Sleepwalker (Nightwatcher #2)(4)

Sometimes, Jerry wonders if Doobie is even real.

Jamie wasn’t.

That’s what the cops told him, and so did his lawyer, and the nice doctor who came to talk to Jerry a lot back when he was first arrested.

Everyone said that Jamie had died years ago, and now only lived in Jerry’s head.

It was hard to believe, because Jamie seemed so real, walking and talking, and bringing Jerry cake . . .

“That was you, Jerry. You said and did those things,” the cops said on the awful day when Jerry found Mama dead in the bedroom, and Jamie ran away just before the police came to the apartment . . .

That was what he thought had happened, anyway. But when he told the policemen that the bloody dress and the bloody knife belonged to Jamie, they didn’t believe him.

“Jamie only exists up here.” Detective Manzillo tapped his head. “Do you understand, Jerry?”

He didn’t at the time.

Even now, when he thinks about it, he’s not quite sure he understands how someone who only lives in your imagination can go around killing people.

Maybe that, too, is because Jerry’s brain is damaged.

Anyway, it’s not his fault that he is the way he is.

You can’t help it.

That’s what Jerry’s lawyer told him, and that’s what she told the judge, too, and the jury, and everyone else in the courtroom during the trial. She said Jerry shouldn’t worry, even though he had admitted to killing people and signed the papers, too.

“You were not responsible for your actions, Jerry,” his lawyer would say, and she would pat Jerry’s hand with fingers that were cold and bony, the fingernails bitten all the way down so that they bled on the notebook paper she was always scribbling on.

“You’re going to be found not guilty by reason of insanity,” she said. “You’re not going to go to prison. Don’t worry.”

“I won’t,” Jerry said, and he didn’t.

But then came the day when the judge asked the lady in charge of the jury—the tall, skinny lady with the mean-looking face—“Have you reached your verdict?”

The lady said, “We have, Your Honor.”

The verdict was guilty.

The courtroom exploded with noise. Some people were cheering, others crying. Jerry’s lawyer put her forehead down on the table for a long time.

Jerry was confused. “What happened? What does that mean? Is it over? Can I go home now?”

No one would answer his questions. Not even his lawyer. When she finally looked up, her eyes were sad—and mad, too—and she said only, “I’m so sorry, Jerry,” before the judge banged his gavel and called for order.

Jerry soon found out why she was sorry. It was because she had lied. Jerry did go to prison.

And he’s never going to get out. That’s one of the things Doobie says to him, late at night.

He scares Jerry. He scares everyone. His tattooed neck is almost as thick as his head, and he’s missing a couple of teeth so that the ones he has remind Jerry of fangs.

He’s in charge of the cell block. Well, the guards are really supposed to be in charge, but Doobie is the one who runs things around here. He decides what everyone else gets to say, and do, and watch on TV.

Tonight, though, the same thing is on every channel as Doobie flips from one to the next: a special news report about the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks.

After shouting a string of curses at the television, Doobie throws the remote control at the wall. When it hits the floor, the batteries fall out. One rolls all the way over to Jerry’s feet. He looks down.

“Touch that, and you’re a dead man,” Doobie warns.

Jerry doesn’t touch it.

He’s sure—pretty sure, anyway—that he doesn’t want to be a dead man, no matter what Doobie says.

Doobie is always telling him that he’d be better off dead than in here. He tells Jerry all the things he’d be able to do in heaven that he can’t do here, or even back at home in New York. He says there’s cake in heaven—as much cake as you want, every day and every night.

He knows Jerry’s favorite thing in the whole world is cake. He knows a lot of things about Jerry, because there’s not much else to do here besides talk, and there aren’t many people to talk to.

“Just think, Jerry,” Doobie says, late at night, when the lights are out. “If you were in heaven right now, you would be eating cake and sleeping on a big, soft bed with piles of quilts, and if you wanted to, you could get up and walk right outside and look at the stars.”

Stars—Jerry hasn’t seen them in years. He misses them, but not as much as he misses seeing the lights that look like stars. A million of them, twinkling all around him in the sky . . .

Home. New York City at night.

The thought of it makes him want to cry.

But the New York City they’re showing on television right now doesn’t bring back good memories at all.

He remembers that day, the terrible day when the bad guys drove the planes into the towers and knocked them down. He remembers the fire and the people falling and jumping from the top floors, and the big, dusty, burning pile after the buildings fell, one right after the other.

“Sheee-it,” Rollins, one of the inmates, says as he stares at the footage of people running for their lives up Broadway, chased by the fire-breathing cloud of dust.