Thomas burst into the room.
The dart went into Nicole’s neck. It went in far enough, an inch or two, that it hung there.
Her mouth opened but no scream came out. Her right hand held on to the gun as her left flew up. She grasped the dart, and yanked it out.
It was like water from a tap.
Blood spurting everywhere.
Nicole dropped the dart and clamped her left hand over the wound. She dropped the gun from her right, turned, stumbled over to the desk.
She coughed and blood spilled from her mouth as well as her throat. She used the desk to briefly support herself, but only for a few seconds. She dropped to the floor as the sirens became almost deafening.
Now Julie was in the room, and she hit the brakes as soon as she saw the carnage. A firefighter, running in behind her, nearly knocked her over when she stopped so abruptly.
“Ray?” she said.
Thomas was already helping me to my feet. “Look who I found,” he said. “I brought Julie.” He smiled. “I’m back.”
SEVENTY-ONE
OVER the next twenty-four hours, Thomas and I, and Julie, had to answer a lot of questions from a lot of different agencies. We were questioned separately, and together, by New York City cops, state police, FBI, even the Port Authority, for all I knew. One guy, I was told later, was from Homeland Security, but there were so many who wanted to pick our brains that I couldn’t figure out which one he was.
Thomas, when we had a moment together, expressed some concern that there was no one from the CIA. “You’d think they’d be here, wanting to see how I’m doing,” he whispered. I could see the disappointment in his eyes. He was hurt.
The benefit of all these hours of interrogation was that they had a way of informing us about what had happened. The blanks started to get filled in, in large part because the fire department and paramedics had arrived in time to save Howard Talliman and Morris Sawchuck, both found bleeding on the floor of the toy shop.
Talliman, whose condition was critical, had not been all that forthcoming so far, but Sawchuck, who’d been shot in the lung and was listed in serious condition, was telling prosecutors everything he knew. Because he was hooked up to various machines to assist with his breathing, he was answering questions as quickly as he could type them on the laptop they’d brought into the ICU.
A lot of what had happened became clear during our kidnapping. Fitch’s blackmail attempt—what she knew or claimed to have known was still not entirely clear to us—led to a decision to kill her. Bridget Sawchuck was killed by mistake. Nicole killed that couple in Chicago as part of her mission to get the image of the smothered woman off the Internet.
That was kind of it, in a nutshell.
Lewis Blocker, of course, was dead.
And the paramedics were not able to save Nicole. Turned out that wasn’t her real name. There was talk that in another life she was some kind of Olympic athlete—that explained the power in that kick—but the cops were still trying to piece a lot of things together.
I didn’t feel good about killing the woman. I knew I’d had no choice, but I took no pleasure in it. I was going to be having nightmares about this for a very long time.
Bottom line was, I’d rather it was her being put in the ground than me. Or Thomas.
Many of the questions that were put to me, when I was being questioned alone, were about Thomas, and his bizarre preoccupation. I know they were in touch with Dr. Grigorin, and our good friends Agents Parker and Driscoll of the FBI made an appearance. They confirmed much of what I’d been saying: that while Thomas was certainly unique, he was not a threat to anyone or himself. By the end, it appeared the various law enforcement agencies were not only persuaded that Thomas was harmless, but that he was a hero. Bridget Sawchuck’s murder would never have come to light without his explorations on Whirl360.
What was left unspoken was that it was these same explorations that led, ultimately, to the deaths of Kyle and Rochelle Billings. Whether this crossed Thomas’s mind I don’t know, and I certainly didn’t point it out to him. Maybe because their deaths were as much my fault as his. I was the idiot who’d waved that printout around when I’d knocked on Allison Fitch’s apartment door, which, evidently, had been picked up on a surveillance camera.
The one thing that never came up was the call Lewis took in Thomas’s bedroom. Thomas told me he’d never mentioned it, and neither had I.
THOMAS was more withdrawn than usual in the wake of everything that had happened. What we’d been through would be traumatic for anyone. Yet I wondered whether Thomas’s idiosyncrasies actually made him better prepared to cope. He generally shut the world out, except those parts he could access online. With that kind of wall around him, maybe he’d taken in less of the horror.