Quentin's Queue

Quentin's Queue -- a Nick Serpico "killer" crime series story

Quentin looked round furtively. This was the hottest (near-freezing though she was) he had seen in some time, and he'd had his eye on her gunshot wound since they rolled her in the night before. The security guard would be napping now, he knew.

Quentin's heart's pounding so hard he thought it would explode through his rib cage, he opened her drawer, barely breathing, light-headed. He steadied himself, drool dripping from his chin, pupils damn near as big as that hole. He tortured himself, opening the drawer slowly. When her head finally appeared, he shouted in horror.

"Damn that kid!" muttered the security guard, startled awake, and out of long habit unsnapping his gun, nonchalantly (so he told himself) resting his hand on the grip, ready for fast draw. He rolled away from the well of his desk and stood, stretched, muttered again. The last thing he saw was the flourescent flash from Quentin's axe...

Quentin had surreptitiously watched the security guard before, violating Quentin's girls. Veronica was different. She was to be Quentin's wife! And this miserable, fat, fucking slob had desecrated her on their wedding night! (Quentin had not had the courage to confront him before, but would watch, waiting, shaking in fear and rage, his massive, blanched fingers gripping the axe handle so hard, the wood would creak). This time, the dam of fear had broken, his rage roaring through the gorge of his broken brain. For finding this semen-sacrilege, of his Veronica, was too great to bear. Quentin might have only beaten the man with the flat of the axe, had he only penetrated her pelvis, but left her sweet head alone. No, the demon had to leave his demon seed in her wound, knowing it would hurt, infuriate him. Her poor, hurt head. "No one will hurt you again," he'd promised, and had stalked away with his axe.

He stood over the dead man, axe gleaming red(der), like the lake growing from the neatly cleaved cranium, in the garish light of this, his and Veronica's wedding chapel.
"You raped the wrong girl, this time, Walt," he blubbered.
"I had heard the screams of the others, but had been too fucking scared to help! We (Quentin gestured in the direction of his Veronica on their morgue marriage bed) were betrothed! Didn't you know? Didn't you care?" Quentin paused, looking expectantly at the man, who would remain rigor-motis-free indefinitely, here in the frigid air of the morgue. "Liar!" shrieked Quentin. "I saw you laughing at me as I stroked her hair and kissed her wound and sang soothing songs to her, you bastard! And didn't I warn you don't dare defile her, leave her alone, keep your filthy fucking fingers away from her head? It's your fault you're dead!" Tears frolicked with the blood below. Quentin weakly choked, "Is nothing sacred to you?" Walt only stared.

...

It wasn't your standard busy East Coast police precinct, with the parading pimps, whores, petty thieves and muggers. It almost had a Bobby and Bloke lack of combativeness, in a town with the musty feel of New England and her unique regional and cultural memory, her worn edges, time-honored, wicked independence.

Nick Serpico liked it here. He'd had a buttful of Boston, and couldn't be happier to be hundreds of miles from his litigious ex, up here in Stanton. Taking a deep breath of this sweet New Hampshire air, he decided today to walk to the morgue, saying aloud, almost shouting, "It's too damned gorgeous to drive!" Then muttered the young detective, "Besides, I've never done a fuckin' necro before -- can't wait to meet the perp."

...

"Homicide!" barked Serpico into the phone. It was three days since the morgue incident, and he was no closer to figuring out what the fuck had happened there.
"I know, Mrs. Blanchard. We're doing all we can to find your dog's killer. We'll call you the moment we get a lead." Mrs. Blanchard, the batty widow, had rung off, and Serpico slammed down the phone, got up, stamped across the littered floor to the coffee pot.

"What's eatin' you?" asked Jim "Slim Jim" Barnes, his gargantuan partner, between bites of his Cinnabon. Barnes didn't look it, but he was a dynamo of detective energy, and more than once had surprised Serpico with his agility and speed on the racquetball court.
"You know that fuckin' morgue case's fuck-insane, right?" answered Serpico.
"Nick, it's not a 'case.' Ok, I'll humor you: what do you have?"
"Nothin.' Not a fuckin' thing, Man. I mean, nothing makes sense. We know someone did that corpse, but it wasn't Short." (At seven foot one and over four hundred pounds, Quentin was as inaptly named as they came). Serpico continued, "He's still at County Mental, gibbering. Doctors and staff there got nothin.'" (They had called the paramedics to the morgue on the morning of Quentin's call, whereupon the near-catatonic, muttering giant had had to be subdued and sedated after throwing several men like rag dolls, including Barnes, himself nearly four hundred pounds).

"Leave it, Nick. It'll only grey your hair."
"I can't. I can't sleep for three days. Can't eat."
"You got a crush on 'er too, Nick?" chortled Barnes.
Serpico ignored the crack, saying, "Barnes, there's something about this kid. There's no question he's batshit, but my gut tells me he saw something."
"You mean someone?"

...

"Impossible!" cried Dr. Julie Kramer. "That is a level five security ward with twenty-four-hour guard on the patient's cell. He couldn't've just disappeared!"
She put down the phone and sat up, looked at her soundly sleeping husband with a shrug, rose to dress. "Shit," she cooed, "no time for coffee."

...

"What's the situation?" Kramer queried her assistant chief, Dr. Melton, a thorough professional whose icy stare thoroughly unnerved her.
"We've locked down the hospital and conducted a thorough search. No sign of Short."
"How did he escape?"
"According to the security guard posted at his cell, he had -- and I quote -- 'disappeared.'"
"Dr. Melton, we're on this side of the padded cell, remember?"
"I'm reporting facts, Dr. Kramer." (That fucking stare).
"What do you suggest?"
"I suggest either the entire shift is hallucinating, or Short has disappeared into thin air, and is now a ward of the police. A Detective Serpico is interviewing patients now."
"Patients, Dr. Melton?"

...

"Detective Serpico, I'm Dr. Kra--" began Kramer in the doorway of her office, as Serpico stepped around her and went inside.
Circling her slowly, continually driving away her eyes, Serpico chawed, "Dr. Julie Anne Kramer-Zunino, M.D., Ph.D., J.D., summa cum laude, Columbia -- twice, summa cum laude, Yale, magna cum laude, Harvard, Associate Director of Neuropsychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital,"
"I'm sorry, Detective, but is--"
"You're right, Doc. Mind if I sit?"
"Please." Serpico waited for her to sit at her desk, then sat, intently studying the doctor's gaze.
"I want to know why you've been interrogating my patients."
"I'll bet you do, Doc."

"How long has Quentin Short been in the program, Dr. Kramer?" drilled Detective Serpico.
"Program, Lieutenant?" she blurted. (Only Serpico's precinct captain could have known his promotion was in the works. She might as well have said, "I'm fucking your precinct captain." Hell, he hadn't even told Barnes). Serpico's eyes narrowed; he rose, walked behind and leaned over her.
"Program, Doctor," Serpico fired back, his face so close she could feel the heat of his breath on her throat, his eyes flashing as though to say, "What. You think we don't have eyes and ears on you?"
"Tell me about Project Cerberus, Doctor." Kramer went two or three distinct shades greyer, Serpico thought. He was going to nip this in the bud. "We can do this here, or downtown, Doc. Doesn' matter to me. Oh -- you don't mind if I record this, do you?" Kramer shook her head. She rose, trying her damnedest to brush his cock as she did. A piece of work, she was. Her loathesomeness was a healthy dose of saltpeter. She slank to the window and spoke.

"We were approached shortly after 9/11 by an agency--"
"What agency?"
"They wouldn't say."
"Go on."
"They wanted us to create an experimental program using psychotropic drugs and radiotelepathic trans--"
"Don't give me gobbledygook, Doc. Use layman's terms. I want something a Grand Jury can sink its teeth into."
"We were ask-- told -- to create a drug-based, sound-based program of mental control of subjects -- patients -- they said it was for 'national security,' that it was our 'patriotic duty.'"

...

The plan went off without a hitch: the plant in the control room had rigged the camera to play a loop, while Quentin made himself into an 'x' on his cell's ceiling; the guard, having seen no Quentin through the window, rendered unconscious by over four hundred pounds of dropping patient, propped up against the cell door and adorned with sunglasses, appeared to be on duty, albeit a bit Palace Guard. In a fluid motion the laundryman had fit the glasses on the incredibly life-like mannequin and scooped up the diving Quentin in his cart, barely breathing harder at the extra weight.

...

"How do you feel, Kid?" Serpico asked the giant, who'd barely left the bed since they'd brought him to the safe house, rising only for food, water, and toilet. He'd drawn Quentin's blood himself, overnighted it to Boston, where an FBI buddy'd isolated the shit-cocktail concocted for Quentin at the "Agency's" behest: Thorazine, Haldol, Stelazine, Prozac, half a dozen others in trace amounts -- so far, so good was the "care package" Kramer'd provided -- but there was one whose identity Serpico's man hadn't yet determined. He'd said it might be days, maybe never. Whatever it was, he'd said, "It's one fucking long, complex molecule."

"Kid, you need to get up and move around. Lyin' in bed's not healthy."
"Where am I?" queried Quentin, raising himself to sit upright.
"I'm Sergeant Nick Serpico of the Stanton County Sheriff's Department," offered the older man, most of his hand's disappearing in Quentin's as though it were a child's.
"Quentin Short. Always hated that," he simpered.
Chuckled Serpico, "I'll bet. Look, Kid, I'm going to the deli. Anything special I can get you?"
"Twelve-inch roast beef and swiss, everything, large Coke...three bags of Fritos?"
"You got it, Kid. I'll be back in thirty or less." The kid wasn't going anywhere, if he'd had the idea. Serpico'd picked half a dozen good, big men. He spoke to them in the front room, then walked to his lime green Dart, put the cherry on top, and sped to County Mental.

Serpico needed that drug, and he needed it now.
While watching Kramer get into her car, her having ignored his instructions, it hit him, just as federal assets rolled into his peripheral vision -- he managed the thought, "Damn you, vain, stupid woman!" and the next instant Kramer's little Mercedes, and she in it, became a blinding fireball. She'd chosen to run to the Agency with the note he'd passed to her in her office, and now she was dead. Hey keyed up his microphone, breaking radio silence to order his inside crew to take firing positions. Until proved otherwise, anyone unknown was an enemy, and known, a potential enemy. He drove, engine roaring, toward the buzzards moving in on the flaming wreck, nearly running over one in an FBI jacket, whose attention he directed to his sniper teams moving into position above. He sped toward the hospital lobby.

Taking them at a slight angle, he drove up the steps and through the lobby's plate glass facade, spraying glass and metal for a screaming audience. As far as Nick Serpico, young namesake of the great New York undercover cop was concerned, everyone in that building but patients and his crew, complicit. All he was as a cop, and as a man, was focused on finding one Dr. David "Mengele" Melton.

...

Serpico never called him "Jim." This was heavy, Barnes thought.
"What the Hell, Nick? You want me to believe the Cap's dirty?" Nick threw the photos on the table.
"As a sewer."
"You put a PI on 'im? I don't fuckin' believe it. This is low, Man."
"Keep lookin.'"
"I'm lookin!' I'm lookin!' So the Cap's fuckin' the head shrink. Old news."
"You'll see."
"Fuck me."
"Yeah. Cap's on the take, with the Agency. Look at the eyes buggin' out of his head."
"And Walter Redd's being yanked into the WPP. What the fuck is that?"
"Yeah, what is that?" winked Nick.

"What you got?"
"We got a jolly green giant, my friend."
"The kid? He's fuckin' bananas."
"Is he?"
"Nick, you know he is. Come on."
"Remember the black light sweep, how clean it was?"
"Yeah, so?"
"It was too fuckin' clean. Not so much as a drop of spit. Does that seem odd to you? Not even Felix fuckin' Unger's that clean."
"Redd's dead." Barnes flicked his temple, then, "Cleaners?"
"Yeah. Not a fuckin' trace."
"Agency?"
"And how. They make CIA look like cub scouts."
"So Short had some help that night. Too bad he knows nothin.'"
"He knows plenty."
"How do you figure?"

"You heard Mengele. He'd trained the kid to be detached.
Fucked him almost from infancy, the sick fuck. Know what that does?"
"You mean besides break brains?"
"In addition to developing detachment, it causes the child's sensory sensitivity to be many times normal, and eidetic, photographic retention, high intelligence. Quentin's is huge."
"A fuckin' walking video recorder. Hypnosis?"
"Hypnosis. But here's the rub, and you can bet your ass Mengele's is puckerin.'
You have to get the regression right, or the Defense will try to have it thrown out for bias.
Motherfuckers think they can get away with it, that a kid knows nothing! They know. An' we got us one."

...

Serpico exited his freshly modified Dart, gun in hand, badge in the other, disarmed the security guard in the lobby, and impolitely letting his gun do most of the talking, had the guard lead him to Melton. On reaching the nursery, he was shocked to find Barnes standing over a partially nude Melton with a quaking trigger finger.

"Easy, Partner, easy. I got 'im," a calm Serpico assured Barnes. "Keep an eye on Barney Fife here, while Dr. Melton and I have a talk. What did you see, Partner?"
"Caught him in flagrante delicto with child, anogenital penetration. Told the nurse to sit tight with the kid till the paramedics showed; one of our counselors will be here any minute, to ride in with him. One of your crew's watching the nurse, with instructions to keep all -- and I mean all -- paws off that kid; I don't care if it's Mother Theresa with a medical bag. The rest have buttoned down all hospital facilities."
"Good job, Bro. You and Barney should have a look at the lobby. Real mess, and a circus in the parking lot, too. Give the media the lowdown."
"You got it, Lieutenant."

The "doctor" sat in the examination room on a pediatric table, hands cuffed behind his back, expressionless. Serpico stalked him in a tight arc, gun pointed at his head, a hungry, caged cat who'd just been thrown a poodle.
"If it were up to me, Doc, you'd be dead. Fortunately for you, my partner and I are good men, and mostly by-the-book. I've filed down this
trigger -- gun might go off if you fuck up. Where's the secret sauce? The drug, Doc. Where is it?" Serpico jerked a round into the chamber,
grabbed a handful of Mengele's hair, put the barrel to his temple. "Take me to the drug, Doc," he cooed, almost whispered, and Mengele obeyed.

"Get this shit to 'em right away," Serpico commanded a crew member, handing him a supply of the drug. He turned his attention back to Mengele.
"Let's take a walk, Doc."
"What are you doing?"
"Shut up and move," Serpico directed, still guiding him by gun barrel. He wanted to send a message to this fuckin' place that their former boss and his weird ways were out of service. "We're going to look in on the media, Doc."

...

Whatever it was: the blindness of arrogance, or a bulwark of good beyond which the Agency was barred, IAD was onto the captain, and an interim captain had given Barnes the go on Mengele. They blew open the Agency's infiltration of the WPP and corroborated Serpico's theory that their cleaners had destroyed Walter Redd's body. They arrested dozens of County Mental "doctors" and staff, and prominent "citizens" involved in the morgue rape and snuff parties Mengele had hosted and supplied with female mental patients.

With help from Quentin and a co-operative Melton,
Serpico and Barnes had pieced together the case, and with Quentin's retrieval of stashed evidence, abandoned Serpico's hitherto working theory.
"What Melton hadn't known," wrote Captain Serpico,
and Lieutenant Barnes, fellow field-promoted cops,
"was that he, not Quentin, had killed Walter Redd, the complicit guard."

"An extremely intelligent young man intent on survival, Quentin had devised a plan to turn Project Cerberus on its head. Using Melton's arrogant belief in his own invulnerability against him, Quentin regularly adulterated Melton's food and drink with the drug intended for himself, gradually addicting Melton and weaning himself from it.

"Simultaneously, he'd created elaborate electronic decoys: the first, of the computerized radio signal program -- the robotic assassin program intended for him -- tuning it instead to Melton's unique signature; the second, a digitally created scene showing Quentin as the murder weapon's wielder, while making a recording of what had actually transpired.

"Quentin had wished to give us the authentic video recording and the murder weapon that morning, but from the early stages of his plan had created the theater of his psychotic breakdown, forcing Melton to adjust the experiment. Quentin's ruse, his being unsure of how thoroughgoing the Agency's conspiracy, served him well on the morning of the murder. Having seen from his hiding place (one of the drawers) the diabolical results of the assassin program in action, and the Agency cleaners' work, he had believed himself in mortal danger, and decided to take his chances at County Mental Hospital."

Serpico turned in their report, which met the Prosecutor's satisfaction.

Their handling of the media circus at the hospital would have made Ziegfried and Roy blush. It was a watershed event, triggering the arrest of several top officials of the National Security State, dismantling of their robotic assassin program and its radio/satellite network, and had sparked heated debate over the constitutionality of indicting a sitting President of the United States.

Serpico and Barnes sat in the lieutenant's car.
The People would probably see Doctor David "Mengele" Melton live to a ripe old age in prison. Serpico vomited. Barnes hooked a large paw around his shoulders, hauled him upright in the passenger seat of his Caddy and gave him his handkerchief. "We did good, Brother," Barnes said.
"Yeah. We did...I'm buyin.'"
"You'll spit more than puke!" barked Barnes, showing him his fist.
"Okay, okay," chortled Serpico. "Let's get the fuck out of here."
Tonight they would go to bed drunk, but many would sleep better for their work.