Michael Prescott: In Dark Places

And especially not with a woman doctor. No way a woman could understand them. Many of these guys had never had a deep, lasting relationship with a woman. They turned to women for sex, but they relied on their buddies for comfort.

The clock ticked. One-nineteen.

He should have been here at one. No, earliershe'd asked him to arrive a little before the hour so he could complete the necessary paperwork. She remembered his sigh over the phone as he echoed, "Paperwork." It was the voice of a man who'd filled out too many forms.

A nice voice, she'd thought at the time. Mellow, tugged down into a low register by world-weariness. A man with that kind of voice might be cynical and tired, but he would not be empty inside. She had looked forward to meeting him.

She was still looking forward to it nowat one-twenty in the afternoon.

For a second time she called his cell number. No answer.

She wasn't going to pace her office aimlessly for the rest of the hour. She intended to have a session with this man. If he wouldn't come to her, she would go to him.

Quickly she walked through the waiting room, out into the hall, locking the door behind her. The hall door afforded access to the lot behind the building, where her battered Saab was still parked. She climbed into the car, wincing at the bullet hole and the spiderweb of fractures in the windshield.

Sgt. Alan Brand worked out of the Newton Area station. She looked it up in a city map book, then pulled out of her reserved space, heading east, avoiding the street where the attack had taken place.

Not that the other streets were any safer. Her office was a few blocks from MacArthur Park, which had once been a place for family picnics and was now the disputed territory of three rival gangs. A bad neighborhood, as the patrol officers had said. VFWwhatever that meant.

She found herself clutching the steering wheel with both fists, aware of the rush of air through the glassless frame of the driver's-side window. She kept the CD player off. She was not in the mood for Bach, and besides, she wanted to maintain full alertness.

She hooked onto Hoover Street, heading south, and tried Brand's cell phone a third time without success. Then she left messages for the two other patients with appointments for this afternoon, asking them to reschedule. They were paying customers, and Brand was a freebie, but it didn't mattershe had to have the session with Brand.

Hoover Street took her down to the USC campus. She turned left onto Jefferson Boulevard, passing through a neighborhood of shotgun flats, liquor stores, and boarded-up minimalls. Knots of young people congregated on street corners or against walls tattooed with graffiti. She found herself wishing she could roll up her window.

Conventional thinking was that the graffiti vandals and the other antisocial elements here, or anywhere, suffered from a deficiency of self-esteem. As a proactive measure, from preschool onward, kids were indoctrinated in the dogma of their own unassailable self-worth. Yet they kept turning into taggers and dealers and killers anyway.

It was her view that a lack of self-esteem had little to do with criminal tendencies. The typical inmate in the county jail had sky-high self-esteem. He saw himself as superior to most of the population. He believed he was smarter than the policenever mind that they had caught himand more adventurous than the workaday civilians he characterized unkindly as clones, drones, or "normals."

Felons could not be talked out of this attitude, or preached out of it, or medicated out of it. They had to be reached on a deeper levelthe level of neural programming itself, the hardwiring of their mental circuitry. It was the only way.

If it worked, she reminded herself. If .

At the corner of Jefferson and Central Avenue, the police station came into view. She pulled into the parking lot. She felt safe here, she thoughtbut when she got out of her car, a shudder of panic quivered through her, and she turned, quickly scanning her surroundings for danger. There was none.

Damn, what was the matter with her?

Then she smiled at herself. Of all people, she ought to know the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. This morning's fight-or-flight response had been burned into her neural circuitry. It would keep recurring at unexpected times. Meanwhile, she would seek to dissociate from the symptoms by rationalizing and intellectualizing the eventjust as she was doing now.

"Physician," she murmured, "heal thyself."

The lobby of the station house was crowded with civilians and uniformed officers. One man in a jacket and tie, in earnest conversation with a crying woman, looked at Robin as she entered. She felt his stare and looked back, wondering if he was a victim, a witness, or a plainclothes cop.

People waited in line at the desk. When it was her turn to speak to the desk officer, she asked if she could speak with Sergeant Brand.

"Brand's not here," the officer said without glancing up from a stack of papers.

"Is he expected back soon?"

"He's not here . Not on duty."

Robin didn't get it. The appointment had been set up during Brand's normal working hours. "Are you sure?"

The officer flicked a glance at her. "Can I help you?"

She doubted it. "Who's in charge here?"

"The WC is Lieutenant Wolper." WCwatch commander.

"I'd like to speak with him."

"He's pretty busy, ma'am."

She held her ground. "I need to discuss something with him. It's urgent."

The cop shrugged, eager to be rid of her, and gave her directions to the lieutenant's office. Robin proceeded down a hall lined with corkboards displaying memos and notices. Fluorescent light panels buzzed overhead. Coffee stains spotted the carpet.

Lieutenant Wolper was protected from distractions by a civilian assistant, a heavyset, grim-faced woman with a butch haircut. Robin introduced herself, drawing a frown from the assistant. She didn't take it personally. The woman seemed like the type who frowned a lot.

"The lieutenant is on the phone. Have a seat."

Robin doubted this story. She had the feeling that the assistant merely wanted to show who was in charge. It was a power play, but Robin didn't care. She sat and waited. She would wait all day if she had to.

Noises echoed from other parts of the stationdrunken shouts, laughter, slamming doors. Men and women in uniform passed through the hall, gear rattling on Sam Browne belts, radios crackling with cross talk.

None of it was unfamiliar to her. Though she had never been inside this station, she had spent time in many similar environments. The atmosphere was always the same. A police station, a county jail, a state prisonsuch places had been part of her life throughout her childhood, until the age of ten, when they took her father away for the last time.

She wasn't surprised when he was taken. He had gone to jail several times before. The other kids in Mrs. Allen's homeroom teased her about it, said she had a dad who was a jailbird and a crazy man. They said her dad had held up a liquor store and beaten the proprietor over the head with a baseball bat even after he'd cleaned out the cash register. They said her dad had driven a car off a bridge and down an embankment during his failed getaway from another robbery. They said her dad was a drunken loser who got into fights in bars. She couldn't dispute any of this. It was all true.

The next-to-last time her dad had gone away, Robin had asked her mother if he would ever get out. She'd been almost disappointed to hear that he would. Life was easier when her dad wasn't around. Not easier in the financial sensenot with her mom struggling to pay the bills and raise a ten-year-old daughter on her own. But easier emotionally. When her dad was around, the little house where they lived on the outskirts of Phoenix, in the fast-growing suburb of Paradise Valley, was hot with tension and the certainty of violence. Her dad had never lashed out at her, but he'd whupped Robin's mom plenty of times. Whupped herthat was what he called it when he got angry and took his fists to her face and backside. Sometimes he was drunk when he did it, but mostly he was just pissed off. He got mad all the time for no good reason. The TV picture was snowy, there was an overdue electric bill, his supper was too cold, his beer was too warmany little thing was enough to get him riled, and for the next few days her mom would wear layers of makeup and long-sleeved shirtsin the desert, in summer, in one-hundred-degree heat.