Strangers (35 page)

“You’re making a mistake.”

“Maybe I am, my friend. Maybe. But…then why do I feel so good?”

Chicago, Illinois

Dr. Bennet Sonneford, who had operated on Winton Tolk yesterday subsequent to the shooting at the sandwich shop, ushered Father Wycazik into a spacious den, where the walls were covered with mounted fish: marlin, an immense albacore, bass, trout. More than thirty glass eyes stared sightlessly down upon the two men. A trophy case was filled with silver and gold cups, bowls, medallions. The doctor sat at a pine desk in the shadow of a forever-swimming, open-mouthed marlin of startling proportions, and Stefan sat beside the desk in a comfortable chair.

Although the hospital had provided only Dr. Sonneford’s office number, Father Wycazik had been able to track down the surgeon’s home address with the aid of friends at the telephone company and police department. He had arrived at Sonneford’s doorstep at seven-thirty Christmas night, effusively apologetic about interrupting holiday celebrations.

Now, Stefan said, “Brendan works with me at St. Bernadette’s, and I think very highly of him, so I don’t want to see him in trouble.”

Sonneford, who looked a bit like a fish—pale, slightly protuberant eyes, a naturally puckered mouth—said, “Trouble?” He opened a kit of small tools, choosing a miniature screwdriver, and turned his attention to a fly-casting reel that lay on the blotter. “What trouble?”

“Interfering with officers in the performance of their duties.”

“Ridiculous.” Sonneford carefully removed tiny screws from the reel housing. “If he hadn’t tended to Tolk, the man would be dead now. We gave him four and a half liters.”

“Really? That isn’t a mistake on the patient’s chart.”

“No mistake.” Sonneford removed the metal case from the automatic reel, peered intently into its mechanical guts. “An adult has seventy milliliters of blood per kilogram of body weight. Tolk is a big man—one hundred kilos. He’d normally contain seven liters. So when I first ordered blood in the ER, he’d lost over sixty percent of his own.” He put down the screwdriver and picked up an equally small wrench. “And they gave him another liter in the ambulance before I saw him.”

“You mean he’d actually lost over seventy-five percent of his blood by the time they got him out of that sandwich shop? But…can a man lose so much blood and survive?”

“No,” Sonneford said quietly.

A pleasant shiver passed through Stefan. “And both bullets lodged in soft tissue but damaged no organs. Deflected by ribs, other bones?”

Sonneford was still squinting at the reel but had stopped tinkering with it. “If those .38s had hit bone, the impact would’ve resulted in chipping, splintering. I found nothing like that. On the other hand, if they were
not
deflected by bone, they should’ve passed through him, leaving massive exit wounds. But I found them lodged in muscle tissue.”

Stefan stared at the surgeon’s bent head. “Why do I have the feeling there’s something more you want to tell me, but that it’s something you’re afraid to talk about?”

At last Sonneford glanced up. “And why do I get the feeling that you’ve not told the truth about your reasons for coming here, Father?”

“Touché,” Stefan said.

Sonneford sighed and put the tools away in the kit. “All right. The entry wounds make it clear that one bullet hit Tolk in the chest, impacted with the lower portion of the sternum, which should’ve snapped off or fractured; splinters like shrapnel should’ve pierced organs, vital blood vessels. Apparently, none of that happened.”

“Why do you say ‘apparently’? Either it happened, or it didn’t.”

“From the entry wound in the flesh, I
know
that bullet hit the sternum, Father, and I found it lodged harmlessly in tissue on the other side of the sternum; therefore…somehow…it passed
through
that bone without damaging it. Impossible, of course. Yet I found just an entry wound over the sternum, the undamaged bone directly under the wound—and then the bullet lodged inside behind the sternum, with no indication how it had gotten from one place to the other. Furthermore, the entry wound of the second slug was over the base of the fourth rib, right side, but that rib was undamaged as well. The bullet should have shattered it.”

“Maybe you’re wrong,” Stefan said, playing devil’s advocate. “Maybe the bullet entered just slightly off the rib, between ribs.”

“No.” Sonneford raised his head but did not look at Stefan. The physician’s uneasiness still seemed peculiar and was not explained by what he had said thus far. “I don’t make diagnostic errors. Besides, inside the patient, those bullets were lodged where you’d expect them to be if they
had
hit bone, had punched through, and had had the last of their energy absorbed by the muscle. But there were no damaged tissues
between
the point of entry and the expended slugs. Which is impossible. Bullets can’t pass through a man’s chest and leave no trail at all!”

“Almost seems as if we have a minor miracle.”

“More than minor. Seems like a pretty damn
major
miracle to me.”

“If only one artery and vein were injured, and if both were only nicked, how did Tolk lose so much blood? Were those nicks big enough to account for it?”

“No. He couldn’t have hemorrhaged so massively from those traumas.”

The surgeon said nothing more. He seemed gripped in the talons of some dark fear that Stefan could not understand. What had he to fear? If he believed that he had witnessed a miracle, should he not be joyous?

“Doctor, I know it’s difficult for a man of science and medicine to admit he’s seen something that his education can’t explain, something that in fact is in opposition to everything he had believed to be true. But I beg you to tell me everything you saw. What are you holding back? How did Winton Tolk lose so much blood if his injuries were so small?”

Sonneford slumped back in his chair. “In surgery, after beginning transfusions, I located the bullets on the X-rays and made the necessary incisions to remove them. In the process, I found a tiny hole in the superior mesenteric artery and another small tear in one of the superior intercostal veins. I was certain there must be other severed vessels, but I couldn’t locate them immediately, so I clamped off both the superior mesenteric and the intercostal for repair, figuring to search further when those were attended to. It only took a few minutes, an easy task. I sewed the artery first, of course, because the bleeding was in spurts and was more serious. Then…”

“Then?” Father Wycazik urged gently.

“Then, when I had quickly finished stitching the artery, I turned to the torn intercostal vein…and the tear was gone.”

“Gone,” Stefan said. A quiver of awe passed through him, for this was the thing he had expected—yet it was also a revelation of such astounding importance that it seemed too much to have hoped for.

“Gone,” Sonneford repeated, and at last he met Stefan’s gaze. In the surgeon’s watery gray eyes, a shadow moved like the half-perceived passage
of a leviathan through the depths of a murky sea, the shadow of fear, and Stefan confirmed that for some inexplicable reason the miracle occasioned dread in the doctor. “The torn vein healed itself, Father. I
know
the tear had been there. Clamped it off myself. My technician saw it. My nurse saw it. But when I was ready to sew it up, the rent was gone. Healed. I removed the clamps, and the blood flowed again through the vein, and there was no leakage. And later…when I excised the bullets, the muscle tissue appeared to…knit up before my eyes.”

“Appeared to?”

“No, that’s an evasion,” Sonneford admitted. “It
did
knit before my eyes. Incredible, but I saw it. Can’t prove it, Father, but I know those two slugs
did
smash Tolk’s sternum and shatter his rib. They
did
send bone fragments through him like shrapnel. Major, mortal damage
was
done, had to have been. But by the time he was on the table in surgery, his body had almost entirely healed itself. The shattered bones had…reformed. The superior mesenteric artery and the intercostal vein were severed to begin with, which is why he lost blood so fast, but by the time I opened him, both vessels had knitted up except for a small tear in each. Sounds crazy, but if I hadn’t moved to repair the artery, I’m sure it would’ve finished closing on its own…just as the vein did.”

“What did your nurse and other assistants think of this?”

“Funny thing is…we didn’t talk much about it. I can’t account for how little we discussed it. Maybe we didn’t talk about it because…we’re living in a rational age when the miraculous is unacceptable.”

“How sad if true,” Stefan said.

With the shadow of dread still shimmering anemonelike in the depths of his eyes, Sonneford said, “Father, if there is a God—and I’m not admitting there is—why would He save this particular cop?”

“He’s a good man,” Father Wycazik said.

“So? I’ve seen hundreds of good men die. Why should this one be saved and none of the others?”

Father Wycazik pulled a chair around from the side of the desk in order to be able to sit near the surgeon. “You’ve been frank with me, Doctor, so I’ll be upfront with you. I sense a force behind these events that’s more than human. A Presence. And that Presence isn’t primarily concerned with Winton Tolk but with Brendan, the man…the
priest
who first reached Officer Tolk in that sandwich shop.”

Bennet Sonneford blinked in surprise. “Oh. But you wouldn’t have gotten such a notion unless…”

“Unless Brendan was linked to at least one other miraculous event,” Stefan said. Without using Emmy Halbourg’s name, he told Sonneford about the girl’s mending limbs that had once been crippled by disease.

Instead of taking hope from what Stefan told him, Bennet Sonneford shriveled further in the heat of his strange despair.

Frustrated by the physician’s relentless gloominess, Father Wycazik said, “Doctor, maybe I’m missing something, but it seems to me you’ve got every reason to be joyous. You were privileged to witness what—I personally believe—was the hand of God at work.” He held one hand out to Sonneford and was not surprised when the doctor gripped it tightly. “Bennet, why’re you so despondent?”

Sonneford cleared his throat and said, “I was born and raised a Lutheran, but for twenty-five years I’ve been an atheist. And now…”

“Ah,” Stefan said, “I see….”

Happily, Stefan began angling for Bennet Sonneford’s soul in the fish-lined den. He had no suspicion that, before the day was done, his current euphoria would be dispelled and that he would experience a bitter disappointment.

Reno, Nevada

Zeb Lomack had never imagined that his life would end in bloody suicide on Christmas, but by that night he had sunk so low that he longed to end his existence. He loaded his shotgun, put it on the filthy kitchen table, and promised himself that he would use it if he was unable to get rid of all the goddamned moon stuff before midnight.

His bizarre fascination with the moon had begun the summer before last, though at first it had seemed innocent enough. Toward the end of August that year, he had taken to going out on the back porch of his cozy little house and watching the moon and stars while sipping Coors. In mid-September, he purchased a Tasco 10VR refracting telescope and bought a couple of books on amateur astronomy.

Zebediah was surprised by his own sudden interest in stargazing. For most of his fifty years, Zeb Lomack, a professional gambler, had shown little interest in anything but cards. He worked Reno, Lake Tahoe, Vegas, occasionally one of the smaller gambling towns like Elko or Bullhead City, playing poker with the tourists and local would-be poker champs. He was not only good at card games: He
loved
cards more than he loved women, booze, food. Even the money was not important to Zeb; it was just a handy by-product of playing cards. The important thing was staying in the game.

Until he got the telescope and went crazy.

For a couple of months he used the scope on a casual basis, and he bought a few more books on astronomy, and it was just a hobby. But by
last Christmas he began to focus his attention less on the stars than on the moon, and thereafter something strange happened to him. The new hobby soon became as interesting as card games, and he found himself canceling planned excursions to the casinos in order to study the lunar surface. By February, he was glued to the eyepiece of the Tasco every night that the moon was visible. By April he built a collection of books about the moon that numbered more than one hundred, and he went out to play cards only two or three nights a week. By the end of June, his book collection had grown to five hundred titles, and he had begun to paper the bedroom walls and ceiling with pictures of the moon clipped from old magazines and newspapers. He no longer played cards, but began living off his savings, and thereafter his interest in things lunar ceased to bear any resemblance to a hobby and became a mad obsession.

By September, his book collection had grown to more than fifteen hundred volumes stacked throughout his small house. During the day, he read about the moon or, more often, sat for hours staring intently at photographs of it, unable either to understand or to resist its allure, until its craters and ridges and plains became as familiar to him as the five rooms of his own house. On those nights when the moon was visible, he studied it through the telescope until he could no longer stay awake, until his eyes were bloodshot and sore.

Before this obsession took control of him, Zeb Lomack had been a ruggedly hewn and relatively fit man. But as his preoccupation with things lunar tightened its grip, he stopped exercising and began eating junk food—cake, ice cream, TV dinners, bologna sandwiches—because he no longer had time to prepare good meals. Furthermore, the moon not only fascinated him but also made him uneasy, filled him not only with wonder but with dread, so he was always nervous; and he tranquilized himself with food. He became softer, flabbier, though he was only minimally aware of the physical changes he was undergoing.

By early October, he thought about the moon every hour of every day, dreamed of it, and could go nowhere in his house without seeing hundreds of images of the lunar face. He had not stopped repapering the walls when he had finished his bedroom in June, but had carried that project throughout. The full-color and black-and-white moon pictures came from astronomy journals, magazines, books, and newspapers. On one of his infrequent ventures out of the house, he had seen a three-by-five-foot poster of the moon, a color photograph taken by astronauts, and he had bought fifty copies, enough to paper the ceiling and every wall in the living room; he had even taped the poster over the windows, so every square inch of the room was decorated with that repeating image, except for doorways. He moved the furniture out, transforming the empty chamber
into a planetarium where the show never changed. Sometimes he’d lie on his back on the floor and stare up and around at those fifty moons, transported by an exhilarating sense of wonder and an inexplicable terror, neither of which he could understand.