The Playing Card Killer

by Russell James

  Chapter Eight

  Brian knew he shouldn’t feel like this. Dread shouldn’t fill him as he stood on the front porch of his adoptive parents’ home that evening. Family get-togethers were supposed to be warm, joyous events. Hallmark TV movies told him so. But not in the Sheridan household.

  From the outside, the home would be the envy of any stranger passing by, if somehow that stranger got into this gated community outside Tampa to start with. An expansive two-story home sat in the center of an acre of verdant Bermuda grass. White flowers bloomed from the Indian hawthorn bushes that lined the faux-cobblestone driveway. Potted orchids hung from the overhangs and filled the air with a scent so cloying it seemed artificial.

  Brian rang the bell. Plates clanked together inside the house. Footsteps sounded on tile. He took a deep breath and tensed, as if he was about to withstand a blast of frigid air.

  Camilla Sheridan opened the door. Early forties and fit, she wore a white tennis outfit, mandatory club attire whether one played or not, and she did not play. The last year and a half, her tan had deepened, and the lines on her face lessened, coincidentally aligned with Brian moving out. She managed an unconvincing smile.

  “Brian! Come on in before the humidity ruins everything in the house.”

  “Hey, Cam.” He’d slipped to a first-name basis with his parents during high school and they’d never objected.

  He walked in. They did not hug. Camilla had never been much of a hugger, even less so with Brian.

  Camilla followed him through the foyer and the living room to the screened back patio. Aquamarine water cast a sparkling invitation from the full-size pool. Derek Sheridan stood beside a built-in stone-faced gas grill. He wore his weekend relaxation outfit, a short sleeve button-down shirt, khaki shorts and deck shoes without socks. He prodded thick steaks with a huge two-tined fork as the meat sizzled over the open flames. He gave Brian a nod.

  “Brian. Good to see you.”

  “Derek.” Coworkers passing the water cooler exchanged more warmth.

  Three chairs with topaz padded covers surrounded a glossy, circular redwood table. The fourth chair had been consigned to storage when Brian moved out. The thoughtful family had put a folding chair out for Brian’s brief visit.

  Ariana sat in one of the padded chairs. Brian’s stepsister was in her senior year at high school, already accepted at Dartmouth. Her tennis outfit matched her mother’s, but she actually played. One finger danced back and forth across her smartphone. With her head leaned forward, her shoulder-length brown hair hung like blinders on either side of her connection to the rest of the world. Brian sat down. She didn’t look up.

  Camilla joined them at the table. She set down a plastic tray of fresh cut vegetables ordered from the local organic grocery. Derek piled four steaks on a platter, doused the grill’s flames, and took his seat at the table.

  “Get ’em while they’re hot,” he said as he delivered a sizzling slab to each of the four plates at the table.

  Ariana looked up long enough from her phone to see that food had arrived, then responded to another text message. Brian and his parents exchanged quick glances, tense as gunslingers waiting for the other to draw in some weird three-way duel. An uncomfortable silence turned tortuous. Brian waited to hear why he’d been summoned for the meal.

  “I spoke to Dr. Kaufman on Thursday,” Camilla said.

  Brian shook his head. Of course. Dr. Kaufman always thought that the restriction of doctor/patient confidentiality was familial, not individual, in nature.

  Relieved of the responsibility of starting the conversation, Derek raised his knife and fork. He began to study his steak, like Caesar looking for the weak spot in the Gallic lines before battle.

  “Of course, I was checking,” Camilla said, “because we hadn’t been invoiced for last week’s session.”

  “Because I didn’t go,” Brian said. Lying about it would be a waste of time.

  “And this week?” Camilla said.

  “I’ll guess you know I missed that one, too.”

  “Now, Brian,” Derek said. He pointed a steak knife at his son for emphasis. “That was part of the judge’s conditional release.”

  Brian twitched, his usual involuntary response to bringing back dark memories. He tugged the sleeves of his shirt down to cover the purple, ropy scars along his wrists. “He set that up when I was thirteen.”

  “To run until you were twenty-one,” Camilla said.

  “Well, hell!” Brian said in frustration.

  Ariana finally looked up from her phone in curiosity.

  “That’s six months away,” Brian continued, “so what difference does it make?”

  “Quite a difference to the courts,” Camilla said.

  “And you would tell them?”

  “I’d be remiss not to.”

  “And,” Derek cut in, “there’s a question of liability, in case—”

  Brian slapped the table so hard the plates bounced. “In case I go nuts and start killing people?”

  Camilla slid her chair a few inches away from the table. “I can see you’ve also stopped taking your medications as well.”

  Brian’s blood went to a boil. To still be treated like a kid.… He shot to his feet. His chair skidded back and collapsed in a heap.

  “Well, family, thanks for the invite. Great catching up. I say we do the same thing next year, how’s that?”

  Brian marched past Camilla, through the back door, and then straight out the front. Before he knew it, he was in his car and halfway down the street, doing forty in first gear.

  The idiocy of what he was doing caught up with him. He pulled over to the side of the road and shut off the car. He inhaled and exhaled deep, measured breaths. His fury ebbed.

  He was twenty years old, for Christ’s sake. He lived on his own, had his own job. He wasn’t a kid anymore. He was livid with them for not seeing that.

  He was also furious with himself. What did he expect was going to happen? Derek Sheridan was going to pop out like some 1950s sitcom dad and take him downtown for an ice cream sundae? That Camilla was going to shower him with praise for having not tried to kill himself, or even consider it, for the past seven years? Ridiculous.

  He slammed his palm against the steering wheel, feeling stupid for losing it with his parents. Two nights in a row of interrupted sleep and the chemical backflips induced by medication withdrawal had put him on edge. His face flushed at realizing he hadn’t controlled himself.

  But he was also a bit amazed by the ferocity of his response. He’d never been so forceful when he was on his medications. He’d just kept all the anger inside, muted and wrapped under that cottony veil that meds draped over his world. He’d have to keep an eye on his reactions to everyone. They might be hair-trigger in this new, sober world. He hoped this was one of the temporary side effects. Telling his parents off did feel pretty cleansing, though.

  His parents were right about the court-ordered visits with Dr. Kaufman. He could really get a maelstrom started by not going. Worst-case scenario, the doc could have him recommitted. At the least, he might recommend an extension of Brian’s treatment past age twenty-one. He was too damn close to freedom to let that happen.

  He picked up his phone and scrolled to Dr. Kaufman’s number. He thought about the standup comedian who used to do a ‘You might be a redneck if…’ routine.

  You might be mentally defective if you have your shrink’s number saved into your phone.

  He sighed and made an appointment for before work tomorrow.

  Chapter Nine

  The next day, Brian gripped the arms of Dr. Kaufman’s waiting room chair, as if squeezing them would somehow wring a bit of his dread out onto the floor. Having someone with an anxiety disorder spend time in a waiting room was as thoughtless as having a lung cancer patient sit in an airport smoking lounge.

&nb
sp; Three other people waited as well. Across from him sat a mother with a child who looked about twelve. The kid’s long hair swept down over his face in sheepdog fashion. Every stitch of his clothing was black. Brian consoled himself that he had never been quite that screwed up. Brian compensated for feeling like an outsider by pursuing anonymity, not embracing the outsider status. The mother flipped through texts and email on her phone, interspersed with glances up at the clock on the wall.

  Two chairs down sat a frail, older man, at least sixty, balding, with his gray hair swept back in a ridiculous attempt at a ponytail. He kept scraping his bottom teeth against his upper lip, as if trying to rake his lip back into his mouth. The frayed hems of his too-long khaki pants had grazed the ground for a long time.

  Brian felt like Ebenezer Scrooge, with the Ghost of Brian Past and what he sure hoped wasn’t the Ghost of Brian Future around him. He’d always wondered if the shrinks really wanted people cured, or if they wanted them as stable sources of income.

  The receptionist called Brian’s name. He walked the familiar path past her to Dr. Kaufman’s office. It reminded him more than ever of a scene from a prison film where the death row inmate made the long walk to the electric chair. The Doc was not going to be happy with him at all.

  The therapy room door was open. Therapy rooms on television always looked like someone’s personal study, lined with bookshelves, walls covered in diplomas. Dr. Kaufman never went in for that. The small, simply decorated room just had a couch and two easy chairs around a coffee table. Bright pictures of snow-capped Colorado mountains hung on the peach-colored walls. Maybe some of the other rooms were decorated differently, tuned for different mental problems. Brian didn’t know. He’d spent the last eight years coming to this one.

  Dr. Kaufman stood behind one chair. Years of experience had told him to skip the handshake greeting with Brian. He had sandy hair, parted on one side, and wore gold, wire-rimmed glasses. He’d always struck Brian as looking like a thin Robert Redford. As usual, his face didn’t betray his emotions, and Brian couldn’t guess if the missed appointments had made him mad or disappointed.

  “Thanks for squeezing me in, Doctor K.” He took his usual seat on the couch.

  “I thought it was important since you missed two sessions.”

  Brian winced. Even though the doctor got paid by the hour, he never wasted time. Dr. Kaufman took his usual chair across from Brian.

  “Yeah,” Brian said. He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m just short of twenty-one, thought I’d see what doing without was going to be like.”

  “And what have you discovered?”

  “Oh, well, that part’s good. All good.” His pants suddenly felt like sandpaper. He rubbed his palms against his thighs. “But I kind of backed off my meds.”

  “That was obvious. How much did you back off?”

  “All the way.”

  Dr. Kaufman’s expression turned grim. “Both the label instructions and my personal instructions were pretty clear on the dangers of doing that. How long have you been off them?”

  “Two weeks. The first week was okay.”

  “Because the medications don’t flush out of your system for several days after you discontinue them.”

  “And it isn’t bad now. Mostly. Except the nightmares.” Admitting to Mr. Jitters and the other hallucinations would be like asking for a ticket back to the psych ward. “They wake me up.”

  “Abruptly stopping treatment like that will always cause poor sleep cycles, and poor sleep cycles increase the likelihood of nightmares.”

  Brian thought that maybe he could get something useful out of the normally reticent shrink after all. “The nightmares. Where do they come from?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Some of them are horrible. People getting killed. Lots of violence.” He didn’t want to add that they were getting worse. “Am I thinking up all that gruesome stuff?”

  “You mean are they your personal fantasies?”

  Brian nodded.

  “No,” Dr. Kaufman said. “The subconscious doesn’t work that way. It is kind of a holding area for all sorts of things, some are hopes and desires, some are fantasies, but most are experiences. And not necessarily personal experiences.”

  “Like stuff from movies, or books I’ve read?”

  “Exactly. Dreams pull on all of that, probably as a way for people to deal with stress and anxiety. If you experience it in a dream, it’s less scary if there’s a second time around in real life.”

  Brian was really hoping to never experience killing a woman in real life. “So these nightmares could be rearranged scenes from some horror movie?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Nothing dangerous?”

  Dr. Kaufman pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “What do you mean by dangerous?”

  Brian wasn’t the shrink, but by now he knew Dr. Kaufman’s tell. A push on the glasses meant that something had piqued his interest. The last thing Brian wanted was for this conversation to get interesting.

  “You know, it won’t give me a heart attack in the middle of the night or anything?”

  “No, nightmares don’t give heart attacks. That is definitely from the movies. You really should get back on your medications. Not right back at full strength, of course, you need to work up to it again. Going back on full strength will really cause havoc. It will likely amplify your anxiety, not relieve it.”

  “I understand,” Brian said. Even though he wanted out of the office, he couldn’t bring himself to lie and say he’d start taking the drugs again. There was no way he was going back to the fuzzy life under pharmaceuticals.

  “Julia will have your usual prescriptions ready. Just take the pills at a quarter strength for a week. We’ll see where you are at our next scheduled session and decide how much to up the dosage.”

  “That sounds good,” Brian said. He rose. “I’ll let you get to the other patients. Thanks for your help.”

  “Call me if things seem more than you can handle.”

  “I will.”

  Brian left the room and headed to the front desk. His prescriptions sat on the counter. He palmed them as he walked past without stopping. He shoved them in his pocket and went for the front door.

  Dr. Kaufman hadn’t offered anything but the same-old same-old. Back on meds. Back on the therapy schedule. Back to him making boat payments or whatever the hell he did with all his money. The two of them would just run out the clock until Brian hit twenty-one. That course of treatment wasn’t going to get Brian anywhere he hadn’t already been.

  Brian left the building and got a blast of straight Florida sunshine wrapped in sweltering sub-tropical humidity. He headed back to his car.

  The visit wasn’t a total loss, though. He definitely felt better knowing that the screwed-up crap in his dreams wasn’t some personal fantasy. Whatever bits and pieces of late-night horror stories his mind strung together were just that, fiction. Maybe just knowing that would banish them.

  He could hope.

  His phone buzzed with a text message. The sender was a new number, 5642.

  Breakthrough tonight to find your true self. Awaken!

  This Totally You Institute spam was getting really old, really fast. He pressed Delete so hard he was afraid he’d crack the screen. He imagined the crap they were peddling. A glorified self-help revival meeting. Somewhere to display his scars, mental and physical. He bet that Camilla had dropped his name onto this place’s mailing list, trying to get him into something else that might make him less of a burden. Then again, maybe Ariana signed him up just to piss him off. How lucky he was to have his list of suspects be all family members and all with different, negative, motives.

  He considered calling Daniela, then discarded the idea. Seeing the shrink was a step she’d approve of, but it wouldn’t be enough. He needed
to be on meds or better without them before he tried to reconcile with her. The former wasn’t going to happen. The latter definitely hadn’t happened yet.

  The world was getting to be a lonely place again. He was looking forward to seeing the ever-abusive Sidney at work tomorrow. That was certainly a sign of desperation.

  Chapter Ten

  The dream is so vivid, it is hyper-real, even in black and white, even without a soundtrack. That partial sensory deprivation only makes it worse. There is no distraction from what he sees.

  It is night. The cowl of a sweatshirt hood reduces the view to tunnel vision. Streetlights spray their meager illumination out from the curb and across the street, but shadows command the space from the sidewalk to the rundown homes. Dilapidated fences corral tiny, weed-choked yards. The houses’ sagging porches and peeling paint scream of the locality’s slow decline. It looks like an urban neighborhood, the kind of place where long ago these little one-story homes were quite desirable. But subdivision sprawl eroded their value, and turned a community of owners into a collection of renters.

  A girl walks ahead of him down the cracked sidewalk. She wears tight shorts cut to the top of her thighs. Twiggy, cocoa-colored legs dissolve into a butt still years from being shaped by womanhood. A tight T-shirt, black, maybe purple, covers her boyish torso. In the dim light and the grayscale mode, the colors all look the same. Cornrows stretch down to the base of her neck. They bounce up and down with each step she takes. White wires trail from her ears to a small MP3 player in her left hand. Her head bounces to an unheard beat.

  She should not be here, on this dark, deserted street, this little girl. He wonders where her parents are, why they let her travel through the night alone.

  A chill runs up his spine. The houses sit dark, the air still. No rumbling cars prowl the pavement, no men stare from the shadows. Yet he knows the street is unsafe.

  Because he is there.

  His strides lengthen, each step a bit more of a stretch. No furtive movements to attract attention, no radical sprint. Just an almost imperceptible shift of speed. The distance between him and the girl closes.