Greg Iles - Sleep No More

“You gutless bitch! You can’t take him from me like this!”

The Acura wallowed onto its left side. The water rushed over Lily’s left shoulder and into her ear, then her mouth.

“Please God…forgive me,” she gasped. “I did this for my family.”

And then the water covered her.

John Waters stood bolt upright and gripped his left arm like a man having a heart attack. He was leaning over the sink in the bathroom of the police station when the pain hit. Now he staggered against the wall, unable to breathe.

Lily, he thought, and inexplicable terror filled his mind.

With soapy hands he pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed his wife’s cell number. After five rings, an automated message saying the subscriber was out of the service area began to play. He hung up and dialed Linton Hill, but all he got was the machine.

“Damn it,” he muttered.

He dialed Lily’s mother’s house, but no one answered there either, and Evelyn did not carry a cell phone.

Someone knocked on the door of the rest room.

“John? You okay?”

Tom Jackson wasn’t going to let him out of his sight for more than a minute.

“I’m fine,” he mumbled. “Stomach trouble.”

“You need some Pepto-Bismol?”

Waters put his cell phone back in his pocket, rinsed the soap off his hands, then opened the door.

“Shit, John, you look bad.”

“I’m worried about my wife and daughter. I know this thing with Eve is going to be public now, and…Jesus, if I hurt those two, I don’t know if I can stand it.”

Jackson could have said, “You should have thought about that before you screwed Eve Sumner,” but he didn’t. He took Waters’s arm and gently walked him back toward the interrogation room, where Barlow and Penn waited. As they reached the door, Waters glanced down the hall at a fire exit. With Lily and Annelise unaccounted for, he felt an almost irresistible urge to flee.

“Don’t think about it,” Jackson said kindly. “That’s no answer.”

Waters nodded dully and took his seat.

Lily Waters sat in church between her mother and her grandmother, running her hand over her mother’s treasured mink coat. Lily was six years old, and she never listened to the preacher. She watched the people and caressed the coat, the softest thing she had ever felt against her skin. She only stopped when it was time to sing. Her father sang out of tune, and he sang louder than anyone else. Sometimes people stared, but Lily was proud of him, because he loved to sing so much.

The church faded like a dream, and she found herself on horseback, her arms around her father’s waist as the saddle bounced up and down beneath her. She smelled the sweat of the horse and the sweat of her father, mixed with the acrid odor of cigarettes and old leather. The leather smell faded into the scent of newly mown grass, and then she was running, her chest burning, a stitch in her side that screamed Stop! But she didn’t stop. She kept putting one foot in front of the other, more distance between herself and the girl in second place. Only a tenth-grader, she was leading the two-mile run at the State Championship in Jackson. She heard the wind whipping the paper number against her chest and a distant roar, the roar of people shouting her name: Lil-lee, Lil-lee… She ran still harder, and then the athletic field morphed into another church, and she was running through its doors in a white gown as rice flew around her head. John helped her up into a horse-drawn carriage that waited to take them to Stanton Hall for their reception. Her mother and father waved, and John gripped her hand as though he would never let go. Strangely, the street led into a bedroom, where with shining eyes John watched her lay the gown across a chair and climb into their wedding bed. She lay back on the down mattress, as fulfilled as she had ever felt, and terrible pain ripped through her. Annelise was coming, and the nurse was screaming at her not to push, and then to Push! Push! She heard a slap and then a cry, the sound of life from her own body. Ineffable joy filled her heart, and then the nurse took Annelise away, and the doctor looked at her, his face changing from happiness to concern, his voice grave: The fetus is already in hydrops, Lily. He can’t live inside you, but he can’t live outside either…. And then the terrible sound of the heartbeat decelerating, like a little boy trying his hardest to beat a drum but wearing out in spite of his desire to play on, while Lily screamed and her mother talked to her as though she were a baby herself and still the drumbeat slowed, faded, down into silence so black and deep that nothing ever returned from it. That was where she was going now, into that silence. Without color, without echoes, without warmth, without love-

From the inmost chamber of her heart, a force beyond anything Lily had ever known burst forth, suffusing her mind and body with a will to live. She screamed, an explosion of bubbles that burst into blue light with a white sun shining in the midst of it.

The Acura had bobbed from its side onto its tail, and the waters had receded. She sucked in a lungful of air and looked down at her handcuffed wrist. Soon she would sink beneath the surface, lost to the world.

Mallory had tried to free herself, tried and failed. An image of a butcher knife came to Lily, but the knife was back in the motel room with Cole. I couldn’t cut off my hand anyway, she thought. I’d pass out. She tugged again on the handcuff. The real problem is my thumb, she realized. She yanked open the glove compartment, spilling papers everywhere. There was a plastic ice scraper, but no knife. Panic ballooned in her chest, cutting off her air. As she stared at the thumb, swollen from Mallory’s efforts to free herself, she saw the broken Maglite in her lap.

She grabbed the black tube with her free hand. There was only one battery inside. She wedged the tube between her legs and groped blindly on the floor of the car. Her hand closed around a battery. She picked it up and shoved it down the tube, then grasped the open end and slammed the makeshift club with all her strength against the base of her thumb.

Pain exploded through her body, searing and infinite. Tears poured from her eyes as she gasped for breath. She could not bear to do that again. But not to meant death. The car listed to the left, and water sloshed around her waist. Again she drove the Maglite downward, and her left arm went numb to the elbow. She yanked against the handcuffs, but still her hand would not come free. With a scream of animal rage, she drove the club down yet again, and this time bone snapped.

Her stomach heaved as the car settled deeper in the water. “No!” she screamed. “Not yet!”

As the car slid beneath the surface, she yanked her shattered hand through the steel cuff and hammered the Maglite against her window. The glass cracked, then gave way, and a flood of brown water poured over her face. She coiled her legs beneath her and sprang through the opening, driving herself upward and away from the metal coffin, following the bubbles that rose to the surface.

When she burst into the light, she felt the vast river pulling her downstream like the hand of God. You couldn’t swim against that current, she knew. You had to go with the flow and work your way slowly toward the bank, far downstream. As the pain in her left hand curled her body into a ball, she pulled off her boots with her right, then forced herself to tread water and looked toward the nearest bank. It seemed impossibly distant, but she had conquered distance before. She imagined that she saw Annelise standing among the trees on the bank, waving her in.