Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

“Did he stockpile all the Thorazine or flush it? You have any idea?”

“We found it. He stockpiled it.”

“How much?”

Lowe said resignedly, “Five full days. Thirty-two hundred a day. This’ll be the sixth.”

“When you saw him tonight, was there any indication of what he had in mind?”

“He was just standing there in the buff, looking at us like he was surprised. But he wasn’t surprised at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” Lowe spat out. “I don’t mean a fucking thing.”

“Tell me what he said. Exactly.”

“Didn’t Frank tell you? You already talked to him.” He looked at Kohler bitterly to see if he had been as big a fool as he thought. The doctor had no choice but to oblige. “Frank’s still recovering from surgery. He won’t be conscious till morning.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“ What did Michael say? Come on, Stu.”

“Something about a death. He had a death to go to. I don’t know. Maybe he meant a funeral or graveyard. I was pretty shook, you know. I was trying to fight him off Frank.”

Kohler didn’t respond and the orderly continued, “With those rubber things they give us.”

“The truncheons?”

“I tried. I was trying to get him upside the head but he don’t feel no pain. You know that.”

“That’s one thing about Michael,” Kohler agreed, observing what a sorrowful liar Lowe was and feeling pity for this man, who’d obviously abandoned his partner to die a terrible death.

“That’s all I heard. Then Michael grabbed away the club and come after me…”

“Now tell me what Adler really said to you.”

Lowe exhaled air through puffed-out cheeks. He finally said, “I wasn’t supposed to say nothing about the meds. To nobody. And he wanted to know if Michael’d said anything about that lady in Ridgeton. He sent her a note or something.”

“What lady?”

“Some broad at his trial, I don’t know. Adler asked me if Michael’d ever mentioned her.”

“Did he?”

“Not to me he didn’t.”

“What about this note?”

“I don’t know nothing about it. Adler said to keep quiet about that too.”

“When did he send it to her?”

“How the fuck should I know?”

“What’s this woman’s name?”

“You’re going to ruin me, aren’t you? I didn’t get your patient back and you’re going to fuck me over. Why don’t you just admit it?”

“What’s her name, Stu?”

“Liz something. Wait. Liz Atcheson, I think.”

“Is there anything else you can tell me?”

“No,” Lowe blurted so quickly all Kohler could do was fill the ensuing silence with his serene, unyielding gaze. The orderly finally said miserably, “Well, the wire.”

“Wire?”

“I told Adler and Grimes and they made me swear I wouldn’t say anything. Oh, Jesus… What a time I’ve had.”

Kohler didn’t move. His red, stinging eyes gazed at Lowe, who said sotto voce, as if Ronald Adler were making this a threesome, “We didn’t fall.”

“Tell me, Stu. Tell me.”

“We could’ve jumped over that ravine easy. But Michael strung a trip wire for us. He knew we were coming. Strung a piece of fishline or bell wire and led us over it.”

Kohler was dumbfounded. “What are you saying?”

“What am I saying?” Lowe blurted furiously. “Aren’t you listening? Aren’t you listening ? I’m saying your patient may be off his brain candy and may be a schizo but he was fucking clever enough to lead us into a trap. And he damn near killed both of us.” The orderly sealed his testimony by clicking the television back on and slouched into the couch, refusing to say anything more.

Passing over the Gunderson town line Trenton Heck braked deftly with his left foot as he skidded around a deer that stepped into the road and stopped to see what a collision with a one-ton pickup might do to her.

He eased back into the right lane and continued caroming down Route 236. He was driving like a teenager and he knew it, even taking the extreme measure of strapping a very unhappy Emil into the passenger seat with the blue canvas seat belt, which the hound immediately began to chew through. Behind the truck swirled a wake of dust and bleached autumn leaves.

“Stop,” Heck barked over the roar of the engine, knowing that “Don’t chew,” let alone “Leave that seat-belt be,” would register in Emil’s mind as mere human grunts, worth ignoring. The familiar command was pointless, however, and Heck let the matter go. “Good fellow,” Heck said in a rare moment of sentiment, and reached over to scratch the big head, which slipped away in irritation.

“Damn,” he muttered, “I’m doing it again.” He realized that the hound’s evasive maneuver reminded him of the way Jill had dodged away from his embrace the day after she’d served him with papers.

Got to stop thinking about that girl, he now ordered.

But of course he didn’t.

“Mental cruelty and abandonment,” Heck had read after the process server left. He hadn’t even comprehended at first what these documents were. Abandonment? He thought they meant Jill herself was being sued for leaving the scene of an accident. She was a terrible driver. Then like a firecracker going off inside him he understood. Heck had been little good for anything for the month after that. It seemed that all he did was work with Emil and spend hours debating the separation with Jill-or rather with Jill’s picture, since by then she’d moved out. Sitting on the bed where they’d romped so friskily he tried to recall her arguments. It seemed that he hadn’t upheld his end of a vague bargain that had been made the morning following one particularly romantic, playful night. Their seventh date. At sunrise he’d found her plowing through his kitchen cabinets, looking for the Bisquick mix, and he’d interrupted the frenzied search to blurt a proposal. Jill had squealed and in her eagerness to hug him dropped a bag of flour. It detonated with a large white mushroom cloud. With happiness in her eyes and a little-girl pout on her lips, she cried, talking at curious length about the home that had been denied her all her life.

The marriage had been a stormy union, Heck was the first to admit. When you were on Jill’s side, heaven’s gate opened up and she rained her good nature on you and if you were her man there were plenty of other rewards. But if you didn’t share her opinion or-good luck-if you opposed her, then the flesh over her cheekbones tightened and her tongue somehow contracted and she commenced to take you down.

Trenton Heck in fact had not been all that certain about getting married. Unreasonably, he was disappointed at having a fiancée with one syllable in her name. And when Jill grew angry-he couldn’t always predict when this would happen-she became a tiny fireball. Her eyebrows knit and her voice grew husky, like the tone he believed hookers took when confronting obnoxious clients. She would mope aggressively if he said they couldn’t afford a pair of high-heeled green shoes dusted with sequins, or a microwave with a revolving carousel.

“You’re icky to me, Trenton. And I don’t like it one bit.”

“Jill, honey, baby…”

But the fact remained that she was a woman who’d leap into his arms at unexpected times, even at the mall, and kiss his ear wetly. She would smile with her entire face when he came home and talk nonstop about some silliness in a way that made the whole evening seem to him like good crystal and silver. And he could never forget the way she’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night, roll over on top of him, and drive her head into his collarbone, humping with so much energy that he fought hard not to move for fear it would be over too fast.