Sounded like Star Trek stuff to Renny, but he wasn't going anywhere around Lom unless he was fully armed. So he'd camped outside.
"I'm telling you, Sergeant, Mr. Lom is not going to take a walk. Anywhere."
"And I'm telling you he grinned at me. He's playing you for a sucker, Doc."
"Uh-uh. That was a random muscle twitch."
Renny was about to suggest another muscle Stein could twitch when the MRI technician stuck his head out the door.
"Yo! Dr. Stein. We got ourselves a little problem in here."
Renny was on his feet, reaching for his .38. I knew it!
"Where is he? What's he doing?"
The tech was a skinny black guy sporting short dreadlocks. He looked at Renny as if he was nuts.
"Who? The patient? He ain't doing nothin', man. Be cool. It's the computer. It's puttin' out some weird shit."
As Stein followed the tech into the control room he glanced back over his shoulder at Renny.
"Coming?"
Renny was about to tell him that he'd already seen enough weird shit for one night, then decided that a little more wouldn't make much difference.
"Yeah, sure. Why not?"
He followed them to the control console with its rows of monitors. He watched Stein lean forward and stare at one of the screens, saw his face go slack and fade to the color of the eggshell wallpaper behind him.
"You're kidding, right?" Stein said. "This is bullshit, Jordan. If you think this is funny—"
"What's wrong?" Renny said.
"Hey, man," the tech told Stein. "If I could make it show that kinda shit just for fun, you think I'd be workin' this shift?"
"What the hell's wrongT' Renny said.
Stein sagged into the chair before the console.
"That's Mr. Lom's head," he said, pointing to the screen before him. "A side view. A sagital cut through the center of his head and neck, top to bottom, right between his nostrils."
Renny could see that. The nose was toward the right side of the screen, the back of the head toward the left.
"Looks like one of those sinus medicine commercials," Renny said.
Stein laughed. The sound had a slightly hysterical edge to it.
"Yeah. His sinuses look fine. But something's missing."
"What?"
Stein tapped the screen with the eraser end of a pencil, indicating the big empty space behind the nose and sinuses.
"There's supposed to be a brain here."
That cold hand did an encore down Renny's spine; this time it was dancing.
"And there's not?"
"Not according to this. No sign of a spinal cord either."
"Then your machine's fucked up! He'd—he'd be dead!"
"Tell me about it," Stein said, and turned to the technician. "Slide him farther in and get the chest cavity."
The tech nodded and threw some switches. Before too long, an empty circle lit on the screen.
Jordan the technician said, "Shit, man! Where's his lungs? Where's his fucking heart?'
"That's what I said when I saw these," Stein said, handing Jordan the X rays he'd been carrying. "I was trying to tell myself they'd pushed the tube too high but I didn't really believe it."
"Shit!" Jordan said as he held the X rays up to the recessed fluorescents overhead.
"What's wrong?" Renny said, knowing he sounded like a broken record but unable to say anything else. He was completely in the dark here.
Jordan held the films up for him. Renny had no idea what he was supposed to see.
"What?"
"Empty, man," he said. "The guy's whole chest is fucking empty!"
"Aw, come on!" Renny said. He was starting to feel a little sick.
"He's not kidding," Stein said. "Just for the hell of it, Jordan, let's get a look at the abdomen."
Jordan did some more fiddling at the console and soon another image filled the screen. Stein stared at it, then rotated his chair to face Renny. He wore a crazy smile and his eyes looked as if they were receding toward the back of his head.
"He's hollow!" he said. "No brain, no heart, no lungs, no liver, no intestines! He's completely hollow! A walking shell!" He started to laugh.
Renny found Stein's laughter almost as frightening as what he was saying.
"Hey, easy, Doc."
"Easy my ass! We're talking about some sort of zombie here! It can't be! It's crazy! It can't fucking be!"
The monitoring room was silent as the three of them sat and stared at each other.
"What we gonna do with this guy?" Jordan said.
"He's a murder-one suspect," Renny said.
Jordan smiled. "Try him and fry him."
"Not in this state. Besides, with all the bullshit that's going down here tonight, he might walk."
The thought of that twisted Renny's insides. Nobody should get off on a head case plea after what he did to that kid.
"He's not walking anywhere tonight," Stein said. He turned to Jordan. "Wheel him out of there. I'm taking him back to the ER and no one—" He glared at Renny. "No one is moving him anywhere else until I've got plenty of witnesses to what's going down here."
As long as Loin remained in custody, Renny didn't care where he was kept. And when all this was over, maybe a few questions would get answered.
Like, where was Mrs. Lorn?
The waiting jvas killing Bill. The waiting and the incredible story Danny's surgeon had told. No blood? No anesthesia? Awake during the surgery? Feeling everything? How could that be?
He shuddered. What was happening here? This kind of brutal crime wasn't supposed to make sense, but what had been done to Danny—what was still being done to him, apparently—went beyond madness into—what? The supernatural?
Poor Danny. God, he wanted to see him, be with him, find some way to comfort him. Only one thing restrained him from making a scene and demanding, as his legal guardian—Some guardian—to be taken to him. The last words Danny had spoken to him in that almost-gone voice still echoed in his mind. Each syllable drove a nail into a different corner of his skull.
Why didn't you come, Father Bill? You said you'd come if I called. Why didn't you come?
"I did come, Danny!" he said aloud around the sob crammed into his throat. "I did! I just came too late!"
And then the phone rang. One ring that wouldn't stop. He'd never heard a phone ring like that. Was that the way hospital phones worked? On and on it went. Bill looked around, wishing someone would answer it. But he was alone in the doctors' lounge, as he had been all night.
And then it occurred to him that maybe it was for him. Maybe Danny was out of Recovery and they wanted him upstairs. But wouldn't they tell the cop outside first?
No matter. He had to stop that ringing. He crossed the room and lifted the receiver.
"Doctors' lounge."
There was a child on the line, a small boy, his voice pitched somewhere between a scream and a sob. Bill recognized it immediately.
Danny's voice.
"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me. Don't let him kill me. I don't want to die!"
"Danny?" Bill said into the phone, his voice rising to a shout. "Danny, where are you?"
The voice started again.
"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me . . ."