Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

Donny almost laughed out loud: For all his toughness, even big Nick had been sitting openmouthed, and all he could manage when he finally found his voice was, "No shit!"

A half hour later, as they caravanned west to the Hunters Point mine, Donny dialed Nick's cell phone number. In his rearview mirror, he watched Nick's broad silhouette put its hand to its ear.

They had milked the nurse for a while more, and she had milked them in return. At last, with Nick flirting and Donny assuring her that she always had a job at McCarty Energy if she needed it, they'd left the restaurant. Donny's mind was in overdrive.

"We have to do lunch more often, huh, Nicko?"

"Oh fuck, Donny. Oh man. I was going to wring her neck if she did any more dancing around, so help me. This close, man. This close." Nick's voice had a broad smile in it. Donny could visualize him holding his thick thumb and forefinger a millimeter apart. "Seriously, I was thinking, too bad her account wasn't closed when good old Vern's was."

"So what are we up against here?"

"Seems like a good-news-bad-news situation," Nick's voice said. Nick would know to keep it reasonably circumspect, given that cell phones were not the most private form of communication.

"Julieta, she's really planning something major. Gotta be, with the engineer, the bogus thing with the mutilations. And the mesa! Jesus Christ!"

"But we've got her by the balls! The ghost buster, the sick kid. If we can keep the nurse's cooperation. We need her to keep us informed. And she'd need to back us up, maybe testify, if it comes out in the open."

"You'll see to that? Keeping her sweet on us?"

Nick groaned at the thought of more sessions with Lynn Pierce. "Yeah. Provided I get a bonus here, Sahib. Call it hazard pay."

They both chuckled and then were silent as they navigated past a slow-moving pickup truck with a goat tethered in the back and about six Navajos crammed into the single-seat cab. Donny frowned, nagged by the sense that something didn't quite compute with this whole thing. If Julieta had brought in the parapsychologist to deal with the kid's problem, why were they talking about the mutes or the mesa? On the other hand, if she'd brought her and her team in to throw a monkey wrench at McCarty Energy, what was the whole business with the kid? But whatever it was, the only workable hypothesis was that it was aimed at his head in some way, and he'd better think about preemption.

When they were past the truck, Nick's voice crackled over the phone again: "So. With the ghost business. We want to start the word circulating among the men right away?"

Donny had made a strategic decision. He hoped it wasn't overly biased by what he had to admit was some trepidation at the thought of an outright war with Julieta. "Nick!" he scolded. "I'm surprised at you!"

"Why not?"

"Think about it. Julieta's planning something-that's the only explanation. It's got to be a major offensive. She's found out something. I don't know what she knows or how she knows it, but there's no other conclusion. If we shoot our ammo now, she'll be even more pissed off and she'll have no reason left not to shoot us down in return. So we hold our fire. We do our homework, we poke around a little more, get our ducks in order. When we know more about what she's trying to do, we go to her and gently suggest she cease and desist because with what we know we can take her down. We preserve what we know as a disincentive for her to give us grief, not use it prematurely to stir up a hornets' nest."

"Right." Nick was silent for a moment, thinking that through, and then chuckled. "You're good with the big picture. I guess that's why you're the boss, huh?"

"It's all just psychology," Donny told him. "Human psychology."

By the time Cree got to Ketteridge Hospital, she was almost in a state of panic. She'd been running on an adrenaline overdose for over an hour as she drove a borrowed Oak Springs School car to Gallup.

Inside, the front desk receptionist rang Dr. Corcoran's office, told her he'd be down shortly, and invited her to have a seat in the lobby. After ten minutes of pacing and fretting, she wanted to scream. Or to run through the halls to find Tommy.

After she and Ed had gotten back from her early-morning hike, she had showered and dressed and found she still had an hour to kill before she had to leave for her appointments. She'd used the time to read through the last of the materials Mason had given her.

And had gotten badly shocked.

It was one of Mason's own papers that made her break into a sick sweat of anxiety. In arguing that some apparent cases of seizure disorders, schizophrenia, or DID were in fact examples of possession, he had cited six cases in which conventional pharmaceutical treatment had not only failed to help the victim but had been directly counterproductive. The medications had made the sufferer worse. The reason was simple: Most antipsychotic medications had a sedative or suppressive effect, which Mason believed weakened the host personality's resistance to the invader. All victims of possession fought the parasitic beings attempting to move in on them, he said; treatments that made the patient lethargic or passive, or otherwise suspended his volition, gave the invading entity free rein. In each of the cases he cited, the damage had proved irreversible. Of the six victims, two had committed suicide and four had gone on to lifetime institutionalization. Of those, one had later been lobotomized and had never come out of a postoperative catatonia.

Cree had dropped the papers as if they'd burned her hands. She'd left a quick message on Dr. Corcoran's voice mail, hurried out to the car, and driven to Gallup like a madwoman, trying to figure out how to forestall any drastic treatment without telling Corcoran the reason why.

When at last Dr. Corcoran arrived, he was accompanied by a short, officious-looking man wearing a three-piece suit and a trim goatee. Dr. Corcoran wasn't wearing his usual benevolent grin, and the other man looked positively dour.

"I've invited Dr. Schaeffer to join us," Dr. Corcoran said curtly. "He's our head of neuropsychiatry, and he's very… interested in Tommy's condition. We've been consulting on pharmacological aspects of Tommy's treatment."

Without waiting for a word from her, the two men turned back into the corridor.

She caught up to them at the elevator bank. "Dr. Corcoran," she panted, "I have a rather urgent recommendation for Tommy that we need to-"

"If it's not too much to ask," Dr. Schaeffer chided, glaring at her, "can we at least wait until we have some privacy? We'll discuss this in my office, like professionals." He gestured at a trio of nurses who also waited for the elevator.

They rode up to the third floor in silence. The two men led Cree down a stretch of corridor to an office on the left, where they stopped and gestured her inside. Dr. Schaeffer came in last, shutting the door behind himself.

It was a small room, with one window overlooking the flat roof of a lower wing of the building and the surrounding parking lots. Dr. Schaeffer's desk was piled with folders, and shelves on one wall were stuffed with hundreds more, but otherwise it was a stark room, without the personalizing effect of family photos, art, curios. Cree automatically moved toward a chair to the right of the desk and then stopped as she realized that neither man had sat. Nor invited her to. Schaeffer positioned himself behind his desk, leaning forward and resting his weight on his knuckles; Corcoran stood at the other side of the room in his vulture's hunch, arms folded disapprovingly.

"You were saying? You were going to recommend-?" Dr. Corcoran prompted icily.

"Yes, do proceed," Dr. Schaeffer said. "We're very curious as to why you're here today."