Black Lightning Part 30

"Is it an emergency?" the nurse asked, sounding only somewhat mollified.

Glen hesitated. He was scared, more scared than he wanted to admit, at least to the nurse. But was it really an emergency? He wasn't sure.

The memory of the dream flashed back into his mind, as clear now as when he'd awakened a few minutes ago. In the dream, he'd "awakened," too, opening his eyes to discover he was no longer in his own house or any other familiar surrounding, but standing in a stream, stark naked, with a fly rod in his hands and no memory at all of how he'd gotten there.

Like a dream within a dream.

The only memory he had-if it even was a genuine memory-was of cutting open a woman's chest. And that image had been vivid, too, not at all like the fuzzy half-obscured flashes he'd had before.

In the dream, he'd reeled in the fish line and scrambled out of the stream, hurrying to a motor home parked in the middle of a flat gra.s.sy area a couple of hundred feet from the stream's edge.

Though he had no memory of where the vehicle had come from, it nevertheless seemed familiar. His heart had begun pounding as he neared the van, but when he went inside, nothing was amiss. There certainly was no sign of anything like the hideous butchery he could also clearly remember. In one of the compartments in the vehicle's undercarriage, he found a Makita saw, its blade removed. In one of the galley drawers he found a handle for an X-Acto blade, but again there was no blade attached to it. He could find no signs of blood anywhere in the motor home, but after putting on his clothes-the same clothes he was wearing now, as he talked to Gordy Farber's nurse-he'd searched the woods surrounding the gra.s.sy clearing.

He'd found nothing.

He'd been on his way back to the motor home when he blacked out again.

"Mr. Jeffers?" the nurse asked. "Are you still there?"

"Yes," Glen replied. "And it is an emergency. I really need to talk to Gordy."

The nurse hesitated, as if trying to decide if he was lying, then apparently decided to let her employer make the decision for himself. "I'll see if the doctor can be disturbed."

Tinny Muzak dribbled from the speaker for a moment, then Gordy Farber's voice came on the line. "Glen? Where are you? What's going on? How come you hung up on me?"

"Can I come in and see you?" Glen asked. "I can be there as soon as you have some time open."

"I'll make the time," Gordy Farber told him, reading the fear in Glen's voice. "Can you get here in fifteen minutes?"

"I'll be there," Glen replied.

It was actually only ten minutes later that Glen walked into the doctor's office. It would have been less, but as he set off to walk the eight blocks down to the hospital complex, he'd seen a motor home just like the one in the dream. He peered into its windows, and his heart had raced as he recognized what little of the interior he could see. He tried the doors, found them locked, and only then continued on to Group Health and Farber's office.

The heart specialist insisted on a thorough examination despite Glen's protests, then, satisfied that his patient wasn't on the verge of a second attack, he gestured Glen to a chair and rested his own weight against his big walnut desk, arms crossed, eyeing the seated man carefully. Whatever had occasioned Glen's worried phone call, it didn't appear to be a medical emergency; in fact, from all signs, it appeared as if Glen's physical recovery was proceeding satisfactorily. "So," he asked, "what is this all about, Glen?"

"I don't know," Glen replied.

Gordy Farber stared at him. "You don't know?" he echoed. "What the h.e.l.l kind of answer is that? You were making an appointment. The doorbell rang, and then you came back, were barely civil to me, and hung up. So don't tell me you don't know. Who was at the door?"

Glen shook his head helplessly. "I don't know," he repeated. "I remember talking to you, and I remember the doorbell ringing. After that, the whole day is a mess. I woke up on the sofa twenty minutes ago, but I don't think I was there all day. But it's all crazy. I have this memory of waking up earlier, but that time I wasn't even in the house. I was standing in a stream up in the mountains. I was fis.h.i.+ng." He reddened and his eyes s.h.i.+fted away from the doctor. "And I was stark naked." Slowly and carefully, Glen repeated everything he remembered. When he was finally finished, he looked up at the doctor, fear blazing in his eyes. "The thing is, I'm starting to wonder what's real and what's a dream. My G.o.d, Gordy, what's happening to me? And don't try to tell me this is something that normally happens after a heart attack."

The specialist moved around his desk and dropped into his chair. "You don't have any memory of driving up to the mountains, or driving back?"

Glen shook his head. "I don't even have a motor home. But the weird thing is, the one in my dream, or whatever it was, is parked half a block from my house. I just have the two memories-cutting up the woman, and then looking for her body in the motor home."

"Obviously, you didn't do either of those things," Farber told him.

"What if I did?" Glen countered.

Farber frowned, then switched on the intercom. "Could you bring in this morning's Herald Herald, please?" he asked his nurse. "The front page." A moment later the door opened and the woman appeared, a folded newspaper in her hand. When Farber nodded toward Glen, she handed it to him.

"Will that be all?"

"Yes, thanks," Farber replied. As the nurse closed the door behind her, he turned back to Glen. "Take a look at the front page." Glen unfolded the paper to see Anne's story on the murder of Rory Kraven spread across the lower half of page one. "Did you read that this morning?" the doctor asked. Glen nodded. "Then I think we can identify the source of that dream," Farber observed, a thin smile curving his lips. "Come on, Glen-that story doesn't just talk about what happened to the guy they found across the street. It describes what he did to those two women, too. And one thing you can say for your wife-when she draws you a verbal picture, it's vivid. So if you read that article this morning, and dreamed about cutting open a woman's chest this afternoon, I don't think it's rocket science to find a connection between the two events."

Glen shook his head doggedly. "But it doesn't account for the blackouts. And what was I doing fis.h.i.+ng in the nude?"

Gordy Farber grinned. "It was only a dream, Glen, remember? h.e.l.l, if it had been my dream, I might have been tempted to try it myself." When his attempt to lighten Glen's mood was only met by a dark look, Farber's smile faded. "All right, I admit it's a weird dream. But it's also way out of my field. The kind of stuff you're talking about, you need a shrink for. Want me to call someone?"

Glen hesitated. The image of the woman's torso-and his own hands cutting into it, first with the X-Acto knife, then with the Makita-filled his mind. "Do you know someone good?" When the heart specialist nodded, he made up his mind. "Set me up."

Jake Jacobson was ten years younger than Glen, five inches shorter, and forty pounds heavier. By the time Glen arrived in Jacobson's office, the psychiatrist had already pulled his medical history from the central computer, and as his new patient came in the door, the doctor looked at him critically. "Well, at least you don't look crazy," he offered in an attempt to put Glen at his ease.

"Is that supposed to make me feel better?" Glen asked.

"If you don't want me to make you feel better, why did you come?" Jacobson countered.

For the next half hour he listened while Glen related as much as he could remember about his state of mind since he'd had the heart attack, and especially the strange, surreal experiences of the past few days. The psychiatrist took some notes, but didn't interrupt Glen's story until he had finished.

"The human mind is a very complex organ," Jacobson observed when Glen at last fell silent. "We already know that a very simple suggestion can implant false memories that are every bit as vivid as genuine ones. We're seeing it all the time in alleged child s.e.x-abuse cases. I don't question your belief that what you remember about this afternoon is real. All I question is the validity validity of that belief." He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. "For the sake of argument, let's a.s.sume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did." He smiled. "A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?" of that belief." He leaned back in his chair, folding his hands across his ample belly. "For the sake of argument, let's a.s.sume the experience in the river was real. You yourself were unable to find any evidence of what you think you did." He smiled. "A saw and a knife, neither of them with a blade?"

"I could have thrown them away anywhere," Glen said, his voice obstinate. "I didn't even look for them."

"But you did look for a body, and didn't find one. Nor did you find any blood, or any sign of a struggle, or anything else that might rationally lead you to believe you'd actually killed someone. It was all a dream, Glen. As for the motor home, obviously you saw it at some point this morning. You probably even looked in the windows earlier, so when you had the dream, the images were already in your mind." He began ticking points off on his fingers. "Your next-door neighbor was murdered in a manner not unlike what you dreamed. There is a motor home like the one you dreamed of, sitting almost in front of your house. Your wife has been writing about Richard Kraven for years, and one of the things I remember about him is that he liked to go on fis.h.i.+ng trips in a motor home. I can't believe that little fact isn't buried somewhere in your subconscious, too. What you've done is put all that material together into a single vivid, pseudomemory of an event for which you admit you could find no physical evidence whatsoever."

"What about the blackouts?" Glen pressed.

Jacobson spread his hands in a dismissive gesture. "I can think of at least one possibility right off the top of my head: you may have suffered a minor stroke."

"A stroke?" Glen echoed hollowly. "But if I'd had a stroke-"

"People have strokes every day," the psychiatrist cut in. "Most of them go unnoticed. A stroke doesn't have to be a huge event, you know. Even the tiniest, most insignificant hemorrhage in the brain falls into the category. And it's quite possible you've had one." He picked up the phone and spoke into it. "Ellie, could you set up for an EEG, please. We'll be in in a couple of minutes." Hanging up the phone, he turned his attention back to Glen. "An electroencephalogram will tell us if you have any major problems, and we'll schedule an MRI, just to be sure." He tapped at the keyboard of his computer, pulling up his scheduling program. "Is Monday all right?"

Glen nodded, feeling the terror begin to retreat. Maybe, after all, there was a rational explanation for his bizarre and frustrating experiences. The psychiatrist led him through a door into an examining room, explaining the procedure while Glen rolled up his sleeve so the nurse could take his blood pressure and pulse.

"It's pretty simple, really," Jacobson told him. "I'm going to attach some electrodes to your head, and then we'll measure the electrical activity in your brain." He smiled rea.s.suringly as he saw an expression of panic cross Glen's face. "Believe me, you won't feel a thing."

The nurse unwrapped the cuff of the sphygmomanometer from Glen's left arm, then began attaching the electrodes to his scalp. Glen could feel the contacts being attached to his skin.

"All set?" the psychiatrist asked a few moments later.

"Ready," the nurse replied.

The doctor turned a switch on the console of the EEG, and though Glen felt no physical pain whatsoever, a wave of panic swept over him.

And then a howl filled his head. A howl of both terror and agony, it was a sound of such unutterable horror that for a moment Glen was afraid his mind would shatter.

But where was it coming from? His eyes darted from the doctor to the nurse, then back again. Obviously neither of them was hearing the mind-rending scream, so it had to be coming from inside his own brain.

As the doctor adjusted the dials, the tenor of the shriek changed, and when Jacobson finally turned the machine off, it abruptly died away-and left no memory of having happened at all.

"That's it," the psychiatrist said. "And you didn't feel a thing, did you?"

Glen shook his head, his eyes fixed on the sheet of paper that had fed out of the machine. "Is that it?"

"That's it," Jacobson replied, tearing off the sheet. "Let's have a look." He studied the paper for a moment, then showed it to Glen.

All Glen could see were three lines, rising and falling in three distinct, different patterns. "Well?" he asked. "What does it mean?"

Jake Jacobson smiled at him rea.s.suringly. "It means that so far your brain looks very normal. You're not showing any major abnormalities, and unless the MRI turns up something different, I suspect you're mostly simply suffering from stress. Which shouldn't come as a shock, given the severity of your heart attack. Your whole life's changed, and that is traumatic. But it's not fatal." He scribbled on a prescription form, tore the sheet off the pad, and handed it to Glen. "You can get this on your way home. It's a tranquilizer you can use if you need it." He led Glen back into his office. "The main thing is to just try to take it easy," he said. "Tell you what-you dreamed about fis.h.i.+ng, so go go fis.h.i.+ng! Then on Monday, we'll take a look at the MRI, and I suspect we'll have all the answers. All right?" fis.h.i.+ng! Then on Monday, we'll take a look at the MRI, and I suspect we'll have all the answers. All right?"

A sense of relief flooded over Glen. "Great." He grinned weakly. "I was afraid you were going to want to put me back in the hospital."

"Not likely," Jacobson replied. "Whatever you may think, I don't see you as a danger to yourself or anyone else. Just go home, relax, and have a good weekend. See you on Monday."

Glen Jeffers left Jake Jacobson's office intending to go directly to the pharmacy to fill the prescription.

Instead he started homeward, the very existence of the prescription obliterated from his memory.

Obliterated as completely as the memory of that terrible scream of agony he'd heard inside his skull when the electrodes attached to his scalp had been activated....

CHAPTER 56.

Anne came home to an empty house, and searched in vain for a note telling her where Glen might have gone. There was nothing: no Post-it on the refrigerator, no message on the answering machine. So she was pretty sure he hadn't gone too far, especially since his Saab was parked in its usual spot. At least the d.a.m.n motor home hadn't been able to displace both both their cars! Then the front door slammed, and a moment later Kevin came through the dining room into the kitchen. Alone. their cars! Then the front door slammed, and a moment later Kevin came through the dining room into the kitchen. Alone.

"Isn't Heather with you?" Anne asked.

Kevin shook his head. "She's over on Broadway, hangin' with Rayette."

Anne felt a stab of the same fear that had made her call the school that afternoon. She'd distinctly told Heather not to let Kevin walk home alone. Had Heather a.s.sumed she'd only meant yesterday? "Why didn't you go with her?" she asked, trying not to let Kevin see how upset she was.

Her son, who was now poking around in the refrigerator, shrugged. "I did, but they weren't doing anything, so I came home." Then, with far more aplomb than Anne would have expected, he added, "That guy that killed Mrs. Cottrell is dead, isn't he? So what's the big deal if I was walking by myself?"

For a moment Anne wasn't sure what to say. But then she wondered why she was surprised at Kevin's composure-after all, for years her children had been dealing with kids who brought knives and guns to school, and she probably knew even better than most parents just how much violence and crime city kids were exposed to every day of their lives. "I think you and I better have a little talk," she said.

Kevin rolled his eyes, but gave up his search for something to eat, and perched on the edge of one of the kitchen chairs.

"Just because the man who killed Mrs. Cottrell is dead doesn't mean it's safe for you to be wandering around by yourself. Until they find out who killed him-"

"Aw, Mom, come on," Kevin groaned. "What are you gonna do, lock me up? What about that kid that got shot down by Garfield? You didn't make me start hangin' with Heather all the time then!"

Anne shuddered as she remembered the girl who'd been killed on the sidewalk in front of Garfield High. She had covered the case-a teenage hazing that up until a few years ago would never have resulted in anything more serious than hurt feelings.

Now kids got killed.

No one could even guarantee Kevin's safety at school anymore-how could she expect to keep him safe simply by making him walk home with his sister every day? The ugly reality was that if someone was truly determined to kill-whether the intended victim was a total stranger, one of her kids, or even herself-there was virtually nothing she could do about it. Furthermore, Kevin was right-she certainly couldn't just lock him up until whoever had killed Rory Kraven was caught. And if, through some bizarre circ.u.mstances she couldn't even begin to understand, it turned out that Rory Kraven's killer had actually committed all the crimes Richard Kraven had been accused of, then he'd already eluded identification for years; what made her think he wouldn't be able to keep on doing it? She thought about the five transcripts of interviews she'd read that afternoon. Five out of 127. And she didn't even know what she was looking for.

The sound of the front door opening and closing interrupted her thoughts, then Glen appeared in the kitchen doorway. The second she saw him, Anne felt her anger rising. Her anger, and her defenses, too. He'd known how frightened she was, how worried, since k.u.mquat had been found dead in the alley, but he'd just taken off somewhere without so much as a note or a message on the answering machine. She found herself looking at him in a way she never had before-searching his face for some clue as to what had gone wrong, what had changed him.

And whether he'd killed k.u.mquat?

The thought flashed unbidden into her mind; she banished it instantly, furious at herself for allowing Mark Blakemoor to have planted the seed of such an idea. And Glen looked all right-he was smiling; smiling the way he used to, before his heart attack. As he leaned over to kiss her, she felt her guard lowering a little.

"Hey, guy," he said, straightening up from the kiss and rumpling Kevin's hair. "Why the long faces? You two having a fight?"

"Mom thinks I should have to come home with Heather every day," Kevin grumbled.

"I didn't say that," Anne began, then realized it was almost exactly what she had said, or at least implied. "All right, maybe I did. But just promise me you'll be careful, okay? Stay away from strangers, and if you see anyone even looking at you, just walk away. Promise?" Kevin's eyes rolled heavenward once more. "Promise?" Anne repeated.

"Do what your mom says, and I'll take you fis.h.i.+ng on Sat.u.r.day."

Instantly Kevin's face lit up. "Really?"

"Really. I promise, if you promise."

"I promise!" Kevin sang out. "Where?" he demanded. "Are we going to be gone all night? Can Justin go, too?"

"No, Justin can't go." Glen laughed. "It's gonna be just you and me. And I don't know where we'll go. And maybe we'll spend the night somewhere, and maybe we won't, depending on what your mom thinks."

As Kevin dashed out of the room to call Justin Reynolds and tell him how he was going to spend the weekend, Anne tamped down her irritation with her husband. What was going on? When had he decided to take Kevin fis.h.i.+ng for the weekend? He certainly hadn't mentioned anything about it to her, and until now they'd always discussed everything concerning the kids. Even before Heather was born, they'd resolved to make all the decisions together. "Don't I have anything to say about this fis.h.i.+ng trip?" she asked, abandoning the attempt to conceal her feelings. "And while you're at it, you might tell me why you didn't bother to leave me a note. After what's been happening-"

"Hey," Glen broke in, holding up his hands as if to fend off an attack of swarming bees. "Look, I'm really sorry I didn't leave a note. I went down to see Gordy Farber, and it took a little longer than I thought it would."

Anne's anger instantly dissolved into concern. "What did he say?" she asked, hoping the doctor hadn't told Glen he'd called him at her own urging.

"He said I'm doing just fine," Glen replied, seeing no reason to worry her. Besides, both Farber and Jake Jacobson had told him to stop worrying, hadn't they? "If I'd gotten home five minutes earlier, you wouldn't even have known I'd been gone, would you?" He moved closer to her and drew her to her feet. "Come on, it wasn't more than five minutes, was it?"

His arms drew her close to his chest, and Anne's determination wavered. "It was closer to ten minutes," she said, struggling to keep some kind of control over the situation. "And you still haven't answered my question about this little trip with Kevin. We always talk about these things, remember?"

"How could I remember?" Glen asked. "I've never even considered taking Kevin fis.h.i.+ng before."

Now his lips were nuzzling at her neck, and part of Anne wanted to push him away, while the other part wanted to snuggle closer. "Glen, wait," she protested, but his embrace only tightened. "Oh, G.o.d, what am I going to do with you?" she sighed, her anger collapsing under a wave of affection for the man she'd married.

Anne was still in Glen's arms when Boots trotted into the room. The little dog started toward Glen but stopped abruptly, one foreleg hovering off the floor. A tiny growl emerged from his throat and his hackles rose.

Then, his eyes still fixed on Glen, he slowly backed away.