Heartsick

CHAPTER 27

Today, when Gretchen comes with the pills, Archie manages to get a sentence out when she removes the tape. “I’ll swallow them,” he tells her.

She sets the funnel on the tray and Archie opens his mouth and extends his tongue, like a good patient. She places a pill on his tongue and holds a small glass of water against his parched lips so he can drink. It is the first water he has had since his arrival and it feels good in his mouth and in his throat. She checks around his tongue to ensure that he has swallowed the medicine. They repeat the exercise four times.

When they are done, Archie asks, “How long have I been here?”

“It doesn’t matter,” she says.

He hears a buzzing. At first, he thinks it’s in his head, but then he recognizes the sound: flies. The decomposing corpse on the floor. It reminds him of the other man, and for a moment he is a cop again. “The second man who lifted me into the van,” he says. “Where is he? Have you killed him, too?”

Gretchen raises a bewildered eyebrow. “Darling, you sound like a raving lunatic.”

“He was here,” Archie says, his mind foggy. “Before.”

“It’s just us,” she says impatiently.

But he wants to keep her talking, to get as much information as he can. He glances around at the windowless room. The subway tiles. The medical equipment. “Where are we?”

She is done with his questions. “Have you thought about what I asked you?” she says.

Archie has no idea what she’s talking about. “What?”

“What you want to send them.” This is delivered with thinly disguised irritation. “They’re worried about you, darling.” She runs her hand lightly along his arm to where his wrist is bound with a padded leather strap to the gurney. “You’re right-handed, yes?”

Archie has to think on his feet, while he is still lucid, before the pills kick in. “Why, Gretchen? You never sent anything from the other bodies.” Then it strikes him. Her victims. They were always killed within three days of their abductions. “It’s been four days,” he says. “They’re starting to think I’m dead. You want them to know I’m still alive.”

“I’ll let you choose. But we need to do it now.”

The terror is building in his body, but he knows he can’t agree to her terms. As soon as he does, he becomes a partner to it. “No.”

“I’ve removed dozens of spleens,” she mutters. “But only postmortem. Do you think you can remain still?”

He starts to fold in on himself. “Gretchen, don’t do this.”

“It’s moot, of course.” She picks up a syringe from the tray. “This is succinylcholine. It’s a paralyzing agent, used for surgery. You won’t be able to move at all. But you’ll remain conscious. You’ll feel everything.” She glances at him meaningfully. “I think that’s essential, don’t you? If you’re going to lose a part of your body, you should experience it happening. If you wake up and it’s gone, how do you know if you feel any different?”

He can’t stop it. He knows there is no reasoning with her. He can only protect the people he’s left behind. “Who are you going to send it to?” he asks her.

“I was thinking Debbie.”

Archie’s mind lurches, imagining Debbie’s face. “Send it to Henry,” he asks. “Please, Gretchen. Send it to Henry Sobol.”

Gretchen pauses with her preparations and smiles at him. “If I do, you’ll have to be good.”

“I’ll do what you want,” Archie says. “I’ll be good.”

“The problem with succinylcholine is that it will paralyze your diaphragm.” She holds up a plastic tube that leads to a machine behind her. “So first I’m going to have to intubate you.”

Before Archie can react, she inserts a curved steel blade into his mouth, depresses his tongue, and pushes the tube in behind it. The tube is large, filling his throat, and he gags violently and fights it. “Swallow,” she says as she presses her hand against his forehead, pinning his head hard against the gurney.

He can feel his fingers splay, every muscle tensed as he fights the tube. She leans in close, tenderly, her hand still on his forehead. “Swallow it,” she says again. “Fighting it will only make it worse.”

He closes his eyes and forces himself to overcome the gag reflex and swallow the tube as she slides it farther down his throat, deep into his body.

Then it is done. The air fills his lungs. It is calming, actually. It forces his breaths to equalize, his heart rate to slow. He opens his eyes and watches as she slides the hypo into his IV and adjusts the drip into his arm.

He feels suddenly, disturbingly calm. It is the resignation he had seen on the faces of death row inmates. He has no control, so there is no point in fighting any of it. The sensation bleeds out of his body until it is just deadweight. He tries to move his fingers, his head, his shoulders, but nothing responds. It’s a relief, really. He has fought so hard in his tiny career to order chaos, discourage violence, prevent crime. Now he can just let it happen.

She smiles at him, and he knows with that smile that he has been played. He has asked for and received a favor from his murderer. And more than that, he notes with dry detachment, he is grateful.

He can only stare at the familiar fluorescent lights and pipes on the white ceiling, vaguely aware of her movements as she washes her hands, prepares an instrument tray, shaves the hair off his abdomen. He feels the cold iodine on his skin and then she presses the scalpel into his flesh. It opens easily under the sharp blade in her hands, a slice and then a pop as it pulls through the muscle. He tries to distance himself from it; to talk himself out of the pain. For a moment, he thinks he’s going to be all right. That he can stand this. That it’s no worse than the nails. And then she inserts the clamp and pries open the hole she had made in him. It is a wrenching, ripping, nausea-inducing pain that makes Archie scream, only he cannot speak, cannot move his mouth, cannot lift his head. He still manages to cry out in his mind, a strangled howl that he carries with him into unconsciousness.

She lets him sleep. It feels like days, because when he wakes up, his mind has constructed a tunnel of clarity. He turns his head and she is right beside him, face propped up on two stacked fists set on his bed. They are inches apart, nose-to-nose. The tube is gone from his throat, but his throat aches from it. She has not slept. He can tell. He can see the fine veins underneath the pale skin of her forehead. He knows her expressions. He is starting to know her face as well as Debbie’s.

“What were you dreaming about?” she asks him.

Color images flash through his mind. “I was in a car in a city, looking for my house,” he says. His voice is hoarse, a cracked whisper. “I couldn’t find it. I’d forgotten the address. So I just kept circling.” He smirks mirthlessly, feeling his chapped lips crack. A hard nut of pain sits in his chest. “I wonder what it means.”

Gretchen doesn’t move. “You’ll never see them again, you know.”

“I know.” He glances down at the bandage on his abdomen. The pain pales compared to the ache of his ribs. His entire torso is bruised, the skin the color of rotten fruit. His body feels like wet sand. He hardly notices the smell of decomposing flesh anymore. It is a strange thing to be alive. He is getting less and less attached to the idea. “They get it?”

“I sent it to Henry,” she says. “They haven’t released it to the media.”

“No, they wouldn’t.”

“Why?”

“They’ll want to confirm it’s mine,” he explains.

She’s perplexed. “I sent your wallet with it.”

“They’ll match the DNA,” he reassures her. “It will take a few days.”

She lowers her perfect face next to his again. “They’ll know I took it out of you while you were alive. And they’ll find traces of the drugs I’ve given you.”

“It’s important to you, isn’t it?” he asks. “That they know what you’re doing to me.”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I want them to know that I’m hurting you. I want them to know that and not be able to find you. And then I want to kill you.” She places a hand on his forehead and holds it there like a mother checking a child for fever. “But I don’t think I’ll give you back, darling. I think I’ll let them wonder. I like to let them wonder sometimes. Life shouldn’t always be so cut-and-dried.”

He had squatted in the rain next to so many corpses, seen so much death. He had always wondered how many more she killed. Serial killers often killed for years before the police caught on to a pattern. He wanted to know. He had spent ten years living for the answer to two questions: “Who was the Beauty Killer?” and “How many had been murdered?” He knows the answer to the first question. Now some part of him felt that if he knew the second, some door on the person he had been might close. It was as if the more she confided in him, the more he belonged to her.

Gretchen grows impatient. “Just ask me how many people I’ve killed. I want to tell you.”

He sighs. The effort hurts his ribs and he winces. She is still waiting, her anticipation palpable. She is like an insistent child who must be indulged. It is the only way to make her go away. “How many people have you killed, Gretchen?”

“You will be number two hundred.”

He swallows hard. Jesus Christ, he thinks. Jesus fucking Christ. “That’s a lot of people,” he says.

“I had my lovers kill for me sometimes. But I always chose whom it would be. It was always at my bidding. So I think I should get to count it, don’t you?”

“I think you can count it.”

“Are you in pain?” Her face is shining.

He nods.

“Tell me,” she says.

He does. He tells her because he knows it will satisfy her, and if she is satisfied, she might give him some peace. She might let him rest. And when she lets him rest, he gets the pills. “I can’t breathe. I can’t take a full breath without a searing pain in my ribs.”

“What’s it like?” Her eyes gleam.

He searches for the right words. “It’s like razor wire. Like someone wrapped razor wire around my lungs, and when I breathe, it cuts deep into the tissue.”

“What about the incision?”

“It’s starting to throb. It’s a different kind of pain. More of a burning. It’s okay if I don’t move. My head hurts. Especially behind the eyes. The wound, where you stabbed me, it feels like it’s getting infected. And my skin itches. All over. I think my hands are asleep. I can’t feel them.”

“Do you want your medicine?”

He smiles, imagining the tingling wave of fog that follows the pills. His mouth waters for it. “Yes.”

“All of it?”

“No,” he tells her. “I don’t want the hallucinations. I just see my life. I see them looking for me. I see Debbie.”

“Just the amphetamine and the codeine?”

“Yes.”

“Extra codeine?”

“Yes,” he says, choking.

“Ask me for it.”

“Can I have some extra codeine?”

She smiles. “Yes.”

She empties the pills from bottles on a counter against the wall and returns with the water. She feeds them to him, and lets him drink. She doesn’t check to see if he’s swallowed them, because she doesn’t need to.

It will be fifteen minutes before he feels the medicine, so he tries to divorce himself from the slow death of his body. She sits in a chair beside his bed, hands neatly on her lap, staring.

“Why did you decide to become a psychiatrist?” he asks her after a long silence.

“I’m not,” she says. “I just read some books.”

“But you’ve got medical training.”

“I worked as an ER nurse. I went to medical school, but I dropped out.” She smiles. “I would have been a great doctor, though, don’t you think?”

“I’m maybe the wrong person to ask.”

They sit quietly again, but she is fidgety.

“Do you want to know all about my shitty childhood?” she asks. “The incest? The beatings?”

He shakes his head. “No,” he says thickly. “Maybe later.”

He feels the first tingle bloom in the center of his face and begin its tidal surge across his body. Just stay there in the room, he tells himself. Don’t think about Debbie. Don’t think about the kids. Don’t think. Just be in the room.

Gretchen is looking at him appreciatively. She reaches out and touches his face. It’s an affectionate gesture he has learned often indicates that she is about to do something terrible.

“I want to kill you, Archie,” she says, her voice soft and sweet and untroubled. “I’ve thought about it. I’ve fantasized about it for years.”

She runs her fingertips over the edge of his earlobe. It feels good. His breathing eases as the codeine softens the pain of his broken bones, his split flesh. “So do it.”

“I want to use drain cleaner,” she tells him, as if discussing a wine they might serve at a dinner party. “I’ve always done it quickly. Made them drink a lot of it at the end. Death comes very suddenly.” Her face is animated. “But with you, I want to do it slowly. I want to watch you experience death. I want you to drink the drain cleaner slowly. A tablespoon a day. I want to see how long it takes. What it does to you. I want to take my time.”

He meets her stare. Amazing, he thinks, what psychopathic horror lives in that pretty, demure body.

“Are you waiting for my blessing?” he asks.

“You said you’d be good. I sent the package to Henry. Like you asked.”

“So that’s part of the fantasy? I have to take the poison willingly?”

She nods, biting her lip. “I’m going to kill you, Archie,” she says with absolute assurance. “I can carve you up and send you piece by piece to your children. Or we can do it my way.”

He considers his options. He knows that she presents him with impossible choices, fully realizing that he can choose only one outcome. She wants total power over him. His only weapon is to retain some illusion of power himself. “Okay,” he agrees. “On one condition.”

“What?”

“Four more days. That’s all I can do. If I’m not dead from it in four days, you find some other way to kill me.”

“Four days,” she concurs, her blue eyes bright with pleasure. “Can we start now?”

He watches her body language change; her excitement palpable. He nods his surrender and she immediately jumps up and goes to the counter against the wall. She pours a glass of water, retrieves a beaker of clear golden fluid, and returns to him. “It will burn,” she instructs him. “You’ll have to resist a gag reflex. I’ll plug your nose for you and follow the drain cleaner with water to wash it down.” She pours a teaspoon of fluid from the beaker and holds it at his chin. The familiar smell sickens him. “Are you ready?” she asks.

He has no sense of consequence. It is not him who is there in the basement with Gretchen Lowell. It is someone else. He opens his mouth and she plugs his nose and thrusts the spoon far back into his throat and empties the poison. He swallows. She holds the glass of water to his lips and he gulps as much of it as he can. The burning is overwhelming. He feels it scald his throat and then flame into his gullet, and for a second he is back in his physical self, his nervous system in full panic. He screws up every muscle in his face and bites down on his tongue to keep from vomiting. Then, after a while, it passes and he lies panting on the bed, Gretchen holding his head in her hands.

“Shh,” she says, soothing him. “You did well.” She smoothes his hair and kisses his forehead several times. Then she reaches into her pocket and pulls out six large white oval pills. “More codeine,” she explains. “You can have as much as you want. From now on.”