Head Games (10 page)

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Authors: Eileen Dreyer

BOOK: Head Games
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He'd designed it so well. He'd worked it out a thousand times in his head. A million times. Securely tucked away in his room in the basement where nobody could find him and he'd be safe with the pictures he'd carried with him since he'd been a boy.
He'd even made the effort to wait outside for her so he could make sure she got it. Tucked back in the shadows of a silent street, standing in the cold, holding his breath, holding his silence. Holding all those dreams in his head so they didn't tumble out into sound at the very moment she stepped outside.
And she'd given him such pictures. Oh, how she had, with her wide-eyed reaction, her words. Her disbelief and wonder. He'd seen it on her, just for the moments before she'd taken his gifts inside again, and he held those pictures to him now like a treasure. The fresh technicolor image of all his old, old dreams.
But there had to be more. He saw right there in his head what she was supposed to look like when she called Donnatheanchor to share her terrible surprises. He knew exactly how the perspiration would shine on her upper lip, how wide her eyes would be, how her voice would tremble when she shared the news about the gifts he'd finally, finally given her.
But she hadn't.
She'd ignored them.
Maybe she hadn't realized just what she'd been given. Maybe she didn't appreciate it.
Kenny didn't believe that.
So he finished his beer and put his friend to bed, all the while trying so very hard to stay calm and focused, when he wanted to destroy something. When he wanted to run right over and wring from Miss Burke what she was too stupid and slow to figure out.
But Kenny wasn't still alive because he lost control. He'd dreamed about this for too long to let it be less than he'd hoped.
So he'd have to plan harder.
He'd have to make sure it went just the way he wanted.
Flipping off the lights in the living room, he made his way to the basement where his dreams lived, and he prepared to make Molly Burke pay attention to him
.
Two days later Molly realized that she had a list after all. She wasn't sure how valid it was, but suddenly it seemed that everybody in her known universe was mad at her.
First there was Latesha Wilson's mother.
Molly had been in the basement repotting African violets under her grow lights when Patrick yelled down to tell her she was on the news. Molly grumbled. She really wanted to ignore it. But she hadn't done any of those “cause-of-death” interviews lately, so something else must be going on. She climbed the steep basement stairs and joined Patrick before her TV.
To see Mrs. Wilson, a small, skinny woman with smoker-pocked, grayish-brown skin and rheumy eyes. Clad in her best threadbare coat and finest mother's outrage, she was busy wailing at one of the Action News reporters that the city didn't care enough to find the stranger who'd murdered the daughter she'd looked for for six days.
The daughter she'd certainly known was down in that empty basement every hour of those six days.
“They'nt nothin' I wouldn't do for my baby,” she protested, teary and clutching her coat closed as if standing out in the snow instead of the foyer of the downtown police station. “You knows, she a white girl, them people be fallin' over theyselves tryin' to find out who did her. But that bitch didn't even listen to me.”
That bitch. Ah, now Molly understood. All the homicide guys in town
right now were men. The only bitch on the scene that night had been Molly.
“Who she think she is?” Wilmetta Wilson demanded. “It's her baby, she'd do somethin'. She get the monster killed my Latesha.”
I tried, Molly thought. We all did. Which was probably why Wilmetta was showing off for the press. Since she was making her outraged statement from the police station, it probably meant that the homicide guys had had her in again trying to get her to turn her boyfriend Bobby. But it wouldn't do to betray the boyfriend. Too few of those around. And if she did drop a dime on Bobby, who'd she come home to? Much easier to rationalize the blame away onto some convenient Stranger Danger.
“Turn it off,” Molly said, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Tossed over the couch like a pile of dirty laundry, Patrick paid no attention. “What'd you do to her?” he demanded, his gaze fixed on the screen.
Molly turned for the kitchen. “My job.”
That got him to his feet. “So, you, like, do this all the time? Murders and stuff? What's it like?”
Molly didn't bother to stop moving. “I asked you to clean your mess in the kitchen, Patrick. Please do it.”
Patrick skidded to a halt as if he'd hit an invisible wall. “What'd I do?” he demanded. “All I did was ask about your job!”
Just like he'd been asking since he'd first set foot in the morgue. Questions, comments, assumptions. Mostly wrong, mostly inappropriate, most of which Molly could have handled with far greater equanimity if he hadn't been asking them this close to Christmas. Most she could at least have ignored if he hadn't been so persistent. So hungry.
“My job is mostly paperwork and phone calls,” she said, heading back for the stairs and her secret garden in a ninety-year-old basement. “It's not that romantic.”
Flowers were romantic, plants that never seemed to notice the winter if you just bathed them in purple light. Seeds were satisfying, growing where you planted them as long as you remembered their basic needs. They didn't ask questions, they didn't demand tolerance, they didn't need things from you that you couldn't give.
Like forgiveness. Or secrets. Or shame.
“It's sure a hell of a lot more interesting to talk about than trade negotiations!” Patrick insisted, his voice even sharper as he followed hot on her heels. “And that's all I get at home. I've been thinking that I might want to do it. Law enforcement, maybe. Like what you're doing. And, ya know, I'd think if you're doing it, you'd think it was interesting enough to talk about.”
Molly stopped three steps down and stared into the soft lilac light that washed her basement walls. She could see the forest of miniature plants spread out over her workbenches, their leaves still fetal and fragile, their beauty in the anticipation.
Why couldn't Patrick want to talk about flowers? Molly could talk about flowers. She could wax rhapsodic about the English garden she was plotting for the backyard beyond the koi pond. She could expound on twenty different kinds of azaleas and fifty kinds of irises. She could instruct him on the breathtaking patience it took to grow a really perfect rose.
She just couldn't talk to him right now about dead people. How could Molly tell Patrick that in other basements, young girls' terror still leaked from the cement and wept from the walls?
“Tell you what,” she said, wiping again at the dirt on her hands and struggling to keep her voice light. “We'll talk about it later. Okay?”
That earned her the kind of laugh sixteen-year-olds reserved for stupid adults. “Well, I guess you're not all that different from the parents,” he said, hands shoved in pockets. “Any time I want to talk about something, they tell me to fuck off, too.”
Molly spun on him. “If I'd wanted to tell you to fuck off, I would have done it the first night you showed up. I'm just not in the mood for morbid fascination today, Patrick.”
“It's not morbid fascination,” he protested, posture suddenly rigid, as if conviction had a stance. “I'm serious! I really want to be a cop. And you can imagine what the parents said about that, can't you? I might as well have said I wanted to be a pimp.”
Molly did know, of course. She knew all too well. She'd had much the same reaction the first time she'd mentioned the word
nurse
to her parents.
Funny. The best and worst thing she'd done, she'd done to appease them. She'd gone to Vietnam to serve, even if it wasn't the way Burkes usually served. And in the end, it still hadn't been right. She'd been in her
second VA hospital screaming at the walls when she'd finally figured it out and told them to fuck off, too.
Of course, not one Burke had ever shown up to hear her.
Molly took another look down the steps. The ceiling was so low down there that few people taller than Molly could stand up straight. Patrick had asked her if she was growing marijuana under her purple lights. This time, she'd been able to give him an honest no. But she was growing. And she needed that.
“I can't explain this to you in fifteen words or less,” she said, suddenly wondering what she'd thought she could give children of her own if she couldn't afford this kid one or two truths in the dead of winter. “And this just isn't the time to do it. If you're serious, I'll let you talk to some of the cops I know. And I'll talk to you about it right after Christmas. Just not now.”
“Why right after Christmas?” he demanded. “I'll be back with the parents by then, and they'll have me clamped back into the system so hard I won't have a chance to get out!”
Molly turned back up to see him silhouetted near the top of the stairs. Tall, intense, all but thrumming with frustration. Why couldn't teenagers figure out that the next twenty seconds weren't the only ones that mattered in their lives?
“You can do anything if you want to.”
“Oh yeah, like you did,” he all but sneered. “You ended up living right back under their roof.”
And then he just stalked off. Molly was sure there was more she'd meant to say to him. Explanations, rationalizations. All that baggage a person stores up in her lifetime for the sole purpose of dumping on some unsuspecting child. Instead, she sucked in a calming breath and turned back to her plants.
She was down there sometime later humming to her violets when she realized that Magnum was barking. Pausing a second, she also made out the faint, persistent jabs of the doorbell.
“Patrick!”
Nothing.
Molly sighed. Setting the tray of African violet babies back down, she wiped off her hands on muddy jeans and headed upstairs.
Molly peeked through her spyhole and groaned. No wonder Magnum was barking. Little Allen was standing on her porch, and he was loaded down with groceries.
“I didn't order anything,” Molly said, throwing open the door.
Allen was another of the unremarkable masses. Forgettable features, even when they were red and chapped from the sharp north wind that rattled the windows.
Right now, he was glowering, which still didn't make much of an impression. “I've been out here for twenty minutes!” he protested. “Where've you been?”
“Considering the fact that I wasn't expecting you,” Molly answered as kindly as possible, “I bet I wasn't waiting to hear you ring my doorbell. What can I do for you, Allen?”
“Where's that old man?” he demanded, as if Molly was in charge of Sam. Which, she supposed, she was. But not for the pleasure of petulant delivery boys. She wanted temper tantrums, she'd just go upstairs and roust Patrick out of bed.
“Wasn't my day to watch him.”
Come to think of it, though, she had seen Sam driving off down the block when she'd gone out to get her mail. Tough to miss Sam. He drove the biggest old Cadillac on the block, his head barely clearing the steering wheel. All you saw was that cute flat yellow golf cap he wore, a waving, gnarled hand, and curls of smoke from his cigarette. For years Molly had wanted to get him a car seat so he could actually see over the steering wheel.
“I think he went to visit Myra,” she said. “You want to drop his groceries here instead?”
Little Allen glared as if Molly had insulted his intelligence. “Why do you think I'm at your door?”
Molly tried another one of those long, calming breaths. Maybe it was the weather, but she was having a little trouble with all the surly males today. “I know you don't want me to complain about you to Straub's, Allen. I bet you'd rather just put the groceries in my refrigerator and head on to your next drop-off. Okay?”
His face got even redder. He dipped his head and huffed a couple of
times. “I'm … uh, sorry. It's just cold. And I always seem to end up waiting at that old guy's house for half an hour before he shows up.”
Molly would have suggested he call to make sure Sam would be home next time before heading over with his groceries, but he probably had. Sam was notoriously bad about remembering Little Allen's visits. But then, Sam was eighty. He had a right to forget once in a while. Pushing open the door, Molly leaned back as Allen brushed by a little too closely on his way in.
 
 
Seven hours later Molly was convinced that it was the weather. She'd survived both Allen and Patrick, only to arrive at the ED to find all hell breaking loose. The sharp wind had disintegrated into rain and then sleet and then auto accidents. Old people bumped down front porches, gangbangers got revenge for fender benders, and children were burned by candles used when power lines fell. And everybody involved seemed to hold Molly personally responsible.
It probably didn't help that she was charge and triage nurse that evening. Sasha, being Sasha, had decided that she simply was not in the mood to risk her Grand Prix coming in from the far county, which left them shorthanded. It also left them with three inexperienced nurses, including Nancy, and Dr. Spizer, who still hadn't figured out that medicine wasn't as easy as it was on TV. And, of course, Molly's favorite secretary, Marianne, who came in just to let everybody know how put-upon she was.
“Have we heard from the trauma surgeon on call yet?” Molly asked her as she updated the flowboard nearby.
Marianne glared from beneath her teased Clairol number 7 yellow bangs. “You want him so bad, you call him,” she snapped.
Molly's head was throbbing. Her hip was aching again, and she hadn't eaten in twelve hours. Not a good path toward patience.
“I'll make you a deal, Marianne,” she said through gritted teeth. “You put in the call to the trauma surgeon, and I promise I'll leave my stun gun in my purse.”
Marianne tossed her hair and turned back toward the phone banks. Beyond her to the right, the radio crackled and beeped.
“Grace Hospital ED, this is City four-five-one calling to advise.”
Molly sighed and walked around the edge of the desk to where the radio crouched in the corner beneath a shelf stacked with research books, one stuffed frog in fireman's gear, and a snakebite poster on which all the snakes bore physician's names, the latest addition being the RattleSpizer.
“City four-five-one, this is Grace,” she intoned, pulling a pen from behind her ear and noting time and rig on the call log. “Go ahead.”
“Trauma surgeon is at mass,” Marianne announced behind her as if she hadn't heard the radio. “What do you want to do?”
“Grace, be advised we are answering a house fire with possible multiple injuries,” a male voice announced over the radio in bored tones. “Our ETA to scene is seven minutes.”

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