by Paul Neuhaus
“That’s what I said!” Gasparyan blurted.
“Wait,” Evelyn said, scraping the remaining Dzash out of her bowl with her spoon. “Who’re you exactly? You’re the boyfriend? How’d you and Helen even meet?”
“We met like two blocks from here,” Gasparyan said, pointing to a place outside the building's walls we couldn’t see. “Helen’s car broke down. I stopped. The rest is history.”
Evelyn nodded. “Sexy, sexy history.”
Arsen blushed (which made me like him more). “Please don’t do that,” he said.
“Okay, hold up. So, Patrick found out about you two… That’s why Helen’s been locked up…”
“Afraid so,” Arsen said. “Believe me, I wouldn’t have—“
Evelyn held up a reassuring hand. “No one’s blaming you. It’s not your fault Patrick’s a psychopath.”
Tad remembered Patrick Dankworth had been his friend. He forgot everything else that was going on. “Hold up. In Patrick’s defense, there was the problem of marital infidelity.”
“Are you defending the guy who had your boyfriend murdered?” I asked him.
Tad’s shoulders sank. “I guess not, no.”
I turned to Evelyn. “Here’s the problem.” I said. “This place Helen’s in—Discovery Base—Tad says it’s got more security than most US military bases. We’ve got no way in, and the police won’t or can’t go anywhere near it. Not without some proof Helen’s in there.”
Evelyn turned to Albright. “Tad, do you think Helen’s in there?”
“I’d bet money on it, yeah.”
“Me too. What do you mean we’ve got no way in?” she said, turning to me.
I shrugged. “Do we look like The Dirty Dozen to you?”
“Maybe not,” Evelyn replied. “But we have something those guys—whoever they are—don’t...”
“What’s that?”
“The most famous man in the world. Who also is the most revered man in a cult. The cult that runs Discovery Base.”
A short time later, we were all in Arsen’s silver sedan headed toward the desert. Gasparyan and Albright were in the front seat, Evelyn and I were in the back. “Can I just say again what a terrible idea I think this is?”
“You said it already,” Tad said, looking over the seat at me. “Twice.”
“Three times,” Arsen and Evelyn said together.
We found out from Tad Destiny Base was in Riverside County, so Arsen put us on the 10 pointed east through Pasadena, West Covina, and Chino Hills. It was about an hour’s drive from Pepe Bell, and evening was settling in around us.
I didn’t care they were trying to keep me stifled. I was grumpy—for good reason; I thought. I started out addressing my comments to Evelyn, but I opened it up to the car at large as I spoke. “You’re so big on plans,” I said. “What is the plan here? What happens after Tad gets us past the gate? We say to the guy, ‘Hey can you point us to Helen Dankworth’s spider hole? We just wanna say, hi’. And what happens if Patrick’s out of custody? Which—if his lawyers are as good as they’re supposed to be—I can guarantee you he is. You think the guards won’t pick up the phone and say, ‘Hey, Pat… Funny thing: Tad Albright just showed up and he’s asking about your better half’? I’m assuming Concordance Security’s on full alert since Mr. Movie Star disappeared and since I turned Liam O'Connor into a cyclops. Nothing about this seems right. Like we’re a car full of knuckle-headed lambs headed for the slaughter.”
“No one said you had to come,” Tad said. “You coulda bailed and none of us would’ve thought any less of you.”
“I would’ve,” Arsen and Evelyn said together.
I really didn’t give a shit what any of them thought of me. That wasn’t what this was about. This was about being stupid, and I don’t enjoy being stupid if I can help it.
6 Extenuating Circumstances
The first time I woke up, I was in my driveway in Sherman Oaks. I was crawling toward the building. It was the deep blue of evening. I couldn’t feel my legs. I remember blanking out again—at least visually. I heard a clatter break out around me. I heard that clatter doppler in and out, fade up and fade down, combine with the voices and sounds in my head. It got to where I wasn’t sure which were which, my own head versus outside it. I heard one voice I recognized, a feminine voice, and latched onto it as a focal point. For a while, I thought it was my mother’s voice, but then I remembered she was dead. Was I dead too? There was no tunnel of light. There were no cheering throngs to meet me at the Pearly Gates. For the moment, my agnosticism was unchallenged. The fact I remembered a concept as esoteric as agnosticism was encouraging to me, though I could be sure of little else. I wasn’t even certain about the Sherman Oaks driveway. If that’s where I was, I sure as hell had no idea how I’d gotten there—or where I’d been prior to that. I knew I was badly hurt, but I was cut off from my pain centers. I knew I was badly disoriented, but since I was struggling with what proper orientation meant, I was okay with it.
I focused on the feminine voice and the echo-y sound of distant sirens.
The next time I woke up, I had bright lights in my eyes.
Painfully bright lights.
A small group of people were moving me from a cold gurney to a table. They were poking and prodding me. Lifting and arranging my limbs. I knew they were lifting and arranging my limbs because, for the first time in a while, I could feel my limbs. I could feel them and the news wasn’t good. My pain centers were active again. Way active.
The people crowded around me, speaking in urgent tones and wearing hospital blue.
The third time I woke up, I was partly back in charge of myself. I knew I was partly back in charge of myself because I could tell I was heavily drugged. I congratulated myself on my deductive reasoning. I could also tell I had a tube in my mouth and a network of wires and hoses going into not only my left arm but also my chest. Despite not having much energy, I panicked. The way everyone panics when they realize they’re in a situation not of their own making. I flailed and tried to make a sound. The room was nearly dark. The light came from the headboard of my bed. It was dim and yellow. Two hands came out of the murk, each one of them pressing down one of my shoulders. A voice—the same voice from the driveway—said, “Shhh, shhhh, shhh”.
I couldn’t speak. Not with the hardware in my mouth. I struggled to align and focus my eyes. I hadn’t used them in I don’t know how long. There was a face floating above mine.
A beautiful, worried face.
Time wasn’t relevant during that period. I spent most of it in a dream state. A fever dream state where aspects of my history and my vivid imagination warred with one another. I sweat whenever I slept. The way you sleep-sweat when you’re recovering from a virus. I woke up wet and bleary. I smacked my lips, realizing two things: I was thirsty, and the tube was out of my mouth.
I must’ve moaned without realizing it. The hands from before were on me again, one on my stomach, the other on my left bicep. I could connect the hands to the person they belonged to. That person’s head was no longer free-floating and gauzy. That person was Hailey.
I was wrong about her being beautiful.
She looked like shit. Her skin was shiny, her hair was fighting with itself over which direction it should go next. Underneath her eyes were deep purple bags.
But all of that was beautiful in its way. Beautiful because I knew what it meant. It meant I’d been in and out of danger for days, and Hailey hadn’t left me.
Hailey said, “Dennis…”
Someone out of my line of sight folded a magazine and dropped it onto a chair. That someone appeared on my right. It was Dennis Hill. He was grinning. “Hey, how you doing, Rambo?”
Hailey said “Dennis” again, but this time her voice was chiding.
Hill smiled at the former Mrs. Huggins. “I’m here to give our boy shit.” He turned his attention to me. “The next time you take on a private army of religious yahoos, let me know so I can block out more time in my sch
edule. For hospital visits. Do you know where you are?”
“Hospital,” I said, only certain of the answer because he’d just said it.
“That’s right. Do you know how long you’ve been here?”
I didn’t. Time still felt less concrete to me than it had before. I shook my head.
“A week,” Dennis said. “A week in and out. Touch and go. Do you know who found you? Do you know who’s been with you this whole time?”
I looked at Hailey. She didn’t nod or say anything. She wasn’t interested in acknowledgement or credit. Whatever she’d done, she’d done because she thought it was the right thing.
I started crying. And when I say “crying”, I don’t mean runny eyes, I mean full-on crying with deep, wracking sobs. Sobs that hurt my body.
Both Hailey and Dennis reacted quickly, doing their best to comfort me. Their kind reassurance didn’t break my bout of deep existential melancholy. The thing that did that was when Dennis said, “I’m gonna get the nurse. Get him some sedation.”
Unlike Joey Ramone, I didn’t want to be sedated. I’d had enough fugue states to last me for a while. I came back in halting gasps, tamping down the grief in fits and starts. “I’m okay, I’m okay, I’m okay,” I managed at last.
“Does he sound okay to you?” Hill said.
“Yes. Leave him be, Dennis. Skip the nurse.”
The cop grabbed my right hand and squeezed. “You alright, buddy?”
I nodded. I wanted to wipe the tears out of my eyes, but I had a visitor on each hand. I had to content myself to let the water just run away down my cheeks. I was feeling self-conscious, so I changed the subject. “What happened?” I managed at last.
Hailey and Dennis looked at one another. “Jeeze,” Dennis said. “I was hoping you could tell me. I know you went into the Concordance compound in Riverside, but what happened inside is a mystery. I know the airheads are mad as hornets and the Feds are beside themselves, wondering what to do about the whole mess.”
I looked at Hailey. “Randall?” I said. “Randall Dunphey?”
Hailey sighed. At that moment, I would’ve wagered she was even more exhausted than I was. “I’ve spoken to him,” she replied, her voice hoarse. “He’s fired.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” I said. “Don’t tell me that. That was the reason behind all of this. It was all so Randy wouldn’t lose his job.”
“I know, I know,” she said, rubbing my stomach. “Look, he’s not mad. He says he will come and see you. He wants to talk. He doesn’t blame you for what happened—especially with all the extenuating circumstances.”
I looked back and forth between the two of them. “I think maybe you better tell me about the extenuating circumstances.” I had a vague recollection now of the drive into Riverside—and of the three people I’d shared the car with. If Randall was out of a job, that meant Tad Albright hadn’t reported for work that Monday. If he was MIA, what had happened to Arsen Gasparyan and Evelyn, Helen Dankworth’s sister? Hell, for that matter, what’d happened to Helen Dankworth?
Dennis started to speak, and the door opened. Because of course the door opened.
A balding Pakistani entered the room. All of five foot nothing and crossed-eyed. He was wearing a white coat and carrying a metal-bound chart.
“Jack,” Hailey said. “This is Dr. Hank.”
I wanted to ask, “First name or last?”, but I held my tongue. Although the medic looked like an eighties sitcom character, he was probably the one that’d saved my bacon. I cut him some slack. “Heya, doc,” I said.
Dr. Hank’s grin was genuinely warm. “You wouldn’t believe how long I’ve been waiting to hear those words,” he said in a thickly accented voice. “Look at you… When you came in, you looked like chewed-up bubble gum. Now you only look like half-chewed-up bubble gum.”
Okay, the guy was growing on me. “I suspect that’s on account of you…”
He made a dismissive gesture with his hand. “I lose patients all the time. I’m incompetent,” he said.
We all knew he was bullshitting, but he was good at it, so we laughed. Yeah, I liked the guy alright.
Dennis gave my hand a squeeze and said, “I gotta get back to the grind. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
I really didn’t want him to go yet, but if I was being honest with myself, I’d probably already had about as much excitement as I could stand.
Before my friend left, he leaned in and whispered in my ear. “For real,” he said. “Hailey’s been here the whole time. Mrs. Hill offered to come in and relieve her, but she wouldn’t hear of it.”
Before I could reply, he patted my shoulder and was on his way.
Dr. Hank looked at my vitals and engaged Hailey and I in more light banter. He knew not to outstay his welcome, though and left us alone again shortly. When he was gone, Hailey got into bed with me and stretched out along my left side. She was asleep in seconds and I put my arm around her shoulders.
I let Hailey sleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. What had happened in Riverside? How had I gotten all the way back to my driveway in Sherman Oaks? Why couldn’t I remember? Amnesia was supposed to just be a trope in movies and video games, but I’d never encountered it in real life. I was a good detective, and I didn’t like not having all the fragments of my experience and observation at my disposal. A good bit of my job was laying down the incomplete puzzle and taking a high-angle view. This was the first time I could recall not being able to do that, and it caused a deep existential anxiety. I felt restrained—as if it were more just the tubes going into my body holding me in place.
The arm I had around Hailey was going to sleep, but I ignored it. Soon, it’d go beyond simple numbness into needles and pins, but that was a ways off. It was a ways off and I wanted Hailey to rest. I picked up the tubes leading into my torso and examined them as if I would understand what they did. I had no knowledge of medical technology or procedure, so it was an empty exercise. One tube had brown fluid flowing out of it. I could muster no thought more insightful than, Man, that’s gross, so I dropped the tubes and looked around me.
A typical hospital room in every way. Things on stands. Dim light. A machine with readouts but no sounds. A television hanging from the ceiling. The television seemed like a sure bet to get me the grounding I needed. Even some national news would give context. Unfortunately, Hailey had laid down on the remote and it was wedged between us. I tried fishing around in the tight crevice between our bodies, but it was a no-go. I was trapped in a hermetically sealed half-light with no stimulus beyond my beginning-to-ache arm.
I settled in and prepared for a couple of hours of discomfort. I also tried to be pragmatic. I decided it was better to be bored than dead.
The sunrise didn’t do much for the room. From a dark gray space, it went to a light gray space. Hailey only awoke again when Dennis returned. She sat up, rubbing her eyes and looking around blearily. I massaged the bicep she’d been laying on with my free hand. That entire arm would be numb for a while and there’d be no jumpstarting it. “Hailey,” I said. “I need you to do me a favor…”
“Yeah?” she said.
“I need you to go home. Get a shower and a change of clothes.”
She shook her head. “I’d rather stay here.”
“Okay, but I’d rather you go home and get a change of clothes and a shower. I think Dennis would too.”
Hailey looked at Dennis. Our mutual friend crinkled up his nose and said, “No offense, Hail, but you smell like a water buffalo. I can hang with him for a little while. Plus, there’s the man on the door.”
That caused me to raise one eyebrow. “There’s a man on the door?”
Hill nodded. “Has been since day one. Extenuating circumstances…”
Hailey gathered up a few things and made for the exit. “Okay,” she said. “I’m sorry I was offending your delicate sensibilities. I’ll come back as soon as I can.”
“Don’t hurry. Take the scenic route. Stop at Fatburger on the way back.”
“No, I want you to have Fatburger. If you’ve taken all your meals in the hospital, you’re probably ready for some food with, you know, flavor.”
She nodded and headed for the door. Before she opened it, she dashed back, gave me a hug then left again.
After I was sure she was out of earshot, I said, “You know, here lately, I’ve become more and more aware of how broken I am. It’s got me thinking… If I’m broken, what does that make Hailey?”
Hill’s brow furrowed and his face flushed. He pulled over a chair and sat down next to my bed. “If by you’re broken, you mean ‘I’m an uncharitable little shit’ then I think you’re on to something.”
It was charming he came so quickly to Hailey’s defense, but he’d misread me—at least I think he had. “Don’t get me wrong… I’m trying to figure out why a woman with so much on the ball otherwise would stay so devoted to your’s truly.”
My friend’s brow unfurrowed. “That’s a better way of framing it. We’ll see if Marjory can slot her in.” Dennis’ wife was a therapist. In the prison system. With Hailey’s honor defended, he changed gears by holding up a manilla envelope. “I figured you’d be ready to talk business today…”
“Yer goddam right,” I said, reaching for the envelope. “My recovery just downshifted into the Cabin Fever phase.”
Hill snatched the envelope back. “Ah-ah. We do this my way. It’s too much to take all at once.”
“That’s what she said.”
He rolled his eyes and opened the manilla, sliding out a stack of papers. “Look,” he said. “Let’s start with the gruesome one and get it out of the way, okay?”
I nodded, suddenly dreading whatever it was he might have. He turned around an eight by ten and handed it to me. It was a color photo of a man lying in a drainage ditch. A dead man beaten almost beyond recognition. Almost. The man was Arsen Gasparyan. Behind him, slightly out of focus, were the stripped remains of his silver sedan. I closed my eyes. The way you do when someone you were acquainted with cashes out early. “You’ve got a positive I.D. I take it?”
