Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(21)

But the other two days make it all worthwhile. Chuck likes nothing better, weekend afternoons, than to strap on his helmet and ride off into the Catskills on his Harley with Cora’s arms—one of which is tattooed with a “CN2” inside a heart, to symbolize their identical initials—wrapped around his waist.

Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those days.

The Harley is sitting in the garage and the keys to his pickup are in his pocket as he enjoys a last smoke on the small back deck of the house he and Cora rent in Newburgh.

Dusk is falling and he notes the sharp chill in the air that wasn’t here yesterday. Off in the distance, the pleasant buzz of a speedboat cruising the Hudson gives way to police sirens, signifying another wave of gang violence.

The neighborhood is sandwiched between the Hudson River and a notorious stretch of dilapidated, drug-infested row houses. Kids kill each other and anyone else who gets in the way—happens every day, every night in this city.

Having grown up here, Chuck didn’t plan on ever leaving, but lately, he’s been thinking they might have to. Now that the escalating crime from the adjoining neighborhood is creeping into their own, he worries about Cora being home alone every night; worries, too, about her driving through seedy neighborhoods on her way to and from work.

Plus, their commutes are getting longer because there’s more traffic around, especially on weekends. On this final Friday night of the summer, throngs of city people will be making their way up to weekend retreats in the Catskills. It will probably take him over an hour to get to work, even on the back roads.

If they lived closer to the prison, he and Cora would have more time together—that’s what he told her.

“How so? Closer to the prison means further from my job.”

“You can always get a new job near Fallsburg.”

“Or we can move across the river and you can become a CO at the prison in Fishkill,” she returned.

She’s a strong-willed woman, Cora. That’s one of the things he loves about her. Most of the time.

He’s not going anywhere. He’s been at Sullivan for too long to just start fresh someplace else. He’s paid his dues—and then some.

Never a dull moment on the job, that’s for damned sure.

He thinks back to last weekend’s big excitement. One of the inmates on the block decided to kill himself on Chuck’s watch. Son of a bitch gulped down a cup of orange juice laced with cleaning fluid. It wasn’t a pretty way to go, that’s for damned sure.

The inmate, Jerry Thompson, didn’t leave a note or anything. But Doobie Jones, the prisoner who occupies the adjoining cell, claimed that he’d been talking about suicide for a while.

“Guess he just finally gave up,” Doobie commented in a tone that made Chuck look sharply at his face.

The guy is a vicious, manipulative psychopath responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen people on the outside. Chuck wouldn’t put it past him to commit another murder, just for kicks, while behind bars.

“Wonder where he got the orange juice?” Doobie mused on with an evil gleam in his eye.

Never mind that. Where the hell did Jerry get the cleaning fluid? He wasn’t on kitchen or bathroom duty.

But Doobie was.

Yeah, Chuck has his suspicions, but he’ll keep them to himself. So the world is rid of one more serial killer. No great loss, right?

He takes one last drag on his Marlboro, stubs it out with his steel-toed boot, and kicks it into the shrubbery beneath the deck.

Time to head to work.

He’d been hoping Cora would show up before he left—once in a while on a Friday, she manages to leave work early enough to see him—but he can’t afford to wait any longer.

He closes the slider leading out to the deck and locks it. Then he sets a yardstick into the metal groove to keep the door from opening, an added measure of security, should anyone try to break in.

Cora says it’s a joke—“If someone really wanted to get in, he could just break the window next to the door, climb on in, and help himself to our stuff.”

She’s right. All the more reason to consider moving.

Chuck opens the fridge and looks for the lunch he packed earlier in the insulated bag embossed with a white “CN.” Cora ordered it for him this summer, and one for herself, too.

Both are blue. “Mix and match,” she told him. “Isn’t it nice to have the same initials?”

Yeah, it’s nice. Everything about being married to Cora is nice.

He takes the bag from the fridge, turns on a living room lamp so that his wife won’t have to walk into a dark house alone, and steps out the front door.

The sirens are still wailing. God knows he’s used to the sound, but for some reason it’s really getting to him tonight.

Crossing the small, sparse patch of grass, he feels increasingly uneasy, as though something bad is about to happen.

Or maybe it’s more a feeling that he’s not alone.

His work at the prison has taught him well. You learn, when you’re locked behind steel doors with hundreds of depraved, lethal predators, never to ignore your instincts. Frowning, he looks at the windows of the neighboring houses, half expecting to spot someone looking out at him, but there’s no evidence of that. Not that he can see, anyway.

Still . . .

Something is off.

He pictures Cora in her little Toyota crossing the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge with all that weaving traffic, and he worries. He can’t help it. There are a lot of crazy drivers out there who might have stopped for happy hour to kick off the weekend.