The Inn(67)

An announcement calling for doctors to respond to a code on the eighth floor blasted over the PA system above me. I covered the phone mike with my hand, adrenaline dumped into my veins.

“Don’t panic,” Cline said. “I know exactly where Russ is. He can recover there with his bodyguards. I’ll get him when the time is right.”

I wondered if Cline was bluffing. It made me decide to try it myself.

“Let me tell you something that I know,” I said. “I know why you won’t do prison time.”

“Really?” he asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Really.”

There was a pause while Cline assessed my words. I hoped my tone was convincing. I could hear nothing in the background on his end. He was somewhere quiet, collecting himself before he went into battle again. The seconds ticked by, and I bit my tongue, waiting for him to call or fold on what I’d said.

“They need me,” he said. “You might think you’re doing them a favor, but they need me.”

I smiled. Nick was walking down the hallway toward me. I hung up on Cline and grabbed his arm.

“Let’s go,” I said. “I think I’ve hit on something.”





CHAPTER NINETY-TWO





NICK WAS SILENT as we walked from the hospital to the car. He sat with his feet on the dash and his seat reclined as I drove close to Cline’s house, then stopped in the street beyond his. I could just make out a slice of Cline’s driveway beyond the neat hedges, but as I watched, the man appeared; I saw a flash of black trousers, shiny shoes, a pin-striped shirt as he headed for the Escalade parked out front. I’d spooked him.

“I knew it,” I said. “I knew it.”

Nick didn’t respond. I did a slow U-turn and waited for Cline to get out into traffic, then followed him at a distance.

“So what did she say?” I asked. “The shrink?”

“How do you know it was a woman?” he said.

“Because they’re smarter than us.” I kept my eyes locked on Cline’s big black car. “Susan makes me feel like a dope with a single sideways glance.”

“You’re talking about her like she’s your girlfriend,” Nick said, putting his arms behind his head. Maybe it was the excitement of being on Cline without his knowing I was there or the rush of trying to obtain the upper hand, the gathering hope that I could bring him down, remove him from my life, my friends’ lives. Whatever it was, I wasn’t paying attention to Nick’s mood. I gripped the steering wheel, took a deep breath.

“We …” I glanced at him. “Before everything that happened last night. You know. We might have taken things up a notch.”

“That’s nice. So sorry a psychopath leaving us a corpse and me being a crazy freak ruined it for you.”

“You’re not a crazy freak,” I said. “And no number of corpses could take the shine off Susan Solie.”

“That should be on your Valentine’s Day card to her,” Nick said.

“It just sort of happened. I’d been wondering if … if it was going to happen. We’d kissed. But I didn’t know if it was just the moment and something that struck us both. We were on the beach and the moon was over us and I’d been so consumed worrying about everyone and the plan with the boat,” I said. “But I think there’s something there with Susan. Something between us. I mean, I know there’s something there, at least on my side. But maybe she—”

I looked at Nick. He hardly seemed to be listening.

“Sorry,” I said. I burned through a yellow light to keep on Cline. “So what did the shrink say?”

“It was bullshit.” Nick snorted. “Total bullshit. I don’t think I’ll go back. You sit with a person for more than an hour and they can’t even give you a solid diagnosis. Can you believe that? She wants to consult with her supervisor. Why would you license someone to be a shrink if she can’t even give you a proper diagnosis without having to run to her teacher? ‘Congratulations, madame. You sort of know how to do your job but not really.’”

“She has to talk to her supervisor to decide if you’ve got PTSD?” I asked.

Nick licked his teeth, watched the cars ahead of us.

“Nick?”

“She knows I’ve got PTSD,” he said.

We sat in silence. Nick took his feet off the dashboard, clasped his hands, and looked at them in his lap. I listened to him taking a deep breath, trying to find the words, failing, and trying again.

“I’m pulling over.”

“Don’t pull over,” he said. “We need to stay on Cline. We need to get this guy.” He folded his arms, a barrier of muscle and bone over his heart. “She thinks I’m also schizophrenic.”





CHAPTER NINETY-THREE





THE CAR AROUND me seemed to shrink. Suddenly it was hard to stay on the road. I looked at my friend.

“What do you mean, she thinks that?”

“You can’t just diagnose it in an hour,” he said. “See, this is the bullshit I was talking about. She needs to get her supervisor to sign off on me having schizophreniform disorder, which is what you have if your schizophrenia symptoms haven’t been going on longer than six months. And then when the supervisor signs off on that, that becomes your day one. So you have to be observed for six months like a fucking rat in a lab until they can figure out if it’s the full version or one of the sub-versions. I mean, what the fuck? It was all so wishy-washy. She wasn’t listening to me properly. Most of the time she was just taking notes. She’s the one who’s nuts if you ask me.”