Thicker Than Blood - Crouch Blake - Страница 119

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It was an urban ghost town.

Empty, sagging houses.

Abandoned cars.

Trash everywhere.

I glanced at Violet in the rearview mirror, sprawled across the metal floor.

She was awake.

In agony.

I’d examined her in the warehouse—third-degree burns on her arms, legs and back.

Excruciating.

"Am I going to die?"

It took me thirty-five minutes to find a hospital—a six-story block tower on the outskirts of a bad neighborhood.

It was already getting dark as I pulled under the emergency room overhang.

I slid out of the driver’s seat and stepped into the back.

Knelt down by Violet who was lying on the floor and moaning in some half-conscious fever state.

"Violet," I said.

Her eyes were open but unfocused.

"Vi, look at me."

She did, said, "It hurts, Andy."

"We’re at a hospital."

"We are?"

"I have to drop you off just inside. I can’t stay."

"Why?"

"You know why. This is very..." Her eyes had left mine, wandering off into space. "Listen to me, Vi, this is so important."

I framed her face with my hands.

"You can’t tell them anything. Nothing. Not about me, or Luther, or where you were."

I couldn’t tell if she heard me, if she was comprehending any of this.

"Violet, do you understand me?"

She nodded. "Are you hurt, Andy?"

"Not enough to go in there."

"Where’s Max?"

"He’s not here right now."

She took a moment to register this.

"I don’t think you’re going to see me again," I said.

Her eyes filled with tears.

"You understand, right?"

A nod.

"Never come looking for me, Vi."

"I love you."

"Never come looking for me."

"I love you."

"Andy Thomas is dead."

"I love—"

"Stop, Vi. Let it go."

Violet

SO much pain. She was drowning in it, and it occurred to her that if she lived through this, she would never be the same, just for knowing that pain like this existed.

He was carrying her toward the automatic doors, every footfall sending a spike through her body, the sleeves of his tracksuit rubbing against the burns across her legs and back.

She was crying, and Andy was hushing her, telling her she was going to be all right, she was going to recover from all of this, that beautiful things still lay ahead.

Lies.

And then they were inside the hospital—central heating for the first time in days and the burning glare of the fluorescent lights overhead, and she was trying to say his name, but a heavy darkness was falling and if it contained a single breath of relief, she couldn’t bring herself to fight it.

When she came to, she was draped across a chair in the waiting room and Andy was gone and the pain was back.

A young doctor with wire-rim glasses was squatting down in front of her, two nurses behind him, and though his lips moved, she couldn’t hear a thing.

Andy

NIGHT had dropped and that made finding my way back to the concrete barrens infinitely more challenging.

The Oxycodone was wearing off, the pain of my flayed right leg, stretched muscles, and joints intensifying with each passing moment.

It was that water tower that finally guided me home—its red aviation light blinking through the mist.

8:27 p.m. when I pulled into the parking spot outside the warehouse.

I killed the engine, climbed out from behind the wheel.

The pain in my leg was blinding.

I limped across the broken concrete to the entrance and unlocked the door.

Took all of my remaining strength to cross the length of the warehouse to the cart, my hands shaking as I pulled open the drawer and grabbed a vial of Oxycodone.

The urge to double up the dose was strong, but I resisted.

Hit the vein and slammed 40mg.

The relief was instantaneous.

Euphoria.

"Andy...Andy...Andy, look at me."

I stood smiling in the warehouse. Letting the narcotic joy wash over me.

"Andy..."

 So many consecutive days of pain and fear, and now this.

Relief.

Power.

"Andy..."

Violet safe. Sweet Violet.

"Andy..."

And rage.

"Andy..."

"Yes, Luther?"

I put my hands on the cart and rolled it across the floor toward the gurney I had strapped him to several hours prior.

"Andy, please, listen to me."

I flipped the power switch and his chair began to hum.

"I’m listening."

It went on for two days.

I never stopped, never slept.

I burned him, stretched him, froze him, cut him.

I did everything but kill him, and not once did he beg me to stop. I wanted to hear it—the abject terror in his voice that I’m sure he’d heard in mine and countless others—but all he ever did was scream.

With each infliction of pain, I thought about what he’d done to me. To Violet, her husband, and son. To Beth Lancing. To his victims—the ones I knew about and those I didn’t.

I took a flashlight with me and followed the stairs that led from the warehouse down several flights into a basement.

Just exploring.

In search of Luther’s store of food and water, and of course, more drugs.

My light passing over old cinderblock.

Cobwebs amassed in the corners and there was rat shit everywhere, and occasionally the lightbeam would strike upon a pair of glowing eyes that would instantly vanish, followed by the soft scrape of rat feet scrambling off into the dark.

Fifty feet in, I stopped.

There was a noise coming from behind a door at the end of the hall.

I hurried down the corridor and pulled it open.

Shock.

Disbelief.

Never had expected to find this, and I stood speechless in the threshold, waiting for the mirage to evaporate, but it never did.

The room was tiny—an old janitor’s closet.

Against the back wall stood a crib, where two babies, one of them Max, lay crying at the top of their lungs.

I cleaned them up.

Changed their diapers.

Fed them from jars of baby food on hand and then held one in each arm, rocking and hushing them until they’d fallen asleep.

It was three in the morning when I pulled Luther’s van back up to the hospital’s emergency room entrance. The babies slept side-by-side on cushions in the same cardboard box which I’d jammed down between the front seats.

It was too cold and rainy to risk leaving them outside, so I carried the box through the automatic doors into the ER, and walked over to the sitting area where four people waited to be seen—a couple with a colicky infant and a young man who reeked of booze holding a bloody tee-shirt that had been wrapped around his left hand.

I said to them, "You might tell the nurse that a man just dropped off two babies, and that the mother of the little boy is a patient in this hospital."

They stared at me, bleary-eyed, skeptical.

I set the cardboard box on the magazine table, started for the exit, and as the automatic doors slid open, I heard the mother of the colicky infant say, "Oh my God."

I drove back.

Feeling so strange.

So anxious to return to Luther.

As the windshield wipers whipped back and forth and the van sped through the puddled streets, I kept trying to imagine Violet’s and Max’s reunion.

When she woke, the nurses would be there.

They would ask her if she had a son.

She would say yes, why?

They would ask her for the boy’s name and a physical description, and when Vi provided this, they would bring Max, now swaddled up in blankets, into her room.

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