Greg Iles - Sleep No More

Lily sat in the pickup, listening to Annelise breathing. Once, the respirations got so faint that she reached over the seat and put her hand on Ana’s chest to feel the reassuring rise and fall. For a few panicked seconds, she wondered if she had used too much Benadryl-then the inhalation came, weak but there.

Where was John now? On the porch? In the apartment? She prayed that he had the nerve to go through with it. Her husband had great compassion; that was one reason she had married him. Now compassion was his enemy.

“Hurry,” she murmured. “Don’t think. Just do it.”

She had been sitting in the truck, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cloak of night parted to reveal a yard with a swing set, seesaws, and a rose garden by Sybil’s apartment. Lily could imagine Sybil out there on Sunday mornings, alone, doing her best to make her apartment seem like a home. That simple thought pierced her heart, but she shut her mind to empathy. It wasn’t too difficult. All she had to do was focus on an image of herself dangling a butcher knife over her own daughter’s head. Superimposed on this horrifying scene was another: naked figures thrashing in ghostly green light, her own face clenched in ecstasy as she demeaned herself in ways that nauseated her now. Mallory Candler had done all that.

Lily actually remembered Mallory from St. Stephens. Like Cole, Mallory had been a senior when Lily was in the ninth grade. Her clearest memory of Mallory was a tall, proud, and stunningly beautiful girl moving through the halls of the school, leaving a wake of staring boys behind her. Lily had been a gangly freshman then, obsessed with long-distance running, though in her secret heart she knew she used running as an excuse not to deal with her insecurity about boys. Someone like Mallory Candler was beyond her understanding, a girl so radiantly desirable that grown men fawned over her whenever she was around. Lily had once seen her own father become tongue-tied in Mallory’s presence. Having experienced that reality, it was hard to imagine Mallory as the obsessively jealous psychotic her husband described. Yet she knew it could be true. What would it feel like to be such a creature and be denied something after so many years of having everything?

Lily went rigid, gooseflesh covering her skin, her eyes and ears alert. Something had snapped outside the truck. She didn’t think an animal had made the sound. A large deer perhaps, but she was downtown, and her senses told her it had taken more weight than that to produce the sound she’d heard. She peered toward the main house, then the apartment, but she saw nothing. What would she say if the owner of the house suddenly appeared at her window with a gun?

Hi, I’m Lily Waters. My husband had to stop off and tell his receptionist something. I hope we didn’t scare you in this awful truck. John had to go out and check a leak at one of his wells on the river…

“That’s exactly what I’ll say,” she whispered.

And if a shot rang out while the owner stood there? What then? Would John have to kill him too?

Yes, said a voice inside her. That’s what happens when you start this kind of madness….

Annelise stirred in the backseat. Lily reached back and rubbed her shoulder, praying she would not wake.

Halfway up Sybil’s stairs, Waters stood motionless against the wall. He had heard something. A groan or a snore, perhaps. But only one. He had to keep moving, yet something held him where he was.

Go, he told himself. Don’t stop.

But his feet remained still. The gun had felt so natural in the truck. Now he wanted to throw it on the floor. He knew what horror awaited him upstairs. That was how he thought of Mallory now-not as a person, but as a thing. There was no human pity in her, no real love. He had no choice but to go on. Yet the image of Sybil smiling in his office today would not leave him. So young, so trusting. She had trusted Cole Smith with her heart, which was the height of lunacy. But she was not the first young woman to do it.

Waters shut his eyes and tried to visualize himself shooting her. If you can’t see it in your mind, you’ll never do it in life. A popular New Age platitude. And why should it be difficult? After all, he’d already killed one woman. At least his hands had killed her. But killing was not a thing of hands. It was a thing of the mind. Killing in cold blood demanded a cold mind. A gun made it easier, a matter of a momentary trigger pull rather than the eternity of crushing hands and bulging eyes it had taken to end Eve Sumner’s life. But for a man with a conscience, a single finger’s pull could be more difficult than lifting a mountain. Would shooting Sybil from behind make it easier? It seemed the act of a coward, but wouldn’t it be better for her if she never saw it coming?

That’s how I’d want it, he thought. None of that life-passing-before-your-eyes bullshit. If you saw it coming, those last seconds could dilate into a lifetime of regret and self-recrimination. But with a bullet through the base of your brain, there would be none of that-no white light or angel choirs either-only instant and utter darkness.

He gritted his teeth and forced himself up to the next step. Then the next. There was a small landing at the top. Two doors led off it. The one on the right led to a bathroom. He saw light reflecting off a stainless-steel leg bracing the sink. The other door, only slightly open, would be her bedroom. Yellow light trickled onto the landing as though in invitation.

Why is she up here? he wondered. Why isn’t she waiting downstairs with a bottle of champagne? Maybe she was sitting naked on the bed in her favorite position, legs crossed yoga-style, silently awaiting the lover she had fought for a decade to reach. But then he remembered Cole, fast asleep at his desk that afternoon. Maybe Mallory was at this moment struggling to take control of Sybil’s sleeping mind. If so, it was the perfect opportunity to destroy her. Before she had a chance to plead for mercy or fight back. Only if she was asleep…how could he be certain Mallory was inside her? He concealed the.38 behind his back and slipped into the bedroom.

Sybil lay on the bed, the covers pulled loosely over her chest, her lower body exposed in the sheer nightgown. But for her curves and pubic hair, she looked like a sleeping child. She still wore her makeup. Maybe she’d passed out from too much alcohol. He knew he should wake her. If she panicked, she was Sybil. If she smiled and pulled him into the bed, she was Mallory. Simple. But he could not find it in himself to touch her.

Do it! Lily shouted in his mind. Hurry!

Waters picked up a throw pillow and held it over the muzzle of the gun, then held the pillow above Sybil’s face. His right hand began to shake. In his mind, he saw her eyes snap open, as ravenously alive as a vampire’s, filled with hatred and fury at his betrayal.

“Come on,” he whispered. “For Annelise…”

He tried to pull the trigger, but his finger would not obey.

Lily lay shivering in the backseat of the truck, trying to cover Annelise’s body with her own. There was someone outside. Close. Moving carefully. She could hear them through the window John had left open. It had taken all her self-restraint not to start the engine and race away, but she couldn’t abandon her husband. She wished she had brought a gun of her own, but there had seemed no reason. Shielding Annelise with her body seemed an ineffectual act, but she might keep Ana alive long enough for John to save her if an attacker came out of the night. If that happened, she would scream through the window and pray that John heard her. She was holding back a scream when a large black figure loomed in the driver’s window.