Authors: Neil McMahon
“It is a hell of a coincidence, Tommy and Robby Vandenard being in there together, and then that file turning up missing,” he said. As if Jephson had known that it obtained something damaging to him, and destroyed it.
“Why else would Jephson go to such trouble to get Tommy into the program, even pay his way?” Larrabee said. “No money in it. No prestige in rehabbing a punk. He had a use for him.”
“Like getting rid of Robby?”
“That’s running through my mind. Say he encouraged their friendship, knowing that Robby would break it off. Then worked on Tommy to get even with the pal who fucked him over.”
“You think a Thomas Springkell could overpower a Caymas Schulte?” Monks said.
“I think you could take out just about anybody if you got the drop on them. But to hamstring these guys, break their bones, dump them, without a whisper of suspicion. Christ knows how many times, over a period of years.”
Larrabee turned his back to the wind and shoved his hands in his pockets.
“I’m plenty impressed by Naia. But I’m not real interested in getting to know her better.”
Four
P.M.
was a quiet time on Three-Psych, meds at the peak of their effect, staff staying scarce and coasting. Alison stepped out of her office. In the pocket of her skirt she carried a flesh-pink toothbrush
that had been sharpened to a point by rubbing against concrete.
John James Garlick was in his usual place at the courtyard’s far end, hands in pockets, leaning against the fence. The pose was youthful, even appealing, and the thought came to her:
a predator’s natural camouflage.
Soon to be released.
She stepped into sight in the doorway. The NGIs turned quickly, keen to notice entrances and exits. A few of them murmured greetings before turning away in disinterest or unease. Her gaze remained on Garlick until he looked again. She mouthed his name and gestured invitingly, by the book, as nonthreatening as possible. He approached slowly.
“I wondered if we could talk a minute, John. About your post-release plans.” She could feel the eyes measuring her from behind the polite veil: the look of an experienced con, concerned only with what he stood to gain or lose. He was clear, controlled, and in that moment she was certain that he had not been taking his meds.
She started to walk back into the building. “Dr. Jephson feels your therapy’s been a great success.”
For a heartbeat longer, she felt the measuring intensify. Then he grinned, a quick flash of clean teeth that something even in her responded to, and she had to fight the urge to swallow. It was as
if an evil secret had been revealed: this was how he had done it, the contrition and impish smile, the glib salesman’s tongue, the bad boy who mom would always forgive one more time. A pattern which might have continued lifelong, if he had not finally pushed past the point where even the most tearful remorse was of no avail.
“I’ll never forget the people who straightened me out,” he said.
“You’re going live at home? Work for your father?”
“My move is to take things slow. Right?”
“Exactly right,” she said. She stepped out into the garden, meagerly tended by patients, with not much remaining of the summer’s efforts but a few straggling rows of corn. It was never crowded and sure to be deserted at a time like this.
“You’re feeling confident about the adjustment?”
“I don’t see I have anything to be worried about, Doctor. I made mistakes, but that’s all done with.”
“I assume Dr. Jephson has arranged for you to keep in touch?”
His eyes widened in a quick, mock innocent flash. “Why? You want to get together?”
She smiled and kept moving, slow pacing that took them farther into the garden.
“Just in case you did feel trouble coming on. He’s told you to call him first, hasn’t he?”
The wary look slid across Garlick’s eyes like a reptile’s membranes.
“Nobody else will know,” she said. “Is that what he told you?”
He looked past her toward the door. “What’s this to you?”
“Professional interest.”
He grimaced contemptuously and sidestepped, but she moved to block him.
“When did you stop taking your meds, John?”
“I take meds three rimes a day, lady.”
“You realize I’m not going to be able to recommend your release.”
That something
other
beyond human or animal flared in his eyes, its force and suddenness stopping her breath. Slowly, the rage receded, veneered over by thin tight control.
“You don’t have any fucking thing to do with it,” Garlick said.
“I have everything to do with it. Answer me. Did Dr. Jephson offer to keep in touch with you privately?”
Very quietly, Garlick said, “When I’m released, I’ll report once a month to the outpatient clinic in Santa Rosa for decanoate treatment. Okay? Now I’d like to leave.”
“Did he ever come on to you sexually, John? Is that what you’re so angry about?”
“Out of my fucking
way.”
Her hand gripped the makeshift weapon in her pocket.
“Did he ever use the name Naia?”
The look was back in his eyes again, at the breaking point, the last instant to back off. She stared into the bristling menace that had killed one woman and injured several more, and raised the toothbrush into his view.
“You know what this is?” she said. “Your ticket back to Atascadero. For assaulting me, right here, right now. Your word against mine.”
His movement was like the strike of a snake, slapping the toothbrush down. His other hand went to her neck, fingers gripping the collar of her blouse, ripping it halfway open as she pulled away. He glided after her, crouched, simian, and she saw with disbelief the erection bulging the thin fabric of his scrubs. Those eyes from another world burned into her, his peeled back lips crooning the words:
“Ohh, I can just hear the
sounds
you’re gonna make.”
His fist shot toward her in a blur, knuckles catching the edge of her jaw and bringing a silent painless explosion in her brain. His fingers tore into her hair and incredible strength forced her to her knees, dragging her, with his voice panting sounds that might have been words. She twisted, fighting, flailing her arms behind. He wrenched her head back, poised to ram it into the raw concrete of the wall.
In that instant she became aware of another noise blasting her senses: the half-second
bursts of the assault alert, filling the building.
Then Harold Henley was there, his blue-shirted body the size of an upended wheelbarrow.
“You get hold yourself, Mister Garlick,” Harold said with venomous calm. “You try real hard.” The rest of the assault team was arriving now, in a group as if they had been somewhere hiding: attendants and aides, another PSO, the pair of gay psych techs known as Tom and Jerry, carrying a restraint belt. Garlick stayed rigid, hand twisted in her hair as if it were the mane of a rebellious horse, holding her tight against his legs.
“Let her go, Garlick,” Harold said, and Garlick did, shoving her head forward. Harold stepped to her and pulled her to her feet. She stumbled to safety. Garlick was backing away, fingers rigid, lips skinned back to bare his teeth. The assault team was in action now, circling him. Jerry dropped to hands and knees behind him, the prop over which Garlick would be pushed and tripped.
But Garlick had been through this before and he was waiting for it. He whirled and brought his foot up with vicious fury into the tech’s outstretched abdomen. The sound was something she could feel. Garlick was fast enough to get a knee to Jerry’s face before Harold piled into him. The others grabbed for his flailing limbs and the group went down, gasping and cursing. One wiry
leg was still free, lashing like a calf’s in a branding chute. Alison fell on it, taking a knee to the chest with stunning force, hugging it with her face pressed against the sour-smelling scrubs while his kicks slid her back and forth like a dustmop.
Tense hands pressed the snarling face down hard, distorting his flesh, and snaked the restraint belt around his waist inches at a time. At last it was secure, his wrists manacled, and Harold knelt beside her to grip the ankle she held. He locked the cuffs on, and she rolled away and lay with her eyes closed, fighting nausea.
Someone gripped her arms and helped her stand. She steadied her breathing, holding the torn blouse together at her throat. Jerry was sitting pale and bloody-faced while his partner examined him tenderly. The aides had brought a gurney and were cautiously strapping Garlick onto it, while he snarled a litany of threat. The charge nurse, Airs. Guymon, had come from the Nurses’ Station and waited inquiringly. Everybody knew the drill but it had to be official.
Alison said, “Five milligrams of droperidol, IM. Get Dr. Ghose to sign it off.”
The aides wheeled Garlick past. His eyes locked with hers again, and she understood that never, for the rest of his life, would he forget being forced to surrender to her.
Harold stood beside her, watching. His face, in profile, was grim.
“That was fast,” she said. “Thanks.”
“She make the punishment fit the crime.”
Alison stared at Harold in astonishment, not sure she had heard right, but he was already following the gurney to Seclusion. “You should see someone,” Mrs. Guymon said to Alison. Both knew that it was not physical damage she was talking about.
“I’m all right. There’ll need to be an assault team meeting.” This was another form of therapy, for the keepers: debriefing sessions designed to dissipate the fear and rage that might otherwise lead to time-honored forms of staff retaliation, beatings, starvation, psychosis-inducing medication overdoses, even hacked genitals.
Mrs. Guymon left, too. The toothbrush was lying against the wall. Allison pocketed it unseen and walked to her office past a collage of patients’ stares, fearful, childlike, blank.
Inside, she raised her fingers to explore the tenderness of her face and neck.
But her fear vanished in sudden elation.
You become a cobra hunter.
There was not going to be any early release for John James Garlick now.
She shrugged on her raincoat, buttoning it to the neck, and gathered her things. Harold was waiting at the main door.
She said, “What did you mean earlier about the punishment fitting the crime?”
“Alison.” He glanced up and down the hall.
No one stood near. His face tightened into the expression of a concerned adult trying to explain a difficult concept to a child.
“They a
world
out there. You come in here, you think you seeing that world, but you only seeing a little part of it.”
The door closed behind her with a cold metallic clang.
She walked to her car, quickly at first, then slowing down. She had left it unlocked.
But today, there was no gift.
Monks waited at Sproul Plaza, where Telegraph Avenue met the Berkeley campus: nursery of the sixties, where the SDS had preached a revolution that never came, where crowds had gathered to demonstrate, battle police, and put an end to a faraway war. He had first visited here on his way to that same war, feeling, with his short hair and civvies, like a sacrificial animal among pagans. Now most of the students looked more like he had then, clean-cut frat types or career-seekers. But Telegraph seemed unchanged, with its sidewalk stalls of jewelry merchants, the same outfits and long hair.
A group of skateboarders bullied their way through the crowd: aggressive, energetic, a little frightening. These were not boys, but in their late teens and even twenties. Monks recalled the gangfight only a couple of nights before, and wondered, not for the first time, how much of
that war had been about old men wanting young men out of the way.
Alison was late. As the minutes passed, his tension moved into concern, then worry. But then he spotted her, a slender figure in a tan raincoat. He strode toward her, raising his hand. When he embraced her, she leaned into him, but her body did not yield. Monks let her go.
He said, “We found more pieces. They’re spinning around in the air, but they won’t click together.”
“Pieces like?”
He told her, keeping pace with her as she walked: noting that she moved toward the lights and crowds of the city rather than the sometimes isolated pathways of the campus.
“Stover wondered if Jephson might have used Springkell, maybe even still does,” he finished. “Brainwashed him and controls him. Is that feasible?”
“I think it might be possible to get somebody to kill that way,” Alison said. “But to expect him not to slip up, to stay stable and never reveal anything, would be very risky.”
They reached Telegraph, stepping into the street to skirt vendors’ booths, with traffic edging alongside, sociopathic bicyclists careening through, fresh-faced upwardly mobile youths brushing shoulders with street people clad in outlandish combinations of garments, like primitives just touched by civilization.
Back on the sidewalk, Alison stopped and shook loose a cigarette.
“Worst city in the world to do this in. I won’t make it to the end of the block before somebody starts in on me.”
Monks took her lighter. She leaned in against the wind. That was when he saw the carefully applied makeup over the swollen right side of her jaw. He touched it with his finger, and noticed now that her coat was buttoned all the way to her chin, with the collar turned up. He pulled it away and saw the bruises spreading down her neck, and the torn blouse.
“It happened on the ward,” she said. “That man I told you about, Garlick. I’ve been threatened before. Never touched.”
Monks became aware that the anger which was always in him was building to rare intensity. “Did it have anything to do with this?”
“It will as soon as he talks to Jephson. I tried to get him to admit what’s going on. I used the name Naia.”
“Come with me, right now,” Monks said. “My place is safe. We’ll go to the FBI, get you out of sight until she’s caught.”
“What if she’s not?”
Monks said, “I could go with you. We could find a place to stay, maybe out of the country. See how we get along.”
“Oh, Rasp.” Her tone was exasperated, even amused by the absurdity of the idea. “That’s
sweet,” she added quickly, and kissed him, a peck on the cheek. “I’ve arranged to stay with a girlfriend the next few nights. Don’t worry, I’ll be around people all the time.”