Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

He circled the car again, weaving over the shoulder and through the bushes nearby. No sign of Hrubek’s prints in any direction. Hands on hips, he glanced at the car once more. This time he noticed the bike rack but then he immediately dismissed the idea that Hrubek had stolen a cycle. What kind of escapee, he reasoned, would make a getaway on a bike, riding down open highways?

But wait… Michael Hrubek was a man whose madness had its own logic. A bicycle? Why not? Owen examined the road around the car and found faint tread marks, rather wide ones-either balloon tires or those of a bike ridden by a heavy cyclist. He glanced back at the car. The carrier rack seemed broken as if the bike had been removed by sheer force.

Owen continued to follow the tread marks. At the intersection of this country lane and Route 236 he found where the rider had paused, perhaps debating which way to go.

He was not surprised to find, beside the tread, the clear imprint of Hrubek’s boot.

Nor was he surprised to find that the rider had decided to turn west.

The house was little more than a shotgun cabin at the end of a dirt-and-rock road winding through this scruffy forest. The BMW squealed to a stop in a rectangle of mud amid discarded auto parts, sheet metal, termite-chewed firewood and oil drums torch-cut as if someone had intended to make a business of manufacturing barbecues but gave up after running out of acetylene, or desire.

Richard Kohler climbed out of the car and walked to the cabin. Rubbing his deep-set red eyes with a scrawny knuckle, he knocked on the screen door. No answer, though he heard the tinny, cluttered sound of a TV from inside. He rapped again, louder.

When the door opened he smelled liquor before he smelled wood smoke, and there was a lot of wood smoke to smell.

“Hello, Stuart.”

After a long pause the man responded, “Didn’t expect to see you. Guess I might’ve. Raining yet? It’s supposed to be a son-of-a-bitch storm.”

“You mind if I come in for a few minutes?”

“My girlfriend, she’s out tonight.” Stuart Lowe didn’t move from the doorway.

“It won’t take long.”

“Well.”

Kohler stepped past the orderly and into the small living room.

The couch was draped with two blankets and had the appearance of a sickbed. It was an odd piece of furniture-bamboo frame, cushions printed with orange and brown and yellow blotches. It reminded Kohler poignantly of Tahiti, where he’d gone on his honeymoon. And where he’d gone after his divorce, which had occurred thirty-three months later. Those two weeks represented his only vacations in the last seven years.

Kohler chose a high-backed chair to sit in. The orderly, no longer in his regulation blue jumpsuit, was now wearing jeans and a T-shirt and white socks without shoes. His arms were covered with bandages, his left eye was blackened, and his forehead and cheeks were flecked with small puncture wounds brown-stained from Beta-dine. He now sat back on the couch and glanced at the blankets as if he were surprised to find the bedclothes sitting out.

On the TV Jackie Gleason was screaming in a shrill and thoroughly unpleasant way at Audrey Meadows. Lowe muted the program. “They snag him yet?” Lowe asked, glancing at the phone, by which he presumably would already have learned if they’d snagged him.

Kohler told him no.

Lowe nodded and laughed vacantly at Jackie Gleason shaking his fist.

“I want to ask you a few things about what happened,” Kohler asked conversationally.

“Not much to tell.”

“Still.”

“How’d you hear about it? Adler wanted it kept quiet.”

“I’ve got my spies,” Kohler said, and did not smile. “What happened?”

“Uh-hum. Well, we seen him and we run after him. But it was pretty dark. It was damn dark. He must’ve knowed the lay of the land pretty good and he jumped over this ravine but we fell into it.”

Lowe closed his mouth and once more examined the screen, on which an automobile commercial now played. “Look at all that writing on there. Giving all that financing crap. Who can read that in three seconds? That’s stupid, they do that.”

The room wasn’t shabby so much as dim. The prints on the walls weren’t bad seascapes but they were dusky. The carpet was gray, as were the blankets that Lowe was pretending he hadn’t been wrapped in five minutes before.

“How you feeling?”

“Nothing broke. Sore, but not like Frank. He took the worst of it.”

“What’d Adler say to you?”

Lowe found some serviceable words and submitted them. Nothing much. Wanted to know how Lowe was feeling. Where Hrubek seemed to be going. “Truth be told, he wasn’t real happy we dropped the ball in the first place and he got loose.”

Across the bottom of the TV screen ran a banner announcing that a tornado had touched down in Morristown, killing two people. The National Weather Service, the streaming type reported, had extended the tornado and flash-flood warnings until 3:00 a.m. Both men stared at these words intently and both men forgot them almost as soon as the bulletin ended.

“When you found him tonight, did Michael say anything?”

“Can’t hardly recall. I think something about us wearing clothes and him not. Maybe something else. I don’t know. I was never so scared in my life.”

Kohler said, “Frank Jessup was telling me about Michael’s meds.”

“ Frank knows about that? I didn’t think he did. Wait, maybe I mentioned it to him.”

The doctor nodded at the screen. “Art Carney’s my favorite.”

“He’s a funny one, sure is. I like Alice. She knows what she’s about.”

“Frank wasn’t sure how long Michael’d been cheeking them. He said two days.”

“Two?” Lowe shook his head. “Where’d he hear that? Try five.”

“I think they want to keep it quiet.”

Lowe began to relax. “That’s what Adler told me. It’s not my business. I mean, with…” The comfort vanished instantly and Kohler noticed Lowe’s hand seeking the satin strip on the blanket beside him. “And I just spilled the beans, didn’t I? Oh, fuck,” he spat out, bitterly discouraged at how easily his mind had been picked.

“I had to know, Stu. I’m his doctor. It’s my job to know.”

“And it’s my job, period. And I’m gonna lose it. Shit. Why’d you trick me?”

Kohler wasn’t giving any thought to Lowe’s employment. He felt his skin crackling with shock at this confirmation of his hunch. In his last session before the escape, yesterday, Michael Hrubek had looked Kohler in the eye and had lied about the Thorazine. He’d said he was taking all his meds and the dosage was working well. Three thousand milligrams! And the patient had given it up purposefully and lied about doing so after he’d been off the pills for five days. And he’d lied very well. Unlike psychopaths, schizophrenic patients are rarely duplicitous in such calculating ways.

“You’ve got to come clean, Stu. Hrubek’s a time bomb. I don’t think Adler understands that. Or if he does he doesn’t much care.” Kohler added soothingly, “You know Michael better than most of the doctors at Marsden. You’ve got to help me.”

“I got to keep my job is what I’ve got to do. I’m making twenty-one thousand a year and spending twenty-two. Adler’ll have my nuts for what I told you already.”

“Ron Adler isn’t God.”

“I’m not saying anything else.”

“Okay, Stuart, you gonna help me, or do I have to make some phone calls?”

“Fuck.” A can of beer flew from the big hand into the gray wall and with a spray of foam fell gushing onto the dingy shag carpet. It was suddenly vitally important for Stuart Lowe to tend the embers of his fire. He leapt up and pitched three fresh logs onto the heap of the dying flames. A gorgeous cascade of orange sparks bounced to the hearth. Lowe returned to the couch and said nothing for a moment. Kohler believed this meant that he accepted the terms of the agreement, which was of course no agreement at all. The signal of surrender was the soft pop as the TV was shut off.