by Jeff Abbott
Miles waited.
‘The traumatic memory is walled off from “regular” memories, as it were, and fails to integrate with other memories. It’s never processed as a nonthreatening memory would be – filed and put away, to borrow an office metaphor. So the terrible memory becomes more deeply rooted and so does the trauma associated with it – the nightmares, the crippling fear, the paranoia that fate will strike a deadly blow again. Even when you don’t remember specific details, the memory is there, an engine for the trauma. It’s a vicious circle.’
Miles tucked his hands in between the armrests and the cushion of his chair in case the trembles returned.
‘If you could forget the worst moment of your life – would you?’ Sorenson asked.
‘No one can forget.’
‘But if you could, would you? Forget all the trauma associated with killing this Andy person.’
‘Yes,’ Miles said. ‘Yeah, I would.’
‘Won’t happen,’ Andy said, now sitting on the chair’s arm, leaning close to inspect Sorenson. ‘We’re freaking inseparable.’
‘Well, I can’t wipe your brain clean, but I could lessen the trauma of the memory.’ Now Sorenson smiled. ‘Think of it as a shot of mental Botox, as it were, to smooth out the wrinkles in your memory that cause the pain.’
Picturing Andy dying, with no guilt, no pain, no fear, no horror. No guilt. Miles looked at Allison. ‘This is for real?’
‘I want to enter you in a special program for trauma victims. Allison thinks it might be helpful to you.’
Allison studied her hands in her lap.
‘Is this program what you think I need?’ Miles asked.
Allison, wordlessly, nodded. She glanced at Sorenson and Miles saw this was why she’d been tense when he arrived, this other doctor hidden in her office. Waiting for him.
It all seemed – wrong.
‘Will you let me help you, Michael? Allison is recommending two other patients of hers for the program. We’re meeting here tonight at eight to discuss it. I hope you’ll join us. Your case fascinates me.’
‘Thanks for the offer. I’ll give it serious consideration.’ Miles stood. Session over, even though twenty minutes remained on the clock.
‘You made real progress today,’ Allison said. ‘I appreciate your listening to and talking with Doctor Sorenson. Thank you for – understanding.’
‘I’ll make my decision and let you know.’
‘Decision made, you asshole,’ Andy said to Sorenson. ‘He’s not coming anywhere near you.’
Sorenson shook Miles’s hand with an iron grip. ‘I hope we can, together, make your pain go away.’
‘Speaking of which,’ Allison said, ‘here, Michael.’ She pressed a white plastic vial of pills into his hand.
‘What’s this?’
‘A very mild sedative to help you if you have another flashback.’
‘Not necessary.’ He disliked pills and hated taking the antidepressants she prescribed for him. Swallowing each pill reminded him of his failure to be strong.
‘Dosage directions inside,’ Allison said. ‘Call me if you have questions. I really hope we’ll see you here tonight at eight.’
Miles slipped the pills into his jacket. He heard his confession crinkle against the vial. He left, closing the office door behind him. Sweat coated his palms, ran in a trickle down his ribs.
Andy lounged by the entrance. ‘I knew you couldn’t go through with it. Just tear up the confession and let’s go home.’
Miles said, ‘I’m going to work and forget about you.’ He stumbled outside. The bracing air slapped against his face.
‘Sorenson,’ Andy said, ‘calling your case interesting, it made my skin crawl. I’m a lot more than a case.’
‘You’re right,’ Miles said. ‘I don’t like him either.’ He spoke low, into his cupped hand, as if he were warming his skin with his breath.
‘Good, then, you don’t need his dumb-ass program.’ Andy slung an arm around his shoulder. ‘My favorite part of the confession was when you said you were trying to save me. That’s rich. You don’t save me, you don’t get to save yourself, that’s only fair, Miles.’
Miles stopped. Closed his eyes, hunched his shoulders against the cold, counted to one hundred, listening to the distant hum of cars driving on Paseo de Peralta. He opened his eyes and Andy was gone.
Would you forget the worst moment of your life?
I can’t go on this way, he thought. I can’t. He’d join the stupid program, let Sorenson take apart his brain if it would banish Andy. If Allison believed going under Sorenson’s wing would cure him, fine.
He touched the confession in his pocket, realizing he’d been rubbing at it like a praying man fingering a rosary. Tonight at eight. Tonight he’d give it to Allison as a show of faith, listen with an open, if broken, mind to Sorenson’s proposal to fix his head.
‘But I might kill you before tonight,’ Andy said, back again, leaning in close. ‘Make you step out in front of a speeding car. Put a gun in your mouth. Walk you up to the top of a tall building and right off the edge-’
Miles ran.
TWO
Dennis Groote was late to visit his daughter because he had to kill the last of the Duartes.
He’d tracked the man – an accountant who’d managed to duck under the police radar after the Duarte gang collapsed – to a meeting Monday night in San Diego at a luxury hotel near the beach. Groote had spent Monday night camped in an unoccupied room next to the target. He had slipped inside it at nine that evening using an illegal scramble card. If any late-arriving guests showed up to claim the room, he would simply send them back down to the front desk, claiming a mistake had been made, and leave. The kill would wait for another day. Patience meant success; patience meant life.
The accountant arrived shortly after nine-thirty Monday night, but wasn’t alone. Groote heard the accountant and a woman, talking in awkward tones, then the accountant’s laughter, hearty, trying to be macho. Then the unmistakable sounds of kissing, of clothes sliding along skin, of movement on mattress.
Groote played solitaire on his PDA during the lovemaking, yawning once, waiting for the accountant to be done. He could simply pick the lock on the adjoining room door, walk in, shoot them both, and not miss a second of visitation time with Amanda. But he did not see why he should kill a woman who simply had selected the wrong sexual partner for the evening. He hated the idea of an innocent person suffering needlessly. He waited and hoped that the target’s girlfriend wouldn’t stay the night.
But she did. Groote listened to them continue their intimacies until midnight, then they fell asleep. He gave them another hour, hoping the woman would rouse from the post-coital slumber. Still the sound of silence, of light snoring from both the accountant and the woman. Then Groote dozed himself, waking in the thin light of Tuesday morning.
He listened at the door. Hushed, steady snoring. But he heard a soft step, heard the shower next door rush to life.
Now. He could be done and gone while the woman showered, out of harm’s way. Groote jimmied the lock between the door linking the two rooms, eased it open. The accountant was fortyish, tall, barrel-chested. He didn’t look the part of a bean counter; more like a laborer, with his rough face and heavy jaw.
‘Hi,’ Groote said.
The accountant’s eyes opened in sleepy confusion and he said, ‘Uh, hi.’
‘You helped destroy my family. Just so you know.’ Groote shot him with his silenced gun, twice between the eyes.
He heard a scream from behind him, over the hiss of the shower. Damn, she’d started the hot water but hadn’t stepped under the spray. He grabbed the woman, shoved her hard against the wall, covered her mouth with his hand. She was older than the accountant, in her late forties. Groote recognized her; a concierge at the hotel. Groote had noticed her last night; he’d noticed and taken account of every person in the lobby during his walk-through. She’d had a welcoming smile for him then, glancing up from h
er computer, and he had nodded in return.
Now Groote jabbed his gun against the woman’s throat. ‘Answer me and I’ll let you live.’
The concierge closed her eyes, shuddering underneath his touch.
‘You understand?’
She nodded.
‘Why are you here?’ Groote took his hand a centimeter off her mouth.
‘Here?’ The concierge sputtered in her terror. ‘Oh, my God, oh, my God…’
‘Yes. Here. With him.’ Wrong place, wrong time, rattled in Groote’s head, but he hated the phrase. He heard Cathy’s final words: I’m taking your car, more room for junk in the trunk.
‘He invited me. Please don’t kill me. Please don’t.’ The concierge tried to back away from the gun barrel pressed into her throat, but Groote kept a hard grip on the woman’s hair.
‘Does he stay at this hotel often?’
She nodded a yes.
‘Did you know him before tonight?’
‘Yes.’
A predetermined choice then, not the random lovemaking of just one night. ‘You know what kind of man he is?’
She shuddered with fear. ‘He – he’s just a CPA. For a boating company…’
‘He had a different job before. His actions helped kill my wife, maim my daughter. He paid out the cash that bought the guns that destroyed my family.’
She shivered under his touch. ‘Boating… company…’
‘You should be more discerning about your friends, miss,’ he said gently.
‘Yes, okay, I will, I promise…’
‘I’m very sorry for the inconvenience.’
And he shot the concierge once between astonished eyes.
He took I-5 North to Orange. Staying up most of the night, generously giving the concierge the chance to leave, taking the time to check the accountant’s laptop and files for anyone else connected to the remnants of the Duarte crime ring who needed killing, setting up the scene to appear like a robbery, battling the morning traffic sludge, made him late for his morning with Amanda. But at least he knew now he had not been unfair.
Not like Amanda or Cathy, who had never had a chance.
At ten – almost an hour late – he screeched into the heart of Orange, zooming past the restored Orange Circle with its charming shops, down past Chapman University and its sparkling new buildings. Orange was a nice town; he ought to move here, be closer to Amanda. Hit man of suburbia – the idea nearly made him laugh. He drove a few more blocks down to a cluster of brick buildings that suggested the quiet ambience of a modern prep school. Except with bars on the windows. At the gate at Pleasant Point Hospital, he gave his name to the guard at the post. He drove up to the main building, parked his Mercedes, hurried across the lot. He knew he needed a shower, a shave, but he had not wanted to waste another moment. A group of the children played outside in the morning sunshine, a few others standing, staring off at the sky or the ground or their hands. He didn’t see Amanda.
He hurried into the building, checked in at the front desk. Today’s nurse was Mariana, his favorite.
‘I’m late,’ Groote said. ‘Terrible traffic.’
‘Amanda’s in her room,’ Mariana said.
‘Thank you.’ Groote signed in and hurried down the hall to Amanda’s room. He heard the plaintive notes before he reached her door, stepped in slowly so she could see him, not be startled. She remained jumpy, months after the horror.
Amanda lay twisted on her bed, knees drawn close to her chest, her right cheek pressed to the pillow. Patsy Cline, her mother’s favorite singer, drifted softly from the speakers. ‘Walking After Midnight.’ Too sad a song for a bright morning, too sad a song for a sixteen-year-old. She ought to be listening to those boy bands, snapping her fingers, singing into a hairbrush, dancing before bathroom mirrors. At home with him, where she belonged.
‘Amanda?’ He stepped over to the CD player, turned the volume low. ‘Amanda, it’s Daddy.’
Now she opened her brown eyes, looked at him, through him.
‘Hey, Amanda Banana.’ He drew a chair close to the side of the bed. ‘How are you?’ He kept his voice gentle and soothing.
Amanda didn’t answer. The frown on her mouth, the way her stare cut through him as if he were mist, told him a bad day loomed for her. And for him.
He took her hand. ‘You want to get up and go outside?’
She barely shook her head. One of the scars on her face – the small star-shaped one near the corner of her mouth – jerked and he thought she would say good morning. But she went still.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late, pumpkin, I had a work project this morning I had to finish.’
Now her eyes focused on his face. She said, slowly and carefully, ‘Mom came to see me.’
‘Ah. Did she?’
‘Yes.’
‘What did Mom say?’
‘She wants me to hurt myself.’
‘Oh, no, baby, she doesn’t. She doesn’t.’ Groote tried to take one of her hands in his but she kept her hands twisted into claws, tucked tight against her chest.
‘She said,’ Amanda whispered, ‘that I should cut off my face.’
‘No, baby,’ Groote said. The drugs, the lame-ass therapy’s not working, she doesn’t even remember Cathy’s dead. ‘She wasn’t here.’
Now steel crept into Amanda’s tone. ‘She was. She comes nearly every day.’
‘Baby. It’s all in your head.’
‘She was here!’
He stopped trying to argue with her. He wanted her calm and talking, not shrieking and screaming and cutting his visit short. There was so much necessary ugliness in the world, she was his pocket of beauty. He touched the scar at the corner of her mouth; another scar bisecting her eyebrow; the wriggled thread of tissue beneath her ear. The outward souvenirs of bullets smashing through glass, of a car tumbling down a rocky canyon. He kissed each scar. He whispered in her ear: ‘Mom would never tell you to hurt yourself.’
He smelled a raw, metallic odor. Familiar. The smell of blood. He leaned back from her, searching her face, running fingers along the bed. ‘Amanda!’
She folded her gaze back into herself.
He yanked the covers off her. She lay in soft pants and shirt and he groped along her limbs and her torso for injury. Nothing. He pulled her cheek up from the pillow; her skin lay smooth and unbroken. His hands hurried at the back of her head and stickiness gummed his fingers.
She began to scream, thrashing against him, screaming for him please to take her face off.
‘I don’t understand,’ Groote said, ‘why she hurts herself.’
‘The reasons are many.’ Doctor Warner was a heavyset man, florid face under carrot-red hair starting to gray. ‘She blames herself for the accident.’
‘She shouldn’t. It wasn’t remotely her fault.’
‘She still blames herself.’
‘Well, I blame you for her state of mind,’ Groote said in a voice of icy calm. ‘My daughter is cutting her scalp open, for God’s sakes. Your staff let her get hold of a safety pin.’ And that had been her shrieked explanation as he summoned help: Taking my face off has to be done from the back, Dad, it’s easier.
‘It won’t happen again.’
‘I want you,’ Groote said, keeping his control but nearly hissing through his teeth, ‘to help her.’
‘We’ve tried art therapy, medications, group therapy. All the standard treatments to process unintegrated, traumatic memory. Amanda is simply not improving.’ Warner tented his hands under his jaw. ‘The mental damage she suffered, trapped with her dead mother for so long, it may not be reparable.’
‘If it’s broken, it can be fixed,’ Groote said.
‘Amanda is not a dish to be glued back together,’ Warner said.
Patience, he reminded himself. Deep breath. ‘When I say fix, I mean… give her enough health to have her life back. To want to live again.’ Groote thought, I’ll find out if you have a family, Doctor, because if you don’t help my daughter you won
’t be able to help your own. You can get a real sense of what pain is.
‘Amanda had problems before the accident. Her biological father abused her.’
‘Yes.’ Groote didn’t care to be reminded of the sad details, and he felt Warner was saying, Sorry, buddy, your daughter was damaged goods before you brought her here. But Groote had taken care of the rotten, no-good deadbeat father as a secret favor to his new wife and daughter. He never experienced hate when he killed, except when he’d put ten bullets into that worthless scum. He had not known he could love Cathy and Amanda so much; the idea of love had seemed like a rumor, never real until he found them.
And now Cathy was gone, and Amanda needed him. She only had him to protect her.
‘Obviously the loss of her mother is devastating to her. But the conditions in which she lost her mom, they’re much more damaging than her mother dying in a hospital bed of cancer, or even dying instantly in an accident. In a way, Amanda experienced her own death when she experienced her mother’s. Think of it as a compound fracture against her mental health. It took her straight over into complex post-traumatic stress disorder.’
‘You’re not helping her,’ Groote said in a low tone. ‘She’s trying to take her face off. If she hurts herself again I will hold you personally responsible and you’ll learn an entirely new meaning of the word consequences.’
Warner smiled. He was a smart man, Groote thought, who knew very little. ‘Threatening me doesn’t help your daughter, Mr. Groote.’
‘I’m sorry. But I need you to fix her. To make her right again. Please. Please.’ And then salvation came, in the form of his cell phone ringing. Only the hospital and his clients had this number. He opened the phone; he didn’t use voice mail, it carried too much risk. ‘I’ll have to call you back,’ he said instead of hello.
‘Please do,’ a smooth voice answered. ‘This is Quantrill. I have the perfect job for you. It could even help your daughter.’