Projection (18 page)

We heard shooting outside.  Rice ran to the door and opened it.

Calvin Sanger was bounding across the green toward the hospital, stretching those marathon runner legs of his like a gazelle.  Two officers were chasing him, but they had no hope of catching him.  He opened up a ten-yard lead that quickly turned into fifteen.

I pushed past Rice.  "Calvin!" I shouted at the top of my lungs.  "Don't!"  I noticed the bank of cameras across the way swing in my direction, then focus back on him.

He turned around for an instant, like a wide receiver catching a pass.  Even from a distance I could see his eyes were wild with excitement.  He was grinning.  "Story of a lifetime!" he yelled back at me.

I wanted to say something to stop him, but I knew it was hopeless.  He looked like a man possessed.  Maybe evil really does beckon like a Siren.  Maybe we were all — Winston, Sanger and I — paradoxically, mysteriously, irretrievably drawn to the dark force residing in Lucas.  Maybe that explained why women so desperately wanted him inside them and why men like Vernon, Bishop, Kaminsky and Zweig followed him.  Perhaps it even explained why surgical patients had once flocked to his practice to be cut up and sewn back together by him.

I thought again of Kathy's thirst to see Lucas once more, her certainty that he
needed
her.  Was I losing myself in the same psychological undertow that had pulled her under?  Had I been enticed into a competition for Trevor's soul?

Sanger sprinted to the sliding glass doors and, without any hesitation, walked into the hospital.

Rice was taking slow, deep breaths.  His jaw was set.  He looked up at me.  "You're a very persuasive person.  You just made that young man lay his life on the line for a story.  I hope you can deliver the ending you seem to think you can."

*            *            *

I drove away from Lynn State Hospital at 7:40
P.M.
, passing through a gauntlet of ambulances, police cruisers, fire trucks, TV vans and reporters that stretched a quarter mile.  Teams from at least twenty television networks had staked out roadside camps complete with folding tables that held three-foot plastic drums of coffee and stacks of Dunkin’ Donuts boxes.  Again and again reporters advanced within inches of my door, targeting me with halogen beams and thrusting microphones against the windows.  In the reflected light their mouths seemed disembodied as they screamed questions about what I had seen on the unit.  Male reporters acting like traffic cops held up their hands demanding I stop my truck.  A stunning young woman apparently anxious for a scoop smiled and flipped her long black hair as I approached, then gave me the finger and shouted, ‘Die, asshole!’ as I accelerated past her.  When I stopped briefly at the same police roadblock I had passed through on my way to the hospital, a man and a woman in respectable clothes, holding microphones from New England Cable News and FOX, grabbed hold of my side mirrors, desperate to keep me from moving.  Three officers had to pry them loose and pull them to the side of the road.  I heard one of the officers scream, "You should be on that fucking psych unit!"

I focused ahead, trying to keep my hands steady on the wheel and my foot reliable on the brake and gas.  Finally, the crowd thinned to curiosity seekers.  They were gone in a few more blocks, and I was speeding down Jessup Road on a night that could have been any night but for the horror I knew had unfolded a mile behind me.  For a moment I had the strange thought to declare the past day and night null and void by driving home to my loft in Chelsea as if nothing had happened, refusing to think of the locked unit, much less speak of it, hoping slowly to forget it.  But I recognized that impulse more as a clue to Lucas’ psyche than a road map for mine.  It was a reminder that he had unconsciously attempted to relieve his unbearable psychic pain by burying it, a strategy always doomed because emotions mutate monstrously underground.  As terrifying as the events on the unit — and in parts of the rest of my life — had been, they were the most crucial memories connecting my thoughts and perceptions to the real world.  Pain, not pleasure, grounds us.  To disown one's traumas is to invite their distorted projections — imagined enemies, phantom visions, voices calling out from nowhere.

Twenty yards up the road, Emma Hancock's red Jeep Cherokee swerved from the oncoming lane and blocked mine.  I jammed on my brakes and skidded to a stop.

Hancock got out and started toward my truck.  She walked up to my window.  I rolled it down.  "Where is she?" she asked, expressionless.

"Who?"

"Kathy."

"Why would you bring up—"

Hancock reached into the truck and grabbed my shirt in her fists, pulling me toward her.  Her arms were as powerful as any man's.  "Don't make a mistake here, Frank.  Obstruction of justice isn't a joke.  You can go away a hell of a long time.  State prison.  And if you don't come clean right now, I'll make sure you do."

I had already accepted the risks of hiding Kathy.  "I don't know," I said.

She pulled harder, nearly lifting me out of my seat.  "Tell me."

I stayed silent.

Tears welled up in her eyes.  She threw me back against the seat, then pulled me into the door.  "My niece was killed, you son of a bitch."  Her hands were shaking.  "Tell me!"

My eyes filled up.  Part of me, the part that had been conditioned to believe that vengeance can relieve a victim's pain, hungered to tell her where I had hidden Kathy.  But the bigger part of me spoke.  "I can't."

She was breathing like a bellows.  She held me against the door a few seconds, then let go of me and took a step back.  "I'll find her myself.  Then I'll come looking for you."

"I'm sorry, Emma," was all I could think to say.

She shook her head.  "No, you're not."  She turned around and walked to her cruiser.  She gunned the engine and shot past me, toward the hospital.

I put my foot to the gas and lurched into the night.  Sweat soaked my neck and chest.  I took lefts and rights I didn't need to in order to reassure myself I wasn't being followed, then snaked back toward the Lynnway so I could pick up 1A to Logan International Airport and my 9:05
P.M.
flight to Baltimore.  I couldn't know where Calvin Sanger had dredged up information on Kathy's phony flight abroad or whether someone from Austin Grate Clinic had called in half a lead, maybe holding back on Kathy's exact whereabouts, trying to negotiate a reward.  Matt Hollander had told me about one of the unit counselors meeting privately with Kathy from the very beginning of her stay.  He might be the one.  Or he might not.

With everything unraveling, my mind fastened on the slim chance I had to save the hostages.  I figured Hancock would find out soon enough that Sanger had bolted for an even better story than she could offer him.  That wrinkle gave me hope I still had my twenty-four hours.

I took a right onto the Lynnway.  I saw the West Lynn Creamery building up ahead.  Directly across from it, Webster Avenue led to the Y.  I remembered the time I had spent there with Cynthia Baxter, a.k.a. Ginger, making love with her.  I also remembered looking through her handbag and finding her driver's license from Maryland.  My sense of isolation and my need to be comforted combined with my lifelong hesitancy to accept the gift of coincidence.  I have always felt the hand of a higher power in symmetries others might dismiss as chance.  I took Webster Avenue and parked in front of the Y.  I told myself that if fate declared itself even more plainly and Cynthia were in her room, I would ask her to come to Baltimore with me.

Fate was bolder than I had imagined.  I had just reached the front desk when the elevator doors opened and Cynthia stepped out with a distinguished-looking Hispanic man, fifty or fifty-five years old.  I turned to her.  She looked as if she were seeing a ghost.  "Frank?" she said.  "We just saw you on TV."  She was wearing tight jeans and a black leather bomber jacket that looked a lot better on her than the soiled white wool coat she had worn to my place.  Her light brown hair hung in shiny, damp curtains beside her chestnut eyes.  Compared to the worn, tortured women on the unit, she looked brand-new.

The man smiled tightly at me.  Other than a wrinkled tab collar shirt, he was impeccably dressed in a blue, double-breasted suit, Versace tie and Gucci loafers.  I figured he was probably an attorney or a banker on his way home somewhere tony like Boxford or Newburyport, twenty miles north.  Judging from the fear in his eyes I guessed he had come to the Lynn Y, in the middle of a crime-ridden wasteland, to be safe — safe from his sexual appetite devouring the rest of his life.  He didn't want to meet me or anyone else.  As irrational as it sounds given Cynthia's profession, I disliked him immediately for having had her.

"Hopefully none of the reporters followed me here," I said, watching him.

The man grimaced and scanned the lobby.

"What happened to your face?" Cynthia asked.

I went to touch my wound, then realized my hand was shaking badly and put it back at my side.  "A little run-in with a patient on the unit.  It's not important."

She nodded at my leg.  "You lost a lot of blood."

I looked down and saw that my thigh was covered with dried blood — Craig Bishop's blood.  "Can I talk to you alone?" I asked.  "Just for a minute?"

She hesitated, then took a step away from the man.  "I won't need a ride after all," she told him.  "Frank's an old friend.  He can drive me."

He looked relieved. "Fair enough."  He hurried past me, headed for the door.

"What are you doing here?" Cynthia asked.

"My truck's outside.  We can talk while we drive."

We climbed into the Ram.  I started the engine.  "I stopped on my way to Logan," I said immediately.  "I'm flying to Baltimore to find out what I can about Trevor Lucas.  He was born there."

"Why does that matter?"

"I think what he's doing now is linked to something that happened there."

"Oh."  She almost left it at that.  "Why?"

"Because he can't remember
anything
that happened there."

She nodded, seeming to accept that theory.  She reached out and touched the blood on my thigh.  "Are you sure you're OK to go?  You look really rough."

I had the impulse to fall against her, to be held like a child, then coaxed back into her room.  But that desire was just another escape fantasy that would ultimately imprison me.  I had to search for the truth about Lucas.  I had to try to help him.  I gripped the wheel with both hands.  "Lucas forced me to take drugs on the unit," I said.  I paused, admitting to myself that he hadn't forced me every time.  "I took a lot of methadone and some pharmaceutical cocaine.  I might come down hard, but I'll get through it."

"How long will you be gone?"

"Overnight.  I have to be back this time tomorrow."

"Need a guide?  I was born in Baltimore, too."

If I hadn't already put myself in the hands of Fate, I would have diagnosed Cynthia as self-destructive to do the same.  Taking off for another state on the spur of the moment with a man she hardly knew was probably the kind of behavior that had landed her on the streets to begin with.  But I was grateful for it at that moment.  "I thought you were headed somewhere."

She reached into her handbag and took out her cellular phone.  "One girl's as good as the next as far as this guy's concerned," she said.  "I'll call the service and tell them I had to see my shrink."

We took the Lynnway past the Wonderland Dog Track in Revere, a pink neon temple to luck that was holding exactly $51, 978.72 of my money in its coffers.  For months I had kept the tally of my losses on a Post-it note in my wallet to remind me not to visit my friend Manny who worked the window there.  At 8:30 we reached Bell Circle, the gateway to 1A, just five minutes from Logan.  Cynthia looked over at me.  "When I used, I bought over on Shirley Avenue," she said.  "If you need something to get yourself through tomorrow, we could swing by."  She said it flatly, almost clinically, with none of the hungry, anxious drama of the drug seeker.

"What did you use?"

"Crack, mostly.  It's been two hundred twenty-three days, but it's still one day at a time."

I wanted to say ‘no’ to bolster Cynthia's sobriety and my own, but my muscles were cramping up and my stomach was starting to flutter like my hands.  I could let my system fail in twenty-two hours, but not now.  "Let's stop," I said.

Cynthia directed me through a maze of side streets to a parking spot in sight of a drab, off-white triple decker with an open front door.  "It's more depressing than Lynn," I said.

"That's why the drugs have to be better."

We sat and watched three men and one woman come and go from the place within a few minutes.  "I guess they're still in business," she said.  "I'll be right out."  She climbed down from the truck, jogged across the street and walked into the house.

As I waited two more people walked into the place.  I started worry when one left before Cynthia came out, but she was the next through the door.  She jogged over to the truck, pulled herself inside and handed me five tiny Baggies.  "Vun says to go easy.  It's from Thailand.  You shouldn’t need much to keep your head above water."

I had never used heroin or any intravenous drug.  "Am I supposed to inject this?"

"You could.  But it's pure enough to snort."

"He didn't have any cocaine?"

"He has everything."  She reached into her coat pocket and produced a small, triangular package fashioned from folded magazine paper.

I reached for it.

She held it away.  "Do you swear not to touch any of this crap after tomorrow?"

"My word isn’t what it used to be."

"It's good enough for me."

"My hooker, my healer," I winked.  I meant no offense.  "The Lord works in mysterious ways."  I held my hand out.

She pulled the package further away.  "Is that a ‘yes’?  You'll get clean starting tomorrow?"

"I swear," I said — and meant it.  "Do you swear not to touch it at all?"

"I do," she said.

*            *            *