An ambulance was already on the scene, as were two officers from the patrol police. A second ambulance pulled up with screeching tires. One of the first responders jumped out of the car with his backpack.
The fire department would also arrive at any moment.
Elizabeth, Nick, and Jane looked in awe at the destruction the truck had caused. The driver's cab had drilled three-quarters of the way into the front facade of the hotel. The entire front window was destroyed, as were parts of the tiled wall, a section of which bent grotesquely downward. Tables, chairs, info boxes, and an umbrella stand with about five hidden umbrellas lay crushed under the truck's massive tires. Shards of glass were scattered up to thirty yards away around the accident scene, glinting in the light of the street lamps. The man in the cab seemed to be just waking up from his stupor of shock and looked down in disbelief.
Elizabeth, Nick, and Jane looked equally skeptical, for as loud as the bang had been that had drawn them here, there appeared to be no casualties. Not at the hotel, anyway. The guests had all jumped up quickly enough when the colossal metal monster drilled into the front of the building.
Two cops and the first responders helped the truck driver out of the cab.
Are you hurt?
No, not at all; what could happen to me up there?
Can you climb down yourself?
Sure.
But we'll support you.
The truck driver climbed down the steps unsteadily. Then he fell forward. The two first responders barely caught him. "We'd better take him with us," said one of the men. "He doesn't seem to have taken it well after all."
"Shock," the other man said. "We'll keep him under inpatient observation for a day. Put in access with NaCI. And call his company to come pick up the truck when the cops are done here."
Elizabeth, Nick, and Jane continued to find it hard to believe that no one had been hurt at the hotel. Some of the guests, the three heard, had made veritable leaps and bounds to safety. Even if the truck driver had braked as quickly as possible, it bordered on a miracle that no one had come to harm here. At least not physically.
The only one who appeared to have been injured was the man lying on the road. His clothes were dirty and bedraggled, the stench could be smelled for five yards, and a little blood was seeping from the head wound. One of the first responders was with him immediately. Two of the other men placed him on a mobile stretcher. "Spine seems fine, but you never know," one of the paramedics muttered. One of the men attached a stiff neck to the stranger's neck.
"Nice," Jane said. "Looks a bit like Philip II now."
Elizabeth knew her mother had been in Madrid that summer with her wife, Maura Isles, and their granddaughters, Ashlyn and Nikki. At El Escorial Palace, the four had seen pictures of King Philip II with the classic ruffs. As distasteful as Jane's comparison was, it was apt. The man had a stiff neck put on without looking up.
"Make his neck stiff," one of the first responders muttered. "It's not like we know if he has a spinal injury."
"Do they make this for other body parts?" asked Jane. Who wasn't finished with her silly joke. "Could be a gap in the market." Elizabeth gave her mother a punishing look and shook her head.
The man let everything happen to him without taking the slightest notice and merely blinked stupidly into the area. He seemed to have lost consciousness and yet had such a tight grip on a cardboard box as if his life depended on it. A cardboard box that was double and triple-wrapped with duct tape.
"Did he run in front of the truck?" wanted Jane to know with furrowed brows.
"Not just in front of the truck," a voice said. A man in an Adidas jacket stood behind them.
"Thomas Garcia is my name," the man said. "The guy," he pointed downward, "almost ran in front of my car, too. I was in the other lane and managed to swerve out of the way. When I heard the crash, I called 911 right away."
Jane pursed her lips and gave a curt nod. "Good job, other people didn't think of that." She pointed to the hotel guests still standing behind the destroyed window frontage, just gawking dully at the street. Some had already gotten over the shock, as evidenced by the fact that they pulled out their cell phones and began filming the scene. Otherwise, they did nothing.
Next to one of the first responders, Elizabeth bent over the bedraggled man lying in the street; the cardboard box still clutched tightly.
His hair was done and smelled putrid, his skin a yellowish gray, as if he had liver damage combined with hepatitis. The paramedic had already put on latex gloves, and latex gloves, as the stranger also wore.
Elizabeth noticed the red-brown splatter on the gloves while Nick talked to the truck driver.
"Seems like a junkie," she said.
"Yeah, he doesn't look like Dr. Feelgood or a Californian Dreamboy," Jane growled. "Might as well be on The Walking Dead, and would even be cheaper because they don't need a makeup artist."
Elizabeth looked at her mother closely and frowned deeply, but her mother was right.
The guy was a junkie, and he was utterly run down. The sleeves of his stiff-as-a-stick shirt of indeterminable color were rolled up and showed dozens of puncture marks in both arms. The lips were dry and cracked, blood clinging to them, the teeth nothing but black, broken stumps, the breath foul and almost worse than the man's body odor.
It was a man who had completely given himself up. The fire department had recently pulled a man out of his apartment in a comparable condition. He had been so bottled up that he was no longer in control of even his bodily functions, and the fire department had to have the entire squad car cleaned after the man left feces and urine on the strecher.
"Can you hear me?" the paramedic asked. He had additionally attached a compress to the stranger's forehead.
The man moved slightly, groping around like someone half asleep looking for his pillow. He felt the cardboard box and seemed to be relieved. Suddenly he opened his eyelids, and his head shot forward. His jaw snapped shut. And already he had bitten the paramedic's hand.
"Holy shit!" The paramedic pulled his hand back.
One of the officers bent over the man to calm him down. But the stranger's head jerked upward once again. His forehead caught the officer's nose. There was a dry crack. Blood shot from the officer's nose. "Son of a bitch!" the cop also shouted.
Two more officers were on the scene, holding the unidentified man down. "Spinal fracture," one of them growled, "my ass. He's hopping around here like a fucking deer!"
The junkie did indeed appear to be barely injured. "I bit them," he yelled suddenly, jaws clattering together. "Bit them so I could fall asleep!"
Jane took a wide-eyed step toward the men. "There's blood on his lips!"
The paramedic looked at his hand where the maniac had bitten him. "It's not mine, thank goodness."
Elizabeth's frown had deepened dramatically. "But it could also be that he bit his lips."
"Where is my ... my --" The junkie flailed his arms, fumbling the box, wanting to hold it. "Ahhhh, here!"
"What's that on your gloves, anyway?" asked Jane, approaching the junkie with furrowed brows.
"Blood," the man croaked, his voice cracking. "The blood of the living! I have taken it from them. I will take others from them! More!"
Elizabeth straightened up and looked anxiously at her mother, her eyebrows drawn together.
Jane looked at the first responders with as much confusion as concern. "Are you going to take him?"
The paramedic took a deep breath and raised his shoulders. "At first glance, he doesn't appear to have a spinal injury, and we can't cure rabies here. But we'll take him anyway, just to be safe."
Elizabeth rolled her eyes as the first responder finished his text. "Is this man tripping?"
He shrugged. "It's possible. Could be acid. Or a bad magic mushroom. They induce trips you can't come down from. Drug-induced psychosis."
"Trip," the man babbled, "trip? No, it's all true!"
Elizabeth frowned and leaned forward a little, not wanting to risk being attacked. "What's true, sir?"
"...And then they all talk about legalizing hard drugs," Jane muttered. "With that stuff, first contact promotes you out of existence. Without it killing you."
At that moment, the stranger below them suddenly perked up. He snapped his eyes open, authentic as a zombie. "I staked them! Staked them all ... Staked! On a wooden stake! For all to see! You have to cut away the flesh. The connection. Between the anus and the vagina. Then the stake fits through. And then they sit... on the pole! And slowly slide down. You can sit there and time ... Time it until the stake comes out of the top of the head!" He looked enthusiastically at Jane, Elizabeth, and the paramedic with widened, mad eyes while the officers held back the gawkers.
Jane's expression darkened, and she took a step forward. "Damn, what are you talking about?"
"The ... BodyCounter!" The man turned his eyes skyward as if waiting for some divine revelation. "And the BodyCounter knows that many more will die."
Jane looked at him for a long moment and furrowed her brows. "The BodyCounter?"
But at that moment, the stranger put his hand over his mouth as if no word would ever pass his lips again.
"Who's the BodyCounter?" asked Jane emphatically. "And what's this about staking? Is that related to the blood on your hands?"
The man just shook his head mechanically and stared at the sky with motionless beady eyes. "No, no ... no," he whimpered.
Jane looked at the two detectives with a deeply furrowed brow. "All right, my friend, we're going to whisper!" She signaled to the officers. "Into the BPD with him! And then we'll," she looked at her daughter and Nick, "have a serious talk. The gloves need to go to the lab, and I want to know what's in that damn box he holds so sacred. Will have to do Boonstra without us."
"I'll go get Kate," Elizabeth said. "She's still at BCU."
"Fine," Jane growled. "I'll meet you back here in thirty minutes."
"Thirty minutes --" The junkie's voice rang out behind them. As if from a grave. All three cops turned to face him. "In thirty minutes," his crooked mouth with its broken teeth and bloody, chapped lips was twisted into a sinister grin. "In thirty minutes, another one may die --"