Get Real

by Erik Carter

  She cautiously settled back in to her seat.

  Dale checked the speed. 90 miles per hour. Fast but not insane—because even though they were in a hurry, they had to get to Redcrest in one piece.

  He gave her a smile and said, “Don’t worry. I got this.”

  “But you look so relaxed.”

  He supposed she was right. Aside from having two hands on the wheel, he probably appeared completely at ease to Jane. Which, really, he was. He’d covered a lot of miles in Arancia while driving at breakneck speeds. He almost found it a bit soothing.

  He glanced over at her. From the photos he’d seen, he knew that her hair was naturally a reddish-brown color like her brother’s, but the darker color she’d dyed it looked amazing on her. She was classically beautiful, and even though she clearly wasn’t at the pinnacle of health—having lived a ramshackle existence for the better part of a year—there was something about the resilience in her eyes that made her even more attractive. But there were other aspects of her visage that had clearly developed long before these last several months—from years of protecting her brother, living on the run, hiding from her father. Her crow’s-feet were a bit more pronounced than your average twenty-nine-year-old, and there were slight rings beneath her eyes. Pain etched into her face—way, way beyond her years.

  Dale pulled Arancia to the left, zoomed around a pair of cars that had pulled over for the flashing lights. More trees zipped by on either side, glowing ghostly blue in the moonlight, and Dale was disappointed to see that they, too, were normal-sized. Redcrest was about 250 miles from where they’d started back at the Hall, and they’d been driving for a while now—but Dale had yet to see one of the famous mammoth trees.

  Then, as he pulled around a curve, something massive showed itself in the glimmering light, for just a moment, before it zipped by.

  A gigantic tree trunk.

  Dale felt a big, childlike grin form on his face.

  Jane looked over and gave him a smile. “First time seeing one of the giants?”

  “Sure is,” Dale said. “I’ve always wanted to. There’s a quote from John Steinbeck. ‘The redwoods, once seen—”

  Jane cut in, finished for him. “‘The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always.’ One of my favorite quotes.” She looked out the window. “I haven’t seen them myself in years.”

  “Must be tough to have spent so long away from your homeland. How have you done all this—kept you and your brother hidden from your father for so long?”

  Jane hesitated. “I’ve never really told anyone about it.”

  “It’s okay, ma’am,” Dale said in a cheeseball voice. “I’m a cop.”

  Jane laughed. But then hesitated again.

  Dale glanced at her. “Look, I was just curious. You don’t have to—”

  “John and I were never going to be what my father wanted,” she said. “We were both curious and creative and service-minded. And we had issues. For me it was sleep problems along with depression, anxiety. Serotonin-related things. But John was worse. There was … an incident. One of my father’s men showed himself to John. When he was ten. Didn’t touch him, thank God, but John never recovered. His personality split.”

  “How do you mean?” Dale said.

  “That’s what happens with multiple personality disorder. The person’s mind splits into alternate personalities—alters—creating other people with traits that the original person might not have. They can be stronger, less fearful, more innocent.”

  “Did Jonathan use these personalities to retaliate against his attacker?”

  “He didn’t have to. My father quickly had the man killed. Well, he responded quickly. From what I understand, the man’s death was certainly not a quick one. Nor painless. And John’s alters didn’t come out in full force until a few years later, at puberty. He went to my father, told him what was happening, asked to go to a doctor. But my father told him that since John recognized the fact that he had a problem, he therefore didn’t have a problem.” She scoffed. “Can you even imagine that?”

  Dale shook his head. “No, I can’t. I truly can’t. With all due respect to your father, that’s one of the most ignorant things I’ve ever heard.”

  Dale hated hearing stories like this, the misunderstanding of and lack of proper response to mental health issues, particularly in children. He wondered how many adults lived their lives in pain only because issues with their mental health hadn’t been properly addressed as children. It was a damn shame. A travesty. A simple head cold would keep a child out of school, but a debilitating neurological disorder would go ignored or, worse, dismissed.

  “You can’t possibly offend me by bad-mouthing my father,” Jane said. “I despise him.”

  Her voice had been icy cold as she said it. Deadly serious. It was rather alarming.

  “John could have been something amazing,” she said. “He wanted so badly to be a journalist or a historian. And he could have, if that worthless sack of shit I call a father had given him the medical treatment he begged for as a child.”

  She was quivering with anger now. Dale didn’t respond.

  She continued. “Instead, he hid me and John away, kept his two problem children out of the limelight. Daddy’s embarrassments. So when we went to college, I started publicly speaking out against his criminal activities. It was the perfect time—1960s San Francisco. This was right around the time of the Human Be-In and the Summer of Love. Everything was happening. It gave me one hell of a platform.”

  “The Summer of Love, huh?” Dale said with a grin as he pulled Arancia past another car that had yielded to the lights and siren. “You don’t look much like a hippie to me.”

  She chuckled. “I’m not. And I wasn’t then either. When I graduated, he tried to pull us back into the family. It was then I knew we’d never be free of him unless I did something drastic. So I moved us out of state, legally changed our names.”

  “To Jane and John Logan,” Dale said. “Why ‘Logan,’ if I may ask?”

  “There was a guy back in college. I wouldn’t have gotten free without him. Logan Winters. Best guy I ever knew. He and I ... we could have been something. But I knew it could never be, not with me protecting John.”

  “It could still work out some day,” Dale said in an optimistic tone.

  She sighed. “It’s been seven years.” She was quiet for a moment. “I gave that up for John. I’ve sacrificed everything for John. I’ve never had a boyfriend. And I’m still a virgin.”

  She immediately buried her face in her hands.

  “Oh my god! I can’t believe I just told you that.”

  “Nothing to be embarrassed about.”

  “But I’m twenty-nine!”

  “It’s not a big deal. Really.”

  She uncovered her face. When she didn’t immediately say anything, Dale broke the awkward silence.

  “Why Kansas?” he said.

  She didn’t reply.

  He glanced over.

  She was ... asleep.

  He’d been talking to her only moments earlier, and now her head was hanging to the side, resting on her shoulder, her eyes closed.

  She jolted awake. Gasped. Looked around the car, startled, confused.

  “Oh no,” she said. “I fell asleep, didn’t I? God, so embarrassing.”

  “Hey, when you gotta sleep, you gotta sleep.”

  Jane groaned and hid her face again. “You asked me a question, didn’t you?”

  “I’m wondering why you moved to Kansas.”

  “To be as random as possible.”

  Dale chuckled. “Yes, that’s about as random as you can get.”

  “You’d think so,” Jane said. “But I often wondered if my choice wasn’t random enough. See, I have a mild obsession with The Wizard of Oz. I did a reverse-Dorothy. Instead of fleeing from Kansas, I fled to Kansas. I’d always dreamed about going there. People have these checklists of places they feel they need to go, but my lis
t has small towns and state parks you’ve never heard of and random cities like Albuquerque or Providence. Does that sound silly to you?”

  “Not at all,” Dale said.

  While Dale had enjoyed getting to know San Francisco and was currently thrilling to the world-famous redwoods, he could understand where Jane was coming from with her desire to see a place like Kansas. There were so many places in the world that could color a person’s experience but would never be labeled as “must sees.” While Dale did see the value in visiting the Eiffel Tower and Mount Rushmore and driving the Autobahn, he also knew that there were thousands of little places with millions of little stories to tell. So he knew exactly where Jane was coming from.

  “I got my master’s in counseling at the University of Kansas,” Jane said. “That put us a couple years in Lawrence, where we met Dr. Goldstein. He helped John more than anyone has. Things just kept getting better and better after their appointments. When I graduated and took a job in Topeka, we were then over half an hour away from Goldstein, so the sessions were scheduled less and less. John started to get worse again. The alters appeared more often. Which is another reason why it’s my fault John developed the Felix personality.”

  Dale felt a bit sad for her. He’d seen this before. Someone who worked tirelessly for other people yet still felt guilt, still felt like they hadn’t done enough. There were so many people in the world who didn’t give two shits about anyone but themselves, but then there were other people, like Jane Logan, who sacrificed everything for others and still felt like they weren’t doing enough.

  “And Felix was so much more intense than the other alters. Not just because he was a stronger personality, but because he dwelled in John’s other issue, his schizophrenic tendencies, seeing the world as 1906.” She let out a long sigh. “God, I’m sorry. I shared too much. I haven’t had many opportunities to talk about all that.”

  “Well, since you’ve been so personal with me, I feel I should be upfront about something. But, first, let me ask—can you keep a secret?”

  She just gave him a look.

  “Yeah. Right. Silly question,” Dale said with a smile. “My name’s not really Tim Melbourne. That’s a cover for this assignment.”

  “Really?” Jane said with a heaping dose of sarcasm. “I would have never guessed that after you tore an entire beard off your face.”

  Dale laughed. “My name’s Dale Conley.”

  “Nice to meet you, Dale.”

  “And I don’t work for the FBI. I work for another federal agency, which I shouldn’t mention. They’re the ones who gave me my name.”

  “So what’s your real name?”

  “Dale Conley is my real name. But I assume you’re asking what my original name is—and I’m afraid I can’t tell you that either.”

  He wouldn’t have told her if he could. Dale chose to forget who he was before he joined the BEI. Now he was Dale Conley. That was his reality, one he liked much better than the reality under the old name. Dale Conley was who he was. And always would be.

  Jane was quiet for a moment. Dale thought she might have fallen asleep again. Then she said, “I miss Kansas. I miss the life John and I had there. And I want this nightmare to be over.”

  To this point, there hadn’t been many consoling things Dale could say to Jane, but now he was able to reassure her.

  “One way or another, the nightmare ends tonight.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  John’s eyes blinked, slowly opening, and as his consciousness regrouped, he thought for a moment that he was back in the surreal no man’s land of his mind.

  But as his surroundings came into focus, he remembered where he was. He was at his family’s cabin in the redwoods outside Redcrest. And he remembered how he’d gotten there. By gunpoint. Along with another hostage—San Francisco’s district attorney, Beau Lawton.

  John hadn’t been to the cabin in many years, and he couldn’t have imagined a stranger set of circumstances in which to find himself back. The cabin was small and simple. A shared living and dining space with a kitchen in the back, separated by a pony wall. There were two bedrooms and a bath to the side.

  John’s arms were behind him, tied at the wrists to one of the chairs from the dining room table. As he looked up, he saw Lee and Beau Lawton on the other side of the room. Lee stood with a gun aimed at Lawton, who sat on the opposite side of the table. In front of Lawton was a notepad, and in his hand was a pen.

  “I won’t do it,” Lawton said.

  “I said write.”

  Lee slapped Lawton hard.

  “Hey!” John yelled out.

  Lee’s attention turned to him. His eyes were bloodshot and seething with rage. There was sweat on his brow. He kept his gun aimed at Beau as he stomped over to John.

  “You’re still awake?” he said through his teeth.

  Still with the gun aimed at Lawton, Lee reached into his back pocket and grabbed a cloth, the same one he’d used on him earlier. He shoved it onto John’s face, clamped down hard.

  John felt Lee’s fingers digging through the cloth and into his cheek. He struggled. A cool, pungent smell filled his nostrils.

  His head teetered. He felt light, airy, cold.

  Lee removed the cloth and went back to the table.

  John’s vision faded. Everything was turning white. In the haze, he saw Lee pull a butcher knife from the block on the counter, yank Lawton’s left hand onto the table, and position the knife over one of his fingers.

  “Now write this down,” Lee said. “‘I, Beau Lawton…’”

  The rest of the words faded out as John’s head fell to his chest.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  “Turn here,” Jane said.

  Dale followed her instruction and pulled onto a gravel road. Enormous trunks surrounded them on either side, climbing hundreds of feet into the moonlight.

  “It’s not much farther.”

  The road curved around another massive trunk then Dale saw the shape of a small cabin in the distance.

  And parked outside was a Chevette.

  “You were right!” Jane said. “They’re here.”

  Dale brought Arancia to a stop and pulled the parking brake. They were several hundred feet from the cabin.

  Jane turned on him. “What are you doing?”

  “Putting some distance between you and the cabin. In case something should happen. Bullets go pretty darn far. Lie down, okay? Across the seats. Below the dash.”

  He was essentially telling Jane to use Arancia as a shield in case hot lead started flying. Even the vaguest notion of Arancia getting struck by bullets made a small piece of Dale’s soul wither up and die.

  He noticed a look of trepidation on Jane’s face. He put his hand on her shoulder.

  “I’ll bring your brother back safe.”

  He opened the door.

  Dale sprinted down the road toward the cabin, the gravel crunching beneath his boots.

  Whereas it had been a touch warm earlier in the day, it was now very cool, almost cold. The shirt he wore kept him a bit warmer than a T-shirt would have, but still he could feel his eyes beginning to water as he sprinted toward the cabin.

  All around him, he could see the sheer mass of the giants. There was an eerie quietness, amplifying the sounds of his heavy breathing.

  As he drew closer to the cabin, he saw just a bit of light escaping the two draped windows behind the porch, which spanned the whole front side of the building.

  It was an A-frame cabin, a perfect triangle, the roof angled all the way to the ground on either side. The giants framed it majestically. There was a door in the center, a draped window on either side, and a tall, thin window above the door, at the peak of the triangular shape.

  Dale slowed as he reached the porch. He drew his Model 36 and slowly took the two wooden steps onto the porch. He crept to the door, carefully monitoring the sounds of the boards creaking beneath his feet.

  He approached the window to the right of the d
oor. There was a small gap in the drapes, and he looked in. On the other side of the window, only a couple feet away, was Jonathan Fair, tied to a small, wooden chair. Slumped over.

  Motionless.

  Dale feared the worst. But then Fair stirred.

  He was alive, at least.

  Farther back was a table where Beau Lawton sat with Lee Kimble standing over him, pointing a gun and saying something. While Kimble continued to speak, Lawton was hunched over the table, writing on a notepad. Dale couldn’t hear what Kimble was saying, but two words were audible as Kimble suddenly screamed them out.

  “Hurry up!”

  It was a perplexing scene, nearly impossible to decipher.

  Lawton finished writing and dropped the pen.

  Keeping his gun pointed at Lawton, Kimble pulled a second, smaller gun—a tiny snub-nose like Dale’s—from his waistband and put it in Lawton’s hand then shoved the barrel under Lawton’s chin.

  Oh, shit.

  No matter how confusing the scene was before Dale, one thing was clear. Kimble was going to force Beau to shoot himself.

  Dale didn’t even try the doorknob.

  He just kicked the door in.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Jane awoke with a jolt. Her cheek was against something cool. Glass. She was cold. Skin covered in goosebumps. It was dark. There was an earthy smell in the air. Sounds of insects.

  She remembered. She was lying across the seats in Dale Conley’s De Tomaso Pantera. Her face was against the window. She quickly used her sleeve to wipe away the smudge. Dale seemed like the type who would flip his lid at the sight of a single speck of dust in his car.

  Again. Dammit. Again she’d fallen asleep. Jane was disgusted with herself. How could she have dozed off right now of all times? When her brother’s fate hung in the balance.