Bill tore the receiver away from his ear. The horror of the call was submerged in an almost overwhelming sense of deja vu. And then he remembered that this wasn't the first time for this call. Danny had cried and screamed those same words last night when he'd called from the Loms' house. His last words just before the phone went dead. His last words…
…just before Herb had—
Bill couldn't finish the thought. He slammed the phone down and headed for the door to the hall. Some sick bastard had recorded the call and was playing it back. Someone in the hospital. That could be only one person.
The cop named Kolarcik was sitting outside. He jumped to his feet as Bill stepped out in the hall.
"Whoa, Father! You can't leave the lounge, not until the sarge says so."
"Then find him! I want to go see Danny! Now!"
As the cop fumbled for his walkie-talkie he glanced up the hall.
"Hey, here he comes now."
Bill saw Sergeant Augustino and two other men, one white, one black, wheeling a fourth down the hall on a gurney. Their expressions were grim and their eyes held a strange look. As he started toward them Bill wondered what could have happened to make all three men look so strained.
"Sergeant, I want to—"
And then he saw who was on the gurney. It was the filthy, perverted son of a bitch who'd mutilated Danny.
Herb Lom.
Rage like a cold black flame blasted through him, igniting him, consuming him. There was no control, not the slightest consideration given toward control. Bill just wanted to get his hands on Lom. He lunged forward.
"You bastardV
He heard shouts, cries of surprise and warning, but they might as well have been coming from the moon. Kolarcik, Augustino, the two men with him, they had disappeared as far as Bill was concerned. There was only Bill, the hallway, and Lom. And Bill knew just what he was going to do: yank Lom from the gurney, pull him to his feet, and slam him against the nearest wall; and when he'd bounced off that wall he'd fling him across the corridor against the opposite wall, and then he'd do it again and again until there was nothing left of either the walls or Herb Lom, whichever went first. Somehow, it was a beautiful thought.
With his fingers hooked into claws he brushed off the hands that tried to stop him and dove at Lom, reaching for the front of his mint-green hospital gown. His hands slammed down against Lom's chest—
—and kept on going.
With a sickening crunch Lom's chest cavity gave way like weak plaster and Bill's hands sank to their wrists in the man's chest cavity.
And good God, it was cold in there. Far colder than ice… and empty.
Bill yanked out his hands and backpedaled until he hit the wall where he stood and stared at Herb Lom's chest, at the concavity in his hospital gown that dipped deep into it. He glanced around at Sergeant Augustino and the two men with him. They too were staring at Lom's chest.
"My God!" Bill said. His hands were numb, still aching with the cold.
Kolarcik skidded to a halt beside him and gaped at the gurney, gasping.
"Father! What did you do?"
And then Lom's body started to shake. Little tremors at first, as if he had a chill. But instead of subsiding they became steadily more pronounced, growing until his whole body was spasming, shaking, convulsing so violently that the gurney began to rattle.
Then Lorn seemed to collapse.
Bill noticed it first in his chest wall. The depression in the hospital gown began to widen as more of the green material fell into his chest cavity like Florida real estate dropping into a giant sink hole. Then the rest of his body began to flatten under the gown—his pelvis, legs, arms. They all seemed to be melting away.
Good Lord, they were melting away. A thick brown fluid was beginning to run out from under the gown and drip off the edges of the gurney. It steamed in the air of the hospital corridor. The stench was awful.
As he turned away, gagging, Bill saw Lom's head collapse into a mahogany puddle on the pillow and begin to stream toward the floor.
EIGHTEEN
Three days in hell.
That poor kid had spent the three days since Christmas Eve in unremitting agony, writhing and turning in his bed. His voice was gone but his open mouth, tight-squeezed eyes, and white, twisted features told the whole story of what he was feeling.
A story Renny could not bear to hear. And though he came by the hospital often he could not bring himself to enter that room more than once a day or stay more than a moment or two.
But the priest, Bill Ryan—Father Bill as Renny had come to think of him—he stuck by the kid's side, sitting by the bed like some guardian angel, holding his hand, talking and reading and praying into ears that weren't listening.
"They say his mind's gone," Father Bill told Renny and Nick on the morning of the fourth day.
This fellow Nick, late twenties and homely as all hell, was some sort of scientific professor at Columbia. He'd been in and out, hanging with the priest since Christmas night. Renny learned that the prof was a former St. F.'s orphan too. Good to see an orphan kid go from nothing to being a hotshot scientist. And seeing as they had St. F.'s in common, the prof was all right in Renny's book.
The three of them were sipping coffee in the parent lounge of the pediatric wing where Danny had one of the few private rooms. Late morning sunlight poured in through the wide picture windows and glared off the remnants of the Christmas snow on the rooftops around them, warming the room until the heat was almost stifling.
"I'm not surprised," Nick said. "And your mind'U be gone soon as well if you don't get some rest."
"I'll be okay."
"He's right, Father," Renny said. "You're heading for a breakdown at about ninety miles an hour. You can't keep going like this."
The priest shrugged. "I can always catch up. But Danny… who knows how much time he's got left?"
Renny wondered how much time Father Bill had left before he collapsed. He looked like hell. His eyes were sunken halfway into his head, his hair was unkempt from running his hands through it every couple of minutes, and he needed a shave. He looked like an escapee from the drunk tank.
And Renny was feeling like one. He hadn't had much sleep himself. Seemed like he'd been on a treadmill since Christmas Eve, which wasn't sitting well at all with Joanne. Bad enough he'd missed Christmas morning—good thing they didn't have any kids or he'd really be in the dog house—but he'd also missed Christmas dinner at his in-laws'. It wasn't that he didn't like his in-laws—they were okay folks—it was just that he was in deep shit with the department. A suspect in an attempted murder case had been transferred to him at Downstate, and a few hours later all he had in custody was a pile of stinking goo.
Renny's stomach gave a little heave at the memory. Over the past three days he had endlessly replayed the scene in the corridor in his mind, but no number of viewings could add any sense or reason to what had happened. One moment he had a suspect in custody, the next he had some lumpy brown liquid. Thank God there'd been witnesses or else no one would have believed him. Hell, he'd been there and had seen the whole thing and still didn't quite believe it himself.
And no matter who he talked to he couldn't get an explanation. None of the docs in this entire medical center could make any sense out of the MR images or the chest X ray, or what had finally happened to Lom's body. In fact there seemed to be a kind of doublethink going on. Since they couldn't explain it, they were sweeping it under their mental rugs. He'd overheard one of the medical bigwigs saying something like: Well, since what they say happened is obviously impossible, their memories of the incident must be faulty. How can we be expected to come up with a rational explanation when the primary data is faulty and anecdotal?
It was a different story up at the 112. The precinct had transferred a suspect to Renny and now the suspect was gone. A pile of goo was not going to be able to go before the grand jury for indictment. So they needed a new suspect. The hunt was now on for the missing wife. And Renaldo Augustino knew he'd better find her if he wanted to hold his head up again in the squad room.