when he woke up, he had the feeling, now as then, that he’d let his sister down.
When he came into work the next morning, Freddy Dexter was hanging Christmas decorations on a tree in the lobby. Seeing Lassiter, he shoved a box of ornaments into the receptionist’s hands and chased after him.
‘What’s up?’ Lassiter asked.
‘Glass,’ Freddy said, looking pleased with himself.
‘What?’ Lassiter looked at him.
‘The little bottle,’ Freddy said, reminding him.
‘Oh, yeah. We can talk in my office.’ They went through the door, one after another, and Lassiter gestured to a chair. Sitting down at his desk, he picked up the phone. ‘You want some coffee?’
Freddy shook his head. Lassiter hung up the phone, leaned back in his chair and waited. Finally, Freddy cleared his throat. ‘Turns out,’ he said, ‘glass is more interesting than you’d think.’