Shutter Island Page 16

  “Edward.”

  He laughed.

  “What?”

  He held up a hand. “Nothing.”

  “No. What?”

  “No one calls me Edward but my mother.”

  “Teddy, then.”

  He loved hearing her say the word.

  “Yes.”

  “Teddy,” she said again, trying it out.

  “Hey. What’s your last name?” he said.

  “Chanal.”

  Teddy cocked an eyebrow at that.

  She said, “I know. It doesn’t go with the rest of me at all. Sounds so highfalutin.”

  “Can I call you?”

  “You got a head for numbers?”

  Teddy smiled. “Actually…”

  “Winter Hill six-four-three-four-six,” she said.

  He’d stood on the sidewalk as the cab pulled away, and the memory of her face just an inch from his—through the cab window, on the dance floor—nearly short-circuited his brain, almost drove her name and number right out of there.

  He thought: so this is what it feels like to love. No logic to it—he barely knew her. But there it was just the same. He’d just met the woman he’d known, somehow, since before he was born. The measure of every dream he’d never dared indulge.

  Dolores. She was thinking of him now in the dark backseat, feeling him as he was feeling her.

  Dolores.

  Everything he’d ever needed, and now it had a name.

  TEDDY TURNED OVER on his cot and reached down to the floor, searched around until he found his notebook and a box of matches. He lit the first match off his thumb, held it above the page he’d scribbled on in the storm. He went through four matches before he’d ascribed the appropriate letters to the numbers:

  18—1—4—9—5—4—19—1—12—4—23—14—5

  R—A—D—I—E—D—S—A—L—D—W—N—E

  Once that was done, though, it didn’t take long to unscramble the code. Another two matches, and Teddy was staring at the name as the flame winnowed its way down the wood toward his fingers:

  Andrew Laeddis.

  As the match grew hotter, he looked over at Chuck, sleeping two cots over, and he hoped his career wouldn’t suffer. It shouldn’t. Teddy would take all the blame. Chuck should be fine. He had that aura about him in general—no matter what happened, Chuck would emerge unscathed.

  He looked back at the page, got one last glimpse before the match blew itself out.

  Going to find you today, Andrew. If I don’t owe Dolores my life, I owe her that much, at least.

  Going to find you.

  Going to kill you dead.

  DAY THREE

  Patient Sixty-Seven

  14

  THE TWO HOMES outside the wall—the warden’s and Cawley’s—took direct hits. Half of Cawley’s roof was gone, the tile flung all over the hospital grounds like a lesson in humility. A tree had gone through the warden’s living room window, through the plywood nailed there for protection, roots and all in the middle of his house.

  The compound was strewn with shells and tree branches and an inch and a half of water. Cawley’s tile, a few dead rats, scores of soggy apples, all of it gritty with sand. The foundation of the hospital looked like someone had taken a jackhammer to it, and Ward A had lost four windows and several sections of flashing were curled back like pompadours on the roof. Two of the staff cottages had been turned into sticks, and a few others lay on their sides. The nurse and orderly dormitories had lost several windows and suffered some water damage between them. Ward B had been spared, not a mark on it. All up and down the island, Teddy could see trees with their tops snapped off, the naked wood pointing up like spears.

  The air was dead again, thick and sullen. The rain fell in a tired, steady drizzle. Dead fish covered the shore. When they’d first come out into the morning, a single flounder lay flapping and puffing in the breezeway, one sad, swollen eye looking back toward the sea.

  Teddy and Chuck watched McPherson and a guard rock a jeep off its side. When they turned the ignition, it started on the fifth try, and they roared back out through the gates and Teddy saw them a minute later, racing up the incline behind the hospital toward Ward C.

  Cawley walked into the compound, paused to pick up a piece of his roof and stare at it before dropping it back to the watery ground. His gaze swept past Teddy and Chuck twice before he recognized them in their white orderly clothing and their black slickers and black ranger’s hats. He gave them an ironic smile and seemed about to approach them when a doctor with a stethoscope around his neck jogged out of the hospital and ran up to him.

  “Number two’s gone. We can’t get it back up. We’ve got those two criticals. They’ll die, John.”

  “Where’s Harry?”

  “Harry’s working on it, but he can’t get a charge. What good’s a backup if it doesn’t back anything up?”

  “All right. Let’s get in there.”

  They strode off into the hospital, and Teddy said, “Their backup generator failed?”

  Chuck said, “These things will happen in a hurricane apparently.”

  “You see any lights?”

  Chuck looked around at the windows. “Nope.”

  “You think the whole electrical system is fried?”

  Chuck said, “Good possibility.”

  “That would mean fences.”

  Chuck picked up an apple as it floated onto his foot. He went into a windup and kicked his leg and fired it into the wall. “Stee-rike one!” He turned to Teddy. “That would mean fences, yes.”

  “Probably all electronic security. Gates. Doors.”

  Chuck said, “Oh, dear God, help us.” He picked up another apple, tossed it above his head, and caught it behind his back. “You want to go into that fort, don’t you?”

  Teddy tilted his face into the soft rain. “Perfect day for it.”

  The warden made an appearance, driving into the compound with three guards in a jeep, the water churning out from the tires. The warden noticed Chuck and Teddy standing idly in the yard, and it seemed to annoy him. He was taking them for orderlies, Teddy realized, just as Cawley had, and it pissed him off that they didn’t have rakes or water pumps in their hands. He drove past, though, his head snapping forward, on to more important things. Teddy realized he had yet to hear the man’s voice, and he wondered if it was as black as his hair or as pale as his skin.

  “Probably should get going, then,” Chuck said. “This won’t hold forever.”

  Teddy started walking toward the gate.

  Chuck caught up with him. “I’d whistle, but my mouth’s too dry.”

  “Scared?” Teddy said lightly.

  “I believe the term is shit-scared, boss.” He rifled the apple into another section of wall.

  They approached the gate and the guard there had a little boy’s face and cruel eyes. He said, “All orderlies are to report to Mr. Willis in the admin office. You guys are on cleanup detail.”

  Chuck and Teddy looked at each other’s white shirts and pants.

  Chuck said, “Eggs Benedict.”

  Teddy nodded. “Thanks. I was wondering. Lunch?”

  “A thinly sliced Reuben.”

  Teddy turned to the guard, flashed his badge. “Our clothes are still in the laundry.”

  The guard glanced at Teddy’s badge, then looked at Chuck, waiting.

  Chuck sighed and removed his wallet, flipped it open under the guard’s nose.

  The guard said, “What’s your business outside the wall? The missing patient was found.”

  Any explanation, Teddy decided, would make them look weak and place the balance of power firmly in this little shit’s hand. Teddy had had a dozen little shits like this in his company during the war. Most of them didn’t come home, and Teddy had often wondered if anyone really minded. You couldn’t reach this type of asshole, couldn’t teach him anything. But you could back him off if you understood that the only thing he respected was power.

 
Teddy stepped up to the guy, searched his face, a small smile tugging the corner of his lips, waiting until the guy met his eyes and held them.

  “We’re going on a stroll,” Teddy said.

  “You don’t have authorization.”

  “Yes, we do.” Teddy stepped closer so the boy had to tilt his eyes up. He could smell his breath. “We’re federal marshals on a federal facility. That’s the authorization of God himself. We don’t answer to you. We don’t explain to you. We can choose to shoot you in the dick, boy, and there’s not a court in the country that would even hear the case.” Teddy leaned in another half inch. “So open the fucking gate.”

  The kid tried to hold Teddy’s stare. He swallowed. He tried to harden his eyes.

  Teddy said, “I repeat: Open that—”

  “Okay.”

  “I didn’t hear you,” Teddy said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Teddy kept the evil eye in the kid’s face for another second, exhaled audibly through his nostrils.

  “Good enough, son. Hoo-ah.”

  “Hoo-ah,” the kid said reflexively, his Adam’s apple bulging.

  He turned his key in the lock and swung back the gate, and Teddy walked through without a look back.

  They turned right and walked along the outside of the wall for a bit before Chuck said, “Nice touch with the ’hoo-ah.’”

  Teddy looked over at him. “I liked that one, myself.”

  “You were a ballbuster overseas, weren’t you?”

  “I was a battalion sergeant with a bunch of kids under my command. Half of ’em died without ever getting laid. You don’t ’nice’ your way to respect, you fucking scare it into ’em.”

  “Yes, Sergeant. Damn straight.” Chuck snapped a salute at him. “Even with the power out, you recall that this is a fort we’re trying to infiltrate, don’t you?”

  “It did not slip my mind, no.”

  “Any ideas?”

  “Nope.”

  “You think they have a moat? That’d be something.”

  “Maybe some vats of hot oil up on the battlements.”

  “Archers,” Chuck said. “If they have archers, Teddy…”

  “And us without our chain mail.”

  They stepped over a fallen tree, the ground soggy and slick with wet leaves. Through the shredded vegetation ahead of them, they could see the fort, its great gray walls, see the tracks from the jeeps that had been going back and forth all morning.

  “That guard had a point,” Chuck said.

  “How so?”

  “Now that Rachel’s been found, our authority here—such as it was—is pretty much nonexistent. We get caught, boss, there’s no way we’ll be able to come up with a logical explanation.”

  Teddy felt the riot of discarded, shredded green in the back of his eyes. He felt exhausted, a bit hazy. Four hours of drug-induced, nightmare-ridden sleep last night was all he’d had. The drizzle pattered the top of his hat, collected in the brim. His brain buzzed, almost imperceptibly, but constantly. If the ferry came today—and he doubted it would—one part of him wanted to just hop on it and go. Get the fuck off this rock. But without something to show for this trip, whether that was evidence for Senator Hurly or Laeddis’s death certificate, he’d be returning a failure. Still borderline-suicidal, but with the added weight to his conscience that he’d done nothing to effect change.

  He flipped open his notebook. “Those rock piles Rachel left us yesterday. This is the broken code.” He handed the notebook to Chuck.

  Chuck cupped a hand around it, kept it close to his chest. “So, he’s here.”

  “He’s here.”

  “Patient Sixty-seven, you think?”

  “Be my guess.”

  Teddy stopped by an outcropping in the middle of a muddy slope. “You can go back, Chuck. You don’t have to be involved in this.”

  Chuck looked up at him and flapped the notebook against his hand. “We’re marshals, Teddy. What do marshals always do?”

  Teddy smiled. “We go through the doors.”

  “First,” Chuck said. “We go through the doors first. We don’t wait for some city doughnut cops to back us up if time’s a-wasting. We go through that fucking door.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Well, all right, then,” Chuck said and handed the notebook back to him and they continued toward the fort.

  ONE LOOK AT it from up close, nothing separating them but a stand of trees and a short field, and Chuck said what Teddy was thinking:

  “We’re fucked.”

  The Cyclone fence that normally surrounded it had been blown out of the ground in sections. Parts of it lay flat on the ground, others had been flung to the far tree line, and the rest sagged in various states of uselessness.

  Armed guards roamed the perimeter, though. Several of them did steady circuits in jeeps. A contingent of orderlies picked up the debris around the exterior and another group of them set to work on a thick tree that had downed itself against the wall. There was no moat, but there was only one door, a small red one of dimpled iron set in the center of the wall. Guards stood sentry up on the battlements, rifles held to their shoulders and chests. The few small window squares cut into the stone were barred. There were no patients outside the door, manacled or not. Just guards and orderlies in equal measure.

  Teddy saw two of the roof guards step to the side, saw several orderlies step up to the edge of the battlements and call out to those on the ground to stand clear. They wrestled half a tree to the edge of the roof and then pushed and pulled it until it teetered there. Then they disappeared, getting behind it and pushing, and the half-tree rammed forward another couple of feet and then tipped and men shouted as it sped down the wall and then crashed to the ground. The orderlies came back up to the edge of the battlements and looked down at their handiwork and shook hands and clapped shoulders.

  “There’s got to be a duct of some sort, right?” Chuck said. “Maybe to dump water or waste out into the sea? We could go in that way.”

  Teddy shook his head. “Why bother? We’re just going to walk right in.”

  “Oh, like Rachel walked out of Ward B? I get it. Take some of that invisible powder she had. Good idea.”

  Chuck frowned at him and Teddy touched the collar of his rain slicker. “We’re not dressed like marshals, Chuck. Know what I mean?”

  Chuck looked back at the orderlies working the perimeter and watched one come out through the iron door with a cup of coffee in his hand, the steam rising through the drizzle in small snakes of smoke.

  “Amen,” he said. “Amen, brother.”

  THEY SMOKED CIGARETTES and talked gibberish to each other as they walked down the road toward the fort.

  Halfway across the field, they were met by a guard, his rifle hanging lazily under his arm and pointed at the ground.

  Teddy said, “They sent us over. Something about a tree on the roof?”

  The guard looked back over his shoulder. “Nah. They took care of that.”

  “Oh, great,” Chuck said, and they started to turn away.

  “Whoa, Trigger,” the guard said. “There’s still plenty of work to be done.”

  They turned back.

  Teddy said, “You got thirty guys working that wall.”

  “Yeah, well, the inside’s a fucking mess. A storm ain’t gonna knock a place like this down, but it’s still gonna get inside. You know?”

  “Oh, sure,” Teddy said.

  “WHERE’S THE MOP detail?” Chuck said to the guard lounging against the wall by the door.

  He jerked his thumb and opened the door and they passed through into the receiving hall.

  “I don’t want to appear ungrateful,” Chuck said, “but that was too easy.”

  Teddy said, “Don’t overthink it. Sometimes you get lucky.”

  The door closed behind them.

  “Luck,” Chuck said, a small vibration in his voice. “That’s what we’re calling it?”

  “That’s what we’re cal
ling it.”

  The first thing that hit Teddy was the smells. An aroma of industrial-strength disinfectant doing its level best to disguise the reek of vomit, feces, sweat, and most of all, urine.

  Then the noise billowed out from the rear of the building and down from the upper floors: the rumble of running feet, shouts that bounced and echoed off the thick walls and dank air, sudden high-pitched yelps that seized the ear and then died, the pervasive yammering of several different voices all talking at once.

  Someone shouted, “You can’t! You fucking can’t do that! You hear me? You can’t. Get away…,” and the words trailed off.

  Somewhere above them, around the curve of a stone staircase, a man sang “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall.” He’d finished the seventy-seventh bottle and started on the seventy-sixth.

  Two canisters of coffee sat up on a card table along with stacks of paper cups and a few bottles of milk. A guard sat at another card table at the base of the staircase, looking at them, smiling.

  “First time, huh?”

  Teddy looked over at him even as the old sounds were replaced by new ones, the whole place a kind of sonic orgy, yanking the ears in every direction.

  “Yeah. Heard stories, but…”

  “You get used to it,” the guard said. “You get used to anything.”

  “Ain’t that the truth.”

  He said, “If you guys aren’t working the roof, you can hang your coats and hats in the room behind me.”

  “They told us we’re on the roof,” Teddy said.

  “Who’d you piss off?” The guard pointed. “Just follow those stairs. We got most of the bugsies locked down to their beds now, but a few are running free. You see one, you shout, all right? Whatever you do, don’t try to restrain him yourself. This ain’t Ward A. You know? These fuckers’ll kill you. Clear?”

  “Clear.”

  They started up the steps and the guard said, “Wait a minute.”

  They stopped, looked back down at him.

  He was smiling, pointing a finger at them.

  They waited.

  “I know you guys.” His voice had a singsong lilt to it.