by H. P. Bayne
Dez’s suspicions were confirmed as he spotted the Toyota parked a little crookedly outside the building’s entrance. His heart, already thudding against his chest wall thanks to the physical exertion, picked up the pace as he saw no sign of Sully.
Dez yanked open one of the doors that made up a portion of the building’s glass-fronted north side and scanned the building’s lobby for his brother.
He recognized one of the building’s uniformed security team members hovering near the front desk. The man was staring in the direction of the elevators and, as he shifted his gaze back to the front entrance and the newest visitor, Dez noticed the bewildered expression of raised eyebrows and parted lips.
“You looking for your brother?”
“Where’d he go?”
Dez listened to the answer as he rushed past, headed for the elevators. “Mr. Braddock’s office. He looked pretty wild.”
Dez tapped the button repeatedly for the top floor, the display above the four separate doors counting down numbers at a maddening crawl. It was end of shift for many and it was clear employees were leaving the building for the day, tying up the lifts as they made to head down to the underground parkade.
“How long ago?” Dez shouted to the security guard.
“Only about a minute before you got here. Why? Should I be concerned?”
Dez kept the thought to himself: God, I hope not. Aloud, he said only, “Family thing. I’ll handle it.”
One of the elevators finally arrived, after heading first to the parking levels, and Dez was greeted by an empty car. Praying no one else had pressed the “up” button on any of the twenty-two floors separating lobby from executive offices, Dez watched the display as it counted toward his destination.
Luck was on his side, and he made it to the top floor without further disruptions, the elevator emitting a chirpy ding, which sounded out of place given the tension of the situation.
As anticipated, he arrived to an anxious-looking receptionist who, seeing him, pointed weakly in the direction of the hall leading to the offices.
Dez didn’t bother to ask for details of his brother’s arrival. Already he could hear signs of a struggle and it only intensified as he raced down the hall in the direction of his uncle’s huge corner office.
Lowell was a big man, nearly as tall and muscular as his elder brother, Flynn. But even he was having a hard time warding off the attack from his small-by-comparison foster nephew as Sully strained to break Lowell’s hold on his left wrist. Clenched in Sully’s fingers was a long and dangerously pointed letter opener.
Dez didn’t stop to yell a command, merely rushed forward as Lowell succeeded at last in using his free hand to shove Sully back a couple feet. It was all Dez needed to execute the tackle, taking his brother to the ground and relying on the solid weight of thick muscle to hold him there. Ordinarily, that would have been more than enough, many a lighthearted, brotherly wrestling match ending with a tap-out from Sully once they reached this point. But not today. Although Dez was sitting heavily on his brother’s waist and hips and had Sully’s wrists pinned to the floor, the younger man was still fighting. What was more, he was succeeding in lifting Dez a few inches into the air. It wasn’t much and Dez didn’t think there was any huge risk he would end up being bucked off, but Sully shouldn’t have been able to budge him at all.
Focused as he was on his brother, Dez didn’t dare look away to see what was keeping Lowell. “I could use some help here.”
Lowell materialized at his side. “Think you can hold him still long enough for me to get at a vein?”
Dez risked looking away from Sully for a moment, enabling him to see the syringe in his uncle’s hand. “What the hell is that?”
“It’s a sedative. If you can’t hold him, tell me, and I’ll try for the hip instead. Vein would put him under quicker though.”
Lowell knelt on Sully’s right arm while Dez shifted his grip entirely to the left, placing the full weight of his upper body against Sully’s shoulder and wrist as Lowell moved in with the syringe.
Sully had yet to speak, the sounds he was making restricted to grunts from the struggle. But now, with the needle moving in, words formed, the same two as the last time—“blue room”—uttered repeatedly through a voice that sounded nothing like his own.
Dez fought to hold the arm steady as Lowell pierced the flesh near the crook of Sully’s elbow, bringing on a fresh attempt at escape. But even Harry’s frighteningly strong influence wasn’t enough to shift two large men. Dez observed the liquid sedative slowly leave the syringe and disappear into Sully’s arm.
“It’s okay, Sull,” Dez said as he watched the drug take effect, his brother’s increasingly unfocused eyes losing the battle as they finally slid shut and remained that way.
Sully’s voice changed in the moments before unconsciousness slid fully over him, becoming softer as he muttered just one word, the name a question. “Dez?”
“I’ve got you, buddy. You’re okay.”
Dez maintained both grip and pressure until he felt Sully go completely limp beneath him, body sinking bonelessly into the area rug.
Lowell slumped back against his desk, exhaling a slow but heavy breath through pursed lips. Dez felt for the pulse at Sully’s neck, relieved to feel it slowing until it maintained a solid and healthy beat against his fingertips.
“How long does this stuff last?”
Lowell reached up and back, depositing the used syringe atop his desk. “Not that long, probably only an hour or two.”
“Probably? You don’t know?”
“I’ve never had to personally use it before.”
“Are you in the habit of keeping injectable sedative in your office?”
Lowell’s smile didn’t move beyond a slight upturn of lips. “I've had my share of threats over the years. You never know when someone’s going to burst in and come after you. I just never thought it would be my nephew. Thanks for getting here when you did. I don’t think I could have held him off for long.”
Dez didn’t respond directly to his uncle’s expression of gratitude, mind shifting instead to next moves. “If there’s only an hour at the lower end, I’d like to get him back to Mom and Dad’s pretty quick. Is there a less obvious way out of here so I don’t have to be lugging him through the lobby with everyone around?”
“Dez.” The way Lowell spoke his name was heavy with meaning, with concern not yet spoken and worry for what would happen once it was.
And Dez knew without having to ask that he didn’t want to listen. He couldn’t. “I need to get my cruiser and bring it around. Is there another way out of here?”
“Dez, you know we can’t keep going like this. Sullivan’s out of control. He just tried to kill me, for God’s sake.”
“It wasn’t him, Uncle Lowell.”
Lowell made no attempt to hide his incredulity as his eyes moved from Dez to Sully and back again. “Sure as hell looks like him.”
“It’s like what happened the other night when he slashed up. He was possessed. The guy who’s doing it is making him do these things, stuff he wouldn’t do otherwise. You know Sully. This isn’t him.”
“Dez, there’s no such thing as ghosts, all right? Please, listen to me on this. I love Sullivan, too, and I’d like to believe him, but there’s absolutely no scientific basis for anything you’re saying.”
“Okay, how about the fact he was using his left hand to try to stab you? Sully’s right handed. Or there’s this.” Dez reached into the right, front pocket of Sully’s jeans, extracting the Swiss Army knife he kept there for some of the odd jobs he was faced with at the Black Fox. “He always carries a knife on him, yet he went for a letter opener.”
“Have you ever heard of dissociative identity disorder? It used to be called multiple personality disorder.”
“I know what it is.”
“It’s often mistaken for possession, and there are documented cases of patients switching their dominant hand during an episode of fr
agmentation.”
Dez loved his uncle, but there were times his patience faded with Lowell’s opinions and constant need to be right. “Look, Uncle Lowell. You don’t need to explain this to me, okay? I know about DID, and Sully doesn’t have it. I know my brother. Now, are you going to help me here or not?”
Lowell’s sigh was both frustrated and resigned. “I’ll help you get him down to the parking garage on the executive office’s private elevator, and you can bring your car down there to get him. But I can’t look the other way on this much longer, Dez. By all rights, I should report this to the police. I can’t promise no one else did.”
Dez considered that and hoped the fact a uniformed officer had run in after Sully had been enough to keep people’s fingers away from their phones’ 9-1-1 buttons. If it hadn’t been, there wasn’t much he could do about the situation but convince Lowell not to lay charges.
“I swear to you, it wasn’t Sully,” he said. “We’re working at getting to the bottom of this but, in the meantime, I’m asking you to trust me. I’m sorry this happened, but I’m begging you to just let me and Mom and Dad handle this for now. Okay?”
Lowell was silent long enough that Dez felt the creep of anxiety at the possibility his stubborn uncle would decide taking matters into his own hands was the only way to help Sully. In the end, though, Dez’s pleas did not fall on deaf ears.
“I’ll do what you’re asking, Dez,” he said, but then added the caveat Dez realized he himself had used. “For now. But I’m warning you, find a way to get Sully the help he needs, or I’m going to get it for him—with or without your consent.”
18
When Sully opened his eyes, his surroundings, for a few moments, swam in front of him.
He blinked, clearing both his vision and his brain until memory returned like a jolt of electricity, a lightning strike through a storm-blackened sky. But it wasn’t Harry Schuster’s wide, terrified eyes and baggy, yellow hospital clothing illuminated in front of him.
He was instead greeted by the familiar, by his mother’s concerned face moving in closer for assessment. The woman’s expression did nothing to relieve the cold dread that dropped over Sully with the full return of consciousness.
His too-quick attempt to sit up was prevented by his mother’s gentle but firm hand on his shoulder. “How are you feeling, Sully?”
“Mom? How did I get here?”
“Dez brought you over.”
“When? What time is it?”
“He dropped you off about half an hour ago. It’s getting close to six.”
“But I went over to Betty’s a little after three.”
“Is that the last thing you remember?”
“Sort of, I guess. I mean, uh ….” He was uncertain how or even if he should be telling his mother—the wife of the deputy police chief—about the fact he’d committed a break and enter.
But there had never been any hiding from Mara—particularly when she’d managed to corner Dez first. “I know about you sneaking into Betty’s, Sully. What I need to know is whether you remember anything about what happened after that.”
“No, nothing. God, did I do something?”
“You could say that. But Dez says it wasn’t you. He said it was Betty’s husband.”
“The last thing I remember was him coming at me in the closet where I was hiding. Is Dez okay? Bulldog?”
“They’re both fine, although Dez was pretty shaken up.”
“Where is he?”
“He had to go pick up Bulldog and drop off the cruiser. His shift ended while he was in the middle of dealing with this. Luckily for him—for all of us—it was a quiet shift. I don’t know what he would have told dispatch if they’d tried to assign him a call.”
“What happened after that? After Harry took over, I mean?”
“Dez told your dad and me you took off in Thackeray’s car. Dez followed but lost you downtown. Luckily, he figured out you were headed for Lowell’s office.”
“Why would Harry want to go there?”
“Apparently, Lowell was involved in getting Harry committed to Lockwood,” Mara said. “He’d been supplying Harry’s meds back then, until Harry took a turn for the worse and attempted suicide. It was the last straw for Betty, and she decided Lowell and Dr. Gerhardt were making sense in recommending Harry go to stay at Lockwood. Dez thinks Harry has it in for Lowell because of it and used you to get to him. As his nephew, you have easy and immediate access to him.”
“I didn’t hurt him, did I?”
“No. Dez got there first. Lowell was holding you off, but only just. It took both of them to restrain you so Lowell could sedate you. Lowell agreed to keep what happened to himself, and Dez brought you back here.”
Sully rubbed his palms against his eyelids, sealing out the image of Mara. He wished it was as easy to make the rest of this disappear. “I’m sorry. God, Mom, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for any of that to happen.”
Her gentle hand settled on his shoulder, fingers kneading in and working to rub away tension. “I know, kiddo. I know.”
Mara left the room with a promise of returning with a glass of water, allowing Sully a minute or two to pull himself together.
She wasn’t gone long, and she pressed a glass of cold water into Sully’s hand as she sat on the edge of the bed. “Drink this. Lowell thought you might be a bit dizzy or have a headache when you woke up. I don’t want to give you anything right now since I’m not sure exactly what you were injected with. He’s the chemist, not me.”
Sully nodded and downed half the glass. Mara waited until the glass was safely on the nightstand before launching into another line of questioning.
“Dez tells me Lowell’s been giving you sleeping pills for a while. Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t want you guys to worry. I have trouble sleeping sometimes with the stuff I see, and there are times when I get to the point where I can’t take it anymore. The pills help. I don’t abuse them. They’re just for emergencies, when things are really bad.”
“Here’s the thing, Sully. Flynn told me that after Betty was killed, a search of your apartment turned up some pills. When no one was able to figure out what they were, they were handed off to a forensic drug expert. No conflict since she isn’t associated with LOBRA. Flynn said she’d never seen anything like it before, that it appears to be a synthetic compound of some sort. I don’t understand this chemistry stuff, but she said her initial tests showed some similarities between this drug and LSD. As such, she said she would be concerned someone using it might experience visual, auditory or other sensory hallucinations. Flynn said the lead investigator on Betty’s shooting seemed quite interested in that information.”
“Then someone must have planted that stuff. I haven’t been hallucinating, Mom. I’ve never made up anything.”
“I know you haven’t made up the things you see, Sully. But things have been happening lately that don’t make sense, even for you. You’ve never been possessed before. Until recently, we didn’t even know it could really happen, not like this. You always said you believed ghosts could impact people’s emotions, maybe even their thoughts, or that they could make people sick over time. But you thought the sort of possession where a person is completely taken over didn’t really happen.”
“That was before it happened to me,” Sully said. “The longer I do this, the more I realize there’s a lot I don’t know.”
“Sully, what if there’s something else going on here? What if whatever you’ve been taking is responsible for what you’ve been experiencing lately? I’m not saying the man you saw wasn’t real. Obviously, he was. I mean, you and Dez found him and identified him. But maybe you saw a picture of him somewhere and—”
“I didn’t make him up, Mom. He’s really been appearing to me. I’ve only taken a pill one time in the last few days.”
“The night you tried to kill yourself at Dez’s, when you said Harry possessed you.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been
seeing him plenty when I haven’t taken anything. I didn’t take one of my pills today, and all this happened anyway.”
“Maybe the effects of the stuff are longer-lasting than anyone realized. If those pills are the ones you've been taking, LSD use often results in flashbacks. Maybe this is something similar.”
“Mom, I know what this is and what it isn’t, all right? Please. I need you to believe me.”
“I do. I do believe you. But there are still questions here, and your dad and I are worried about you.”
“Is he here?”
“He was,” Mara said. “He left.”
There was something in her expression, the way her lips drew in, a slight tension at the corners of her eyes. She was worried about something and, he suspected, she was equally worried about sharing it with him.
“Mom? What’s going on?”
“Nothing, Sully. I need you to get some rest, okay?”
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s nothing wr—”
“I know you, all right? And I’m not stupid. Something happened, didn’t it? Mom?”
She drew in a breath and let it out slowly, eyes fixed on him as if weighing how much, if anything, she should tell him. In the end, he must have passed her silent test.
“Your dad was very upset when he left,” she said. “He wouldn’t talk to me about it. He just said he needed to see Lowell, and would discuss it when he got back. He wanted to talk to you about something he found in your pocket.”
Sully didn’t typically carry anything but his wallet, keys and folding knife, so he was left at a loss as to what his mother was talking about. “What did he find?”
“I didn’t see, not really. After Dez left, Dad was trying to get you comfortable and he emptied your pockets. He knows you carry that utility knife, and he wanted to make sure you didn’t hurt yourself. Only he pulled something else out of your other pocket first. He didn’t say anything about it, just went down to the office. A few minutes later, he stormed out, so I went to the office to see if he’d left any clues behind. All I could see was that the computer was on, set to the home screen. The only thing I can think is when he was going through your pockets, he found a thumb drive.”