I set the effigy of wire and straw on the pavement in front of the John D. Bailey Center for Palliative Care and reached in my pocket for my lighter. The “John D,” as it was known, was built in the 60s to be something of an urban fortress of public safety. A striated-brick block jutted from the ground floor into the U-shaped visitor’s lot where I stood. A pair of outer doors marked ‘Exit’ and ‘Enter’ led to separate entryways with a heavy wall between. Even if you crashed into it with a truck, all that brick would make sure you never breached the inner doors. The designer relied on that. Electronic surveillance was minimal. White-boxed cameras perched like gargoyles over both the front and rear doors as well as the side exits, but that was it. If—hypothetically speaking—someone were to drop a footstool at the corner of the building, where a pair of rectangular sodium lamps jutted from both walls, and if that person were reasonably athletic, they could jump from the stool, grab one of the lamps with gloved hands, and pull themselves onto the first-floor roof, all without appearing on camera.
Of course, that person would still need some way into the building. All of the ground floor windows were barred. Even the window-mounted AC units were kept in solid metal cages. Both employees and visitors had to be buzzed into the building—although to be compliant with the fire code, those inside could of course buzz themselves out via the big red buttons on the wall near the exits. That meant someone could rush out of the building very easily—to see what was creating the giant blaze in the parking lot, for example.
The most important thing to know about the John D, however, was that its doors were pretty much like those of any hospital. They swung shut very slowly so as to leave time for long stretchers and the shuffling feet of the sick and elderly, of which there were quite a few inside. If someone did come rushing out, the inner door, normally locked, would take several long seconds to close.
I crouched on the roof over the exit until an orderly, or maybe a male nurse, ran into the visitors’ lot to examine my flaming effigy, now a spiraling column of fire a good 20 feet high. It was just after 11:00 p.m. and the lot was completely empty. He passed through the outer door and I hopped down from my perch and made it across the hall to the inner door in four strides, slipping my gloved fingers between it and the frame at the last moment. The orderly saw me, of course, so I slipped in quickly and slammed the door shut, trapping him outside with the click of the lock.
As he ran around to the entrance, hoping to be buzzed back in, the skinny night nurse with the dead eyes, the one sitting behind the desk, grabbed a fat syringe, held it like a dagger, and started toward me like this was all part of normal life after midnight at the John D and I was the third person that night who’d assaulted the place. She didn’t shout or anything, despite that I was dressed head-to-toe in black, including ski mask and hood. I had already pulled the first Molotov from my backpack. I lit the cloth with a Zippo from my pocket. She was halfway to me when I tossed it underhanded into the air. It landed in the nurses’ station she had just vacated, where it smashed on the floor of the records room. The color-tabbed paper files caught fire immediately, and in two seconds, tips of the flames were scraping the ceiling. The fire alarm was triggered, sirens sounded, and floodlights above each exit illuminated the dim halls in sideways beams.
The nurse raised the syringe like a psycho. She certainly looked like one. But I had to be sure. I spun into a foot sweep and knocked her down. I grabbed her throat. The reflection of the world was upside down in her eyes. And her skin was room temperature. She wasn’t dead, and she wasn’t a living zombie, although she was made from one. A possessing spirit had taken control of the soulless husk. If it retained control for a year and a day—technically one turn of the earth around the sun, or 365.24 days—then the prior owner became a disembodied spirit and the tenant took over the lease.
I pulled my gun and shot her in the head.
The orderly outside banged on the locked entrance, demanding to be let in. I ignored him and pulled a burner from my back pocket, already keyed to 911, and hit the dial button. I tossed it onto one of the seats in the waiting area and moved toward the hall, gun in hand. Smoke from the fire already obscured the ceiling, and I kept to a low crouch.
A man burst through the haze, but I had plenty of warning. He was backlit by the floodlights in the hall, so I could see his shape coming through the smoke. He was nothing but a silhouette and didn’t make any noise as he came at me, not even a shout of surprise. But since I had to be sure before putting a bullet in his skull, I shot him in the knee. He made no sound as his leg gave way. I saw his hollow eyes then and put a bullet through his head on its descent to the floor.
How many of these things did she have? How many people had she stole?
Behind me, barely audible over the roar of the flames, I could hear a loud voice calling out from the other end of the phone, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. At that moment, another man burst through the smoke. My gun swung around, and he jumped back, arms raised.
“I’m alive! I’m alive!” he called.
I motioned with the barrel to the front door and he slid past me, arms up, like I was contaminated by disease and he didn’t want to be within three feet of me. Then he hit the button and ran out. His colleague, the man I’d tricked, was still by the entrance. He cursed in frustration before running around to the other side, which shut before he reached it.
“Shit!” He pounded on the glass.
I made my way past the restrooms and toward the patient suites at the back, keeping low to avoid the smoke. The foam paneling in the ceiling of the records room had disintegrated in the heat and filled the air with choking particulates. I hugged the left wall, facing right, and made sure the hall was clear. Patient rooms stretched all the way to the illuminated exit sign at the far end. There were small dark lights over every door, painted with the room number. All of them were lit, which cast a violet glow over everything, like a black light. I moved to the right wall and swung left, keeping my gun raised, when a man grabbed me from behind. His skin was cool. He was unnaturally strong, and even though he held me with just one arm, my first attempt to pull free failed miserably. In that moment, he swung a fat hypodermic needle around toward my chest. I couldn’t block it!
The needle hit my pendant with a clink and snapped.
Twisting in rather than out, which he didn’t expect, I faced him and shoved my gun under his chin. I pulled the trigger and the splatter hit the ceiling. I felt some of it on my face. It was cold.
The fire was growing rapidly, and I began to worry that I might have given my colleagues in emergency services too much credit. They would need to arrive soon in order to get the residents out before they suffocated. Since I didn’t see my quarry on the ground floor, I crossed the hall to the enclosed stairwell near the back exit and pulled the fire alarm, just to be sure. Stuttering klaxons blared as I walked swiftly but carefully to the second floor, making sure to clear my corners as I went. I leaned out for a peek and ducked back in. That’s when I saw her. She was standing in the hall in a nightgown, tangles of white hair in her face, waiting. Her wheelchair was sideways on the floor behind her. Her arthritic hands made loose fists. She was backlit by the floodlight at the end of the hall. I couldn’t see her face.
I stepped into the open and replaced my gun in its holster. No one in any of the rooms was stirring, but I could hear sirens in the distance, finally. Not police. The fire department would be first on the scene, as expected.
The black lights over the doors in the hall made the pale wildflowers on her nightgown seem to glow. And her yellow teeth too, revealing a sneer.
We squared off like gunfighters. Granny Tuesday’s fingers twitched as if in anticipation of what they were going to do to me. I slowly slipped a hand into my open bag, which hung loose off one shoulder.
“Granny,” I said in terse greeting.
“Still haven’t figured it out, have you?”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t be here if’n you did.”
“Why don’t you tell me?”
As I stepped down the hall, I caught sight of the patients in their rooms out of the corners of my eyes. Every one of them looked as if death might find them at any moment. They lay catatonic with their mouths open and their shriveled lips curled over their teeth. Most had plastic oxygen masks over their faces and tubes running from their arms.
The fire trucks were out front of the building now. I could see red flashers reflected in the blinds of the rooms to my right. Wouldn’t be long.
“This how you hang on, Granny? Stealing the last remainder of life from folks who have nothing left?”
“Ain’t enough for them. But put it all together and it adds up to a little something for me,” she said, fingers twitching again.
I was very aware of how close I was getting. I knew that’s what she wanted, for me to get close so she could spring whatever trap she’d prepared.
“You set me up,” I accused calmly, not more than 15 feet from her.
Granny’s hands jerked hard, like she was moving to pull an invisible gun, and I tossed an item from my bag like a grenade. As it left my fingers, I flipped the metal toggle to release the padlock, and the carrion ghoul’s smoky form trailed the peglike spirit totem as it flew through the air—right toward the aged woman with the arthritic hands. Granny’s eyes went wide. She stopped whatever spell she’d been casting and turned circles in the air with one hand while drawing runes with the other. It was quite a feat to watch. Her left hand was turning wide circles as the totem hit the squeaky-clean floor and slid close to her slippered feet. She must have finished tracing the binding runes then because she flat-palmed the space in the center of the circle she’d been tracing and pushed air down to the totem. She was just closing the padlock again when I got close enough to attack. I swiped with a knife. She raised her arms defensively, and it cut across them, slicing her gown and the skin underneath. But she hardly seemed to notice. Her hands turned again as she spoke strange words—words I didn’t recognize and couldn’t repeat if I tried. Instantly, it felt like someone’s hand reached through me, through my intestines—which, as odd as it felt, was only the second-weirdest sensation of the evening. Half a second later, I felt that phantom hand grab my spine, just above my pelvis, and pull.
Hard.
I fell face forward as the ligaments in my spine stretched. I screamed. Something strong was trying to yank my spine out of my back, as if to rip both it and my skull free of my body and whip them about in a frenzy. And it would’ve, too, if one of Granny’s deftly spinning arms hadn’t cracked—audibly—just below the shoulder, and then fallen limp. Now it was her turn to scream. She clutched her elbow to keep the arm from swinging and fell to her knees.
For a moment, neither of us did anything but pant in pain. Whether it was because I was younger or just that much more pissed off, I stood first, a bit wobbly. I showed her the wax voodoo doll in my hand. It was missing one of its stubby arms. I’d snapped it off.
When it comes to voodoo dolls, hair works. So do very personal possessions, like a keepsake from childhood. But nothing works quite like blood. The effect is temporary, and there’s a reason why people do little more than stab the dolls with needles. Distance is a factor. You can only do so much from far away. But I was standing right next to the woman. I’d wiped my knife through a crease in the doll. I hadn’t intended to snap the arm off, to be honest, but I was in pain and had acted hastily.
Granny was on her knees. She opened her mouth to speak words I knew shouldn’t be spoken and I jabbed the tip of my thumb so hard into the doll’s neck that the soft wax spread under the crease of my glove. She fell to the ground choking and gagging. Her eyes bulged from her head while her tongue squirmed like a snake with its head cut off—and I wondered if maybe that’s exactly what it was. Her eyes were spiders. Her hair, a rat’s nest.
A hard sound echoed up the stairwell behind me. I heard heavy pounding on the front doors. The firemen downstairs were battering their way into the building. I lifted my thumb from the doll and Granny gasped loudly before coughing over and over between huge, gulping breaths.
“How’s that feel?” I asked.
“Damn yo—”
I pressed again and she gagged and choked.
I let go and knelt over her.
“Where is he, Granny? Where’s he hiding?”
“You don’t know wha—”
I heard a ruckus on the lower floor. I didn’t have time for an interrogation. I snapped a wax leg off the doll. Granny shrieked with such air and volume that it surprised me, and I moved back. She clutched her leg with her one good hand. It had snapped hard like the crack of a log in a fire. Her body shook in heaves, and she alternated between holding her breath from the pain and gasping for much-needed breath.
I had come angry. With vengeance and fury. But seeing her then, I actually pitied the old thing. I hadn’t expected that. I looked at the wax doll in my hand.
“You still don’t know what you are!” she screamed.
“He told me.”
“NO! You fool! You’re a weapon! That’s all. You think this is how you beat the darkness? With anger? And violence?” She spat the word. Then she laughed. “Look at you. You still think you’re the good guy. Even after everything. Hahahaha!”
The firemen broke into the building. I heard the shatter echo up the hall. A moment later, the klaxons ceased and I heard water and footsteps.
“Where is he?” I repeated, raising the doll.
“I woulda toldya.” Her voice quivered. “Without that.”
“Prove it.”
“Downtown,” she blurted, as if pushing the word over a cliff, before holding her breath again from the pain. Her shaking body was bordering on convulsion. She was going into shock. I wasn’t sure she was going to survive. “O—Omin,” she stuttered. “Omin! Top floor. Downtown. Wall Street!” she screamed. “That’s where they are.”
“HEY!” A fireman in bulky gear stepped into the hall behind me.
I snatched the locked totem from the ground and ran for the end of the hall. I fixed my bag on my back and shot the window four times without stopping. I’d tried Muay Thai. And CrossFit. And rugby. Maybe it was time for a little parkour. I dove through the glass. By the time the man with the ax and heavy oxygen tank on his back checked the old woman on the floor and chugged his way to the shattered window, I’d reached the ground, covered the gap to the fence, and was climbing over it, my face obscured by the hood and ski mask.
Maybe Granny would survive. Maybe she wouldn’t. Honestly, I wouldn’t put anything past the old bird. The important thing was that the John D was going to be swarming with cops and firemen. With any luck, the right folks would ask how it was two men and one woman thought to have died months before—perhaps even years—were lying in that hall with their heads blown off. And of course all the patients would have to be moved to new facilities. Questions would inevitably arise. From the families. From the state. With the John D’s records burned, people would have to do something more than stamp a file and validate whatever paper lies had sustained the place. Someone would have to go out and talk to real people, which as a detective I can tell you is always your best shot at the truth. Maybe Livonia Tuesday would make it through all that. Certainly, as I’d left her, she looked more like the victim than the perpetrator. Maybe that and her gray hair and simple homespun manner would be enough. But either way, she’d be off my back for a few months.
An hour after crawling down from the window, I was sitting in my car at the end of an industrial pier. The door was open and my boots rested on cracked asphalt. I’d wiped the gun clean again, just to be sure, wrapped it in a towel, and thrown it into the East River. My bag and clothes were burning in a rusted steel drum nearby. There was an irregular breeze coming off the water, and with each gust, the embers in the drum flared and I felt the heat.
Time to end it.