Ten Plagues

He didn’t play out the ritual like he’d planned, but the satisfaction was surprisingly intense.

Terror such as he’d never known followed him home. He could feel the eyes on him. Surely someone had seen what happened.

Pravus prepared quickly for his artwork. He’d listen and be ready to run, but he couldn’t move yet. The beast was like a starving wolf licking its jaws. He had to paint. He had to create.

Because she’d fallen into his hands, he had no time to prepare, so that would come now. There was an address in her purse, so he could find her house. The reverend wouldn’t even feel pain over this. So why involve him?

Pravus quickly carved the sign for this plague. It wasn’t his best work, but Melody Fredericks wasn’t worthy, so it hardly mattered.

Finishing the plaque in quick time, he slipped up to her home. A pretty house in a nice neighborhood, not the isolated, dreary apartment he was used to. He quietly hung the plaque in place and went back to his creation.

Only to find she wouldn’t supply him with paint. Dead women don’t bleed. He looked from his latest creation to the empty white gown and fumed.

There was no help for it. The only one available to bleed was himself. Pravus raised the chisel to his own arm. The pain was pleasure and the beast was content.

Paul spent the night between Keren’s cubicle—where she seemed determined to make every doctor and nurse who came in contact with her reconsider their occupation—and the waiting area nearest LaToya’s operating room. When O’Shea came barreling into the hospital, Paul turned the tiny frogs over to him.

O’Shea, befuddled, stuck them in a plastic evidence bag as if they might contain fingerprints. They stared, wriggling pathetically, through the bag. O’Shea muttered, “Airholes.” He poked a few before he gently lowered the bag into the pocket of his brown suit.

Then Agent Higgins came.

Paul felt like a criminal under interrogation.

Keren heard them talking and demanded loudly, from behind the curtain, to be included.

“It’ll probably kill her,” the doctor said sarcastically. “But the nurses are pooling their money to hire a hit man anyway, so what the heck. Go on in.”

She was sitting up, so Paul didn’t take the doctor’s dark warnings of death very seriously. The hit man? Maybe.

Paul had to go through it again, with Keren adding details.

“You got the make and model of his car at night, on a dimly lit street, after you’d been run down?” Paul asked incredulously.

Keren rolled her eyes. “Some of us do this for a living, Rev.”

O’Shea said, “I’ll put an ATL on a dark-green Malibu with a broken taillight and bullet holes.”

“An Attempt to Locate for possible connection to a homicide.” Keren nodded. “It’s got to be the same car we saw those men driving outside the mission.”

“But when he was questioned, Murray had already reported it stolen.” Paul shook his head. “The cops remember him because he was so upset. He’d just bought the car. The first car he’d owned in his life. That’s why he was giving everybody a ride. It was stolen before he’d owned it two days. I can’t believe it’s him.”

He saw Keren and O’Shea exchange a glance of pity and didn’t even have the gumption to snarl at them.

“A stolen car is really convenient,” Keren said. “If he’s got a place to hide it, he can use it once in a while and it’ll all be blamed on someone else as long as he’s not caught.”

Paul ducked away while they grilled Keren. No one else was there for LaToya but him. The paramedics had already “slipped” and told a reporter she was dead. The police were in full agreement that it was best she be declared dead for now. It made Paul sick when he overheard a spokesman for the hospital say the words. It was far too close to the truth.

There was a nurse in the operating room who spoke to him every time she came out. “They’re bringing in a plastic surgeon to try to fix the cuts in her arms with the least scarring possible. We’ve taken pictures from every angle, as the police requested. We’ve already handed the white dress over to the detective.”

The next time the nurse came out, she said, “She’s sedated, but the EEG shows she’s in a deep coma. The final stab wound was the only potentially fatal wound, but the cumulative effect of all that trauma and blood loss is extensive. It’s the doctor’s feeling that she’s probably been in a coma for the last twenty-four hours.”

Paul ran his hands through his dark hair and felt it standing on end. “I saw her move just an hour ago. I saw the man who did the cutting on her strike the last blow. She rolled away from him. She saved herself.”

The nurse shook her head. “That’s not possible. The doctor is estimating how long she’s been out, so it could be less than twenty-four hours, but it’s definitely longer than one. There’s no way she could have made any defensive movements so recently.”

“But I saw her,” Paul insisted.

“Maybe she rolled because the hillside was steep and the man leaned against her wrong. Whatever caused her to move saved her life.”