But she wouldn’t be here for that.
There were a few old friends up in ICU whom she just couldn’t wait to see.
She climbed down out of bed and limped out into the corridor.
A quiet afternoon on her floor. Reminded her of the prison hospital, those days with D which she’d now—so strange to think—remember fondly, with a tinge of sadness even.
Lucy wandered down the hallway toward the elevators across from the nurses’ station.
No one noticed her, the nurses buried in chart work.
She punched the UP arrow and waited for the doors to split.
Stepped inside when it arrived, glad to see the car empty.
She hit number seven, the ICU floor, heard footsteps coming quickly out in the hall, a man’s voice asking for the elevator to be held.
“Too late,” she said, as she jammed her deformed finger into the CLOSE DOOR button.
She was just exiting the elevator when she saw a cop run into the washroom. Lucy watched for a moment, wondering what was happening.
A minute later, a patient stuck his head out and placed a stand outside the door.
DO NOT ENTER, RESTROOM BEING CLEANED.
Lucy had a hunch what was going on. Could she really have gotten this lucky?
Her hunch was confirmed a moment later, when the patient strolled out of the bathroom by himself.
His face was badly swollen, but Lucy knew who it was.
She knew it deep in the bones she still had left.
The door opened, and I turned, expecting to see Richie and Tony, but stood face-to-face with a monster instead.
I didn’t recognize him at first—his face so swollen and distorted.
But the eyes revealed him. The color had inexplicably changed from black to bright blue, but the intensity remained.
They’d contained some element of play in the few horrific moments we’d shared previously, but now they were all rage.
Luther Kite stepped over the threshold and came into the room, closing the door softly behind him with one hand as he pointed a gun at me with the other.
For a long moment, no one spoke.
Luther’s breathing was accelerated, from what I could only imagine was the exertion it had taken him to get past the two cops. I yelled for them.
“Hello, Jack. Tony and Richie aren’t going to answer.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
“You’re going to die not knowing.”
He was twitching, and I recognized the look. His calm demeanor was gone. This was a man on the edge, ready to plunge over.
I held up my hands, trying to buy some time. If he’d killed the cops outside, replacements would come. “You need me, Luther. You want me. You think I’m going to—”
“I’m over you, Jack. We could’ve been amazing together, but you and your friends screwed everything up. My God, how I’d love to spend several weeks killing you, but we’ll just have to make our brief time together count.”
He pulled a knife out of his pocket.
I thought quickly. Like all of the serial killers I’ve known, Luther was a grandiose narcissist, his ego off the charts. He chose me because he thought, in some warped bastardization of logic, that I’d appreciate his genius.
“You took his fingerprints,” I said, spreading my hands. “So the evidence had both your prints and Andrew’s prints on them. To make it look like you were killing together.”
Luther paused. “How’d you figure that out?”
“His are gone. You must have snipped them off. What did you do with them?”
Luther smiled. “Tanned them and then glued them on a pair of leather gloves. Important to keep them oiled, so they didn’t crack and dry up.”
Keep him talking, Jack.
“Why?” I asked. “Why frame Thomas?”
“Horror writer turns from writing about murder to actually doing it. Interesting story, don’t you think?”
“Were you ALONEAGAIN as well?” I asked, thinking back to the Andrew Z. Thomas message board and the reviews of his books on Amazon.
“You saw those? I hoped you would. But then, you don’t miss much, do you, Jack? But you did miss something. Maybe even the biggest secret of them all. Unfortunately, you’re going to die without ever finding—”
The door busted in.
I turned, expecting cops, but it wasn’t the police.
Instead, a horribly disfigured woman stood in the threshold clutching a gun in a three-fingered hand.
I’d never met her, but I knew this was Lucy. Donaldson’s partner.
For a second, it looked like she and Luther were going to shoot each other. But neither made a move.
“There’s another cop on the ward,” Lucy said. “We fire, no one gets out alive.”
“What makes you think I want anyone to get out alive, Lucy?”
“Don’t be stupid, Andrew. You’re too self-absorbed to want to die here.”
Andrew?
And then it hit me.
The pieces all coming together at once.
Andrew’s missing fingerprints.
Luther’s contact lenses and wig.
The odd ALONEAGAIN comments.
How he’d lured the agent, Cynthia Mathis, to Michigan.
The reason for putting Thomas’s books in the bodies.
The maniacal obsession with Dante.
Holy shit.
The man I’d known as Luther Kite was really Andrew Z. Thomas.
I looked at the bed. At the emaciated man lying there.
That wasn’t Andrew Z. Thomas.
That was…
“Hi, Luther,” Lucy said to the man on the bed. “Been dieting, I see.”
“Do we know each other?” he asked.
“I’ve had some cosmetic work done since I last saw you back at that convention. I’m Lucy. Remember? You got me out of that jam.”
The man on the bed—the real Luther Kite—smiled a hellish, toothless smile. “I remember, angel. Good to see you again. Is Andrew here responsible for your appearance?”
“Mine and yours.”
I turned and stared at…what was I supposed to call him?
“You’re the writer,” I said to the man pointing a gun in my face. “You’re Thomas.”
“That was a lifetime ago. I don’t write anymore. I pursue different forms of artistic expression. As you so well know, Jack.”
“How?” I asked. “How did this…?”
“Luther,” Andrew said, pointing his knife at the man on the bed while the gun stayed on Lucy. “He broke me. Just like I was trying to do to you, Jack. That was seven years ago. There was torture, of course. But the thing that changed me was what he made me do to Violet.”
I recalled Violet King. The burn scars on her arms.
“You did that?”
Andrew nodded. “Luther told me if I did, he’d free her. But then I got the upper hand. I gave as good as I got, didn’t I, Luther?”
“Yes, you did, Andrew. And then some. You’ve become quite accomplished. You’re a better me than me.”
I chanced another nervous glance at the door, wondering where the hell the cops were.
“It’s so strange, Jack,” the real Andrew said. “Suddenly realizing you have these…appetites, but not knowing how to satisfy them. I didn’t have the benefit of starting young, learning as I went along. I had to take a crash course in becoming a predator.”
His eyes were glazed, manic, like someone on speed. I thought about making a try for the gun, but his finger was tight on the trigger.
“So I studied other killers,” Andrew continued. “Studied their methods. Tried them on for size to see if they fit. I spent many long, intimate hours with Luther, picking his brain, coaxing out his secrets. In order to drain his bank accounts—his family was quite rich—I had to impersonate him. And I found that I liked it. Stepping into his cowboy boots and black jeans, putting on the wig and the contacts, sucking those god-awful Lemonheads he likes so much. I real
ized the best way to be me was to be him. So we switched places. Let him be Andrew Z. Thomas, and then I could be Luther Kite.”
This guy wasn’t just broken. He was wrecked beyond repair.
“Look, Andrew,” I said, “we need to—”
The shot was so sudden I didn’t know where it came from. A bright muzzle flash, the smell of gunpowder.
It was followed by another, and another.
Andrew crumpled on the floor, both knees blown out, his gun arm disabled, his curved knife skittering under the bed, Lucy standing over him, aiming a 9mm at his stomach.
“You used to be my hero,” she said. “I once drove six hundred miles to see the famous mystery writer Andrew Z. Thomas. Just to get an autograph. I used to be beautiful. And you turned me into a freak.”
Andrew groaned on the floor, struggling to reach his gun.
“This is for Donaldson,” she said, shooting him between the legs.
“Lucy!” I yelled, taking a step forward. “Stop it!”
“Back it up, lady.” She pointed her gun in my face while Andrew groaned and writhed on the floor. “I’ll deal with you in a second.”
I held out my hands. “He’ll rot in prison. You don’t have to do this.”
“Actually, I do.”
Where was that goddamn cop? “Please, Lucy. He took my baby.”
“Sucks to be you.”
“Lucy!”
The gun went back to Andrew. “Should have finished me off when you had the chance,” Lucy said.
“See…you…in hell,” Andrew croaked.
“Hell doesn’t exist, you dumb ass.”
She shot him in the head as he cowered beneath her.
“No!” I rushed forward.
Before I got to her, Lucy turned the gun on me again. “And now, for the encore.”
“Don’t,” Luther rasped, trying to sit up in bed. “She saved me, Lucy. Let this one go.”
“I’ve heard about her. Supposed to be a real badass. Why take a chance? You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Lucy bent down, tugged the pair of handcuffs off of Andrew’s utility belt, and then forced me at gunpoint toward the open door leading into the bathroom.
“Get in the shower, Jack.”
I stepped inside, and she tossed me the cuffs. If she’d killed me at that moment, I wouldn’t have cared. When Andrew died, so did my hopes of finding my daughter.
“You know what to do,” she told me.
“Lucy—”
“Bitch, I am running out of patience.”
I snapped a bracelet onto one wrist and clamped another to the shower handrail.
Then Lucy disappeared back into the room. I couldn’t see what she was doing, but it sounded like Luther was struggling up and out of bed. I heard her say, “They’re going to be here any minute.”
“Hold on. Push me to the bathroom.”
Lucy appeared in the doorway, Luther in a wheelchair. He stared up at me, his eyes black as night.
“Andrew lost his humanity,” he said. “But not completely. That’s why he failed. He left too many survivors. Survivors have a way of coming back and biting you in the ass.”
“Do you know where my baby is, Luther? Please.”
He paused, said, “Andrew always regretted what he did to Violet. To Violet and her son. That’s how a lot of us go astray. We all break things. But sometimes…” His tongue shot out, licking his thin, pale lips. “Sometimes we try to fix the things we broke.”
My last glimpse of them was Lucy pushing him away.
Then the door opened and shut, followed by shouts and another gunshot, causing my heart to skip a beat.
Phin’s guard?
Had he gotten Lucy?
Had she gotten him?
Or…God forbid…one of my boys?
I didn’t call out. There was no point. The shots had been heard by everyone in the adjacent floors, and word would be spreading fast around the hospital.
Less than a minute later, Harry and Herb were in the bathroom, both holding guns.
“Phin?” I asked.
“Safe,” said Herb. “You got a dead cop outside the door. Place is going crazy. What the hell happened?”
“Find a handcuff key.” I held up my arm, frantic to be freed. “We need to get out of here, Herb. I think I know where my baby is.”
• • •
After hearing Andrew’s story, it made perfect sense.
There was a risk to not calling the authorities first. A risk that weighed heavily on me during the long car ride. I didn’t want the SWAT team storming in, guns blazing. I’d seen that end badly before.
I just had to keep telling myself that my baby was safe, and that I’d get her back unharmed.
The boys had insisted on coming with me, even though they were in bad shape. The hospital made us all sign release forms saying we left against doctors’ orders. Phin was especially fragile, but keeping him away from going after his daughter was like holding back a flood with a single sandbag.
The drive was made both bearable and unbearable by Harry and Herb singing old Neil Diamond songs, egged on by their newfound bromance and some heavy-duty narcotic painkillers.
It was cute at first, but after the fifth rendition of “Song Sung Blue,” which neither of them knew completely, I was grinding my teeth hard enough to crush granite.
When we finally got to Peoria, I checked to make sure the cylinder of my Colt was full, even though I hoped I wouldn’t need it.
“Harry, Herb, the back. Take one of the universal keys. Phin, you should wait here.”
“Like hell.”
“You just had major surgery.”
He rolled his eyes like that was no big thing and then grabbed the other key.
The four of us extricated ourselves from my Juke and converged on the residence of Violet King.
It had to be her.
Andrew had been sending her his royalty checks.
Andrew had felt responsible for the loss of her baby.
Andrew must have had help to get out of those zip ties, and although the Detroit PD still hadn’t decrypted any of the footage he recorded, I knew in my gut who’d helped him.
The Sam Adams Cherry Wheat bottle had been the clincher.
And my hunch proved correct when I got up to the front door and heard the wonderful, musical sound of a baby crying.
Phin had stitches, and I wasn’t faring much better, so we brought along two universal keys—a paint can filled with concrete. One swing at the latch and the door burst inward.
We rushed in.
Violet was on her couch, my daughter cradled in her arms. She stared up at us, surprised.
The surprise quickly melted into sadness.
“Andy didn’t kill you all at the hospital,” she said.
“No. He didn’t.” Neither Phin nor I had drawn our weapons. “You’re the one that helped him escape.”
Violet nodded, her eyes welling up. “After what he did to me, he owed me. Is he dead?”
“Yeah.”
Another nod. “Was it those two? Lucy and Donaldson?”
“You sent them?”
I heard the sound of the back door breaking in.
“I told them they could kill Andy, but only after I got the baby.” Violet glanced down to look at the child in her arms. “She’s beautiful.”
“I know.”
Phin stepped forward, reached out his hands. Violet hesitated.
“She’s not yours,” I said. “She’s ours. Please don’t make this messy.”
After a tender finger stroke across the cheek, she handed the baby over, and Phin snuggled her up in the crook of his arm.
“Hi, there,” he said. “I’m your dad.”
“Got her!” I yelled. Herb and Harry stampeded in a moment later.
We all watched Phin hold her, everyone quiet for almost a minute, no sounds but our breathing and the crying of my little girl.
STIRRED Page 38