Stephen Cannell - The Plan

Johnny let out another chilling scream.

Then the back door slammed and Cole Harris ran into the kitchen. He was a Jewish-Italian mixture with blue eyes and black hair slicked back. He looked in amazement at Thirteen Weeks who was now holding the bloody stump in his left hand, screaming, "Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!" in fright and shock.

Ryan tied to get up but his leg was useless.

"Ryan?" Cole Harris said, pulling up the name from memory as his eyes darted back to the 250-pound monster who was hosing down the walls with arterial spurts.

Thirteen Weeks let go of his stump long enough to grab for his gun hand, but Ryan used his good leg to kick the hand across the kitchen. It wedged under the dishwasher, the gun still gripped in the fingers. Thirteen Weeks let out a howl, then turned and ran out the back door.

The sound of sirens approaching could be heard in the distance.

"Cole, I need help. Get me outta here."

"Who was that guy?"

"I can't go to the hospital. They'll kill me." He could feel himself going into shock. Cole helped him up. Ryan's leg was bleeding badly. He leaned on Cole and they headed out of the house through the front door.

Lucinda was across the street and ran to help them as Cole loaded Ryan into the back of a VW van parked in the driveway.

"I called the police." She looked at his leg. "What happened?"

"Gotta get outta here," Ryan said, dully, as the sirens got louder. "Follow us. Don't leave your car."

Lucinda tailed the VW van. They turned the corner at the end of the street seconds before two police cars squealed onto Hamilton Boulevard.

The police found Thirteen Weeks's gun hand wedged under the dishwasher. A rookie patrolman gingerly kicked it out and stared at it dumbly. They followed the trail of blood out the back gate and found Thirteen Weeks in the alley a block away, almost dead from loss of blood. They pulled him into the squad car, retrieved his gun from the kitchen floor, and went code-three to the Rye General Hospital.

Johnny Furie was immediately put on the critical list. The bewildered cops stood around, drank machine-brewed coffee, and wondered out loud how Johnny's gun hand had ended up under the dishwasher.

While Thirteen Weeks was being cross-typed for a blood transfusion and pumped full of plasma, Ryan was shivering in the back of Cole Harris's speeding van.

Lucinda had Kaz on the cell phone and told him what had happened.

"Don't take him back to the Blue Rainbow Hotel," Kaz said. "Find a place, but not on a busy street. Get a room in the back and call me with the address."

They picked a downscale motel off the main drag in Rye.

Kaz arrived with Dr. Jazz at nine-thirty. Lucinda couldn't believe they had been waiting two hours for the gold-toothed man, who came jiving and bopping through the door, carrying a medical bag. His bald head was shining, his Adam's apple tromboning up and down in his stringbean neck whenever he spoke.

Kaz tried to get Lucinda to go to the restaurant across the street with Cole Harris, but she refused. She spun on him.

"I've had it with your orders and your attitude," she said, venting all her frustration, fear, and worry about Ryan, in a counterattack on the rumpled ex-fed.

"Hold it, lady." He tried to slow her down.

"No, you hold it. I'm not leaving and I'm not taking any more of your shit!"

Kaz knew she meant business. He finally smiled and put out his hand. "Nice to finally meet ya, Miss Alo," he said, laconically. She shook his hand, but didn't smile back.

Dr. Jazz was examining Ryan's leg. "He very sick. He pulled out de stitches, he ripped de veins. He in mighty bad shape," the doctor said, shaking his head, too concerned about Ryan to rhyme. He opened his medical bag, filled a syringe, and injected Ryan with antibiotics for infection. Then he gave him an Adrenalin shot to keep his heartbeat up. He took a blood sample in a syringe, twisted the needle valve shut, and put it in his medical bag. He cleaned the wound and resewed it, then bandaged it carefully. The entire procedure took him almost two hours. Dr. Jazz left the motel at some time past midnight.

Ryan slept fitfully while Lucinda held his hand.

He finally drifted slowly down into a deep sleep, where he dreamed of Lucinda, backlit and gorgeous. They were standing on opposite sides of a raging river, yelling to each other. "Don't come across," he screamed in the dream, but she didn't hear him and started to ford the treacherous water. Falling, she was swept away, arms flailing in the bubbling turbulence. He saw Kaz for a moment, drowning in the current, hideous in his green and yellow Hawaiian shirt, going down the stream with her, tumbling, rolling, his face appearing for a moment, the cigar soggy, still clamped in smiling teeth. And then he was on a deserted beach at sunset. He started walking, not knowing where he was going, until he saw Matt and Terry. They were sitting together on the beach, looking out to sea. Ryan came up and stood behind them.

"Can you forgive me?" he said to the two dead boys. They turned and looked at him. "It was never your fault," they said in unison. And for the first time, still deep in the delirious dream, he believed it.

While Ryan was dreaming and Lucinda was praying, Thirteen Weeks was dying.

Charles Romano was his employer of record and the hospital insurance administrator called him for verification of employment. Charlie Six Fingers called Mickey and told him that Thirteen Weeks was in the Rye hospital, that somebody had cut off his right hand. Mickey and Pula-cargo Depaulo drove up to Rye and arrived at eleven o'clock. They found the back service stairs at the hospital and climbed to the second floor where Charlie Six Fingers had said Johnny Furie was recuperating. Mickey was resolute. A guy didn't get multiple chances to screw up. He wanted the word to go out. . You better not fuck up if you were working for Mickey Alo. Some time shortly after midnight, as the medical shift was changing, Mickey slipped into Thirteen Weeks's room and looked down at the huge accounts receivable specialist. Johnny's right hand was now a heavily bandaged stump.

"Hey, paisan," Mickey said, touching him on the side of the neck. When he didn't wake up, Mickey grabbed the bandaged stump and squeezed hard. Thirteen Weeks moaned and opened his eyes.

"Talk to me," Mickey said to the hitter.

"Cut off my hand," he stated the obvious.

"Where is Bolt?"

"Don't know. He cut off my hand," he said again. "This fucking guy can't be working alone," Mickey said softly.

"I saw him coming into the house, through the front window, with the girl in the picture."

"What picture? Whatta you talkin' about?"

"The painting in your house."

Mickey's disgust at Lucinda turned his insides cold and his face empty.

Thirteen Weeks saw the expression and knew he was looking into the eyes of the devil. It was the last thing he saw.

Mickey ripped the pillow out from under Johnny's head, put it firmly over his face, and held it. Thirteen Weeks struggled to get the suffocating softness off his nose and mouth. His stumpy wrist pawed helplessly, trying to grab the pillow with remembered fingers. In a few brief moments, he stopped fighting. Like a light going out, he plunged into blackness.

After Dr. Jazz left,Cole Harris went across the street and got a cup of coffee at a truck stop. Cole had had a few words with the rumpled, cigar-chewing man whom Ryan called Kaz. His journalistic instincts told him he was onto a big story.

For most of his life, chasing stories had been Cole's only passion. He valued it over everything else in his fifty-six compulsive nit-picking years. At his core he was an investigative reporter, an IR.

He had started doing journalism as a corporal in Vietnam, filing personal action stories with Stars and Stripes. Cole had eventually taken small-arms fire in his foot when an airfield in the Delta had been overrun by VC in '63, and he'd come Stateside and mustered out.