Bleeding in the Eye of a Brainstorm

bag, worried expressions on their faces. Michael was still sitting, unmoving and with his back to us, at the window.

Margaret gasped and put a hand to her mouth. 'Mongo, what's wrong with your eyes?!'

'I'm all right. Now, listen up. I have good news and I have bad news. The good news is that I found the chemist I told you about, and he's discovered a way to make more of your meds. The bad news is that most of what he'd already made has been destroyed. It will probably be a few days before he can make up another batch, and so you're just going to have to somehow hold out until then. Here's the drill. I-' I paused, turned toward the figure who remained in the chair by the window. 'Michael? I hope I'm not boring you. Would you come over here and join us? What I have to say is important.'

His answer was to make a dry, rasping sound deep in his throat that sounded like a chuckle but wasn't. It reminded me of rustling leaves.

'Michael? Are you all right?'

The sound came again, this time louder. I hurried across the room and stepped in front of him. What I saw filled me with horror, and I choked off a cry. Blood was running in two steadily streaming rivulets from his nostrils, running down over his lips, dripping off his chin onto the front of his pajamas, which were stained a bright crimson. His eyes were totally vacant, and as I looked on, blood suddenly squirted in a tiny font from the left one, hitting me in the face.

'Get me his capsules!' I shouted to Margaret, wrapping my arms around Michael and easing him off the chair and onto his back on the floor. 'They're in the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, bottom shelf! Hurry!'

Margaret rushed out of the room and down the narrow corridor leading to the bathroom as I cradled Michael's head in my arms. The sound of dry, rustling leaves emanating from his chest grew louder, and he was springing deadly crimson leaks everywhere. A dark stain had appeared at his crotch and was spreading down his pajama bottoms as blood flowed from his urethra and anus. Even his high forehead had become spotted; he was sweating blood from his pores.

'They're not there!' Margaret cried as she rushed back into the living room. 'Mongo, they're not there!'

I turned to Emily, whose features were clenched in torment. 'Get me one of yours or Margaret's, or the extra one! Hurry, Emily!'

For a moment the empath seemed paralyzed by her own terror and horror, but then she suddenly bolted from the room. I heard the door to the apartment slam open, and then her footsteps on the stairs as she raced to the apartment below. I reached into my shirt pocket and took out a large pinch of the adulterated compound I had scraped up from the floor of the laboratory, forced open his mouth with my left hand, and shoved the powder in. It came right back out again, riding the crest of a river of red as he belched blood that flooded out of his mouth, over my hand, and onto the floor. I tried again with a second pinch of powder, but it was useless. I hung my head as Michael shuddered and died.

I heard footsteps, then felt a hand on my shoulder. I looked up into

Emily's stricken face. Margaret and Sharon Stephens stood on either side of her, staring at me intently. In Emily's trembling, outstretched hand was a single black-and-yellow capsule. I shook my head. 'He's gone.'

'There was an extra capsule in my bag, Mongo,' the girl sobbed as tears streamed down her cheeks. 'I think Michael must have put it there. He gave up his last med so that Margaret and I could each have one more day.'

I nodded, then bent down and kissed the chess master's bloody forehead. And then I wept.

Chapter 14

Sharon Stephens, who could not stop crying, helped me wrap Michael Stout's corpse, which we would properly attend to at a more propitious time, in a shower curtain. While the women cleaned the floor of the living room, I stripped off my bloody clothes, showered to wash the blood off my face and hands, dressed in clean clothes, and went down to my office. Struggling to put the horror of Michael's death out of my mind, I tried to concentrate on his exquisite and incredibly heroic act, the gift of his life so that two people could live at least another twenty-four hours.

I picked up the phone and began calling the medical specialists I had contacted earlier, double-checking to make sure they would be in the emergency room of the nearest hospital by six o'clock to meet us all when we arrived sometime later in the evening. When I had finished doing that, a tearful Francisco and I went back upstairs to join the others, including the two guards, for our own private memorial service for Michael. When that was over, I scoured Garth's apartment and my own for dark glasses, woolen caps, mufflers, and anything else we could use to provide suitable disguises for the psychiatrist and Emily. At five-thirty, accompanied by Veil, we left the brownstone and, to the sounds of Christmas carols provided by a Salvation Army group and a steel band and a lone violinist stationed along the route, headed through the streets toward Rockefeller Center. A light snow, the first of the season, had begun to fall.

This time out I made sure I was armed, with my Beretta in a shoulder holster and the small Seecamp strapped to my right ankle.

I had Veil and his students escort the three women down to the coffee shop adjacent to the rink, while I stayed up above on the promenade, below the magnificent Christmas tree and above the great, prone figure of Prometheus, checking out the people on the skating rink below me who were whirling about in the snow flurry to the sound of Christmas music. There were hordes of people walking around the promenade, standing around the rink, or gathered to admire the towering, brightly lighted tree behind me. The skaters of both sexes came in all sizes, ages, and races, and there were upwards of three dozen of them, including one understuffed Santa Claus zipping around the rink carrying over his shoulder an understuffed laundry bag with something lumpy in the bottom. There were a number of uniformed policemen patrolling the area, but there didn't seem to be more than the usual contingent. By now I assumed that Bailey had told MacWhorter the whole story, and I wondered how many of the people in the crowd were plainclothes detectives-or killers.

There had been a dozen patients who had originally escaped with Sharon Stephens. Punch and Judy had killed one, and the killers who had come to the laboratory said a woman had been captured, and she was presumably dead by now. Michael Stout was dead, and Emily was with us. That left eight people to round up, and I fervently hoped they were here in the crowd, or soon would be, because there was no time to waste. I had to get them to the hospital so the doctors could examine and start working on them, and then every minute would count in the day or two they had left to them before they ran out of their medication and I had pinched out the last of the precious powder in my pocket.

And then, of course, there was the wild card to consider-Raymond Rogers. Obviously, Rogers had snatched his own supply of the black-and-yellow capsules from the infirmary; when he ran out, he would presumably die. However, from his hidden perch on top of the bus, he may well have overheard the psychiatrist and the other patients making plans to meet on Christmas Eve. If that was the case, he too would be here, somewhere in the crowd, hoping Sharon Stephens had obtained more of the drug, and looking to grab his own lifesaving handout.

In fact, there had been a dramatic decrease in the number of ice-pick killings over the past ten days. Much of that good news was probably attributable to the fact that people in the city had grown eyes in the back of their heads and were extraordinarily cautious in their comings and goings, but I also thought it possible that Rogers was being much more cautious so as not to be caught before Christmas Eve; his description had been printed in all the newspapers, and posters with his likeness and a warning were up all over the city, and at every subway station. There was also the possibility that his medication had run out and he was dead in some alley in a lake of his own blood. But if he was somewhere here in the crowd, watching and waiting, I assumed I would know about it before the end of the evening, and I was going to keep an especially sharp lookout for tall, rangy men.

I watched Santa and the other skaters for a few more minutes to satisfy myself that none of them looked suspicious, then wandered around the promenade, trying very hard to look like your average, everyday New York City dwarf. I felt more than a tad self-conscious, which I thought understandable in light of the fact that Lorminix or Chill Shop assassins in the crowd certainly had my description. I could end up a target marker, a danger to my charges, but it couldn't be helped; I had to be able to communicate with the others. From this point on I intended to stay out of sight, let the psychiatrist and Emily do the spotting, and Margaret and Veil the gathering in of the lost