The Jake Helman Files Personal Demons (12 page)

He grasped her shoulders to steady her. “Three hundred Gs.”

Her jaw dropped. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

Jake shook his head. “I’m on the level.”

“That’s incredible! My God, congratulations! I’m really happy for you. I always knew you were meant for better things than the Department.”

He let go of her. “It’s not entirely a perfect situation. I have to live in the Tower until this DCL-21 craziness blows over.”

“We all have to make sacrifices to get ahead.”

“I’m doing this for us.”

“Do it for yourself.”

“I don’t want us to live apart.”

Her face cooled. “We’re already doing that.”

“And I don’t like it.”

“We’ve only just separated. You have to think about yourself right now, and I have to think about myself.”

“I am thinking about myself. I want you back.”

She sighed. “I know you do. If we’re meant to work things out, we will.”

“I swear I’ll never touch that stuff again.”

“You made that clear last night. What about the booze?”

“I’ll give that up, too.”

“We’re going around in circles. You can make all the promises you want, but the only thing that’s going to convince me that you mean business is time.”

He stared at her, careful not to glare.

“I don’t want to argue. When do you start this job?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“So soon? You always manage to land on your feet, don’t you?”

“I wanted to wait until Monday, but they need someone right away. They’re paying me a ten-thousand-dollar signing bonus to see things their way.”

She whistled. “Good luck, then. I mean it. This will be a fresh start for you.”

He glanced around the shop. “Can we have dinner next week?”

She looked into his eyes. “I’ll think about it. That’s all I’m willing to commit to right now. Call me over the weekend and let me know how the job’s going, and we’ll discuss it then.” Her hand brushed his arm. “I have to get back to work. Thanks again for the flowers.”

He watched her return to her office, sniffing the roses as she closed the door behind her. His heart swelled and he felt like a sap.

I love you
.

Jake charged three new suits to his credit card before returning to the Lexington. Treating himself to a steak dinner in the hotel’s restaurant, he resisted the urge to have a celebratory glass of wine. He knew that if he started drinking, he would be unable to stop and that would lead to greater trouble. He needed to be clearheaded in the morning. While eating, he pondered his good fortune. He had done more than just land on his feet, as Sheryl had suggested. He had climbed from the ashes of his police job to a full-fledged position in the private sector, all because Nicholas Tower acted on impulse.

Upstairs in his room, he ironed his shirts and repacked them, then sat at the desk and pored over the documents Kira had given him. His hand shook as he signed his employment contract. He filled out his insurance forms, considered his 401K options, and studied the company’s regulations.

At 11:00 p.m., he pushed the manuals aside. Thirsting for alcohol, he smoked a cigarette, then showered and went to bed. Lying on his back, he went over his interview with Tower. It had gone exceptionally well, much better than he had expected. Thank God his new employers had not insisted that he take a drug test. The only awkward moment had been Tower’s comment about him being an orphan. Jake disliked discussing the events that had deprived him of natural parents.

He had been raised by his Aunt Rose, his father’s sister. Rose, a devout Catholic, had put her nursing career on hold to take care of him. She had never married, nor had children of her own, which Jake partly blamed on himself. As a boy, he had been incapable of grasping the toll that his father’s death had taken on Rose. She kept her medicine cabinet stocked with vials of antidepressants and her face occasionally took on a blue pallor. She kept the circumstances of his parents’ deaths a secret from him until his sixteenth birthday, when she deemed him mature enough to cope with the truth.

Jake’s mother, Mary, had hemorrhaged to death while giving birth to him. His father, Sergeant Neal Helman, had been overwhelmed with grief. One week to the day after his wife’s passing, he parked his Ford in the parking lot of the 175th Precinct in Queens and blew his brains out with his police revolver.

After those revelations, Jake had romanticized the notion of police work. Rose encouraged him to become a lawyer and he studied pre-law at John Jay College of Criminal Law. But the urge to follow in his father’s footsteps had been too great, and after obtaining his bachelor’s degree, he enrolled at the Police Academy. Three weeks after his graduation, he discovered Rose’s corpse on the sofa of the apartment in which she had raised him. The coroner ruled her death the result of an accidental overdose of antidepressants, but Jake knew better. His personal investigation revealed that his aunt had put her beloved cats to sleep the day before her death. Suicide ran in the family.

The craving for cocaine gripped him and he could not sleep. The inside of his nose felt dry and sore, and his stomach cramped. He tossed and turned, soaking the bedsheets with his sweat. Christ, he needed a drink.

The minibar …

No!

He got up, switched on a light, paced the floor, smoked another cigarette.

The clock read 1:09 a.m.

He opened the door to the minibar and gazed at the miniature glass bottles inside. Picturing Sheryl’s face, he slammed the door shut.

He wrung his hands, pulled his hair, struck the mattress with his fists.

I won’t break
.

He awoke with spiders crawling over his face. He slapped his cheeks and forehead with both hands, but the spiders had disappeared. Opening his eyes, he saw Sheryl standing before him, her nude body glowing in the moonlight that shone through the windows.

Sitting up, he attempted to control his breathing. Sheryl’s hair had grown long again, the way he liked it.

“I miss you, Jake.”

He swallowed. “I miss you, too.”

She drifted closer to him, her movement liquid. “Do you believe in true love?”

He nodded. “You know I do.”

“Are you my soul mate?”

“Yes.”

“I want you.” Standing before him, she slid her hands over her breasts and the flat of her stomach. “I need you.”

Tears formed in his eyes.

She sat on the edge of the bed and arched her back so the moonbeams highlighted her erect nipples. Turning her face toward his, her lips parted. “Please come back to me.”

He felt himself growing hard.

She leaned even closer, her breath moist on his face. “Kiss me.”

He embraced her. “Sheryl …”

He pulled her closer to him, sliding his hands up her belly and over her breasts, around her back and along her neck. He kissed her with desperation, enjoying the warm taste of her tongue. Then he opened his eyes and stared into the elliptical pupils of a reptile framed within feminine features.

His heart beat faster, and he tried to pull his hands away from her neck. Sheryl seized his wrists and dug her fingernails into them so hard that she drew blood. Her flesh turned rough and sandpapery, like sharkskin, and her tongue writhed inside his mouth like a snake. He twisted his head, pulling his mouth free of hers, and saw that he had been kissing Kira, not Sheryl. How had he confused them? A forked tongue darted at him from her gaping jaws.

Crying out, he threw her from the bed, leapt to his feet, and reached for the bedside lamp. He heard her body thump on the carpet and roll away in the darkness, heard her crawling on hands and knees as he fumbled with the light switch. The shaded lamp came on, and out of the corner of one eye he glimpsed her malformed shadow disappearing around the corner of the bed.

Jake sat up wild-eyed in the darkness, gasping for breath, the hair on the back of his neck standing on end. He reached over and turned on the lamp, then relaxed, reassured that he alone occupied the room. The nightmare had been so vivid that he had kicked the damp covers over the edge of the bed. He looked at the clock: 4:27 a.m. Sighing, he reached for the pack of Marlboros and lit a cigarette. Then he gazed at the ceiling and waited for the sun to rise.

T
he Tower came into view as the limousine crept through morning rush hour traffic. Wearing his trench coat over a dark, olive-colored suit, Jake sat in the backseat, tapping his foot on the floor. While suiting up for his civilian job, he had felt strange strapping on his holstered Glock. The driver turned onto Madison Avenue and pulled over to the curb, where a dozen men and women stood loitering outside the glass doors of the building. Jake paid the driver, collected a receipt, and got out, the lingering scent of urine on the sidewalk greeting him. Circling the limo as the driver removed his luggage from the trunk, he noticed that the people on the sidewalk stood gazing at the sky. With a sick feeling growing in the pit of his stomach, he raised his expectant eyes to where the Tower met the overcast sky. He saw no flames shooting through the windows, no black smoke billowing from the rooftop, no jumper perched on a ledge; just the structure, silhouetted against a gray canvas. He dropped his gaze to the motionless people before him. What the hell did they see?

“Have a good day, sir.”

He turned to the driver, who had balanced his luggage on the edge of the trunk. “Thanks; you, too.” Tucking the gun case under his left arm, he grabbed the handle of the suitcase with his left hand and swung the carrying bag with his suits over his right shoulder. Stepping onto the sidewalk, he passed between the sky gazers, who stood so still he felt as though he had somehow entered a photograph. He stopped beside a black man with graying hair and a trimmed beard.

“Excuse me?”

The man turned to him with a confused expression on his face. As a cop, Jake would have labeled the man an EDP: an Emotionally Disturbed Person.

“What’s going on?”

Knitting his eyebrows together, the man squinted at Jake as if struggling to remember him from somewhere. Then his facial muscles relaxed and he turned back to the Tower without saying anything. Shaking his head, Jake glanced at the other people and moved to the glass doors. They all looked like EDPs to him. He struggled with a door and carried his luggage into the lobby. Laddock sat at the security station with Birch standing beside him, their positions reversed from the previous morning.

“Good morning, Mr. Helman,” Laddock said.

“Good morning, sir,” Birch echoed.

“Good morning.” Jake set his gun case on top of the station and his suitcase on the floor.

Laddock handed him a stick-on visitor’s pass. “You won’t need one of these after today.”

Jake peeled off the backing and affixed the pass to the front of his coat. Nodding at the front doors, he said, “Who are those people?”

Laddock shrugged. “I think they live down the street at a group home for the mentally disabled. As long as they’re not demonstrators or terrorists, I don’t care.”

“Maybe we should call Dispatch—I mean, the police—just to be safe. I’m sure they can spare one of those uniforms out front to keep an eye on these folks.”

Laddock shook his head. “Ms. Thorn’s ordered us to ignore them.”

Jake raised his eyebrows.

“She doesn’t want any unnecessary public relations problems,” Birch said.

Jake faced the doors. The EDPs continued to stare at the skyscraper’s peak. Considering the PR concerns, he shrugged. “Okay, if that’s what she wants.” He carried his luggage to the elevators, summoned a car, and boarded it. When the doors opened on the sixtieth floor, he entered the corridor and saw Graham standing behind the glass door. Another guard sat behind the security station. Graham palmed a lock release and held the door open.

“Good morning,” Graham said.

Entering the receiving area, Jake repeated the greeting. At least by living on-site he would be spared this small talk every morning.

Graham gestured to the burly guard at his station. “This is Pulaski. He has seniority after me. I’ll be giving you the grand tour. and he’s cleared to cover for me.”