Second Comings III The Mask of Anar

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What do you say when a smile is not a smile.
10.9k words
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Part 3 of the 3 part series

Updated 06/07/2023
Created 12/23/2015
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(Note: this is Part III of the Second Coming series. Part I was released last December, Part II a few days ago, confusingly titled Second Comings - Sex Type Thing. This current posting is Part III, and they should be read in order for the tale to make much sense. Thanks to "rightbank" for pointing this out!)

Second Comings III: The Mask of Anarchy

May

Justin Lake sat behind Sharon Hastings as she drove towards Boston on the Mass Pike; Jordan Secord sat beside Hastings, looking out the window, his face a mask – lost in thought. Alternating between hope and despair, Secord ignored the world around the car, his thoughts oscillating through extremes as he felt his way through all the possible outcomes of this day. Michele...his Michele...was dying. What was left of this world but darkness?

A half hour into surgery she had crashed. Multiple cranial fractures created an almost impossible surgical environment, then fractured ribs and a punctured lung complicated the series of life-saving procedures her surgeons needed to get done simply to stabilize her. Both were general surgeons, however, and as events unfolded she desperately needed both neuro- and thoracic surgeons. The closest were in Hanover and Boston, the best at Mass Gen. A helicopter was summoned, the patient prepped for transport – still under anesthesia. Two physicians jumped in the helicopter before the patient was loaded, then the aircraft rose and dashed to the east. A Volvo wagon sped from the hospital, it too bound for Boston. The remaining general surgeon dashed back to the ER, to the gunshot wound that had just arrived – and he was now the only surgeon in the house. The on-call surgeon was summoned, an orthopedist, but she wouldn't arrive for a half hour.

This new patient had three gunshot wounds, all from 9mm rounds: one in her upper right arm, two in the upper chest, both near the right subclavian artery, but her pressure was steady, the apparent bleeding minimal. She had been stabilized in the ER, taken up to OR5 and while he scrubbed-in he looked at her chemistries on the blue LCD display. Something didn't look right, so he ordered a narcotics panel while the anesthesiologist prepped her. He went in quickly, wanted to talk to her before she went under.

"What's her name?" the surgeon asked.

"Grier, Laura Grier," a scrub nurse said.

He went to her, pinched her earlobe gently, waking her slightly. "Miss Grier, I'm Dan Wilkins, and I'm about to try to get these bullets out. Do you understand me?"

She nodded. "Yes. Where am I?"

"You've been shot, and you're in the hospital now. Can you tell me, it's important now, but can you tell me what drugs you've taken today? Any medications? Any cocaine? Anything like that?"

"Yeah, so what? Fuck you – why don't you just let me die!" Grier said raspily, then she turned away and closed her eyes.

He saw she was crying now. Not good. "Okay," Wilkins said. "That's that. A soon as we get those labs let's take her under. I wanna get to work while her pressure's good."

A police office stood in the corner of the operating room, taking notes.

+++++

Tony Bianchi sat in the small interrogation room, wondering what had happened to his life, what had gone wrong that morning. All Laura Grier wanted, she'd told them, was for them to rough her up a little, but when he saw her, right after they'd broken into that house, something inside him broke loose. He remembered kicking the bitch, stomping her head, then Kyle was pulling her panties down, fucking the fag-bitch in the ass, and all of a sudden it was like some kind of fucked-up war movie...like someone flipped a switch – the four of them were out of control. Animals, he thought, they'd turned into animals. He shook his head, looked around the little room again, then down at the handcuffs on his wrists – and the ankle shackles binding him to the floor.

Acoustic tiles, a one-way mirror, all props right out of central casting, Bianchi thought. A gray metal desk, three grey metal chairs, two lights in the ceiling, everything coated with the brown sheen of cigarette smoke. Decades of oily shit, coating everything, probably his lungs now too, he thought. None of it mattered though. He knew his dad would get him out, and get him off. He was a good lawyer, and he'd told him not to say a word until he got there. The detectives had given up on him and he smiled, but perhaps that was because Kyle Chandler, his friend from the Lacrosse team and the one who'd approached him about doing this shit in the first place, had been talking non-stop ever since they'd been caught inside the Secord residence. He wouldn't have smiled if he'd known Chandler had blamed it all on Bianchi, and had proof to back up his assertions.

+++++

Hastings made her way to Storrow Drive, then to Fruit Street, looking for the main parking garage entrance as she got close to the Mass Gen campus. Both Lake and Secord were, she thought, impossibly quiet now, but she'd seen Secord's hands shaking several times during the drive. Once she parked the car, she went to his door and helped him out, but she could tell there was something seriously wrong with him now. Secord could hardly breathe when he stood, and his gait seemed unsteady. Lake came over and they helped Secord walk, first across the glassed in walkway above the street, then into the Lunder Building, to the information desk, and this was where Secord fell to the floor.

Orderlies picked him up, put him on a gurney, and Sharon rushed with him into the ER. "I don't believe this," Lake said as he shook his head and took off behind Hastings.

+++++

Wilkins looked at the films, looked at the bullets in Laura Grier's arm and thorax, and due to the amount of damage he saw he decided to start on the arm first, as he looked at the latest labs. Worse than expected, he thought. Very high levels of Xanax, SSRIs off the charts, as well as what profiled out as a possible anti-psychotic. 'Ah-ha!' he said to himself: residual levels of cocaine too, but most unexpected were trace amounts of heroin in her system and almost undetectable levels of an amphetamine.

"Whoa!" he said to the anesthesiologist. "Jack, look at those T-cells; they're kind of whacky. Can we get a quick-count HIV going?"

"Yeah, I'll pull a tube, but you do the paperwork, okay?"

"Yeah. Is she under?"

"Yup. You about ready?"

"Yeah, coming in. She's got a pretty serious cocktail on board. Everything from coke to H, uppers and downers and anti-depressants."

"A real happy camper. Her chemistries are a anemic, Dan, and her sats are falling. We better not dawdle on this one..."

Wilkins went into her arm, peeling away layers of muscle rather than cutting through them, hoping to preserve function and speed healing, then he got to the humerus. He looked up, saw Jane Wilson, an orthopedic surgeon, scrubbing in; he continued to expose the humerus until he had the head was fully exposed. "I can see a lot of damage in the brachial plexus, Dr Wilson, and the humeral head is just shattered. And I do mean shattered. Bullet must have hit there, then tumbled down..."

"How's the brachial artery," Wilson asked. "Intact?"

"Yes, but I see some pooling near the ulnar."

"What's going on up there," she said as she entered the room, pointing to the two entry wounds on her chest. "Was this woman shot?"

"They didn't tell you?"

"No. Looks like 38s, maybe 9mil."

"Cops tried to arrest her, she resisted, with a knife," one of the nurses said.

"Just what my dad always told me to do. Go after a cop with a knife. Smart. She a local?"

"English prof, at the college," the cop in the corner said.

"What are you doing here?" Wilson demanded.

"She's under arrest. The chief told me to stay here and take notes."

Wilson looked at Wilkins; both shrugged.

"What did she do," Wilson asked.

"Basically, it looks like she put out some kind of a hit. That's all I know."

"Well, well, a real go-getter," Wilson said. "Dan, change places with me, would you? I want to look at those fragments. Would you go ahead and expose the clavicle? Let's see what kind of mess we have there..."

+++++

Secord was on a gurney in Trauma Room 14, EKG and pulse oximeter readings just coming online, an intern looking at the screens.

"He's having a heart attack," the intern called out to a passing nurse. "Get Dr Anderson in here, stat!"

Sharon watched the transformation, almost in shock. The quiet little room exploded into frenzied chaos, yet even so everything seemed well-choreographed, almost like a ballet. Lines were started, IVs hung, stats called out, medications injected, then one of the nurses told her to leave. She backed out of the room, crying now, then turned and looked for Lake. She couldn't see him, not anywhere, then a clerk from admitting was on her, asking about insurance and next of kin. She told the clerk what she knew, then asked about Michele: there was a Lansing in surgery – that's all the clerk had now.

Lake was there, out of the blue. "She's upstairs, they're operating on her now. What's up with Jordan?"

"He's having a heart attack...they pushed me out of the room."

Lake shook his head, sat down, put his face in his hands. "This isn't happening," he whispered. "This just can't be happening..."

He grew restless, went and called called the hospital back in Vermont...

Grier still in surgery, nothing new to report...

He called the police department. Four suspects in custody, charges pending, arraignments set for tomorrow morning...

He found Sharon, they walked to a lounge and sat down, waiting for the world to make sense.

"Did you find out anything about Laura?" Sharon asked?

"Nothing. She's still in surgery too."

"What in God's name are you going to do about her, Justin?"

"I'll have to talk with her, find out why..."

"Why? I mean, what could she say to justify this?"

"Oh, she can't. Not ever. If what's been alleged is true. Still, I can't help but think people are innocent until proven guilty."

"Okay, but let's say she got those boys to do it. And she used sex to manipulate them into doing it. Then what? Then what can you say to her?"

"Oh, Sharon, I don't know. Perhaps the only words that matter at that point will come from the judge that sentences her. You know, I've been thinking about, well, something I recall from a Renaissance Lit class. "Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know." I can't recall who said it, but..."

"Montaigne."

"Oh, yeah, that's it. But I was thinking how much I loved her, how much I believed in her, and how little I knew her."

"Knew? Is she dead yet, Justin?"

"No, of course not. I'm sorry, it's just that..."

"You know, Justin, Montaigne wrote something else you might want to think about now. "He who fears he shall suffer, already suffers what he fears."

Lake nodded his head, because he was afraid.

"When you love someone, it's a bond. As much as I detest what Dennis has become, what he's done to our marriage as a result, I still love him. He's still my friend. I can't ever turn my back on that friendship. On him."

"Are you saying I should stick with Laura? After what she's done? How could I..."

"I always thought if you love someone that's what you do, Justin. It's not that you're giving her the benefit of the doubt, or even that you forgive her. It's that you love her, they need you now, and you're there for that person. It's a part of our humanity, Justin."

"You know, Jordan's been sounding more and more like some sort of evangelical..."

"Jordan? Hah! There may be a bigger atheist on campus, but I doubt it. Don't confuse the Will to Goodness with some sort of Christian line, or any other religion for that matter. Religion is a cloak, Jordan told me once. The heart needs no shrouds, it needn't hide in the shadows of ritual and dogma."

"Jordan? An atheist? I can't..."

"As you said, he's a historian. And a good one, too, as it turns out. He knows Christ as a historian knows the man, not as a Christian might, perhaps, and he knows Buddha, and the Prophet in the same way – through the same eyes and ears. I think, from the little we've talked about these things, he sees that religions have more in common with one another than they have differences. I know he believes in goodness, but that goodness isn't defined by or restricted to any religion, but that's about as far as it goes with him. And you know, I doubt there's a religion that would officially condone his relationship with Michele. I think about that too. Think about what his love for Michele really means, what it says about his humanity. Now I think about Laura's, I don't know, hatred, and what that says about our world. Your world too, I guess."

"If it's true, if what they say she did is true, there's no way I could ever look at her again, much less talk to her, or as you say, love her."

"You said she's a monster, didn't you? That she's...sick? Don't marriage vows have something to say about that? You know...like 'in sickness and in health?'"

"We're not married. And you still think I should talk to her?"

"Whatever she's done, Justin, she's a human being. Something's caused her immense suffering, maybe something beyond her control. You might be the only one able to help her get to an answer, maybe get to an understanding of the causes, and maybe help her."

"Maybe she's just crazy, Sharon. Broken, a broken monster. I don't want to spend my life taking care of someone like that. Someone who might just be sick, full of hate. She was dishonest, Sharon. If this is true, she was living a life of lies. Lies, as simple as that. Lies of acts and omissions, to me. If all this is true, she was using me. She was using me as a shield, and I became a part of her mask. She used me, to get at Michele, maybe even to Jordan. I'm not going to spend another minute with her if this is true. Period. End of discussion."

"Well, it's something to think about, Justin. I hear you, understand what you mean. If I can help, let me know."

"You did this when Michele had her problem last year, didn't you?"

"What?"

"Helped Jordan. Helped him get the whole thing under control?"

"Yeah. Rough time."

"I guess Michele has caused you a fair amount of trouble this year. As a result of these things."

"Trouble? I wouldn't call it that."

"Why not? If so, goodness seems to be just another mask. Humanity is good? I don't know..."

"I do what I think is right, Justin. What I'd hope people would do for me."

"Do you have kids, Sharon?"

"Nope. We never got around to it."

"Oh. I wonder if we could be so dispassionate if she was our daughter."

"What about her parents?"

"Her mother's dead. Never knew her father."

Sharon shook her head, then fell silent. An hour later a doctor came to the waiting room, asked for the family of Jordan Secord, and Sharon got up, Justin with her, and joined the doctor in a conference room.

"Pretty good heart attack he had, not major, very little underlying pathology. Probably stress induced. You know of anything...?"

Sharon filled him in, and when the physician understood he went back to the OR suites and got an update on Michele's status, then he returned.

"She's still on the table, but they're wrapping up now. Her right orbit was fractured, the bone around her right eye, and that took time to fix. The eye's okay. Ribs are stabilized, the puncture repaired. Fingers in her hand and wrist have been set, some with pins. There's some concern about a thoracic vertebra. Won't know the answer for a while." He looked at his notes. "Some anal injuries. Those I don't know about. Uh. Let's see...this is being treated as a sexual assault. I don't know about the rape kit. You want me to get that going?"

"Please," Justin said. "I don't think the police back in Vermont had time to do that."

"And you are?"

"A co-worker. He's my friend."

"Okay. I'll get the police here to supervise that, get it into custody. He's a professor? What's he teach?"

"History," Lake said. "And Goodness."

The physician looked at Lake, then nodded his head. "Okay. Here's my name and cell; call me if I can help. Secord will move up to CCU in about an hour. No visitors 'til day after tomorrow. You'll need to get with patient information for Lansing's information. They won't have it for a few hours, though."

"I'd better call Dennis," Sharon said. "Why don't you call the hospital?"

+++++

Wilson had tried for an hour to reconstruct the humerus, but with many fragments either missing or too small she now looked down on a hopeless mess; Wilkins had had even less luck with the mangled shreds of nerves and blood vessels in the area. "We're getting nowhere fast," she said after looking at the anesthesiologist. "How's she doing?"

"We're three hours twelve minutes in. Holding her own."

"Okay," Wilson said, "this is my call. We're taking the arm. Dan, start clamping the arteries..."

+++++

Detective Frank Marchand had worked homicide in Washington, D.C. for fifteen years, then grown sick of the life. He quit, moved to Vermont, starting doing what he loved most, doing finish carpentry on houses and building cabinetry, but keeping his wife and four kids fed and clothed had become difficult. When the local police department announced they were hiring a few years back he applied, was accepted, and soon found himself right back where he'd left off – doing detective work – nine to five. But while D.C. had hundreds of homicides a year, this town had a homicide about once every thirty years, and while assaults were more common, after the homecoming football game usually, Vermont just wasn't, he soon discovered, a hotbed of crime. Even the drug gangs had given up on the state; it was just too damn cold, and too close to Hartford and Boston.

Marchand worked the few burglaries that happened, and all the assaults too, so he was called-in on his day off to work the Lansing case. His first impression, when he interviewed the kids from the college was that something was really wrong with the picture. Kids, college kids especially, didn't easily get pulled into this type of crime unless drugs were involved. Not in his experience, anyway. When he learned that the Grier suspect had lured the boys in with sex he thought that might fit, but still, something was missing. When he learned that Lansing was a transexual, and this was a 'hate-crime', he understood – and he just about lost interest in the case. He might have let it go but for the behavior of the suspects, the boys who'd assaulted this Lansing character.

What bothered him was the sense of privilege he heard in the boy's voices when he talked with them. The boys came from moderately wealthy families, and that wealth had conferred on them a sense of exemption, of being a little too above the law. The Bianchi kid was odious, too. His father was, the kid said, a lawyer and would get him off no matter what. "Why don't you go write some parking tickets, and stop wasting my time, Pencil Dick," the kid said to him. Marchand was in a bad mood by the time he got to Bianchi, and that pushed him over the edge.

"You know, Tony, you're a very smart kid. I know that. I know you know that. So here's the deal. Your buddy in the other room, Kyle? Kyle told me this was all your doing. You didn't like Secord. You didn't like the grades he gave you. You wanted to get back at him somehow. You had this Grier for another class, you two started fucking last fall, right after school started. Kyle says she was fucking everyone else too, lots of jocks. Anyone who needed a little extra help with their grades. She also wanted help beating up this Lansing back then, but someone ratted her out. This sounding familiar to you, Tony?"

"I ain't sayin' nothin'."

"Yeah? Well, so you two were still fucking, like once maybe twice a week, sometimes more, right up until last week. You know how I know this, Dickhead? Hmm?"