The Laughterhouse A Thriller

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

“You sure you’re okay?” Schroder asks.

“I’m fine,” I tell him, knowing that if he’d heard me speak earlier he’d know I wasn’t.

“Okay,” he says, and climbs into the back of the ambulance with Caleb Cole.

I drive Schroder’s car. I asked one of the paramedics for the strongest painkillers they had and he handed me two tablets but the headache isn’t going. My ears are still ringing from the gunshots. Some of the media stay at the house, some follow, more media vans show up as the story gathers momentum. We get to the hospital. I pull in behind the ambulance with Cole in it and see it unloaded in the opposite order I saw it loaded. They rush him into an emergency room. The second ambulance pulls up and they do the same for Dr. Stanton. His daughter is carried out and rushed in too.

Seeing Katy I remember I have her finger at home. I pull out of the parking lot and head back to the house. All the boy-racers seem to have gone home. The only traffic now is made up from people finishing the graveyard shift, or those with an early start. I see a fluffy tail, two back legs, and not much else of the cat as it races away from the back door of my house. I grab the finger from the fridge. It’s cold and feels solid and I tuck it into my pocket before deciding that’s a bad idea, that the body heat may only damage it. I grab a drink of water and stand by the sink with my eyes closed willing the headache to disappear, but it’s not listening to me, the thing living in there no longer willing to be ignored. My ears are still ringing. I head back to the hospital with the finger on the passenger seat, the same sights as before only in the opposite order and lighter too.

I can’t find a parking space when I get back to the hospital. Cop cars and media vans are everywhere, and I have to park on the other side of the road by Hagley Park, the huge park in the middle of the city that even at this time has a few people jogging slowly around it. I get buzzed in by the same nurse I spoke to when I came here to see my wife. I hold up the finger and show the first doctor I come across and tell him who it belongs to. He takes it and rushes off. I find the waiting room I was in earlier. Schroder is sitting down in it. So are a bunch of other cops. I sit next to Schroder. We don’t talk to each other. Others are chatting away. Schroder stares ahead and I can tell he’s replaying the shootings over and over, first Mrs. Whitby, then Dr. Stanton, and I’m replaying them too, wondering if there was anything different we could have done. An hour goes by. Nobody comes, nobody goes. The replays don’t get any prettier but the headache fades. I don’t come up with any other scenarios that might have worked. Schroder just keeps looking at the wall. Eventually I check my cell phone for missed calls, and there are a few, most of them from the police station, one of them from Dr. Forster. My heart sinks seeing that one. The way the week has gone, I don’t see it being good news. I don’t call him back. I can’t. Whatever he has to say, no matter how bad, if I don’t hear him say it then it doesn’t need to have happened.

After another hour a doctor comes out. By this point I’m pacing the room, every few minutes reaching for my phone and reminding myself there’s no point, that there is only going to be pain in the message waiting for me. There’s blood on the doctor’s scrubs but not much of it. He looks at us and there is nothing in his face to suggest one thing or the other.

“Caleb Cole is in serious condition,” he says, addressing all of us, though it’s Detective Kent he looks at the most, and who could blame him? “But it looks like he’s going to make it.”

I don’t know how I feel about that. Schroder says nothing. Kent nods at the doctor, and the doctor glances at her chest for a second before looking at the rest of us. When the doctor sees nothing else is going to be added, he turns and heads back through the same doors he came from.

“How long do you think he’ll get?” I ask Schroder.

“What?”

“Cole. You think he’ll ever come out of jail?”

Schroder shakes his head but doesn’t answer. He gets himself comfortable and stares at the wall again. For the first time he finally looks tired. I think about Cole’s game plan, and how angry he’s going to be when he wakes up to find out he’s still alive. He’s going to go back to jail. He’s going to go through the beatings he took all over again. He didn’t kill himself last time—will he this time? And in twenty years, if he’s released, what then? I can’t see him making it twenty years.

Another hour goes by. I spend most of it with my eyes closed and my head tilted so far back it touches the wall. A different doctor from before comes out to see us, showing up from the corridor behind us. He shakes his head. “We couldn’t save her finger,” he says, “but aside from that, Katy is fine. We’ll be able to discharge her tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Kent says, and we go through the same routine as the last doctor—he stands there waiting for us to add something else and nobody does, so he walks back the way he came. I wonder what will happen to the finger.

Some of the detectives start to disappear. Soon there are only five of us. Nobody is talking. Then Dominic Stevens comes along. He steps into the room and scans everybody’s faces. Detective Kent finds a reason to take the others out into the corridor, leaving me and Schroder behind. Before Stevens can start in on us, a third doctor shows up, this one coming through the same doors as the first.

“Nicholas Stanton’s shoulder wound isn’t the problem,” he says, “but the second bullet went under his armpit and into his right lung. He lost a lot of blood. We’ve patched the damage, and barring nothing unforeseen, he should pull through.”

“Good,” Stevens says, slowly nodding. “That’s very, very good.” He puts his hand on Schroder’s shoulder. “Let’s go for a walk,” he tells him.

Schroder and Stevens step into the corridor and I’m left alone with the doctor. When I try to get up I lose my balance and fall back into my chair. I need sleep. All of a sudden I can barely keep my eyes open.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine. Just tired, that’s all. Thanks,” I tell him. “Thanks for saving him.”

He nods. “He’s not saved yet,” he says, “but it’s looking good.”

“Okay,” I tell him, but he stays there looking at me.

“Your right eye,” he says, “is blown.”

“What?”

He kneels down in front of me, then suddenly he points a flashlight into my eye and my brain does a somersault, but I stay in control.

“It’s not dilating. You got a headache?”

“Yeah.”

“When did it start?”

“About six weeks ago.”

“What?”

“It comes and goes,” I tell him. “I was hit in the head.”

“How hard?”

“Very,” I say, rubbing the dent. “I have a prescription,” I tell him, then reach into my pocket, but I’m just too sleepy now to find it. My hand falls out. It falls down my side and hangs over the side of the chair.

“Wait here,” he says, and disappears.

I do the opposite and I walk out of the waiting room, my right arm swinging by my side. Dominic Stevens is in the hallway talking to Schroder. Stevens is in a pair of jeans and a shirt and I’ve never seen him looking so casual. He also looks calm. They are keeping their voices low, and I lean against the wall and watch them. For the first half of the conversation Schroder is shaking his head, and for the second half he’s nodding. Then Stevens acknowledges me with a nod, says something else to Schroder, and leaves.

“What’s the verdict?” I ask, knowing the conversation had to be about Mrs. Whitby.

“I’m not being fired,” he says.

“But?”

“But I’ve been told to step down.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry too even though it’s what half of me wanted.”

“And Mrs. Whitby?”

“Stevens says the scene is still sealed, but it might be called a suicide. He said there’s a chance Mrs. Whitby was found with the gun in her hand. He says there’s a chance she killed herself because she felt bad about what she had done, that all of this was her fault.”

“You happy to accept that?”

He shakes his head, but then says, “Yeah, I’m happy. We saved the girl, right? The world is down one evil old lady, so yeah, I can live with it,” he says, but I’m not so sure he can, and Stevens’s plan also comes down to how quiet they can keep Cole.

“And Stanton?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. It’s not up to us, Theo. Stanton stabbed an unarmed man on national TV. That’s for the lawyers to figure out. I’m going home,” he says, “before my wife fires me too.”

I watch him heading down the corridor. I figure Katy, Cole, and Stanton—all of them are going to be okay. I figure that’s a good omen, but then I think about the balance that Schroder was talking about earlier, and how that balance is going to be my wife. I stare at my cell phone for a few moments, then finally make the call, already knowing what I’m going to hear—when was the last time anybody called me with good news? I call Dr. Forster back and he answers after the second ring and I say nothing as he talks to me, I just listen, absorbing the information.

Bridget isn’t dead. She isn’t in a coma. She’s alert and conscious but there is another problem. He tries to explain it to me, but I can’t make sense of it. I turn in the corridor trying to orientate myself, trying to figure out the floor my wife is on and how to get there from here, and after I turn a full circle I drop down to my knees and throw up. The doctor who looked into my eyes a few minutes earlier sees me and rushes toward me, but I get back up and step into the elevator. The doors close in front of him and I make my way up a few floors.

By the time I make it to my wife’s room, I can barely walk straight. At first I think half of the lights have been turned off, but then I realize it’s me, that I’m struggling to see. I open the door and Bridget looks at me. A smile bursts onto my face, but then the floor comes rushing up toward me, my head crashes into the side of her bed on the way down, and the thing inside my head lights up the rest of its distress flares. I lie on the floor realizing that for something good to have happened, the city has to give something bad. That’s the balance Schroder was talking about. Cole, Stanton, my wife—I’m the balance for them surviving.

I can hear the door opening behind me, somebody rushing in, somebody saying “there he is,” and crouching over me. I hear “Christ, this is going to be close,” and then it all fades away—the lights, the pain, my wife, and I can feel the tears on my cheek and then I can’t feel a thing.





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to say thank-you to the very cool crew at Simon & Schuster. To Lisa Keim, Janice Fryer, Mellony Torres, Alexandra Arnold, Emily Bestler, and Judith Curr, and, of course, a huge thank-you to Sarah Branham—my wonderfully talented editor who once again has done a fantastic job steering me in the right direction. I’m grateful for Jane Gregory—the best agent in the world—for her support and belief in my books and for changing my life in many good ways. Her in-house editor, Stephanie Glencross, has also changed my life in many good ways and will always continue to do so. She’s such an amazing editor and an amazing person and there are barely enough hours in the day for her to point out my mistakes. And of course Gregory and Company’s Claire Morris and Linden Sherriff, who do great jobs working on my behalf on my books and putting up with me. Again, thanks to everybody who has enjoyed the stories and to those who contact me with some really kind words. It really does help.


PAUL CLEAVE is the author of five internationally bestselling thrillers, The Cleaner; The Killing Hour; Cemetery Lake; Blood Men, winner of the Ngaio Marsh Award for Best Crime Novel of 2011; and Collecting Cooper, a Suspense Magazine Best Book of 2011. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Find out more at www.paulcleave.com.