Norman Partridge - Slippin' into Darkness

Home. That was where he should be now. Not driving around, a scared kid wearing a cop’s uniform.

But Steve was afraid. He was afraid to face April. He didn’t want to find her screaming her head off in his fortress of solitude, still trapped in her nightmare. Because if she wasn’t free after everything he had done, what more could he do?

He didn’t have an answer for that. He slipped behind the wheel and decided that it was time to find one. He came to a red light at the foot of Georgia, sat there waiting with a picture of himself locked in his house, listening to April’s tortured screams for years to come.

The Six Million Dollar Man watched the light. It was as red and dangerous as the cherry on his police cruiser. A warning. The streets were empty. Downtown was deserted. He didn’t move when the light turned green. The old engine idled, missing the occasional beat. April’s nightmare was real enough to hold in his hand, real enough to hide in the pocket of his uniform. But his dream was real, too, wasn’t it?

Parts of it were. The doves nesting in the dying pines that ringed the drive-in. April’s dog, Homer Price, racing through the eucalyptus grove near the cemetery. But he hadn’t found the meadow. It wasn’t real. Not yet.

Steve had wanted April to step into his dream, alive and young, just as she had wanted him to enter her nightmare as a living, breathing avenger. They had tried to make it happen with drugs and paperback wisdom. But neither thing had happened, not really.

Something else had happened, something that they hadn’t anticipated. April’s nightmare had slipped into Steve’s dream, and now one reality was tearing at the other. But the tempest was only beginning. The winds were rising, just now, and Steve felt that in the end only one of the two realities could survive.

The dream, or the nightmare.

Seagulls drifted on dirty wings over the empty streets, rooting for fast food scraps. Steve felt the house of cards tilting. Maybe he could save it. He didn’t know if he was up to the task. The way he was feeling today…everything was out of sync.

Behind him, a car horn sounded.

Steve jerked in his seat as if he’d been stabbed in the back. His brain kicked into gear. He made a right turn and drove to the hospital.

Emptiness burned a hole in his gut as he stepped into the elevator. The caretaker was still alive. Steve was certain of that, because the receptionist on the first floor had informed him that Royce Lewis was on the third floor in room 303.

Steve waited for the elevator doors to close. Maybe everything would end while he was in this small metal box. Royce Lewis would release his last breath as Steve drew his next, and when the elevator doors opened Steve would step into his basement and find April waiting there in the cool, screamless silence.

Jesus, that was silly, almost as bad as his dream of being an avenging cyborg. Stupid.

The elevator doors were rattling closed. An older woman hurried toward the diminishing gap, her heels clicking on the polished white floor in the hospital foyer. Steve closed his eyes, willing the doors to close, but a bell sounded above his head and he knew that he was trapped.

The doors whispered open.

“Oh my,” the woman said. “I’m glad I caught this one.”

Steve nodded. The woman had gray curls, glasses, and a grin that seemed to waver, as if it were about to collapse into a frown at any moment. The doors closed. Steve was standing next to the controls, but the woman didn’t ask him to push a button for her.

The elevator rose. The woman was heading for the third floor.

Maybe she was Royce Lewis’s wife.

Christ. Stop it. But he couldn’t. He was in an elevator with the caretaker’s wife. He was sure of it. He started sweating, and he leaned against the wall as the elevator came to a jarring stop on the second floor.

A man pushing a shopping cart filled with patient records entered the elevator, taking the space between Steve and the woman. Steve’s thumbs closed over his fingers. Dull cracks echoed in the elevator as he popped his knuckles. He wasn’t an avenging cyborg, but he felt like one. What he had done to the caretaker was inhuman. Going after the old guy with a shovel. Just brutal. The guy couldn’t have seen him well enough to make a positive identification. The confrontation had taken place after midnight, the only light from the moon and a flashlight.

But Royce Lewis had seen him. Steve was sure of that. He remembered the man’s unforgiving eyes.

Steve stared at the woman. Beneath heavy bifocals, her eyes were wet, tortured.

The hospital attendant punched a button. The doors closed. The elevator jerked. And then Steve wasn’t a cop, and he wasn’t a cyborg. He was a hit man in some bad movie. He was here to murder a South American dictator who was in the hospital for brain surgery. Steve would smother the bastard with a pillow if necessary, but he was going to get the job done, no matter the cost.

The doors slid open. The attendant pushed the cart into the foyer.

The woman glanced at Steve. Her grin faltered. Steve shored it up with one of his own, and she stepped onto the third floor.

No. He wasn’t going to do it. He couldn’t do it now, anyway. He was in uniform, for christsakes. He couldn’t just walk in, pull out his revolver and fire away like a shootist in a Clint Eastwood-

“Austin! Hey, what are you doing here?”

Steve recognized another cop, Pete Rojas.

“And what’s with the uniform?” Rojas asked, not waiting for an answer to his first question. “I’ve heard of heavy overtime, but this…”

Steve stepped from the elevator. “I haven’t made it home yet. That thing this morning at the cemetery…I don’t know if you heard about it, but it really got under my skin.” Steve said that, and he knew it was no bluff.

“That’s why I’m here,” Rojas said. “You can stop worrying. Lewis came around about two hours ago. Guy’s a diabetic. He faded out bad at the cemetery Blood sugar crashed big time. Getting whacked on the head and practically drowning didn’t help him any. I just finished questioning him.”

“Get anything?”

“The old guy doesn’t remember much. He knows it was a man who hit him, but he can’t recall if the guy said anything. And he couldn’t give me much of a description, apart from the fact that the guy was big…and white.” Rojas grinned. “Hell…that could be you, Austin.”

Steve managed a sick little smile. “Yeah. Put me on the list of suspects.”

Rojas slapped Steve’s shoulder. “I guess I saved you a trip. How about a cup of coffee before I hit the streets?”

“No thanks,” Steve said. “I think I’ll look in on Mr. Lewis.”

“Sure.” Rojas stepped into the elevator. “Like they say-seeing is believing.”

The corridor was too white and there were no shadows. Steve had no place to hide. He stood near the nurse’s station, just across from Room 303. Inside the room, the woman from the elevator held the hand of the gray little man who lay in the hospital bed. A bandage masked the man’s forehead and his eyes were closed, but the steady rise and fall of his chest was apparent, even from Steve’s distant position.

The knot in Steve’s stomach uncoiled just a little bit. The old guy had been through hell, but he was going to be okay. And he didn’t know anything. Steve turned and started for the elevator. And then it hit him. Royce Lewis. The woman in the elevator-Lewis’s wife. Steve realized that he was actually feeling something for them. He shared their pain. He desperately wanted things to be okay with them. They had broken through the distance that separated him from the world.