Shut Your Eyes Tight (Dave Gurney, No. 2): A Novel (63 page)

On the screen, two pews were in flames, flames were rising from half the lamps, some of the drapes were smoldering. Most of the girls were on the floor, some covering their faces, some trying to breathe through torn pieces of their clothing, some crying, some coughing, a few vomiting.

Hardwick appeared to be on the verge of an explosion.

“Then you came along,” Ashton repeated. “Clever, clever David Gurney. And this is the result.” He waved his gun at the screen. “Why didn’t your cleverness tell you that this is the way it would end? How else
could
it end? Did you really think I’d let them go? Is clever, clever David Gurney really that stupid?”

Hobart Ashton took a few short steps to the back of his son’s chair.

Hardwick screamed, “This is your solution, Ashton? This is it, you crazy fucker? Burn a hundred and twenty teenage girls to death?
This is your fucking solution?
”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, it is! You really thought when I was finally trapped, I’d let them go?” Ashton’s voice was rising now, out of control, hurtling at Gurney and Hardwick like a wild thing with a life of its own. “You thought I’d turn a nest of snakes loose on all the little babies of the world? These toxic things, these slimy, venomous things! Demented, rotten, sucking, slimy things! These slither—”

It happened so quickly that Gurney almost thought he hadn’t seen it. The sudden flash of an arm around from the back of the chair, a quick curving movement, and that was all—Ashton’s rant cut off in the middle of a word. Then the old man stepping quickly,
athletically to the side of the chair, grasping the barrel of Ashton’s gun, pulling it away with a twisting yank and the disturbingly sharp crack of a finger bone. Ashton’s head lolled forward on his chest, and his body began to tilt forward, curling downward, toppling onto the floor, collapsing sideways into a fetal position. It was then that the actual method of killing was made obvious by all the blood that began to pool around his throat.

Hardwick’s jaw muscles bulged.

The little man in the brown cardigan wiped his pocketknife on the back cushion of the chair in which Ashton had been sitting, folded it deftly with one hand, and replaced it in his pocket.

Then he looked down at Ashton and, as if in benediction to his son’s passing soul, said softly, “You’re a piece of shit.”

T
he intense revulsion Gurney had felt toward violence and blood as a rookie cop, especially the blood from a fatal wound, was something he had learned to contain and conceal during his twenty years in homicide. When he had to, he was able to cloak pretty effectively what he felt—or at least to wrap his horror in the semblance of mere distaste. Which is what he did now.

Commenting on the blood spreading out in a slow oval, being absorbed into the delicate intricacies of the Persian rug, he said, as if he were describing nothing more tragic than bird shit on a windshield, “What a fucking mess.”

Hardwick blinked. He stared first at Gurney, then at the body on the floor, then at the fiery bedlam on the screen. He looked uncomprehendingly at Ashton’s father. “The doors. Why don’t you unlock the fucking doors?”

Gurney and the old man gazed at each other with an eerie lack of any visible concern. In past difficulties the ability to project an attitude of perfect calm had served Gurney well, given him an advantage. But that didn’t seem to be the case now. The old man was radiating a quiet, brutal confidence. It was as though killing Ashton had brought him a deep peace and strength—as though an imbalance had finally been righted.

This was not a man with whom one could win a simple staring contest. Gurney decided to up the ante and change the rules. And he knew that he needed to do it quickly if anyone was going to get out of that building alive. It was time to take a wild swing.

“Reminds me of Tel Aviv,” said Gurney, gesturing toward the screen.

The little man blinked and stretched his lips in a meaningless smile.

Gurney sensed that the wild swing had produced a solid hit. But now what?

Hardwick was staring at them with a bewildered fury.

Gurney continued to focus on the man with the gun. “Too bad you didn’t come a little sooner.”

“What?”

“Too bad you didn’t come sooner. Like five months ago instead of three.”

The little man looked honestly curious. “What’s that to you?”

“You could’ve stopped that crazy shit with Jillian.”

“Ah.” He nodded slowly, almost appreciatively.

“Of course, if you’d intervened even sooner, back when you should have, everything would be different now. Better, I think, don’t you?”

The little man continued nodding, but vaguely, without any apparent meaning. Then he frowned. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Gurney was seized by the sickening possibility that he was on the wrong track. But there was nowhere left to go except forward, no time left for thinking twice. So, then, forward with a vengeance. “Maybe you should’ve killed him a long time ago. Maybe you should’ve strangled him when he was born, before Tirana really sank her teeth into him. Little fucker was nuts from the beginning, like his mother, not a businessman like you.”

Gurney searched the man’s face for the slightest reaction, but his expression was no more communicative—or human—than the pistol in his hand. So once again there was nowhere to go but forward. “That’s why you showed up here after the Jillian drama, right? Leonardo killing her was one thing, that could just be good business, but cutting her fucking head off at the wedding, that was … more than business. My guess is you came to keep an eye on things. Make sure that things were conducted in a more businesslike fashion. You didn’t want the crazy little fucker fucking it all up. But, to be fair, Leonardo had some strong points. Smart. Imaginative. Right?”

Still no reaction beyond a dead stare.

Gurney went on. “You have to admit that the Hector idea was pretty good. Inventing the perfect fall guy in case anyone caught on to all those Mapleshade graduates being unlocatable. So the mythical Hector ‘appeared on the scene’ just before the girls started disappearing. That shows forward thinking on Leonardo’s part. Real initiative. Good planning. But it came with a price. He was just too fucking crazy, wasn’t he? That’s why you finally had to do it. Backed into a corner. Crisis management.” Gurney shook his head, looked with dismay at the huge bloodstain on the rug between them. “Too fucking little, Giotto. Too fucking late.”

“The fuck did you call me?”

Gurney returned the man’s granite stare for a long moment before answering, “Don’t waste my time. I have a deal for you. You have five minutes to take it or leave it.” He thought he saw a tiny crack in the stone. For maybe a quarter of a second.

“The fuck did you call me?”

“Giotto, get it through your head. It’s over. The Skards are done. The Skards are fucking done. You get it? Clock’s ticking. Here’s the deal. You hand me the names and addresses of all Karnala’s customers, all the Jordan Ballston creeps you do business with. I especially want the addresses where some Mapleshade girls might still be alive. You give me all that and I give you a guarantee that you will live through the process of being arrested.”

The little man laughed, a sound like gravel being crushed under a blanket. “You got amazing balls, Gurney. You’re in the wrong fucking business.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re down to four and a half minutes. Time fucking flies. So if you choose not to give me the addresses I want, here’s what’s going to happen: There will be a careful, by-the-book attempt to take you into custody. You, however, will foolishly try to escape. In doing so you will endanger the life of a police officer, making it necessary to shoot you. You will be shot twice. The first bullet, a nine-millimeter hollow-point, will blow your balls off. The second will sever your spinal cord between the first and second cervical vertebrae, resulting in irreversible paralysis. This combination of wounds will convert you into a soprano in a wheelchair in a prison hospital for the rest of your fucking
life. It will also give your fellow inmates an opportunity to piss in your face whenever they feel the urge. Okay? You understand the deal?”

Again came the laugh. A laugh that would make Hardwick’s nasty rasp sound sweet. “You know why you’re still alive, Gurney? Because I can’t fucking wait to hear what you’re going to say next.”

Gurney looked at his watch. “Three minutes and twenty seconds to go.”

There were no voices coming from the monitor now—just moans, hacking coughs, a sharp little scream, crying.

“What the fuck?” said Hardwick. “Jesus, what the fuck?”

Gurney looked at the screen, listened to the piteous sounds, turned to Hardwick, spoke with deliberate clarity and evenness. “In case I forget, remember that the door opener is in Ashton’s pocket.”

Hardwick looked strangely at him, seeming to register the implication of his statement.

“Time is running out,” Gurney added, turning toward Giotto Skard.

Again the old man laughed. He could not be bluffed. There would be no deal.

A girl’s face appeared on the screen, half obscured by a tumble of blond hair, full of fear and fury, larger than life, distorted into ugliness by its closeness to the camera.

“You fuck!” the girl screamed, her voice cracking. “You fuck! You fuck! You fuck!” She began to cough violently, wheezing, hacking.

The cadaverous Dr. Lazarus appeared from behind an upended pew, crawling like a giant black beetle across the smoky floor.

Giotto Skard was watching the screen. Worse than emotionless, he seemed amused.

This minor distraction, Gurney concluded, was as good as it was going to get. This one last chance was all he had left.

There was no one to blame. No one to save him. His own decisions had brought him to this place. This most dangerous place in all his life. This narrow place, teetering on the edge of hell.

Gate of Heaven.

There was only one thing he could do.

He hoped it would be enough.

If it wasn’t, he hoped that perhaps one day Madeleine would be able to forgive him.

T
here was no course at the academy that adequately prepared you for being shot. Hearing it described by those who’d been through it gave you some idea, and seeing it happen added a certain disturbing dimension, but like most powerful experiences, the idea of it and the reality of it existed in two different worlds.

His plan, such as it was, conceived as it was in a second or two, was, like jumping out a window, simplicity itself. The plan was to launch himself directly at the little man with the gun, who was standing ten or twelve feet from him next to Ashton’s empty chair just inside the open door. The hope was to smash into him with sufficient force to drive him backward through the doorway—the momentum carrying them both over the small landing and down the stone stairs. The price was getting shot, probably more than once.

As Giotto Skard watched the blond girl shrieking “Fuck!” Gurney hurled himself forward with a guttural roar, placing one arm across the heart area of his chest and the other across his forehead. Skard’s .25-caliber pistol would not have great stopping power, except to those two areas, and Gurney was resigned to absorbing elsewhere whatever damage was necessary.

It was crazy, probably suicidal, but he saw no alternative.

The deafening report of the first shot in the small room came almost immediately. With a shocking impact, the bullet shattered Gurney’s right wrist, which was pressed against the heart side of his breastbone.

The second bullet was a spike of fire through his stomach.

The third was the bad one.

N
either here nor there
.

A
n explosion of electricity. A blinding green spark, a spark like an exploding star. Screaming. A scream of terror and shock, screaming into a rage. The light is the scream, the scream is the light.

T
here is nothing. And there is something. At first it’s hard to tell which is which.

A
white expanse. Could be nothing. Could be a ceiling.

S
omewhere below the white expanse, somewhere above him, a black hook. A small black hook extended like a beckoning finger. A gesture of vast meaning. Too vast for words. Everything now is too vast for words. He can’t think of any words. Not a single one. Forgets what they are. Words. Small bumpy objects. Black plastic insects. Designs. Pieces of something. Alphabet soup.

F
rom the hook hangs a colorless transparent bag. The bag is bulging with colorless transparent liquid. From the bag a transparent tube descends toward him. Like the neoprene gas tube on a model airplane in the park. He can smell the airplane fuel. He watches as the practiced flick of a deft forefinger on the propeller brings the little engine sputtering to life. The volume and pitch of the sound rises, the engine screaming, the scream building to a constant shriek. On the way home from the park, trailing his
father, his taciturn father, he falls on a pile of stones. His knee is cut and bloody. The blood trickles down his shin onto his sock. He doesn’t cry. His father looks happy, looks proud of him, later tells his mother about his great achievement, that he’s reached an age where he doesn’t have to cry anymore. It’s a rare thing for his father to look at him with pride. His mother says, “For Godsake, he’s only four, he’s allowed to cry.” His father says nothing.

H
e sees himself driving his car. A familiar Catskill road. A deer crossing ahead of him, a doe passing into the opposite field. And then her fawn following her, unexpectedly. The thump. Image of the twisted body, mother looking back, waiting in the field.