Reprisal

EIGHTEEN

Three days in hell.

That poor kid had spent the three days since Christmas Eve in unremitting agony, writhing and turning in his bed. His voice was gone but his open mouth, tight-squeezed eyes, and white, twisted features told the whole story of what he was feeling.

A story Renny could not bear to hear. And though he came by the hospital often he could not bring himself to enter that room more than once a day or stay more than a moment or two.

But the priest, Bill Ryan—Father Bill as Renny had come to think of him—he stuck by the kid's side, sitting by the bed like some guardian angel, holding his hand, talking and reading and praying into ears that weren't listening.

"They say his mind's gone," Father Bill told Renny and Nick on the morning of the fourth day.

This fellow Nick, late twenties and homely as all hell, was some sort of scientific professor at Columbia. He'd been in and out, hanging with the priest since Christmas night. Renny learned that the prof was a former St. F.'s orphan too. Good to see an orphan kid go from nothing to being a hotshot scientist. And seeing as they had St. F.'s in common, the prof was all right in Renny's book.

The three of them were sipping coffee in the parent lounge of the pediatric wing where Danny had one of the few private rooms. Late morning sunlight poured in through the wide picture windows and glared off the remnants of the Christmas snow on the rooftops around them, warming the room until the heat was almost stifling.

"I'm not surprised," Nick said. "And your mind'U be gone soon as well if you don't get some rest."

"I'll be okay."

"He's right, Father," Renny said. "You're heading for a breakdown at about ninety miles an hour. You can't keep going like this."

The priest shrugged. "I can always catch up. But Danny… who knows how much time he's got left?"

Renny wondered how much time Father Bill had left before he collapsed. He looked like hell. His eyes were sunken halfway into his head, his hair was unkempt from running his hands through it every couple of minutes, and he needed a shave. He looked like an escapee from the drunk tank.

And Renny was feeling like one. He hadn't had much sleep himself. Seemed like he'd been on a treadmill since Christmas Eve, which wasn't sitting well at all with Joanne. Bad enough he'd missed Christmas morning—good thing they didn't have any kids or he'd really be in the dog house—but he'd also missed Christmas dinner at his in-laws'. It wasn't that he didn't like his in-laws—they were okay folks—it was just that he was in deep shit with the department. A suspect in an attempted murder case had been transferred to him at Downstate, and a few hours later all he had in custody was a pile of stinking goo.

Renny's stomach gave a little heave at the memory. Over the past three days he had endlessly replayed the scene in the corridor in his mind, but no number of viewings could add any sense or reason to what had happened. One moment he had a suspect in custody, the next he had some lumpy brown liquid. Thank God there'd been witnesses or else no one would have believed him. Hell, he'd been there and had seen the whole thing and still didn't quite believe it himself.

And no matter who he talked to he couldn't get an explanation. None of the docs in this entire medical center could make any sense out of the MR images or the chest X ray, or what had finally happened to Lom's body. In fact there seemed to be a kind of doublethink going on. Since they couldn't explain it, they were sweeping it under their mental rugs. He'd overheard one of the medical bigwigs saying something like: Well, since what they say happened is obviously impossible, their memories of the incident must be faulty. How can we be expected to come up with a rational explanation when the primary data is faulty and anecdotal?

It was a different story up at the 112. The precinct had transferred a suspect to Renny and now the suspect was gone. A pile of goo was not going to be able to go before the grand jury for indictment. So they needed a new suspect. The hunt was now on for the missing wife. And Renaldo Augustino knew he'd better find her if he wanted to hold his head up again in the squad room.

So: Joanne was barely speaking to him at home, his name was mud down at the precinct, and Danny Gordon was still in agony here in the hospital.

Renny wondered why he stuck with this job. He had his twenty years. He should have got out then.

"Are they saying Danny's gone crazy?" Renny said to Father Bill.

"Not so much crazy as shutting down parts of his mind. The human mind can experience only so much trauma and then it begins to draw the blinds. The doctors say he's not really experiencing pain on a high level of consciousness."

"That's a blessing," Renny said. "I guess."

The priest gave him a sidelong glance.

"If they know what they're talking about."

Renny nodded tiredly. "I hear you, Padre."

None of the doctors seemed to know what they were doing in Danny's case. They trooped in and out of that room, new bunches every day, about as much help explaining what was happening to the kid as they'd been explaining what had happened to Lorn. Lots of talk, lots of big words, but when you cleared away all the smoke, they didn't know diddly.

Nick the professor sighed with exasperation.

"You both realize, don't you, that what's supposedly happening with Danny is impossible. I mean it can't be happening. They say they're putting blood and other fluids into Danny and it's simply disappearing. That's patently impossible. Fluid is matter and matter exists. What goes in as fluid may come out as gas but it just doesn't disappear. It has to be somewhere!"

Father Bill smiled weakly. "Maybe it is. But it's not in Danny."

"Wasn't he worked up here before?"

"Completely. Everything one hundred percent normal."

Shaking his head, Nick glanced at his watch and stood up.

"I've got to run," he said, shaking hands with the priest. "But I can be back tonight if you want me to spell you with Danny."

"Thanks, but I'll be all right."

Nick shrugged. "I'll come back anyway."

He waved and left. Renny decided he liked Nick. But he still had to wonder a little. Like, what was the relationship between Nick and Father Bill? An unmarried guy still visiting the priest that took care of him as a kid? What kind of a relationship could they have had when Nick lived at St. F.'s that would hold up after all these years. Renny remembered Father Dougherty from his own days at St. F.'s. He couldn't imagine wanting to pay that cold fish a visit every week, even if he were still alive.

He canned the thought. Just his policeman's mind at work. You got so used to seeing the slimy side of people that when it didn't hit you in the face you went looking for it. But he could see that Father Bill might be a pretty regular guy when he wasn't under this kind of stress, someone you might want to be friends with, even if he was a priest.

"How about Sara?" the priest said when Nick was gone. "Anything on her?"

Renny had been dreading that question. Father Bill had asked it every day, and until this morning the answer had been an easy no.

"Yeah," he said. "We got something. I sent for a newspaper clipping and a copy of her senior page in the U. of T. at Austin yearbook. They arrived today."

"Her yearbook? How can that tell you anything?"

"I do it routinely, just to make sure that the person I'm looking for is really the person I'm looking for."

The priest's expression was puzzled. "I don't…"

Renny pulled the folded sheets from his breast pocket and handed them over.

"Here. They're Xeroxes of Xeroxes, but I think you'U*ee what I mean."

He watched Father Bill's eyes scan the top sheet, come to a halt, narrow, then widen in shock. Renny had had almost the same reaction. The yearbook picture of the Sara Bainbridge who later married Herbert Lorn showed a big, moon-faced blonde. The second sheet was a newspaper clipping of a wedding announcement with a photo of the same big blonde in a wedding gown.

Neither of them bore the remotest resemblance to the woman in the photo the priest had given Renny from the St. Francis adoption application.

Father Bill flipped to the second sheet, then looked up at him with a stricken, befuddled expression.

"But this isn't…"

"Yeah. I know."

The priest dropped the sheets and staggered to his feet.

"Oh, my God!"

He turned and leaned against the windowsill and stared out at the Brooklyn rooftops in silence. Renny knew he'd just been socked in the gut so he let him have his time. Finally he turned around.

"I really screwed up, didn't I?"

There was an impulse in Renny to say, Yeah, you did. But he knew it was just his own anger looking for a convenient target. As a cop he'd had his share of times as target for that kind of anger from citizens and he wasn't going to fall into the trap himself. Besides, what was the point of kicking a decent man when he was down?

"You got taken. You followed the routine and she slipped through. And didn't you tell me you even went so far as to call the woman's old pastor?"

A mute nod from the priest.

"Okay. So how were you to know that the two of you were talking about different people?"

But Father Bill didn't seem to be listening. He started talking to the air.

"My God, it's all my fault. If I'd done my job right, Danny wouldn't be all cut up like that. He'd still be in one piece back in St. F.'s."

"Aw, don't start with that bullshit. It's her fault. Whoever took the real Sara's place is to blame. She's the one who took the knife to Danny."

"But why? Why all the subterfuge, the elaborate plotting, and most likely the murder of the real Sara?"

"We don't know that."

True. They didn't know that. But Renny felt it in his gut: The real Sara was dead.

"Why, dammit? Just to mutilate a small boy? It doesn't make sense."

"I stopped expecting sense a long time ago."

"And what about Herb?"

"At this point I can go either way on Herb," Renny said with a shrug, trying not to remember what the man had looked like the last time he'd seen him. "But my gut instinct is that Herb was a victim too."

The priest's eyes were bleak as he looked at Renny.

"So then it's Sara—the bogus Sara—we're after."

"Right. And we'll find her."

"I'm not so sure about that," Father Bill said softly.

"What's that supposed to mean?"

Before the priest could answer, a doctor walked into the lounge, one of the nameless, faceless white coats that had been trooping in and out of Danny's room for days.

"Excuse me. Father Ryan? I want to discuss some procedures we'd like to do on the Gordon boy."

Renny saw the priest's body tense, like an animal ready to spring.

"Tests? More tests? What about his pain? All you do is tests but that child is still in agony in there! Don't come to me with more requests for tests until you've healed his wounds and stopped his pain!"

"We've tried everything we know," the doctor said, "but nothing works. We need to test—"

Father Bill took two quick steps toward the doctor and grabbed the lapels of his white coat.

"Screw your tests!" His voice was edging toward a scream. "Stop his pain!"

Renny leapt from his seat and pulled the priest off the doctor. He shooed the doctor out of the lounge and got Father Bill into a chair.

"Cool it, Father. Just cool it, okay?"

A nasty thought slithered through Renny's mind. In a crime with no witnesses, the first suspects should be the people closest to the victim. He remembered how everyone he'd interviewed at St. F.'s had commented on how attached Father Bill had been to little Danny. What if he'd been too attached? What if the thought of giving the kid up for adoption had been too much for him? What if—?

Jesus! Knock it off Augustino! This is one of the good guys here. Save it for the street slime.

"Why don't you go home," he told the priest. "You're cracking up from spending too much time in that hospital room."

The priest looked away. "I can't leave him. And besides, it's the only place I know without a phone."

Oh, yeah. Another sign that Father Bill might be cracking under the weight of all this craziness. He kept talking about these phone calls he was getting from Danny where the kid was screaming for help, begging him to come get him. A sure sign that—

The priest jumped as the lounge phone began to ring.

"That's him!" Father Bill said hoarsely, staring at the phone as if it were going to bite him.

"Yeah? How can you tell?"

"That's the way it rings when it's Danny."

The phone did sound weird. One long, uninterrupted ring that kept going. But weird ring or not, Renny knew it wasn't Danny Gordon on the phone. He snatched it up.

"Hello!"

A child's voice, terrified, screaming.

"Father, please come and get me! Pleeeeease! Father, Father, Father, I don't want to die. Please come and get me. Don't let him kill me. I don't want to dieT

Renny felt his heart begin to thud in response to the anguish in that little voice. It made him want to run out the door and find him, help him, wherever he was.

But he knew where he was. Danny was down the hall, in bed, hooked up to half a dozen tubes and monitors.

"Is that you, lady?" he shouted into the phone. "This is Detective Sergeant Augustino, NYPD, and you just made the biggest mistake of your life!"

The line was dead. He depressed the plunger and dialed the operator. After identifying himself he asked if she had just put the call through to extension 2579. She said no and checked with the other operators. No one could remember putting a call through to that extension all morning. He slammed the phone down.

"She's somewhere in the hospital!" he said.

"What?" The priest was back on his feet, his eyes wide.

"If the call didn't come through the switchboard, it had to originate in-house. She's probably sitting in some corner playing her tape into the phone."

"You mean it sounded like a tape to you?"

"Come to think of it… no."

Father Bill was suddenly running down the hall.

"Danny! She's here to finish him off!"

Renny followed him. He hated the thought of entering Danny's room, of hearing Danny's sound, his voiceless scream, like air escaping a punctured tire. Endlessly. It never stopped. The whole time you were in there it went on and on and on. He didn't know how Father Bill stood it. But he followed the priest into the room. He'd go anywhere, to hell itself to catch the bitch who'd done this to that kid…

But Danny was just as they'd left him, twisting and writhing in openmouthed agony. Renny could bear only a moment or two in that room, then he had to flee it, leaving Father Bill alone at the bedside.

Bill seated himself at the side of the bed, pulled a Rosary from his pocket, and began fingering the beads. But he didn't say the usual Our Fathers and Hail Marys. He couldn't find the words. His mind was saturated with Danny's ungodly torment.

Ungodly. A fitting adjective. Where was God when Bill needed Him? When Danny needed Him? Where had He been Christmas Eve? On vacation?

Or is He out there at all?

Such a question would have been unthinkable a few days ago. But Bill had run out of excuses.

And he knew them all. All the gentle explanations of why bad things happen to good people, and why even the most devout, most sincere, most selfless prayers often go unanswered. He knew how events often seemed to conspire to work against the best people, against the best things they tried to achieve. But that didn't mean there was a Divine Hand at work, moving people around, shaping events, checking off names of those who could go on living and those whose time was up.

As Bill saw it, death, disease, rape, murder, accidents, famine, plague—they all had earthly causes, and therefore had earthly solutions. As God's creatures we were expected to find those solutions. That was why He equipped us with hands, hearts, and minds.

Neither God nor the mythical Satan were the cause of our woes; if the culprits weren't ourselves or other people, they were time, circumstance, or nature.

Or so Bill had thought.

How did he explain what had happened—what was still happening—to Danny?

From everything Bill knew, from everything he had seen during the past few days, the answer was None Of The Above.

None of the above.

Sure, blame whoever had posed as Sara for taking a knife to Danny. She started it all. But what about the rest of it? The endless pain, the wounds that refused to heal, the unresponsiveness to anesthesia, the transfusions—almost fifty liters had been poured into Danny since his arrival—that seemed to be sucked down some black hole never to be seen again—what of them? Danny wasn't eating; his kidneys weren't functioning, so he was putting out no urine; his heart was beating but there was no blood for it to pump. It was impossible for him to be alive—every doctor who'd seen him had uttered those same words at one time or another.

Impossible… but here he was.

And what of Herb Lorn? A hollow man—not just spiritually, but without internal organs or a nervous system—who had dissolved when Bill punched a hole in his chest.

Good God!… the hole in his chest… the cold… the stench… the slime…

As much as his faith resisted it, as much as his mind saw it as a surrender of the intellect, he could not escape the feeling, the overwhelming belief that something supernatural was at work here.

Something supernatural… and evil.

And Danny was the target.

Why Danny? What had this child ever done to deserve this living hell? He was an innocent, and he was being put through unimaginable torture by a force beyond nature. Something dark and powerful had taken hold of him and was thumbing its nose at the laws of God and man and nature, keeping Danny beyond the reach of humanity's most advanced medical science.

And deep in his gut Bill knew that the torture would go on as long as Danny lived.

Where there's life, there's hope.

Bill had lived by that neat little aphorism for the four and a half decades of his life. He'd believed it.

But no more. Poor little Danny's case broke that rule. As long as he remained alive, there was no hope of relief for Danny. His life would go on—

No. Not life. Existence was a better term. For what Danny had now was not life. His existence would go on as it had since Christmas Eve—unhealed wounds, unremitting pain, with no hope of relief.

At least not from anything in this world.

Bill pocketed the Rosary and said a silent prayer of his own.

Help him, Lord. Something beyond the natural is causing his torment and so only something else beyond the natural can save him. That's You, Lord. We can bounce back from any blow Your world hands us, but we are helpless against the otherworldly. That's why Danny needs You to step in on his behalf. Not for

my sake—put his wounds on me, if that will do it. Just don't let him suffer anymore. If there's something that can be done that's not being done, let me know. Tell me and I'll do it. No matter what it is, I'll do it. Please.

Danny's rasping screams ceased and he opened his eyes.

Bill froze and watched as Danny's eyes stared about the room, searching, finally stopping when they found Bill. He grabbed the boy's hand and squeezed.

"Danny?" Bill said. "Danny, are you there? Can you hear me?"

Danny's lips moved.

"What?" Bill said, leaning closer. "What is it?"

The lips moved again. A whisper escaped.

Bill moved closer still. The breath from the parched tunnel of Danny's throat was sour as Bill put his ear almost against the dry lips.

"What, Danny? Say it again."

"Bury me… in holy ground… It won't stop… till you bury me…"