Scott Nicholson - Chronic fear

She’d parked her late-model Lexus in the satellite faculty lot that morning, and Scagnelli expected her to walk straight to it and drive away. Scagnelli passed the cute traffic monitor, who was busy writing a ticket and didn’t see him.

Dr. Morgan turned her head suddenly in his direction, and Scagnelli wondered if she had somehow sensed him. He fought an urge to speed up. While she would be on her guard after yesterday’s encounter, she would be looking out for two dark-skinned men, not a swarthy, smiling white guy.

Scagnelli silently applauded Forsyth’s little shell game, which would have her suspecting the lab raid had been connected to terrorists or international espionage instead of federal investigators.

But you only sold me a bowl of smoke, didn’t you? Just doing your job as Danny-Boy’s advance scout.

Scagnelli planned to circle the lot as if unable to find a parking space, and then loop behind her when she hit the highway. He was easing forward, checking her in the rearview, when a black-and-white police cruiser wheeled in front of him, skidding and swerving.

“Fucking townie!” Scagnelli shouted, braking and cutting hard right, narrowly missing the cruiser’s fender. The cruiser didn’t slow at all.

Weird. No siren, no lights.

Town police were usually the most by-the-book because they were often the newest to law enforcement, the lowest on the totem pole in any cross-jurisdictional investigation, and the most likely to be reprimanded or fired. One citizen report of reckless behavior could be enough to send the mayor crawling up the chief’s ass.

Scagnelli watched in the mirror as the cruiser spun into the satellite lot toward Alexis Morgan a hundred feet away. The cruiser slowed and the cop apparently said something to her, because she stopped walking and stared in surprise.

Hold the guacamole. That damned cruiser doesn’t have any insignia.

Town departments often employed one of two looks for their fleet, usually reflecting the current chief’s personality and philosophy. The first was the two-toned, old-school, black-and-white look if the chief believed in visibility and crime prevention. The second was tinted windows and sleek, unmarked cars designed for stealth and intimidation. That was the theory. In practice, limited funding often meant departments had a mix of each.

But Scagnelli had never heard of a department whose marked cars didn’t sport departmental emblems on the doors. The cruiser was almost like a movie prop. He eased his own car forward, keeping one eye on the mock cruiser as a pickup truck pulled in behind him. The ticket girl had also noticed the cruiser and was watching with her beady little tattletale eyes.

Alexis Morgan walked toward the cruiser, her confident gait now stilted and unsure.

If Forsyth cut another agent in on this deal, I’m going to yank his rubbery old ears down around his neck, strangle him, and shove a Bible up his ass. Except he’d probably enjoy it.

By the time Scagnelli had negotiated a three-point turn, Alexis Morgan had climbed into the passenger side of the cruiser. The ticket girl scrawled a little note on her pad, probably the cruiser’s license plate number. Scagnelli’s anger cooled a little as he realized his job had just gotten a whole lot easier.

I’ll let that clown cop do all the heavy lifting, and I’ll just walk in and pick up the winning lottery ticket. A guy acting all erratic like that, the suspicion will fall on him when she turns up dead.

He popped one of Forsyth’s gift amphetamines to celebrate.

“Every four hours,” Roland said.

“What’s that, honey?” Wendy said. She sat curled on the window seat, between the maidenhair fern and the wax begonias, sketching in the midday sun. Her T-shirt was a Jackson Pollock mess of spilled paint and stains.

“Does that mean anything to you? Every four hours?”

“Sounds like a TV commercial.”

The cabin didn’t have a television. If they wanted to watch something, they had to rent a Redbox movie and huddle around the laptop. Not that Roland cared. That made movies a good excuse for snuggling and popcorn and then some dangerous erotic play.

What he did care about was Wendy’s memory of the Monkey House. As a long-time alcoholic, he understood obliterating chunks of consciousness. And he’d done it by choice, at least as far as drunks had any control in their own self-destruction.

Wendy, however, had been an innocent victim of Briggs’s drug experiments. Seethe had scrambled her senses and driven her into a confused, hedonistic hurricane. She hadn’t been herself when she’d fallen for Briggs’s sick seduction.

Yeah. Keep telling yourself that. Just like you only killed Briggs in self-defense, not because he was fucking your wife. So much for a twelve-step program built on honesty.

Roland tried to tell himself the Seethe had driven him to murder, but he remembered the pleasure he’d felt in pulling the trigger and watching Briggs leak. Sure, Seethe was designed to evoke such a reaction. But just like a drunk on a blackout was still acting from a core impulse, no drug could totally alter personality.

All Seethe had done was make him more like himself.

Wendy paused in her sketching, noticing he’d dropped the conversation. “Why are you talking about ‘every four hours’?”

“One of my clients is using it for a book title,” Roland said. “I have to wrap the words around a picture of a scantily clad woman.”

“Tough duty, huh?”

“Beats selling billboards.” He opened his e-mail program and looked again at the message he’d received that morning. Just like the first one, it had the subject line “Every four hrs or else” and was from the same National Clandestine Service address.

This one also had a message in the body of the e-mail. It said, “Surely you didn’t think we could let you live, after what happened.”

“Is she cuter than me?” Wendy said.

“Who?”

“The scantily clad woman.”

“It’s a cartoon. Old pulp-fiction style. Boobs the size of watermelons and a waist like Gandhi.”

“Blonde?”

“If I paint it that way.”

“Make her blonde so I don’t get jealous.”

“You never get jealous.” Only me.

“Yeah, out here I guess there’s not much competition.” She tucked a leg under her rear in a motion of feline grace and continued with her work.

Roland studied the e-mail for clues, but he couldn’t read anything between the lines. First the “David Underwood” trick and now this new threat.

On a whim, he hit “Reply,” and when the message window opened, he typed, “Maybe we can help each other.” He paused, then typed “David Underwood” as a signature beneath the message and hit “Send.”

“What’s it about?” Wendy asked.

Roland jerked upright. “What?”

“The book. Every Four Hours. That sounds familiar.”

“It’s by a new mystery writer.” He waited. “David Underwood. You haven’t heard of him.”

“There are too many writers in the world. Who can keep track of them all?”

“Not like you artists. Supply perfectly matches demand.”

“Hey, smarty-pants.” Wendy perched her sketchbook on the ledge of the bay window. “Come over here and kiss me.”

“I’m working,” Roland said, watching his e-mail to see if a response was forthcoming. The message hadn’t bounced, so it must have been routed to

someone’s inbox, although he doubted it went to the CIA.

Wendy curled up on the window seat and gave a fake pout. He grinned at her and went back to his laptop screen.

“Ro?” she whispered.

He ignored her. Work was work, and even pretending to work was work.

“Honey?” she said, louder.