“Jesus,” I said again, and took a sip of my coffee. And then grimaced.
Langdon noticed the grimace. “How’s the coffee?”
“It’s terrible.”
“I know a place where we can talk. The coffee there will be better, I promise. Come on. First cup’s on me.”
“How long have you known James Albert?”
I set my coffee down and looked over at Detective Langdon. She had steered us to a cafe on North St. Clair, a block south from the hospital. We were sitting in the al fresco part, meaning the cafe had carved out some of the sidewalk for its own use.
“Jimmy,” I said. “He hates being called James.”
“So you know him well enough to know that about him.”
“Anyone who knew him more than five minutes would know that about him. It was pretty much the first thing he ever said to me.”
“And when was it that he said that to you for the first time?”
“When we started dispatcher training. About eight years ago.”
“So you two were some of the first dispatchers.”
“We were the second class here in Chicago, yeah.”
“Are you close?”
“We’re friendly,” I said. I picked up my coffee again and blew on it. Langdon had her own cup, but she wasn’t touching it.
“Define ‘friendly.’”
“Meaning I’ve been to his house and he’s been to mine. I know his wife. He knows mine, or did until I got a divorce. We’ve been bowling. That sort of thing.”
“Friendly but not too close.”
“That’s right.” I drank from my cup.
“So why did he call you to sub in for him at the hospital?”
“That didn’t have anything to do with me in particular. I was on call.”
“Explain that.”
“Well, you know what being ‘on call’ is.”
“I get the general concept. Explain what it means for you in particular.”
A bus rolled by, making a bunch of noise as it squealed to a stop in front of us; I waited until it rolled away. “Dispatchers work the hospitals,” I said. “Insurance companies work with the Agency to make sure we’re in the room for high-risk operations like the one today, and otherwise we’re often stationed in the building in case we’re needed in the ER or somewhere else.”
“Okay.”
“So, usually the same dispatcher works the same hospital for a while. It’s easier that way and everyone gets into a schedule. Jimmy’s been working Northwestern for about three months now. But like everyone, once in a while he’s got something else on his schedule and he can’t make an appointment. So it goes to whichever dispatcher’s on call. Today that’s me. Jimmy called me to confirm and make sure I had the files.”
“You don’t have your own hospital to work?”
“I used to do the University of Chicago hospitals, but right now I’m between regular stints. So I’m on call instead. It’s like being a substitute teacher.”
“Well, except that you kill people.”
“They come back,” I said. “Mostly.” I took another sip of my coffee.
Langdon looked at me. “So what’s that like?”
“What’s what like?”
“Killing people.”
I shrugged. “You’re a cop. You ever shoot anyone?”
“No,” Langdon said. “I’ve never had to draw my gun.”
“But you might have to.”
“Sure.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“It’s less of a problem now than it might have been ten years ago.”
“Because they come back now.”
“Right. Mostly.”
“Same thing.”
“I might have to pull my gun one day. You kill people every day you do your job. There’s a difference.”
I smiled and set my cup back down. “This is beginning to sound a lot like one of my dates.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“I mean that I go on a lot of first dates. Online dating, you know. I go on dates and eventually we talk about what we do for a living. And then I get a lot of questions about what I do. About killing people.”
“And what do you tell them?”
“I don’t tell them, I do this.” I reached into a pocket and pulled out three small objects and held them out for Langdon to look at.
She did. “All right, I give up. What are those?”
“They’re ten-sided dice.” I set them down in front of her.
“You actually walk around with three ten-sided dice in your pocket.”
“I do. A lot of us do. Because we answer this question a lot. Pick them up, please.”
She did. “All right, what now?”
“Here’s the deal. You’re someone who needs a dispatcher. The dispatcher is going to shoot you in the head. If you roll three zeros, you’re dead. If you roll anything else, then after you’ve been shot in the head, five seconds later you rematerialize at home, probably on your bed. You’re naked but otherwise you’re perfectly fine.” I pointed to the hand she held the dice in. “Now roll.”
She rolled. “Six two one.”
“You live. Roll again.”
“Two nine nine.”
“You live. Roll again.”
“Six five three.”
“You live. Roll again.”
“I actually do understand statistics, Mr. Valdez.”
“Then you get my point. When a dispatcher does his or her job, the odds of them killing someone are actually pretty low.”
Langdon reached out to return my dice to me. “You’re saying about one chance in a thousand.”
I took them and pocketed them. “That’s what the Agency says.”
“What about your own experience?”
“I’ve been doing this for eight years. I’ve dispatched more than a thousand people. Probably closer to fourteen or fifteen hundred. They’ve all ended up at home, mostly in bed, naked.”
“But there’s always a chance someone will stay dead.”
“Yes, there is. And that’s why dispatchers exist. Licensed, bonded, insured and we’ve passed a bunch of psychological tests that indicate we can handle the aftermath of a failed dispatch.”
“Do you believe that? That you’re psychologically equipped to handle the fact that you’ve killed someone? I mean, that they’re actually dead because of you.”
Another bus rolled in; I took a sip of my coffee until it drove away. “You know about the first time anyone ever came back?” I said, to Langdon.
“Not really.”
“It was a guy named Taylor Barnes. He and his wife go to Iceland to celebrate their anniversary, or something like that. They go hiking on some cliffs. She’s been having an affair, doesn’t want to live with him anymore but doesn’t know how to say it, sees him peering over the edge of a cliff and decides pushing him off the cliff is easier than an awkward conversation. He goes over, falls something like two hundred feet and hits the rocks below—and then the next thing he knows he’s home, in Glendale, California, wondering what the hell just happened.”
“It’s a good question.”
“It’s a very good question. He knows his wife pushed him off the cliff, he knows he fell, he knows he died—and yet, there he is in his condo in southern California, not dead but very confused. He calls 911 and reports his own murder, in Iceland. Everyone else is very confused as well, including his wife.”
“Until it starts happening everywhere.”
“Right. The United States has something like forty or fifty murders a day, and all of those murder victims just…stop dying. Or they die, but show up at home, naked and bewildered. That bomb went off in Athens, killing eighty tourists at the Parthenon, and all but one of them ended up back in their country of origin. In Afghanistan, hundreds of fighters dying in that Kabul offensive, and showing up at home a couple of seconds later, naked as the day they were born. And finally someone figures out the pattern.
”
“Someone has to kill you in order for you to come back.”
“That’s right.” I signaled the waiter to get more coffee. “If you die of natural causes, you’re dead. If you commit suicide, you’re dead. If you accidentally fall down an elevator shaft or drop a radio in your bathwater, you’re dead. But if someone pushes you down that elevator shaft or drops that radio into your tub? You come back. Nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand.”
“Okay,” Langdon said. “And this has to do with you being psychologically prepared to kill someone how?”
The waiter arrived with more coffee. “Murder victims come back,” I said, picking up the cup. “No one else faced with death does. Except when dispatchers are involved.” I waved in the direction of the hospital. “I just dispatched a seventy-eight-year-old man who was about to die on the operating table. The operation had gone bad. It’s possible the surgeon could have pulled it out, but at what cost? The trauma to the body was so significant at that point that the patient was never likely to get back to where he was before the operation, in terms of quality of life. He would have been a mess, his insurance would have to shell out, his family would have been overwhelmed with dealing with the cost of the operation and the aftermath. If he survived.”
Langdon smiled. “I see where this is going.”
“Then tell me.”
“You’re detailing this nightmare scenario and now you going to tell me how you offer a better alternative.”
“You got it. I dispatch the patient. Yes, there’s a small chance of him dying, but what’s more likely to happen—and what did happen—is he ends up at home.”
“With his chest open and heart exposed.”
I shook my head. “No, because whatever trauma the body’s experienced just prior to dispatch disappears. The patient in this case is back home, uncarved. He still needs a heart operation, and will probably die without one, is my best guess. But if he goes under the knife again, they don’t have to work around any previous operation. Clean start. Plus they know what went wrong last time and can factor that in for the next time.”
“You’re saying you’re psychologically equipped for your job because you’re prolonging lives, not ending them.”
“No. I’m psychologically equipped for my job because whoever is using my services was already about to die. I’m increasing their odds of survival. If they still die, it’s not because I didn’t offer them a better chance to live.”
“So it’s not your fault.”
“No more than it’s a doctor’s fault if a severely injured patient dies on the table.”
“But the doctor is working to save their life.”
“So am I.” I drank from my coffee.
Langdon watched me drink. “Does it work?”
“Does what work?”
“That rationalization.”
“It works so far.”
“But you haven’t lost anyone yet.”
“No,” I admitted.
“Have you known any dispatchers who’ve had a failed dispatch?”
“Sure. A couple of the dispatchers in my class.”
“How did they deal with them?”
“One of them quit,” I said. “The last I heard she’s working at an orphanage in Mexico or something like that. The other one handled it just fine. She’s working Mercy Hospital most days.”
“What about Jimmy?”
“Are you asking if he’s had any failed dispatches?”
“Yes.”
“Not that I know of.”
“He wouldn’t tell you?”
“He might not. If it happened through a hospital he’d file a report to whatever insurance provider had contacted the Agency, and you could find it through the Freedom of Information Act. The Agency’s a state agency. They’d have to let you see it. But it doesn’t mean he’d talk about it, and I wouldn’t ask him.”
“What if it was a private gig?”
“You mean, if he was working for a client directly, not through the Agency or through an insurance company.”
“Yeah. I understand that happens from time to time.”
“Sure. I definitely wouldn’t know about those.”
“Why not?”
“They’re kind of a gray area, legally speaking.”
“Do you have any private clients?”
“What part of ‘it’s a gray area, legally speaking’ are you having trouble with?”
“You can tell me confidentially.”
I raised my cup to Langdon. “I appreciate the coffee, but I’m not that cheap. Or stupid.”
“Fair enough,” Langdon said. “Who would know if he had any private clients?”
“Katie might,” I said. “His wife. You’ve spoken to her?”
Langdon nodded. “Briefly. We asked her who she knew that might want to do harm to her husband. She wasn’t coming up with anyone.”
“You might ask her again. She might have thought you were asking about someone who had a grudge against him, not one of his private clients.”
“Would she tell us?”
“She might. Jimmy wouldn’t like it, but Jimmy’s missing.”
“Would you come with me?”
“To ask her?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You know her husband. You know her. It might help.”
I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not a cop, and I don’t know that I want to be involved.”
“This is your friend.”
“This is someone I’m friendly with. There’s a difference.”
“Is there any other reason?”
“It would take more time than we have.”
Langdon smiled. “This is your way of telling me our date here has come to an end.”
“I do have paperwork to fill out. And then I have other things on my agenda.”
“How does this compare to your other ‘dates’?”
“Not bad. We covered most of the basics. You never got to the theological aspects of my job.”
“There are theological aspects to your job?”
“Most of the time on my dates I get asked whether I think murdered people coming back proves that God exists.”
“That’s a pretty deep question for a first date.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Out of curiosity, what do you say?”
There was a squeal of tires behind me, the thump of something fleshy hitting something that was not, and the sound of someone screaming. Both Langdon and I turned to the sound.
Twenty yards away a bus had stopped, an impressive crack in its windshield and a smear of blood in the center of the crack’s spiderweb pattern. In front of the bus, a few yards away, a woman was crumpled in the street.
Langdon and I were both out of our chairs and heading toward the woman.
The driver was out of the bus and holding her arms out, in a defensive motion, as we approached. “She walked in front of the bus!” she said. “It’s on the dashcam! I tried to stop but I couldn’t!”
“Yours,” I said to Langdon, who nodded and headed to the bus driver. I kneeled down in front of the fallen woman and assessed her.
The woman looked to have been hit by the bus from the left side, which would have been consistent with her walking out in front of it. Her left arm was shattered and either her radius or ulna was sticking out of its lower portion; I wasn’t qualified to say which it was. Her skull above her left temple was cracked and flattened. That was probably the part that left the spiderweb crack on the windshield. I glanced up and looked around on the street and found what I was looking for; a cell phone, its screen shattered. The screen was still on, showing a half finished text.
“Idiot,” I said.
“How is she?” Langdon asked, coming up to me. The driver stood next to her bus, uncertain what to do next.
“She’s alive, but not for much longer,??
? I said. “Broken bones, massive head trauma and by the sound of her breathing, punctured lung and internal bleeding.”
“Are you qualified to make that assessment?”
“Dispatchers get first aid assessment and treatment as part of their training. I recertified last year. And anyway look at her.”
“The hospital’s one street over.”
“She’s not going to last that long.”
“What do you want to do, then?”
“Give me your gun.”
Langdon blinked. “The hell you say.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m not going to give you my gun, Valdez. I’ll get fired for that.”
I shook my head. “Law enforcement officials are allowed to assist dispatchers. You’re legally protected. Give me your gun.”
“No.”
“Look, Langdon, she doesn’t have any time. If you don’t give me your gun I’m going have to dispatch her another way. The only way I’ve got right now is manually. So if you want me to strangle her right here in middle of the street, fine. But your gun would be faster. And merciful.”
Langdon thought for a second. “You’ll come with me to talk to Katie Albert.”
“What?”
“I give you my gun, and you come with me to talk to Katie Albert when we’re done.”
“You’re fucking bargaining with me right now? Are you shitting me?”
“That’s the deal.”
“Jesus Christ. Yes. Now give me the fucking gun.”
Langdon unholstered her handgun and handed it to me. I checked it and familiarized myself with it. I stood up and looked around.
“My name is Anthony Valdez and I am a dispatcher, licensed and bonded with the State of Illinois,” I said, loudly, to the now-considerable assembled crowd. “I judge this woman to be in a near-death state. As she is unresponsive, by State of Illinois law I am assuming her implied consent to dispatch her safely and humanely. You may all witness and record this action but be aware live ammunition is to be used.” Some of the crowd backed away at that last sentence. But none of them left.
I knelt back down, positioned Langdon’s handgun close to the fallen woman’s temple, and fired.
The woman’s body jolted and was still.
It was, literally, deathly quiet.
And then, with the familiar sucking pop of inrushing air, the woman was no longer there.