Shades of Eva, page 47
She stared at Ully. All of a sudden, I heard Ully call out, defiantly. “I didn’t kill that bitch Bermicelli!”
Abigail screamed something vile at him, and then walked closer to his cell.
We had three minutes to prevent something awful from happening, and all I could think of was who could have killed Sophia. Was it an ally of Sophia’s, someone dispatched by Abby to travel with her to assist her in cashing the account out? Did the ally turn traitor on Sophia? Or was this someone Ully sent down there? A friend of his, or a paid operative?
And then I remembered something vital. Ully had one friend. His limo driver. And then I remembered something Tom Quail said to me on the day he brought Ully to Coastal State. He’d said he had a flight to catch.
Suddenly, it became clear just who killed Sophia. Tom Quail was Ully’s lone heir.
“I know who killed Sophia!” I yelled this into the microphone, and all at once, regretted I’d said it. If I was wrong, it would only delay things. If it was Tom Quail, it needed to come out of Ully’s mouth, not mine. I hadn’t told Abby about what Tom Quail said of his flight. It hadn’t dawned on me that he might be flying to the Caymans to protect his boss’s assets—and his inheritance. I wasn’t sure it meant anything, but I had to say something.
“Ully. We know what happened. We know who killed Sophia. You might as well admit it.”
Abby stared at Ully. He had a blank expression on his face. He coughed, and then he just shook his head.
“We know who, Ully. And we have the toolbox. You’re the only one who could have known where it was. All you have to do is confess, Uncle, and you can walk out of here.”
Again, Abby turned to me but kept her gun on Ully. Smoke was now making it nearly impossible to see her face, and they were both coughing more frequently.
“Two minutes!” An officer yelled.
I was growing desperate. “Abby, you can’t shoot an unarmed man. They’ll hang you. Please don’t do this.”
Abby must have thought about it for a moment, and then she did something I wouldn’t have told her to do. I immediately regretted ever having said so. She walked over and placed her gun on the food pass built into the bars of Ully’s cell door. She then took four or five steps backward and just stood there as if to taunt my uncle.
The camera operator zoomed in on the weapon. It was Abby’s Beretta.
We were all watching the monitor aimed at Ully. “What in the hell is she doing?” Someone asked, as if I could know. I could no better predict Abigail Angstrom than I could predict the weather on Venus. She then took a few more steps backward as if she’d just told Ully to draw at ten paces.
I could hear the SWAT members chatting feverishly amongst themselves, trying to decide if this was the right time to storm the corridor or not.
“Ninety seconds!” An officer yelled, this time with heightened urgency.
“Son, if you have anything,” the officer flanking me said, “anything at all, then use it. I don’t know what she’s doing, but she’s either going to get put down by your uncle, or SWAT’s going to have to take her out!”
I could do little but watch as Ully stood up and walked slowly toward the front of his cell, toward the gun perched ominously between the bars. Abby had backed up those ten paces and was watching him, her hands hanging stoically at her sides.
I heard Abby say something to Ully. “If you ever cared anything about your sister, or Mitchell, then tell us who shot Sophia and I will walk away.”
“And if I don’t?” Ully responded.
“Then you are free to do whatever you want.”
“The gun isn’t loaded,” I heard my uncle say.
Abby replied. “It’s fully loaded.”
I saw Ully look toward the glass to where I was sitting. Then he looked to the gun.
“Ully, say his name and this is over!” I called to him. “Don’t do this!”
Ully seemed to be shaking his head.
“Sixty seconds!” An officer screamed.
I cleared my throat as best I could and clicked the switch again. And then something came to mind: Russian roulette. Was Abby playing a game with Ully? Was she asking him to play a game with her, a very suicidal game?
I knew then I was going to lose Abby. That gun was either loaded to the hilt, or there was not a bullet in it. Abigail was giving her life up. Either SWAT was going to take her out, or my uncle was, right before my eyes. All he had to do was give us a name.
I could almost hear my father’s voice whispering to me. ‘You have to know how the game’s played, son! You have to know where the bullets are, and to where they are flying! You have to be able to see the tricks people can play on one another!’
“Thirty seconds!”
I looked to the corridor. I cleared my throat one more time, clicked the talk switch, and hollered, “Ully! Don’t!”
An officer yelled. “Ready on five!”
That’s when Ully lunged for the weapon. He picked it up quickly and drew on Abby. She still hadn’t moved. Her eyes were closed. Her hands were out to her sides as if she were somehow sacrificing herself.
The SWAT team had moved into position at the entryway. An officer was counting backward from four. Ully then backed up a step and raised the gun and put it to his head. Abby had opened her eyes. Ully then turned to her. And then he turned my way and looked to me. I thought I saw him smile. He was going to shoot himself.
“Three! Two!”
That’s when Ully lowered the gun, pointed it quickly at Abby, and fired.
The bang was unmistakable. It was devastating.
“Zero!”
I could see a faint flash of light from the weapon’s discharge. That was about the last thing I saw in that little room. Two officers yanked me from the chair I was sitting in and pulled me out into the hallway, now filled completely with smoke. I was frantically screaming Abby’s name behind my ventilator, and fighting with officers to let go of me, to let me into the corridor, but it was all in vain. I couldn’t fight them off.
Within seconds, I heard more gunfire or what sounded like a series of deeper explosions maybe, or flash bangs, and then screaming followed by the loud clanking of steel doors falling onto marble floors. I was dragged further away and then outside and thrown onto the front steps, and then dragged further, still, out into the yard.
Ward C was an inferno, just like Mom had predicted. Aging dignitary though she was, she burned. She burned with the unspent fury of a forty year old dream whose fuse had been lit in this very place.
I thought for a moment about Ully’s beatings: to the blood red welts he used to leave on me, and to his indifference, to me and to Mom. I thought back to his admonitions: Still sons are sick sons, and don’t poke a bear in a cage because the bear might poke back!
I thought of my mother’s money and to Tom Quail, the limo driver, whose name was still comforted by my uncle’s silence, but none of that meant a thing right then. All I could think about was Abby, and I never felt more love for anyone. I also never felt more alone. It was all a flashback to the toolshed. I remember arms enrapturing me. I remember the flashing lights of the patrol cars and the awe-struck faces of all the others there that night, some familiar and some not so familiar, who, like me, didn’t quite understand what had happened. That’s the way it was when I was five-years-old. That’s the way it was that night at the Asylum. That’s the way it’s been ever since.
***
part 3 - The Land of Mourning
Chapter 50
Mitchell
I got a chance to see what transpired when those six minutes in ward C were up during my pre-indictment hearing three weeks later. The hearing took place in the main boardroom at Coastal State. It was a convenient location for me. The Coastal State Institution had become my residence for the time being.
The hearing was conducted by William Kalwitz, a district attorney with the Owen County prosecutor’s office. He was accompanied by a secretary. I was facing two charges of fraud: one for the impersonation of an armed security officer, and one for infiltrating a medical establishment. I was also looking at two counts of felony grave-tampering: one for conspiracy to exhume human remains, and another for tampering with exhumed human remains. Lastly, I was facing a charge of extortion in the amount of $1.2 million from my uncle Ulysses’ estate.
Detective Ramsey from River Bluff PD was there. Ben Levantle was there, and so was Superintendent Norris. Two of the Institution’s attorneys accompanied her. And Dad was there. His lawyer, Margaret Inslow, accompanied him. A public defender by the name of Lou Davis was assigned to my case. He was sitting attentively beside me ready to offer my pleas should it come to that.
We were watching the images of the corridor cameras from the night of Abigail’s attack projected onto a large screen at the east wall of the boardroom. It was smoky in the corridor, but Abigail and Ully were reasonably visible. On one half of the screen was the camera capture of Abigail; on the other half, Ully. Abigail had placed her Beretta 9 MM pistol on a ledge in the bean slot in Ully’s cell door, and she had taken a few steps backward.
Ully was ignoring my pleas for him to give us the name of Sophia’s assassin. It’s all Abby was really asking of him at that point. Instead, he chose the gun. He picked up the weapon, put it playfully to his head, gave me a rueful glance, then pointed the weapon at Abby and fired.
I knew the bang was coming. It sounded like a small canon had just went off. There was a collective gasp in the boardroom as more bangs followed. At that point, it was hard to tell if these were rounds spent from the M9 by my uncle, or flash bangs tossed by SWAT into the corridor.
That was about the last thing I remembered that night before being pulled out of there. What I wasn’t allowed to see was what happened immediately after SWAT blew those doors in. The screen showed Abigail flailing backward. Ully had shot her. The bullet knocked her into the cell door behind her as if she’d just been kicked in the chest. That’s when I saw her right herself and then pull a second pistol from her waistband and return fire on Ully.
That’s about the time each of them fell. Ully had shot Abigail in the chest, and Abigail had shot Ully in the forehead. The M9 Abby had given Ully was not empty, as I thought it might have been. But then again, I never was good at predicting which guns were loaded and which ones weren’t. I’d just witnessed my uncle Ully shoot the only woman I’d ever loved.
Abigail lay motionless on screen, as was Ully. There was a collective, respectful silence on screen, as well as in the boardroom. SWAT officers seemed not to know what to do. They stood there much as we were sitting there, in stunned silence. There was no perpetrator to restrain, no suspect to corral, and no rooms to sweep. There was only the screaming blare of the fire alarm, and stillness.
My attention was on the weapon that had fallen from Abigail’s hand.
I’d never seen her carry two guns. I felt Dad’s hand on my left shoulder. He squeezed ever so gently; it was as if he were telling me what that other weapon was. Police had once asked him to get rid of that gun, and so had Mom. It was his peacemaker—the revolver he used to keep in the toolshed. He must have given it to Abby. It was the gun that killed Fred Levantle. Now it was the gun that killed Ully McGinnis.
I could feel every eye in that room on me. I turned to look at Ben. He seemed to be stunned. I turned back to the screen. The peacemaker had disappeared into the smoke, or maybe a SWAT officer had kicked it aside. Medics had entered the hallway. They began working on Abby as SWAT unlocked Ully’s cell. Some of the medics then turned their attention to him. That’s when those who knew CPR did CPR.
My uncle was dead on arrival at Brickton Methodist Hospital. Abigail was taken to surgery.
Once the failed security measures Abigail had exposed were attended to, the pump house repaired, smoke damage cleaned, and water restored to the facility, patients were allowed back into the Institution. This took about three weeks. Fifty evacuees from the Coastal State prison, and me, had spent those three weeks in the Calhoun Penitentiary fifty miles to the east of River Bluff. Abigail spent two weeks in ICU recovering from her gunshot wound under enhanced security. A bullet from her own pistol had cut her aorta and punctured her lung. She was very lucky. One week ago she was released into Anna Norris’s custody to await trial.
She was looking at two counts of homicide, one count of felony extortion, and several counts of fraud. Because of the circumstances of Greer’s gang membership and the Southwest Mafia’s open threat of retaliation, the matter of Abby’s location (and mine), and the status of our cases, were gagged by the prosecutor’s office. I suppose Coastal State was as good a place as any for Abby and I. No one would think to look for us in the very place we’d just infiltrated, and had apparently tried to incinerate.
Our new residence was my mother’s house of adolescence. It was a sad, if not comical, irony. It wasn’t an easy time for me, but knowledge does often come at a price. We’d found Elmer, and we’d found Fred Levantle using the only means of persuasion we knew of. So for all of those things, and for all of that knowledge, I had to be willing to pay.
Abigail must have agreed. She turned the toolbox coffin complete with Baby Elmer’s disassembled remains over to Detective Ramsey. She turned the audio-video tapes that she’d collected over. She turned over every bug we’d placed, and every pinhole camera. Every piece of surveillance equipment she had, including the satellite phones and even the xenon flashlights, the PCs and the car trackers. She turned it all in. She even turned over the tapes that captured Ully’s confession to me when I’d confronted him in the halfway house. She turned it all over and gave in to the fate of the systems we’d been fighting for so many days.
Drs. Norris and Levantle were contributing their opinions to the DA’s office on the matter; and for the most part, I had placed my trust in their hands. I was hoping for leniency, but I wasn’t expecting it. You don’t treat people the likes of these doctors and these officials like fools and then presume leniency, let alone amnesty. Nature just doesn’t work that way.
Abigail and I weren’t allowed contact with each in those three weeks. It was a hard time because of that separation. It wasn’t as if Abby and I had a nexus of relatives to lean on for support. We had become isolated, and in that shared isolation we’d come to need one another much as two close friends do in tough times who don’t have anyone else.
We each, Abby and I, had to heal, irrespective of any criminal charges. We each had to come to terms with who we’d become—as individuals—and only then as friends to one another.
We were addicts to different forces in those days. That was the first thing I had to admit. I had become addicted to grief, much like I had become an addict to alcohol. Grief Addiction is a strange thing; you can carry around a lot of pain and not even realize it. You deny that pain, yet you come to depend it. Pain comes to define who you are, and in that sense, you come to need it much like you need air to breathe.
Abigail’s predicament wasn’t as easy to describe. Her pain was relatively short-lived, unlike mine, which had been a ball and chain I’d been dragging around behind me for years. Her trauma was more recent. Her imprisonment in Iraq was only four years ago. The deaths of her parents, of her husband and daughter, had taken place, for the most part, in the last few months. Abigail’s predicament—if you want to call it that—was acute and her reactions very direct.
She didn’t waste time running away from anything. She gathered information and she made decisions. It was the violence of those decisions she was now going to have to address, much like her victims had just been forced to address the consequences of their actions. In as much as I went along with Abby’s direction, I was going to have to address that, as well.
For Jackson Greer, the consequence was swift. He didn’t live a week beyond killing Joe and Amy. For Ully time was a bit more generous. He lived a fairly long life, as Abigail had said, reaping the benefits of life in the wake of Eva’s suffering.
Anna had given me a dual diagnosis of Chronic Alcoholism, which is an Axis II diagnosis, and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, or PTSD, an Axis I mental illness. Without getting into the distinctions of what psychiatry’s diagnostic axes are, suffice it to say that my alcoholism was secondary to the PTSD. I drank because of the pain I was carrying around, which had everything to do with those traumas I’d suffered as a child. Any hallucinations that I experienced, auditory or otherwise, and the same goes for the seizure I experienced, were as related to those traumas as they were to the hallucinosis of quitting whiskey cold turkey.
I asked her about Rape Trauma Syndrome as a diagnosis, and also Schizophrenia NOS. Anna said that rape was a significant element in my condition, but not the determining one. Having come to understand the entirety of my history, Ben had to agree. As far as schizophrenia was concerned, I just didn’t meet the requirements.
I always thought PTSD was a disorder reserved for military veterans like Abby, so I was a bit surprised when Drs. Norris and Levantle told me that I was suffering from it. PTSD has its origins in combat fatigue. Anna and Ben would explain, however, that there are wars fought on battlefields with mortar fire and bombing runs and IEDs, and there are wars fought in homes, where the fighters in those wars are often not trained to fight, and are often children. Sometimes it’s a parent who provokes the war; sometimes it’s a neighbor; sometimes the war takes the form of sexual assault; sometimes it’s a natural event, like traumatic death. Sometimes, as in my case, it’s a mix of all of these things. But in any case, the brain of a child doesn’t make the distinction between the traumas of governmental war and those suffered in one’s own home. There is little difference to him.
As I lay there in my cell in Jackson Penitentiary, watching the spinning ceiling above me in the delirium of alcohol withdrawal minus the narcotics, awaiting my indictments, holding tight to the cot beneath me that provided me no solid anchor in this new sea of attrition, those sounds and those illusory voices were never as real. I saw faces I was finally able to pin names to, and others I wasn’t so familiar with. I formed them into the imagined faces of aunts and uncles, missing brothers, and to sisters who were never meant to be, and grandparents whom I’d never met. I seated the voices in those faces, and I gave them words to talk to me with—and how they talked!
