Season of the Assassin (25 page)

‘Here are the tapes,’ I said, passing them over to Field. ‘You listen to them and decide.’ 

In a half-hour we were back in his office.

‘I’ll have a warrant for Anglin’s arrest in about twenty minutes. Make sure he doesn’t flee the county,’ Henry Field warned us.

*

There would be a small army present at the cuffing of Carl Anglin. A dozen squads. A backup SWAT team, just in case Carl got testy.

Anglin had relocated to the far northwest part of town. Our street people had pinpointed his new digs just two days ago, Tactical informed us. There would be no stakeout. It was the middle of a hot July afternoon, and we were going straight in. We weren’t sure he was in there, but we were about to find out.

The block was swarming with police vehicles. We had got the street cordoned off at either end as well as the two streets east and west that ran parallel to Dempsy Street, where Anglin now lived.

Doc and I led the way up to the second-floor apartment. There were no federal people accompanying us on this raid.

The entry at the ground level had no lock, so Doc could put his burglary tools back in his pocket. He and I and four uniforms made our way up to the second flight.

‘Anglin! Police! Open the door!’ Doc yelled.

We waited five beats, and then the uniforms rammed the door with their metal apparatus that splintered the entryway open after three hits.

We went into the flat with our guns aimed waist high. There was no one in the living room. Nor in the dining room or kitchenette. All that remained was the bedroom.

I was at point. We opened the bedroom door.

On the mattress sprawled that gorgeous brunette from Anglin’s other apartment who’d greeted us in the buff a few months prior.

She was naked except for her thong panties again, but this time her face was a mess, a collection of bruises and lacerations.

I propped her head up on the bloody pillow.

‘Can you talk?’ I asked.

She tried to blink her eyes, but one of them was swollen shut, thanks to Anglin’s fists.

‘Please. Where is he? Can you talk at all?’ I repeated.

She managed only a whisper.

‘Carl…He said he was on his way…’

‘Where?’ I urged her.

‘He said he was on his way…Unfinished business. He said he was on his way to…Indiana.’

[July 1999]

This was my first helicopter ride since my second tour in Vietnam. The chopper took off from the top of our downtown headquarters. It had taken us a half-hour of speeding through city traffic to get from Anglin’s apartment to HQ, but Doc had the siren and the lights going, and we made it quickly through the snarl-ups. I hated high-speed pursuits. Doc understood my fear, but he had no choice. We barely missed a few other cars and several pedestrians. But we made it.

I also had no love of heights. I made my nervousness clear to our chopper pilot, who laughed and lifted off from the multiple-storeyed headquarters building. The pilot, Jack McDade, had also been a helicopter pilot in the Vietnam War. The pilots were, as I recall, the goofiest bastards in country.

‘We’ll get you there in minutes,’ Jack grinned.

Doc’s face was already green. This was his first ride in one of these rickety-ass miracles of aviation.

‘We may not have minutes,’ I reminded the pilot.

‘I hear you,’ Jack told me. This time he was all business.

We headed east-southeast, toward Indiana and Theresa Rojas.

‘The Major told him. The Major got it from the Fibbies who got it by surveillance that we weren’t aware of, someone at the hospital who shot their mouth off — ’

‘What difference does it make now, Doc?’ I asked.

He nodded resignedly. Who knew what kind of a lead Anglin had on us? Maybe the helicopter would even the odds. Maybe he wouldn’t be able to penetrate the hospital’s security…which I knew wouldn’t stop him. When he got there, he’d get in. That was his kind of thing. After all those years of experience, it’d be like walking through the front doors of a church on Sunday.

The Indiana State Police had been notified. They were on their way. But the hospital was in a remote area, and it’d take some time for them to arrive. Also, the choppers in Indiana were all engaged at the moment. It’d be an hour before any of them came free, so the cops had to go by automobile. There was no place near the hospital for an ordinary airplane to land.

So we were it. We were the closest available helping hand.

I’d already contacted the hospital by phone. They were on high alert — whatever that meant. Doc and I and Jack were likely to be the only cops on scene in about fifteen minutes.

The crosswinds began to pick up, so Jack’s job was made more difficult.

‘No problem. We’ll get there. But we’re going to have to go in lower than I’d like to. Let’s all of us keep our eyes open for power lines.’

‘Shit,’ Doc declared.

‘Indeed. Shit,’ Jack repeated and smiled.

We swooped down to about a hundred feet from ground level and the pilot changed course slightly to fly directly above Indiana Highway 96. Jack claimed it would be the quickest way to the mental facility.

It began to rain, complete with lightning and thunder.

‘Isn’t this stuff supposed to ground us?’ Doc asked.

‘Yeah. Usually,’ Jack snorted.

But he pressed on above the light traffic below us. We were moving faster than the cars, but I couldn’t figure out the speed. I was too terrified. I clutched the arm of my seat like it was a buoy in a shark-infested ocean.

In another ten minutes we saw the building where Theresa Rojas lived. There was a small park just a few blocks from the actual site, so Jack wanted to put us down there.

The sky was nearly as green as Doc’s face. I could imagine tornado sirens going off in the distance. But just then the wind died down to nothing. We landed with rain streaming down the bubble canopy of the chopper. When we got out of the helicopter, lightning daggered down out of the east, and suddenly we couldn’t see the hospital’s lights.

‘Jesus. The power’s out…Jack, you can stay here if you — ’

‘Bullshit,’ he laughed. ‘I’m going in with the troops. That creep could be out here somewhere. I like your company a whole lot, Jimmy.’

‘All right. Are you packing?’ I asked the pilot.

He patted his shoulder holster.

‘Always,’ he said softly, and grinned.

The rain began to come down as we tried to make sure we had all our weapons in tact. I checked the ankle holster, and I drew out the Bulldog .38. It was my gun of choice in close encounters. It’d halt Anglin — a whole platoon of Anglins — with its stopping power.

We moved out quickly toward the hospital. By now the rain was coming down furiously, making it almost impossible to stay on a straight line to the facility, but we pressed on in spite of the deluge. I was first; Doc and Jack followed with their weapons in their hands.

The front gate, one of those black wrought-iron deals, was wide open. I looked at Doc. I could barely see his face until another streak of lightning lit up the sky. There was more than concern in his expression as we approached and passed the opened gate.

We ran up to the entrance. We could see nothing through the glass door because there was no light on inside. I would’ve thought they’d have used candles or a backup generator, but there was no illumination inside that I could see.

‘He’d take care of the generator even without the storm, Jimmy. He knows how to create a friendly atmosphere for his business.’

We walked into the darkened building. Doc’s railroad flashlight gave us some help in finding our way. Outside the rain swirled everything into an opaque green soup. Inside we had a slightly better chance of seeing what was in front of us.

We reached the admissions desk. No one there.

Until Doc aimed the flashlight’s beam behind the desk and found the unconscious body of the receptionist. My partner reached down and found that she still had a pulse.

‘He hasn’t had time to have fun with the staff,’ I told Doc and Jack. ‘He’s gone directly to the target.’

We left the still-breathing receptionist where she lay, and we moved on down the hall toward Theresa’s room, number 226. There was a knocked-flat orderly about twenty feet down the hallway. He was still alive as well, Doc discovered.

When we arrived at Theresa’s room, we found the door had been opened. Jagged streaks of lightning outside illuminated the inside of her cubicle just for a second. Anglin was holding her from behind. He was sitting on the bed. Doc leveled the flashlight at the two of them. Anglin had his forearm underneath Theresa’s chin, and we could see that he was squeezing hard. The beam of the flashlight showed us the razor that he was gripping tightly in his right hand while he methodically, expertly choked the life out of our only witness with that forearm.

I could hear Theresa gurgling. Anglin was looking at the three of us pointing our pistols at his forehead.

‘Turn that fuckin’ thing off or I’ll cut her right now.’

Doc extinguished the flashlight.

‘This is pointless, Carl,’ I reminded him. ‘You aren’t leaving here and you know — ’

‘She’s the last one. The one I missed, back when your daddy couldn’t cuff me…You know how many staff members they got here? Eight. That’s how many. I chloroformed five of them and had to club the rest. Picked them off one by one. Mother Nature made it too easy…And then you three had to show up. The cavalry, right?’

‘You should’ve whacked that big-titted brunette. She pointed us at you,’ Doc told him.

‘That’s what you get when you leave your enemies alive. Can’t hurt you if they ain’t 

breathing.’

‘You hurt her and you won’t get your day in court,’ I reminded him.

‘She ain’t going to testify against me…Are you, girl? See, we’ve been sitting here for the past few minutes, just before you so rudely interrupted us, and we’ve been discussing the past. You know. The history that we shared all those years ago. Theresa was jabbering when we first began, but I think she’s done had a relapse…And you’ve already noticed that all those lovely folks here at the home are still breathing. They’re just taking a nap. Now, you all might get me for assault and breaking and entering and whatever else you want to cook up, but you ain’t getting me for the nurses because you just lost your best witness again…She was a talkative little thing when I first got in here. Even a bit feisty…Bit me on the forearm. See?’

He pulled up a sleeve and showed Doc the marks of her teeth. The flashlight beam revealed little droplets of blood.

Lightning shocked the green sky outside alive, and the blooming pressure of a thunderclap burst Theresa’s window open. All of us jerked in shock. But Anglin never let go of her, and he was still clutching the razor tightly.

‘Yeah. I’m going to skip out on all those charges you’re getting ready, Lieutenant. My friends will make sure that I don’t pay for too

long because of what you might throw at me on account of tonight’s little get-together. You aren’t wired, are you, Parisi? No. You were in too big a hurry to haul ass down here and save your favorite witness…Her roommates were good, Lieutenant. They fought a little, and I always liked fight in a woman…You ever choked a bitch almost to the point of killing her when you were both about to come? No? Too bad. You could see the come in their eyes when I squeezed them almost to the point of dyin’. It sure is some kind of rush…’

‘What were their names?’

Anglin loosened his grip on her neck.

The voice belonged to Theresa Rojas. Lightning spiked the green sky with yellow pitchforks. The thunder hit just seconds later.

Doc pointed the flashlight beam at Anglin’s face. We could see the green of his cat’s eyes raging back at us.

‘I’m walking this little lady right out the front door, Lieutenant. You and your boyfriends there blink, and I cut her throat. And there goes your sole witness.’

‘And you die the second she bleeds,’ I told him.

‘I ain’t afraid to die, Parisi. Anyway, I wouldn’t want to go into a cage over the likes of this cunt. I’m hoping you really would pull the trigger. You’d be doing me a favor. But she’d still be dead and you don’t want that to happen, now do you?’ 

Anglin began to back out of the room with Theresa in tow. He held the razor precariously close to her jugular vein. He would cut her just the way he’d cut the other nurses, and he knew that we knew it.

The lights were still out in the hospital. Only the flashes from the electrical storm outside illuminated our way toward the hospital’s entrance. All I could see of Anglin’s face were his eyes as the lightning flashed outside. The razor never moved from its place against Theresa’s exposed throat. We had our guns pointed at Anglin’s head, but I never felt so powerless as I did then as we followed him and Theresa toward the entry.

A lightning flash lit up the reception area. Anglin pulled open the glass door, and then he snatched Theresa violently backward through it.

We followed them along the concrete driveway. Anglin was headed toward an old Jeep that sat in the circular drive in front of the hospital entrance. He was reaching into his pocket for the key, I supposed, as another booming jolt of lightning struck not far from where we stood.

‘I won’t let you leave here,’ I shouted through the rolling thunder of the storm that was pelting us with a mixture of heavy rain and pea-sized hailstones. The hail felt like little stabbings on our faces and heads. Doc and Jack and myself were drenched by the downpour, but we managed to keep our weapons pointed at the man struggling to get Theresa Rojas into that Jeep.

Another boom shook the five of us standing on that drive. Yet another concussion followed. Then the sky lit up in a ghastly flickering yellow and green flash as pitchforks of lightning pocked the sky.

Just for a moment Anglin let his attention wander from the razor that nestled against Theresa’s vulnerable throat, and he dropped the hand that held the blade as he peered skyward.

I cocked my piece, but before I could put a round through one of his green eyes, another batch of lightning pitchforks flared as the thunder reached a crescendo. A bolt of pure white electrical energy hurled itself toward the power lines that stood at the edge of the drive, and we all jumped at the resulting explosion. We saw the power line snap away from its couplings, and down it came, writhing and twisting like a furious snake about to strike whatever stood before it.

Theresa dove away from Anglin once she realized he’d released his hold on her neck, and she scrambled away from him with feral speed. Anglin tried to duck the thrashing power line, but he moved too slowly this time and the wild black snake sprang at his throat as if it were a real serpent. The force of the blow whipped Anglin down onto his back, and it was then that he screamed, just as blue arcs of high-voltage sparks came crackling out of his mouth and ears and eyes.

Anglin’s scream didn’t last long, but the stink of scorched flesh started to come at us almost immediately. Black smoke rose from his fried corpse as the rain continued to drench us and as arcs of lethal blue force continued to burst out of every orifice in his dead body.

I rushed over to Theresa, who lay in a sobbing heap about ten yards from the electrified remains of Anglin. I picked her up and hustled her back inside the hospital. I yelled for Doc and Jack to get out of the fury of the storm, but they stood there mesmerized, watching Anglin burn up in a coruscating blue blaze. Their guns were still pointed at him as if he might still escape from the cable that had wrapped itself around his throat.