Gundown (32 page)

Sorrow filled him like water pouring into an empty glass. Tears welled in his eyes.

“Go ahead,” Dr. Moore said. “I’m here if you need me.”

His chest seized as if a giant fist squeezed it. He couldn’t breathe. Pain coiled in his lungs, and he tried to gasp. Then it smashed out in a long moan. He turned his face away from Dr. Moore, crossed his arms over his chest, and fought to hold the pain back. But he couldn’t. He lay his head back onto the recliner and wept.

Can’t get there from here

It was almost noon when Jewel poked her head into Noah Stone’s office—it had taken most of the morning to work up the gumption to do this. Franklin was right, she was never gonna have a life here until she worked out her problems with Stone’s way of doing things. He stood at a window, coffee cup in hand, gazing at the valley.

Damn, she didn’t want to do this. But she had to. “Excuse me, Noah . . . ” she said.

He turned to her and smiled. “Jewel! Come in, please. Coffee?”

Coffee on this stomach was begging for heartburn. “No, thanks. I, uh, need to talk?”

“About the Hank Soldado thing?”

“How did you—”

“I’ve seen you frowning for days now, and Benson has told me about your feelings. Have a seat.”

Feeling that he was somehow an opponent, she said, “No thanks.”

His smile faded. “So what’s on your mind?”

She blurted, “Why didn’t you do something to save him?”

“I tried to persuade him to go through therapy. He could have saved himself.”

“You could have stopped him from being sent to the Keep.”

“I couldn’t.”

Who was he trying to kid? “I don’t believe that. You’ve got the power.”

He gazed at her. At last he sighed. “I guess, from your way of thinking, I could have ‘arranged’ something.” He shook his head. “But I have a promise to keep.”

“That’s keeping your promise? How can anybody trust you to help if you turn your back on a man who saved your life?!”

“Because you can trust me to keep my promise.”

“Trust you? How? You promised to help, and you didn’t do shit.”

His eyes saddened, and he looked older. As though suddenly fragile, he eased into a chair by the coffee table. “Jewel, you don’t know how tempted I was to help him.” He looked up at her. His face looked like something hurt inside. “I wanted desperately to save Hank from the Keep. I thought there was so much we could do together . . .”

His emotion cooled her anger. He seemed sincere, but . . . “Why didn’t you do anything?”

He gazed at the mountains outside, and then turned to her. His eyes were brighter, determined. “To use my influence to circumvent the court’s ruling would have corrupted the system I’ve worked so hard to see become a reality.”

His voice took on an edge. “Think it through. If I’d gotten Hank off, that would say it’s okay to break the gun law if you think you have a good-enough reason. So somebody else would, I guarantee you, think they can get away with the same thing. Corrupted, the system would break down.”

She thought he was probably right about that. Still, Soldado had saved his life. “But—”

He held up his hand and she waited for the rest. He said, “To undermine the system that holds the capacity for real justice would be breaking my promise to all, including Hank Soldado. And you. He got justice, and so did you when that awful man from Illinois came after you.”

She shook her head. “That’s all theory. This is a man’s life.”

His gaze became as hard as his last name. “They are the same.”

She didn’t know what to think. You could trust Noah Stone to keep to the rules. But you couldn’t trust him to do everything he could for you. Defeated, she said, “I guess maybe I’ll never understand.”

His expression softened. “I’m sorry.”

“I am, too.”

Going Under the Knife

After the morning session with Dr. Moore, Hank had a lunch of hardly anything—it was difficult to look at a plate of food when your mind was filled with a slide show of a dead life. Blocked memories poured in. Marcie in her wedding gown, him a grinning idiot beside her. An April stroll along Lake Michigan with Marcie, so into each other that the chill spring wind could have saved its breath. Him when he first held Amy in the delivery room.

And then Marcie throwing Amy’s body off the roof. All the good memories turned to ashes. Hoping for relief, Hank arrived at Dr. Moore’s office early.

She said, “How’re you doing?”

He shrugged.

“Memories, right?”

He nodded and knew he hadn’t kept his grief from his expression.

She said, “The good ones will get stronger and stronger and the bad ones will fade. I promise. Take a seat and let’s get started on your other problems. We’re going to revisit some things I found in our first session. One is pleasant, the other—” She shook her head. “Isn’t.”

He reclined, and her voice soon stilled his thoughts. Into his mental quiet, she said, “Go back in time, back to when you were ten years old. You’re standing with your uncle Walt in the backyard of the farm you lived on and you’ve been playing cowboys and Indians with your toy gun.”

His mind’s eye looked up from a ten-year-old height at his uncle, a husky man with a handlebar mustache and a twinkle in his eyes that Little Hank loved. His uncle pointed at him. “Mighty nice six-shooter you’ve got there, cowboy.”

Little Hank settled his hand on the butt of the cap gun holstered on his hip. He smiled. It was a gift from his mom. He said, “Yep. It shoots straight, too.”

“What do you shoot?”

“Bad guys.”

His uncle leaned forward. “You know, I think I’d like to have a gun like that. Maybe I’ll just take it.”

Hank backed away a step. “No, you won’t.”

“Oh yeah? I’m a lot bigger than you.”

Hank drew and aimed at his uncle. “You better not.”

“You’re going to shoot me?”

“That’s what you do to bad guys.”

His uncle grabbed for the gun, and Hank pulled the trigger. A cap banged, and his uncle grabbed his chest and fell to the ground. And then started the deep belly laugh that was so funny. “Got me!”

Little Hank holstered his gun and leaped onto his uncle, and was wrapped in a mighty hug.

Dr. Moore’s voice intruded. “Now you’re fifteen. It’s your birthday, and your uncle has a present for you.”

His birthday cake waiting on the dining room table, his Uncle Walt came up to him, one hand behind his back, and said, “Got somethin’ for you. It’s the most valuable thing there is.” He held out a gleaming new .22 rifle.

A rush of pleasure zoomed through Hank as he took the weapon. He brought it to his shoulder and sighted out a window, imagining drawing a bead on the rabbit that kept invading the truck garden. “Oh, man! Wow, Uncle Walt.”

Hank lowered the barrel to point at the floor. Walt said, “This gift might look like a gun to you, but it’s a lot more than that.”

Hank studied the rifle and saw nothing extra about it. “I don’t get it.”

His uncle said, “It’s freedom. Your freedom.” He tapped Hank’s chest. “Hold on to it, son. It’s your God-given right, handed down to us by our forefathers to defend ourselves from tyranny.” He gave Hank a hearty clap on the shoulder and said, “Now I gotta find me a cold beer.”

Hank cradled the rifle to his chest and felt a surge of pride.

Dr. Moore’s voice came softly. “Okay, Hank, you will now return to the present. You will remember what happened. Three. Two. One. Wake.”

Hank opened his eyes and stared at the memories that replayed in his head. They felt warm and good. He smiled.

The doctor nodded at his reaction. “The incident with the cap gun became your core ‘teaching’ about guns. Add to that many years of very positive events with your uncle Walt. Your feelings about guns run deep.”

She was attacking his very roots. “So? I feel what I feel, and I can’t help that.”

Her smile eased his mind. “Oh, there are many good things that stem from your relationship with your uncle—I think he’s where your strong sense of honor comes from.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Those feelings fuel your conviction that all Americans have the right to own guns, all kinds of guns. But it doesn’t have to be that way, if you agree to change.”

His gut tightened. Was this what his fear had warned him about? “Change how?”

“Let us isolate that belief in your brain and eliminate it so you can consider the issues without being mentally handcuffed.”

This was what Benson Spencer had let them do. And he was out of the Keep. He had a life. And he seemed just fine.

But there was more, wasn’t there? “And the other part? You said I was a ‘stone killer,’ but I don’t think I am.”

“How did you feel about killing that man who attacked Noah Stone?”

He shrugged. “It was . . . necessary.”

“But what did you feel?”

“Nothing much.”

“What about the two men who attacked Ms. Washington in Chicago?”

“You know about that?”

She smiled. “I told you I was going to rummage around in your mind.”

He shrugged again. “It was necessary.”

“No regret? No remorse?”

“Why?”

She leaned forward. “That’s what I’m getting at. Those people were human beings.”

He scowled. “They were animals out to hurt people. Like rabid dogs. You put them down.”

“Animals. That fits with what I learned from your memories.”

He flashed on carrying Nick from the top of the Keep. “But it’s not always that way. I didn’t kill a man in the Keep who was pretty much an animal. And he attacked me. I could have killed him, but I didn’t.”

She nodded. “There’s conflict between two models of right and wrong in your mind. One is rational and humane, but there’s a deeper, antisocial model that trumps it.” She gazed at him. “It is profound. Do you remember much of your childhood experiences with your father?”

He never thought about his father. Never. Then he understood. “He did this to me?”

“Sadly, he did. I found many incidents of . . . well, let’s call it deep programming. To defeat it will, I’m afraid, take more than psychotherapy.”

“What’s ‘more than psychotherapy’?”

“The same technique we’d use to eliminate your conviction about guns. Neurosurgery.”

Now they were into the scary part. “You carve up my brain?”

She laughed. “Hardly. For one thing, we don’t cut at all—we do stereotactic radiosurgery using a CyberKnife to ablate a tiny spot in your brain that we identify by using MEG, MRI, and fMRI.”

“When did we stop speaking English?”

She laughed again. “Sorry. Stereotactic is a way to locate a precise point within your brain, and radiosurgery projects radiation into that location from outside—the CyberKnife is a robotic surgical instrument that’s accurate to half a millimeter. Because it’s noninvasive, you’re ready to go the next day.

“MEG is magnetoencephalography, which identifies neural pathways and locations inside your brain. And fMRI is functional magnetic resonance imaging that also locates neural activity. Before surgery, we use hypnosis to stimulate the activity we want to locate and then we create a precise picture of its location. We use radiosurgery to eliminate it.”

“Eliminate? Eliminate what? I don’t think so.”

“We’ve talked about your beliefs about guns. Even more harmful, though, is the way you dehumanize certain people.”

What the hell was she talking about? He didn’t dehumanize people, he protected them.

“Let me show you. I think you’ll agree once you remember.”

He had to will himself to relax into the recliner, but he managed. Her voice soon stilled his thoughts. Into his mental quiet, she said, “Go back in time, back to when you were six years old. You’re walking along a street in downtown Peoria with your father. Can you see him?”

His mind’s eye looked up from a six-year-old size at his father. A shabby John Deere cap shadowed his father’s face, but Little Hank knew there was a frown there. His focus went to the part of his father’s face that stood out most—his down-turned, sour mouth.

The doctor’s gentle voice intruded. “Bernie Allen is coming toward you.”

Little Hank looked ahead and there was Bernie, walking toward them. Bernie was a funny guy who went to high school. Little Hank liked him.