Free Metro by Stephen Romano Page B

to punish himself for being what he is. He thinks his death may be very near.
    And he thinks that might be A-OK.
    His father once explained to him that great-great-grandpappy Samuel Mudd was just an ordinary medical doctor who happened to draw the short straw the night John Wilkes Booth unloaded his derringer at the opera and made a sloppy getaway and ended up with a broken leg—and, well, son, you know how those family practitioners are with their Hippocratic oaths and all, particularly when a lone gunman bangs on their door in the dead of night.
    The history books still disagree over whether old Doc Sam was actually a conspirator or just some random guy.
    Jake Mudd knows the truth.
    Knows that his great-great-grandpappy was the victim of something bigger than all of them—even the great and mighty Abraham Lincoln. ( Especially bigger than that dumb old fuck, come to think of it.) Something like an all-crushing, all-enveloping black hand that scoops up everything in its path. The hand of fate, the hand of justice. For wise guys and nice guys. Something like a storm, set loose on the face of time to curse us all, down through history, until even the people who know the real names of those shadow murderers are snuffed. Because here’s the thing: Nobody believes in any of it anyway. Nobody wants to know about conspiracies or corrupt systems or ghosts in the machine. And everybody is doomed to die in the storm eventually.
    That’s how they get us . That’s how they rule us.
    Nobody wants to know.
    And I’m the rainmaker.
    Mudd senses that terrible black hand reaching down for him now.
    It’s like the sick thrill of anticipation he got when he strapped on his gun for the first time. Or the awful, sinful, paralyzing rush of exhilaration that came with the first child he ever murdered.
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    S ix men walk through the rear ER entrance of Saint Apollonia’s Medical Center. Nobody tells them to turn around and walk the other way because nobody is guarding the door. That’s the tragic thing about hospitals. You can walk right in, even just before dawn, so long as you look like you’re a normal guy.
    The six men all look like normal guys.
    Except for the man in front.
    That one has a big scar running down the middle of his face, just off-center. It angles weirdly and splits his eye socket at an awkward degree, zigzagging part of his lips into a mismatched jigsaw shape so it looks almost like someone cut him in half and glued him back together wrong. You’d notice it from a hundred feet away.
    He’s an apparition split in two—almost handsome, almost horrifying—wearing a very expensive black suit.
    He stands there in the lobby of the ER for a moment.
    Thinking.
    Goes into his right inside coat pocket and pulls out a stick of strawberry chewing gum. The sugarless variety, with extra flavor crystals.
    Pops it in his mouth.
    Chews slowly.
    Then he leads his boys straight for the elevator, which will take them to the trauma ward on the fifth floor. If there had been a security guard, it wouldn’t have been a problem. There should have been one, but the guy is actually around the corner right now, spending his last five dollars in cash on a Coke and a bag of M&Ms. (Breakfast of champions, obviously.) He’s an old man with arthritis in both hands. He’s not even wearing a sidearm. His name is Karl Munt.
    Mister Munt wouldn’t believe you in a million years if you told him that the Coca-Cola Company just saved his life this morning.
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    J ackie-Boy Schaeffer dreams of many things.
    The bad lieutenant will never know what any of them are.
    Tomorrow there will be another job.
    Tomorrow there will be—
    â€œA complete pesthole.”
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    T he voice is low and strong, gentle and heavy all at once. Each syllable perfectly enunciated. Everything in its proper place.
    The bad lieutenant turns and he