Sigma Curse - 04 (25 page)

Except back then, each time, he’d awoken in a comfortable hospital bed, and had been allowed to drift off again, returning a little more each time and at his own speed.

The woman’s lips moved again. “What’s your name?” Her voice was a soft murmur.

He didn’t answer. Didn’t know if he was capable yet of speech.

Something hovered between his face and the woman’s. His vision contracted and he focussed on it.

The steel circle of a gun barrel was poised inches from his eye.

“What’s your
name
,” she said, even more quietly this time.

Venn swallowed, wincing at the dryness in his throat. He made a sound that wasn’t a word, but more like a hoarse choking noise.

He tried again, slowly, enunciating each syllable carefully, but still rasping. “Detective Lieutenant Joseph Venn. NYPD.”

It didn’t all come out clearly, but he thought she got the gist.

As the woman moved more fully into the thin light cast by the nearest bulb overhead, Venn took stock. His limbs weren’t immobile just because of the drug he’d been injected with. There were restraints, straps of some kind, across his chest and his belly and his arms and legs. Given enough time, and enough energy, he’d be able to wriggle loose. But there was a gun aimed at his head, and a bullet would move faster than he ever could, by an order of infinite magnitude.

“The woman in ICU,” she said. “Detective Jones.”

He watched those pallid eyes, behind the gun.

“She never said anything, did she? Anything about who shot her?”

Venn found even his thoughts were sluggish, crawling after one another one by one. He tried to grasp what the woman was asking, and
why
she was asking it.

He remembered that Harmony had been shot. That he’d told Teller to put out the word that Harmony had identified her shooter as a man.

This woman was here to kill Harmony.

Testing his dry lips with the tip of his tongue first, Venn said: “No. She’s in a coma.” His words sounded slurred to him. “She never woke. We made all of that up.”

The woman’s lips parted further in a silent
aah
. She gave the faintest nod, as if she understood.

“The doctors think she isn’t going to make it,” Venn said.

It was a gamble, but one worth taking. The woman was probably going to kill him. But if he led her to believe that Harmony wasn’t a threat to her, after all, she might leave her alone.

His mind struggled to pull itself into a coherent whole, but his thoughts felt like sludge. It would be so much easier just to close his eyes, and sink into the warm oblivion of sleep...

Venn drove the knuckles of his fist into his thigh, hard, the pain dragging him back into the room.

Concentrate.

Remember what you’ve learned about her.

The woman was watching him intently. Studying him, in fact. Her eyes crawled over his face painstakingly, like a scientist examining a specimen in a jar.

A thought, seemingly random, flitted through Venn’s mind. Something he’d said to Fil.

So it’s about self-harm, in some way... abusing your body...

Yes. That was it. That was the key.

Venn said, “I understand. I know why you’re doing this. I’m pure.”

Her pale eyes took on a new look. One of wonder.

“Sure, I’ve taken a few knocks,” Venn continued, wondering distantly where all this was coming from, since he didn’t seem to have a lot of control over what he was saying. “I’ve got scars. But I’ve taken care of myself. I’ve respected what God’s given me. And I know how important that is to you, too.”

Now the wonder in the gray eyes segued into something else. Venn couldn’t be sure, but he thought it was...
apprehension
. As though she realized for the first time she was up against something she couldn’t quite believe.

“The disgusting wino in the alleyway,” said Venn. “The fat heap of lard, O’Farrell. Dale Fincher, who took a razor blade to his wrists. The Peters woman. She wasn’t kidding anybody. Once a dirty junkie, always one.”

A rim of white appeared around the pale irises as the eyelids flared. The face inched closer above the gun barrel. Venn noticed for the first time that the gun was a Beretta. His own.

Keeping his voice low for effect, Venn murmured: “And Rickenbacker. Hard-nosed, tough-talking. But she was poisoning herself. Breathing in toxins, deliberately. There was nothing tough about her. She was weak, just like all the others.”

The Beretta’s barrel lowered a fraction more. For the first time, Venn could feel the woman’s breath on his face, its rhythm quick.

“But you and I are different. We know, and appreciate, the value of the body. We’re better than all of them.”

All the while, Venn had been tensing the muscles of his arms against the straps that held them down, holding the contraction for a few seconds, and then relaxing again. Tensing and relaxing, over and over again.

He needed just one arm free. The right arm, nearest to her. If he could get that out, she was close enough to him that he might have a chance at driving her nasal bones up into her skull. It would need to be a perfectly-timed blow, but he’d done it before.

His voice had dwindled to a whisper. “You see, there
are
people who understand. Not many of us. Maybe nobody else but me. But I do. I
understand
.”

Venn felt his wrist slip against the material of the strap covering it. Just a couple of millimetres, but it was progress.

A minute more. If he could spin this out one minute more, he’d be able to free his arm.

The woman lowered the Beretta completely.

She stepped back,
well
back, and the frustration screamed in Venn’s head.

She reached her arm into the shadows.

When her hand came back into Venn’s field of vision, she no longer held the Beretta.

Instead, the light winking off its tip, he saw an icepick.

––––––––

H
e understood.

The awe broke over Sally-Jo like a waterfall, threatening to bowl her over and drag her under.

And he did understand. He wasn’t bluffing. It was there in his eyes, and in the words he was saying.

She felt tears trembling on her lower lids, threatening to spill over, and blinked them away.

She hadn’t needed to show him the photos. The pictures of Frank, before and during and after the butchery. The images of holy places: churches, synagogues, mosques.

He understood, deep in the fibre of his being, that the body was a temple. And that what had been done to Frank was a violation, a sacrilege, of monstrous proportions.

She twisted the icepick this way and that, watching the end gleam in the dull light from the ceiling bulbs.

He didn’t look afraid. His eyes weren’t even on the icepick, but on hers.

She expected to see acceptance in his gaze. But instead, she was unsettled to note an intensity there. An urgency.

He would be the last. She’d said that before, about Rickenbacker. But she’d been wrong about Rickenbacker, too. This man, Detective Lieutenant Joseph Venn, was the one she’d been looking for all along.

Fate had brought him to her.

She didn’t have the branding iron with the sigma symbol on her. It was out in the car, in the rucksack she’d stowed under the seat. But that didn’t matter.

After this, she’d never have to think about that hated symbol again.
Ever.

She knew the man had been working one of his arms free. He was a cop, after all, and cops didn’t just lie around waiting to die. But she knew he was still sluggish from the propofol, and wouldn’t be able to free his arm in time.

Nonetheless, as a precaution she pulled the strap tight again with her free hand.

She lowered her face and the icepick in tandem, so that she was peering into his eyes around the upright sliver of metal.

“Thank you,” Sally-Jo whispered.

And he murmured back: “I know everything.”

She paused.

“I know about Sigma. And Franklin Gray. Frank, I guess you call him.”

She heard her own breathing in the silence, a counterpoint to the soft rumble of the hospital through the walls.

He said: “You don’t need Frank any longer. You need
me
.”

Her breathing stopped. When her body reminded her, she let out the air in a great, sighing gasp.

His eyes flicked sideways. “They’re coming. The cops. They’ll have noticed that I’m gone, and they’ll be calling my phone. I guess you’ve gotten rid of it, but they’ll find it sooner or later.” His eyes burned into hers. “We have to get out of here. You and me. Right now.”

Her eyes darted away from his, around the dim, dingy basement storeroom.

“What’s your name?” he said.

She stared at him.

Mouthed her name, so softly she didn’t think he’d hear.

But he said, “
Sally-Jo.
Yes. I like it. It fits you perfectly.” His gaze roved over her face, just as she’d studied him a few minutes earlier. “There’s lots I need to learn about you, Sally-Jo. I’m Joe, by the way. Sally-Jo. Joe. They’re similar. I don’t think it’s a coincidence, do you?”

She straightened, the icepick still in her hand but hanging down by her side. She felt utterly confused. Trapped, like a rabbit in a snare, with the hunters closing in.

“We can beat this,” Joe said, quietly but with urgency. “I’m the only one that knows about you. They’ll never find you, because they only have Frank’s fingerprints. His DNA. And Frank’s gone now. Forever. So they’ll never find him, either. Don’t you see? It’s perfect.”

Her head reeled, like it was taking a physical beating.

“But we’ll only do it if we get out now.
Right now.
” His gaze flitted around the storeroom. “I’m guessing we’re in the basement. That doesn’t leave a whole lot of exit routes. Once they come looking down here, it’ll be too late for both of us.”

A voice sounded in Sally-Jo’s inner ear, low and warning. Frank’s voice.

He’s tricking you. Don’t listen to him. Kill him, and get out of there.

On the gurney, Joe said, “Give me some more of that sedative, if you don’t quite trust me yet. But you have to act
now
, Sally-Jo. Wheel me out of here and up to the first floor. Take us out to the ambulance bays. Once we’re outside, we’ll have more options.”

No
, said Frank.

“The hell with you,” Sally-Jo whispered, possibly aloud.

She picked up the syringe from the shelf.

––––––––

T
he ambulance bay was a broad stretch of asphalt along the west side of the hospital building, located just beside the entrance to the Emergency Room. Sally-Jo had worked in the ER during her training, and she’d been out there to receive incoming emergency cases at all hours of the day and night.

She wasn’t prepared for it to be so busy, not at just after five in the morning. At least four ambulances sat outside the ER doors, while paramedics unloaded stretchers of tightly-wrapped bodies as if on a production line. The condensation from the ambulance crews’ breath in the freezing air formed a fug as thick as the clouds you saw when office workers congregated on a fire escape to smoke.

Some kind of traffic accident, she supposed, with multiple casualties.

It didn’t matter that there were so many people. In fact, it would take the attention off her.

She’d pushed the gurney, laden with its cargo, through a reception area, and had spotted an overcoat draped over the back of a plastic chair. Without breaking her stride, she swept up the coat and shrugged it on, heading for the doors, expecting an angry voice to yell after her. But none came. The overcoat was a man’s, and stank of stale booze, so perhaps it belonged to some drunk who’d gone off to pee.

Before leaving the basement storeroom, she’d found a length of bandage among the supplies crammed on the shelves, and had swathed Joe’s head in it until only his nose and mouth were visible. It wasn’t much, but it might prevent anybody she encountered – any cops – from recognizing him as she passed.

She’d shoved his gun inside her uniform, between her waist and her belt. As Joe had guessed, she’d disposed of his phone before going down into the basement, dropping it into the gap between the elevator and the floor.

Keeping her head ducked low once again, against the cold as much as to avoid somebody recognizing her, Sally-Jo pushed the gurney past the throng of people outside the doors. Nobody so much as glanced at her.

Seven or eight ambulances stood over in the bay, their engines shut off. A couple of personnel stood around, chatting, looking like they were coming to the end of their shift and winding down after a busy night. She steered the gurney in a wide arc around them.

As she reached the ambulances on the far side of the parked fleet, she caught something at the corner of her eye, and glanced round.

The two ambulance crew members were staring after her.

Sally-Jo knew she had to move.

She stopped behind the nearest vehicle and seized the rear doors and opened them. Nobody inside. She put the brake on the gurney and reached under the blankets covering Joe and undid the straps securing him. Then she hopped up into the back of the ambulance and grabbed him under the shoulders and slid him off the gurney, dumping him without finesse on the floor of the vehicle.

Sally-Jo leaped down. At that moment, one of the EMTs appeared, striding toward her.

“Hey,” he called. “What are you –”

Without pausing, she drew the Beretta from inside her uniform and shot him in the chest from ten feet away.

The blast bounced off the outer wall of the hospital building and came echoing back. The man took three rapid steps backward, his face contorted in shock, before he dropped to the asphalt.

Behind him, a woman screamed. The second EMT.

Sally-Jo brandished the gun in her direction, though she didn’t stop to take aim because she was running for the cab of the ambulance. The woman dove out of sight, behind one of the other vehicles.

Pandemonium was breaking out from in front of the ER as Sally-Jo climbed up into the driver’s seat. She saw the keys in the ignition, and uttered a silent prayer to a God she’d long ago lost faith in.