blood. He’d been fighting blind. Blood also spurted from his already-swollen broken nose. He wiped the blood out of his eyes with the back of his hand. For a second he saw his opponent’s eyes burn as Seamus retreated. Bobbie turned away, figuring he’d won.
Then suddenly Seamus circled and leaped on him from behind. He wrapped his legs around Bobbie’s waist and his arms around Bobbie’s neck. Bobbie made a choking noise as the crazy man crooked his arm, trying to bend Bobbie’s head back and snap his thick neck. Not a chance of that. Bobbie swung around, then bent forward, throwing Seamus to the floor with a loud crack. Then he picked up the chair he’d been sitting on.
Ellen dragged herself to her feet. “Hey, stop that.… That’s enough.… ” She pulled at the chair in Bobbie’s hands. “Stop … it.”
Bobbie swung at her. Ellen McCoo was a heavy woman, but tough, and now very angry. She ducked, screaming for help. This time her voice carried and two nurse’s aides rushed in. A third went to the phone to call for help. Doors started opening up and down the hall.
The whole ward was fighting when Special Agent Daveys ran into the brawl with his snub-nosed pistol held out in both hands.
“FBI,” he croaked, then found his voice. “FBI! Freeze!”
No one froze. At the sight of the gun, the screaming in Spanish and English, the curses and imprecations, the wild gesticulations only got louder and wilder. The school of fish had been frenzied; now it was terrified. Daveys pointed his gun at Bobbie, who still held the chair over his head in his hands. From the hall came sounds of people screaming and wailing.
“Get back!” Daveys screamed at the throng behind him. “Get out of here!”
“You get out of here!” Bobbie shouted back. “Don’t even think about coming in here.”
“Freeze, Bob. I’ve got a gun,” Daveys said. But he didn’t look too confident about it, hadn’t seen too many psycho wards.
“I don’t give a shit about the gun. Shoot the place up. Go ahead, you might get a gold star.” Bobbie laughed at the thought.
“That’s it, it’s over, Bob. Put the chair down.” Davey gaped at the spectacle. “Let’s calm it down in here,” he said reasonably.
“Fuck you.”
Ellen saw her chance and started wrestling Bobbie for the chair. Seamus pulled himself to his knees and grabbed Bobbie’s ankles. Bobbie wrenched the chair out of the nurse’s grasp and slammed it down on Seamus’s head. He collapsed and didn’t move again.
Daveys moved the gun from side to side, trying to get a clear sight. “Stop it! I said,
“Oh, sure you will.” Bobbie grabbed Alberto, the closest patient, who still stood close to his nurse, weeping and holding onto his penis for dear life. Effortlessly, Bobbie picked up the half-naked old man and held him like a shield. He was laughing when he said, “Go ahead, asshole, shoot.”
At 11:56, Mike and April charged down the hall, past a dozen frantic aides and nurses, who had arrived from other floors to reestablish order on Six North. They raced into the opening at the end of the hall just in time to see Daveys’s arms tremble, skewing his aim from Bobbie’s foot to his head. Alberto screamed and wept for help. Daveys missed whatever he’d been trying for when his gun went off. The discharged bullet hit Bobbie and Alberto. Locked in a fatal embrace, they went down together.
seventy-five
Wednesday morning brought a white sky, punctuated with dark pockets of brewing storm. The temperature had sunk ten degrees below freezing during the night. The snow was gone, but crusty patches of ice had formed in the puddles on the streets and sidewalks.
Clara Treadwell saw the ice on her terraces and some lacy frost crusting the corners of her windows. She decided to take the cold storage tags off her mink coat. She was no longer troubled by winter or anything else. At two A.M. she had been awakened from her medicated sleep by Special Agent Daveys. He told her that Robert Boudreau had killed Gunn Tram in her home, then fled to the Centre, where he caused a disturbance among the patients on Six North and killed one of them. When Clara asked about the outcome, Daveys told her Boudreau and another patient had been fatally shot when Boudreau took the patient hostage in an effort to escape. Clara counted the victims of the Centre’s former employee, Robert Boudreau. Because of him, five people associated with her institution were dead.
Clara spent the rest of the night on the phone, telling different versions of the truth to different important people. At six-forty-five she called Jason Frank and told him to meet her at her apartment with the Cowles file at seven-thirty. Jason seemed distracted by other things when she called, but after she told him what had happened, she managed to persuade him to leave the arms of his wife and get over there.
Then Clara took a long, hot shower to warm her bones and thought not of the day ahead but of Florida. Abruptly, she had decided that Florida was not such a bad place if you owned two or three big houses and thousands of acres of orange groves. It was not as bad, say, as her life with husbands one and two had been in California. Those husbands had been difficult and jealous. Arch Candel was powerful and protective. He’d brought the FBI in to solve all her problems. Arch would see that she came out of this clean. Maybe after a few years, when her contract at the Centre was up and all this was forgotten, he’d arrange a presidential appointment for her. Surgeon General or Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare would be nice.
Full of her bright future, Clara Treadwell dressed in a neat black suit, as was appropriate for a day of gravity and mourning. She was composed and serious as she opened the door of her apartment for Jason Frank at seven twenty-nine.
“Come in, Jason. It’s good to see you. I’ve already made the coffee. You must be freezing.” She went through the door to the kitchen without stopping to take his coat.
“It’s cold,” Jason admitted. “How are you doing?”
“I’m shocked and saddened, of course. Deeply saddened,” she added.
Jason unbuttoned his coat, then opened his briefcase and pulled out the thick Cowles file. He put it down on the table. It was clear he was troubled and not as sanguine about the whole thing as she.
Clara didn’t give a shit. “Milk?”
“No, thanks.”
“Is that the complete file, everything I gave you?” she asked as she carefully opened a fresh carton of orange juice.
Jason nodded at the file. “Yes. It’s all here.”
“You didn’t make a copy?”
“No, Clara, I didn’t make a copy.”
Clara’s briefcase was open on the kitchen table. Her tape recorder lay on top of a pile of papers. Realizing the button for voice-activation was off, she put the juice container down and rearranged the papers in the briefcase as a camouflage to pressing the button on the recorder.
“This has been a terrible ordeal. I want to thank you for your counsel, Jason, and for your time. I’m glad it’s over. You’ll be free of the unpleasantness of all this soon.”
Jason considered his mug of inky coffee. “I didn’t realize the case was closed. I thought lawsuits took forever. Did the hospital settle so quickly?”
“No, no. It’s all still up in the air. But I know it will all go smoothly now.” Clara poured herself a half-glass of orange juice and drank it, savoring the freshness of the taste. Then she poured some more. “Doesn’t the FBI renew your faith in the system?”
“The FBI?”
“Yes, they came in after the police failed to solve Harold’s murder. Can you imagine what a disaster this could have been for me without the FBI? Those stupid cops actually suspected me of some involvement with Ray’s death, Hal’s death.… It was the FBI agent who followed Boudreau to Six North. Boudreau had started a riot among the patients.” Clara poured herself some coffee before going on.
“The police incompetence in all this is absolutely shocking. If I were you, Jason, I’d cut back my involvement with them before you get in serious trouble.” The nerve in Clara’s cheek jumped.
