Bleeders

by Anthony Bruno

  She felt a hand on her shoulder, looked up, and saw Barry Krieger.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “How are you feeling? You should go to the hospital.”

  She suddenly thought of her father. Where was he? And Cindy. Were they all right? She tried to take off the mask, but the EMS worker held it in place.

  “Easy, hon’, easy.”

  But Trisha waved her off. “Where’s my father? And my sister?”

  “Right behind you, hon’. Everybody’s safe.”

  Trisha turned around and saw her father and Cindy lying side-by-side on stretchers, both wearing oxygen masks. A third EMS worker, a small woman Trisha’s size, tended to them. Cindy seemed to be alert, but Dad’s eyes were closed. Trisha zeroed in on his exposed chest. His shirt was open, and she immediately thought the worst.

  “Did my father have a heart attack?”

  “No, no, no, hon’. Nothing like that. We just had to check his vitals. He’s okay.”

  “They’re just doing their jobs,” Barry said.

  She reached out to her father and gripped his ankle. She stared at his chest, searching for signs of trouble, refusing to take their word for it. Then out of the blue something occurred to her.

  “Dad! Dad!” she said.

  His eyes shot open at the sound of her voice. He lifted his head and reached out to her.

  She scrambled to her knees and held his hand. “Dad, do you have it?”

  “What?” he said through the mask. “Do I have what?”

  “The scrap of paper! With the code and phone number. To get the foundation money back. He put it inside your shirt when you were tied up. Remember?”

  His eyes widened as it came back to him. He frantically felt inside his shirt, then sat up and pulled out the tails. Nothing. He looked over the sides of the stretcher. “Did you see something fall out of my shirt?” he said to his EMS worker.

  She shook her head. “No sir. I didn’t. Now please lie back and relax.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll find it,” Trisha said but only to calm him. She had no idea where it could be, and she knew Lassiter would never just give them those numbers again. He’d use it as a bargaining chip in exchange for reduced charges, and she wasn’t about to let that happen. The man who murdered her mother deserved no leniency.

  She stared out at the empty street and spotted the officer who had escorted her. He was on the sidewalk twenty feet away with a group of SWAT cops, holding his helmet and guzzling water from a clear plastic bottle.

  Trisha ripped off her mask and ran to them. “Did any of you recover a small piece of newspaper with numbers written on it? It was inside my father’s shirt.”

  The men shrugged and shook their heads.

  “It’s very important,” she said.

  Her escort wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “When I cut the tape off your father, I think I did see something fall out of his shirt. It wasn’t in his pocket, though.”

  “No, it was inside his shirt.”

  “Then it’s still in there. But no one can go back in. Con Ed says there’s a fifty-fifty chance it’ll blow before they can disperse the gas.”

  “I need those numbers,” she said, more to herself than to him. Without them, Lassiter wins, she thought. He killed my mother and now he’ll destroy my father. He’ll be killing tens of thousands of impoverished children. She had to go back in there. She had to find that piece of paper.

  She started walking toward the house, her stocking feet on the black pavement.

  “Where the hell does she think she’s going?” one of the SWAT officers said.

  Trisha broke into a trot.

  “Hey! Hey! Agent McCleery! Where you going?” they called after her.

  But she didn’t look back.

  “Trisha!” Barry Krieger shouted from the rear of the ambulance. “Agent McCleery! Stop!”

  She glanced over her shoulder. He was walking briskly toward her. “Agent McCleery! I’m ordering you to stop.” He picked up his pace and started jogging.

  She sprinted forward.

  “Agent McCleery!” He was right behind her. “I’m ordering you to stop.” He got a hand on her shoulder and grabbed her blouse, but the silky material slipped out of his grasp. They were running full tilt.

  “McCleery, stop!” He reached out to grab her again and got a handful of blouse.

  She pulled away and ripped her sleeve, pouring on the speed.

  “Stop her!” he yelled in her wake.

  A big athletic-looking cop appeared in her peripheral vision. He charged at her from the side and threw his arms around her waist, dragging her to a stop. Instinctively she raised her arms and dropped her weight, slipping through the bear hug and falling into a squat.

  She jumped back up and ran as fast as she could. The big cop pursued but couldn’t catch up.

  She ran past the Con Ed truck. The men in the HAZMAT suits tried to wave her off, warning her to stay away, but in their protective gear they were too slow to stop her.

  The front door was wide open. She dashed up the stone steps and ran inside. The smell of gas was powerful, stronger than she remembered. Her temples started to throb. Her headache was back, worse than before.

  She went to the staircase that led to the basement, and her chest tightened. It seemed like a bottomless well. The walls could close in and crush her. She froze, afraid to go down.

  But when she heard shouting coming from outside, she knew they were coming in to get her. She held her breath and descended the stairs as fast as her legs would carry her, holding the walls on both sides.

  She ran into the room with the bed, relieved to be out of the stairwell, but the smell was overpowering, and she started to cough. She scanned the floor, looking for the scrap of paper. The light was dimmer than before, very little coming in through the smashed windows. She reached for the wall switch to turn on the overhead lights, but just as her fingers touched the plate, her hand recoiled as if she’d touched a hot stove. Lights make sparks.

  She saw the remnants of duct tape on the floor and the torn scarves on the bed. She saw the ax and her shoes. A spasm of coughing squeezed her lungs. She forced herself to keep her eyes open. Where the hell was it?

  The portrait on the shade had ripped almost in half and now hung crooked. The eyes seemed to be looking up and away. Trisha couldn’t stop coughing so she buried her face in the comforter, hoping for some relief, but it didn’t help.

  Under the bed, she thought. Look under the bed.

  She slid to her knees and put her cheek to the floor. It was dark under the bed, and it took her eyes a moment to adjust, but she thought she saw something. She thrust out her hand, but it was just out of reach. She got her head and shoulder under the frame and tried again, and this time she was able to grab it. A ragged strip of newspaper. She worked her way out and still on her back held the paper up to the dying light from the windows. She could make out two series of numbers—an international phone number and a ten-digit code. She dropped her head back, relieved. Her body went slack, and she could have drifted off to sleep right there.

  “Get up,” she said out loud. “Get up and get out.”

  Fighting total exhaustion, she rolled over and got on her hands and knees.

  “Get up,” she said.

  Hanging onto the bed for support, she climbed to her feet.

  “Go. Don’t stop.”

  She stumbled toward the staircase, fighting to keep her eyes open. She was about to go up when she spotted something on the floor near the ax, something bright green. Lassiter’s cigarette lighter.

  “Evidence,” she murmured and stumbled toward it. She squatted and used the only thing available, the scrap of newspaper, to pick it up. She wrapped the paper around the lighter to preserve his fingerprints a
nd stuffed them in her pocket.

  She turned to go but suddenly felt so light-headed she had to hold the footboard to steady herself.

  “Go,” she mumbled. “Go.”

  Her legs wobbled, but she managed to make it to the staircase. She looked up, and an image flew into her brain. A deep-sea diver exploring the hull of a sunken ship, squeezing into impossibly tight spaces that she might not be able to escape from. Panic flooded her chest, and her heart slammed like a jackhammer.

  “Go,” she said. “Just go.”

  She got down on her knees and began to crawl up the stairs, keeping her head down and looking only at the step right in front of her.

  “Keep going,” she whispered. “Keep going.”

  She tried to drive the scary images out of her head—herself in scuba gear, trapped inside a sunken ship, running out of air—but the more she tried not to think about it, the more vivid the horror became. She glanced up and saw that she was only halfway up the stairs. Tremors shook her limbs, and she couldn’t will herself to go any farther.

  Think of something else, she screamed in her head. Anything!

  She touched her pocket and felt the piece of paper around the lighter, and suddenly she thought of the large photos in her father’s living room, the pictures of smiling children from around the world, kids his foundation has saved. Mentally she strolled through the room, stopping at each photograph, recalling the faces.

  “For them,” she whispered. “Go.”

  Her legs moved, her knees treading up the steps. She used her hands to pull herself up like climbing a ladder.

  For them, she thought. She closed her eyes and kept going. In her mind she wasn’t in Lassiter’s townhouse. She was in her father’s living room, the house she’d grown up in. She kept moving, crawling from photo to photo, smiling at the smiling faces she saw, coughing and smiling.

  “Hey!”

  She opened her eyes and saw a skin diver looking back at her, a man in a face mask.

  “Give me your hand,” he shouted, his voice muffled.

  Panic paralyzed her. She was trapped underwater.

  “She’s over here!” the man shouted. He grabbed her wrist and pulled her up. His wet suit was yellow, and he had a silver air tank on his back. She was at the top of the stairs. He got her to her feet and helped her out to the foyer, and when she saw his partner, also dressed in yellow, she realized they weren’t divers, they were the Con Ed workers in their HAZMAT suits.

  In a panic she felt her pocket, worried that she’d lost the paper and the lighter, but they were still there.

  “Take me to my father…” she whispered, gasping for breath, “… and my sister… right away…”

  That’s when she lost consciousness.

  Chapter 26

  “Mangia, Trisha! You’re so skinny. Eat!”

  Adele Cardinalli held out a tray of mini cannoli, crusty sweet pastry shells with creamy fillings in a variety of flavors—vanilla, chocolate, pistachio, and hazelnut—each one drizzled with chocolate syrup.

  Trisha sat on a sofa in Adele’s living room between her father and sister, and her eyes crossed just looking at the rich pastries. “Adele, I can’t eat anymore. I’ll explode.”

  Adele rolled her eyes. “I would think you’d be a little more careful with that word, sweetheart.”

  Everyone in the room laughed. It was five days after the ordeal at Lassiter’s townhouse, and Adele had invited a “small group” to her apartment for “drinks and nibbles” as she’d written in her invitation. The “small group” turned out to be over 40 people, including Trisha’s father, Cindy, Assistant Chief Colleen Franco, Pete Warwick, SWAT Commander William Booker, Detective Diego Soto, hostage negotiator Paul Weinberg, the SWAT team who’d rescued the McCleerys, the two Con Ed guys, and select members of the Orchid Club—the ones who didn’t call Adele the “Ravioli Queen” behind her back, Trisha suspected. And though the food was served on small plates and presented on trays like hors d’oeuvres, it was more than an Italian wedding—all kinds of delicacies, including salami and cured ham, cheeses, Roman artichokes, ravioli, manicotti, sausage, meatballs, eggplant parmagian, veal piccata, fried calamari and smelts.

  “It was a miracle that building didn’t blow up,” Adele said. “Here’s to the young men from Con Ed who kept that from happening.” She toasted the two utility workers with a chocolate cannoli.

  The guests gave them a round of applause. They were both rugged-looking and fireman handsome—one in his mid-thirties, the other maybe just thirty. They hoisted aperitif glasses of sambuca and smiled their appreciation for the recognition.

  Colleen Franco raised her espresso cup. “And let’s not forget the one who risked her life to facilitate the capture of Mr. Lassiter. Once again, here’s to you, Agent McCleery.”

  Trisha blushed. This was the fourth toast she’d received that night. The coffee table was stacked with newspapers proclaiming her extraordinary heroism in front-page stories. She was on the cover of People magazine, and she’d received eager messages from several book publishers and literary agents wanting to know if she would write a book, offers she politely declined because active federal agents cannot publish anything related to their work if they intend to stay on the job, and she had no intention of retiring.

  “Our streets are a little safer tonight,” Franco said, “now that Drac is behind bars.”

  Pete caught Trisha’s eye from across the room and sent her a sardonic half smile. They were thinking the same thing. Franco, who had been nothing but Cruella DeVille toward Trisha during the investigation, had become sweet as pie since the arrest. The woman was a political animal, and she knew the value of standing in the limelight with the “Drac Slayer” as the Gazette had dubbed Trisha.

  Adele set down the tray of pastries on the coffee table and wedged in next to Trisha on the sofa. “So, Colleen, what’s the deal with Lassiter? Is he gonna get the chair or what?”

  “Good question, Adele. Technically this state still has the death penalty on the books, but a court ordered moratorium is in effect and a criminal hasn’t been executed here since the mid-seventies. However, I would—and will—lobby to reinstate it in Lassiter’s case if he’s deemed competent to stand trial and he’s convicted in a court of law.”

  Spoken like a true politician, Trisha thought. She had no doubts that Franco would eventually run for some elected office.

  “And what about that young fellow who worked for Lassiter?” Adele asked. “Shugrue? Is that his name? What gonna happen to him?”

  “Richard Shugrue was not charged with any crimes and has been released,” Franco said. “He’s agreed to testify against Lassiter if he’s needed.”

  “So he knew about the murders?” Adele said.

  Franco shook her head. “We’re confident that he had no knowledge of the homicides. His testimony would be used in a civil case for financial malfeasance if one is brought against him.” Her gaze settled on Michael McCleery.

  “I’m discussing it with my lawyers,” he said. “The phone number Lassiter gave us was out of service, and who knows if the code is valid. I’ve been told we’ll probably never recover those assets.”

  A shocked hush fell over the room.

  “But,” Michael continued, “the good news is, a consortium of wealthy philanthropists led by George Soros and Bill Gates have offered to give us enough capital to keep our anti-poverty initiatives going. Their contribution is only about a third of what we had, but it’s a beginning. My intention is get back to where we were. And if a civil suit can get some of that money back, all the better.”

  He started to tear up. “I know Lassiter will never be tried for the murder of my wife. Not enough evidence, they tell me. But I’m not interested in revenge. I just want to keep helping kids.”

  Trisha hugged him. Cindy patted her ha
nd.

  “I’m okay,” he whispered.

  “We’re all okay,” Cindy said. “Thank God.”

  “Well, for what it’s worth,” Franco said, “we’re pursuing additional charges against Lassiter in connection with the disappearance and presumed murders of two individuals suspected of insider trading. One way or another, we’ll get him.”

  The gathering became more subdued as people divided into smaller, quieter conversation groups, the cops forming one, the Orchid Club ladies forming two others. Coffee cups were refilled, and Adele brought out another bottle of sambuca when the first one was finished. Cindy was swept up into one of the discussions, as was Michael.

  Trisha noticed the Orchid Club women checking her father out, and there was no reason why they shouldn’t. He was handsome, intelligent, wealthy from the ongoing royalties on his songs, and had lived a fascinating life. She even caught Colleen Franco sneaking a few surreptitious glances. Trisha had heard that Franco was divorced and figured she was in the market for a rich husband to bankroll her political ambitions. Well, dream on, Colleen, Trisha thought. Her father had dated several women over the years—some of them pretty wonderful—but he had told her a long time ago that he just couldn’t see himself getting married again. Whenever the subject came up, he always joked that he was married to his charity and already had millions of kids around the world to support. Trisha would like to see him happy with someone, but she had mixed feelings about dealing with a stepmother and not because she assumed the woman would turn out to be a witch. Whoever that person was, she just wouldn’t be her mother.

  As the party continued, Trisha was dragged from one group to another, meeting new people and immediately forgetting their names. She was the center of attention, the person everyone wanted to congratulate, but inside she felt isolated, as if she were watching things through an astronaut’s space suit, there but not there. She wondered if she was fated to feel this way for the rest of her life—a keen observer but never a participant. She would like to have someone special in her life, too, but after misreading Lassiter so badly, she had to question her judgment when it came to looking for love.