Lethal Practice (32 page)

Stiffened by this reinforcement, I began to think a little more offensively. “Give me that card a second.” I reached for the phone. This time, with the help of information, I talked to another police station, near where we were going to play. They understood, and would be available to help. Easy. Cooperation assured. Of course the county cops had no idea I wasn’t really Detective G. Riley of the Buffalo police force.

Doug went upstairs to select the men he’d need for his part of our plan. I went downstairs and collected my waterproof hiking boots and changed into long underwear and heavy socks. I put my dress slacks and socks over the outdoor stuff so no watcher could guess my destination. I replaced my sport jacket with a heavy ski sweater and hid this with my regular topcoat and white scarf. The bush would ruin the coat, but it would be warm enough. I dumped out my doctor’s bag, actually more a small suitcase, and hid my boots in there. I added my computer disks and made sure I had all the keys and money I’d need. Finally I squeezed into a pair of black oxfords. To all appearances I looked city bound. Doug and I met quickly back in the kitchen, checked our watches, and he started getting the men he was taking with him ready to leave.

I wasn’t hungry, but I made myself heat up some soup. It was going to be a strenuous night. The cold itself would take its toll. The soup was tasteless but hot. I downed it like coffee and was out the door.

My first task was to lay a false trail. It was completely dark now, and the air was fresh with frost. I walked a block south to the corner of a main thoroughfare, where I grabbed the first cab I flagged. Buffalo still partied Sunday night to buffer facing the gloom of Monday, but it was early. I asked for the downtown train station, then watched as we entered the east end and passed by blocks of buildings long gone out of business and boarded up with plywood. A few stores remained lit up but were nearly empty of goods and not far from the inevitable slide to bankruptcy and more plywood.

The station, little more than a redbrick house, was a cruel testament to the abandonment of the train travel that was once so prevalent in this city. But it was where a lot of taxis could be found. I paid the fare without comment, hopped out with my briefcase, and walked up to the lead cab in the line. It was strewn in back with old mud-stained papers. I’d just passed cleaner versions using more recent editions, but to avoid a fight with the driver, I ignored them and jumped into his more lived-in offering. Besides, the bus terminal was only four blocks away.

The driver must have figured he had a real tourist who didn’t know the city, because I got another tour of plywood tombstones, in silence, before he finally deposited me back where I could have walked in three minutes flat. My tip evoked a slightly raised eyebrow. I didn’t ask for a receipt.

I ducked into the bus station. It was an overlit, echoing cavern designed for hordes coming and going. No one was leaving or arriving that night. Expectant vendors eyed me hopefully as I clacked across the tile floor. I felt their disappointment when I headed straight over to the Ellicott Street exit. Back outside I turned right, walked two blocks north to Clinton, and turned west. This brought me to the side door of a large hotel that squatted beside Lafayette Square. It had once been grand but now seemed faded among the refashioned buildings that surrounded it. A perfect place to hide out, I wanted my pursuers to think.

I slipped into the lobby. The interior was dusty and the carpet worn. Bored bellhops didn’t even look up. They’d come to take vacant rooms for granted.

I walked by the front desk without a glance and pushed my way out the revolving front door that jammed only a few times. The security guard eyed me suspiciously from where he was sprawled on a feeble-looking wooden chair reading the
Police News.

Back on the street, it took me three minutes to reach Main, where the tram cars ran. Here I would make sure no one followed.

Since
the
events in the morgue, it seemed pretty evident I was being stalked by more than one person.

I really didn’t care what they made of all my skulking about. I wanted them to see me running and perhaps assume I was trying to hide in the city. Or think I was trying to leave town but presume I’d head where a train or bus could take me. Their confusion would buy me time to get set up, yet I had to do more than confuse them. I had to really lose them, and here was my key move to accomplish that, if they were still out there, tracking.

I dropped ten quarters into the fare box, got a round-trip ticket, and then stood by the tracks for a northbound tram. As I waited, I looked up at the city hall building, a huge layered obelisk that bulked thirty stories over downtown Buffalo. The windows were narrow, pointed at the top, and set in deep vertical grooves running up the height of the walls. In the mist they resembled scales on loose folds of skin. The final hundred feet of the tower was eight-sided in shape, and the peak was a series of ever-smaller octagons stacked on top of one another to form a ridged hump. Decorative patterns of yellow and red had once been stained into the sand-colored stone, and the entire structure was touted as a monument to Art Deco. To me it always looked rather shabby and rusted, like the sides were about to slough off. Ironically, it was these upper floors that housed Zak, his staff, and the command center from where they dispatched ambulances in response to 911 calls. But instead of overlooking the city as a beacon of help, the place brooded in the fog. I shivered and glanced back down the darkened street behind me. I was still alone, yet I welcomed the distant bells of the approaching tram.

Once on board, I relaxed slightly. It was a three-car train less than half full, and for the next few stops we poked along the aboveground tracks through the theater district. I found the light and laughter as people got on and off briefly comforting. All too soon we went underground, where the tram picked up speed and I got ready. I let the first station go by and got off at Summer-Best. On this platform there were nearly as many people as I’d seen on the tram. At first I thought waiting for the subway had become a night out in itself. On closer look, the bags carried by these withered, dirty women told me I was in their home.

I stood at the platform’s end near the stairs. Across from me was its mirror image for southbound travelers. More people were gathering on both sides of the station, but the place was full of the hush that marks a crowd of strangers. I watched every newcomer on my side of the tracks but saw no likely candidate. Not surprising, since I’d no idea who
they
were anyway.

Another northbound train arrived first. I let it go by. A few people got off and went upstairs. Most of the people on the platform entered the train, were shut in and whisked away. The taillights and sound of the last car faded up the tunnel, leaving me alone with the bag ladies and their suspicious stares. This uneasy silence lasted until in the distance I heard the approach of a southbound train. I bolted for the stairs, ran over the crosswalk above the track, and descended on the other side just as the doors slid open for business. A quick glance behind assured me none of the bag ladies had followed. There was no one else. I felt an odd little spurt of elation. I had lost them.

Still wary, I jumped off the train after only one stop, ran up the stairs, found a cab, and gave him the mother lode of fares, at least in this city on this night.

Any initial sense of advantage began to fade as the city dropped behind us. The deserted highway led my cab south through the farmland toward the mountains. Some of the bungalows that had seemed so bleak midweek looked cozier. Through the lit windows of kitchens and sitting rooms, I caught glimpses of happy children bobbing around gray-haired elders. It reminded me of Sunday nights long ago on my father’s farm—family and neighbors gathered to share and lessen the worries.

My cab made a sorry comparison. The floor was littered with more wet, shredded newspaper. The driver looked concerned about what he’d gotten into and kept glancing nervously back at me, chewing his lip.

The plan Doug and I hatched at my kitchen table had seemed simple, plausible. Now, in the dark, and with increasingly cold feet, I had the feeling that same scheme was rapidly becoming pathetic.

“Could you turn up the heat back here?” I asked.

Without answering, the cabdriver grudgingly turned some dials on the dash and sent a blast of hot air directly into my face. It just made it hard to breathe and my feet seem colder.

“Thanks.”

He missed the sarcasm. He’d gotten over his first enthusiasm at the hundred I’d handed him in Buffalo. Out here on the highway, alone, it was little wonder he was visibly afraid. Someone in the city had recently taken to hunting cabbies. It had been a front-page headline recently that three had been killed in the last month.

I knew how he felt.

Waves of sludge from southbound traffic arched over the median and thudded onto the hood of the cab.

In the glow of theory, I’d thought coming south would be unexpected, that I’d be safe for a while, and Doug would have time to prepare for his part in what lay ahead. But I kept looking out the rear window and didn’t feel safe at all.

A heavy ridge of slush caught the cab’s front wheels, and we lunged back and forth until my reluctant driver regained control. I heard some muttering, but he didn’t dare turn his eyes from the road to give me an accompanying glare. His grip on the wheel was so tight, his knuckles were nearly white enough to glow in the dark.

My thoughts were no less erratic than the movement of the cab. The attacks had to have come from someone near me. They seemed based on an intimate knowledge of my life and where I was at work. Tracking me to the cabin, the move on me in the alley, the search of my house, the call to the morgue within minutes of my arriving at my office, unscheduled, on a Sunday; it all suggested they knew my movements. Whoever they were, they obviously could keep track of me from close by and remain unobserved. They also appeared capable of taking instant action. The person—or, now, I assumed, people—who wanted me dead must have been right in the thick of the attempts to kill me. It would probably be a hands-on killing, not an anonymous hit ordered through a chain of command. At least I’d know my killer when the time came, I thought bitterly.

But the elaborate setup with Watts betrayed even more. One of these killers knew modern resuscitation routines and techniques, knew how I’d react, and counted on my shocking myself into oblivion. Electrocuting myself. My pulse raced.

Evidently my death had to appear accidental now. They had to know Bufort was about to blame Fernandez for the murder of Kingsly and the derelict. Otherwise, why all the trouble and risk of staging the show at the morgue to make it seem like a bizarre yet deadly mishap, not another murder? I could just hear Bufort and Hurst explaining it. Tragic!” they’d say. “Obviously Dr. Watts had a cardiac arrest while working in his lab at the sink. He must have hit his head as he fell. Dr. Garnet, in his rush to defibrillate him, forgot to turn off the water and insulate himself. Terrible loss.” There’d be a lot of unanswered questions, but for sure Bufort and Hurst wouldn’t ask them.

Only someone at our meeting earlier that day could have known for certain that Bufort was holding Fernandez responsible for the murders. Was it Hurst? But if he had murdered Kingsly, would he now risk trying to kill me simply because I hadn’t accepted Fernandez as
the
killer? And while he might know how to use a cardiac needle, was he up enough on cardiac resuscitation to have pulled off such a cunning plan?

All this begged the real question: Why did whoever it was think I still had to die? Why didn’t they lie low and let Bufort’s closed mind do the rest? Somehow I was still a threat to them and could possibly, even probably, stumble across what had really happened. I looked at my briefcase on the seat beside me.

My plan in heading to the cabin this way was twofold— lose them long enough to find the secret of the ER stats and, after, use myself as bait to lure them into a trap.

More slush splatted across the windshield, then slid down like dirty egg whites. The wipers smeared this mess into a greasy film. Apparently our budget for the trip didn’t include windshield fluid. The driver just hunched farther down to peer through a bare spot. Like Quasimodo with a day job.

My questions raised even more gruesome possibilities. Was there a connection between the citywide increase in DOAs and the murders at St. Paul’s? Did my ER data hold evidence of an even blacker secret rotting in God only knew how many paupers’ graves? No! That was just too fantastic, too paranoid. But as my cab brought me nearer and nearer to where I’d intended him to drop me in the night, a little paranoia didn’t seem inappropriate.

I brought myself back to the odds. Doug’s precautions in case the attackers were able to watch the cabin presumed they’d have to do it from a distance. Otherwise the people who shared our road might spot them or their vehicle hidden in the woods. We’d also presumed they wouldn’t break in and wait in the cabin, since again they might be spotted by a neighbor.

In this cold, they’d have to have a shelter, a vehicle they’d turn on now and then for heat. Or a tent with some kind of heater, or fire.

At least that’s how it played back in my kitchen. Now, nearing my drop-off, the inside of my mouth blow-dried with the blast of the heater and my cold feet becoming unpleasantly metaphorical, the chances of our plan working out seemed to depend on a lot of assumptions being correct. If they weren’t, I’d probably end up dead.

We rose out of the farmlands and onto the dark, twisting road that started the climb into the mountains. The course of the black pavement ran back and forth like a metronome timing my thoughts. Occasionally the entire road disappeared into sheets of blowing snow.

My jovial chauffeur slowed and muttered, “Shit!” For a moment I feared he was going to dump me right there.

“It’s only another twenty minutes!” I implored, hoping for a shred of empathy. He didn’t bother with an answer but kept going.