Omega Dog (12 page)

‘Believe it or not, lady,’ Venn said, ‘I don’t like seeing innocent people getting gunned down. I was a cop, remember. It offends my natural sense of justice.’

The way he paused made her ask, ‘And? What else?’

‘And, you could be useful to me. You knew Professor Lomax. You worked with him.’

‘But I don’t know where he is now,’ said Beth.

Venn studied her. ‘Maybe you do, and just don’t know it.’

Beth said nothing.

Venn went on, ‘So what do you say? You help me find the professor. In exchange, I keep you from getting killed.’

She raised her eyes to his, defiant. ‘What makes you think I don’t want to find the professor as much as you do?’

He shrugged. ‘Fair point. Though you’re not facing life in prison if he stays missing. I am.’

Beth looked away. She had to admit, there was really no option. She had to go along with this man.

‘I wouldn’t know where to start,’ she said.

‘I would,’ said Venn. ‘Tell me about the work you and Professor Lomax were doing together.’

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T
he ambulance veered through the wet streets, its siren and flashers going even though there was little traffic to be navigated through.

In the rear, Officer Clark sat beside one of the two EMTs. The other one crouched by the side of the prisoner, adjusting a cuff round his arm. Monitoring equipment beeped and hummed faintly.

The EMTs wouldn’t allow more than one cop in back with them. Said it was too crowded, and that the extra body would get in the way of their work.

Well, Andy Clark didn’t care. He could guard this bastard on his own.

He itched to pull the plug on the guy. Rip out all the tubes and wires and watch him die. He wasn’t sure exactly what was wrong with the guy, or how badly injured he was, so if removing his IV didn’t do the trick, Clark was happy to help the process along by throttling the life out of the cop-killing asshole.

Clark hadn’t known Lou Harris well. And what he had known of him, he hadn’t particularly liked. But a fellow cop was a fellow cop. And when some scumbag took one of your own down, you stepped up and avenged him.

Clark sat with his gun drawn – the EMTs hadn’t liked that, but Clark had told them to go to hell – and studied the prisoner. He was middle-aged, maybe five years older than Clark himself. A full head of hair that probably normally looked quite elegant but was now mussed and caked with blood from the head wound he’d received. There was a gash on his scalp somewhere, but it didn’t seem to be bleeding actively anymore. His eyes were closed.

At the other end of the gurney the man’s feet protruded. Clark couldn’t help noticing the shoes. They too were spattered with blood, and a little scuffed, but they were otherwise quality items. Good leather, two-tone. Kind of old-fashioned. Clark could imagine them on the feet of some cool-cat jazz musician or Sammy Davis Jr-type crooner.

To one of the paramedics, Clark said, ‘He gonna make it?’

The guy rocked a palm from side to side. ‘Hard to tell. No sign of injury to the body, but he’s had a bang on the head, and it doesn’t look promising. He’s not responding to pain stimuli. Could be comatose for a while. Or his brainstem might just shut down, in which case he’s gone forever.’

‘A coma?’ Clark fought to stay upright in his seat as the ambulance took another sharp turn. He didn’t want the guy to stay in a coma, maybe for years. If he died, Clark would be fine with that. If he woke up, even better, because Clark could find a way to beat the shit out of him and then kill him. But a coma? That would be like escaping justice, somehow.

Clark glared at the prisoner’s face, hating him even more than before.

Come on, you son of a bitch
, he told the guy silently.
Either wake up, or goddamn well die.

Then he rocked forward in his seat, his eyes wide.

The prisoner’s lips had moved.

‘He said something,’ Clark blurted.

The paramedics glanced at him, then at their patient.

‘Nope,’ said one of them. ‘He’s out for the count.’

‘I’m telling you,’ said Clark. ‘His lips moved.’

One of the EMTs squatted close to the patient and peered into his face. With a thumb he lifted first one of the prone man’s eyelids, then the other.

He looked back at Clark.

‘He’s still unconscious,’ he said. ‘You must have imagined it.’

‘I know what I saw,’ snarled Clark.

The EMTs exchanged a look. Clark knew what they were thinking.
Dumbass cop.

And there it was again. The man on the gurney moved his mouth.

‘Look, for crying out loud,’ yelled Clark.

‘Officer, please keep your voice down,’ said one of the paramedics. They weren’t even looking at the prisoner now.

Clark lunged forward before the EMTs could stop him. He came up close, his face inches from the prisoner’s.

A whisper, faint as a memory, rose from between the man’s parted lips.

One of the EMTs grabbed Clark’s arm, but he shook it free. He put his right ear up against the man’s mouth.

‘Come on, you bastard,’ he muttered. ‘What are you trying to say?’

And that was when the man bit him.

Clark felt pain of an order he’d never before experienced, never even conceived of, exploding in his ear as the teeth sunk into the cartilage.

He screamed, jerking his head away.

And felt an awful, excruciating, tearing sensation as his ear ripped free from the side of his head.

Clark screamed again, distantly aware that the EMTs were shouting on either side of him. He put his right hand – his gun hand – up to his ear, the sickening wet pulpiness of mutilated flesh touching his fingers.

It was a mistake, lifting his gun hand up to his head like that. A mistake Clark lived only a fraction of a second to regret.

The prisoner jackknifed up from the gurney, his waist held down by a strap, and grabbed Clark, one hand at the back off his head, the other gripping Clark’s right wrist.

Through the waves of agony Clark felt the man’s strong fingers bend his wrist until the hard steel of his own gun pressed against his temple.

Felt the man’s index finger slip through the trigger guard over his.

Then a shocking white explosion ended it all.

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R
oyle averted his face at the last instant, grimacing as the policeman’s head erupted in a mist of red.

He had no problem with blood. He’d spilt a lot of it in his time. But Royle didn’t especially care for getting it all over him if he could help it.

Hurling the policeman’s body to one side, Royle shot first one of the paramedics, then the other. Clean kills, a single bullet each to the chest.

Regrettable deaths, but necessary.

Through the partition at his back he could hear shouting from the cab of the ambulance. The vehicle began to swerve even more violently than before.

Royle unfastened the strap across his waist, then the one holding his legs down. Leaping off the stretcher he peered out through the glass in the rear doors.

Two squad cars were following, their lights flashing.

Royle slid back the bolt on the doors, then kicked the doors wide. He grabbed the nearer of the two paramedics’ bodies and heaved it out.

The body bounced off the windshield of the cop car immediately behind. Royle heard the screech of tires and the thump and crack of flesh and bone meeting metal and glass, but he didn’t pause to admire his handiwork. Instead, he hauled the second body to the doors and rolled that out, too.

The cop car braked hard, its front wheels bumping over the body on the tarmac. An instant later the car behind it smashed into its rear, spinning it side-on.

Royle gripped the door frame to keep himself steady as the ambulance veered this way and that. The police cars receded into the distance, other vehicles thumping into the pile-up, becoming part of it.

Shoving the cop’s gun into his pocket, Royle braced himself, then leaped onto the road. He hit the tarmac with his shoulder, immediately going into a roll to reduce the impact.

Then he was up on his feet and running for the sidewalk, pain blazing in his shoulder and throbbing dully in his head.

When he’d dived out of the car earlier a moment before the fuel tank went up, he’d hit the ground headfirst and for a second feared he was going to black out. But he hadn’t, and as far as he could tell his brain and nervous system had survived the thump intact. The advancing ring of cops had persuaded him that shooting his way out wasn’t a realistic option, so Royle had played unconscious, waiting for his moment.

Waiting for one of the cops to get sloppy.

He ran through warrens of alleys, not taking time to orient himself. He believed the ambulance had been heading toward the Lower East Side. But identifying his exact location could wait until he was clear.

The events of the last half hour were a setback, nothing more.

Yes, the police had seen Royle’s face. But his appearance could be changed. He was a master at it. He carried no ID on him, so the police had no name for him or other details about him.

And yes, the Colby woman had escaped again, abetted once more by her mysterious savior. But this only piqued Royle’s interest.

Most of the killings he undertook were, if he was honest, deathly dull. They involved the straightforward dispatching of people who never had any hope of defending themselves. Royle tried to vary his methods of killing, both to make it more difficult for any investigating agencies to identify patterns, and to make his job more interesting. But however innovative the method of assassination he came up with, his targets almost never fought back.

For an intended victim to escape, not once but
twice
on the same night, was unheard of.

The challenge fired Royle’s enthusiasm, stirred his blood. He’d find somewhere to clean off the blood, assess the damage to his scalp from where his head had hit the ground, and alter his appearance subtly.

He’d lost his gun back there at the site of the exploded car, which didn’t matter as the weapon was of course untraceable. But he had the cop’s gun, a Smith & Wesson 9 mm pistol. Standard cop firearm. He had access to several stashes of cash he’d left around the city in lockers and various other places, in preparation for just such an eventuality.

And he had his wits.

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V
enn watched as Dr Colby sketched on the napkin she’d spread out over the table.

‘This is the synapse,’ she said, indicating what looked like a channel of water between two landmasses. ‘The gap in between the neuronal – that’s nerve cell – endings.’

She drew a bunch of tiny crosses on one of the landmasses, and a smaller number within the channel.

‘These are neurotransmitters. The things that convey information from one neuron to the next, and then the next, in a chain. They have to cross the synapse to get from one neuron to the next. And that slows things down.’

Venn listened, but he wasn’t looking at the diagram. Instead, he was looking at Dr Colby. At the way her auburn hair hung over one eye. At the slant of her cheekbone as she pored over the drawing, engrossed.

‘The research the Prof – Professor Lomax – and I are working on, involves speeding up neurotransmitter delivery across the synapse. By enhancing receptor expression on the postsynaptic neuron, we’re looking to facilitate neurotransmission.’

She looked up, and Venn glanced away from her face, embarrassed at having been caught staring at her. But she seemed to take his look for bewilderment, because she gave an apologetic half-smile.

‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Tech talk. Basically, we’re looking to make neuroactive and psychoactive drugs – drugs that work on the central nervous system via neurotransmitters – work better. Better and faster. Medications for depression, for schizophrenia, for Parkinson’s disease. Even Alzheimer’s. Instead of a lag of weeks before the full therapeutic effect is seen, as currently happens with a lot of these meds, we’re aiming at beneficial effects within hours.’

‘Sounds pretty impressive,’ said Venn.

‘It’s revolutionary.’ She was warming to her theme. ‘The biggest breakthrough in neurochemistry this decade. Maybe for the last fifty years. People’s suffering alleviated on a massive scale. Not to mention the economic benefits. The huge savings in hospital bills and treatment times.’

‘So you’re, what - designing drugs to enhance the effects of other drugs?’

‘Yes.’ Dr Colby nodded. ‘Only we’re not designing them. They’re already there. We’re conducting phase three trials. Trials in human volunteers, who’re taking either the active drug or a dummy, a placebo. So that we can gather data about the efficacy and safety of the drugs.’

‘And if they work, and don’t have too many side effects... these drugs could be on the market soon?’

Dr Colby smiled ruefully and shook her head. She had a nice smile, Venn decided. With the trace of a dimple on one cheek.

‘I wish,’ she said. ‘But, no. This is only a pilot study. A small trial, being conducted here at the university with a limited number of subjects. If the preliminary data are good, the company that manufacture the drug will organize much bigger studies. International ones, with thousands of subjects, spanning several continents. Those studies will take two or three years, minimum. Only then will the FDA consider granting the drug a license. Assuming the trial outcomes are favorable.’

Venn thought about it.

‘Dr Colby,’ he said. But she interrupted him.

‘Beth.’

‘Beth. Would you say the work you and Professor Lomax are engaged in, is important enough that someone might abduct him over it?’

‘Yes. It’s possible.’ She looked to one side. It gave Venn a chance to study her face again. ‘I’ve been thinking about it ever since you told me the Prof was missing. But I don’t know who might have done it.’

‘A rival drug company?’ Venn offered.

‘I don’t think so,’ said Beth. ‘The competition between these firms is pretty intense, and you see sharp practise and ethically dubious manoeuvers from time to time... but
kidnaping
? It’s too blatant. Too openly criminal.’