Praying for Sleep

by Deaver, Jeffrey

  Kohler chose a high-backed chair to sit in. The orderly, no longer in his regulation blue jumpsuit, was now wearing jeans and a T-shirt and white socks without shoes. His arms were covered with bandages, his left eye was blackened, and his forehead and cheeks were flecked with small puncture wounds brown-stained from Beta-dine. He now sat back on the couch and glanced at the blankets as if he were surprised to find the bedclothes sitting out.

  On the TV Jackie Gleason was screaming in a shrill and thoroughly unpleasant way at Audrey Meadows. Lowe muted the program. “They snag him yet?” Lowe asked, glancing at the phone, by which he presumably would already have learned if they’d snagged him.

  Kohler told him no.

  Lowe nodded and laughed vacantly at Jackie Gleason shaking his fist.

  “I want to ask you a few things about what happened,” Kohler asked conversationally.

  “Not much to tell.”

  “Still.”

  “How’d you hear about it? Adler wanted it kept quiet.”

  “I’ve got my spies,” Kohler said, and did not smile. “What happened?”

  “Uh-hum. Well, we seen him and we run after him. But it was pretty dark. It was damn dark. He must’ve knowed the lay of the land pretty good and he jumped over this ravine but we fell into it.”

  Lowe closed his mouth and once more examined the screen, on which an automobile commercial now played. “Look at all that writing on there. Giving all that financing crap. Who can read that in three seconds? That’s stupid, they do that.”

  The room wasn’t shabby so much as dim. The prints on the walls weren’t bad seascapes but they were dusky. The carpet was gray, as were the blankets that Lowe was pretending he hadn’t been wrapped in five minutes before.

  “How you feeling?”

  “Nothing broke. Sore, but not like Frank. He took the worst of it.”

  “What’d Adler say to you?”

  Lowe found some serviceable words and submitted them. Nothing much. Wanted to know how Lowe was feeling. Where Hrubek seemed to be going. “Truth be told, he wasn’t real happy we dropped the ball in the first place and he got loose.”

  Across the bottom of the TV screen ran a banner announcing that a tornado had touched down in Morristown, killing two people. The National Weather Service, the streaming type reported, had extended the tornado and flash-flood warnings until 3:00 a.m. Both men stared at these words intently and both men forgot them almost as soon as the bulletin ended.

  “When you found him tonight, did Michael say anything?”

  “Can’t hardly recall. I think something about us wearing clothes and him not. Maybe something else. I don’t know. I was never so scared in my life.”

  Kohler said, “Frank Jessup was telling me about Michael’s meds.”

  “Frank knows about that? I didn’t think he did. Wait, maybe I mentioned it to him.”

  The doctor nodded at the screen. “Art Carney’s my favorite.”

  “He’s a funny one, sure is. I like Alice. She knows what she’s about.”

  “Frank wasn’t sure how long Michael’d been cheeking them. He said two days.”

  “Two?” Lowe shook his head. “Where’d he hear that? Try five.”

  “I think they want to keep it quiet.”

  Lowe began to relax. “That’s what Adler told me. It’s not my business. I mean, with . . .” The comfort vanished instantly and Kohler noticed Lowe’s hand seeking the satin strip on the blanket beside him. “And I just spilled the beans, didn’t I? Oh, fuck,” he spat out, bitterly discouraged at how easily his mind had been picked.

  “I had to know, Stu. I’m his doctor. It’s my job to know.”

  “And it’s my job, period. And I’m gonna lose it. Shit. Why’d you trick me?”

  Kohler wasn’t giving any thought to Lowe’s employment. He felt his skin crackling with shock at this confirmation of his hunch. In his last session before the escape, yesterday, Michael Hrubek had looked Kohler in the eye and had lied about the Thorazine. He’d said he was taking all his meds and the dosage was working well. Three thousand milligrams! And the patient had given it up purposefully and lied about doing so after he’d been off the pills for five days. And he’d lied very well. Unlike psychopaths, schizophrenic patients are rarely duplicitous in such calculating ways.

  “You’ve got to come clean, Stu. Hrubek’s a time bomb. I don’t think Adler understands that. Or if he does he doesn’t much care.” Kohler added soothingly, “You know Michael better than most of the doctors at Marsden. You’ve got to help me.”

  “I got to keep my job is what I’ve got to do. I’m making twenty-one thousand a year and spending twenty-two. Adler’ll have my nuts for what I told you already.”

  “Ron Adler isn’t God.”

  “I’m not saying anything else.”

  “Okay, Stuart, you gonna help me, or do I have to make some phone calls?”

  “Fuck.” A can of beer flew from the big hand into the gray wall and with a spray of foam fell gushing onto the dingy shag carpet. It was suddenly vitally important for Stuart Lowe to tend the embers of his fire. He leapt up and pitched three fresh logs onto the heap of the dying flames. A gorgeous cascade of orange sparks bounced to the hearth. Lowe returned to the couch and said nothing for a moment. Kohler believed this meant that he accepted the terms of the agreement, which was of course no agreement at all. The signal of surrender was the soft pop as the TV was shut off.

  “Did he stockpile all the Thorazine or flush it? You have any idea?”

  “We found it. He stockpiled it.”

  “How much?”

  Lowe said resignedly, “Five full days. Thirty-two hundred a day. This’ll be the sixth.”

  “When you saw him tonight, was there any indication of what he had in mind?”

  “He was just standing there in the buff, looking at us like he was surprised. But he wasn’t surprised at all.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing,” Lowe spat out. “I don’t mean a fucking thing.”

  “Tell me what he said. Exactly.”

  “Didn’t Frank tell you? You already talked to him.” He looked at Kohler bitterly to see if he had been as big a fool as he thought. The doctor had no choice but to oblige. “Frank’s still recovering from surgery. He won’t be conscious till morning.”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “What did Michael say? Come on, Stu.”

  “Something about a death. He had a death to go to. I don’t know. Maybe he meant a funeral or graveyard. I was pretty shook, you know. I was trying to fight him off Frank.”

  Kohler didn’t respond and the orderly continued, “With those rubber things they give us.”

  “The truncheons?”

  “I tried. I was trying to get him upside the head but he don’t feel no pain. You know that.”

  “That’s one thing about Michael,” Kohler agreed, observing what a sorrowful liar Lowe was and feeling pity for this man, who’d obviously abandoned his partner to die a terrible death.

  “That’s all I heard. Then Michael grabbed away the club and come after me. . . .”

  “Now tell me what Adler really said to you.”

  Lowe exhaled air through puffed-out cheeks. He finally said, “I wasn’t supposed to say nothing about the meds. To nobody. And he wanted to know if Michael’d said anything about that lady in Ridgeton. He sent her a note or something.”

  “What lady?”

  “Some broad at his trial, I don’t know. Adler asked me if Michael’d ever mentioned her.”

  “Did he?”

  “Not to me he didn’t.”

  “What about this note?”

  “I don’t know nothing about it. Adler said to keep quiet about that too.”

  “When did he send it to her?”

  “How the fuck should I know?”

  “What’s this woman’s name?”

  “You’re going to ruin me, aren’t you? I didn’t get your patient back and you’re going to fuck me ov
er. Why don’t you just admit it?”

  “What’s her name, Stu?”

  “Liz something. Wait. Liz Atcheson, I think.”

  “Is there anything else you can tell me?”

  “No,” Lowe blurted so quickly all Kohler could do was fill the ensuing silence with his serene, unyielding gaze. The orderly finally said miserably, “Well, the wire.”

  “Wire?”

  “I told Adler and Grimes and they made me swear I wouldn’t say anything. Oh, Jesus . . . What a time I’ve had.”

  Kohler didn’t move. His red, stinging eyes gazed at Lowe, who said sotto voce, as if Ronald Adler were making this a threesome, “We didn’t fall.”

  “Tell me, Stu. Tell me.”

  “We could’ve jumped over that ravine easy. But Michael strung a trip wire for us. He knew we were coming. Strung a piece of fishline or bell wire and led us over it.”

  Kohler was dumbfounded. “What are you saying?”

  “What am I saying?” Lowe blurted furiously. “Aren’t you listening? Aren’t you listening? I’m saying your patient may be off his brain candy and may be a schizo but he was fucking clever enough to lead us into a trap. And he damn near killed both of us.” The orderly sealed his testimony by clicking the television back on and slouched into the couch, refusing to say anything more.

  Passing over the Gunderson town line Trenton Heck braked deftly with his left foot as he skidded around a deer that stepped into the road and stopped to see what a collision with a one-ton pickup might do to her.

  He eased back into the right lane and continued caroming down Route 236. He was driving like a teenager and he knew it, even taking the extreme measure of strapping a very unhappy Emil into the passenger seat with the blue canvas seat belt, which the hound immediately began to chew through. Behind the truck swirled a wake of dust and bleached autumn leaves.

  “Stop,” Heck barked over the roar of the engine, knowing that “Don’t chew,” let alone “Leave that seat-belt be,” would register in Emil’s mind as mere human grunts, worth ignoring. The familiar command was pointless, however, and Heck let the matter go. “Good fellow,” Heck said in a rare moment of sentiment, and reached over to scratch the big head, which slipped away in irritation.

  “Damn,” he muttered, “I’m doing it again.” He realized that the hound’s evasive maneuver reminded him of the way Jill had dodged away from his embrace the day after she’d served him with papers.

  Got to stop thinking about that girl, he now ordered.

  But of course he didn’t.

  “Mental cruelty and abandonment,” Heck had read after the process server left. He hadn’t even comprehended at first what these documents were. Abandonment? He thought they meant Jill herself was being sued for leaving the scene of an accident. She was a terrible driver. Then like a firecracker going off inside him he understood. Heck had been little good for anything for the month after that. It seemed that all he did was work with Emil and spend hours debating the separation with Jill—or rather with Jill’s picture, since by then she’d moved out. Sitting on the bed where they’d romped so friskily he tried to recall her arguments. It seemed that he hadn’t upheld his end of a vague bargain that had been made the morning following one particularly romantic, playful night. Their seventh date. At sunrise he’d found her plowing through his kitchen cabinets, looking for the Bisquick mix, and he’d interrupted the frenzied search to blurt a proposal. Jill had squealed and in her eagerness to hug him dropped a bag of flour. It detonated with a large white mushroom cloud. With happiness in her eyes and a little-girl pout on her lips, she cried, talking at curious length about the home that had been denied her all her life.

  The marriage had been a stormy union, Heck was the first to admit. When you were on Jill’s side, heaven’s gate opened up and she rained her good nature on you and if you were her man there were plenty of other rewards. But if you didn’t share her opinion or—good luck—if you opposed her, then the flesh over her cheekbones tightened and her tongue somehow contracted and she commenced to take you down.

  Trenton Heck in fact had not been all that certain about getting married. Unreasonably, he was disappointed at having a fiancée with one syllable in her name. And when Jill grew angry—he couldn’t always predict when this would happen—she became a tiny fireball. Her eyebrows knit and her voice grew husky, like the tone he believed hookers took when confronting obnoxious clients. She would mope aggressively if he said they couldn’t afford a pair of high-heeled green shoes dusted with sequins, or a microwave with a revolving carousel.

  “You’re icky to me, Trenton. And I don’t like it one bit.”

  “Jill, honey, baby . . .”

  But the fact remained that she was a woman who’d leap into his arms at unexpected times, even at the mall, and kiss his ear wetly. She would smile with her entire face when he came home and talk nonstop about some silliness in a way that made the whole evening seem to him like good crystal and silver. And he could never forget the way she’d wake suddenly in the middle of the night, roll over on top of him, and drive her head into his collarbone, humping with so much energy that he fought hard not to move for fear it would be over too fast.

  Slowly though the pouts began to outnumber the smiles and humps. The money, which was like a lubricant between their spirits, grew sparse when he was denied a raise and the mortgage on the trailer was adjusted upward. Heck began to like Jill’s waitress friends and their husbands less and less; there was much drinking in that group and more silliness than seemed normal for people in their thirties. These were clues and he supposed he’d been aware of them all along. But when he finally understood that she really meant mental cruelty and abandonment—his mental cruelty and his abandonment—it knocked the wind clean out of him.

  Exactly twenty-two months ago, at nine-forty-eight one Saturday night, Jill let slam the aluminum door of their trailer for the last time and went to live by herself in Dillon. The ultimate insult was that she moved into a mobile-home park. “Why didn’t you just stay with me?” he blurted. “I thought you left because you wanted a house.”

  “Oh, Trent,” she moaned hopelessly, “you don’t understand nothing, do you? Not . . . a . . . thing.”

  “Well, you’re in a trailer park, for God’s sake!”

  “Trent!”

  “What’d I say?”

  So Jill left to live in a mobile home somehow better than the one that Trenton Heck could offer her and once there, he supposed, entertain men friends. Billy Mosler, Heck’s truck-driving buddy from next door, seemed relieved at the breakup. “Trenton, she wasn’t for you. I’m not going to say anything bad about Jill because that’s not my way—”

  Watch it, you prick, Heck thought, eyeing his friend belligerently.

  “—but she was too dippy for you. Bad choice in a woman. Don’t look at me that way. You can do better.”

  “But I loved her,” Heck said, his anger sadly tamed by a memory of Jill making him a lunch of egg salad one autumn afternoon. “Oh, damn, I’m whining, aren’t I? Damn.”

  “You didn’t love her,” Billy Mosler said sagely. “You were in love with her. Or, in lust with her, more like. See the difference?”

  Watch it, prick. Heck recovered enough to begin glaring once more.

  The worst of the sting wore off after a few months though still he mourned. He drove past her restaurant a hundred times and would call her often to talk to her about the few things they could still talk about, which was not much. Many times he got her answering machine. What the hell does a waitress need an answering machine for, he brooded, except to take men’s phone calls? He grew despairing when the machine picked up on the second ring, which meant that someone had called before him. Heck saw his ex-wife all over the county. At Kmart, at picnics, driving in cars he didn’t recognize, in Jo-Jo’s steakhouse, in liquor-store parking lots as she hiked her skirt up to adjust her slip, rolled at the waist to compensate for her being four foot eleven.

  There weren’t t
his many Jills in the universe but Trenton Heck saw them just the same.

  Tonight, his ex-wife fading very reluctantly from his mind, Heck turned off the highway. Emil stirred with relief as the truck braked to a fast stop and the evil seat belt came off. His master then hooked up the harness and track line and together they bounded off down the road.

  Emil easily picked up Hrubek’s scent and trotted down the highway, mimicking more or less the bicycle’s passage. Because they were on the asphalt with good visibility, Heck saw no need to keep the hound short-lined; Hrubek wouldn’t be setting traps on the surface of the road. They made good time, coursing past abandoned shacks and farms and lowlands and pumpkin fields. Still, after passing two intersections—and verifying that the madman was continuing west on Route 236—Heck ordered Emil back to the truck. Because of the bicycle, which Hrubek could pedal at fifteen or twenty miles an hour, Heck continued to drop-track—driving for several miles then stopping just long enough to let Emil make sure they were still on scent. For a diligent dog like Emil to follow a bicyclist was certainly possible—especially on a damp night like this—but doing so would exhaust him quickly. Then too Heck, with his damaged leg, was hardly up for a twenty-mile run after a man on wheels.

  As he drove, scanning the road before him for a bicycle reflector or Hrubek’s back, Trenton Heck thought about the meeting with Richard Kohler. He recalled the doctor’s slight scowl when Heck had rejected his offer. This reinforced Heck’s fear that maybe he’d blown it bad, that he’d chosen exactly the opposite from what a smart person would’ve picked. He often had trouble choosing the sensible thing, the thing everybody else just knew was best. The thing that both Jill and his father would appraise and say, “Damn good choice, boy.”

  He supposed in some ways it was crazy to turn down that money. But when he actually pictured taking the check, folding it up, going home—no, no, he just couldn’t have done it. Maybe God hadn’t made him like Emil, doling out to him a singular, remarkable knack. But Trenton Heck felt in his heart that if he had any purpose at all, it was to spend his hours tracking behind his dog through wilderness just like this. Even if he never found Hrubek tonight, even if he never caught a glimpse of him, being here had to be better than sitting in front of the tube with a quart of beer in his hand and Emil fidgeting on the back deck.