Richard Doetsch - Half-Past Dawn

“You can still save her, Jack,” the man whispered as he wrote, “but time is slipping away and will soon fall through your fingers, where all will be forever lost.”

Jack’s eyes flashed open, and he desperately tried to recapture the fading thread of the dream, trying to hold on to the answers that floated up from his memory while he slept. He lay in the hospital bed, the strap around his chest reaffixed, his arms tethered back down. He was filled with such agony, such grief, such confusion.

Everything he held as reality had slipped away. Mia was everything, his better half, his lover, his best friend, and she was dead.

He reviewed the last fifteen hours in his mind, every conversation, every action he took. It had all seemed so real. Talking to Jimmy Griffin… he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t have been an imposter. He had not set Jack up. He was her friend. He didn’t lead him down some rabbit hole. He merely said that her salvation lay with the fate of the evidence case.

And Cristos, he was not some illusion, some spirit come back to haunt him. He was flesh and blood. The bullets were real, not dreamed. Jack would not go off randomly shooting his way into the Tombs. He wouldn’t have killed Charlie or shot some innocents. He had seen death at his own hand in the past. It was what had brought him to law and away from guns. He wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.

But above all, it was Mia’s voice that rang in his ear. He had spoken to her from Cristos’s car. It wasn’t imagined. It was not the wishful thinking of a grieving man. He heard her desperation, her surprise at his being alive.

He had known Ryan for too many years to count; he had always been a good friend, someone he could always count on. He couldn’t imagine him lying to him, making up some elaborate story. But was he, too, being manipulated? Was he drawing conclusions off facts that he couldn’t possibly verify himself in such short order? Had he fallen into the trap of being fed information that could only lead to one conclusion? Jack couldn’t imagine his friend toying with him. He had seen Ryan’s pain when Ryan told him of his cancer diagnosis; he had seen his agony at seeing Jack tied to the bed. And above all, Ryan was not one to fake tears or grief at the loss of a friend’s wife at the behest of the FBI. Ryan believed everything he told Jack… and Ryan believed he was crazy.

He and Emily had left the room to consult further on Jack’s “condition” and “illusions,” leaving him alone for the last ten minutes, which felt more like ten hours.

They never explained how Mia died, simply implying that she died in the car accident, but he had seen her kidnapped, driven away. Or had he? Everything was so murky. Had his mind played tricks on him? Had he blocked out what he had seen, suppressed the tragedy of her death? Had she been lying there next to him on the riverbank, or was she drowned in the car only to be washed downstream? Had her death been the impetus for his insanity, for some desperate act within a reality of his own making? Did a crazy man ever know he was crazy, or did he simply create his own reality?

And he thought about the parallels to Cristos. Was it coincidence that he, too, had risen from the afterlife? Both had been declared dead: Jack by the newspaper, Cristos by the coroner. The world, in both cases, was convinced of their passing only to have them walk the earth again. Had his current state of mind been brought about by Cristos’s prophetic statement of death not being the end, the implications being that he couldn’t die? Could Jack’s mind have truly snapped, creating this elaborate scenario all in order to do what he had failed to do: save the woman he loved?

Jack looked at his bandaged arm. It wasn’t injured as the nurse had said; the mehndi tattoo was real, his visit to Professor Adoy was real… the warning of death to come tomorrow at dawn was…

If he could somehow tear away the bandage, see the tattoo once more, it would be the anchor that could pull him back to reality, that could give his mind the footing it so desperately needed now. It could wipe away any and all doubt. For if the elaborate tattoo was there, it meant that someone had been with him after the accident and had saved him, that it wasn’t all a figment of his imagination. It meant that he was being lied to, a cog in some conspiracy in much the same way as the system was manipulated to keep Cristos alive.

He pulled at his restraints, his arms straining with the effort, but it was to no avail. There had to be a way. He looked to the door, pondering escape. There were so many barriers in his way-FBI, police, building security-insurmountable obstacles, but so had been stealing the case from the basement of the Tombs.

But the biggest barrier was the fragility of his mind.

If it was a choice between an insane existence where Mia was alive or a reality where she had perished, he would simply choose the madness. And that sudden thought terrified him. Had he already made that decision subconsciously?

Hope was lost. It was lost for him, for his two girls, for Mia. And it was bone-crushing. To be faced with death by cancer was one thing. To have your body fail, as tragic as it was, was part of life. But to have your mind slip away, to have your wife ripped from existence, to leave your children alone in the world, was far more devastating, for there was nothing to cling to, nothing to give a glimmer of optimism, nothing but a forever night where the sun would never rise again.

He looked again at his arm and the thick white bandage. He just needed to see. What had once brought him confusion and panic could give him the one thing he would need. For if it was there, then, truths could be washed away, minds could be brought back to sanity, and Mia, despite everything he had been told, could be brought back to life.

All Jack needed was a little hope.

F RANK AND J OY rode up the elevator to the fifth floor of the Tombs. Joy had spent the last several hours poring over the old case files on Cristos while cross-referencing them with the information on Cotis from Professor Adoy and the note of appreciation Jack had received with the blue necklace from the Cotis government. Hoping for some kind of link or clue, she found none.

As they emerged from the cab, they were greeted by the security desk officer, who sat behind thick bulletproof glass similar to the setup in the evidence room. Nolan Ludeke was at the end of a double shift, a shift that brought tragic surprises that he could never have anticipated.

Frank had known him for too many years to count, since back when Nolan was on the street. He had always spoken of retiring, moving to Florida with his wife, to be closer to his kids, but as that fateful day approached, Nolan realized that work was his life, and if work stopped, how far behind would the end of his life be? So he regrouped. His years of service and his reputation gave him the inside track on a job with little to no stress that would alleviate the forever fears of his wife getting that 3:00 a.m. call of death in the line of duty.

“Frank,” Nolan said in a warm greeting, buzzing him and Joy through.

“Hey,” Frank said as he walked through the heavy metal door, which closed with a thud behind him. “We’re here to see Jack.”

Nolan looked at the two. “I don’t know. He’s down the hall, the feds have two posted outside his door, and they’ve labeled him a suicide watch.”

“This still is under our jurisdiction, correct?”

“Come on, Frank, semantics.”

“What can you tell me?”

“They brought him in an hour ago. He was in rough shape, out cold. Tucked him in a psych room. A nurse patched him up. A couple of doctors came in, evaluated him, and declared him nuts. A hot-shot FBI guy has been all over this thing. I heard whispers of all kinds of mayhem downstairs on sub five, but no one will confirm a thing. The rumor is it’s not hard to connect Keeler to it, though that seems so wrong. I heard the guy was killed last night in a car accident along with his wife, but then he shows up here. Whole thing seems crazier than that mess years back with the mayor’s son.”