Джеймс Паттерсон - The Inn

“How do you know it was a woman?” he said.

“Because they’re smarter than us.” I kept my eyes locked on Cline’s big black car. “Susan makes me feel like a dope with a single sideways glance.”

“You’re talking about her like she’s your girlfriend,” Nick said, putting his arms behind his head. Maybe it was the excitement of being on Cline without his knowing I was there or the rush of trying to obtain the upper hand, the gathering hope that I could bring him down, remove him from my life, my friends’ lives. Whatever it was, I wasn’t paying attention to Nick’s mood. I gripped the steering wheel, took a deep breath.

“We …” I glanced at him. “Before everything that happened last night. You know. We might have taken things up a notch.”

“That’s nice. So sorry a psychopath leaving us a corpse and me being a crazy freak ruined it for you.”

“You’re not a crazy freak,” I said. “And no number of corpses could take the shine off Susan Solie.”

“That should be on your Valentine’s Day card to her,” Nick said.

“It just sort of happened. I’d been wondering if … if it was going to happen. We’d kissed. But I didn’t know if it was just the moment and something that struck us both. We were on the beach and the moon was over us and I’d been so consumed worrying about everyone and the plan with the boat,” I said. “But I think there’s something there with Susan. Something between us. I mean, I know there’s something there, at least on my side. But maybe she—”

I looked at Nick. He hardly seemed to be listening.

“Sorry,” I said. I burned through a yellow light to keep on Cline. “So what did the shrink say?”

“It was bullshit.” Nick snorted. “Total bullshit. I don’t think I’ll go back. You sit with a person for more than an hour and they can’t even give you a solid diagnosis. Can you believe that? She wants to consult with her supervisor. Why would you license someone to be a shrink if she can’t even give you a proper diagnosis without having to run to her teacher? ‘Congratulations, madame. You sort of know how to do your job but not really.’”

“She has to talk to her supervisor to decide if you’ve got PTSD?” I asked.

Nick licked his teeth, watched the cars ahead of us.

“Nick?”

“She knows I’ve got PTSD,” he said.

We sat in silence. Nick took his feet off the dashboard, clasped his hands, and looked at them in his lap. I listened to him taking a deep breath, trying to find the words, failing, and trying again.

“I’m pulling over.”

“Don’t pull over,” he said. “We need to stay on Cline. We need to get this guy.” He folded his arms, a barrier of muscle and bone over his heart. “She thinks I’m also schizophrenic.”

CHAPTER NINETY-THREE

THE CAR AROUND me seemed to shrink. Suddenly it was hard to stay on the road. I looked at my friend.

“What do you mean, she thinks that?”

“You can’t just diagnose it in an hour,” he said. “See, this is the bullshit I was talking about. She needs to get her supervisor to sign off on me having schizophreniform disorder , which is what you have if your schizophrenia symptoms haven’t been going on longer than six months. And then when the supervisor signs off on that, that becomes your day one. So you have to be observed for six months like a fucking rat in a lab until they can figure out if it’s the full version or one of the sub-versions. I mean, what the fuck? It was all so wishy-washy. She wasn’t listening to me properly. Most of the time she was just taking notes. She’s the one who’s nuts if you ask me.”

“So you don’t think she really got what you were saying?”

“No.” Nick straightened in his seat. “I mean, one of the symptoms she was talking about was catatonic stupor. I know what that is. I’ve read about it. That’s what she didn’t get—I’m not an idiot and I checked out this stuff before when I was trying to figure out what was wrong with me. Catatonic is when you’re there but you’re not really there, like you’re a robot. In a trance. I’ve never experienced that.”

I thought about the sleepy, dreamy state Nick went into after his episodes, the almost automatic way he moved and talked. Like someone who wasn’t fully present. I opened my mouth to say something and then closed it.

“She wanted to know about my delusions.” He shrugged. “That’s when you’re imagining rainbow elephants prancing around the fucking sky and lizards crawling on your skin and shit.”

“Well.” I cleared my throat. “Those might be hallucinations, which are different from delusions, I think.”

“Whatever.”

“I mean last night … ” I cleared my throat again, glanced at him. “You seemed to be sort of … reenacting a scene, maybe? Talking to people who weren’t there. Someone named Rickson?”

Nick turned away from me to look out his window.

“You said you did bad things over there while you were deployed. You said to Rickson that this guy wasn’t going to give you anything, and then you shot—”

“I don’t want to talk about this. It was my mind playing tricks. It means nothing.”

“Yes, but were they memories you were reliving, or was it just—”

“Cap, fuck!” Nick said. “Would you listen to yourself? You have no fucking idea what you’re talking about!”

“That’s the point!” I said. “Look, I know war is hard. But I’m starting to wonder whether there was … maybe there was more to it. Who was Rickson? Were you asked to do things that were …”

Nick didn’t answer.

“You can trust me, Nick,” I said.

“It was just the regular stuff,” he said slowly. “Just the fucked-up nature of war. I don’t know any guys named Rickson from back then. I didn’t do anything criminal.”

I didn’t say you did , I thought.

Silence fell between us, hot and heavy. He sniffed, then spoke again in a softer voice, trying to ease back into the conversation. “So maybe it is hallucinations.” He shrugged. “Whatever. Fine. But if I’m having hallucinations, how am I supposed to know they’re hallucinations? What are we saying here? Like, is Cline not real? Are we not following a dude who’s been messing with us, who killed Marni, who sent guys to our house? Are you even real?” He poked me in the shoulder, too hard to be a friendly jab.

“I’m real,” I said. “And we’ll figure it out together. Whether it’s PTSD or schizophrenia or whatever the hell it is.”

“Well, she thinks I’ve got both, which is just fantastic,” he said. “Whoo-hoo! What a catch I am. A crazy, messed-up freak who doesn’t even know what’s real and what isn’t.”

“You’re not crazy,” I said. When he didn’t answer I put my hand on his arm. “You’re not crazy.”

“She thinks the PTSD kicked it off.” He shrugged my hand away. “It can bring out symptoms of schizophrenia you might have had lying dormant under the surface. She said it was like the thunderclap that sets off the avalanche. She was full of stupid metaphors like that.” He snorted, clumped his big boots up onto the dashboard again. “See, these people at the veterans hospitals, they diagnose you with whatever condition because they need the funding. Putting me on a program of observation, feeding me pills, x-raying my brain—that all costs money. Someone has to pay for that, and they charge whatever they want. They’re as bad as Cline.” He gestured out the windshield. “It was all bullshit, Cap. I’m not going back.”

“Nick,” I said. “I just want to say that I—”

“I know, I know,” he snapped. “You’re here for me. Well, if you’re here for me, Cap, you better go get yourself a crowbar or a fucking metal file or something, because they’re going to lock me up. That’s how it works. They say you’re crazy, that you’re a danger to yourself and others. Then they commit you to an institution, and they keep you there and rake in the insurance money.”