Some horses require more effort to be ridden than do others. In horror, some buck and kick, metaphorically speaking, when they see themselves committing atrocities. Others, like Reese Salsetto, actually feel liberated by their new master, and respond less like ridden beasts than like conspirators. They are thrilled that they have been freed from the last constraints that hobbled them, from the fear of death, and may now be the fully revealed and ruthless apostles of chaos that they have longed to be.
Andy Tane is neither horrified nor exhilarated. His thousands of corrupt acts—bribe-taking, facilitating white slavery, rape by intimidation, running a protection racket with his badge—have been committed without the ardor and the glee that would have fermented his soul into a thick, dark, intoxicating devil’s brew. Instead he has done his evil in the unimaginative and plodding manner of a dull-minded bureaucrat, in the process poaching the leaves of his soul until they are nothing but a cup of weak tea. Incapable of either outrage or delight at the acts his rider forces him to commit, Andy Tane can react only as the coward he has for so long been, retreating into a kind of automatismic trance, allowing himself to be used while retreating from all awareness of what he has been forced to do.
He knows to which hospital the Woburns were taken, and there as well he will find the boy and girl, the unfinished business that his rider is determined to address.
After Brenda Woburn’s children and sister had been allowed, as a group, to spend ten minutes with her, the head nurse in the ICU was hesitant to admit John. His badge didn’t impress her. But his powers of gentle persuasion, long practiced with witnesses, and his earnest assurances convinced her to give him three minutes.
“But I’ll be timing you, and I mean just three,” she warned.
When John slid the curtain aside from Brenda Woburn’s bed bay and then pulled it closed behind him, she did not open her eyes. She seemed to be fast asleep.
Her heart, respiration, and blood pressure were being monitored, but she was not on a ventilator. An intravenous drip maintained her body fluids and sugar level. She received oxygen through nasal cannulas.
Tendrils of her short dark hair, damp and pasted flat, looked like the checks and X’s of some game played on her pallid brow with felt-tip markers. The deep hollows of her eyes seemed exaggerated, resembling those of luckless travelers in movies about survival on a desert trek along a route where every oasis was a mirage. Her lips were bloodless.
John spoke her name three times before she opened her eyes. Her gaze resolved on him as he identified himself. She was on painkillers, but the effect was more apparent in the slackness of her face and in her lethargy than in her eyes, which were clear, focused, and suggestive of alertness.
“You must’ve had handgun training,” he said. “Three mortal hits. Not a round wasted. That’s more than luck. Even if they never make an issue of it, they won’t believe you accidentally shot yourself.”
She stared at him. Her voice was parched: “What do you want?”
Mindful of his three-minute limit, he went to the heart of it: “Twenty years ago, four families were murdered in my hometown. The fourth was my family—both my parents, two younger sisters.”
Unblinking, she stared at him.
“I killed the killer. Now I have a family of my own.… ”
The light from overhead did not paint a flat sheen on her eyes but fell away into them.
“A family of my own now, and I’m afraid it’s happening again. You must’ve seen the news … the Lucases.”
Brenda Woburn blinked, blinked.
“They were killed exactly the way that first family was killed twenty years ago. The second family back then, the Sollenburgs—the father, mother, and son were shot to death. In that order. Daughter was raped. Tortured. For hours.”
The soft beep and the spiking light pulse of the ECG monitor tracked an increase in her heartbeat.
“I don’t want to distress you,” John said. “But I need to know something. I’m not here as a cop. I’m here as a husband and father.”
The automatic sphygmomanometer showed a rise in Brenda’s blood pressure.
“Why did you shoot yourself?”
She licked her lips. Her gaze slid to her left, to the hanging IV bags, past them to the heart monitor.
“Billy Lucas didn’t kill his family,” John said. “Your brother, Reese, didn’t kill your husband.”
Her stare returned to him.
“You can tell me. Please. Tell me. Why did you shoot yourself?”
“Suicide.”
“You meant to kill yourself? Why?”
“To stop it.”
“Stop what?”
She hesitated. Then: “Stop whatever it was. Stop it from taking me. Control of me.”
And here was the revelation. Mere truth and yet extraordinary. Confirmation.
“Cold and crawling, slithering. Not just in my head. Everywhere in my body. Skin to bones.”
“You reacted so fast.”
“No time. It knew me,
John thought of his sisters, stripped and brutalized, and his legs felt weak. He leaned with both hands on the bed railing.
Brenda shuddered as though recalling the cold slithery invader fingering the marrow in her bones. “What was it?”
“The killer I killed twenty years ago.”
They stared at each other. He suspected that she might wish, as he almost did, that they were insane, delusional, rather than to know that such a thing as this could be true.
“Is it over?” she asked.
“For you. Maybe not for me. Unless by casting him out, you broke the spell, stopped the cycle, something. Then maybe it could be over for me, too.”
She reached out to him with her left hand. He took it, held it.
34
RIDDEN LESS LIKE A HORSE THAN LIKE A MACHINE, WITHDRAWN to a coward’s perch in a back room of his brain, Andy Tane parks the patrol car near the entrance of St. Joseph’s Hospital. In the main lobby, half the fluorescent lights are doused. The information desk is not staffed at this hour. The gift shop is closed. No one is in sight.
Maybe he should have parked at the ER entrance. But he knows how to find his way to the emergency room by an interior route.
At this late hour, even the ER is deserted, except for three patients. A heavyset woman sits at the only open registration window. A middle-aged couple, she in a blue-and-white exercise suit, he in tan jeans and a white T- shirt, sit watching the blood-soaked towel wrapped around his left hand, waiting to be taken seriously by someone.
Politely because politeness will more quickly get him what he wants, but with official solemnity, Andy apologizes to the heavyset woman and interrupts the registration clerk—ELAINE DIGGS, according to her breast- pocket badge—to inquire as to the whereabouts of two gunshot victims, Brenda and Jack Woburn. Elaine Diggs consults her computer, makes a quick phone call, and reports, “Ms. Woburn is in the ICU. Mr. Woburn recently came out of surgery and is in post-op recovery.”
As an officer of the law, Andy Tane is familiar with the layout of the hospital. The ICU is on the tenth floor. The operating rooms are all on the second floor, as is the recovery room, where patients are taken after surgery until the anesthesia has worn off and their vital signs are stable.
Jack Woburn’s vital signs will not be stable much longer.
