The First Patient

CHAPTER 5

Direct sunlight never found its way into the three-hundred-foot-long underpass beneath Levalee Street. The tunnel, just a few miles from the seats of justice and government of the most powerful nation on Earth, was a living, teeming monument to the have-nots in this richest of societies. In fact, in many ways the rules of this microcosm were as complex and constricting as those of the civilization that surrounded it. And chief among those rules was never to deal with outsiders.

The man appeared at the south opening of the squalid corridor just as dusk was settling in over the city. He wore a light brown suit over a dark knit shirt and looked average in every way, at least until he extracted a powerful flashlight and a noise-suppressed.45-caliber Heckler & Koch pistol from loops on his belt. He had learned to kill game as a child in Mississippi and humans as a sniper in the Army and then had honed his skills over the dozen years since his discharge. The name he used most was Carl-Carl Eric Porter-but there were many others. As usual, he was being well paid, and as usual he was relishing every aspect of his job.

For a time Porter stood motionless, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. With no great effort, he closed his senses to the stench of garbage, filth, urine, whiskey, and vermin. He had encountered worse. Stretched out before him, spaced on either side, was a gauntlet of cardboard appliance containers and makeshift lean-tos.

Every four years, as the world descended on Washington for the inauguration of a new or returning American president, police would swoop down and roust the denizens of the Levalee underpass and other such places from their fetid homes, at times even putting the makeshift villages to the torch. But within a short while, like a forest recovering from a volcano, the space would begin to fill with life once again until soon it was indistinguishable from the village that had preceded it. With a presidential election just a few months away, it would not be long before the cycle commenced once more. But at the moment, no one in the Levalee underpass was concerned with anything but the intruder.

Aware of the dozens of eyes following him, Porter pinned his pistol and flashlight beneath his arm and pulled on a pair of rubber gloves. Steve Crackowski, a security chief for some sort of company-Porter didn't particularly care which one-had hired him to find and eliminate a man named Ferendelli. Now Crackowski had gotten a tip that the mark, a doctor, was hiding out with the down-and-outers he had once taken care of in a nearby free clinic. This was the second hobo village Porter had visited. He strongly sensed this might be the one.

Certain the denizens of the tunnel had gotten a good look at the gun, Porter replaced it in his belt and took a five-by-seven photo of Ferendelli from his jacket. Then he made his way purposefully down the squalid gauntlet, panning the beam from one side to the other, pausing each time the light struck a face to ask about the photo.

"A hundred bucks," Porter was saying to one of the men, loudly enough for everyone to hear. "Tell me where this here man is and a hundred is yours. Don't tell me, and one of you is gonna get hurt real bad."

Over the years, Porter had taken great pains to keep his heavy Mississippi drawl intact. There had been times when his dense accent had actually fed into a mark's southern stereotype and put them at ease. Their mistake.

"White man, five ten, dark hair, fifty-five, thin body, narrow face. Speak up now. I'm losin' my patience, and believe me, you don't want that to happen."

Nothing.

Porter inched ahead, shifting his focus from one side of the tunnel to the other. The eerie, intense silence was broken only by staccato coughing and the clearing of inflamed throats. The killer stopped now and again to kick the soles of tattered shoes to get their owners to look up into the light.

"You there, you seen this man?… A hundred bucks is a pile a money."

The gnarled, wizened man, kneeling placidly beside his refrigerator carton home, stared at Porter with vacant, rheumy eyes and shook his head. Then he coughed up a dense wad of phlegm and spit it in Porter's direction.

Without a moment's hesitation, Porter pulled out his pistol and from less than ten feet away shot the old man through the eye.

Silence.

"I'm gonna wait one minute. If I don't hear something, I'm going to pay a visit to another one of you… Last chance."

"He's gone!" someone called out.

Porter whirled to the voice and fixed the intense beam on the man it belonged to. The hobo blocked the brightness with his hands.

"When?" Porter demanded.

"J-just now when you got here. Out-out that way."

"Fuck you, Frank," someone called out. "The doc was good to us."

"Here, Frank," Porter said, throwing a bill at him. "Go nuts."

Porter raced to the end of the tunnel and scanned the area beyond it. Then he put the flash back in his belt and took a device from his jacket pocket-a remote of some kind. He aimed it down the rows of the cardboard village and depressed a button on it several times.

Nothing.

Finally, without a glance back at the old man he had just killed, Carl Eric Porter disappeared up the embankment.

For ten minutes beneath the Levalee overpass the only sounds were the rasping breathing of forty men and women, the clearing of inflamed throats, and the occasional lighting of a cigarette. Then, from deep within a makeshift duct-taped cardboard home at the end of the tunnel farthest from where the killer had left, Jim Ferendelli, physician to the president, worked his way out from where he had been hiding, huddled beneath a damp, mildewed Harry Potter sleeping bag, and crawled to the opening of the box. Drawn and filthy, Ferendelli looked no different from any of the others in the hobo village.

"What do you think, Santiago?" he asked of the cachectic man sitting on the dirt outside the opening.

"I think he is gone," the man said with a heavy Spanish accent, "but I also think he might come back."

"Did he hurt someone?"

"He killed old Gordon. Just like that. Shot him like he was nothing."

"Damn. I'm sorry, Santiago."

"Frank saved you, I think."

"I heard him. That was quick thinking-by all of you."

"You were always good to us in the clinic."

"I need to go, Santiago. Thank you for sheltering me. I'm so sorry about Gordon. Thank Frank and the others for me, too."

"We wish you well, Doctor."

Still on all fours, Ferendelli crawled cautiously to the tunnel entrance, then ran as best he could down the deep swale toward the next road.