Harlot's Moon (28 page)

Now she started to slide her arm protectively around his waist, but Reeves pushed her away. He was trying hard to get control of himself. "I want you to take your things and get the fuck out of here tonight. Do you understand me?" He was yelling in Wade's face.

All Wade could do was stand there and take it. I glimpsed his eyes and wished I hadn't.

I was about to step in—I didn't like Reeves and maybe I was half using this as an excuse to finally have it out with him—when David and Sylvia Ashton appeared.

The Bridges Theater had been so named for one of the wealthiest men in the city, a man who'd made millions in steel when steel was building the country. His name was Hughton Bridges. Sylvia Ashton's mother, Leora, had had the good sense to marry the man. Sylvia, and consequently her husband David, were very wealthy. They spent their days running the theater.

David Ashton was a mild man given to bankerish three-piece suits and a perpetual sad smile. One could see, though, the fading good looks that had once helped him in his own stage career. When he saw what was going on, he said to Reeves, "I wish you wouldn't make things any worse than they already are."

"I've fired him, David, and I expect you to back me up on it."

Ashton looked pained. He hated confrontations and Reeves was pushing him into a bad one. "Why don't you and Stephen and I go to my office and discuss this?"

Reeves, probably rightly, sensed that Ashton was going to try to ameliorate the situation. "Goddamn you, David, why don't you show some balls for once? This has-been embarrassed all of us tonight and he should be fired for it!"

The small sob had the force of a gunshot.

Everybody turned to look at Sylvia Ashton. She was a frail woman of about her husband's age, maybe forty-five, with one of those too-delicate faces that suggests a mask. Her dark eyes had a quality of quiet madness. She seemed to see beneath surfaces, and what she saw there had unhinged her somehow. People around the theater spoke carefully of her stays over the years in various mental hospitals. Obviously, this was exactly the kind of pressure that got to her. In a sad but rather grand way, she said, "I thought we were all like a family here. We should be, you know. We all love acting more than anything else."

Reeves sighed, exasperated.

Anne Stewart, who was a good friend of Sylvia's, touched the smaller woman gently on the shoulder. Tears were shining in Anne's eyes.

But curiously, it was Wade who looked the most overwhelmed by Sylvia's obvious struggle with this moment. His head was down and he was shaking it side to side, like a penitent in a confessional. When he raised his head, his gaze was fully as forlorn as Sylvia's own.

Reeves pushed him then.

None of us expected it, and I doubt that Reeves meant the push to be that hard. Wade fell back into a grand piano. You could hear its impact with his back. A cracking sound, bone against wood. Then he fell to the floor, his arms flailing out comically.

What surprised me was how quickly he got up. What didn't surprise me was how angry he was.

Wade's reaction to Reeves's taunting had been atypical, perhaps because Wade had been ashamed of his drinking. Maybe he felt that he had no choice but to suffer Reeves's anger. But, according to twenty years of press reports, Wade had a furious temper. He'd been taken to court many times for brawling.

Now I could see that temper.

Before I could get to him, he'd arced an impressive right hand into Reeves's face, startling and hurting the taller man, and slamming him into the wall.

Wade stalked in closer, set to throw more punches at Reeves. Wade, his face red, his eyes crazed for the moment, spittle at either side of his mouth, was frightening to watch. Enraged drunks usually are, as any cop will tell you.

I grabbed Wade before he could get his next punch off. He was all curses and craziness. Keech came over and helped me keep him away from Reeves. For his part, Reeves pushed his face into David Ashton's face and said, "You choose, David—him or me." He jabbed a sharp finger into Ashton's chest and then stormed off.

By now Sylvia was weeping openly, and Anne Stewart was holding her carefully, as if she might break.

I said to Wade, "Why don't you let me give you a ride to your hotel?"

But he was still very drunk and very angry. "I don't want shit from you, Dwyer. Not shit."

Everybody looked at me. There wasn't much to say. I was the first one back to the dressing rooms. I got myself ready for the street and left.

NIGHTJACK – By Tom Piccirilli

Chapter One

A
re you cured
?

They actually ask you that right before you step back into the world.
 
While you're standing there in the corridor, twenty feet from the front door, holding tightly to your little bag of belongings.
 
You've got a change of clothing, five or six prescriptions, the address and phone number of a halfway house.
 
A few items they let you make in shop, what they called the Work Activities Center.
 
Maybe a birdhouse.
 
A pair of gloves that didn't fit.

Pace had an ashtray and a folded-up pair of pajamas that he'd stitched together himself on an old-fashioned sewing machine.
 
It reminded him of the one William Pacella's grandmother had in her bedroom.
 
She used to make clothes for the whole family, had this big sewing basket with two thousand miles of multi-colored threads and yarn.
 
She'd crochet sweaters for him every year for Christmas.
 
Always in the hairnet, wearing black, she'd say,
Non strappi questi, mie mani sono vecchio
.
 
Don't rip these, my hands are old.
 
Pacella would hug her and hear the click of her poorly-fitted dentures as she pressed her wrinkled lips to his cheek.

Are you cured
?

A final test to see if you're really on your toes.
 
Like you might suddenly drop, fling the pajamas aside, and thump your chest with your fists.
 
Cry out, No, I'm still insane, you've found me out, seen through my thin charade, damn your eyes.

But then again, you could never tell, it had probably happened before.

So they escort you back to your room, unfold your pajamas, put the ashtray back on the nightstand, and get your slippers ready for your feet again.
 
You step into the lounge area and all the other headcases look at you like the prize screw-up you are.
 
Sort of laughing while they say, You botched the question, didn't you.
 
We practiced and rehearsed but you went and told them the truth, that you were still nuts.
 
The hell's the matter with you?

The other wrong answer was when you told them, Yes, I'm fine.
 
Then they knew you were still fucked.

What they really wanted to hear you say was that you were sick and you'd always be sick, and you knew you'd always be sick but that you'd make an effort to stay stable by taking your medication regularly.
 
That you'd attend the outpatient group therapy sessions, keep in touch, and if you had any serious troubles along the way, you'd check yourself right back in for a short-term observation period.

So Pace told them that.

He meant it, too, and thanked them for all they'd done.
 
Humbly grinning at the nurses, the guards, the other staffers of Garden Falls Psychiatric Facility.
 
All of them moving off down the hallways, giving him the stink eye that said, Whatever happens, just don't come back here.
 
We have enough trouble.

All right, so he was almost back on the street.
 
He looked left and right down the corridor once more, feeling a little lost.
 
He was alone now.
 
It was a condition he didn't like and couldn't seem to get used to.

He started for the front door and stopped.
 
He was supposed to wait here for somebody.
 
For a minute he couldn't remember who, and then—as she stepped from her office and came at him—he did.
 
His shrink, the assistant Chief of Staff, Dr. Maureen Brandt, was at his side, moving in sync with him as they walked to the exit, shoulder to shoulder.

Dr. Maureen Brandt.
 
The name didn't exactly slide off the tongue.
 
He'd worked it around in his mouth for almost two years now.
 
She often frowned when he said her name because he usually rested on it an extra second, as if he had to remember it all over again.
 
She'd jot notes on her pad and look up at him without raising her chin, her dark gaze burrowing into his head.
 
It wasn't exactly an unpleasant feeling.

“How are you doing, Will?” she asked.

All the nutjobs on the ward always said fine because they didn't have the wit to say anything else.
 
The candor had been burned out of them with primal scream therapy.
 
Three in the morning and these idiots are practicing their prehistoric shrieks, regressing back to cavemen.
 
Hauling ass down the hallways trying to escape the mastodons and saber-toothed tigers.
 
This was supposed to help them with the issues they had with their parents, the oily uncles who took them into the bathroom.
 
Instead, it just started the whole zoo shrieking.

Pace opened his mouth and the word wasn't his word.
 
The voice wasn't his voice either.
 
It said, almost buoyantly, “Fine.”

Dr. Brandt smiled at Pace, the condescension mixed with something else.
 
Fear maybe, or disappointment.
 
Like she missed the man he was before she got her hands on him.

Her face was one of those sculptures that looked too perfect to be real.
 
So beautiful it had a kind of awful magnificence that had enthralled him from the beginning.
 
It didn't have so much to do with her looks as it did with what lurked beneath.
 
A kind of force he connected with even though he couldn't see it and didn't know what it was.

It made him ache.
 
Her prim gait, the angle and curve of her thigh beneath the plaited skirt.
 
The thrust of her breasts under the suit jacket.
 
If her hair was in a bun he'd be living out a porn movie scenario—they hit the music and she pulls the ribbon.
 
The hair comes loose and with a casual flinch the jacket and skirt fall to the floor.
 
Except her hair was never in a bun.

The first time he'd seen her he was just waking up in the hyper-white hospital room, strapped into this funky straitjacket that was tied to stainless steel railings surrounding the bed.

It was supposed to induce calm, revert you to the pre-natal lull of the womb.
 
Give you the feeling that you were weightless, hanging there in mid-air.
 
Like you might wake up unable to move and actually feel good about it.
 
Just turn your chin aside and smile at the three doctors and two burly attendants standing around waiting to pummel the shit out of you if you got out of line.

Dr. Maureen Brandt introducing herself by name while she flicked a fingernail against a syringe, making sure there were no air bubbles.
 
Pace looked down and saw he was completely covered by the straitjacket, even his feet.
 
The only place she could push the plunger was into his neck.

Unless your mother had a significantly fucked-up pregnancy, this was not the pre-natal lull of the womb.

The biggest irony here: He'd voluntarily committed himself.

“Are you sure you're all right, Will?” she asked as they hit the front door.
 
He was back in the present.
 
He had some trouble keeping himself focused on the here and now.

She carried her briefcase with a sort of haughty air, swinging it a little.
 
Five pounds of notes, files, charts, digital video, and transcribed interviews.
 
Two years of his life distilled into the most boring reading anybody would ever have to suffer through.
 
Every third word something you'd have to run to the Psychiatrist's Dictionary to look up.
 
His life, all his many lives, all the many
hims
, laid out like tacked luna moths.

“Yes,” Pace answered.
 
“I'm fine.”

It was drizzling.
 
They headed down the cement walkway to the guard station. The guy in the tiny booth perked up when he saw Pace coming.
 
He stood with a hand on his taser, hoping he'd get to yank it and fire some current into an escapee's ass.

Pace wondered if it would affect him, the way he felt.
 
Maybe it would wake him up some.