Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“I sympathize with you, sir. But I’m telling you, we find him dead somewhere, I personally’ll be coming to talk to you. Even if you get off with manslaughter, that’ll be the end of your legal practice.”

Owen looked back into the calm eyes of the captain, who finally said, “Those are just some things to consider.”

“Duly noted, Captain. Good night to you now.”

From the corner of his eye Michael Hrubek-running through tall grass-noticed headlights on a service road that paralleled his path along the highway. The car was keeping pace with his speed and he believed it was following him. The vehicle stopped suddenly, made a sharp turn and headed in his direction. “Conspirators!” he crowed. Amid the panic that enveloped him like a cloud of hornets he tripped and fell forward onto the shoulder. Cinders, pebbles and bits of glass embedded themselves in his palms and blood appeared. He screamed briefly, picked himself up and ran forty feet into the forest, crashing through a line of low brush then dropping onto the ground. A few moments later the green cube of a car drove past slowly and stopped.

A door slammed and a man climbed out. The conspirator walked in a slow circle near the perimeter of the forest. Hrubek curled up on his side. He closed his eyes and prayed that he might fall asleep so that he’d grow invisible.

“Michael!” the man called tentatively, as if undecided whether to shout or whisper. “Are you there?”

Something familiar about the voice.

“Michael, it’s me.”

Dr. Richard! the stunned patient realized. Dr. Richard Kohler from Marsden!

Or was it? Careful here. Something funny’s going on.

“Michael, I want to talk to you. Can you hear me?”

Hrubek opened his eyes and gazed out from between two ferns. It looked like Dr. Richard. How did those fuckers do it? Hrubek nervously scooted under a bush. His eyes flicked up and down suspiciously as he examined the man, studying the doctor’s thin frame, dark-blue suit, black penny loafers and Argyle socks. His backpack the color of old blood. Sure, this looked just like Dr. Richard. Identical! Hrubek gave the conspirator credit for disguising himself so cleverly.

Smart fucker, make no mistake.

“They told me you’d run off. Michael, is that you? I thought I saw you.”

The footsteps grew closer, crushing leaves beneath the dainty feet. Hrubek pulled his own backpack to his side. It was heavy and clinked with the sound of metal and chains. He froze at the noise then rummaged inside quietly. At the bottom he found the pistol.

“Michael, I know you’re scared. I want to help you.”

He aimed the pistol at the shadowy form that approached. He’d shoot the impostor in the head. No, that’d be too merciful. I’ll aim for the belly, he thought, and let him die like a battlefield soldier, slowly, with a gut wound from a.54 Minié ball.

… for I love the bonnie blue boy who gave his life for me…

The footsteps came closer. The beam from a tiny flashlight swept the ground, lit a patch of grass two feet from his foot, then moved on. Hrubek held the gun close to his face. He smelled oil and metal. As he gazed back into the clearing, a dreadful thought came into his mind: What if this wasn’t an impostor. Maybe this really was Dr. Richard. Maybe he was a conspirator too! Maybe he’d been a traitor all along. From the first fucking day they’d met. Four months of betrayal!

“I’ve been looking all over for you. I want to give you some medicine. It’ll make you feel better.”

How do you feel better when you’re dead? Hrubek responded silently. How does poison make you feel better? If I were a bettor, I’d say you were a bad bet, you fucker.

The conspirator was ten feet away. Hrubek’s right hand began to shake as it gripped the gun, which was pointed directly at the belly of Dr. Richard the betrayer (or John Conspirator the impostor).

“I’m your last chance. There are people who want to hurt you…”

Well, I knew that all along. You’re telling me something new? How’d you like to be in the news? CNN can do a story about your blown-up guts. He pulled the hammer back. The click was very soft but inexplicably it released in Hrubek a flood of fear. He began to quiver. The gun slipped from his hand and he remained paralyzed for a long moment. Finally his vision grew blacker than the black forest around him and his mind froze, seated like a hot drill bit in oak.

When he opened his eyes again and was aware of his surroundings, some minutes had passed. The air felt colder, more oppressive, heavy with moisture. The conspirator was gone, his car too. Hrubek found the gun and lowered the hammer carefully, then stowed the weapon in his bag. As he rose to his feet, dazed and discomfited, and started jogging through the night once more, Hrubek wondered whether the entire incident had been just a dream. But he concluded that even if it hadn’t been real the apparition was certainly a message from God: to remind him that tonight he could trust no one, not even those who were-or who pretended to be-his closest friends on earth.

She called it the Berlin Wall.

A six-foot-high stockade fence of gray cedar, surrounding most of the four acres of the L’Auberget estate. Lis now walked along a stretch of this fence on her way to the dam. To enclose the property had cost Andrew L’Auberget eighteen thousand dollars (and they’d been 1968 dollars, no less). But despite the price he was adamant about the barricade. Lis jokingly named it after the German barrier (the reference shared only with Portia and friends, never with her father) though the man’s concern hadn’t been the Red Peril. Terrorist kidnappings were his main fear.

He’d become convinced that he, as a successful businessman with several European partnerships, was targeted. God damn Basques,” he railed. “Goddamn them! And they know all about me. The SDS, the Black Panthers! I’m in Who’s Who in American Business. There for the whole world to see! Where I live! My children’s names! They could read your name, Lisbonne. Remember what I told you about answering the door? Tell me what you’d do if you saw a Negro walking around outside the gate. Tell me!”

The fence, even Lis the naïve child supposed, was easily breachable and less a deterrent to the bad guys than an inconvenience to the family, who had to walk three-quarters of a mile around it if they wanted to go for walks in the woods across Cedar Swamp Road. But like the builders of its namesake, L’Auberget’s purpose seemed only partially to keep the enemy out; he also wanted to restrain his own citizenry. “I will not have the children wandering off. They’re girls, for God’s sake!” Lis had often heard this declaration, or variations on it.

As she walked along tonight Lis reflected with some irony that while its German counterpart was now dust, Andrew L’Auberget’s cedar folly was still as strong as ever. She noticed too that if the water did overflow the dam, the fence would make a perfect sluice, preventing any flood from spilling off the property into the woods and directing it straight to the house.

She now approached the beach-a small crescent of dark sand. Just beyond was the dam, an old stone-and-cement slab twenty feet high, built around the turn of the century. It was against this wide lip of cement that the white rowboat she’d seen from the house thudded resonantly. Behind the dam was the narrow spillway fed by the overflow; usually dry, tonight it gushed like a Colorado rapid, the water disappearing into the creek that ran beneath the road. The dam was part of the L’Auberget property though it was under the technical control of the state Corps of Engineers, which had been granted an easement to maintain it. Why weren’t they here tonight? she wondered.