David Wiltse: The Edge of Sleep

They had not tried to fight the roar of the helicopter engine and had ridden in silence. When he spoke, it was the first time he had addressed her since their initial meeting.

“Thanks for the ride,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to come here.”

“I thought we could talk better here than on the side of a mountain,” Karen said.

Becker sighed. “I thought I was retired.”

“It probably just felt that way because you weren’t working. Actually, you’re on what’s called ‘indeterminate medical extension.’ I looked it up in your file.”

Karen looked at the surface of her coffee as she stirred it. It was hard to meet his eyes after all these years. But he still looked straight at her most of the time. She remembered that. She remembered most of it, maybe all. Which didn’t necessarily mean that she was ready to deal with it again.

“I wanted to make sure,” she continued.

“Of what?”

“That you were available.”

“Silly me. I was actually convinced I was out of the business.”

“Indeterminate medical…”

“Who determines when it’s determined? Me or the Bureau?”

“It’s a mutual thing,” she said. “You can come back to work whenever you think you’re ready.”

“Or?”

“Or the Bureau can reinstate you.”

“They can, huh?”

“I mean, they can change your status.”

He grinned. “Have you come to change my status, Karen? No one’s touched it in such a long time, I didn’t think I still had one.”

“That’s not what I heard,” she said.

“Is that in my file, too?”

“There’s an unofficial file, too,” she said. “You know that.”

“I seem to remember.”

“They say you were living with a woman during the Roger Dyce business.”

“I was.”

“And?”

He was looking squarely at her. Karen forced herself to keep her gaze on the bridge of his nose. It could give the impression that she was looking him in the eye; not that Becker would be fooled, of course.

“What happened with you and… ”

“Cindi. With an i”

“Cindi.” Karen squirmed in her seat, crossed her legs, looked away from him. She remembered clearly that he was wonderful to talk to when she was willing to be as honest as he was. It was only when she was being evasive or less than candid that it got uncomfortable. Becker had so little tolerance for doing things in a roundabout way. It always made him act as if he knew the joke and was just waiting for her to get to the punchline. It was the way he was acting now.

He was going to make her ask again.

“Are you still together?” she asked.

“The file is out of date?” He sounded amused. “She found it rather difficult to live with me. I’m sure you can sympathize with that.”

“Actually, you and I never really lived together,” Karen said.

“Not actually.”

Karen sighed. “Look, do we have to go into it?”

“Not if you want to avoid it.”

“I don’t want to avoid it… I just don’t want to go into it. It’s very painful, all right?”

“Sorry.” Becker changed the subject. “What are you now, second in command in Kidnapping?”

“How did you know?”

“I read your file.”

“When?”

“Most recently? Six months ago.”

“They let you do that? While you’re on indeterminate?”

Becker laughed. The pilot glanced in their direction.

“They let me do all kinds of things, as long as I don’t ask officially. No one wants Hatcher to find my name on any request memos.”

“Hatcher has nothing to do with Kidnapping,” Karen said.

“I know. He keeps getting kicked upstairs. All he has to do is screw up one more case, blame it on somebody else, and he’ll make Deputy Director of the whole Bureau.”

Karen let the Hatcher discussion die. It would only make her job more difficult if Becker got riled up about his former colleague.

Becker swept all the magazines into a pile and dropped them behind him on the sagging Naugahyde sofa. The sofa frequently doubled as a bed for the owner, and his form was permanently molded into the cushions.

Karen allowed herself to study Becker for the moment that he wasn’t looking at her. He seemed so little changed by the intervening decade since she had seen him last. The unfairness of it almost made her laugh aloud. She was showing every one of her thirty-six years and probably a half dozen more thanks to stress and insufficient sleep. By all appearances Becker, whose internal life she knew to be as tormented as a self-flagellating anchorite’s, seemed impervious to age. The jawline was still as firm, the stomach as flat, the eyes as unwrinkled as ever. There was a bit more gray in the hair, but that only served to add a touch of distinction. It was worse than unfair. She thought he had even improved with age.

“So you’ve been a hermit for all this time?” she asked. “Hermit-or pariah… let’s just say I’ve been living alone and managing well enough.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I mean, that you’re managing well enough.”

“Which is not to be confused with liking it,” Becker said.

“So how often do you look at my file?” she asked.

Becker shrugged. “A couple times a year.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “Going fishing? Why do you suppose I look at it?”

“I didn’t want to suppose. I wanted to know. That’s why I asked you.”

“What makes you think I’ll tell you?”

“Because I think you’d rather be honest than smart,” she said. “You’re completely without guile when it comes to women, aren’t you?” She touched the back of his hand and he recoiled slightly with an involuntary movement.

“Have you been theorizing about me for the last nine years?”

“It’s been ten years, and it wasn’t a full-time preoccupation.”

“And you concluded from my lack of guile that I’m a block of stone, is that it?”

“On the contrary. I think you’re the most vulnerable man I’ve ever known.”

To her surprise, Becker looked away from her shyly.

After a moment he said, “I’m not going to do it, Karen.”

“Do what?”

“Whatever you’ve come to ask me to do.”

“Okay. I didn’t think you would.”

“I can’t ”

“I understand.”

“I have everything under control now. I want to keep it that way.”

“You no longer feel the urge…”

Becker shook his head. She tried again.

“The compulsion…”

“Desire,” he said.

“… to kill…”

“More like lust than anything else. But stronger. Much stronger

… but it’s gone now. There’s no reason for it to arise in my new life.”

“I understand,” she said.

“I doubt it. The only people around who can really understand are in prison.”

“You put them there,” Karen said.

“Some of them. Some of them I killed.”

“You were always justified,” she said.

“So they tell me.”

“Why don’t you ever take it easy on yourself. John?”

“Because everyone else does, I suppose. Somebody’s got to punish me.”

He grinned, but she knew he was not joking.

“You’re a lot more open about it than you used to be,” she said.

“It’s the AA twelve-step method. First you admit what you are to the group. Problem is, I can’t seem to get a group together. Every time I find somebody with the same problem, he ends up dead. We never seem to have conversations.”

“You didn’t kill Roger Dyce.”

“No.”

“He tried to kill you. You were alone with him, he was armed, he tried to kill you. The man had murdered at least a dozen people, he killed an agent, he was about to kill your friend, the cop…”