The Scream Catcher Page 28

  As Lennox cocks the right leg back, Jude closes his eyes, awaits the inevitable impact. But instead of a snap kick to the face, he experiences something else: a handheld detonator dropping to the floor. Just a small black plastic detonator no bigger than a television remote control that comes loose from Lennox’s belt. The plastic device makes a distinct clicking noise when it hits the damp concrete floor causing a small red light encased inside its display face to flash brightly.

  Game over…

  The Lake George Village Precinct

  Friday, 7:10 A.M.

  Rather than make the flight of stairs up to his own private second floor office, Mack sits behind Lino’s desk which is located inside a smaller office on the less private first floor of the Lake George precinct. His posture is best described as painfully hunched over, while he conceals the injured shoulder with an adjustable sling lifted from the hospital and a spare blazer he keeps inside his office closet. Tries to conceal it, that is.

  He’s growing weaker with each passing second, weary face giving away every ounce of physical torment. Maybe the many uniformed and plainclothes cops that swarm the mostly open first floor can easily see that their old Captain has taken a bullet to the shoulder. Perhaps they’re even aware of his hospital breakout. But they say nothing about it, as if their leader’s decision to place his life in jeopardy for the cause of the cop job is not only the right thing to do under blackout circumstances, but the only thing.

  Still, even Mack is beginning to second guess himself.

  When he slips his hand under the sling, touches the padded bandage, pulls the hand back out, his fingertips come away soaked with blood.

  How long can I last with this kind of hemorrhage? But I have to last. Don’t think about the blood. Think about finding your family . . .

  Slumped behind the metal desk, Mack is sure that passing out looms large in his immediate future. At this point, the pain is growing unbearable. If only he thought enough to have snatched some pain killers while still inside the hospital. Hospital strength pain killers! But that’s when it occurs to him that Lino might be able to come through with at least a couple of aspirin.

  “Got any aspirin, Danny?”

  Lino is down on his knees on the office floor, eyes intently staring at a large topographical map of Tongue Mountain and the surrounding state forest.

  “Lower left hand drawer,” the cop mumbles without pulling eyes away from the map.

  Mack opens the drawer, looks down inside. There’s a series of files stacked inside the drawer. Set on top of the files is a bottle of Advil.

  “Perfect,” the old Captain whispers.

  But that’s when something else captures his attention. Penned in ballpoint on the very top manila folder is the name “Blanchfield.” Without hesitation Mack flips open the lid. Inside he steals a quick glance at several photocopies of what appears to be cancelled checks. Behind those is a section of folded Glens Falls Eagle newspaper that bears the headline: BLANCHFIELD STEALS THE PROSECUTION! Maybe it’s the forty years of cop inside him, but instead of directly asking Lino what business he has keeping a private file on the county prosecutor, he pulls one of the sheets of cancelled checks, quickly stuffs it down into his sling, shoving it behind the jacket. Then, pulling out the plastic bottle of Advil, he closes the drawer with a resounding slam.

  “Find them?” Lino poses from the floor.

  “Got ‘em,” Mack says. His entire body pains him, but on the inside he’s beginning to do a slow burn.

  What the fuck is going on here, Lino?

  He might give more thought to it, but when he spots the boy and his stepmother coming through the doors of the crowded village precinct, he shoots up from behind the desk with an energy he would have thought impossible just one minute prior.

  I no longer have to search for my family . . . My family found me.

  A pair of uniformed cops immediately surround the two raggedy, almost half-dead looking stepmother and son.

  “It’s okay!” Mack shouts through the open office door. “Let them through!”

  But the barefoot, half-naked Rosie goes no further than the Watch Commander’s desk. For just a quick moment, she peers in Mack’s direction from across the room. Without a word, she exhales a breath, collapses into the arms of the uniformed policeman to her left.

  Jack pays her no attention.

  The boy sprints across the vinyl-tiled floor through the office door toward his grandfather but stops short as though shocked by the old Captain’s close-up appearance.

  “It’s okay, Jack,” Mack says from where he stands unsteadily behind the desk. “Tell me what’s happened.”

  “Tell us everything, Jack,” Lt. Lino chimes in as he looks up from a now superfluous topographical map of Tongue Mountain.

  Jack is still dressed in Batman and Robin pajamas. He’s covered in mud, scraggily hair hanging over big brown eyes. While the pregnant Rosie is laid out on a couch in the waiting room to await the arrival of an EMS van, Jack begins relaying the night’s events from beginning to end. Does it in one long breath, like reading the headlines from a dozen newspapers.

  “Dark monster woke me in my bed . . . A big man dressed all in black . . . He stuck a needle in me . . . Dad woke me up . . .The rain was coming down on my head and face . . . Thought I was having a dream, but we were in the woods . . . Dark monster did something bad to Rosie . . .”

  “Where’s your father now?” Mack interrupts, slate gray eyes growing heavier.

  “At the courthouse.”

  That’s when the force of the explosion shatters the front windows of the Lake George Village Precinct.

  Office of the Warren County Prosecutor

  Friday, 7:20 A.M.

  Spontaneous detonation of the I.E.D. does not result in a sudden, spectacular catastrophic event. The courthouse does not collapse like a house of cards in a windstorm. The explosion of the van bomb results in minimal structural damage.

  Initially, that is.

  There’s only the crack of the detonation, the primary shock and lurch, then a heavy rumbling that begins to rattle the steel frame so intensely, Lennox is tossed off the chair onto his back, shaved skull bouncing on the concrete like a hollow melon.

  A gray-black fog of smoke and debris arrives then up through the air vents. The thick cloud consumes the building’s interior. All breathable air is sucked from Jude’s lungs. He is blinded not from fear, but from smoke and dust.

  When the second, far more forceful, explosion occurs maybe a second and a half after the first, he feels the building lurch beneath him as the entire west-side facade collapses, falls away in a dramatic gesture of shock and awe.

  From Jude’s vantage inside the eighth floor office, it seems as if the very front of the eight-story building has been sliced like a wedding cake from top to bottom. What survives of the now broken eighth floor concrete slab is no longer level. The floor angles down at a severe thirty degrees. In order to keep from falling, Jude must either grip the floor’s smooth surface like an insect or hang on to the opposite wall in order to avoid slip-sliding away, dropping off the edge for an eight-story plunge to the concrete pavement below.

  He lies flat on his belly, gripping the floor with all four limbs. What has been complete smoke and dust-filled blindness now gives way to bright morning sunshine.

  Total clarity.

  To his direct left, P.J. Blanchfield’s office furniture begins to fall victim to gravity’s pull. Desk, swivel chair, file cabinets, display cabinet, wood guest chairs, and basketballs slide and bounce their way off the smooth painted floor. One by one the objects drop off the edge.

  To Jude’s direct right, Blanchfield herself slides along the floor in the chair to which she’s been duct-taped. From down on his stomach the ex-cop views her gagged face. The reality of her life and immanent death have caused her to go wide-eyed, her color sickly pale while inch by inch the chair moves closer towards the edge. With all available strength, Jude reaches out for a chair
leg. But the effort proves useless. The prosecutor is just too far away, her sliding chair picking up momentum with each inch gained.

  Paralyzed in his own right, Jude is now reduced to passive observer as Blanchfield’s chair grinds its way across the broken office floor. When finally it comes to the slab’s edge, the bound woman seems to hang on in one last miraculous balancing act of survival. Maybe the chair teeters on the brink for a half second, maybe a full second. But Jude imagines that time has no meaning for the woman and her final moment on earth.

  When finally the chair drops out of sight, Jude does not experience an immediate disgust or sadness. In a word, the shocked ex-cop feels nothing as if P.J. Blanchfield and the chair she was bound to never existed in the first place.

  Warren County Courthouse

  Friday, 7:24 A.M.

  Pulling himself up, Jude attempts to crawl one limb at a time towards the far wall. Maybe there it will be possible to grab hold of an open door jamb. Something that will support him until a rescue can be organized. He looks over his right shoulder, views the empty office. He looks over the left shoulder only to view more of the same emptiness. Only this emptiness is colored with beautiful blue sky and in the far distance, the calm surface of Lake George.

  Jude wonders if Lennox has also gone over the edge.

  He doesn’t want him to go over the edge. He wants Lennox alive. So he can kill him.

  But the beast is nowhere to be seen. His presence is only to be felt.

  Jude knows this because someone, or something, starts to pull at his right leg—someone yanking it hard. Lifting his head off the floor, Jude peers down at his feet.

  Lennox has not gone over the edge.

  He’s alive, jerking on Jude’s leg, trying to break an already tenuous grip on the floor. The beast is trying to toss the ex-cop over the edge. Raising his left leg, Jude thrusts the heel of his foot downward, hammering at the beast’s face. Blood spurts from nose and lips. But the assault, as fierce as it seems, causes Lennox little harm. Lennox is fueled by the blood, by the pain. The more Jude kicks at him, the more he bleeds, the more he smiles a broken-toothed grin.

  Lennox improves his grip on the ankle.

  He pulls and yanks on Jude. He wants to send the ex-cop over the side.

  Not even digging his fingernails into the concrete floor can prevent Jude from sliding. The slide is gradual at first until Lennox throws all his weight into it so that the ensuing leverage pulls the two of them down across the length of the shattered concrete floor.

  Jude hangs over the edge, only one damaged hand and one good hand to support his full body weight. To his right, Lennox is also hanging vertical. Not by two hands, but by one. The beast calmly stares Jude down, black face bloodied, top front tooth broken at the root, black bodysuit torn down the middle exposing a bare, hairless, tight-muscled chest. Lennox is beaming happy and confidant even while hanging by only one arm, ice-blue eyes cutting into Jude’s own eyes like the promise of certain death.

  Eight stories below, an indistinguishable mix of Lake George natives and summer tourists gather around the smoking rubble of what only moments before constituted the courthouse’s front façade. Firemen and E.M.T.s busy themselves by attempting to inflate and properly position a giant air mattress in order to break two possible falls.

  Jude looks down upon them.

  It’s not difficult to see that the emergency professionals are failing in their efforts. There is simply too much rubble in the way, not enough time to position the air mattress before the inevitable occurs.

  Still Jude hangs on.

  But he can’t hold out much longer. Battered body is growing heavier with each fading second. His grip on the jagged concrete edge is growing weaker. He tries chining his way up and over the broken edge of the floor slab. But when his injured right hand slips away, he finds himself hanging by only his left.

  The crowd issues a collective roar.

  The roar speaks volumes, tells Jude his immediate future looks bleak. But then the roar also produces a final burst of adrenalin that shoots its way through arteries and veins. He manages to throw his damaged right hand back up, clutching the concrete edge with two hands rather than one.

  Stealing another downward glance, Jude catches sight of two faces he instantly recognizes: Mack and Jack. The two are standing on the flat front lawn flanked by a black-suited Judge Mann on one side and a live action Channel 9 news camera crew on the other.

  The old Captain has a bullhorn gripped in his left hand, has it raised up to his mouth. He’s shouting something. But it’s impossible for Jude to hear a word of it.

  A helicopter arrives from the direction of the lake.

  Its spinning blades cut through the smoke and dust-ridden air. It hovers above, but far enough away so that its rotor-generated wind does not slam into Jude’s back. Out the corner of his right eye he sees that Lennox is closing the gap that remains between them, shimmying his way along the edge of the broken eighth floor slab by thrusting one black-gloved hand over the other. When he’s within range, the beast releases his right hand-hold, reaches into his pocket, pulls out the iPhone.

  “Scream. For. Me.” he calmly orders.

  Jude faces him from only four or five feet away, somehow unafraid of events that are about to transpire even if they are about to prove themselves the final acts of his life. Jude isn’t exactly sure where his fear has disappeared to, but within the span of a final few seconds, one thing is becoming certain: he doesn’t feel much of anything anymore. It’s as if someone has peeled off his skin, scraped away the once raw nerve endings leaving only brittle bone. With a powerful burst of confidence, he gazes into the ice-blue eyes of a psycho killer . . .

  . . . as the eighth floor collapses out from under them.

  Warren County Courthouse

  Friday, 8:11 A.M.

  But in an instant the static images are replaced by a bright white light that stings Jude’s retinas when shined directly into them. He can’t close his lids anymore than he can open his mouth to speak. There is only the bright white light and beyond it the slow motion blades that chop through the dust-filled air from the helicopter that hovers above the spot in which he lay. But then that’s not right either because there are people—so many people moving all around him, some screaming, some carting medical equipment. A few of the people are kneeling down beside him, peering directly into his face, pleading with him to “Breathe.”

  “Breathe, Jude, breathe,” they scream in these too deep voices that sound like an old fashioned record played at slow speed and he can’t help but laugh because of course he’s breathing so what the hell is all the fuss about?

  And then, just like that, the scene shifts to the sky.

  Jude finds himself floating far above Lake George.

  He’s lying on his back, a translucent oxygen mask covering his face. When he turns his head to the left, he can see the deep blue/green water and the boats that dot its surface like ants on a puddle. There’s the muted whump-whump-whump noise of the chopper blades—a noise he feels deep inside his chest. When he turns his head, he spots Rosie. She’s strapped into a seat that folds out of the aircraft’s sidewall. From where Jude lay strapped to a collapsed gurney, he can see that she’s still dressed in the same nightgown from the night before. The blood spot is no longer visible because covering much of her body is a long blue coat, like the kind the New York City policemen used to wear during the winters. Jude can’t understand what she’s doing wearing a winter coat in the middle of the summer anymore than he can grasp the fact that together they are flying through mid-air far above the lake. But just the sight of her gives him a kind of warm fuzzy feeling that follows him back to the land of the dark unconscious.

  Glens Falls Medical Center

  Saturday, 10:09 A.M.

  Another day passes before Jude wakes up.

  On this occasion, there are no crowds of E.M.T.s surrounding him inside the bomb-ravaged Warren County Courthouse, no emergency Medivac ch
oppers to transport him far above Lake George through the blue Adirondack sky south to Glens Falls.

  No Rosie, no Jack, no Mack.

  Lying back in the mechanical bed, he has no other choice than to believe the truth: I’m alive. But then being alive bears with it a specific set of circumstances and challenges for which he—whether he likes it or not—has to face head on.

  First off, his head aches. Temples pound. He feels empty on the inside. Nauseas and so very thirsty.

  A glance over his left shoulder reveals Lt. Lino.

  The tall, black-suited man smoothes out his mustache, gazes into newly opened eyes. Maybe it has something to do with his imagination, but Jude swears the man is trying to work up a welcome smile when he says, “You took quite a fall, Jude.”

  A smile with absolutely no feeling behind it.

  Like a robot.

  Attempting to shift a shell-shocked body up against the headboard of the hospital bed, Jude wrenches and strains to no avail. Movement proves an impossible dream. Any kind of movement, no matter how slight, causes sharp electric jolts of sting to pulse up and down his spinal column.

  “What about my wife?”

  Lino crosses his arms.

  “There were some complications.”

  Jude feels something inside him breaking. Something other than flesh and bone.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Don’t worry. She’s here.”

  “When can I see her?”