Final Stroke (55 page)

The guard, prompted by the doors banging open, and perhaps having glimpsed a wheelchair approaching at high speed, and perhaps having heard the echoes of following footfalls, ever so slowly turns his head toward them as she struggles to scream out a warning.

“Help! Help us! Guns! Coming!”

First the guard who had turned her way stands, then the other stands. Their uniforms are identical, symbols of order and harmony and safety, but they react much too slowly. They are young and have that terrible look of innocence on their faces that demands proof they are not being tricked by elders. When no guns appear she screams at them again.

“Guns! Can’t you hear? Guns!”

She steers the wheelchair to circle the reception island, to put the island between them and the doorway. She can hear the doors open
ing. She can see, above the counter, that one guard bends slightly while looking at the doorway, and the other guard simply stands there, alternately glancing to her and to the doorway, looking like a boy who has done something wrong and is about to be caught.

She feels movement beneath her and sees Steve’s left hand lift for
ward, his hand holding his gun. His gun!

She stabs her foot to the floor to turn the chair fully around so Steve can point the gun at their pursuers.

The counter blocks her view of the doorway. She cannot see Max and Dino but sees the guard who had bent over stand back up and look toward the footsteps and aim a pistol.

But the guard moves too slowly and a shot drives him against his
partner who stumbles behind him and gives off a whimper.

Dull thud of a shot. Silencers! And now another shot that hits the other guard before the first disappears behind the counter. Both guards down and all she can see is the counter and all she can hear is a man’s voice whispering harshly.

Dino’s voice. “Never mind! Just get the fuck down here! Guards are out! Get the keys and lock up the front! We’ll go out the back!” Then it is quiet.

Dino and Max are hidden on the far side of the reception island. They want them alive. They still want them alive! Not telling what they know has saved them. But for how long?

When she hears rustling from both sides, she realizes they are cir
cling the reception island. They come upon them so quickly there is no time to react.

A shot from one side of the island. Steve grunts and his arm whips across her, this followed by the muted thud of another shot from the other side of the island. Steve’s gun skitters across the tile floor and onto the carpeted area where the television with the volume turned down plays to empty chairs. She looks down and sees Steve’s bleeding left arm. His good arm!

Max and Dino appear before them. But it is not Max and Dino. These are monsters with noses and hair and ears flattened and dark as if seared off in a terrible fire.

No, not a fire. They are wearing masks! They are wearing women’s stockings for masks! The cameras! They are aware of the cameras and they are wearing masks!

They both carry silenced pistols with long barrels. One of them looks over the counter, as if looking down into hell, then carefully lifts his gun over the counter, casually takes aim and fires another shot.

The other comes toward them, kicking out violently, hitting her leg
so that she screams. But she forces the scream to end despite the pain. They are wearing masks. They do not want to be seen. They do not speak. Except for whispers when they were behind the counter, they do not want to be heard. But if someone else speaks, if she speaks …

“I’ll tell!” she manages to get out. “Listen, Max, I’ll tell now because …”

But this is all she can get out before he hits her across the face with his gun.

Everything happens very fast then, a nightmare rushing to its con
clusion. She hears the muted thud of another shot from one of their guns and opens one eye to see a man in a gray housekeeping staff uni
form fall back against a Staff-Only doorway next to the elevators. She is aware of Steve struggling beneath her, trying to get up and trying to talk. She is aware that he has been hit. She can tell by the way his attempts at speech come out in moans of anger and frustration. She is aware of being lifted from Steve’s lap and being put into another wheelchair. She is aware of a tearing sound and tape being put on her arms and legs. She is aware of being taped to the wheelchair, then being wheeled rapidly and seeing through one barely open eye that Steve is being wheeled ahead of her.

A voice says, “She was gonna talk. Maybe you should’ve let her.”

They go back the way they came, back through the same double doors, this time waiting for the doors to open inward before being pushed through and into the connecting hallway. A distant voice echoes in the connecting hallway, apparently the sound of a television turned up loud. Then there is another voice. An angry horrifying voice that drowns out all the other sounds.

“Yeah, she’ll fuckin’ talk all right! But not here! Not in this fuck
in’ place! She talks here, she gives us shit ‘cause she thinks we’ll leave ‘em! Not here in this hell hole! This is fuckin’ war now!”

Jan was gone, removed from him. They had taken away the only part of him worth anything, the part of him necessary for life, the part of him that made life worth the struggle.

When he opened his eyes he saw a hallway moving toward him so rapidly he had a sensation of falling. The hallway was a vertical shaft and he was falling through it. As he fell, a voice shouted, then loud music came down the hallway. There was someone in the hallway now, and if someone was standing there, then this was not a dream of falling.

The woman stood perfectly still as he sped in her direction, pro
pelled from behind. At first he thought the woman standing in the hallway might be Jan. But this woman’s hair was darker than Jan’s, and when he got closer he recognized her uniform.

She stood in front of a nurses’ station centered in a widening of the hallway. Her arms were down and he could see her hands outstretched behind her on the vertical front of the counter surrounding the nurses’ station. At first he thought she had an angry look on her face, a wid
ening of the eyes, tenseness in the muscles of her neck. A nurse angry because one of the nursing home residents has turned up the volume on a television set. But as he got closer he could see that the look on the nurse’s face was not one of anger, but one of intense fear.

As if triggered by the fear so obvious in the face of the nurse, he became aware of the pain on the left side of his face, and of the pain in his left arm. And feeling this pain, he suddenly knew the recent past.

He and Jan in the wheelchair trying to escape, entering the lobby and screaming for help, although now he could not remember if he had screamed at the guards to get their guns, or if Jan had screamed
at them. And then the guards moving slowly, hesitating, one of them reaching somewhere beneath the counter. Whether the guard who had bent for something had retrieved a gun or not mattered little. The two men were upon the guards before they could react, killing both within the confines of their island in the center of the lobby. After that came the shot to his arm, then a violent blow that sent Jan tum bling off the side of the wheelchair. The violent blow just after Jan had called one of the men by name. Max … Max Lamberti. After that, there was the blow to the side of his face that knocked him out.

Shortly after realizing he was being wheeled rapidly down the hall
way in his wheelchair, shortly after reconstructing the recent past, he saw movement, something dark and tubular to the right of his head.

There was a muffled explosion at his ear. This followed by a scream. When he opened his eyes that had shut in response to the ex
plosion, he saw a discharge of blood on the nurse’s uniform. The nurse clasped her chest, rebounding off the counter and falling forward.

The smell of gunpowder and another scream as his wheelchair swerved around the nurses’ station. But this scream was not that of the nurse, and as he turned he realized Jan was in another wheelchair. Jan’s face was bleeding, both he and Jan were being pushed by the two men in stockinged faces, and the men had shot the nurse without hesi
tation even though she posed no threat to them except that she had seen them.

When he tried to move his left arm—his good arm—to swing back and strike out at the one pushing his wheelchair, intense pain shot through his shoulder. He had been shot in his good arm! His gun was gone and he had been shot! Although he was able to grip and re-grip his left hand, try as he might, he could not raise his arm.

He was also unable to move his left leg, and when he looked down he saw that the wheelchair footrests were down and in place and that
both his ankles were taped to the footrests with duct tape. When he glanced back at Jan he could see her ankles
and
her wrists were taped to her wheelchair. And now, when he looked back to his arms, he saw both his forearms taped to the arms of the wheelchair. He had been unable to lift his left arm, not because of the wound but because of the tape. And he had been unable to lift his right arm, not because of its weakness from the stroke, but because the arm was bound to the arm of the chair.

As the wheelchair rolled quickly down the hallway, he twisted back and forth, making the chair wobble, and at the same time mak
ing his forearms pivot, twisting the duct tape. As he did this, a low growl came from deep inside, an intense anger from nowhere and everywhere. And with this anger came a feeling that his past, Jan’s past, all the pasts of all civilized human beings was tied up in a single knot of anger that could explode and blow all the bastards he’d ever known to hell!

All the bastards he’d ever known!

Every goddamn bastard who ever leveled a gun at him!

Every goddamn bastard who ever threatened an innocent!

Every goddamn bastard who ever walked into a store and, for a few bucks from the till, shot a young woman. A girl really. Just out of school. A degree in Pharmacy. Cleveland. A girl he was to marry. A girl named Sue. A girl with the same name as So-long Sue.

Once past the nurses’ station, he saw So-long Sue halfway down the hallway. She emerged from behind one of the tall stainless steel food carts parked on the left. The television that had been turned up earlier was turned down and there was Sue caterpillar-walking out from behind the food cart, glancing quickly at him, then disappearing into a resident room.

Sue! The name dug into his soul. He had lost Sue. He had not
been there years earlier when another man with a gun entered the drugstore, demanded money and …

He had not been there! But he
was
here! They were taking Jan! They were going to kill Jan! He was here! But he could do nothing!

He twisted more violently in the chair, causing it to rock back and forth. He stared at the tape on his right forearm, watching it twist and stretch. His bad arm since his stroke. The stroke that had taken away so much. The bastard stroke he had fought all these months. No! Not a bad arm! Not a bad arm at all, just a fucked-up signal!

He stared at his arm and at the tape twisting back and forth. He clenched and unclenched the fist of his bad hand. Yes! It was a bad hand all right. Bad to the fucking bone!

Ahead. Ahead he could see
a head
! Crazy words mixing it up in his noggin. Couple of crazies, Marjorie used to say.

Gray hair. Crazy smile. Sue. Sue standing inside the doorway she had caterpillar-walked into moments earlier, and now if he doesn’t do something they’ll shoot her, too.

When he lunged to the side, flinging out his right elbow and pushing the weight of his upper body against it, the tape at his wrist busted and at the same time he saw Sue casually step into the hall
way, face them, close her eyes in a swoon, and faint dead away directly across their path, her outstretched arms crashing against the food cart parked there.

His wheelchair stopped so suddenly he nearly fell forward out of it. But the tape on his wounded left arm had not been broken and he was held in the chair, the arm feeling as though it had been torn in two.

The footrests on his chair pressed into Sue’s prone body as the man who had been pushing the chair ran forward, tucked his pistol into his belt and bent to clear Sue out of the way. The bastard grabbed Sue by the ankles and pulled her toward the room she had come out
of. But Sue’s hands firmly gripped the rungs on the lower shelf of the tall food cart.