Jan Burke - Dear Irene

“Is this better, Justin?”

“Don’t ever call me that again,” he said angrily. He grabbed my right arm and yanked me out into the aisle between the pews. I struggled to free myself but he knocked me to the floor. He sat on my back and pulled my right arm up behind me. He laid the knife against my face.

Since someone had yanked that same arm out of its socket not three months before, I own up to being something of a wimp about my arm being pulled up behind my back in that particular manner. The pain of the first injury was by no means a distant memory. I felt queasy. Nothing less than pure, unadulterated fear coursed through me.

“We’re going to go outside now,” he said. “We’re going to walk out to the parking lot as if we were lovers. I have this knife, but I also have a gun. And if you cause trouble, I’ll empty the gun into as many bystanders as I can shoot. And I’m an excellent shot. You’ll watch them die before I stab you in the heart. You’ll die knowing that you caused their deaths. Do we understand one another?”

I nodded.

He pressed the knife into my cheek.

“Yes, I understand!”

“Good.” He pulled me to my feet. “Take your jacket off and put it over your shoulders. Keep your arms out of the sleeves.”

I did as he asked. He grabbed my arm again, but hidden beneath my jacket, it would look as if he had an arm around me in an affectionate manner. He moved to my left side. “The gun is here in my jacket. In case your busy little mind should wonder, it will not be a problem for me to fire a gun with my left hand.”

He took me out into the hall. I prayed I could keep my face a mask, that no one would notice anything wrong. It was the start of evening visiting hours, and there were people everywhere. If he began shooting, he’d have no shortage of targets.

My knees were shaking. I glanced up in the same hallway mirror I had seen Frank in; now I saw him again, in the distance, coming out of Steven’s room. I looked down, not wanting Justin Davis to see him, hoping Frank did not see me. I knew that if Davis saw Frank, he would shoot him. And Frank didn’t know that Justin Davis was Thanatos, so he wouldn’t be ready to defend himself.

I caught my reflection in some glass along the hallway, and realized I looked anything but natural. I was too scared to carry it off.

Suddenly, down the hall, I saw one of the last people I wanted to see at that moment. She stopped and briefly studied me, then came walking toward us, smiling.

“Do you know her?” Davis asked, tightening his grip on my wrist.

I nodded.

“If you don’t want her to die, you’d better give a star performance.”

“Hello, Sister Theresa,” I said as naturally as I could.

“Irene! You’ve got a new haircut. And who is this?”

“This is my friend – Jimmy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” she said with a nod, and I thanked God that she hadn’t tried to get him to shake hands.

“Well, I’ve got to rush,” she said. “So much going on here at St. Anne’s tonight – but let me see here-” She reached into her habit. I could feel the tension in my captor and watched him reach into his left-hand jacket pocket.

Please God, no – please God, no – please.

I was on the verge of screaming a warning when she brought her hand back out with – of all things – a holy card. I stared at it dumbly and she pushed it into my left hand. A holy card of St. Jude. I wanted to break into hysterics.

“Thank you, Sister,” I croaked out.

“You do know your saints, don’t you, Irene?”

“Yes, Sister.” She nodded and went on down the hall.

SEVEN PEOPLE KILLED BECAUSE OF HOLY CARD. What a headline that would make. HOLY CARD BLAMED IN HOSPITAL MASSACRE. ST. JUDE SHOOTING SPREE.

I had to inwardly shout at myself to get myself to pull it back together.

We walked outside and through the cold, heavy rain as if it were not falling. He opened the passenger door to a blue van. He pulled the gun out and said, “Get in.”

He climbed in behind me, poking me in the ribs with the gun. “You drive.”

As I crawled into the driver’s seat, I noticed something like a backpack in the back of the van. There was only one.

“Get going. Head out to Dunleavy Road.”

I did as he said. I started to reconsider the backpack notion. Dunleavy Road led out to a private airstrip. It was about six miles out of town, up in the hills.

“Doing some parachuting?” I asked.

“You’ll be dead by the time I do.”

“Nasty weather for it.”

“That’s merely a reprieve for you. But the storm is letting up, and by tomorrow, when we take off, the skies should be that glorious blue that only rain or a Santa Ana wind can bring to Southern California.”

“This storm doesn’t look like it’s letting up.”

“Oh, but it is. This is just the tail end of it. I’ve monitored this storm quite closely. You’ll see. Before long, it will hardly be drizzling.”

We fell into silence as I made the series of turns that would take us out to Dunleavy. Once or twice I thought someone was following us. My hopes would soar, then be dashed at the next intersection.

“I know your mother was killed,” I said. “But why blame people who were only children? Why not go after people who were adults at the time?”

“Ah, so your curiosity is still alive. Good, good. It will make these last hours of yours pass more pleasantly.” He didn’t say anything for a while, then answered. “They set themselves up as gods. The Olympus Center and its little gods. It was time for them to fall from Olympus.”

“But they were children . ”

“Children are the most cruel beings on earth.”

“They didn’t even remember the incident.”

“Exactly. The most painful, awful time of my life. And to them? Nothing. They caused my mother’s death. They blamed her. They were wrong.”

“She did lose her temper.”

“No. They said she lost her temper, but she didn’t. You see, they were false judges. None of them saw what happened very clearly. But they took advantage of us. We were poor. My mother couldn’t afford the kind of attorney that could have saved her life.”

“She didn’t deny hurting the boy.”

“Don’t you see? She was trying to protect me. I shoved that miserable sonofabitch into the wall. I did! The little bastard was choking me to death. She ran over, she tried to pull him off me, but I was the one who shoved him into that wall! They were liars! They were all liars! They hated me and they lied!” He was shouting, and scaring the hell out of me. His eyes were wild and angry, and I berated myself for bringing the whole subject up.

He grew quiet, then said, “She was the best mother in the world.”

I looked over at him. He was crying.

We turned onto Dunleavy. There’s about a five mile strip of it that runs along a flood control channel. As he had said it would, the rain had lightened to a drizzle, but the road was slick and muddy from rain and road construction. Bulldozers and graders sat idle on the right shoulder.

I glanced into the side mirror and felt knots forming in my stomach. We were being followed. I was fairly sure it was Frank’s car. I realized it would be much harder for him to stay out of sight on this dark, deserted road.

Jimmy looked into the mirror on his side.

“What about Maggie Robinson?” I asked, trying to distract him. “She was a good mother, wasn’t she?”

He turned to glare at me. “She was a rotten bitch who did nothing but punish me for her son’s death for years. She was a little worried at first, afraid the Social Service people would come around, check on her. Afraid they hadn’t made me disappear.”