Half-Past Dawn

by Richard Doetsch

  “You did?”

  “Yeah, actually.” Jack was thinking, trying to keep order to things in his mind. “Actually, I played a bit on the kitchen floor with Fruck before I grabbed the Coke.”

  “With Fruck?” Ryan asked as he nodded.

  “Yeah, I’d assumed Mia fed him. I let him out when I grabbed the paper.” Jack refocused. “So, I went upstairs-”

  “How long have you had Fruck?”

  Jack smiled. “God, I don’t know. Years…”

  “Jack.” Ryan spoke quietly, his heart breaking with every word. “Fruck was your dog when you were a kid. I was with you when he got hit by the garbage truck. He died in your arms in the driveway… you were seventeen.”

  Jack’s head began to throb. He looked around the room, feeling as if he needed to hold on to something.

  Ryan stood up and motioned for Emily to walk with him to the corner of the room. They became lost in a conversation of whispers and soft tones. Ryan passed her each of the four files, one by one. Jack’s hearing had grown more acute, but he couldn’t make out their words as they nodded to each other before walking back his way.

  “Jack,” Ryan said in a calm, reassuring voice, “Emily is a psychiatrist, the best in her field. I respect her opinion as much as her experience.”

  “Jack.” Emily spoke softly. “You are going to be moved to a special hospital where we can better care for your state of mind. You can undergo radiation treatment which may alleviate the tumor’s impact on your brain function, but until that time, you are a danger to yourself and anyone around you.”

  “What?” Jack exploded. “Ryan, don’t do this! Please! Mia is out there… you’ve got to get me out of here. Don’t do it for me. Do it for her.”

  “I know. My heart is breaking for you, Jack. I can’t even imagine

  …” Ryan took a slow, measured breath, trying desperately to calm himself. The last five minutes since he’d walked back into the room were leading up to this moment. He had waited too long already but still had trouble finding the way to broach it. “Forgive me for not telling you when I came back into the room, but we needed to judge your state of mind.”

  “Forgive you for what?”

  “They found her, Jack,” Ryan said almost in a whisper.

  Jack closed his eyes, a sense of relief filling him, washing away his fear. He truly didn’t care what they did to him, as long as she was safe. He no longer cared about dawn or whether he lived or died. Love was such a simple thing, a thing that if truly felt and experienced compelled one to give everything he had to the one he loved. He let his anger slip away. None of it mattered, as long as Mia was safe to get home to their girls, to hold and protect them forever.

  But when Jack opened his eyes, he saw a tear on Ryan’s cheek, Ryan, the one who was not known for emotion, the one whose wife had called heartless on more than one occasion.

  “Jack, I don’t know how to tell you this, but Mia’s dead.”

  CHAPTER 34

  FRIDAY, 11:15 P.M.

  Frank had spent the last hour chasing down every friend, contact, and enemy he had in the New York City Police Department to find where Jack had been taken. He had lost Jack once he exited his car with the Suburban in pursuit. They had both disappeared up 48th Street.

  Frank thought of taking up the chase on foot, but Jack was long gone, and he knew he would have no chance of finding him. He quickly set to work changing his front left tire, which the men in the Suburban had shot out, finishing in pit-stop time of two minutes. He was thankful for his intense workouts and large forearms as he muscled through the process but admitted that he felt his age as he climbed back into the car with an ache in his back and a sore shoulder. He had quickly started up the car and headed up 48th Street, where Jack had disappeared. He imagined that he sought refuge within the sea of tourists who prowled Broadway on a Friday night, a far better place to hide than in some isolated hole in the wall.

  He raced west toward Seventh Avenue and couldn’t believe his eyes as he saw Jack carried out of on office building by three cops. Unconscious, his weight taxing the young police officers, he was stuffed into the back of a police cruiser and sped out of there. Frank took up pursuit and was quickly foiled by the slow-moving traffic out of Times Square, but the cop car managed to bob, weave, and vanish to who knows where. He flipped on his scanner, but there was no mention of the goings-on on West 48th Street. Frank knew that Jack was under VIP care, radio silence on whatever had happened, allowing the officers and the department to sort through what to do with the arrest of the city’s DA.

  Frank had called in favors, had called in chits, had called upon captains and rookies, but no one had heard even a rumor about Jack being arrested. There was fractional chatter about an occurrence at the Tombs, but that was being handled by the FBI, where Frank knew he wouldn’t be afforded even a pleasantry. He had called out to Riker’s Island but knew that they would never take Jack there, into the heart of the enemy, whose population would flay the skin from Jack’s body before he was even placed in a cell. He called the central jail at the Tombs, but no one had been brought in during the last hour even anonymously. Frank headed downtown and circled back to the entrance to the Tombs, where he found the FBI poring over the lobby, dusting for prints, noting and cataloguing the bullet slugs and the scars they’d left in the marble walls and floors. Frank couldn’t believe what he saw and was amazed that Jack had made it out of there alive. He had searched for Larry Knoll but was told Larry was being debriefed by the FBI at a different location. The wall of silence on the matter was impenetrable.

  He had been so furious with Jack for leaving him, for slipping into the Tombs. He had no idea what prompted Jack’s singular drive to get downstairs without him or any real idea of what had happened. He had only glimpsed the mythical box that Jack had spoken of, as he clung tightly to it while they raced up the FDR. And he did not get even a glimpse of its contents, let alone a mention of what was inside.

  Frank was loved and respected by the NYPD, both top brass and lowly rookies, but he wasn’t about to get any information from his former colleagues; no one knew a thing. He had been a cop for twenty-five years. Even though he’d retired, he still considered himself one and would until they day he died. He thought back on his career and similar situations-the arrests of movies stars, the senator from Arkansas found unconscious at the Four Seasons with his battered wife next to him, and the incident twenty years ago involving the former mayor’s son, the underage girl, needles, and guns. He thought about each situation and the embarrassment it created, not just for the individual but for law enforcement, the country, and the city administration, all of whom sought legal, PR, and practical advice before informing the media and the world of a respected and loved VIP going off the rails. And the pieces fell into place…

  Frank knew where Jack was.

  Jack lay on the riverbank, his body broken and wet, the sound of the rushing river heavy in his ear, his body and mind enveloped by the darkness of night. Moonlight danced off the muddy shore, the wet leaves of the surrounding woods. And there was a presence beside him. The man who had emerged from the woods, cloaked in the shadows of night, knelt behind his head, just beyond the periphery of his vision.

  An incredible pain coursed through Jack’s body, his head pounded, his face was dotted with multiple stings, his chest throbbed on the left side, and his torso felt as if a vise was closing around it.

  And a voice rose, a quiet chanting, a prayer uttered in the soft whispers of a foreign tongue. But somehow, despite the fact that he spoke no language beyond English, Jack understood the words that poured from the man’s mouth.

  “In between life and death, between the deepest dark of night and the first rays of dawn, in that moment where we begin to drift up from sleep to wakefulness, is where anything is possible, Jack.”

  The man reached over and drew Jack’s naked arm to him. Under the rays of moonlight, the man withdrew a quill from his pocket, a bottle of ink from the ot
her. He dipped the quill in the dark brown ink and began to write. His hand was that of an artist, his focus and demeanor those that of a wise man.

  “You can still save her, Jack,” the man whispered as he wrote, “but time is slipping away and will soon fall through your fingers, where all will be forever lost.”

  Jack’s eyes flashed open, and he desperately tried to recapture the fading thread of the dream, trying to hold on to the answers that floated up from his memory while he slept. He lay in the hospital bed, the strap around his chest reaffixed, his arms tethered back down. He was filled with such agony, such grief, such confusion.

  Everything he held as reality had slipped away. Mia was everything, his better half, his lover, his best friend, and she was dead.

  He reviewed the last fifteen hours in his mind, every conversation, every action he took. It had all seemed so real. Talking to Jimmy Griffin… he couldn’t be dead. He couldn’t have been an imposter. He had not set Jack up. He was her friend. He didn’t lead him down some rabbit hole. He merely said that her salvation lay with the fate of the evidence case.

  And Cristos, he was not some illusion, some spirit come back to haunt him. He was flesh and blood. The bullets were real, not dreamed. Jack would not go off randomly shooting his way into the Tombs. He wouldn’t have killed Charlie or shot some innocents. He had seen death at his own hand in the past. It was what had brought him to law and away from guns. He wouldn’t repeat those mistakes.

  But above all, it was Mia’s voice that rang in his ear. He had spoken to her from Cristos’s car. It wasn’t imagined. It was not the wishful thinking of a grieving man. He heard her desperation, her surprise at his being alive.

  He had known Ryan for too many years to count; he had always been a good friend, someone he could always count on. He couldn’t imagine him lying to him, making up some elaborate story. But was he, too, being manipulated? Was he drawing conclusions off facts that he couldn’t possibly verify himself in such short order? Had he fallen into the trap of being fed information that could only lead to one conclusion? Jack couldn’t imagine his friend toying with him. He had seen Ryan’s pain when Ryan told him of his cancer diagnosis; he had seen his agony at seeing Jack tied to the bed. And above all, Ryan was not one to fake tears or grief at the loss of a friend’s wife at the behest of the FBI. Ryan believed everything he told Jack… and Ryan believed he was crazy.

  He and Emily had left the room to consult further on Jack’s “condition” and “illusions,” leaving him alone for the last ten minutes, which felt more like ten hours.

  They never explained how Mia died, simply implying that she died in the car accident, but he had seen her kidnapped, driven away. Or had he? Everything was so murky. Had his mind played tricks on him? Had he blocked out what he had seen, suppressed the tragedy of her death? Had she been lying there next to him on the riverbank, or was she drowned in the car only to be washed downstream? Had her death been the impetus for his insanity, for some desperate act within a reality of his own making? Did a crazy man ever know he was crazy, or did he simply create his own reality?

  And he thought about the parallels to Cristos. Was it coincidence that he, too, had risen from the afterlife? Both had been declared dead: Jack by the newspaper, Cristos by the coroner. The world, in both cases, was convinced of their passing only to have them walk the earth again. Had his current state of mind been brought about by Cristos’s prophetic statement of death not being the end, the implications being that he couldn’t die? Could Jack’s mind have truly snapped, creating this elaborate scenario all in order to do what he had failed to do: save the woman he loved?

  Jack looked at his bandaged arm. It wasn’t injured as the nurse had said; the mehndi tattoo was real, his visit to Professor Adoy was real… the warning of death to come tomorrow at dawn was…

  If he could somehow tear away the bandage, see the tattoo once more, it would be the anchor that could pull him back to reality, that could give his mind the footing it so desperately needed now. It could wipe away any and all doubt. For if the elaborate tattoo was there, it meant that someone had been with him after the accident and had saved him, that it wasn’t all a figment of his imagination. It meant that he was being lied to, a cog in some conspiracy in much the same way as the system was manipulated to keep Cristos alive.

  He pulled at his restraints, his arms straining with the effort, but it was to no avail. There had to be a way. He looked to the door, pondering escape. There were so many barriers in his way-FBI, police, building security-insurmountable obstacles, but so had been stealing the case from the basement of the Tombs.

  But the biggest barrier was the fragility of his mind.

  If it was a choice between an insane existence where Mia was alive or a reality where she had perished, he would simply choose the madness. And that sudden thought terrified him. Had he already made that decision subconsciously?

  Hope was lost. It was lost for him, for his two girls, for Mia. And it was bone-crushing. To be faced with death by cancer was one thing. To have your body fail, as tragic as it was, was part of life. But to have your mind slip away, to have your wife ripped from existence, to leave your children alone in the world, was far more devastating, for there was nothing to cling to, nothing to give a glimmer of optimism, nothing but a forever night where the sun would never rise again.

  He looked again at his arm and the thick white bandage. He just needed to see. What had once brought him confusion and panic could give him the one thing he would need. For if it was there, then, truths could be washed away, minds could be brought back to sanity, and Mia, despite everything he had been told, could be brought back to life.

  All Jack needed was a little hope.

  F RANK AND J OY rode up the elevator to the fifth floor of the Tombs. Joy had spent the last several hours poring over the old case files on Cristos while cross-referencing them with the information on Cotis from Professor Adoy and the note of appreciation Jack had received with the blue necklace from the Cotis government. Hoping for some kind of link or clue, she found none.

  As they emerged from the cab, they were greeted by the security desk officer, who sat behind thick bulletproof glass similar to the setup in the evidence room. Nolan Ludeke was at the end of a double shift, a shift that brought tragic surprises that he could never have anticipated.

  Frank had known him for too many years to count, since back when Nolan was on the street. He had always spoken of retiring, moving to Florida with his wife, to be closer to his kids, but as that fateful day approached, Nolan realized that work was his life, and if work stopped, how far behind would the end of his life be? So he regrouped. His years of service and his reputation gave him the inside track on a job with little to no stress that would alleviate the forever fears of his wife getting that 3:00 a.m. call of death in the line of duty.

  “Frank,” Nolan said in a warm greeting, buzzing him and Joy through.

  “Hey,” Frank said as he walked through the heavy metal door, which closed with a thud behind him. “We’re here to see Jack.”

  Nolan looked at the two. “I don’t know. He’s down the hall, the feds have two posted outside his door, and they’ve labeled him a suicide watch.”

  “This still is under our jurisdiction, correct?”

  “Come on, Frank, semantics.”

  “What can you tell me?”

  “They brought him in an hour ago. He was in rough shape, out cold. Tucked him in a psych room. A nurse patched him up. A couple of doctors came in, evaluated him, and declared him nuts. A hot-shot FBI guy has been all over this thing. I heard whispers of all kinds of mayhem downstairs on sub five, but no one will confirm a thing. The rumor is it’s not hard to connect Keeler to it, though that seems so wrong. I heard the guy was killed last night in a car accident along with his wife, but then he shows up here. Whole thing seems crazier than that mess years back with the mayor’s son.”

  “We need to see him,” Joy said.

  Nolan looked bet
ween the two. “I’ve got no problem with you seeing him. He’s a good man, as far as I’m concerned. Of course, getting past Tweedledum and Tweedledee may prove difficult.”

  “Who else from the feds is up here?”

  “Tierney, deputy director of the New York office. He commandeered an office down the hall, haven’t seen him in a while. I’m sure he’ll come blustering through shortly.”

  “Let me ask, what kind of security you got on these rooms?”

  Nolan’s eyes filled with concern. “Please tell me you’re not thinking of-”

  “Nolan, relax. Just tell me.” Frank had a way about him; he was trusted and used that faith to bend people to his way of thinking. “I just need to know. You know I wouldn’t do anything stupid, particularly with Joy here.”

  “The nut rooms are for nuts-nothing in there where you can hurt yourself, no long wires, cords, phones, pretty much free of everything except a bed and a bolted-down table. The doors are keylocked from the outside. No lock access on the inside, though there is a door handle. The room Keeler is in, five-oh-four, fits the bill perfectly.

  “Has he had any visitors, family, an attorney?”

  “No.” Nolan shook his head. “I don’t think anyone really knows he’s here. He is just anonymous patient nine-five-three-oh with no one permitted access.

  “Well, I’m his friend, and I’m going to see him. Where’s this nurse?”

  Nolan picked up his phone, spoke quickly, and hung up. “She’ll be right out. You’re going to cause a problem, aren’t you?”

  “Nolan, I will not be breaking any laws, I promise you. But imagine if your best friend was stuck in a mental ward. Would you want to get to the bottom of it or just let him slip away into the system?”

  “May I help you?”

  Frank turned to see the blond nurse behind him

  “I’m Susan Meeks.”

  “Sue, these two are here to see Mr. Keeler.”