Black Lightning

by John Saul

  Anne’s attention shifted from Glen to the nurse. “You mean what he just went through was caused by the medication?”

  “Maybe you should talk to the doctor about this,” the nurse replied, wishing she hadn’t said anything at all.

  “Maybe I should,” Anne said.

  Now Glen, too, began to wish he hadn’t mentioned the dream. Once Anne got hold of something, she wouldn’t easily let it go. “Hey, take it easy, hon. It was just a dream, and it’s over now.” He glanced at the clock on his bed stand. “Aren’t you going to be late to work?”

  “If you had a reaction to one of the drugs—” Anne began, but this time Glen put his finger to her lips to stop her words. The effort of lifting his hand took much more energy than he would have thought possible just twenty-four hours ago.

  “It was nothing,” he lied. “Just a dream, and I can’t even remember what it was about.” His hand dropped back onto the bed, and now his eyelids began to feel heavy. “Just go on to work, okay? I’ll be fine.”

  As his eyes began to close, Anne glanced worriedly at the nurse. “Is he all right?”

  “I gave him a sedative,” the nurse replied. “I know it looked pretty frightening, Mrs. Jeffers, but believe me, he’s doing just fine. If you’d like, I can call the doctor.…”

  Feeling as if she’d foolishly overreacted, Anne shook her head. “It’s all right. I guess—well, I guess I’m just not used to seeing him like this.” She got up from the bed and leaned over to kiss her husband. For a moment she got no response at all. Then Glen’s fingers closed on her wrist and she felt his lips brush her cheek. His grip eased, and by the time she had straightened up, she was sure he’d fallen back into sleep. His eyes were closed and his breathing had quieted. Relieved, she moved quietly toward the door. His voice stopped her.

  “Anne?”

  She turned around to find him looking at her, his eyes barely open.

  “What is it, honey?”

  “Did you jog this morning?”

  Anne blinked. Did she jog this morning? Why on earth would he be asking about that? “Of course I did,” she replied. Then she added playfully, “Can’t get out of shape, can I? Who’d take care of you when you come home?”

  Glen smiled, but it was a smile that quickly faded away. “Just be careful, okay?”

  “Careful?” Anne echoed. What was he talking about? “Careful of what?”

  Glen was silent, and for a second she thought he’d finally fallen asleep. But just as she was passing through the door, she heard his voice once more.

  “There’re a lot of creeps out there.”

  She spun around to look at him once again, but this time his eyes were closed and his chest was rising and falling with the easy rhythm of sleep. She silently pulled the door to his room closed, nodded a good-bye to the nurse at the station and left the CCU, taking the elevator to the ground floor. As she left the hospital through the main doors on Sixteenth East and started toward her car, she turned, looking up at the window to Glen’s room.

  His last words still echoed in her mind.

  “There’re a lot of creeps out there.”

  Coming to her car, she happened to glance up at the shabby-looking brick building across the street. Someone was looking out one of its windows, and for just a second their eyes met. He was a man, perhaps sixty, perhaps much less. He was wearing an undershirt, his face unshaven and his hair uncombed, but none of those details stayed in Anne’s mind. It was the look in his eyes. He looked beaten, as if the world had challenged him and he had lost. But it wasn’t just defeat Anne saw in his eyes.

  There was anger, too.

  The man turned away from the window, but Anne stayed where she was for a moment, her eyes fixed on the building. It struck her that the man looked very much like the apartment house he lived in: worn-out, uncared for. Sad. Was the whole building filled with people like that, people for whom life had become one desperate day after another?

  Probably it was.

  Anne turned and looked back toward the hospital, where the window to Glen’s room was clearly visible. Perhaps this was what he had meant. Perhaps he had awakened early and seen someone—maybe even the same man she herself had just seen—slipping back into the structure’s unwelcoming shelter as dawn washed away the protective shadows of night.

  Shivering in the chill of the morning, Anne hurried to her car and drove quickly away.

  CHAPTER 15

  The rain began as Anne turned into the parking lot of the building Glen had always called Seattle’s ugliest. It wasn’t a point Anne was about to argue, for the building that housed the Herald had been constructed in 1955, smack in the middle of one of the dullest periods in modern architectural history. Utterly devoid of any interesting features, it was a perfectly rectilinear, five-story aluminum-and-glass box, its main facade punctured only by a pair of glass doors. As if understanding that his building was architecturally unsalvageable, the designer had made no attempt to soften the structure with lawns or gardens, and the concept of “one percent for art” had still been years in the future. Anne, like the majority of the Herald’s staff, had long stopped noticing the building at all, and most people who passed it on the street weren’t even aware that it housed one of the city’s major newspapers. If and when the park that would be known as the Commons finally metamorphosed from endless talk into a reality of trees, lawns, and pathways linking Lake Union to the downtown area, the Herald Building would be razed. No one—least of all the newspaper’s employees—would miss it.

  Pulling into the only vacant space in the lot, Anne ducked her head against the rain as she locked the car and threaded her way across the parking area, then through the first of two sets of double doors into a tiny foyer. Waving to the guard behind the scarred blond-wood counter that was the inner lobby’s single distinguishing feature, Anne brushed a few drops of water off her jacket, then pushed the second door open when the buzzer sounded. As if terrorists are just waiting to invade us, she thought as she nodded to the guard on her way to the bank of elevators opposite the doors. What makes anyone think we’re that important?

  She punched at the elevator button, prepared a sarcastic remark for the guard in the typical event that no car showed up within a minute, and was pleasantly surprised when one of the doors instantly slid open. The usual chaos reigned on the third floor, and it took Anne almost five more minutes just to get to her desk, what with half a dozen people commenting on her column in this morning’s edition, and half a dozen more asking about Glen. When she finally crossed the newsroom to her desk, the monitor of her computer was flashing an accusatory beacon informing her that she had twenty-three unanswered internal messages, and forty-two more in her voice mail from outside.

  Square in the center of her desk, where she couldn’t possibly miss it, was a message from her editor. Scrawled in large black letters, the message was no-more-than-usually direct:

  SEE ME

  —VIV

  Pausing only to put her purse in the bottom drawer of her desk and hang her damp jacket on the coat tree she shared with three other reporters, Anne strode into the editor’s office, bypassing the sagging chair with the broken spring that her boss was gesturing her toward even while arguing with someone on the telephone, and helping herself to a cup of coffee. She scanned the papers scattered in front of the editor, her ability to read upside down and backward allowing her to assess that at least there were no formal complaints about her among the clutter on Vivian Andrews’s desk.

  “I know what you’re doing, and I think it’s at least rude, if not illegal,” the editor said as she hung up the phone. “Are you going to read everything, or do you want to sit down?”

  Anne eyed the rump-sprung chair with distaste, but answered neither question. “Got your newsy little epistle,” she said. “What’s up?”

  Vivian Andrews burrowed into the mess on her desk and pulled out a copy of that morning’s paper, neatly opened and folded to expose Anne’s article. Tapping it m
eaningfully with one brightly polished fingernail, she gazed steadily at Anne. “As you can see, I passed this through exactly as you dictated it last night. Now, given that you’re back from the execution, and given that ‘dead men tell no tales,’ as I believe the saying goes, just how much longer are you planning to chase this particular wild goose, and when may I expect you to begin working on something that might be considered news?” She leaned back in her chair and regarded Anne archly. “Oh, and by using the word ‘news,’ I’m suggesting you might want to find a story that occurred within, say, the last six months?” The questioning inflection at the end of her remark was always a clue that Vivian was not feeling particularly patient.

  “How long will you give me?” Anne countered.

  Vivian Andrews placed the tips of her fingers together, resting her chin on them as she thought it over. “Not much,” she decided. “They’re cutting budgets again, and we’re stretched tight already.” Then, as her own eyes caught a few of the words Anne had dictated last night, she relented slightly. “Do you really think something’s missing? Something you can find, I mean?”

  Anne dropped into the chair, wincing as the broken spring jabbed at her hip. “The execution is over, and there aren’t going to be any more trials,” she reminded her editor. “And Mark Blakemoor says they’re closing the files, which means there’s no reason for them not to let me see everything they’ve got.”

  Vivian Andrews weighed the pros and cons quickly. The loss of a few more days of Anne’s time was far outweighed by the number of papers they’d sell if the reporter actually came up with something new. “Okay,” she agreed. “A few days. But if you don’t come up with something, it’s over. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Anne was already halfway out the door when Vivian Andrews spoke again. “Anne? How’s Glen doing?”

  Anne turned back. “Pretty well, I guess, all things considered.”

  “I heard they almost lost him.”

  Anne tried to put up a facade of bravado, but didn’t quite succeed. “The important thing is that they didn’t. He’s going to be okay. It’s just going to take some time.”

  Vivian nodded in sympathy. “If you need a leave—” she began, but Anne quickly shook her head.

  “I don’t think so. At least I don’t right now. But I’ll keep it in mind. When Glen comes home from the hospital, I might just take a few days. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Vivian agreed. “And keep me informed, Anne. About your story, and about Glen, too.”

  “Thanks, Viv,” Anne replied. “I’ll do that.”

  Back at her desk, Anne began going through the internal messages, most of which could safely be ignored. After she’d responded to the last of those requiring an answer, she picked up her phone and punched in the access to her voice mail.

  Most of what she heard was just as inconsequential as the stuff that had been in her electronic mail—suggestions for stories, questions about things she’d written, pleas for her to give a mention to one cause or another, some of them good, some of them not so good.

  Toward the end of the long series of recordings, there were several responses to her article this morning.

  Again, some of them good, some not so good.

  One, the last one, was disturbing.

  It was a woman’s voice, and it sounded strained.

  “I got to talk to you,” it said. “He killed my son! I know he did, but nobody listens! ’Cause we’re Indians, no one listens!”

  There was a name and a garbled address, but though she played it over and over, Anne couldn’t quite make it out.

  She spent the rest of the day at the police department, beginning her search through the boxes of files that Mark Blakemoor and Lois Ackerly brought to the storage rooms even while she worked.

  To her surprise, Mark Blakemoor came downstairs in mid-morning to find out how she was doing, then showed up again at noon, this time with sandwiches and a couple of Cokes.

  “Anything in particular you’re looking for?” he asked as Anne tore the wrapper off a pastrami on rye and hungrily bit into the thick sandwich.

  Chewing hard, Anne shrugged and signaled him to wait until she’d swallowed. “I don’t know,” she said. Then, remembering the garbled message on her voice mail that morning, she frowned again. “Do you remember any reports of a Native American boy?” With the skills she’d honed in her years of reporting, she repeated the message verbatim.

  Mark Blakemoor gazed at her. “That’s all? Just ‘He killed my son, but nobody listens’?”

  “That’s all.”

  A resigned sigh emerged from Mark Blakemoor’s chest as he recalled the hundreds—thousands—of calls he’d fielded over the years of investigating the Richard Kraven murders. How was he supposed to remember just one? Still, if it would help Anne out … “Tell you what,” he offered. “I’ve got some time this evening. Maybe if I go through the logs, something will jog my memory.”

  “You don’t have to do that—” Anne began, but Mark silenced her with a gesture.

  “If I don’t do it, you will, and at least I know where the logs are and what to look for.” Before Anne could respond, he spoke again: “Hell, at least it’ll keep my beer intake down for a night, right?”

  There was a plaintive ring to his voice that made the last of Anne’s polite objections to his working overtime die on her lips. If he wanted to do it for her, why not? “I’d offer to give you a hand, but with Glen in the hospital—”

  “It’s okay,” Blakemoor assured her. “In fact, why don’t I get started right now?”

  For the rest of the hour the two of them searched through boxes, Mark Blakemoor hunting for the telephone logs, Anne scanning the file folders for a name, a notation—whatever might catch her eye.

  When he finally emerged from the storage area at one-thirty, covered with dust and sneezing more than he had since he’d left the Midwest twenty-two years before, Mark realized he’d enjoyed his sandwich in the basement with Anne Jeffers more than any other lunch he’d had in recent memory.

  Anne, on the other hand, didn’t give the lunch another thought. She hadn’t noticed that all the time they were together, going through the boxes, the detective had kept glancing at her out of the corner of his eye, just like some high school kid with a crush on the prom queen.

  CHAPTER 16

  The long spring day was finally fading into night, and as dusk settled over the city beyond the hospital’s windows, Glen Jeffers grew more anxious. All day he’d drifted between a fitful sleep that gave him no real rest, and a drowsy kind of wakefulness that never left his mind unfogged. As he gazed out the window, watching people move up and down the sidewalk two stories below, and lights come on in the apartment buildings across the street, he had the strange sensation that time had somehow twisted around: as the rest of the world drifted toward the end of the day, he was only now coming fully awake. Unless he could convince the nurse to give him something to send him back to sleep, he was certain he would lie awake all night.

  Anne had come to visit him; so had the kids.

  For some reason—a reason he couldn’t quite figure out—he felt disconnected from them. It was the drugs, of course; once he was finished with them, he’d be back to himself. But today when the kids had come in after school, he found it hard to concentrate on what they were saying, hard to pretend interest in the fight Kevin had had with Justin Reynolds, or the new CD Heather had bought that afternoon. What was the name of the group? Crippled Chicken? Something like that.

  While he was pondering the possible hidden meanings of the names of rock bands and poking at the tray of food they’d brought in at exactly six o’clock, Anne arrived. He’d had to concentrate to follow her conversation, as his mind kept veering off to other places.

  Or, more specifically, one other place.

  The nightmare he’d had early this morning, when Anne had come in on her way to work.

  The dream was still vivid in his memory, and had never been
far from his consciousness all day. It kept reaching out to him whenever he drifted into the fringes of sleep, threatening to draw him once more into its dark terrors.

  When Gordy Farber had come in an hour ago, Glen told him about the dream, and it hadn’t taken the heart specialist long to come up with an explanation: “Well, I’m not a psychiatrist, but I’ve had a lot of experience with people in your situation. You’ve had a heart attack, which makes you feel helpless. And what could be a better symbol of helplessness than a little boy hiding in the dark from a threatening father?”

  “But my father wasn’t threatening,” Glen objected. “In fact, my dad was so modern he never even spanked me! Said spanking was child abuse way back when everyone else was still using the belt every day!”

  Farber’s brows arched into an expression of exaggerated envy. “Wish my dad had thought that way—he was a big one for the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ routine, except his bark always turned out to be far worse than his bite.” The doctor’s features assumed a more serious mien. “But what your dad was like doesn’t really make much difference, because we’re not talking about reality here. We’re talking about dreams and symbols.” His gaze shifted to the array of tubes and wires attached to his patient. “As for the electrodes your father was hooking up to you, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but you’re sprouting more wires and tubes than a high school science fair project.” He’d grinned as another thought came to him. “Hey, maybe I’m the father figure in the dream. After all, who could be more fatherly to you than your doctor right now?”

  Glen knew the explanation made a lot of sense. The nightmare’s fear made sense, for what could be more terrifying than a heart attack? Even now he could remember the panic he’d felt as that band tightened around his chest, the pain shot up his arm, and the blackness closed around him. But although the explanation fit perfectly, Glen had a nagging feeling there was something else—that the terror he’d felt from the dream went beyond the fear he experienced when the “incident”—as Gordy Farber insisted on calling it—had occurred.