Jeffery Deaver - Praying for Sleep

She heard no other sound from downstairs. Or from outside either, other than the steady patter of rain. Michael Hrubek had vanished again. Holding the knife in one hand and leading Heck’s hound with the other, Lis Atcheson walked into the greenhouse and sat in a dark corner to wait.

The rain clattered like marbles on the greenhouse roof. Portia’d been gone twenty minutes. It was only eight miles or so to the Sheriff ’s Department but the road might now be completely impassable. It could take her an hour or more to get through. Yet as the time passed and she heard nothing more of Hrubek, she began to relax. She even let herself wonder if maybe, just maybe, he’d fled. She felt a glow of euphoria and reflected that perhaps this was all that comfort ever was: believing that we’re safe despite the clear and unobvious dangers from which we’re protected by nothing more than single-strength glass.

She found herself wondering about Owen. She refused to think the worst. No, no. He was fine. With so much flooding he’d probably ducked into a garage or house to wait out the worst of the storm. She looked up at the black sky above her head and uttered a short prayer for dawn-exactly the opposite of what she usually prayed for, lying in bed, trying so desperately to sleep.

A prayer for light, for morning, for rampaging red and blue and white lights atop approaching cars.

She smelled a rose, whose scent now wafted past her face. Only twenty minutes more. Or nineteen. Or fifteen. Help will be here by then. Surely Michael Hrubek was lost in the forest. Surely he’d fallen and broken his leg.

Lis scratched the dog’s ears. “It’s all right, your master’ll be all right,” she said to him as he tilted his head. Lis put her arm around the drooping shoulders. The poor thing. He was as nervous as she-his ears were quivering and his neck was a knot of muscle. Lis eased back and looked at him, the folds of skin and bored-looking eyes. His nose was in the air and his nostrils began twitching. She smiled. “You like roses too, boy? Do you?”

He stood. His shoulder muscles tensed.

An unearthly growl rumbled from deep in his throat.

“Oh, my Lord,” Lis cried. “No!”

He sniffed the air hard, his legs eager, his head lifting and falling. He began to walk quickly back and forth over the floor. Lis leapt to her feet and grabbed the knife, looking around her at the misted glass of the greenhouse. She couldn’t see through it. Where was he?

Where?

“Stop it,” she shouted to the dog, who continued to pace, sniffing the air, growing more and more frantic. Her palms were suddenly slick with cold sweat and she wiped them and gripped the handle of the knife once again.

“Stop it! He’s gone ! He’s not here anymore. Stop howling!” She was turning in circles, looking for an enemy only the dog could detect. The growling became a bay, a banshee’s wail, ricocheting off every inch of window.

“Oh, please!” she begged. “Stop!”

And he did.

Silently the hound spun around and ran straight to the lath-house door-the one Lis recalled she’d been on her way to check when Heck had arrived.

The door that she’d forgotten completely about.

The door that now burst open and struck the hound in his ribs, knocking him down, stunned. Michael Hrubek stepped into the greenhouse. He stood, dripping and huge and muddy, in the center of the concrete floor. His head swiveled, taking in the gargoyles, the flowers, the mists-all the details-as if he were on a garden-club tour. In his hand was the muddy pistol. Seeing Lis, he called her name in an astonished whisper and his mouth hardened into a smile-a smile that arose from neither irony nor triumph nor even mad humor, but was instead reminiscent of an expression one might find upon the faces of the dead.

Standing before her, he was so much larger than she remembered.

At the trial he’d seemed small, a dense bole of evil. Here, now, he filled the large greenhouse, expanding to touch every wall, the gravel floor, the peaked roof. He wiped rain from his eyes. “Lis-bone. Do you remember me?”

“Please…” she whispered. The narcotic of fear flooded through her and stilled her voice.

“I’ve traveled very far, Lis-bone. I fooled them all. I fooled them pretty good. Make no mistake.”

She stepped back several feet.

“You told them I killed that man. R-O-B-E-R-T. Six letters in his name. You lied…”

“Don’t hurt me. Please.”

A fierce growling came from the hound, who was standing tall and tense behind Michael. The flesh of the dog’s mouth was drawn back from his ardent yellow teeth. Michael looked down and reached for him as if the dog were a stuffed toy. The hound dodged the hand and sank its teeth into Michael’s swollen left forearm. Lis thought he’d scream in agony but the huge man seemed not to feel the bite at all. He lifted the dog by its teeth and dragged him to a large storage closet. He pulled the slavering jaw from his arm and threw the animal inside, slamming the door.

Oblivious to the gleaming razor-sharp knife in her hand Michael turned to Lis. Why bother? He can’t feel pain, he’s huge, he has a gun… Still, she held the knife firmly in her hand and it was pointed directly at his heart.

“Lis-bone. You were in court. You were part of that betrayal.”

“I had to be in court. I had no choice. They make you be a witness. You understand that, don’t you? I didn’t mean you any harm.”

“Harm?” He sounded exasperated. “Harm? There’s harm all around you! How could you miss it? The fuckers are everywhere!”

Trying to stall him she said sympathetically, “You must be tired.”

Ignoring this he said, “I have to tell you something. Before we get down to it.”

Down to it.

A chill ran from her neck to her thighs.

“Now listen carefully. I can’t speak loudly because this room is sure to be bugged. You may know that as sur veil lance, where they watch you from behind veils or masks or TV screens. Are you listening ? Good.”

He began a lecture, frantic yet passionless. “Justice cures betrayal,” he said. “I killed someone. I admit it. It wasn’t a fashionable thing to do and I know now it wasn’t smart.” He squinted, as if trying to recall his text. “True, it was not what you think of as killing. But that doesn’t excuse me. It doesn’t excuse anybody. Anybody! ” He frowned and glanced at words written in red ink on his hand. They had bled, like old tattoos.

The monologue continued, his subject betrayal and revenge, and he paced the greenhouse floor, occasionally turning his back on Lis. At one point she almost leapt forward and plunged the blade into his back. But he turned quickly, as if suspicious of her, and continued to speak.

With its faint blue-green lights the room seemed far removed from this time and place. It reminded her of a scene from a book she’d read years ago, perhaps the first novel of her childhood. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. It seemed, in her own numb dementia, that they stood not in a rural greenhouse but in a Victorian submarine and that she was an innocent harpooner, watching the mad captain rant while the dark ocean passed over and around them.

Michael talked about cows and Christian Scientists and women who hid behind unfashionable hats. He mourned the loss of a beloved black car. Several times he mentioned a Dr. Anne and, scowling, a Dr. Richard. Was that, she wondered, Kohler?

Then he wheeled toward her. “I wrote you a letter. And you never answered it.”