John Lutz - Serial

Sanderson was following someone with single-minded determination not to lose them. He was focused on his purpose as if his life depended on it. Or someone else’s life.

She understood it then. He was stalking someone.

Weaver moved up slightly and observed him more closely, her heartbeat quickening. Sanderson was stalking, all right. Not simply following, but stalking. Everything about his pace and attitude suggested it. Weaver strained to see through the darkness and relentless rain, but couldn’t make out anyone up ahead of Sanderson.

That didn’t mean there was no one there, considering the weather.

They had turned several corners. There were no shop windows now. The neighborhood was downscale. The block they were on featured a closed dry cleaner, a boarded-up restaurant, a political headquarters now for rent. The peeling poster of the smiling candidate in the window reminded Weaver that things weren’t always as hopeful as they seemed. He’d lost big in the last election.

There were only a few people on the street.

And then Weaver noticed that she was alone.

No. Not alone!

She heard a faint rustle and sensed movement behind her and to her left. She began to spin away. Only began. Something slammed into the base of her neck and she was on the wet pavement.

She looked up and saw a man in a dark coat, a balaclava concealing everything of his face but his eyes and mouth. He was holding some kind of club or cudgel in his right hand.

As Weaver scrambled to get up, he jabbed hard with the club beneath her ribs. Pain shot through her right side, but she didn’t go down. Instead she clawed at her attacker’s face. She missed his eyes but felt her fingernails gouge flesh.

Again he was on her with the club-maybe a nightstick!

Is this guy a cop?

Whatever he was swinging was plenty hard. He slammed it across the width of Weaver’s back, making a sound that sickened her. Down again, on her hands and knees, she tried to catch her breath. She caught pain instead.

Then greater pain exploded at the back of her head.

Everything became dim, as if streetlights were going out one by one.

She smelled something like ammonia and felt someone holding her hand. For a second she thought she was being rescued, pulled up away from the darkness that dragged at her. Then she realized what she felt was her assailant cleaning beneath her fingernails that had gouged him. He didn’t want his DNA scraped from beneath her nails in the morgue.

Oh, God! In the morgue!

As she dropped into a dark world, her last awareness was of the slushy patter of soles on wet concrete, the faint and rhythmic splash of rainwater. She’d heard the sound often and could recognize it. Someone running away.

Years ago a hospice worker had warned Weaver to be careful about what she said when her mother lay dying in a hospital bed. The sense of hearing was often the last thing to go.

Am I dying?

The Skinner sat at a table in the atrium of the Citigroup Building, sipping an egg cream. There were no actual eggs in egg creams, which was one of the things the Skinner liked about them. They were tricky and misleading. Possibly most people who drank them, especially out-of-towners, assumed they’d consumed an egg. He smiled grimly. There were a lot of misconceptions about what people ate in this town.

He sipped and savored. Yes, egg creams were misleading. They symbolized the misleading and mislabeled world people were supposed to live in. But he’d learned long ago there were as many worlds as there were people. Anyone who was smart enough soon figured out it was possible to create and live in a world of your own, and it was just as valid as the one projected by so-called reality. It was the individual world of the spirit and the mind. It wasn’t mystical at all, but simply another chosen reality. Not buying into the common delusion; that’s what it was all about. The real rules, the ancient, few ones, were the only rules that mattered. The only actual reality, deeply buried in the human psyche, as it was in that of every living being.

He sucked on the plastic straw and it made a gurgling sound that signified the end of the egg cream.

Best to stop thinking bullshit, he decided. Not the place or time for hypothesizing. Concentrate on creating Quinn’s reality, keeping the wily cop in a world controlled by the Skinner. Different worlds for different folks. If his and Quinn’s worlds met only now and then, and tangentially, everything would work out fine.

He wondered if the lady cop he’d beaten was dead. And if she was alive, had she learned her lesson? Would she be able to go back to her job and be part of the game? Had Quinn lost one of his pieces?

The Skinner had beaten her with a tire thumper, a clublike instrument used by truckers to whap the tires of eighteen-wheelers to make sure they were inflated. He’d bought it in the shop of a highway gas station and restaurant frequented by truck drivers (a sure sign of good food) after noticing how much it resembled an old-fashioned wooden nightstick. It was even weighted at the end like a nightstick and had a leather strap to wind around your wrist so you wouldn’t drop it. A crude weapon, but effective. Ask the lady cop.

He gathered his napkin, cup, and crumpled straw wrapper from the table and stood up to leave. Maybe he’d stop in at the bookstore in the building and buy something to read. A thriller of some sort. Escape literature.

As he made his way toward a trash receptacle, he noticed two men seated facing each other at one of the tiny tables, their heads bowed. Their brows were furrowed and their gazes fixed, as they concentrated on a chess board between them.

Lost in a world of their own.

Quinn loomed watchfully, like a rough-hewn and wingless angel, over Nancy Weaver’s hospital bed. His shoulders drooped and his massive hands dangled useless at his sides. Right now he felt useless. Helpless. Before him was a problem for surgeons’ hands and scalpels, not cops’ hands and guns.

Weaver was unconscious but coming out of it. As Quinn watched, her bruised face contorted in pain and her body twitched in a reflex action to change position, which she couldn’t do because she was belted to the bed faceup so she couldn’t put a strain on her injured back. She moaned and tried to but couldn’t quite open her eyes.

Quinn examined her IV bottles, then adjusted a plastic valve slightly. He waited a few minutes and then stepped out into the hall and hailed a passing nurse.

“I think she’s regained consciousness,” he said.

The nurse, a portly, middle-aged woman with puffy cheeks and diamond-bright blue eyes, gave him a suspicious look. Her plastic name tag identified her as Rose. “The patient in two-oh-five?”

“Right. Officer Nancy Weaver.”

“Ah, the policewoman.” Rose shuffled several clipboards she was carrying, found the proper one, and gazed at it. “Hmm… you’re sure she’s regaining consciousness?”

“She asked if she could talk to me,” Quinn said. “Mumbled it, but she asked.”

“And who might you be?”

Quinn showed her his ID.

Rose looked him in the eye. “You’re positive she’s conscious? She’s receiving a sedative along with her glucose. We’re trying to hydrate her. She has several serious injuries.”

Quinn moved nearer to Rose. “I’ve got to confide in you, dear, that it’s vitally important that she and I speak. Lives do depend on it.”

Rose had heard that one. She shook her head no. “We’ll get Officer Weaver well on her way to survival, then you can question her and catch whoever did that terrible thing to her.”

Quinn laid a huge hand on her shoulder with a feather touch. “No, no, dear, you don’t understand. Her interest and mine, and I hope yours, are to make sure she’s not soon joined by another patient with similar, or perhaps even worse, injuries at the hands of the animal that beat poor Nancy. There is a time-urgent aspect to this matter.”