Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

“Okay,” he says, and he puts the flashlight back into his pocket.

“Okay?”

“Here’s what we’re going to do. I’m going to finish stitching you up, and then I’m going to have you admitted.”

“I don’t have time for that.”

“What do you have time for? For dying? Because that’s what might happen if we don’t take a better look at you. You’ve had trauma today to a preexisting trauma from an attack where a glass jar was broken against the side of your head. You obviously have some intracranial injury. When you were slugged in the head today that could have killed you. You hit your head against a wall tomorrow and that could kill you. You could just as easily die tonight lying down in bed.”

“Thanks for sugarcoating it for me. Listen, I’ll be careful, I promise, and when this case is over I’ll be right back. Can’t you just write me a script?”

He sighs, then slowly nods. “Fine,” he says. He pulls out a prescription pad. He scrawls across it and hands me the top sheet. He’s written “Walking out of here might kill you.” He’s underlined it. I fold it up and slip it into my pocket.

It takes over thirty stitches and twenty minutes to close all of the wounds. When he’s done the nurse comes back and bandages me up. Then she insists on taking me into another room in a wheelchair. It’s a smooth ride. The office she wheels me into has pictures of brains on the wall, illustrated cross sections of it, and a model brain on the desk.

“Wait here,” she says.

“Honestly, I feel fine now,” I tell her.

“Good. Then what I’m saying should make sense to you.”

It does make sense. She steps out of the room and I sit in the silence listening to my body, and it’s telling me that for now it’s okay. It’s telling me there are more important things to be doing. It makes a convincing argument, so convincing in fact that I climb out of the wheelchair and step into the corridor. I take the opposite direction from the way I came, loop around the halls until I find an exit, then leave. I do all of that with perfect balance. There are taxis parked outside and I climb into the one at the front and take a ride to the police station.

The boy-racers must be blocking the other side of town or have gone home to jerk off to The Fast and the Furious. The car I used before has been driven back for me. My leg hurts when I walk, and hurts when I don’t walk, though not as much. I call Dr. Forster on the way into the police building and have to leave another message.

I start to feel a bit dizzy walking into the police station, and I feel sick when the elevator takes me up to the fourth floor-it feels like the world is dropping out from under me-but for the most part I feel pretty good. I lean against the wall to keep the weight off my leg. If my next assignment involves infiltrating a line-dancing ring I’m going to lose my job. The doors open and reveal every detective in a state of information gathering, they’re on phones and on computers and reading files. Schroder comes over from the coffee machine and takes a look at me.

“They don’t have to cut it off?” he asks.

“You look like shit,” I tell him.

“Funny, I was going to tell you the same thing.”

“Where’s the girl?”

“In my office,” he says. “We need to interview her, but first we have to clear something up. We’re looking for Ariel Chancellor. So far there’s no word on her whereabouts, but to be clear you got there and found her door already open, saw drugs on the table, and that gave you reason to enter. That how it played out?” he asks me, but he’s not really asking, he’s telling me the scenario.

“Exactly.”

“That’s what I thought. Run through it for me.”

We walk to his office, the dizziness from the elevator gone. I run though it for him, changing the details from breaking in to walking in an open door and calling out hello.

“Well, nobody in the area saw a thing,” he says, “but we did get a complaint from one of the neighbors. They said you kicked their dog in the head.”

I tighten my jaw and hold onto a sudden burst of anger. “They let it loose on me. They were telling the damn thing to attack!”

“Well, they’re making a complaint. They’re going to push it, no doubt to see if they can get a settlement. They’re saying you trespassed and abused them and assaulted their pet.”

My hand curls into a fist and I look at the wall wanting to punch it, and there are already other fist-shaped holes in it. Most of those holes have been signed and dated, a wall of fame of sorts, smiley faces drawn next to some. I relax my fist. “Are you shitting me?”

He shrugs. “I wish I was. I got a sketch artist coming upstairs to talk with you-just to get a more current description of Cole.”

“Unbelievable,” I say.

“Let it go, Tate, we’ve got more important things to worry about.”

“Like interviewing the girl.”

“About that,” he says. “You remember Benson Barlow?” he asks.

Barlow is a psychiatrist I met six weeks ago out at Grover Hills, the now abandoned mental institution where an ex-mental patient was holed up with a collection of dead bodies and an even bigger collection of really bad ideas.

“What about him?”

“He’s on his way to talk to the girl. I figure it can’t hurt. She’s pretty traumatized. She’s not talking much, but she’s shaking and crying a hell of a lot. We’ve got a female officer in there with her now trying to comfort her, but it’s not going great. Poor kid was initially found covered in fake blood. Probably came from the same shop the fake knife came from.”

“Fake knife?”

“Yeah, one of those types where the blade goes into the handle.”

“So he pretended to kill her?”

“Looks that way,” Schroder says. “Plus the only thing she’s really said is the same thing a few times, which is she was the one chosen.”

“Chosen?”

Schroder shrugs. “Hopefully Barlow can find out for sure, but I’m guessing she was the one chosen to be killed. Or fake killed, as it turned out.”

“For the doctor’s benefit?”

“What other reason is there?” he asks. “Like I said, that’s all she’s said because she’s so damn scared. My guess is he sedated her first. I mean, not much point in pretending to have stabbed her if she’s lying on the floor moving around okay.”

“He asked me what kind of monster I thought he was,” I say, picturing him standing over me after he’d kicked me in the stomach. Caleb Cole with his scarred face and clenched fists. “I don’t think he’s capable of killing children, but he must want Stanton to think otherwise.”

“Well, he’s still a monster, and he still has the two younger ones. As for Melanie, he left her out there with a bag of food, drink, and a bunch of blankets. She could have lived out there for a few days as long as she didn’t wander off looking for help and dying in those woods. Anything could have happened to her out there.”

“Maybe he was planning on phoning in her location.”

“Maybe. We’ll ask when we drag him in here,” Schroder says.

The elevator doors open and we can see Barlow from across the floor. It must be comb-over Tuesday, because Barlow comes in with the same haircut my doctor had and looking just as tired. He looks to his right first, then left, but doesn’t spot us.

“He pulled me over the fence,” I tell Schroder.

“What?”

“The dog. It had a good hold of me and was pulling me back down. I’m telling you, that stupid thing was going to rip me apart, and those bastards in that house, they were going to let it. Cole, he reached up and pulled me free. He saved my ass.”

Schroder gives me a cold stare. “Look, Tate, do we have a problem here?”