Peter Clement: The Inquisitor

"Holy shit!" he cried. He sat bolt upright and rolled forward just as the front and back tires hit the ground, bracketing where he'd been lying in a half foot of water.

"Earl!" Janet screamed.

"I'm okay!" he hollered, and threw his rock.

It glanced off Thomas's shoulder as the big man rounded the car and flew at him.

Earl saw the abandoned tire iron glinting in the pale light and leapt for it.

They both reached it at the same time and wrestled with it between them, like a steel taffy pull. Earl managed to hang on for the first few twists, but the younger man had much more strength and soon wrenched it out of his hands. Earl stumbled backward, ducking swipes at his head, the bar whistling past his ear.

Three times. Four times. Sooner or later it would hit.

Then, over Thomas's shoulder, he saw a row of trucks with orange flashers pull up behind his van, and a bunch of men in tangerine jumpsuits pile out.

"Help!" he screamed at the top of his lungs. "Help me!"

He ducked for the fifth and sixth time, high-stepping it backward, slipping on rocks, trying to keep his footing.

"You don't think I'm going to fall for that stupid trick, do you, Dr. G.?" Thomas asked, winding up for strike seven.

Searchlights befitting a Hollywood opening sliced through the gloom and spotlighted them both.

Thomas shielded his eyes, and his white features twisted into a look of horror that would have done Marcel Marceau proud. He began to run in the opposite direction, giving Earl a wide berth, across the stream and up the far bank, still clutching the tire iron.

Earl immediately ran to the passenger side of the car and got the door open. "Go with the baby," Janet ordered, handing him the tiny figure.

"We go together," he said, clasping the infant inside the folds of his coat. He turned to the group of figures running down from the highway. "We need help here," he yelled at them. "My wife's just had a baby. And someone get that man." He pointed to where Biggs was disappearing up the far slope. "He tried to kill us."

A half dozen of the hydro workers reached the edge of the stream and stopped.

"I said, get him! He's going to escape," Earl yelled at them, still clutching his tiny, newborn son and kneeling beside Janet. Together they watched through the shattered front windshield as Biggs struggled up the far bank and disappeared beyond the reach of the spotlights.

"That bugger's not going anywhere," the man with the ravaged cheeks said as he ran up beside them.

Seconds after he spoke, an arc of electricity bright as the sun exploded out of the darkness where they'd last seen Biggs. At its center stood his rigid silhouette, limbs extended and quivering, hair and clothing ignited in flames. For an instant it turned him into a human lightbulb, the strands of his tissues serving as filaments of carbon, their glow strong enough to illuminate an area as big as a baseball diamond. Then the current snapped off, the effect of a circuit breaker somewhere, and as darkness returned, his blackened form collapsed to earth.

Janet's next few hours came to her in snatches.

She heard Earl yelling into a two-way radio that a hydro worker must have given him, demanding an ambulance, an incubator, and vials of protamine zinc, the antidote to heparin.

Seconds later the attendants seemed to be putting her on a stretcher.

She heard snippets of conversation about CPR and possible organ retrievals.

"Don't bring the bastard to St. Paul's!" she heard Earl snap.

The next moment she found herself in the back of a swaying vehicle, a siren rising and falling above the hiss of tires on the road and the battering of rain against the roof. Earl hovered over her, setting up portable oxygen tanks, inserting several IVs to infuse her with normal saline, and administering the first injection to counteract the hemorrhage.

"Let me hold him," she said, her voice sounding hollow to her own ears.

The rest of the way she comforted their son in a blanket, clutching him to her, refusing to surrender his tiny form back to the isolation of a plastic chamber just yet. This may be the only time he feels me hold him, she thought, and warned Earl off with a sharp glance when he suggested putting a line in one of the child's veins. Time enough for tubes and needles later.

They pulled up to the unloading dock and the rear doors of the vehicle flew open.

A pair of nurses she recognized from the preemie unit leapt inside, their uniforms a cliche of powder blue and baby pink. "We've got him, Dr. Graceton," the older of the two said, carefully lifting him, so little and so light, from Janet's hands to the isolette.

They transferred it onto a cart and ran off, wheeling the Plexiglas chamber between them.

Like a miniature coffin, Janet thought, and her insides gave a wrenching twist. "Stay with him," she ordered Earl, interrupting the string of orders he issued as his ER team rushed her into a resus room.

"I've got Janet," a familiar voice said. Michael Popovitch stepped to her side, the concern in his eyes at odds with the wrinkles of an attempted smile.

The ridges of anxiety on Earl's face rose up in surprise. "But you're not on-"

"They called me in. Now go."

"Thank you-"

"Get!"

Earl nodded, squeezed Janet's hand, and whispered to her, "I love you," then ran out the door.

"My thanks too, Michael," she said quietly. All the ER doctors were competent, but some, like Michael, held the distinction of being a physician's physician, that rare breed not afraid to take care of his own.

By the time he added red cells and fresh frozen blood to Janet's IVs, then got her to ICU, her vitals had steadied and her bleeding had started to subside.

She drifted in and out of nightmares that had her trapped back in her car, screaming at Thomas Biggs, demanding, "Why?"

Awake, she anguished about the baby. Had the violent labor injured him? Had the heparin thinned his blood? Had the combination of drug and trauma led to internal bleeding, in particular the dreaded complication of a brain hemorrhage?

Sometime before dawn she started half awake. Through barely open eyes, she saw Earl leaning over her and felt his hand, free of its glove, stroking her hair. Even in the dim glow of her night-light she could tell that his eyes were washed clear of the worry and dread from before.

He must know from the initial tests and examinations that the baby should be all right.

Her own fear released its grip, and she sank into a dreamless, exhausted sleep.

Two days later, Saturday, July 19, 11:10 a.m.

Preemie Unit, Obstetrical Department, St. Paul's Hospital

"Thomas Biggs was Jerome Wilcher's son," Earl began, settling into the chair by Janet's bed.

"His son?" She'd only just been wheeled upstairs to the obstetrical floor, where the baby could room with her. Though still wan from her ordeal, her color had improved at the prospect of holding the recently named Ryan Graceton Garnet in her arms. She kept glancing toward the door, expecting the nurses to bring him to her any second. Yet she'd also insisted that Earl tell her everything he'd learned about why Thomas Biggs had done what he did. She seemed to need an explanation, as if that would somehow make it easier to recover from the horror of her ordeal. "I thought Jerome and his wife had no children."

"Thomas's mother had been one of his mistresses."

"Really?" The revelation grabbed her full attention for a few seconds, then she resumed her watch of the door.

"Are you sure you want to hear this now?" He'd spent the last two days on the phone tracking fragments of information, then pieced it together sitting by her side in ICU while she slept. Whenever the nurses allowed, he also visited the nursery to hold the tiny, scrawny-limbed little boy with a wrinkled red face under a straight-up brush of black hair. He would watch in wonder as the miniature fingers of a doll-sized hand tentatively closed on his own gloved finger, barely able to reach halfway around it, yet exerting a titan's pull on his heart. To let the sordid, twisted story of Thomas Biggs intrude on such sacred moments seemed a sacrilege, yet it insinuated itself, each time leaving Earl weak-kneed at how closely that legacy of buried pain and obsession had touched Ryan and Janet.