Emily felt the air squirm. Officer Dimke was smirking through her valium haze. She beckoned Emily to the bedside. Emily looked at Samuels. “What’s this?”
“Sharon has something to tell you, Emily.” He darkened and kept her pinned in the bed with his stare. She leered back at him. “It’s that new party trick of mine, Emily. The chances that she knows where Charlie is are very high.”
Emily glanced through the chicken-wire hall window at the uniformed cop on watch. “But she already told them where Fine was hiding.” Emily stared back at Sharon. She hated this, but she had to do it. She winced like she was reaching into the wet darkness inside a hollow log as she stretched through the white noise shield. Madness crawled over her before she yanked herself back behind the barrier.
* * *
“MOVE, MOVE, MOVE!” the S.W.A.T. commander whispered/hissed into this throat mike as his team slipped up the service road toward the warehouse. The racket from the oil derrick—cha-CHUNK, cha-CHUNK, cha-CHUNK—was enough to cover a tank assault, but he wasn’t taking any chances. This suspect had a weird reputation. A serial killer with an M.O. of scaring his victims to death was one thing, but Dimke’s partner—the one Fine had killed when they showed up to originally bring him in for questioning—had died of a massive coronary. The S.W.A.T. commander had read the report. The kid’s heart had been bruised, like someone had reached into his chest and strangled it. The part of the story that had the seasoned vets talking low over their boiler-makers and beers the past couple nights was that there wasn’t a mark on the kid’s body.
The team rounded the corner of the warehouse like a flock of starlings. The commander held his fist up and they all went down on one knee, heads bent over raised assault rifles. The commander held a button on his belt unit that muted his headset. Nothing came but the steady thud and pull from the derrick. A grasshopper flew into the reeds. The air smelled like summer out of the city, green and heavy. Something didn’t feel right.
* * *
“DO YOU HEAR that?” Fine asked.
Charlie listened, footsteps moving up the service road.
“Why haven’t you called out, Mr. Dunbar?”
“Because I don’t want to end up like one of those fucking pigeons.”
Charlie needed time. He needed to figure out a way to help, a way to stall, something, anything that moved against Fine’s machinations. “You said something changed when you saw Emily at the hospital.”
“I thought I was the only one.” Fine focused on Charlie and closed the distance between them. Charlie kept himself still as he would have in the presence of a growling stray, but his guts seemed to shift to the far side of his body. Fine crouched down and peered into Charlie’s face. “She’s like me,” Fine said, his voice rising.
Charlie had seen insanity countless times in his career as an ER nurse. It was New York after all. But he’d never seen this level of chaos. Every human has a spark of creation in them, of life reflected, but not Fine. And it wasn’t some libidinous sadism. He wasn’t about pulling the wings off flies. That madness was simple. If he could, Fine would stretch his long fingers into the genetic record so that the fly would evolve into something broken and hideous. He was about unmaking things.
“I don’t think so, pal.”
“No, you don’t think, Mr. Dunbar, because you don’t know. No one but our Emily knows.”
Charlie’s blood pounded in his ears. “She’s not ours.”
Fine smirked. “Of course not. You think she belongs to you because you’ve put your penis into her vagina. Would you like a banana, little monkey?”
Charlie’s anger peaked, but it was enough to bring his attention to bear on it. He calmed himself. This was about making sure whoever was walking up the road (Please, God, let it be the cops) got the drop on Fine instead of the other way around. “So what makes her yours, then?”
“She and I are kin of sorts. When I was a boy I could feel it when one person hurt another person. I could smell the fear wafting off them like I smell it wafting from you, Mr. Dunbar.” He darkened, looked at the floor. “I can also feel everything, everything else that another person feels. It’s…confusing to say the least.” He looked up and grinned. “You could say that I had the ultimate boundary issues.”
“But not anymore?”
“No, not for some time, Mr. Dunbar. I learned that a dose of the purest, most powerful emotion could clear the confusion away, outline me, if you will, to myself among all the other detritus.”
“Fear, right?”
“Correct, but simplistic. Lower-level fear, everyday fear, is enough to reduce all the others to something of a background hum, but a great burst of concentrated pathos brings transcendence.”
“So what, you scare people to death and get off as they’re dying?”
Fine grimaced. “Nothing so physical. I become clean as they expire, Mr. Dunbar.”
“I still don’t understand why you need Emily.”
“Her range is a thousand times greater than mine. I’m going to use her as an amplifier to tap into the entire city.”
How could he know something like that? Yeah, how could Emily throw a lamp across the room without getting out of bed. “I thought you didn’t want to feel all that ‘detritus’.”
“No, you’re correct. I only want the purity of their terror. A great collective shriek if you follow me.”
“How are you going to scare everyone at the same time?”
“Those nineteen religious zealots from the Middle East and our eager Administration have primed the pump for me. The whole city has been on edge since that beautiful day in September, all they really need is a little push. Do you remember the riot just before I took you?”
Charlie called up a fuzzy image: a flow of panicked faces in the street below his window, a smell like someone used too much bleach in the laundry room. “That was you? What’d you do?”
“A bucket of bleach and a bottle of ammonia. A fan. It was very easy.”
Jesus, he was right. It wouldn’t take much more than that to throw the whole of Manhattan Island into a screaming mess. Hell, the whole country would freak out. It was like when that guy sent anthrax through the mail right after the Eleventh. Only two people actually got hurt, but half the country was sure their next piece of junk mail would contain a puff of white powder. All you’d have to do would be to create a few disturbances at the same time to establish a pattern. Everyone was so ratcheted up they would not only make up their own dots they’d connect them.
“You really expect Em to just sit quietly and amplify for you?” Charlie shook his head. “I’ve got news for you, Doctor Doom, she’s not a big of fan of feeling anything outside her own pretty noggin these days. And, I don’t think she’s going to appreciate you fucking with me like this. It might not mean I own her, but she is a great fan of me and my penis. Told me so just this morning.”
Fine was a grinning shark. “I’m counting on that, Mr. Dunbar. You’re my leverage. She’ll either help me until I’m finished with her or I’ll torture you, and your penis, until she complies. You see, I don’t have to kill right away. I’m sure you’ve seen people in the throws of coronary thrombosis, Nurse Dunbar?”
Charlie’s memory threw up a parade of faces collapsing in on themselves in agony as their hearts shut down and their arteries deflated, clutching at their chests and arms. He blocked it out. Couldn’t think about that. Wouldn’t. “Even if you get her cooperation, how are you going to set off your little gas bombs throughout the rest of the city? You got shit rigged up on timers all over town? You really think it’s going to work?”
Fine chuckled. “No timers. Simplicity is best in matters such as these. Timers malfunction, bombs are found and diffused. No, I’ve taken another lesson from our Middle-Eastern adversaries.” Fine put up a hand. “But quiet! Someone’s here.”
* * *
THEY FANNED OUT, beta pattern, broken into four groups of two. One couplet at each door to the warehouse, one on each c
orner. At the S.W.A.T. commander’s signal they would switch on their lamps and storm the building. He flicked off the safety on his rifle and turned off his mind. Reflexes and training would take care of the rest. The commander squelched his throat mike twice and pistoned a vicious kick to the rotting door. It flew off its hinges. He and his partner were inside and checking quadrants before the door even stopped clattering on the floor. The other members of the team poured in through their own doors, rifle lamps throwing long beams into the dusty gloom. They’d all done this a hundred times. It was over before their shouts of “Clear!” had ceased to echo.
The commander pulled off his helmet and yanked the walkie-talkie off his belt. “Bilko. This is commander S.W.A.T.” He scanned the empty warehouse. “There’s, ah, there’s no one here.”
* * *
Emily drove her old blue Honda over the George Washington Bridge at sunset. A line of lava flowed along the horizon and faded upward into cerulean, cobalt, and then to the blind city cataract where the only visible stars were windows in skyscrapers. Dimke had told them how to find the warehouse. It was simple: she and the old man had enough time to get her car from the hotel and then immediately to the warehouse. Or Charlie would die. Harlan, well, hell, he was probably already gone. Not much left when Fine had sent her. Any word to the cops meant Charlie would die. Anyone other than Samuels and Emily showing up at the warehouse and Charlie would die. If they deviated from Fine’s orders in the slightest, Charlie would die.
“You just do it like I tell you,” Dimke had explained. “But don’t take too long. And don’t try nothin’. Don’t try to get the cops or that bitch Bilko involved. The Doctor’ll know if the wrong people’re coming. The Doctor’ll just blink and your nursey boy’ll keel over. I seen him do it.” She’d gone misty. “He can do anything.”
They’d rushed to the Morgan and Emily stationed Samuels out front—he opening the door for her and taking the doorman stance—while she ran up to fetch her car keys. They drove in silence for most of the way. The exit Dimke had told them about loomed up and Emily took them off the highway. A few more lights and turns, a few more minutes, found them on the borders of the wetlands by the traintracks. Fifty warehouses lurked in the cattails, old forgotten places used for secrets best kept by dust and dark. Emily pulled up and stopped at the head of the service road leading to the building Dimke described. Make sure you go to the one near them old powerlines or you’ll miss it. It’s a maze back in there. Emily turned to Samuels.
“Why do you think he wants you here, too? I don’t get it.”
Samuels had to wrench his attention back into the car. He had been staring at the warehouse, or rather what was superimposed over it for him. He had read about blackholes, but when he first saw an artist’s conception he’d been confused. Blackholes were supposed to be stars that had collapsed under their own gravity and become so dense that not even light could escape them. The artist conceptions always represented them as great funnels, but stars are spherical. That’s what he saw hanging in space over the warehouse: a giant black sphere radiating lines into the night. It was like a photo-negative of the potentialities he had seen up to now, but instead of light on a black field this was the reverse. Every potentiality that could come out of this building was a black spike leading into time. Except one. A single line stabbed from the center of the singularity and punched through the windshield into Emily’s chest. She couldn’t see it.
“Samuels?”
He shook his head and the image faded. “I’m sorry, Miss Emily. What did you…?”
“Why do you think he wants you here, too? He only seemed interested in me at the park. Why you now, too?” She stared out of the windshield. “Everything I fucking touch,” she whispered. Tears ran down her cheeks, but she was quiet.
Samuels let her cry a moment. He remembered the ice water that had welled in his stomach before charging the hill, and the hot water that had steamed down his leg in the woods outside the reservoir at Chosin. There might not be shells shattering the trees above their heads, but death was just as close. If he understood his new friend at all, this remarkable young woman would stop crying in her own time. This wasn’t the kind of woman to quail at danger when so much was at stake. A warm tear ran down his cheek. Neither had Greta been.
Emily stopped crying. She put her hands on the wheel and closed her eyes. “It doesn’t matter why he wants you, too, does it, Mr. Samuels? In the end, he’s just about hurting people and there’s no use in getting more complicated than that.”
“I imagine your father must have sounded an awful lot like you just did from time to time.”
Emily blushed. He was right. “Thank you,” she said and wiped her nose with the back of her hand. She laughed then. “That made me feel really good.”
“Hold onto it, girl. Things are going to be hard now.”
“Do you, uh, know what’s going to happen?”
Samuels looked down at his own chest. A black spike writhed like tar smoke trapped in a clear tube. He blinked it away and lied, “No, do you?”
“No.” She stared through the windshield and let go of the wheel. “I’m just going to try to stop him.” She twisted the engine off and shoved the keys in her jacket pocket. Samuels heard them clink against something and imagined a cell phone. (Perhaps Miss Emily had something up her sleeve after all, some cavalry she could call, but why wouldn’t she have told him?) They stepped onto the service road and the late June air enfolded them. Crickets and frogs competed for first chair. “You know,” Emily said as they walked down the road, “I never understood why Daddy wanted to be a cop. Not really.”
“ No?”
“Until now.” She kicked a pebble. “You ever think about cops and the odds?”
“Seems like the odds are all I think about anymore. What are you on about, though?”
“I think it’s about fighting. In a fair fight you got one person against another person. Everything matches. If one’s got a knife, so's the other. One’s got a gun, the other’s got a gun. That’s what fairness is, right?”
“Simplistically, but I’ll go along with that. It’s not fair for the police. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yeah, that’s why I never got how Daddy could do it. Especially once I got to be a teenager. We had a fight about it once, you know, when I was in that really shitty stage around fourteen? I just couldn’t get how he could put himself on the line like that. It seemed so stupid. There’s like a zillion criminals to every cop.”
“And where men like your father had a pistol or a shot gun, the crooks had machine guns and the like. You thought he was being reckless?”
“I don’t know what I really thinking, to be honest. I was probably just afraid to lose him, too.”
“Of course,” Samuels said. “Your mother. I’d forgotten.”
“Right, so I think I just got it, though, just now. It’s not about how fair the fight is. It’s about the fight itself. You just fight. You just have to.”
Samuels chuckled to himself, remembering that terrified kid with the piss squelching in his boot. The boot that had charged forward anyway because that’s just what a person did. “I understand,” he said and took another step down the road. “What are you going to do? I mean do you have a plan?”
Emily stopped and put her hands on her hips. She looked at the hulk of corrugated iron and concrete squatting at the end of the road like a giant toad, waiting for them to get too close. Charlie was in there. Her man was in there. She squinted and a stone about the size of a crab apple floated off the road and rolled in the air. Samuels gawked. He’d experienced her power first hand in the park, being yanked over the ground as they’d fled, but still to see her perform this magic as if she were playing with a yo-yo... Emily spun the stone faster and faster, a tiny blurring planet. Samuels thought he could hear a faint hum. The rock froze and shot through the air. An instant later one of the toad’s black glass eyes shattered.
“I think I’m just going to march i
n there and try to kick his ass.”
* * *
SHARON DIMKE had not owned her soul in years. Not since the day the bullets chopped her down. Not since the pain and the pills. The doctor had signed her soul over when he signed that first scrip for the Oxy. So, it was no great effort for her new Doctor, The Doctor, to take over her will. Lying there, dehydrating in that god-awful warehouse, smelling her own piss dry, the stink of her sweat as the shakes set in, she had begun to die. And then The Doctor had offered her a piece of her soul. Eat this, he’d said, and you’ll be more yourself. Just do as I say.
She’d fought him in her mind at first, thinking of the kids, her badge. That last one was a fucking joke. The badge had done this to her, and the kids were more their father’s children than hers. No. Even from the very beginning when she’d come to, cuffed to that pipe, she’d known it was over. Really, her end had happened all those years before with the bullets and the scrip, the receipt for her soul.
The Doctor was an angel or a demon, something from a higher place, a more powerful place. That’s what it was all about anyway. Most people will tell you that the greatest fight is between God and the Devil, good and evil, but a cop knows better. It’s not about which side is right, but about which side has the power. Go back through history and the terrorists become freedom fighters if they end up running things. The good guys are always those with the strength to win. The Doctor had the power and there was no use pretending otherwise.
Once she had stopped being able to piss without his consent, he’d proposed his plan to release Sharon as his agent in the world, his messenger to that skinny barbie-girl. It was the strangest thing and it had only taken two days. That’s what the bottled water had been for. To keep her and the other one, Harlan, alive in the summer heat, but also to provide The Doctor with tangible evidence that her training was complete.
The Doctor had watched while Sharon wet herself every few hours, the dark circle of concrete under her sore hip growing darker. Then she just couldn’t go. She tried but her urethra felt like a solid piece of metal. After a short time, her bladder began to feel like a brick in her gut, all edges and grit. He’d known something was wrong before she said anything. He could do that, could tell how she felt, almost like a watchful parent. He’d asked her what was wrong, shook the pill bottle to get her attention, and she’d started to cry. “I can’t go, I can’t go,” she’d whimpered in the half-light. Sharon had seen an exhibit of Catholic art at the Met a long time ago and the look that came over The Doctor’s face then reminded her of the Virgin Mother gazing on the precious Child. He was so proud of her. “You may go now, Sharon,” he’d said and it had all come rushing out of her. All of it.