Stephen Gallagher - Valley of lights

I put the gun away. It wasn't my standard Smith amp; Wesson but a little Colt Detective Special that I'd picked up for cash a couple of years before and which, as far as I knew, couldn't be traced to me. I'd given it a load of half-charged cartridges which didn't make much more of a kick than a distant backfire, because whilst I hadn't actually set out with anything illegal in mind I'd been wary of getting myself into some kind of corner that I might not be able to explain my way out of.

And here I was.

I hauled the body across the yard and got it up into one of the club's two big garbage hoppers; they were the big, industrial-sized drums that hook onto the back of a collecting truck and get emptied automatically. With any luck he'd be minced and mashed and compacted and finally recycled as the dashboard of a Ford Fairmont, and nobody would ever know. I didn't even think about reporting this. I'd already heard how some of it would sound when I said it out loud.

There was a thump when he hit the bottom of the drum, which was almost empty. I walked out of the alley without looking back and I kept my pace down to the same speed until I was a block away, at which point I started to run. I reached my car about five minutes later, breathless and panting, and then it took me another five to speed up to Roosevelt and the County General with an eye on the mirror for my own people.

I almost didn't make it. I parked with some GSA motor pool cars to get as close as possible to the six-story patient tower, but I couldn't be sure which would be the best exit to cover. I did know that they tried to keep the hospital fairly tightly sealed so that the public couldn't simply wander in and out unchecked, but there still had to be service doors and staff exits. I walked along the side towards Emergency Receiving, and suddenly there he was.

He must have known that I was coming, because he was still in his hospital whites with nothing more than an overcoat hastily thrown over. He came running down the wheelchair slope and out into the night, and as soon as he was through the flap doors I was starting after him. He must have seen me because he veered away towards the traffic out on Roosevelt, but I was faster because he was barefoot and I wasn't. If they'd left his soiled old tennis shoes by his bed it might have been a different story, but this way I hit him about halfway across the lot and brought him down. The fall with my weight on top of it drove all the air out of him, but still he tried to struggle from under. I had one of his arms clamped and reached for the other in an attempt to get him cuffed, but he wriggled and fought and so I slammed my fist down between his shoulders with a blow that would have shaken a mahogany table.

He knew that he was cornered. He knew that he was the last of the four from the Paradise, and that there was nowhere else to run. But he was also the strongest and the fittest of all of them, the same kind of build as Mercado only bigger, and he was determined not to stay down. I felt his free elbow come up like a piston into my ribs, and that bought him enough freedom to throw me off and to roll over; but even through the haze of pain I was still hanging onto his wrist, and as he tried to rise I was able to drag him down and hit him around the side of the head on the way. That really slowed him, and I got onto his chest and pinned him to the ground as I reached around for the waistband holster in the small of my back where the Detective Special was hidden under my shirt.

He was grinning at me.

'I've seen through the trick,' I shouted down at him although there were only inches between us. 'I know what you do. You've got all these different faces but you're the same guy every time.' And the grin became a laugh, and I said 'Am I right?' And then he was laughing so hard that he was bouncing me up and down and I stopped fumbling for the gun and socked him as hard as I could. His head snapped over to one side but he kept on laughing as if the pain was something that he didn't really feel, and I leaned forward and screamed again, ' Am I right? ' into his ear. I was reaching for the gun again as I did it, as certain as I'd ever been of anything that I had to kill him now as he lay here in the last of his shell-bodies, and that if I could only do this one simple thing there would be no more slack corpses ticking over on fresh air and baby food and no more children bleeding to death with pieces of their bodies torn away.

Two hands clamped around my upper arm then, and someone else caught me from the other side. I was suddenly weightless, heaved up to my feet with the blind fury draining out of me as I stood.

'You don't beat up on the patients,' one of the orderlies holding me said. 'That's what they pay us for.'

The Chief looked me in the eye and said, 'Explanations, Alex?'

'I mistook the man, sir.'

'You don't say?'

It was now the next morning, and I was on the carpet in the Chief's office. The Chief was behind his big desk and Lieutenant Michaels was sitting to one side, looking uncomfortable and meeting nobody's eyes. I could almost feel sorry for him; he was the man in the middle with no firm place to stand, while my position at least was absolutely indisputable. I was firmly in the ordure.

I also had the sense of being an exhibit as I stood there to attention with my uniform cap under my arm, because although the Chief's office was fully enclosed and soundproofed its walls were two-thirds glass that looked out into the rest of the department; and the rest of the department, of course, looked in. The whole design was supposed to promote a sense of accessibility, but all that it promoted in me was a feeling of being a small bug on a large white piece of paper. I doubted that there was anybody in the building who didn't by now know what I was here for; and I was certain that there was nobody who'd listen to the true story and believe it.

So I said, 'I was driving by. I saw him coming out at a run with a couple of people on his tail, it seemed reasonable to slow him down a little so that I could find out what was going on.'

'Slow him down a little? From the way the ward orderlies tell it, you were trying to reshape his face.'

'Heat of the moment, sir. All I did was give him a little tap when he started to fight me.'

The Chief sat back, looking at the single sheet of memo paper on his otherwise empty desk; empty, that is, apart from the telephone and the blotter and a family photo and a couple of paperweight-sized bronze trophies whose inscriptions I wasn't close enough to read. The Chief was young for his office, dark and good-looking and with a knack of being able to remember everybody's name without having to grope for it like the rest of us have to. I'd had him classed as a born politician from the first time that I'd seen him.

Looking up from the paper, he said, 'You weren't in uniform.'

Lieutenant Michaels said, 'Sergeant Volchak was off-duty yesterday.'

'Like I said,' I insisted, 'I was only passing. First thing that came into my mind was that we had a junkie trying to make a snatch from the Emergency Room. It's happened before.'

'Whatever the justification,' the Chief said, 'the fact remains that we're on very shaky ground here if we get a complaint. You know I've got to suspend you.'

'I understand that, sir.'

Turning to the Lieutenant, he said, 'What's the situation, Dave? Do we have a complaint here, or what?'

Michaels checked his own notes. Somebody walked by outside, and I resisted the impulse to turn to see who it was.

He said, 'Nothing's been submitted yet, but I think we've got to assume that it's going to happen. Mr…' He searched for a name. 'Mr Woods is news this morning. He was one of the three men found in the Paradise Motel and misdiagnosed as brain-dead.'