Shutter Island(86)

Teddy could feel the weight of the gun. Even with the shakes, he had a chance if he took it now. Killed Cawley, killed whoever was waiting outside.

Cawley said, “Warden, you can send him up.”

And Teddy’s vision cleared and his shakes reduced themselves to small vibrations and he looked down the barrel as Cawley put the phone back in the pack.

Cawley got a curious look on his face, as if only now did it occur to him that Teddy might have the faculties left to pull this off.

And Cawley held up a hand.

He said, “Okay, okay.”

And Teddy shot him dead center in the chest.

Then he raised his hands a half an inch and shot Cawley in the face.

With water.

Cawley frowned. Then he blinked several times. He took a handkerchief from his pocket.

The door opened behind Teddy, and he spun in his chair and took aim as a man entered the room.

“Don’t shoot,” Chuck said. “I forgot to wear my raincoat.”





23




CAWLEY WIPED HIS face with the handkerchief and took his seat again and Chuck came around the table to Cawley’s side and Teddy turned the gun in his palm and stared down at it.

He looked across the table as Chuck took his seat, and Teddy noticed he was wearing a lab coat.

“I thought you were dead,” Teddy said.

“Nope,” Chuck said.

It was suddenly hard to get words out. He felt the inclination to stutter, just as the woman doctor had predicted. “I…I…was…I was willing to die to bring you out of here. I…” He dropped the gun to the table, and he felt all strength drain from his body. He fell into his chair, unable to go on.

“I’m genuinely sorry about that,” Chuck said. “Dr. Cawley and I agonized over that for weeks before we put this into play. I never wanted to leave you feeling betrayed or cause you undue anguish. You have to believe me. But we were certain we had no alternative.”

“There’s a bit of a clock ticking on this one,” Cawley said. “This was our last-ditch effort to bring you back, Andrew. A radical idea, even for this place, but I’d hoped it would work.”

Teddy wiped at the sweat in his eyes, ended up smearing it there. He looked through the blur at Chuck.

“Who are you?” he said.

Chuck stretched a hand across the table. “Dr. Lester Sheehan,” he said.

Teddy left the hand hanging in the air and Sheehan eventually withdrew it.

“So,” Teddy said and sucked wet air through his nostrils, “you let me go on about how we needed to find Sheehan when you…you were Sheehan.”

Sheehan nodded.

“Called me ’boss.’ Told me jokes. Kept me entertained. Kept a watch on me at all times, is that right, Lester?”

He looked across the table at him, and Sheehan tried to hold his eyes, but he failed and dropped his gaze to his tie and flapped it against his chest. “I had to keep an eye on you, make sure you were safe.”

“Safe,” Teddy said. “So that made everything okay. Moral.”

Sheehan dropped his tie. “We’ve known each other for two years, Andrew.”

“That’s not my name.”

“Two years. I’ve been your primary psychiatrist. Two years. Look at me. Don’t you even recognize me?”

Teddy used the cuff of his suit jacket to wipe the sweat from his eyes, and this time they cleared, and he looked across the table at Chuck. Good ol’ Chuck with his awkwardness around firearms and those hands that didn’t fit his job description because they weren’t the hands of a cop. They were the hands of a doctor.

“You were my friend,” Teddy said. “I trusted you. I told you about my wife. I talked to you about my father. I climbed down a fucking cliff looking for you. Were you watching me then? Keeping me safe then? You were my friend, Chuck. Oh, I’m sorry. Lester.”

Lester lit a cigarette and Teddy was pleased to see that his hands shook too. Not much. Not nearly as bad as Teddy’s and the tremors stopped as soon as he got the cigarette lit and tossed the match in an ashtray. But still…

I hope you’ve got it too, Teddy thought. Whatever this is.

“Yeah,” Sheehan said (and Teddy had to remind himself not to think of him as Chuck), “I was keeping you safe. My disappearance was, yes, part of your fantasy. But you were supposed to see Laeddis’s intake form on the road, not down the cliff. I dropped it off the promontory by mistake. Just pulling it out of my back pocket, and it blew away. I went down after it, because I knew if I didn’t, you would. And I froze. Right under the lip. Twenty minutes later, you drop down right in front of me. I mean, a foot away. I almost reached out and grabbed you.”

Cawley cleared his throat. “We almost called it off when we saw you were going to go down that cliff. Maybe we should have.”

“Called it off.” Teddy suppressed a giggle into his fist.

“Yes,” Cawley said. “Called it off. This was a pageant, Andrew. A—”

“My name’s Teddy.”

“—play. You wrote it. We helped you stage it. But the play wouldn’t work without an ending, and the ending was always your reaching this lighthouse.”

“Convenient,” Teddy said and looked around at the walls.