JASON STARR - Panic Attack

On Friday morning Adam decided that shooting Carlos Sanchez ten times had probably been a mistake. Shooting him the first two times had been necessary- he had no doubts about that- but he wished he could take back the other eight shots.

But, unfortunately, there was nothing he could do about that now. What was that Shakespeare quote, what was done can’t be undone? It was so true. And ruminating about it incessantly was just causing anxiety and stress, so why not just let go?

Adam was getting dressed to go to work when Dana sat up in bed and said, “I want to go to Florida.”

She had just woken up and her voice was deeper than normal, more gravelly.

“Come on,” Adam said, “you know we can’t do that right now.”

“We can do whatever we want. We’re not trapped here.”

Buttoning a red pinstriped shirt, Adam said, “Clements said he doesn’t want us to leave.”

“I want to talk to a lawyer today. We’re not criminals, for God’s sake, we’re not suspects in anything. We don’t have to stay around here, putting our lives at risk, because he wants us to stay.”

“I think you’re being a little melodramatic-”

“We can be available by telephone. We can be available by e-mail. We can teleconference with him. This is the twenty- first century, for God’s sake.”

Adam, sitting down in a chair, putting on his loafers, said, “If there was a reason to go to Florida I’d go.”

“Your life was threatened,” Dana said. “If that’s not a reason to go, what is?”

“Okay, just relax, take some deep breaths,” Adam said. “It’s very difficult to talk to you when you get like this.”

Adam was looking down at his shoes, but he knew exactly what Dana’s expression was- she was staring at him in mock exasperated disbelief.

“Fine, you do whatever you want to do,” she finally said. “But I’m leaving, and I’m taking Marissa with me. If you want to stay here that’s up to you.”

Adam stood back and checked himself out in the mirror. He didn’t look the best he’d ever looked. He appeared tired, worn, burnt- out-the stress of the past few days was getting to him. He could see Dana behind him, sitting at the edge of the bed. She didn’t look so terrific either.

“Let’s discuss this later when you’re calmer,” he said. “I have to get to the office.”

“I’ll let you know what hotel we’re staying at,” Dana said.

“Oh, come on, can you please just stop it with the posturing?”

“He’s using us as bait. I refuse to be bait.”

“There’s no one to bait us. The note was a prank.”

“It was a death threat, Adam.”

“It said nothing about killing me. It said, what, I don’t even remember. Oh, yeah, it said I was going to wish I was never born. Come on, that means nothing. It’s something a kid in a schoolyard would say.”

“I don’t understand why you’re not taking it seriously.”

“Not taking it seriously? Come on, I had Clements down here right away, I had cops outside all night. I think I’m taking it very seriously, but I still think it was a prank.”

“A kid from the neighborhood wouldn’t do something like that.”

“You don’t know that. It sounded like a kid, I mean the language.”

“It sounded like somebody who’s angry, who wants to hurt you.”

“Explain to me how that makes any sense. Please just try to explain it. Somebody who robbed our house would come here the next day and put a note under the door? Why? To scare me? If somebody’s angry, wants revenge, why leave a note? See, so if you think about it, logically, it doesn’t make any sense. It had to be a prank, maybe not a kid from the neighborhood but maybe some nut who read about me in the paper. I’m sure that happens all the time when somebody’s front- page news. That’s why, you noticed, Clements wasn’t very concerned. He probably sees this kind of thing happen all the time. If our number was listed I bet we would’ve been getting threats all night.”

Dana had a strange look. She was zoning out, looking like she was barely aware he was in the room.

“What’s wrong?” Adam asked.

She seemed far away for a while longer; then she focused and said, “Nothing.”

“You see my point now, don’t you?”

“Gabriela didn’t rob our house:” said she. She sounded oddly distant.

“What? What’re you talking about?”

“She wouldn’t do that,” she said. “I could see her getting desperate, wanting to help her father, but I can’t see her actually breaking into our house. That isn’t something she’d do.”

“I disagree,” Adam said. He glanced at the clock- 8:26. Damn, he had to get going. “She had a relationship with Sanchez, she made him copies of our keys and got him the code to the alarm. It makes sense that she broke in.”

“Then who killed her?” Dana asked.

Adam didn’t have an answer to this, so he said, “I agree there are some holes.”

“Oh, really,” she said sarcastically. “You’ve come to that conclusion, huh?”

Adam couldn’t remember- was his appointment with David Rothman at nine or ten? If it was at nine he’d never make it.

Turning on his BlackBerry to check, he said, “You have to give the police a little more time. Clements seemed confident last night that they’ll get a break in the case. I bet you they’ll make an arrest by the end of the day. Meanwhile, the cops are right outside.”

Dana said something, but Adam was distracted, looking at his BlackBerry. Shit, it was at nine. “Sorry,” he said, “what was that?”

“I said I think this is all about your ego. You think if you run away you’ll be admitting you did something wrong.”

Adam considered this, then said, “When I was in ju nior high and kids threatened to beat me up every day after school, I never had a problem at all running away from them. Trust me, if I believed I was in any danger at all right now, or you or Marissa was in any danger, I’d have no problem running away. But in this case I just don’t think that’s necessary.”

“Yeah? And what if you’re wrong?”

It was 8:28.

“I know you don’t like it when I leave in middiscussion, but I have no choice,” he said. He gave her his usual quick kiss good- bye and then said, “I’ll call you in a couple of hours, okay?” and left.

Adam arrived at his office at a few minutes past nine. David Rothman was in the waiting area, reading Newsweek. “Morning, David, I’ll be with you in one sec,” Adam said and went toward his office. He passed Lauren in the corridor; they exchanged good mornings, and he noticed that she didn’t seem quite as cold and distant as she had yesterday. Adam hadn’t bought a newspaper on the way to work, but he’d glanced at other people’s papers on the subway and knew that at least he wasn’t frontpage news again. Hopefully there were no mentions of him at all in today’s papers and the whole story was starting to fade.

Adam got settled in, refilled the water pitcher, and then reviewed his notes on his previous sessions with David. Things had been going well in David’s therapy lately. He had been seeing Adam for over ten weeks now with various issues, including some associated with middle age, as he had recently turned fifty. His wife had a drinking problem, and he had associated code penden cy issues, as well as difficulty expressing his anger, to his wife and in general. When he started seeing Adam, he’d been acting out by having a series of one- night stands with women he’d picked up at bars, and Adam felt he exhibited several telltale signs of sex addiction. They’d been working on techniques for expressing his anger, and, with Adam’s guidance, he had managed to convince his wife to go to AA. While he still expressed the desire to philander, they had been working on various behavior modification techniques, and David hadn’t cheated on his wife at all under Adam’s care.