Scream Catcher (38 page)

Eight stories below, an indistinguishable mix of Lake George natives and summer tourists gather around the smoking rubble of what only moments before constituted the courthouse’s front façade. Firemen and EMTs busy themselves by attempting to inflate and properly position a giant air mattress in order to break two possible falls.

Jude looks down upon them.

It’s not difficult to see that the emergency professionals are failing in their efforts. There is simply too much rubble in the way, not enough time to position the air mattress before the inevitable occurs.

Still Jude hangs on.

But he can’t hold out much longer. His battered body is growing heavier with each fading second. His grip on the jagged concrete edge is growing weaker. He tries chining his way up and over the broken edge of the floor slab. But when his injured right hand slips away, he finds himself hanging by only his left.

The crowd issues a collective roar.

The roar speaks volumes, tells Jude his immediate future looks bleak. But then the roar also produces a final burst of adrenalin that shoots its way through arteries and veins. He manages to throw his damaged right hand back up, clutching the concrete edge with two hands rather than one.

Stealing another downward glance, Jude catches sight of two faces he instantly recognizes: Mack and Jack. The two are standing on the flat front lawn flanked by a black-suited Judge Mann on one side and a
live action
Channel 9 news camera crew on the other.

The old Captain has a bullhorn gripped in his left hand; has it raised up to his mouth. He’s shouting something. But it’s impossible for Jude to hear a word of it.

A helicopter arrives from the direction of the lake.

Its spinning blades cut through the smoke and dust-ridden air. It hovers above, but far enough away so that its rotor-generated wind does not slam into Jude’s back. Out the corner of his right eye he sees that Lennox is closing the gap that remains between them, shimmying his way along the edge of the broken eighth floor slab by thrusting one black-gloved hand over the other. When he’s within range the beast releases his right hand-hold, reaches into his pocket, pulls out the iPhone.

“Scream. For. Me.” he calmly orders.

Jude faces him from only four or five feet away, somehow unafraid of events that are about to transpire even if they are about to prove themselves the final acts of his life. Jude isn’t exactly sure where his fear has disappeared to, but within the span of a final few seconds, one thing is becoming certain: he doesn’t feel much of anything any more. It’s as if someone has peeled off his skin, scraped away the once raw nerve endings leaving only brittle bone. With a powerful burst of confidence, he gazes into the ice-blue eyes of a psycho killer …

… as the eighth floor collapses out from under them.

Warren County Courthouse

Friday, 8:11 A.M.

But in an instant the static images are replaced by a bright white light that stings Jude’s retinas when shined directly into them. He can’t close his lids any more than he can open his mouth to speak. There is only the bright white light and beyond it the slow motion blades that chop through the dust-filled air from the helicopter that hovers above the spot in which he lies. But then that’s not right either, because there are people—so many people moving all around him, some screaming, some carting medical equipment. A few of the people are kneeling down beside him, peering directly into his face, pleading with him to “Breathe.”

“Breathe, Jude, breathe,” they scream in these too deep voices that sound like an old fashioned record played at slow speed and he can’t help but laugh because of course he’s breathing so what the hell is all the fuss about?

And then, just like that, the scene shifts to the sky.

Jude finds himself floating far above Lake George.

He’s lying on his back, a translucent oxygen mask covering his face. When he turns his head to the left he can see the deep blue/green water and the boats that dot its surface like ants on a puddle. There’s the muted whump-whump-whump noise of the chopper blades—a noise he feels deep inside his chest. When he turns his head, he spots Rosie. She’s strapped into a seat that folds out of the aircraft’s sidewall. From where Jude lies strapped to a collapsed gurney he can see that she’s still dressed in the same nightgown from the night before. The blood spot is no longer visible because covering much of her body is a long blue coat, like the kind the New York City policemen used to wear during the winters. Jude can’t understand what she’s doing wearing a winter coat in the middle of the summer any more than he can grasp the fact that together they are flying through mid-air far above the lake. But just the sight of her gives him a kind of warm fuzzy feeling that follows him back to the land of the dark unconscious.

Glens Falls Medical Center

Saturday, 10:09 A.M.

Another day passes before Jude wakes up.

On this occasion there are no crowds of EMTs surrounding him inside the bomb-ravaged Warren County Courthouse; no emergency Medevac choppers to transport him far above Lake George through the blue Adirondack sky south to Glens Falls.

No Rosie; no Jack; no Mack.

Lying back in the mechanical bed, he has no other choice than to believe the truth:
I’m alive.
But then being alive bears with it a specific set of circumstances and challenges for which he—whether he likes it or not—has to face head on.

First off, his head aches. Temples pound. He feels empty on the inside. Nauseous and so very thirsty.

A glance over his left shoulder reveals Lt. Lino.

The tall black-suited man smoothes out his mustache, gazes into newly opened eyes. Maybe it has something to do with his imagination, but Jude swears the man is trying to work up a welcome smile when he says, “You took quite a fall, Jude.”

A smile with absolutely no feeling behind it.

Like a robot.

Attempting to shift a shell-shocked body up against the headboard of the hospital bed, Jude wrenches and strains to no avail. Movement proves an impossible dream. Any kind of movement, no matter how slight, causes sharp electric jolts of sting to pulse up and down his spinal column.

“What about my wife?”

Lino crosses his arms.

“There were some complications.”

Jude feels something inside him breaking. Something other than flesh and bone.

“Where is she now?”

“Don’t worry. She’s here.”

“When can I see her?”

“You can’t even walk.”

“If you don’t help me, I’ll do it on my own.”

Lino approaches the bed, holds out his hands as if signaling for patience.

“Give me five minutes. Then I’ll take you to her myself.”

“And Jack? Is he here too?”

“With Mack at your home.”

As always the Lieutenant is dressed in a black suit, matching pointy-toed cowboy boots, Brylcreemed hair slicked back against his head. He makes his way to the open door. Leaning out, he waves someone in.

“Let’s have it,” he says out the open door.

A quick moment later, an orderly appears with a laptop computer in her hand. She hands it to the cop and leaves without so much as a crooked glance at Jude.

Setting the laptop on the tray stand, Lino boots the machine up. When it’s done, he double-clicks on the media button, bringing up a video screen. Shifting the cursor he double clicks on Play. After a moment or two of black and white fuzz, Jude sees the digitally videotaped image of the Warren County Courthouse building shot not from Main Street or from the Lake George Park’s wide front green, but from the fourth story rooftop of an unidentified village building. From that vantage point, he can see that the entire concrete and marble façade of the newly constructed courthouse has collapsed—blown away by the IED’s explosion, exposing all the west-side offices and work spaces that surround the structure’s massive central rotunda.

As the never-still camera pans and scans the badly damaged site, it zooms in to reveal the mounds of dust-clouded rubble and debris that surrounds the eight-story structure. The shot also reveals two people hanging from a severely angled eighth story concrete floor slab by their bare hands.

Jude’s head begins to throb. His heart begins to race. Maybe he is viewing actual footage of himself and Lennox hanging from the exposed floor of the courthouse eight stories up, but he’s having an even harder time believing it. He finds himself fighting the distinct sensation that what he’s watching from that hospital bed is a bizarre Hollywood fabrication.

“These images were shot only moments before the second series of collapses,” Lino points out while the long mpeg rolls.

The tall cop reaches out towards the screen with his right hand, uses an extended index finger as he would a pointer. He asks Jude to “Pay strict attention.” On the screen, Lennox is shifting himself hand over hand towards Jude’s vertical, two-handed position. When the beast is close enough, he pulls one hand away from the ledge, reaches for the iPhone. That’s exactly when the remaining interior west-wing portion of the structure collapses. Two bodies fall while a plume of smoke, ash and dust mushrooms up, consumes the building entirely.

Lino stops the video, then clicks on another.

One eye on the screen, the other on Jude, he says, “What you’re about to see now is a far closer angle. I’ll run it in slow motion. That way you will know precisely how your life was spared.”

Again, Lino double clicks on Play.

This time Jude is able to gaze at his screen image not from the vantage of the four-story structure located across the street from the courthouse, but looking down from higher up in the sky. It’s obvious then that this shot has come from the chopper that hovered above them while Lennox and he clung to the broken floor slab.

A kind of top-to-bottom domino effect occurs on the laptop screen. In slow-motion, the top floor gives way, followed by the floor below that and the floor below that, until the entire interior structure appears decimated.

Most of it that is.

Because looking closely Jude can see where more than half the sixth floor remains intact. The helicopter video is proof positive that instead of plunging the entire eight stories to his death, he was saved by the still sound sixth floor slab. The fluttering, sometimes-out-of-focus camera zooms in on his prone, unconscious body. Clearly, he could not have moved a muscle even if he wanted to.

Through the smoke and the dust Jude searches for a sign of Lennox—a human figure or shape moving through the thick gray/black haze. But in the end he makes out nothing that would lead him to believe the beast didn’t fall to his death.

* * *

The video turns back to black and white snow.

“Why didn’t Lennox kill me while he had the chance? Why try to pull me over the edge when he could just shoot me and be done with it? Why try to catch my screams?”

“You were too easy to kill at that point,” Lino insists. “What he wanted were your shrieks and cries for help. That’s what gets him off. Not death.”

“He’s a murderer.”

“His automatic was discovered in the wreckage. The clip was empty. If he was planning on killing you, he forgot to bring bullets.”

Something occurs to Jude.

Jude pulls his eyes away from the screen, presses his head back onto the spongy acrylic pillows, stares directly up at the white antiseptic ceiling.

Jude is immediately transported back to the eve of the Preliminary Hearing. He sees himself bursting into his bedroom only to see a naked Rosie gagged and bound to the four corners of the bed.

He gazes upon Lino. At this point, instead of feeling something breaking inside his body, he feels something caving in. He wants to scream at the Lieutenant, demand where they’ve hidden his wife and son. He knows his family better than he knows himself. They would have been there for him from the moment he came to. No matter how long it took they would have waited for him to come around.

The answer: only something terrible could be keeping them away.

He wants to beat the answer out of Lino. But even if he could—even if he possessed the physical capability—he is too afraid of what he might find out.

The Lieutenant sets the remote control onto the end of the bed.

He says, “At this point, we are confident that Lennox’s remains will be discovered inside the courthouse wreckage.”

“Any sign of him yet?”

Lino admits that despite the use of forensic K-9s, nothing thus far has been uncovered. But this is not an unusual circumstance considering Lennox’s body might have been completely consumed by a gas main fire that continues to smolder inside the heavy rubble.

Jude’s body might be throbbing like one big open sore. But it’s nothing compared to the shock and sadness tail-spinning inside his brain.

“Is it possible Lennox escaped?”

“The entire northern portion of the courthouse and its attached emergency stairwells remained intact. I suppose it’s possible that in all the chaos and confusion, Lennox somehow made his way down six flights of stairs and simply walked out the side door. But I believe we would have caught it all on video. Thus far there is no evidence he ended up anywhere but beneath tons of burning debris.”