Dry Ice

by Stephen White

  “Not so hasty. My friend is still out there. You really want to risk it? I’m owed a favor.”

  An image floated in front of my face like a hologram. I watched myself stand up and put a knife to Michael’s neck. I slid the blade back and forth until he bled. A lot. My fingers felt warm before they felt wet.

  The whole time I was as cool as a shaman.

  He actually laughed at me then. “Where’s your honor? You helped convince these fools once with your silence. Do it again. Loudly, this time. What’s the big deal?”

  I responded with a provocation, just to see how he’d react. “Tell me something—why don’t you belong here, Michael? Rapists, murderers, sociopaths—I think you fit right in.”

  He smirked. “These guys aren’t my peeps. Who knew?” He winked. “Ya think?”

  Unbidden, I imagined him with a y-incision on an autopsy table. His skin pallid.

  I’m fine. Just fine.

  “You’re frightened,” I said. “You know it’s not going to work with me this time.”

  He wouldn’t go there. He said, “Don’t…challenge…me. You will regret it. Save your friend. Save your wife. Save your career. It’s almost all you have left.”

  I realized then that he didn’t know that my career was on life support. It had suffocated at the end of the noose that had broken Kol Cruz’s neck.

  “You’ve now precipitated the deaths of the only two patients I’ve ever lost to suicide, Michael. You really think my career is going to survive the second one?” When he didn’t reply right away, I asked. “Did you get Nicole to jump?”

  “Wasn’t supposed to be me, obviously. But since I was out, I volunteered. We had two ropes, two nooses, in the barn. One was on my neck; one was on hers. We had created some…serious despair for her. Drugs, lies.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t hard. The kid was a mess. She was ready to die, desperate for a friend to come along for the ride. She followed me up there willingly. Then all I had to do was…encourage her to lose her balance. Nicole was a born follower. She thought the plan was that we were both going to die that day—some grand adventure my accomplice had cooked up to screw up your life, her parents’ lives. I counted to three. On three, she leaned forward.”

  “You pushed her?”

  He shrugged. “I prefer ‘encouraged.’”

  “You used the ladder to get up there?”

  He was puzzled at the question. “I’m smart, Alan. But I can’t fly.”

  I remembered the look of surprise that had been frozen on Kol’s postmortem face. The shock was that she was alone at the end of a rope.

  “Were you the one living in the barn?”

  He shook his head. “‘Camping’ is more accurate. But no. My accomplice needed access to your house. It made all the research more convenient to be close. I stayed a night at Nicole’s. Then I moved on. I picked up girls after that. Slept at their places.” He winked. “I missed fucking. Who knew?”

  I straightened my therapist mask. The thought of J. Winter B. having unfettered access to my home made me livid. I hid my rage behind it.

  Michael had gone through life expecting to be forgiven. I’d been one in a long series of his enablers. His father, his sister, the Pitkin County judge, so many others.

  I said, “You fucked up, Michael. You believed I wouldn’t change. Guess what? I’m immune to your problems. Enjoy your stay in Cañon City. I hope it goes on for a long, long time. You’ve earned every day of it.”

  “I’ll die here if that happens,” he said. “You know that.”

  His announcement was almost void of affect. I realized that he was counting on me to find the concept of his death a tragedy. What a sap I’d been.

  “Fine,” I said. “I pray there will be some unpleasant moments for you before that happens.” I stood and stepped toward the door.

  “I mean soon. I’ll die soon.”

  “That’s a threat of some kind?” I said. My back was to him. There wasn’t a gram of compassion in my question.

  “Yes,” he said. Malevolence covered him the way frosting tops a cake. Thick and rich. “Leave me here and I’ll kill myself.”

  “That’s my problem?”

  “I’ll leave notes that say you were warned.”

  “And I’ll deny it.” I turned and waited until he looked me in the eye. “You know what? I almost believe you’d do it. But I really haven’t been that lucky lately.”

  “If you know I’m suicidal you have a professional obligation to act.”

  Another milliliter of fear oozed from the edges of his facade. “That’s your trump card, Michael? You’re counting on me to act honorably?”

  My words surprised him. I savored the moment.

  “You always have,” he said.

  He made it sound like the vilest of accusations. I had no defense. “I was a fool for not intervening at your competency hearing. I won’t repeat the mistake.”

  His breathing was accelerating. I could hear his exhales across the room. Good. The advantage is shifting.

  Over the space of two or three seconds, his face morphed from one of surprise and unease into the victorious one I’d witnessed as he was marched out of Lauren’s office back into custody. Once again he thought he was about to hit the game-winning shot.

  Not this time, I thought. I didn’t know what would come next. Part of me thought he was bluffing. Another part of me was terrified of what he had planned.

  “Do you like the new look in your daughter’s bedroom?” he asked.

  Time stopped.

  No—that’s trump, I thought. His final card was on the table.

  I retraced my steps, walking across the room until I stood about two feet from him.

  He smirked. It was a mistake on his part, one for which I’ll be forever grateful.

  Without any deliberation I swung my left fist into the surprisingly soft flesh just below his solar plexus. It was like punching a top sirloin. He’d had no time to protect himself and he reflexively doubled over in response to the blow. As his head came down my right fist became a missile shooting upward at his descending jaw.

  The impact made a sound like a boot stomping on a sea-shell. Crack, thud. After absorbing the blow to his gut Michael didn’t have enough air in his lungs to scream in pain—the sound he made in reaction to my second sucker punch was a dull, throaty gargle of misery and surprise.

  I stepped back as he crumbled at my feet. I didn’t want to get blood on my shoes again. That hadn’t worked out well the first time.

  I said, “Come near my daughter and I’ll spend whatever life I have left finding ways to torture you for it.”

  As I stepped backward toward the door I gingerly slid my right hand into the pocket of my trousers.

  “You little fuck. You don’t know what you just did. You’ll be looking over your shoulder until the day you die.” Although his words were malicious, McClelland’s voice wasn’t loud or especially threatening. He sounded like a child playing tough in the mirror while brushing his teeth, the brush dangling from his foaming mouth.

  “I’ve tried that. It’s no fun. You’ve cured me. I’m done with you. My biggest fear is right in front of me. I’ll survive it. Yours…is down the hall. Will you survive it?”

  I pounded on the door with the side of my left hand. I did it again.

  Thirty seconds later—it felt like a month—the big metal door swung open.

  The officer with the shoulders yelled, “Duck!”

  Reflexively, I turned and raised my arm.

  Michael’s chair was flying at my head.

  I’d forgotten an important lesson. When Michael’s intellect failed to gain him the advantage he sought, he tended to get impulsively violent.

  Especially after he’d been provoked.

  I could relate.

  FIFTY-FIVE

  I’D TAKEN the bulk of the impact of the chair on my left forearm and triceps. I knew it was going to hurt. Maybe in five
minutes. Maybe the next morning.

  But for that moment the pain in my left arm was so much less significant than the pain in my right hand that I felt a kind of tortuous balance. In all important ways I was fine.

  When I walked away from the meeting room Michael had been bleeding from his mouth and nose. The three guards were shackling him. To my untrained eye his jaw looked like a blind man had assembled it from spare parts. Nothing lined up quite right.

  Using the bored tone of a traffic cop wondering, “Do you know why I pulled you over?” the assistant warden asked, “What happened?”

  “A sudden disagreement,” I said.

  “He attacked you?”

  I thought about the question for a moment. Sure, why not? “Yes,” I said. “I had to protect myself.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “Do you need a doctor?”

  “No, that’s not necessary. But thank you.”

  That was it. I was in a porous fugue as I followed him back to the conference room—a walking-the-corridors version of highway hypnosis. He opened the door and preceded me into the room. He didn’t say a word to the group about the flying chair or the altercation.

  I was starting to like the guy.

  Elliot Bellhaven said, “Alan, sit. Tell us what happened. What he said.”

  I despised his eagerness. I despised the fact that he’d taken control of the meeting.

  I didn’t sit. I stood at the head of the table, near the door. My right hand remained in my pocket. I positioned myself so that I didn’t have to look Kirsten in the eye.

  I said, “Michael McClelland is faking his mental illness to protect his competency status. He’s been faking it for years. His silence is purely strategic. He admitted that. He also said that if for some reason the people in this room don’t buy his act and agree to send him back to Pueblo for continued treatment, he’s going to become a suicidal risk. That, too, will be theater.” I paused. “That’s all I got.”

  Elliot blurted, “You were in there for over half an hour.”

  “We were negotiating,” I said. “The negotiations failed. I’ve told you what I learned.”

  “Sit down, Alan,” Elliot said in a tone that was so demeaning I knew I would never forgive him for it. In his left hand he was holding the agreement that Kirsten had given me in the car. He waved it. “Tell us what you were negotiating. Tell us how the negotiations broke down. Every step. You agreed to share all details of the conversation you had with him. That was our deal.”

  “Did I?” I said. I turned to Kirsten. “I’d like to leave now, if that’s all right with you.”

  “Ms. Lord,” Elliot said, standing. “Your client signed an agreement to—”

  I interrupted. I didn’t want Kirsten to appear responsible for what I’d done. “No, Elliot, I didn’t sign anything. Check your papers.”

  He flipped to the last page. His face turned the mottled red and white of the top of an under-ripe strawberry.

  I said, “I figured you wouldn’t look. You count on other people to dot your i’s.”

  Kirsten opened her copy and turned to the signature page. She tried, almost successfully, not to grin at what she saw.

  I’d signed it, “Carl Luppo.”

  Elliot said, “Who the hell is Carl Luppo?”

  Kirsten stood. Carl Luppo had been her ex-Mafia protector in the Witness Protection Program. “Someone who has a penchant for getting people out of uncomfortable situations, and putting others in them,” she said. “I do apologize for the misunderstanding about the document. Like you, Mr. Bellhaven, I was unaware that it hadn’t been properly executed. I’ll be speaking further with my client about this, and I will get back to you all as soon as…I have something to report.”

  Tharon Thibodeaux winked at me. Michael McClelland’s reign as the poster child for 16-8-112 was over. Tharon was pleased.

  The woman from the Department of Corrections had started knitting while I was visiting McClelland. As far as I could tell she didn’t drop a single stitch during my performance in the conference room.

  I wondered how she’d gotten the knitting needles past security.

  “You want to talk?” Kirsten said. We were on the edge of the high plateau above the sprawling Fort Carson army base between Cañon City and Colorado Springs. Traffic was sparse. On that stretch of high-desert plateau everything was sparse but dirt and sky.

  And felons. Lots and lots of felons.

  We’d been silent since leaving the penitentiary.

  “I want to apologize. I put you in an untenable position in there. I regret that I involved you, but I needed to talk to McClelland on my terms. I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not what I meant,” she said. “Do you want to talk?” She took her eyes from the road momentarily and glanced at me.

  Eliminating what had just happened at New Max—I wasn’t prepared to discuss that—I began doing an inventory of the possible topics for our talk. I quickly narrowed the list to two. One, my toxic history. Two, Kirsten once loving me. Did I want to talk? Hardly.

  My phone vibrated in my pocket. Saved by the bell.

  “Just a second,” I said to Kirsten. The screen told me the call was from Lauren’s mobile. Involuntarily, I tensed. I flipped open the phone and said, “Hello.”

  “Elliot just called,” Lauren said. Her tone was light, playful. “He wants me to talk some sense into you.”

  “Based on the look in his eyes the last time I saw him I would wager that he would prefer you beat some sense into me,” I said.

  Lauren laughed. “That too. Michael admitted it was all an act?”

  “Basically.” I paused. I didn’t want Lauren to have to do Elliot’s bidding. Putting her in the middle wouldn’t help me. It certainly wouldn’t help her. “I’ve told Elliot all I’m going to tell him, Lauren.”

  “He said Michael attacked you. Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I said. In our family “fine” covered a lot of ground.

  “His jaw is broken,” Lauren said.

  Really? Cool. “Let’s not…go there.”

  “Okay—that’s not why I’m calling. Gracie and I are heading home. We’re at the airport; we’ll board in a few minutes. You and I have some things to talk about.”

  I did another inventory. Again, I quickly narrowed the topics down to two. One, my toxic history. Two, the state of our marriage.

  This is going to be a fun night.

  “Yes, we do,” I agreed. McClelland’s final threat to go after Grace reverberated in my head. “It may not be safe yet—you know that?” I was painfully aware that J. Winter B. remained unaccounted for.

  “I know,” she said. She told me that a deputy would pick them up for the ride from DIA to Boulder. “The sheriff promised me a few more days of protection. We can decide…together what happens after that.”

  My wife wasn’t asking for me to place my imprimatur on her plans. Continued protest would have been futile. We would have the prudent-parent talk face-to-face.

  “That was Lauren,” I said to Kirsten after I closed the phone.

  Before Kirsten could comment her cell started singing in her satchel. Some classical riff. I thought Brahms. I reached over and took the wheel so she could track down the phone.

  She found it, eyed the screen, and said, “My boss.”

  Cozy. I released the wheel. “Elliot must be calling everyone we know,” I said.

  Kirsten did more listening than talking during the call. I couldn’t discern much from her end of the conversation. She closed the phone after three or four minutes.

  “Cozy’s not happy,” she said. “With you.”

  “It’s a big club,” I replied without any compassion for his predicament. I figured his dismay was an act—he couldn’t admit it, but I thought he approved of what I did.

  “Or me,” Kirsten added.

  “I’ll explain to him that I set you up.”

  “The police located the missing
grand jury witness late this morning,” Kirsten said, changing directions.

  “Dead?” McClelland’s evasiveness had convinced me that the witness was dead.

  “Buried below a grave out in that cemetery over by the Diagonal.”

  I recalled the article I’d read in the News. “‘Below’? Is that what you said?”

  “Sam had his partner—Lucy?—interview Nicole’s coworkers at the cemetery. Nicole’s supervisor remembered that shortly before she died she worked late one evening by herself doing final preparations on a grave for a morning interment. He knew exactly which grave it was. The ‘alone’ part concerned Lucy. She got an order to exhume, but the only corpse in the casket was the one that was supposed to be there. They were getting ready to reinter when Sam phoned Lucy and suggested they dig down a little.

  “The witness’s body was below the casket buried a few inches deeper in the dirt than the normal grave. They almost missed it.”

  An effective place to hide a dead body. How did Sam know to look there?

  “Cause?” I asked. Of death, I meant. Kirsten knew that.

  “There’s serious decomposition, but the coroner’s assistant told Sam that there were some deep lacerations and that the woman’s hyoid was crushed. Post is tomorrow.”

  “Asphyxiation,” I said. Specifically strangulation. The missing witness had been murdered. “Sam put all this together?”

  “That’s what Cozy said.”

  “I thought he was off the case.”

  “Not so much, apparently,” Kirsten said. “There’s more. You want to hear it?”

  “Please.”

  “They finally found where your patient—Nicole—had been living. She was renting a trailer east of town just off Valmont. Her landlord thought she was a flight attendant, so he didn’t give her absence a second thought. The sheriff executed a warrant. The bathroom in the trailer lit up with Luminol and violet light. It had been cleaned but there had been a lot of blood. Sam’s take is that the grand jury witness was killed in the bathtub. Cut first, then strangled.”

  Ah. She probably wouldn’t die when she was supposed to. “Kol’s nosebleed in my office? That’s where the blood was from?”