The Edge of Sleep (43 page)

“I can tell you’re not real good at this, are you? Those won’t work.”

Dee’s purse was on the bed. Karen found the car keys and put them between her teeth. Tucking the automatic in the skirt waist behind her back where Dee could not reach it, Karen started to drag the other woman across the room. She stopped after the first backward hop, mopping the blood from her eyes and waiting for the dizziness to pass. I should have tried to stop my own bleeding first, she thought. But she wasn’t dying, and the other woman surely would. The cuts in the veins had been surgical: the woman was a nurse and knew what she was doing, and she was probably right: the tourniquets wouldn’t do the job.

Hopping backwards two or three times, stopping to wipe her eyes, then hopping again. Karen dragged Dee out of the room, across the mix of grass and gravel and up to the passenger door of the car. Dee was talking to herself now, mumbling in tones too low for Karen to understand. She grunted with the exertion of lifting the other woman. Her good fool slipped and Karen fell to her knees. Dee’s face was level with her own and she smiled at Karen beatifically. Her teeth were red with her own blood.

Karen folded Dee into the car by stages, then hopped to the driver’s side, using the car for support. She almost blacked out again as she opened the door, but she held on, fighting against her weakness. When it passed, she dropped behind the steering wheel, pulling her bad leg in with both hands.

She looked at Dee, whose head was back against the seat, her mouth open slightly. Despite the tourniquets, blood dripped steadily from her fingertips onto the floor. From the corner of her eye, Karen saw a blanket in the backseat move, then a shape rose up rapidly, the blanket fanning out like Dracula’s cape, blotting her vision and falling upon her.

She was lifted straight over the seat, her arms pinned at her sides, then she was on the floor of the car and encased, as if in a shell of flesh. She tried to struggle, but she seemed to be held everywhere by a great weight that could crush her if it would, but merely restrained her so that she could not move.

“FBI,” she tried to say, knowing it was pointless. The blood from her head wounds seemed to be pouring out of her now, filling her mouth and nose as well as her eyes. With the last of her strength she pushed up with her good leg, her arms, arching her back like a cat, trying to make a space for herself off the floor. The weight over her yielded that much, allowing her to position herself as she would, but not releasing her.

Karen froze in position, keeping the two feet of leeway for herself between her body and the floor. She could feel the man atop her positioning himself in the same way, accommodating her so as not to crush her while still imprisoning her.

“Dee?” Ash called. “Dee, are you all right?”

Dee said weakly, “Where’s my precious boy?”

Karen tilted one shoulder down, trying to keep the man’s body in place atop the other shoulder. He held his position. Fighting against the fainting sensation, she slowly arched her back forward while still thrusting upwards with her buttocks. Again the man atop her kept his position. She now had just room enough to slip one hand behind her back.

“I did what you told me,” Ash said.

Karen felt the grip of the automatic with her straining fingers, slick with blood. She pulled it slowly from the waist of her skirt.

“You didn’t let them take him away from me again?” Dee asked. Her voice was very faint. Karen could scarcely hear her.

“No,” said Ash. “The men wanted to steal him, but I didn’t let them. I dropped him over the cliff.”

Karen turned her wrist, pointing the barrel upwards, and pulled the trigger. She kept pulling until the noise stopped and the man’s full weight fell upon her, crushing her against the floor. She felt blood soaking her body, but she was no longer certain if it was his or hers. As she slipped into unconsciousness she thought she heard Jack’s voice calling her, but she knew it was an illusion.

Chapter 25

B
ECKER LAY IN BED,
waiting for her to return. Karen had heard a sound and had gotten out of bed to check on her son. Jack slept now in the living room, just outside of their bedroom door, and Karen would be out of bed at the slightest noise. Often as not, she would find Jack lying awake. He would smile at her, seemingly untroubled, but his eyes looked as alert as if it were midday.

Sometimes Becker would be awakened in the middle of the night by their whispers as they lay in their separate beds, reaching out to each other for reassurance that the other was still there.

Karen came into the bedroom, limping with the walking cast on her leg. The scars on her head and hands were still red and angry, but healing. Becker had tried to assure Karen that they would not harm her appearance, that indeed, they merely added character to a face already beautiful. She had seemed a good deal less interested in the way she looked than he was, accepting the scars as a price she paid for the return of her son. He was certain she would have borne the loss of a limb with equal equanimity if it had brought Jack safely back to her.

She wriggled backwards into Becker, spooning against him. Since she got out of the hospital she had insisted on maintaining some physical contact with him throughout the night. Becker held her and drifted into sleep.

He was awakened by the shaking of her body. She was crying silently again, as she did every night. The first few nights in the hospital and at home she had been haunted with nightmares that shook her awake with dread. She dreamed of her battle with Dee, of Ash rising up from the back of the car like Satan himself, or suffocating in blood. But the nightmares had vanished with a speed that delighted the psychotherapists that the Bureau had assigned to her. The crying was a good sign, they told her. It was part of the mourning process, they said. Karen listened and nodded and said she was pleased they were pleased.

They told Becker that the nightmares were normal after such a trauma, the silent weeping was to be expected. She is suffering the natural reaction to having killed two people in the most grueling and gruesome of circumstances, they said. They advised him to be patient with her, to provide her with a sense of security, to continue to reassure her that such grief was part of the healing process. In time she would be back to herself, they promised. All in good time.

Becker kissed the back of her neck. “It’s all right,” he said, as he had said for nights. “Go ahead and get it out. You should feel bad, it’s natural, it will pass.”

She twitched her head away from him angrily.

“You know better than that,” she whispered.

“It will pass,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean.” She turned and took his face in her hands. In the light spilling in from the living room she could see him clearly. She looked straight into his eyes.

“What?” Becker asked

For a long time he thought she wasn’t going to answer as she continued to stare into his eyes, searching for reassurance of something.

“I don’t feel bad,” she said at last. “I liked it.” Her face contorted itself as if she had tasted her own bile.

She jerked away and turned her back to him once more. She said something that he did not hear.

“What?”

“I’m just like you,” she hissed and her body shuddered in his arms.