by Tim Stevens
And flashbacks. Yes, the most classic symptom of them all. The sudden intrusions, almost hallucinatory in their intensity, of the events on that July night. They’d appear before her, around her, like malevolent serpents rearing out of nowhere, and at the most inopportune times: during ward rounds, meetings with colleagues, or even when she was riding the subway home. On those last occasions, she wouldn’t be able to hold her composure, and fellow passengers would shift away from her, cursing their luck at finding themselves in a confined space next to one of New York’s thousands of crazy denizens.
Beth understood the genesis of the problem. She’d been in a situation beyond the normal range of experience of most people. A gang of drug cartel members had ambushed her in her own home, kidnapped her at gunpoint, and held her hostage for more than twenty-four hours. And it didn’t help that two years earlier she’d undergone several days of prolonged torment during which she’d been shot at multiple times, pursued across several states, and witnessed the violent deaths of scores of people. Oddly, she’d coped better back then. But Dr Abrams had a theory that that experience had primed her, and all that was needed was a new trauma to tip her over the edge.
Beth knew Venn blamed himself for what had happened to her. And she could understand why. But she didn’t blame him at all. And if it wasn’t for him, the drug men would have killed her.
She supposed she’d recover, at least partially and given enough time. But she knew she wouldn’t get over it as long as Joe Venn was in her life. Seeing him, feeling him close to her, was enough in those first days after the event to bring the memories crowding and screaming back. And she couldn’t live her life like that. It wasn’t fair on her, and it wasn’t fair on Venn either.
Nobody was to blame for all of this, except for the drug gang itself, most of whose members were dead. Nobody else was to blame, nobody deserved to be punished.
It simply was what it was.
Beth turned right, in the direction of the East River, feeling its distant breeze against her face. It felt colder than it should have, and in a moment she understood, and reached up to brush away the wetness on her cheeks.
As she doubled back toward the coffee shop where she was meeting Venn, a thought struck her. All she had discovered in the past few days, everything she’d learned this afternoon... was she reading too much into it? Had the trauma affected her so badly that her judgment, her ability to distinguish fact from speculation, was being distorted?
Venn would know, she thought with a sense of relief. At the same time she felt a pang of guilt. Here she was, asking him to help her, to reassure her that she wasn’t delusional, after she’d rejected him, cut him out of her life. Who the hell did she think she was, anyhow?
There wasn’t time to wallow in bitter self-recrimination, because she’d reached the coffee shop.
Stepping through the door into the aromatic warmth, she saw that Venn was already there.
Chapter 4
A lot of professionals over a lot of years had tried to figure out what made Gene Drake tick.
He despised them all, to a man and a woman.
In many ways, Drake respected the cops who’d taken him down, and the wardens and guards in the numerous prisons he’d found himself locked up in, far more. None of them treated him like a fascinating case study, or even an object of curiosity. None of them appeared to give a rat’s ass about why he was the way he was, why he’d lived his life the way he had.
They saw him simply as bad news. A highly dangerous beast, who would always be a threat to society, and who therefore needed to be removed from society and kept as far away as possible.
Drake, on the other hand, viewed them merely as obstacles to his freedom. And they knew it.
They had clear, unambiguous views about Drake, and he had the same about them. And he liked that. As far as he was concerned, relations between people ought to be simple. That way, you knew where you stood.
Drake recalled one group counseling session he’d been forced to attend, early on in his incarceration at Horn Creek. He and five other inmates had trooped into a room that looked like a kid’s nursery. Brightly patterned wallpaper. Stinky pink flowers in a vase on a desk. There was even a box of toys – toys, for Chrissakes – against one wall.
The counsellor, Luke, must have been forty years old, but dressed like he was in kindergarten, with funky yellow jeans and sneakers and a Tee-shirt. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, leaving his balding forehead even more exposed, and a tiny diamond winked in one earlobe. He sat with his feet apart and his knees pressed together, as if he was trying to hide the fact that he had no balls.
He talked to Drake and his fellow inmates about the need to love yourself before you could love other people. He suspected the six prisoners were, deep down, unhappy people who’d done things that were very wrong, yes, but who hadn’t in the end chosen to do those things. The past couldn’t be undone, Luke said, but if every man in that room looked inside himself, he could discover who he truly was, and learn to make peace with that person, and make the future a better place for himself and for society.
Drake’s first urge was to launch himself across the room and knock the guy out of his chair. But the guards were just beyond the door, armed with batons and prods, and they’d be well aware of the potential for violence in this kind of situation. One suspicious move from Drake or any of his fellow inmates, and the guards would be on them and beating them into submission.
Instead, Drake and the other five played a little ‘joke’.
They attended the weekly sessions and actually paid attention to what Luke was saying. At first they were sullen, but gradually as the sessions went on they began to show an interest, to ask questions, to go along with the exercises the counselor set for them. Drake recalled sitting on the floor at one point with his arms wrapped tightly around himself, his eyes shut, murmuring over and over again, “Come out. Don’t be scared. Come out. Don’t be scared,” to his inner being. He’d never fought so hard before to keep a straight face.
Luke was delighted at their progress. At the end of each session he summed up what they’d achieved, with the help of a whiteboard on which he charted their collective ‘journey of discovery’. The journey was a rocky, hazardous one, with mountains and rivers and ravines along the way, all of them drawn by Luke in loving detail. But Drake and his peers had built bridges along the way, developed ‘creative solutions’ to overcome the numerous obstacles, and were proving themselves stronger for it.
Luke never mentioned anything about their sentences. He didn’t have to. They all knew good behavior during these sessions would have no bearing on how quickly they got out. The authorities weren’t dumb, even if Luke was. The criminal justice system wasn’t looking to rehabilitate any of them, just to keep them away from decent folks for as long as possible, in some cases for life.
So Drake and the other five cons had no obvious vested interest in cooperating with Luke. It wasn’t going to reduce their sentences. Which made their progress appear all the more genuine.
One week before the final scheduled counseling session, Drake and the other five guys went berserk. They did it in an apparently random but actually coordinated way, each in a different area of the prison to spread the chaos maximally. They set fires, stabbed and slashed other inmates non-fatally with homemade weapons, destroyed furniture. The guards got everything under control with relative ease, and Drake received one of the hardest beatings he’d taken since he’d come to Horn Creek.
But it was worth it.
He, and every one of the other five guys, said afterwards: “Luke made me do it.”
Drake never saw or heard from Luke again. But he heard, a couple of weeks later, that the counselor was no longer working at the prison.
After that, there were no further anger-management sessions. There was no more touchy-feely crap. The way Drake liked it.
Despite all of this, despite Drake’s contempt for people who spent so much time trying to unde
rstand and explain that they disappeared up their own asses, he couldn’t help wondering sometimes just what the hell was going on in Skeet Hoxton’s head.
Skeet sat up front in the SUV, alongside the driver, Walusz the Pole. After Drake had told them they weren’t going to the welcome-home party that had set up for him, that they were in fact going to head straight for New York, Skeet had lapsed into a silence that was interrupted from time to time by angry mutters. But it wasn’t words that were slipping out of his mouth. It was unintelligible sounds, tiny whoops and barks. Drake watched the man’s head give little twitches and jerks every now and again.
He and Skeet went way back. They’d met in Chicago’s Southside twelve years earlier, when Drake had been getting together a gang to knock down a branch of Wells Fargo. It wasn’t the kind of job you could exactly advertise with a flyer tacked to a lamppost, so Drake had put the word out through the underworld channels he had access to.
Hoxton had turned up in an acid-washed denim jacket and matching jeans, his lank yellow hair filthy, his eyes rolling and his teeth grinding. Drake had thought to himself, You gotta be kidding. He didn’t need junkies and crankheads with him on this gig. But, surprisingly, Skeet had proved himself remarkably lucid, and with a shrewd working knowledge of the security arrangements at the bank they were planning to rob. Drake took a chance and hired him.
The job had gone down with the minimum of mess. Drake had lost only two members of his fourteen-strong gang, shot dead by cops, and while Drake had to take a couple of hostages and of course kill them afterward, there were no dumb heroics on the part of the bank’s staff or customers, so Drake hadn’t had to create a mini-massacre just to get the situation under control. During the raid Skeet had shown himself both physically fearless and mentally fleet of foot. They’d gotten away with a smaller haul than Drake had been hoping for, in the area of one point two million dollars, but all in all it was a success. To this day, the heist had never been pinned on Drake or any of the others, which left Drake with a feeling of immense satisfaction.
Drake one, The Man zero. Although The Man had gotten his revenge since then, in spades.
After that, Skeet had become Drake’s sidekick and second in command. He continued to pump his body full of shit, which Drake didn’t like, but he remained dependable and often original in his idea, so Drake let the drug abuse slide. But there was something else about Skeet, something deeply wrong with him that had nothing to do with the meth and the speed. Sometimes, unexpectedly, his eyes would roll away and his lips move silently, his face contorting in a smile or a grimace. He was prone to inexplicable rages, during which he’d punch and bite anything he could get his hands on, animate or otherwise. Sometimes Drake and a bunch of other guys would have to restrain Skeet during these episodes, before he broke his teeth or smashed every bone in his hands.
Drake asked Skeet once what his problem was. Skeet was evasive, muttering something about a head injury as a kid and a titanium plate covering up a gap in his skull. Drake didn’t inquire any further.
Now, driving southeast though the night and away from Winnebago County, Drake turned his thoughts to the immediate future. Although there’d be no partying, there were a few things to take care of before they reached New York. He needed a shower to get the blood off him, that was for sure. They needed to meet up with the others, and pick up the guns.
Skeet calmed down a little, took out his phone, and began to make calls. Afterward he turned to Drake in the backseat.
“Okay. The others are headed for a motel fifty miles from here. You can get cleaned up there. the guns are further south, so we’ll go get them next.”
“Good.” Drake thought for a minute. “We’ll need at least one more car.”
“Got two more. Rosenbloom and the twins are making their way there separately.” After a pause, Skeet said, “So we all coming to New York?”
Drake considered it. Six of them. It was probably overkill, for what he had planned. But he wanted to make sure he did this properly, so a little extra insurance was a good idea.
“Yeah. All of us.”
“Road trip, man,” Skeet chuckled. “Like Jack London.”
“Kerouac,” said Drake.
“What?”
“You’re thinking of Jack Kerouac. On The Road.”
Skeet’s fingernails rasped over his unshaven jaw. He looked genuinely distressed. “No, man... you sure? Pretty certain it’s Jack London.”
Drake shrugged, letting it go. He didn’t feel like dealing with one of Skeet’s rages, not now they were driving.
Walusz was an excellent driver, fast and smooth. Drake let his head rest back against the seat and allowed some of the adrenalin to ebb, the tension to flow from his limbs.
He closed his eyes, and thought about the man in New York City he was going to kill.
Chapter 5
Venn’s breath caught in his throat when Beth walked in.
She’d been working all day, he assumed, and the responsibilities she carried were enormous. And even across the shop, he could see stress knitting the muscles of her brow and around her eyes.
But she still looked breathtaking.
Long auburn hair tied back, pale skin, blue eyes. A trim figure even her overcoat couldn’t conceal. That assured walk.
She’d already spotted him, and headed straight over. He stood.
“Beth,” he said, as if they’d happened to bump into one another.
She tried a smile but it didn’t fit. Shrugging off her coat, she dumped it on one of the chairs.
“You want coffee?” he said.
Her eyes dropped to the table. Venn had already bought a latte for her, the kind she liked. Beside the cup sat two sachets of Sweet ‘N Low and a stirrer, arranged neatly.
This time she did smile.
They sat, awkwardly, like a couple on their first real date.
“You smell of fish,” Beth said, wrinkling her nose.
Venn sniffed his hands. “Damn. Sorry.” And he was.
He waited for her to make the first move, watching her patiently. Beth didn’t exactly cast her eyes down, but she was clearly ill at ease. Venn glanced around the coffee shop. Maybe half the tables were occupied, and there was a four-strong queue at the counter. A low buzz of conversation ensured that they could talk quietly without being overheard.
At last, Beth murmured, “There’s something wrong at work. At the hospital.”
She took a sip of her coffee.
“You remember I’ve talked about M&M meetings?”
Venn nodded. The letters stood for Morbidity and Mortality. “Where you discuss patient deaths, things that went wrong, and your superiors bawl you out.”
Beth gave a half smile. “The idea is that it’s a mutual learning experience. But yes, everybody who presents a case there dreads it.” She drank more latte. “Anyhow. For the last three weeks, all of the M&M cases have been from three of the four teams. Mine and two of the others. The way it works is, each attending physician is encouraged to put forward at least one case each week for discussion, assuming there are any worthy of discussion. Most of the time, it means the four teams have approximately similar numbers. It varies from week to week, of course, but tends to average out.”
Venn studied her. “You said three of the four teams,” he said.
“Yes. It’s highly unusual for a team to go three weeks without having a single case to discuss. I got curious. Mostly because, if the other team was doing something exceptionally well, and avoiding screwups, then I wanted to learn from them.”
“Which team was it?” asked Venn.
“The attending is Olivia Collins.”
Venn searched his memory, then shook his head. “Nope. Don’t believe you’ve mentioned her before.” He had a fair understanding of what Beth’s work entailed, or as much of an understanding as a lay person could grasp. He knew a number of her work colleagues, either because he’d met them at social events outside the hospital or because Beth had told him a
bout them, but Dr Collins was a new name to him.”
“I haven’t had a great deal of contact with her, relatively speaking,” said Beth. “She’s been there a few years, but is a bit of a lone wolf. Not a team player. Runs a tight ship, and a good ward, as far as her reputation goes. Her interest is renal pathology, and most of her patients have kidneys disorders of one kind or another. Anyhow, a few days ago I decided to approach her, to congratulate her on not having any M&M cases recently and to ask just what she was doing differently than the rest of us.”
“And?”
“And, I recalled that she was away this week, attending a conference in San Francisco. So I found her head resident, Raj Pillay. I asked him.”
Beth paused again.
“His reaction wasn’t what I was expecting. He got defensive.”
“Defensive?”
“Yeah. His body language, for a start. He crossed his arms across his chest, half turned away from me. He muttered something about having had a lucky streak lately. Then excused himself and disappeared in a hurry.”
“Maybe he felt uncomfortable discussing his boss’ work while she was away,” Venn suggested.
“But why?” said Beth. “He ought to be proud of it. Besides, I know Raj. He was a junior resident back when I was a senior. We always got on well together. It’s not like him to be this tight lipped.”
“So what did you do next?”
“Next, I decided to do a little searching myself. It wasn’t anything underhand – the department’s statistics are on the network openly, for all of us to look at. So I pulled up all the stats I could find on our four teams for the past six months. Numbers of patients treated, death rates, cases referred on to the coroner. Those are ones where the cause of death is unclear, or negligence is suspected. And I discovered a major discrepancy. Dr Collins’ team has a significantly lower mortality rate among its patients than any of our other teams. Not just in the past month, but over the last six.”