Sigma Curse - 04 (26 page)

The engine started at once. Sally-Jo floored the accelerator and the ambulance leaped off the starting blocks with a judder of protest.

She had to swing left to aim in the direction of the hospital gates. In doing so, she had a view of the ER entrance through her window.

Cops, lots of them, maybe six or seven, were sprinting out across the lot, their guns emerging in their hands.

It spooked her, and she banked the wheel a little too sharply. The ambulance’s tires skidded on something – ice, maybe, though she’d seen pools of oil on the surface – and the vehicle fishtailed.

She fought to control it, veering close, too close, to another ambulance that was pulling away from the ER entrance, its lights flashing, no doubt on the way to some new emergency. She saw the driver’s face, his mouth stretched wide in horror, before the ambulance slammed into the side of hers.

The impact was glancing rather than direct, but it sent her vehicle yawing to one side. She heard clanging behind her, looked back, saw the other ambulance stalled with its hood buckled and steam pouring from underneath. Behind it, a couple of metal canisters had bounced out the open doors and onto the asphalt.

Sally-Jo oriented herself, saw the hospital gates over to her right. To her left, the row of cops was advancing, some of them kneeling, their guns leveled at her.

“Step out of the vehicle,” one of them yelled.

Sally-Jo’s ambulance too had stalled with the impact. She turned the key, heard the engine groan into life.

The cops opened fire.

Sally-Jo ducked as the window beside her shattered. She picked up the Beretta from the seat beside her with her left hand and raised herself up just enough to be able to peek over the window frame.

She fired, a sustained burst which sent the cops diving for cover.

The ambulance lurched forward, the wheels scrabbling for purchase on the icy ground, then stalled again. The cops were taking cover behind the other ambulances.

The oxygen canisters lay on the asphalt, scattered like skittles.

As she twisted the key in the ignition again, and pressed down hard on the accelerator, Sally-Jo fired again, not directly at the cops but at the canisters, the ground around them dark with oilstains.

Whether she got lucky, she never knew. She thought she probably had.

One of her shots took off the valve at the top of a canister. She didn’t hear the hiss of escaping oxygen over the crash of the guns. But she saw the spark, then the colossal sheet of flame as the oil on the ground caught fire.

The ignition caught, and the ambulance took off.

Sally-Jo steered it at the gates, hearing the screams behind her, glimpsing the silhouette of a man on fire. One of the cops, she assumed.

In the rearview mirror, one of the ambulances was burning. It was the one that had collided with her. Its fuel tank had evidently been damaged by the impact.

It went up with a thunderous whoomp, a fireball of orange and black and shattering glass and tearing metal.

And she was out, through the gates, and screaming down the street beyond.

––––––––

V
enn had drawn himself up into an awkward position, half-lying, half-slumping against the wall abutting the cab of the ambulance. He’d done so in a daze, reacting instinctively after the crashing blow to the side of the vehicle had buckled one of its walls. Equipment – oxygen masks, packets of IV fluids, surgical tools – scattered across the floor.

He was trying to get his bearings when the vehicle took a sudden lurch to the left and he was flung against the side wall, almost somersaulting.

Nausea clenched at his gut and he vomited, the spew splattering the floor. His vision doubled, and for an instant he was sure he was going to pass out once more.

When the vehicle seemed to be following a more or less straight course, he steadied his hands against a stretcher secured to the floor and tried to haul himself up to look out the window.

He couldn’t do it. His arms felt too weak, his body too leaden. He sagged back down.

He knew he was in the back of an ambulance, and no longer strapped down. He knew it had to be the woman driving it. And he’d heard some kind of explosion back there.

He heard sirens, high-pitched and angry, far away. Then another one started up, shockingly close.

He understood that it belonged to the ambulance he was riding in.

On his hands and knees, his head not clearing but if anything becoming woozier by the second, Venn crawled down the length of the ambulance to the rear doors.

He saw the street behind, weaving crazily.

Even if he had the strength to fling the doors open, the ambulance must be going at close to eighty miles an hour. He’d never be able to jump out without getting killed. Probably wouldn’t even be able to put out his arms to break his fall.

He sagged back against the side wall in a sitting position.

They’d get her before too long. A rogue ambulance wouldn’t be able to travel very far, especially one that looked as beat-up as this one, judging by the massive dent in the wall from where something – another car – had struck it.

All Venn had to do was hang on, and wait, and hope that when the cops closed in they managed to take her down cleanly, and not riddle the ambulance full of bullets, Bonnie and Clyde-style. Because then Venn’s number would be up.

The ambulance took another sharp turn, this time to the right, and Venn tumbled across the floor once more.

He felt the jolt as the vehicle stopped suddenly.

Again, he began to crawl toward the doors. He doubted he’d be able to get the jump on her, but it was worth trying anything.

Before he reached the doors, they opened. The cold predawn air came rushing in.

She stood there, ‘Sally-Jo’, Venn’s Beretta in her hand.

“Out, Joe,” she said, beckoning.

Venn lurched through the doors on his hands and knees, and fell hard onto the surface of a sidewalk. She grabbed him by the collar of his orderly’s overalls and hauled him firmly to his feet. He was astonished to find his legs supported him, though they felt like they belonged to somebody else.

“Walk,” she said.

He saw the East River before him, the lights of the Brooklyn Bridge stretching away in the distance.

*

“P
rove it,” the woman said. “Prove to me you really understand me. That we’re soulmates.”

Venn stared at her, not because he didn’t understand, but because his movements were still delayed by the anesthetic. But she seemed to take his expression for incomprehension.

She indicated with the Beretta, then pointed to the icepick she’d dropped at his feet. Venn looked at it. Then looked at the bum.

They’d found him huddled under the bridge, swaddled in filthy, rotting linen. At first Venn thought he was dead, but when Sally-Jo nudged him with her foot, he stirred and gazed up blearily. A bottle of methylated spirits in a paper bag poked out of his fist.

“Do it,” said Sally-Jo. “Look at him. He’s a violator.”

The bum was too far gone to say anything. But he blinked at the gun in the woman’s hand, and something close to fear flickered in his eyes above his matted beard.

Venn stood a couple of yards away from the bum, the river lapping at the concrete slope near his feet. His arms hung limply at his sides.

He was so tired.
So tired...

“Joe.” She took a step toward Venn, the river at her back. “Do it. For me. For
us
. It’ll be the final sign. The final bond between us.”

Venn stooped, felt the ground rush up toward him, and almost threw up again. he steadied himself with a hand on the concrete bank and groped for the icepick with his other. Straightening up was almost as difficult as stooping had been.

The bum burbled something, tried to sit up, but couldn’t.

Venn was ten feet from Sally-Jo. Under normal circumstances, he might –
might
– have considered rushing her, opening with a feint of some kind. She had the gun, but it hung down carelessly at her side. But he knew his reflexes would fail him, and he’d more than likely end up on his ass, or in the river.

And he wouldn’t get a second chance.

He raised his head, gazed at the woman.

“It’s not this man you want to kill.”

His voice sounded thicker even than it had down in the basement earlier.

“It’s Frank.”

Her face hardened in the dim light reflecting off the river.

Venn let the icepick drop from his fingers, heard it clatter on the bank and roll down.

“You’ll never be free from Frank unless you kill him.”

She said: “I can’t.”

“Then he’ll always be a part of you.
Always.
”

“He isn’t a part of me!” For the first time since she’d abducted Venn, he heard her raise her voice. “He’s already dead!”

“I don’t think so, Sally-Jo,” said Venn.

He risked a step toward her. Felt the ground unsteady beneath his feet.

“You tried to kill him once before, didn’t you? Out there in Switzerland.”

Her eyes were wide with dread. “Don’t say it,” she hissed.

“At the Sigma clinic. Five years ago.”

It had been in the text message Fil had sent him, just before Sally-Jo had attacked him.

The Sigma clinics specialize in gender reassignment surgery. The best in the world.

Sex changes.

“You felt afterward that you’d violated, butchered Frank. That’s the reason for all of these killings. You’re punishing people who have abused their bodies, trying to expunge your own guilt, for abusing your own.”

“You’re wrong,” she whispered, taking a step forward herself. “I’m a woman. I’ve always
been
a woman.”

“Maybe you are now,” said Venn. “And maybe, psychologically, you’ve always been one, too. But you once had a man’s body. Frank’s. And however much you desired to get rid of it, you still feel you violated it. That’s why you leave the Sigma brand on their foreheads. It’s a reference to the place where the ultimate violation, the original sin, was carried out.”

Her whole body was shaking now. Her head, too.

“Dale Fincher knew about you, didn’t he?” Venn pressed on. “When you were stationed together. He knew you were Sally-Jo, trapped inside Frank. And you loved him. He wasn’t gay, was he? Just an insecure young man who fell in love with you, with Sally-Jo, but couldn’t get over the fact that you looked the way you did. He recognized you that night in the bar, didn’t he? Saw that his Sally-Jo had come back. In her real body this time. But he had to die, because he had no respect for his own body. He cut himself.”

As he spoke, he felt his strength returning, degree by degree, assisted by the bracing cold coming off the river. Overhead, the sky was starting to lighten almost imperceptibly as dawn advanced, and Venn felt he was drawing strength from this too.

He took another step forward, mindful of the slipperiness of the bank’s sloping concrete. There was now no more than a four-foot gap between them.

“Frank’s still alive, Sally-Jo. And he always will be. Because he’s your past, and the past never goes away.”

She opened her mouth, let it hang like that.

“So you have a choice. Kill Frank, now. End it forever. Or kill me, escape, and live with Frank for the rest of your days. Always with you, always controlling you.”

She lifted the Beretta. Turned it. Placed the barrel to the side of her head.

Venn gave a faint nod. “He’ll try and talk you out of it. Don’t listen to him, Sally-Jo.”

He watched her finger tighten on the trigger behind the guard.

Her eyes seemed to focus inward.

As if she was... listening.

She brought the gun down and toward Venn even as he lunged for her, his reflexes still slow, terribly slow, and for a moment he thought he’d misjudged it and he was going to go flailing past her and then she’d have the drop on him and it would all be over.

But his fist connected with her forearm, with the tender plexus of nerves beneath the skin, and she hissed and grabbed her arm and Venn seized the Beretta’s barrel and jerked it loose from her fingers.

He fumbled with it, trying to turn it round. As he did so, Sally-Jo turned and began running down the bank.

Her flat shoes sloshed in the water where the river met the flat part of the bank. Venn got the Beretta’s stock in his hand and tried to focus on her as she bobbed and weaved into the distance.

“Stop,” he called, his voice weak one more.

She began scrambling up the slope of the bank toward the wall at the top.

Venn crouched, because he felt more stable hunkering down, and drew a bead on her figure.

He wouldn’t be able to make it up after her in time. Although he heard sirens, frantic and multiple, they sounded far away.

She reached the wall at the top and swung her leg over it.

Venn thought of her torment, the unimaginable mess her mind must have been for all these years.

Then he thought of Harmony, in hospital, pulled back from death by the narrowest of margins.

He fired, again and again, emptying the Beretta.

The woman peeled back from the wall, dropped onto the concrete bank and slid down, tumbling over and over like a rag doll, before landing in the water with a heavy splash.

Venn lowered the gun. He shifted so that his butt was on the bank. Over to his right, the homeless guy had pulled himself to a sitting position and was staring, his mouth moving soundlessly.

Venn closed his eyes.

There’d be Teller, soon, and questions.
Lots
of questions. More than he felt he could cope with.

There’d be Harmony, too, in the ICU, weakened but alive.

And there’d be Beth.

His eyes still closed, Venn smiled.

––––––––

J
oe Venn returns in
Epsilon Creed
.

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