Loving Time

The nurse gasped. “I’m in charge here. You’re in the wrong place. You get lost. Now!”

That was it. There was no negotiating with this bitch—no way was he leaving. Bobbie raised his arm. In one quick motion, he backhanded the nurse, knocking her down. Alberto just missed getting knocked down with her. The old man backed away from her still form, whimpering. Then he dropped his pajama bottoms and peed on the floor beside her.

Seamus stopped punching the air. In two catlike leaps he was across the floor, pummeling Bobbie, kicking him, biting whatever he could reach with his teeth, and tearing at his ears.

seventy-three

April and Mike stayed in Gunn’s apartment until there was a response to their call for help. It took less than six minutes to secure the area and explain the situation to the uniforms who arrived on the scene.

Mike phoned the squad room three times to see if Daveys had called in with his location, but there was no message from him. At eleven-ten, there was a call from Andy Mason. Daveys left a message at the station that Bobbie had gone into the Stone Pavilion and disappeared in the basement. So had Daveys.

Four blue-and-whites were on the street with their lights flashing when Mike and April left Gunn’s building at eleven-twenty-five. The snow had stopped, but the temperature was still dropping.

Mike checked his watch and sighed. “How many Feebs you figure Daveys has in the hospital by now?”

April shook her head and tossed him the keys to her car. He took the driver’s seat, turned on the engine and the lights without comment.

“I don’t think any,” she said to Mike after the heat started to come up.

“No other Feebs. How do you figure that?”

April shivered, thinking of Daveys’s interview with Boudreau. “Some of what he said was the usual bullshit. But some of it was personal.” April studied Mike’s profile. “Like what you did was personal with you, know what I mean?”

Mike pulled away from the curb. “No,” he said curtly.

“Daveys kept talking about his family with us, remember? His big brother died in ’Nam. His little brother is a cop. He’s a big family man, an all-American racist.”

“So?”

“So he hates guys like Boudreau, really hates them. It wasn’t just a line to get the guy to squawk when he said he’d get him. It was personal.”

April studied the side of Mike’s face. She’d seen his profile a thousand times. His right ear was scarred from the burns he’d received in the fire. She, too, had some scars that would never go away. They were connected by those scars, by the ghosts of the victims whose deaths they’d investigated, by the cases they’d cleared together.

“It was personal when you lost it, Mike. But afterward it was over. You didn’t want to kill the guy. Daveys wants to kill him, and he can’t have a bunch of buddies with him. I’d guess there won’t be any team. He’ll be alone.”

Mike sneaked a look at her. “Is this your way of telling me you love me, querida?”

April stared out the window. “I’m telling you Daveys went alone. We have the advantage here.”

“Oh, yeah, what’s that?” Mike ran the red light at Riverside, headed south to the hospital.

“We know where Boudreau went.”

“No, he wouldn’t go back to that room in the basement. He knows we know about it.”

“That’s right. So where would he go?”

“The Medical Center is a big place. He could go anywhere. If he really wanted to get lost in there, we’d need an army to find him.”

“Uh-uh. Think about it. Guy worked in the Psychiatric Centre for a lot of years. He’d go there.”

“Thanks, querida, that’s a big help.” Mike passed the Stone Pavilion. The Centre was on the next block.

“Oh, come on, amigo, you’ve been staring at his file all day. What did it tell you?”

“It said they tried to move him to another unit several times because of his hostility to the community-service patients … but he——refused to——leave——the——sixth——floor.”

Mike braked in the white lines outside the door of the twenty-story building. The car skidded sideways on a patch of ice, then stopped. They jumped out into the freezing night and headed for the revolving front door. It was locked. They went in through the wheelchair-access side door, their shields already out for the guard. But no one was around to challenge them, so they traded glances and headed for the elevators. It was eleven-forty-five.

seventy-four

At eleven-forty-five, Ellen McCoo, the beefy middle-aged nurse who had discovered Bobbie on her floor and been knocked unconscious after confronting him, groaned and tried to open her eyes. Ellen had crumpled in the middle of the ward, oblivious to the chaos made by all fourteen patients of Six North, out of their beds and deeply into their own crazy behaviors.

Joe Penuch, a thirty-year-old delusional-aristocrat street beggar, gestured wildly, muttering curses as he approached and retreated from the melee. Roberto, a forty-five-year-old Puerto Rican who had been lobotomized because he had the compulsive habit of ripping and tearing gaping wounds in his body, and Cesar Garcia, a young man who had tried to commit suicide many times, most recently by cutting his wrists and injecting air into his liver, chased each other around a bed, arguing violently in Spanish.

Peter Austin, a friendly twenty-five-year-old disordered artist who drew happy landscapes in oils but couldn’t make sense when he spoke, wept as he saw Seamus tear some of Bobbie’s hair out, then copied Seamus by ripping out some of his own.

Terry, a short, fat man of indeterminate age and origin, who had recently amputated three of his fingers, was beating on the back of the Haitian known as Herbert, an HIV-positive patient who had raped his wife and then tried to hang himself after she became HIV-positive, too.

And Seamus had started it all. He’d seen Bobbie backhand the nurse who took care of him, saw her fall, and let loose with everything he had. And Seamus had a lot to let go. He was born with the XYY chromosomal abnormality associated with the most violent of criminals, was a hyperaggressive alcoholic and heroin addict. He’d become the object of extremely detailed Psychiatric Centre and police negotiations after his last release, when he’d slashed his boss’s throat with a knife while working in a vocational-rehab halfway house. Readmitted to the hospital instead of going to jail, he was presently contained with massive doses of Thorazine and Haldol.

When the throbbing began to ease a little and Ellen registered what was going on, she feebly tried to call for help. No one came. She struggled to a sitting position and was horrified to see Seamus try to bite off one of Bobbie’s ears.

“Stop that!” she screamed. But she might as well have asked a tornado to calm down and stop twisting.

The interloper in Seamus’s territory had attacked someone he knew. Seamus was going after the intruder with the force of a natural disaster—punching, kicking, tearing at Bobbie’s nose and hair and ears, growling, spattering blood.

He had sent the other patients into a frenzy. They had become a troubled school offish, vicious and hungry. Seamus himself seemed unaffected by the one milligram of Haldol he was on orders to take every hour in the evening until he was out cold. His opponent was bigger and heavier, but Seamus had the advantage of a chemical imbalance in his makeup that—in spite of all efforts—was not adequately tranquilized. He was all violence and no restraint. Bobbie fought just as hard and began to gain momentum as his own anger mounted. With the little finger of his right hand sticking straight out of his hand sideways and blood all over his face, Seamus abruptly backed off.

Bobbie shook himself like a wet dog, thinking it was all over. A cut on his forehead had filled his eyes with