by P. J. Tracy
“We don’t have to do this now.”
“No. Please. It’ll keep my mind occupied. I don’t like where it’s at right now.”
“Were you with Sam Easton this morning?”
“Yes. Until about ten-thirty or so, and then I went home to get ready for work.” Nascent coils of panic began to unfurl in her stomach. “Why?”
“How long have you known him?”
“Six months, I guess.”
“And you’re friends.”
“Friends and coworkers, yes.”
“Close friends?”
“We’re not sleeping together, if that’s what you mean,” she said tartly.
“Did you know Mrs. Easton?”
“No.”
“Did he ever mention anything about his wife being unfaithful?”
Melody’s thoughts slammed to an abrupt halt. No wonder Nolan had been so anxious to chauffeur her to a B and E; she had a captive audience and a perfect environment for interrogation. For what reason, she wasn’t sure, but she didn’t like the direction the conversation was taking. “He found out this morning.”
“Has he ever talked about someone named Dawson Lightner?”
“No. What is this about?”
Nolan kept her eyes on the road ahead. “Yukiko Easton was murdered.”
The world seemed to fall away, and Melody was certain that if she hadn’t been sitting down she would have passed out. “Oh my God. What the hell is happening?”
“We don’t know yet.”
“He didn’t kill her. Yuki was his world. Poor Sam.” Her voice cracked as she punched in a call to him that went to voice mail. “Take me there.”
“We need to check out your apartment, and you need to file a report first.”
“No. Detective, I’m worried about Sam. He’s going through a hard time.”
Nolan finally looked at her, but her eyes were covered with large sunglasses. Ray-Bans. “Are you concerned about his welfare?”
“Hell, yes, I’m concerned about his welfare. His wife was just murdered. If you won’t take me there, I’ll get out and walk.”
Chapter Forty-seven
SAM WENT TO THE BATHROOM, TURNED on the faucet for background noise, and leaned against the vanity for a long time. It was a nice vanity, zebrawood with a marble top and basin. Yuki had designed it; a carpenter she knew had built it; and he’d installed it. Nice work all around.
The mirror he hadn’t looked into for two years had been part of the upgrade, too, a vintage Hollywood Regency Yuki had proudly acquired for too much money. It was a sunburst monstrosity with wicked, writhing, gilt tongues manically licking an escape from an oval of silvered glass. He called it the Exploding Porcupine.
It was hanging directly in front of him, but his eyes were fixed on the sink and the water that swirled down the drain. Down, down, down. Where did it go? Where would it end up? Universal questions you could ask about everything and everyone.
He was a widower now. It struck him as odd that in a world where no sorry human condition was without classification or political currency, losing a spouse wasn’t a category worth dissection or exploitation. Shouldn’t there be a codified difference between being a widower whose spouse had died of natural causes versus a widower whose spouse had been murdered?
No. Dead was dead.
Sam turned off the faucet, took a deep breath, and finally looked into the mirror. It was a milestone, but it wasn’t a heart-stopping moment, not even a significant one, which stunned him. Sleepless, violet puddles under amber eyes. A good nose. Flesh marbled with scar tissue on one side, smooth on the other. He wasn’t looking at a monster, he was looking at a man. Just a man. A widower.
Sam ran his fingers along the scars. They were hard and gnarly and without sensation, a perfect analog to his cerebral state. Gnarly. He thought of Teddy, who probably said “gnarly” on a regular basis. Or maybe the slang was passé and surfers didn’t use the term anymore. And why was he thinking stupid, irrelevant things?
Because you can’t think of relevant things.
He wanted desperately to feel grief instead of deadness, but there was some indiscernible obstruction cocooning him. He could practically see grief seething all around, coagulating, pulsating, but it couldn’t push its way in. Not yet.
He opened the medicine cabinet and stared at the orange bottles of different tranquilizers. He hadn’t taken one in two months, but today was the day to snuggle up with an Ativan. Ease the anxiety, kill the pain. He shook one out, swallowed it, then stared at his face again. Why had he been avoiding his reflection all this time? It’s not like it was the sole reminder of his past—it wasn’t even the most significant one. Maybe this was a breakthrough on a day when he should be having a breakdown. Or maybe he was having a breakdown and this was what it was like.
His sluggish pulse sparked to life when his forehead suddenly misted with amorphic red. He pinched his eyes closed and took deep breaths, willing the Ativan to kick in, but it wasn’t fast-acting. He should have taken a Xanax instead.
When he finally opened his eyes again, he watched in morbid fascination as letters slowly appeared: S … U … I … C … I … D …
He turned away and stumbled out of the bathroom. The hallway floor was warping and buckling beneath his feet, and brilliant, coruscating patterns flashed on the walls. He made it to the kitchen and confronted a large, translucent projection of himself, Colt in hand, rising slowly to his temple.
“No. No, no, no, no, no!”
The phantasm flashed, then disappeared—and along with it, his consciousness.
Chapter Forty-eight
A MAN WAS STANDING OVER SAM, offering a bony hand latticed with blue veins. Half of his face was obscured in the penumbra cast by an unknown occlusion, but the visible half looked familiar: a lantern jaw stippled with whiskers, a long nose that defied symmetry, a watchful hazel eye set in a deep, shadowy socket. Undulating, psychedelic colors splashed the walls behind him.
“Get up, Sam my man.”
The voice. “Rondo?”
“You got it.”
Sam ignored the hand and scrambled to his feet. “Stop visiting me, you’re dead.”
“Yeah. But you should be used to visitors from the other side by now,” he cackled. “Ty, Shaggy, Wilson, they couldn’t make it. Did I tell you last time they send their regards?”
Sam backed into a chair, knocked it over. “You’re not real.”
“I’m obviously real enough to you, and that’s a good thing because I’m here to help you. Don’t let me go. Can you do that?”
Sam grimaced and pressed hard against his pounding temples, against the specter of death, maybe an augury of his own. He pinched his eyes shut, but Rondo was still there when he finally opened them again, the visible half of his face wavering in and out of focus.
“Nice try, but closing your eyes won’t work because you don’t want me to go.”
“Why are you here?”
“I just told you, I’m here to help.”
The neon lights faded, and Sam felt his mental fog dissipate as he faced the same question he’d asked himself the last time Rondo had visited. When dreams bled into reality, was it a psychotic break? Oh, yes, he believed it was. Game over. Charon and the straightjacket and a one-way ticket downstairs.
But maybe Rondo was here to help. Sam had been fighting the dead for so long without results. What would happen if he played along this time, pretended this was real? His mind couldn’t sustain that fantasy within a fantasy for long, and then Rondo might go away forever.
“How did you get in?”
“Ghosts can walk through walls.” He let out his phlegmy cackle again. “I’m just shitting you, Sam, ghosts can’t really walk through walls, I ought to know. Your door wasn’t locked. I tried knocking and when you didn’t answer, I looked in the window and saw you on the floor. I thought maybe they got you, thank God they didn’t. You need to lock your door, Sam, at all times. Especially now.”
He emerged from t
he shadows and Sam recoiled. He wasn’t in bloody camo this time, and his face didn’t belong to the man who’d died two years ago or the man who’d visited him last night. This time, it was chapped and sunken and smeared with grime. The deep eye sockets were bruise-purple. His mouth was slack, and dried spittle frosted the edges of his lips. He was wearing a tattered woolen coat that smelled like decay and should have been roasting him alive on this hot June day, but there was obviously something wrong with his thermostat.
Sam instantly understood. This version of Rondo was mentally ill, likely schizophrenic. Probably homeless, like so many veterans in LA. He’d seen enough of them to perfect the image.
Keep pretending Rondo is real. Challenge him.
“So you’re alive?”
He batted his hand in the air, either fending off the question or an imaginary swarm of predatory insects. “You need to pay attention to the message, not the messenger. I came here to warn you, Sam. Fuck, we’re in trouble. They’re going to kill us. They’ve got operatives everywhere. Everywhere.” He started shuffling and fidgeting and his eyes were suddenly wild, searching for his imaginary tormenter.
A man on fire. A potentially dangerous man his own mind had conjured, and he was afraid of what Rondo might do to him because nightmares weren’t always safe. This one didn’t feel safe, not remotely.
Calm him down.
“Why don’t you have a seat, Rondo? Can I get you some water?”
“Yeah, yeah, that would be great. Thanks.”
He didn’t sit down, but he seemed to relax a little. Sam backed into the kitchen, his eyes fixed on the disturbed dream visitor as he grabbed a bottle of water from the refrigerator.
Rondo snatched the bottle from his hand, ripped off the cap, and drank greedily, water spilling down his chin onto the front of his filthy coat. “Thanks, man.”
“No problem. Where are you staying nowadays?”
He stared at him for a moment with empty, unfocused eyes, then looked around the room nervously. “Here and there. I’ve been on the move since Mexico, had to jump the border.”
How far could this go?
“What happened in Mexico?”
He shook his head. “Gotta stay on the move, and you do, too. They almost got me a few times, they’re shape-shifters, you’ve gotta watch out for that. I told you, they’re trying to kill us.”
“Who’s trying to kill us?”
“You know who. The Army. Greer.”
Sam didn’t recognize the soft rasp that came from his own mouth. “Captain Greer?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t think so. Why would he want to do that?”
Rondo slammed the bottle down on the coffee table and started pacing tight circles. “You know why!”
Sam had more than a passing acquaintance with mental illness, and he knew about delusions. They were flimsily constructed things, absent of logic, and held together solely by a sick mind—his own sick mind, he reminded himself. Inserting rationality into the discussion appeared to be a potent trigger for agitation, and the image of the Colt to his head terrified him.
“Have you talked to the colonel about this?”
Rondo’s face contorted in an ugly sneer. “Colonel Doerr is in on it. My own father. My own fucking father!”
“Okay, Rondo, it’s just me and you then. Tell me why you think Greer wants to kill us and we’ll figure this out together. Come up with a plan.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.” He squatted down on his haunches and for a brief moment, Sam was afraid he was going to shit on his rug. But he just balanced there like a deranged yogi. “You remember what he did. We saw it.”
What did you see? What do you remember?
Sam shook his head, dispelling the voice Dr. Frolich had told him to ignore. “I don’t remember much these days, Rondo.”
“The kids. The kids, the little boys! Bacha bazi, boy play. Christ, we could hear them screaming all night, you’re goddamned lucky if you don’t remember that.” Rondo put his head in his hands and started sobbing. “Greer said we couldn’t do anything about it.”
A dark, malevolent veil settled over Sam, coming from nowhere and going nowhere. But he could hear a child screaming. “I don’t understand.”
Rondo looked up, his ravaged face illuminated by the afternoon sun that filtered in through the slats in the front window shades. His tears had drawn meandering runnels through the grime on his cheeks. Some of the grime looked rusty, like dried blood, and his flesh was pocked and scabbed, as if he’d been picking at it. “The Afghan commander, Raziq, that sick fuck, you remember him, you remember the kid he had chained up? His eight-year-old sex slave? Greer said to ignore it, the Army wouldn’t touch it because he was on our side.”
Sam shook his head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about—”
“But Greer did do something about it! He shot him and we saw it! And he saw us. Good for him, I say, kill a pedophile, the world’s a better place. But he doesn’t see it that way, no, he only sees a court martial and the death penalty or life in Leavenworth if one of us goes public. You think it’s a coincidence that the next day, he put us on that unscheduled convoy and KABOOM!” Rondo screamed, jumping to his feet. “He had to shut us up. But we lived.”
The tableau around Sam suddenly froze as incipient wakefulness and reality seeped into the fringes of his mind. With that single falsehood, the Rondo hologram split apart into meat and bone and blood, and the apparition melted away.
Sam jolted awake on the sofa, his shirt wringing wet, his heart flailing like it was trying to free itself from his chest. There was no bottle of water on the coffee table, no upturned chair, no lingering smell of decay. Another nightmare, as twisted as all his other ones and wholly possessed by death, but so much worse than last night because Melody hadn’t been here to interrupt it.
The canker of PTSD was obviously accelerating its feast on his brain, and now it was planting false memories in his mind because he knew damn well Rondo was dead; Greer hadn’t shot anybody or set up a roadside bomb attack to kill his own men; and Raziq never had children chained up in his barracks. Dr. Frolich had been right, warning him not to focus too much on the details of his dreams. Or maybe her warning had done just the opposite, planted the seed and he’d nurtured it during his blackout.
With a convulsive shiver, he recalled his hallucination of suicide, another warped mirage to add to his mounting catalog of psychotic symptoms. He was the man on fire. He was in trouble. And Yuki was still dead.
He fumbled his phone out of his pocket when it started buzzing and squinted at the caller ID. Dr. Frolich. What perfect timing. He took deep breaths in an attempt to calm his heart, but the effort was wasted. He answered anyhow.
“Hi, Doc.”
“Sam? Are you all right? You sound … you don’t sound like yourself.”
“I’m really not myself.”
“Listen, I just spoke with a police officer, a homicide detective Crawford. He was asking if you were at your appointment yesterday. Tell me what’s happening.”
She had no idea how much was happening, what had happened, but it was surprisingly easy to condense it down into a handful of simple, straightforward sentences. “I’m a person of interest in two murders I didn’t commit. One of the victims was Yuki. She’s dead. And I’m having blackouts and hallucinations like I did with Katy Villa, but they’re escalating. They’re bad. I’m in trouble.”
No pause, no sharp intake of shocked breath. “Have you taken your meds today?”
Had he? “I’m not sure. I think so.”
“I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
Sam listened to the fast beep-beep-beep of the disconnection. It was a steady, regular sound, unchanging and imperturbable. Preposterously, he wondered if his veteran’s medical benefits would cover the house call.
Chapter Forty-nine
MELODY JUMPED OUT OF THE CAR the moment Nolan pulled up to the curb and jogged up Sam’s front walk, but she checke
d herself before she mounted the steps to the porch. However bad her situation was, his was much, much worse, and he deserved a strong, calm, caring friend right now, not a hyperventilating basket case. And what was she thinking? That she’d find a blubbering pool of human jelly on the floor? That her very presence would transform Sam’s collapsing life and save the day?
“Dumb ass,” she mumbled, knocking on the door.
His brows lifted in surprise when he opened it. He was holding a glass of rye. “Melody. Why aren’t you at work?”
“Because I heard about Yuki. I’m so sorry, Sam.” She wanted to wrap her arms around him, but she resisted the urge because she sensed it would be exactly the wrong thing to do.
“How did you hear about…” He looked over her shoulder and frowned. “Nolan?”
“Yes.”
“Why is she here?”
“It’s a long story. Are you okay?”
“I don’t really know, but Dr. Frolich is on her way here, so I’ll be getting a professional opinion.”
“Good.” Melody chewed on her lower lip, one of many bad habits that resurfaced when she was anxious. She heard Nolan’s shoes click on the sidewalk. “I have to go. The cops are at my place. Somebody broke in today and knocked Teddy out.”
Sam braced an arm on the doorframe, once again glad it was there to hold him up. “Jesus. Is he okay?”
“Yeah, I think so.”
“Come back here when you’re finished. Stay here tonight.”
“I will … or maybe we should stay someplace else. Something bad is happening, Sam. I don’t know what, but I feel like we should be hiding. Is that stupid? Paranoid?”
“I’m the wrong person to ask about paranoia. You and Nolan came together?”
“Yeah.”
“How is it possible you got a homicide detective with two hot cases to be your chauffeur in your own car?”
“I told you, it’s a long story.”
“She can be persuasive,” Nolan said, mounting the porch steps. “How are you, Mr. Easton?”
“Pretty terrible. Did you speak with Dawson Lightner?”