The Ferryman (7 page)

“What the hell you standing here for?” he asked, his voice muffled by the swelling of his lower lip and his effort not to move it too much.

“Dr. Pulaski,” Noah replied, “if you could just—”

“Geoffrey Haupt, seventy-six. He's a cancer patient. He just took off a couple of minutes ago, but he can't get far. He's dying. Hell, we thought he was already dead.”

With his right hand, Shane reached up to cover his mouth to hide the grin that spread across his face. All this trouble over some poor old guy about to die from cancer; it was pretty absurd. On the other hand, it was not the first story he'd heard about people at death's door going on a short walkabout before finally heaving their last. The doc was right about one thing, though: Haupt wouldn't get far.

“I'll go after him, Noah,” he offered. “If he's not on this floor, he must have taken the stairs. Probably collapsed on the stairwell somewhere.”

With a sigh, Shane strode out into the corridor again. Nurses and orderlies cleared out of his way. He glanced around at them, searching for eyes that held answers instead of questions. Every single one of the onlookers had an identical, mystified expression on their faces; all save one.

The vulture, the older nurse who had seemed almost too interested when they arrived, stood against the wall across the corridor. The corners of Shane's mouth twitched up in a rough approximation of a smile.

“Which way?” he asked.

As though she had never imagined such a piece of information might be important, the woman blinked several times, then slowly pointed along the hall toward the exit door at the far end.

“He went for the stairs?” Shane asked.

She nodded. “But ... he was dead,” the woman rasped. He studied her eyes and began to wonder if whatever she had witnessed here had put her into a state of shock.

On the other hand, that wasn't his job. They were in a building filled with people who were supposed to worry about such things, but he was not one of them.

“Thanks,” he replied, smiling politely.

“He was,” she chided, a bit defensively. “I saw him go. His heart stopped.”

“Then it shouldn't be too hard to catch up with him, huh?” Shane asked.

He jogged down the corridor, grateful that the disturbed woman had seen the man make his exit. The last thing he wanted to have to do was check all the rooms up here.

When he banged through the door to the stairs, the lights flickered on the landing. Shane had expected to see the old man right off, and frowned when he realized the place was empty. Out of reflex, he took a quick look up, but gave little credence to the idea that the patient might have gone that way. The guy was on his last legs. Taking off like that likely meant he either wanted to escape, or just wanted to be outside again, one last time. Both options would have led him down. Outside.

'Course, no way's he gonna make it all the way down,
Shane thought.

But at the third-floor landing, there was still no sign of the guy. As he started down toward the second floor, he hesitated slightly. It was possible he had chosen the wrong direction; that Mr. Haupt had gone up after all.

His left foot shifted and dropped down to the fourth step.

An alarm screamed up from below.

The emergency exit,
Shane thought immediately.

“You've got to be fucking kidding me.” He groaned. Then he started to hustle, taking the steps two at a time and leaping the last four or five at each turn of the stairs.

No more than twenty seconds later he jumped down to the first-floor landing—the red bell above the door screamed furiously—and slammed through the emergency exit. The metal door clanged against the brick exterior of the hospital and Shane stalked out into the parking lot.

Phillips Memorial Hospital stood on a small hill in the Lions Gate section of Medford, which had been considered swank in the 1940s and still carried a certain air about it despite the faded quality of the Colonials and Victorians that lined the streets. The hospital, though equally faded, also enjoyed a certain reputation, mostly a holdover from earlier days, though with a somewhat well-deserved thanks to its staff.

One benefit it had over Boston-area hospitals was that it had been built in an age and in a neighborhood where few people were willing to encroach upon the sanctity of a place of healing.

Which meant that though Phillips Memorial was filled to brimming with patients and staff, the narrow spillover lot at the rear of the hospital was almost always hauntingly empty save for enormous blue Dumpsters and hazardous waste-disposal units, and the vehicles that routinely arrived to empty them.

A cold wind blew across the empty lot. An empty McDonald's takeout bag whirled and eddied in a dust devil that swirled beneath a distant lamppost as though performing in the spotlight. The door swung shut behind Shane, muffling the alarm bell within. The light above the door had burned out, but the lamps scattered across the lot gave him enough illumination to see.

To see nothing.

But how could there be nothing?

The thumping bass of a car radio cranked all the way up to “deafen” reached him as he stood in the darkness just outside the door and glanced around the lot, utterly bewildered. The alarm bell still wailed inside—he could hear it as if at a distance, or as if it were his morning wake-up and he had buried his head beneath the pillow. Still, it was tangible testimony to the fact that someone had come out this door. It was certainly possible that it had been someone other than the fugitive from the ICU, but the odds against that were astronomical.

On the other hand, how far could a guy dying of cancer get minutes after the ICU staff had been convinced he was done for?

With a sigh, Shane unclipped the two-way radio from his belt. He stepped away from the door and glanced both ways along the length of the back of the hospital. Sanitation containers. That was all he could see. Grimly, and feeling more than a bit absurd, he realized that the old guy might be hiding behind one of them.

He flicked a button on his radio with his thumb. “Noah, you there?”

A moment later, the radio's static was interrupted by his partner's voice. “Here. What've you got? Alarm went off down there. Did the old guy really get that far?”

“Even farther, I think,” Shane replied. “I'm at the back door now and I don't see a goddamn thing.”

“You don't have visual?” Noah asked.

Shane rolled his eyes, then glared almost angrily at his radio. “You watch too much fucking cable,” he snapped. “No, I ‘don't have visual,' you moron. I just told you, I don't see anything. If he came out this way, I think he's gone. I'm going to look around a bit, and—”

“Walk the perimeter,” Noah instructed. “Report back if you find anything.”

With a snicker, Shane thumbed the button on the radio again. “Yeah. I'll do that.”

He clipped it to his belt, then glanced around the lot, shaking his head. “Walk the fucking perimeter,” he whispered to himself. “Look, Ma, I'm in
Platoon
.”

By random choice, he turned left. Thirty feet along was an enormous blue Dumpster with BFD stenciled on the side in letters two feet high. Shane's hand rested comfortably on the haft of his nightstick again, though only by instinct. He was curious about the missing patient, but also amused. It was going to make a hell of a story to tell.

As he passed the Dumpster, he glanced behind it.

The corpse lay sprawled in the sickly yellow lamplight, arms and legs jutting at impossible angles, almost covering one another. Blood had splashed the side of the Dumpster and the pavement all around, and the hospital johnny the patient had worn was drenched crimson and ripped to tatters, pieces of it hanging from the body.

“Holy shit,” Shane muttered breathlessly.

The guy had been a patient, and he knew it was probably safe to assume this was their runaway, but he needed to take a closer look. He narrowed his eyes and peered into the semidarkness at the face.

The two faces.

Or more accurately, the two halves of the man's head. Shane blinked, holding his breath as he realized with mounting horror that the corpse before him was not sprawled out, or radically twisted. The dead man had been ripped in half from head to toe: torn right down the middle. His internal organs had spilled out, intestines landing in a wet coil, piled with the halves of the corpse.

Something moved in the dark mass of flesh and viscera, twitched beneath the raw, bloody flesh.

It poked its nose out and its eyes glowed yellow in the low light. A rat. And from the way the dead man's guts began almost to undulate, Shane knew there were many more rats where that came from.

He turned quickly away, fell to his knees, and violently puked his dinner onto the pavement.

T
he weather the day of Ralph Weiss's funeral was blasphemous. Funerals, David had always believed, were meant to be accompanied by gray skies on the verge of weeping. But that Saturday morning was perhaps the most gloriously beautiful day the spring had proffered thus far. The sky was crystal blue and utterly cloudless. The sun shone down brightly, but softly, without the vigor and even brutality it would adopt when summer blazed in. The lawn at Oak Grove Cemetery was freshly mowed, and the flowers and trees, newly budding, laced the light breeze with sweet, warm scents that made David think of childhood.

As he did so often, that morning he felt like a man comprised of two beings, two David Bairstows. One was the child he had been: the young man lingering into adulthood with the certainty that growing up, becoming adult, was nothing but a myth told to children, no more real than the bogeyman. The other was the David of now: older, forcibly grown wiser by the specter of death and the knowledge of his own imperfections. His attitude toward Ralph Weiss, for one. His inability to make things work with Janine, for another.

The unfortunate truth was that people did, eventually, grow up. Though he knew the process had enriched him, had made him more fully human and more fully aware of the world outside that which his selfish childhood mind had created, he was never quite certain if he was relieved to be quit of that foolish child, or if what he felt was an endless, aching grief.

A snatch of song came into his head. An old one, from his own school days, it was a Bob Seger song. “Against the Wind.” “Wish I didn't know now what I didn't know then ...”

It never ceased to amaze him, all the things he thought he understood as a child that took on entirely new meaning to him as an adult. That song was one of them.

Ralph Weiss's funeral was heartbreakingly small. In addition to the man's wife and grown children, as well as their little ones, there were a handful of friends from the man's private life. Most of the teachers at St. Matthew's had appeared for the mass and the burial, as had half a dozen nuns from the convent by St. Matthew's and a small clutch of only the kindest-hearted and most dedicated students.

It was a sad counterpoint to the last funeral David had attended. The year before, a student named Steve Themeli had been knifed in an argument over drugs. Themeli had been a rough kid, a troublesome student, and raged at every teacher who gave him the low grades he deserved—he had been particularly upset about nearly failing Mr. Bairstow's English class—but seemingly half the student body had turned out to pay their respects when he died.Themeli had been despised by the faculty, but the students had loved him.

It seemed wrong to David that so many would appear for the funeral of a drugged-out tough guy with an attitude the size of Texas, and so few for the old history teacher who had been a bit pompous, but had meant well.Wrong, and sad.

The priest had come from Weiss's own parish, but his words at the church had cemented David's suspicion that he had not known the dead man very well. Any one of Weiss's colleagues could have delivered a more thoughtful eulogy, but of course it would have been most appropriate had Father Charles been asked to do it.

Hugh Charles was the chaplain at St. Matthew's, an eccentric, wise man with sparkling eyes and a storm cloud of a brow when his wrath descended upon unruly students. Many people at St. Matthew's felt that Father Charles was the school's greatest treasure. But there were those among the staff—mostly elderly nuns whose sole function was to monitor study periods—who thought that Father Charles was far too relaxed with his students, and did not engender the proper respect for the clergy in them.

David thought that was pretty much bullshit. It was the very warmth the nuns disdained, combined with a firm, even stern, insistence upon scholarship, that inspired the students to show him more respect than David had ever seen young people give a clergyman. During his own days at St. Matt's, the chaplain had been Father O'Connor, a grim little troll of a man who inspired only dismay and trepidation amongst his charges.

So it was that as the final blessings were said over the casket that held the mortal remains of Ralph Weiss, David kept his eye on Father Charles. A small procession formed of people who desired to pass by the casket to cross themselves and perhaps whisper a parting prayer. Though David had no such desire he would have felt out of place hanging back.

Annette had stood beside him throughout the graveside service, their bodies at times brushing against one another in silent, subconscious communication.
We're here together. Isn't it awful? Let's get out of here as soon as possible. Feel that I love you, and know that it will keep you alive, that love.

Of course it wouldn't. But the two of them lent each other the comfort of that reassurance.