as Otto Boutine came crashing through.
“ Jess! Jess!” he was shouting as he rolled into a dark corner of the room.
“ He's got a gun!” she shouted in return.
At the same instant both men opened fire, returning several shots apiece, and then silence reigned.
From the comer where she had huddled, she cried out, “Otto! Otto, are you all right?”
There was no answer and the police lights from outside sent a chilling silhouette against the window sash.
“ You friend's dead,” croaked Matisak. “And now it's your turn.” He aimed, said, “Checkmate,” and fired point-blank at her head. She heard the pathetic metal click of an empty chamber.
“ Drop it! Drop it, you bastard, or you're mincemeat!” shouted Joe Brewer, who had slipped into the house from the rear. “I ought to blow you away.”
Other cops swarmed in from all sides now, two in uniform taking Matisak and shoving him hard against a wall, frisking him. His side wound was still pumping blood, and the bullet had likely passed through him without hitting any vital organs. There was a cut to the throat where she had almost gotten at his jugular.
Brewer bent over Jessica, asking if she was all right. “Get me to Otto. Otto!” Her voice was choked with blood seeping into her windpipe.
Brewer helped her to where Otto was sitting upright against a wall as if simply at rest. His eyes shone only dimly in the darkness. He was bleeding from two wounds to the abdomen. He was conscious but weak.
' 'Get her out of here, Joe. Get her to a hospital!'' Boutine began coughing and the hack made him spit up blood. It discolored his lips and his ashen-white skin. His white shirt was soaked slick with his blood.
“ Get an ambulance!” she shouted, snatching at Brewer even as the men with the stretchers were spilling into Gamble's small rat hole. “Hurry! Hurry!”
Brewer began telling the medics what to do. “Take these two. Forget the other two. One is dead and the other one is our prisoner. Now, go! Go!”
Jessica clung to Otto. She was draped in an old blanket that'd belonged to Gamble, but she, like Otto, was losing blood. The tear to her jugular and the cuts at her heels continued to bleed. She felt dizzy, light-headed, and now that she knew that Matisak was in custody, she could finally let down, and the moment she did, she went into a traumatic shock.
The medics rushed to her aid, and Boutine became agitated, yelling for them to do something for her. Brewer told Boutine to shut up and stay calm, that he was losing enough blood to kill two men. More paramedics arrived on the scene, two others taking charge of Otto while the first two worked on stabilizing Jessica.
Otto said several times as if it were a litany, “Take care of Jess… take care of Jess…”
Otto was dead before they laid him onto the stretcher.
Brewer, seeing this, became enraged. He turned to face Matisak. “You butcher! You goddamned butcher! Now you've taken-” He leapt onto Matisak, pummeling him with his fists until several other agents tore him away.
“ Joe, Joe!”
“ Christ's sake!”
“ Cocksucking maniac kills good people, and whataya reckon'11 happen to him? Fed pen for the criminally insane? Bastard oughta fry, but he won't. Oughta die here and now!”
One of the other agents grabbed for Brewer's gun in his shoulder holster just as Brewer's hand wrapped around it.
“ He ain't worth your life now, Brewer… Brewer!”
Brewer eased his grip on the gun, and the other man took it. “Until you cool down.”
“ All right… all right,” he said, pulling away. “I'm all right.”
“ Just the same, I'll hold on to this. You go with the woman. She'll need you when she comes out of it.”
“ Yeah… yeah… I suppose you're right.” He stared evilly across the room at Matisak. “You better hope they fry your ass, Matisak. If they don't, I will.”
Matisak looked pathetic in both size and demeanor now; he didn't look at all special, or even extraordinary in the negative sense, as of a freak in a sideshow. In fact, he looked so extremely ordinary, so close to normal and typical, that normalcy and typical and ordinary took on bizarre new meanings for the men standing in a circle around him. This was the vampire killer that had rocked Chicago and half a dozen midwestem states? He was neither tall nor short, neither fat nor thin, and his facial features might put him behind a desk in a bank or below a hood in a car shop. The only thing that marked him as at all different was a slight hump at the shoulders, almost like a buffalo hump, a thickness about the jowls, some scales and pockmark discolorations over the skin. His hair was thinning and wispy, the receding hairline cutting a jagged edge in his profile. The eyes alone might seem unusual as they glowed a dark blue against the lights that were turned up on the bloody scene that Matisak had created.
In the midst of it lay Gamble's body, a bullet through the temple.
Brewer gathered himself up and shouted to his next in command. “Leonard, three things, okay?”
“ You name it, boss.”
“ Get that bastard out of my sight and handle him as if he were Harry Houdini; and I want our best E.T. team in here and no one-no one-is to touch a goddamned thing-”
“ Brewer! She's coming around,” said one of the agents of Jessica. “She wants to talk to you.”
“ No way,” said the medic. “She needs every ounce of energy.” Joe Brewer went to his knees over Jessica.
“ Joe… Joe…”
“ Yes, it's me.”
“ Otto… is he…?”
“ He's… he's going to be fine, Jess.” The lie felt like lead in his throat.
She breathed deeply. “Thank God.”
“ Yeah…”
“ And Joe…”
“ Yes?”
“ Nail the bastard, Joe. Promise me.”
“ You've got it, Dr. Coran. You've got it.”
The medics carried her out.
The second set of medics lifted Boutine on his stretcher but Brewer stopped them. “Put… put the chiefs body back against the wall where he was shot.”
“ What?”
“ Do the fuck as I say!”
The medics shrugged at each other. Leonard conferred with Brewer. Brewer said loudly enough for all to hear, “I want photographs of everything in this room, and that includes Otto Boutine's… body.”
“ Yes, sir,” replied Leonard, who turned to the other agents and said, “Come on, let's get the work done.”
They all understood what it was that Brewer wanted most to happen here tonight: that they leave no stone unturned in nailing Matisak to the cross of justice. Whatever now would become of Matthew Matisak, Brewer and the other FBI men meant to avenge Boutine and Jessica Coran for the murder of one of their own and the torture of another.
Brewer finally left, leaving Boutine's body now as part of the crime scene, staring back only once at his old friend.?
THIRTY-TWO
Four months later
On crutches, Dr. Jessica Coran worked her way through the corridors and past the cells that lined her way; she'd been pushing the healing process and so had not used a wheelchair for a week. The reconstructive surgery to her ankle tendons had worked remarkably well. She had seen some of the microscopic still shots the doctors had
