Sleep No More m-4

by Greg Iles

  Waters froze with the trigger near to breaking, and in that horrifying lacuna of time, he heard Sybil coming up the hall.

  “Cole?” she called. “Hey, sleepyhead!”

  He dropped Cole’s gun hand back into the drawer and tossed the Polo shirt under the desk.

  “What are you doing?” Sybil asked from the doorway.

  Waters nearly jumped out of his shoes. “Trying to be quiet. Cole’s still sleeping.”

  “He’s been asleep half the morning.”

  Waters quickly crossed to the door. “Maybe he drank too much last night.”

  Sybil frowned like a future wife. “He’s not drinking tonight. He says things he doesn’t mean when he’s drunk. And I’ve had it with that. Tonight I’m getting the truth.”

  Waters wanted to pat her arm, but he could not bring himself to touch her. He slipped past her and went into the hall. “I’m going home for lunch. I may not be back.”

  Sybil nodded and peeked into Cole’s office. “Maybe I should wake him up.”

  Waters looked over her shoulder and tried to calculate the probabilities of what would happen if she did. Who would awake? Cole? Or Mallory?

  “I’d let him sleep,” he said, catching the scent of perfume from Sybil’s neck. “You want him rested and clearheaded tonight.”

  She gave him a preoccupied nod. “You’re right. Hey, what were you looking for?”

  “Oh…I lent him my dictation recorder yesterday. No big deal.”

  She nodded again. “No scotch for that boy tonight.”

  Leaving Sybil standing in Cole’s door, Waters walked to the back stairs, his mind focused on Lily and Annelise. That was the only way he would survive the night’s work.

  Waters drove slowly through the darkness of North Union Street, Lily rigid in the seat beside him. Annelise lay asleep on the seat behind them, a gun under the seat beneath him. Large Victorian houses lined both sides of the road, their gingerbread trim strangely threatening in the night. He wasn’t driving his Land Cruiser or Lily’s Acura. An hour ago, Lily had dropped him a quarter mile from an oil field equipment lot on Liberty Road, where an old four-door pickup always sat with a key under the mat. It belonged to a well-checker Waters knew, a man he hadn’t spoken to for more than two years. That was one virtue of small towns. Things changed little, and when they did, they changed slowly.

  He braked on the 1200 block, scanning the house fronts for numbers. Sybil Sonnier lived in a detached apartment behind one of the larger Victorians on North Union. Many single people preferred to live in these cozy quarters rather than take apartments in the homogeneous complexes around town.

  “There it is,” Lily said in a taut voice. “Twelve-sixty-six.”

  Most of the houses here stood fairly close together, but 1266 was surrounded by more than an acre of land, and a second driveway led beneath twisted old oaks to a faint streetlight behind the main house. That light marked Sybil’s apartment. Waters had scouted all this during the afternoon. No one could ask for more isolation in the middle of town, except perhaps at Bienville.

  There was only one light on in the main house. The third floor. A bathroom, Waters guessed.

  “Park a couple of blocks down,” Lily said. “Like we planned.”

  Waters swerved right, turned into the driveway, and headed straight toward the streetlight behind the main house.

  “What are you doing?” Lily whispered.

  “This is better. If you sat on the street, a random cop could come by and talk to you. Even if you ducked down, he might check the truck because it’s unfamiliar or because the plate’s out of date.”

  Lily looked at him a moment longer, then nodded.

  Thirty yards from the small two-story structure, Waters pulled behind a pile of old tires, then shut off the engine. He had no idea what the tires were doing there, other than collecting nesting water for mosquitoes, but they provided excellent cover. They sat in the punctuated silence of the ticking motor, watching a dim yellow glow in the second-floor window of the apartment. The pickup smelled of stale crude oil, cigarettes, and diesel fuel.

  “Look,” said Lily, pointing toward the first floor. “There’s Cole’s Lincoln.”

  Waters recognized the tail end of the silver land yacht sticking out past the far corner of the apartment.

  “And there’s Cole,” she said.

  Light speared into the night as a door opened on the second floor. Then Cole’s bulk blotted out most of it. He seemed to stagger on the landing of the outdoor stairwell, but then he caught himself and turned back to the door. A much smaller form stepped into the light. Sybil, wearing a transparent gown with nothing underneath. As she reached up to Cole’s neck with both arms, Waters cranked down his window and heard the tinkle of laughter. Cole bent and kissed her for a while, then slapped her on the rump and started down the steps. Sybil stood in the light, watching him go.

  “How can we be sure Mallory went into her?” Lily asked. “If the woman has to climax for the transfer to be made…”

  Waters had asked the same question that afternoon. Mallory had called and told him to come to Sybil’s house after midnight, where they would have their first celebration. When Waters asked how she could be sure the transference would happen the first time, Mallory had replied, If I were Cole, I might be worried. But I’m not, am I? Tonight will be the best sex Sybil ever had, and she’ll have no idea that it’s because I’m a woman.

  “You’ll have to say something to her,” Lily said. “See how she reacts. If she’s Mallory, you’ll know after the first few words. The second you do-shoot her.”

  The stately rumble of Cole’s Lincoln filled the night, and then the bluish glow of headlights arced into the dark from behind the apartment. Sybil remained on the landing, watching to be sure her lover made it to the street without difficulty. Cole must have been drinking after all. After a few moments, the Lincoln backed up, stopped, then shot forward on the little drive and rolled past the pile of tires, headed for North Union Street. Sybil waited until Cole made the turn, then closed her door.

  “Now we wait,” Lily said, glancing at her watch. “One hour.”

  Waters sighed and looked into the backseat at Annelise. An hour seemed an eternity when you were sitting on someone else’s property with a pistol under your seat. What if the owner had seen him pull in? What if the police had already been called to check out the suspicious vehicle?

  “Take it easy,” Lily said, laying her hand on his thigh. “We’re fine.”

  “I know.” But he didn’t feel fine. He had wanted to leave Lily at home with Annelise. Then his wife could swear that he had been home with her while the murder took place. But Lily had insisted on coming. Without her there, she feared, his nerve might fail. A moral man was bound to question himself during such a terrible act, perhaps even hesitate at the moment of truth. She wanted him to know she was absolutely committed to perpetrating this crime in order to save her family.

  Lily’s presence made their alibi more difficult to carry off, but Annelise would save them. Lily had put her to bed at home at her regular bedtime, but not before slipping a good dose of Benadryl into her Sprite. All Ana would remember in the morning was going to bed at the usual time in the usual way-nothing of a midnight truck ride and certainly nothing of a murder. Before leaving the house, Waters had also ordered a Pay-Per-View film on a satellite channel. The film lasted two and a half hours, and he and Lily had both seen it during its theatrical release. By the time it ended, they would be back home again, their work done.

  The wild card was Cole. Waters believed that once Cole was himself again, Lily’s story would make him see the necessity of what they had done, and that he would support whatever story they told him was required. But even if he didn’t believe them, what choice did he have? With Sybil dead, he would be in more desperate need of an alibi than anyone, and should he balk, they could easily frame him for her murder. All it would take was an anonymous call to the police. They would check Sybil’s
apartment for hair, fiber, and fingerprint evidence, and Sybil’s body for Cole’s semen. Cole rarely practiced safe sex with regular lovers. An anonymous tip would doom him as surely as Waters was doomed for Eve’s murder. Much easier for Cole to swear he had been watching a Pay-Per-View movie at Linton Hill with his friends while their daughter slept upstairs.

  Their only real problem was time. If Cole went to a bar now instead of going home to his empty house (Jenny had taken the kids to her mother’s in New Orleans), it would greatly complicate Cole’s alibi. But Waters had a plan for that too. A deep gully ran very close behind Sybil’s apartment. From his childhood, Waters remembered steep, heavily wooded banks along the edge of the ravine, and he had verified the accuracy of his memory during this afternoon’s ride, by traveling along a parallel street. If he dumped Sybil’s body down that kudzu-choked bank, it might be several days before she was found. Forty-eight hours, at the very least, unless animals dragged her body into the open. Fixing an exact time of death would be problematic at that point, even with the highly efficient methods of an FBI forensic unit.

  Lily touched his shoulder and pointed into the backseat at Annelise’s prone form. “She’s why we’re doing this,” she said softly.

  “I know that.”

  “I know it’s hard to wait. Think about something else.”

  “Like?”

  “The future. Life is going to be different after this.”

  He swallowed. “No doubt about that.”

  She leaned close so that he could see her eyes in the dark. “Not like that. Not bad. I’m going to start taking care of you again. No more distance. No more coldness. Life is too precious for that.”

  “You’re right. And we’re about to take it from someone.”

  Anger tightened Lily’s face. “Do you know what will happen if we don’t? Mallory will kill her anyway. If you spare Sybil now, with Mallory inside her, you’re not sparing her anything. It’s the same as letting a truck run over her. Mallory wouldn’t leave anything of her. She’d gradually devour her mind, like a swarm of locusts nibbling away.”

  “You’re right. I know you’re right.”

  He expected Sybil’s upstairs light to wink out, but it didn’t. He took this as a sign that Mallory had succeeded. If Sybil were still Sybil, and had just made love after a romantic dinner, he would expect her to be asleep by now. At least watching TV in her bed. But he didn’t see the flicker of a television through any of the windows. He had a feeling that Mallory was sitting in the silent house, waiting for him.

  “I’m going,” he said, reaching under the seat for the gun.

  “It hasn’t been an hour,” Lily protested.

  “I don’t care. I’m doing it now.”

  The gun felt cold in his hand. It was an old Smith amp; Wesson.38 Special that an uncle had given him when he was a teenager. His uncle bought it at a lodge auction, with no records of any kind made.

  Lily watched him check the cylinder. He had driven here with an empty chamber under the hammer, but now he took a shell from his pocket and filled it.

  “Here,” she said, dropping a pair of latex gloves in his lap. “Put these on.”

  “Where did you get those?”

  “My makeup box. They came with some hair coloring, but they’ll do the job.”

  The gloves were too small, but he pulled them on anyway.

  “Keep them on until you get back here. Someone might be able to take fingerprints from the inside of the latex.”

  Her attention to detail amazed him. He nodded, then reached for the door handle, but Lily grabbed his shoulder and peered urgently into his eyes.

  “Don’t think of her as Sybil. You have to see her as Mallory.”

  “I know.” He pulled the handle and kicked the stubborn old door loose from its frame. “When you hear the shot, start the motor.”

  “I love you, John. This is the only way.”

  He pulled himself free, opened the door, and climbed down from the truck. Despite his efforts to be quiet, the door screeched when he closed it. He winced but did not hesitate, running low and quick across the open ground to the first floor of the apartment.

  Through the nearest window, he saw a combination den/living room with a kitchenette against the far wall. A staircase went up one wall on the inside. Good. He reached down and tried the window. Locked. There were three more on the ground floor. He moved to the next one and pulled. The window shifted in its frame. Setting the pistol on the ground, he put both hands on the sash and pulled up with a steady pressure. The window gave and slid upward.

  In seconds he stood inside the dark room. He smelled vinegar. Probably some sort of salad dressing. Meat too. Glancing toward the kitchenette, he saw dirty plates with the remnants of rib-eye steaks on them. Sybil didn’t seem the type to leave dirty dishes out, and he took this as another sign that Mallory had succeeded.

  Drawing a deep breath, he moved to the staircase. The steps were carpeted, but he still put a foot on the second step and tested his weight. It didn’t creak. If Mallory was upstairs, there was no reason to be quiet, but he couldn’t shake the fear wrapped like tentacles around his heart. Gripping the gun with his finger on the trigger, he started up.

  Lily sat in the pickup, listening to Annelise breathing. Once, the respirations got so faint that she reached over the seat and put her hand on Ana’s chest to feel the reassuring rise and fall. For a few panicked seconds, she wondered if she had used too much Benadryl-then the inhalation came, weak but there.

  Where was John now? On the porch? In the apartment? She prayed that he had the nerve to go through with it. Her husband had great compassion; that was one reason she had married him. Now compassion was his enemy.

  “Hurry,” she murmured. “Don’t think. Just do it.”

  She had been sitting in the truck, and her eyes adjusted to the darkness. The cloak of night parted to reveal a yard with a swing set, seesaws, and a rose garden by Sybil’s apartment. Lily could imagine Sybil out there on Sunday mornings, alone, doing her best to make her apartment seem like a home. That simple thought pierced her heart, but she shut her mind to empathy. It wasn’t too difficult. All she had to do was focus on an image of herself dangling a butcher knife over her own daughter’s head. Superimposed on this horrifying scene was another: naked figures thrashing in ghostly green light, her own face clenched in ecstasy as she demeaned herself in ways that nauseated her now. Mallory Candler had done all that.

  Lily actually remembered Mallory from St. Stephens. Like Cole, Mallory had been a senior when Lily was in the ninth grade. Her clearest memory of Mallory was a tall, proud, and stunningly beautiful girl moving through the halls of the school, leaving a wake of staring boys behind her. Lily had been a gangly freshman then, obsessed with long-distance running, though in her secret heart she knew she used running as an excuse not to deal with her insecurity about boys. Someone like Mallory Candler was beyond her understanding, a girl so radiantly desirable that grown men fawned over her whenever she was around. Lily had once seen her own father become tongue-tied in Mallory’s presence. Having experienced that reality, it was hard to imagine Mallory as the obsessively jealous psychotic her husband described. Yet she knew it could be true. What would it feel like to be such a creature and be denied something after so many years of having everything?

  Lily went rigid, gooseflesh covering her skin, her eyes and ears alert. Something had snapped outside the truck. She didn’t think an animal had made the sound. A large deer perhaps, but she was downtown, and her senses told her it had taken more weight than that to produce the sound she’d heard. She peered toward the main house, then the apartment, but she saw nothing. What would she say if the owner of the house suddenly appeared at her window with a gun?

  Hi, I’m Lily Waters. My husband had to stop off and tell his receptionist something. I hope we didn’t scare you in this awful truck. John had to go out and check a leak at one of his wells on the river…

  “That’s exactly what I�
��ll say,” she whispered.

  And if a shot rang out while the owner stood there? What then? Would John have to kill him too?

  Yes, said a voice inside her. That’s what happens when you start this kind of madness….

  Annelise stirred in the backseat. Lily reached back and rubbed her shoulder, praying she would not wake.

  Halfway up Sybil’s stairs, Waters stood motionless against the wall. He had heard something. A groan or a snore, perhaps. But only one. He had to keep moving, yet something held him where he was.

  Go, he told himself. Don’t stop.

  But his feet remained still. The gun had felt so natural in the truck. Now he wanted to throw it on the floor. He knew what horror awaited him upstairs. That was how he thought of Mallory now-not as a person, but as a thing. There was no human pity in her, no real love. He had no choice but to go on. Yet the image of Sybil smiling in his office today would not leave him. So young, so trusting. She had trusted Cole Smith with her heart, which was the height of lunacy. But she was not the first young woman to do it.

  Waters shut his eyes and tried to visualize himself shooting her. If you can’t see it in your mind, you’ll never do it in life. A popular New Age platitude. And why should it be difficult? After all, he’d already killed one woman. At least his hands had killed her. But killing was not a thing of hands. It was a thing of the mind. Killing in cold blood demanded a cold mind. A gun made it easier, a matter of a momentary trigger pull rather than the eternity of crushing hands and bulging eyes it had taken to end Eve Sumner’s life. But for a man with a conscience, a single finger’s pull could be more difficult than lifting a mountain. Would shooting Sybil from behind make it easier? It seemed the act of a coward, but wouldn’t it be better for her if she never saw it coming?

  That’s how I’d want it, he thought. None of that life-passing-before-your-eyes bullshit. If you saw it coming, those last seconds could dilate into a lifetime of regret and self-recrimination. But with a bullet through the base of your brain, there would be none of that-no white light or angel choirs either-only instant and utter darkness.