Greg Iles - Dead Sleep

“I’m going upstairs to get my bags. You stay here while I do it.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. You don’t have anything to worry about.”

“I mean it, Marc.”

Without waiting for a reply, I run up the stairs and grab my suitcase, thanking God I didn’t unpack yet. When I go back down, he’s waiting at the foot of the stairs.

“What am I supposed to tell the kids?” he asks.

“Don’t you dare use them against me like that. Tell them I got called away to a photo shoot. I’ll be back to see them. I just won’t be spending the night.”

He looks penitent now, but the sense of entitlement I heard in his voice only moments ago still haunts me. Before he sinks into drunken apologies, I push past him and leave without a word.

As I hit the sidewalk, a car door opens a few yards away and a dark figure floats onto the sidewalk.

“Jordan?” says a female voice. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m fine, Wendy. I’m just staying elsewhere.”

“What happened?”

My joke to Kaiser about Wendy making a pass at me comes back to me like instant karma. Someone made a pass tonight, all right. But I could never have imagined it would come from my sister’s husband. “Men problems,” I murmur.

“Gotcha. Where are we going?”

“A hotel, I guess.”

She takes my suitcase and starts toward the Mustang, then pauses. “Um, look… I don’t know how you feel about hotels, but I’ve got an extra bedroom at my apartment. I’ve got to stay with you no matter where you go, so, you know. It’s up to you. But that way we’d have food and coffee, toiletries, whatever you need.”

There have been nights I would have killed for a hotel room. I’ve slept in shell craters and been grateful for them. But tonight I don’t want a sterile, empty place… I want real things around me, a humanly messy kitchen and CDs and a crocheted comforter on the couch. I hope Wendy isn’t a compulsive cleaner. “That sounds great. Let’s go.”

I’m about to start the Mustang when a soft beeping sounds in it. “What’s that?” I ask, looking around in confusion.

“Cell phone,” she announces. “A Nokia. I recognize the ring. We use some at the office.”

“Oh.” I grab my fanny pack from the backseat, unzip it, and remove the phone Kaiser gave me back at the FBI office. “Hello?”

“Ms. Glass? Daniel Baxter.”

“What’s up?”

“I’ve been negotiating with Monsieur de Becque of the Cayman Islands.”

“And?”

“He says you can go on our plane, and you can bring one assistant to help with lighting, et cetera.”

“Great. When do I leave?”

“Tomorrow. A few of us have spent the last half hour arguing over who your assistant should be. I’m backing a member of the Hostage Rescue Team. If things take a nasty turn, he’d have the best chance of getting you out of there alive.”

“Is someone arguing with your choice?”

“Agent Kaiser has a different opinion.”

I smile to myself. “Who does the sheriff want to send?”

Baxter’s hand covers the mouthpiece, but despite his effort I hear him say, “She just called you ‘the sheriff.’” When the ISU chief removes his hand, he says, “The sheriff doesn’t want to send anybody. He wants to go himself.”

“You should let him go, then.”

“Is that who you want?”

“Absolutely. I feel safer already.”

“Okay. You’ll probably leave tomorrow afternoon. I’ll call you in the morning to give you the travel details.”

“I’ll talk to you then. And Wendy’s taking good care of me.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

“What’s happening?” Wendy asks after I hang up.

“I’m going to the Cayman Islands.”

“Oh.” She shifts in her seat. “What was that about a sheriff?”

“A joke. I was talking about Kaiser.”

She guessed as much. “He’s going with you?”

“It looks that way. For security.”

She looks out her window. “Lucky you,” she says finally.

The eternal plight of women. A minute ago we were fast friends. Now she’d like to revoke her offer to share her apartment. But her manners are far too good for that. I’d like to reassure Agent Wendy that she has nothing to worry about, but I don’t want to insult her intelligence. I start the engine and pull into St. Charles Avenue.

“Give me some directions. It’s time to get some sleep.”

“Straight,” she says. “I’ll tell you where to turn.”

I start down the tree-lined avenue, the streetcar tracks gleaming silver under the lights as the Mustang swallows them. The leaves on the trees look gray, but only a small part of my brain registers this. The rest is rerunning Marc Lacour’s remark again and again: It wouldn’t be the first time you pretended to be her, would it? And then Dr. Lenz’s voice, out of the dark: What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?

If only you could plead the fifth with your conscience.

Most flights to the Cayman Islands stage out of Houston or Miami, but with the FBI Lear, things are simpler. It’s Kaiser, me, and two pilots up front for the two-hour run from New Orleans to Grand Cayman, largest of the three islands that make up the British colony. The last time I made this flight, my knuckles were white for half the journey. I was covering the air convoy that American pilots take to the Caymans for the annual air show there, one “highlight” of which is the provocative overflight of communist Cuba. Fifteen years ago, this was no joke, and I’m happy to be cruising along with nothing more to worry about than a seventy-year-old Frenchman who for some unknown reason has requested my presence.

We’ve been in the air for an hour, and Kaiser is uncharacteristically quiet. I don’t suppose there’s much to say. Or perhaps I’m radiating enough hostility to discourage conversation. I can still feel my brother-in-law’s lips against my neck, and the emotional fallout is hard to shake. Most difficult of all is the remark Marc made as I rebuffed him: It wouldn’t be the first time you pretended to be her, would it? I’d hoped that particular chapter of my life was shared only by my sister, but apparently I hoped for too much. The fact that Jane told her husband about it reveals a piercing truth: she never really believed my side of the story.

What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done? Dr. Lenz used to ask his patients. A simple but devastating question. And the other one – what was it? What’s the worst thing that ever happened to you? Several terrible things have happened to me, none of which I want to dwell on now, but in making choices about my behavior, I haven’t often gone against the dictates of my conscience. On the most painful occasion when I did, I was eighteen years old. It’s almost embarrassing that twenty-two years of post-high school living haven’t given me some greater claim to infamy, but the journey through adolescence is one of the hardest we ever make, and the wounds sustained along the way last a lifetime.

Years of simmering tension between my sister and me came to a boiling point during our senior year, just weeks before my affair with David Gresham became the sensation of the school. Jane was riding her high horse, chattering endlessly about how she was going to be a Chi-Omega the next year and asking why I didn’t get my act together, “fix up” a little, and try to be “halfway normal,” whatever that meant to her. When I wasn’t worrying about how I was going to pay her expenses at Ole Miss, I was shooting portraits in my tiny studio or sneaking through the woods to my history teacher’s house. Looking back on it, I was like a ghost. Silent during classes, vanishing after school, skipping pep rallies and ball games, never going to high school hangouts.