Forest of the Mind (The Book of Terwilliger 1)

by Michael Stiles

  Tom glanced toward the building again and lowered his voice, but his fury was unabated. “You have no idea how important my job is. You don’t even know what my job is!”

  “Brainwashing people? Setting them up as killers so you and your friends don’t get your nice suits all bloody?”

  Tom turned and walked several paces away from Ed, then wheeled around to face him again. The earliest rays of the sun, just peeking over the horizon, made his livid face look like something straight out of hell. “Albert and I are trying to set things right!” he shouted. “You people have no idea of the necessity of what we do. You just live your lives, blissfully unaware, while we risk our lives to preserve this country against enemies that are trying to tear it apart.”

  “Risk your lives?” Ed replied incredulously.

  “Every damn time a bunch of peacenik hippies get together and hold a protest denouncing not only the war, but the whole American political system, do you think they stop to contemplate the fact that they’re free to criticize their government without being thrown in jail?” He pounded the roof of the car with his fist. “This country is free because men like Albert and I do what’s necessary to keep it that way. When frauds like Lyndon Johnson lead this nation in the wrong direction, or expose it to great risk, or allow the subversives to gain too much power, I do what I have to do to set things right. Johnson got off lucky; stepping back when he did. The others didn’t get it so easy. But make no mistake! If I have to see to it that every last Leftist radical is killed in order to restore this country to the great Republic it used to be, that’s what I’ll do.”

  “Oh, get off your high horse,” Ed scoffed. “How does killing people like Jim Morrison keep America safe?”

  The anger left Kajdas’ face in an instant, replaced by undisguised shock. “What on earth makes you think I’d want to do that?”

  Ed couldn’t very well tell him that he’d just seen Morrison’s murdered corpse in a vision. “Nathaniel told me,” he said.

  “He never said a word to you. I was right behind you the whole time.”

  “He didn’t talk to me that way. But he told me.”

  Tom gave him a doubtful look. “Bunch of nonsense; I don’t go after innocents. Politicians, sure. They’re fair game. But not musicians. As if you could call it music.”

  “You investigate them, don’t you? Keep records on them?”

  “Sure. These rock singers, they’re a barometer for society. If we know what they’re singing about and talking about, we can catch the first signs of impending trouble. Riots or revolution. But that’s a far cry from doing what you’re suggesting.” He shook his head in exaggerated disbelief. “Morrison—did you know he was arrested by the FBI earlier this year? No, you probably never heard. He turned himself in at the L.A. field office. Trial pending. If I had it in for him, wouldn’t I have taken care of him then? He’s not dead. How do you explain that, if I’m such a threat to him?”

  Ed didn’t know what to make of that.

  “Look,” Kajdas said, “it’s no secret the Bureau wants to keep an eye on those kinds of people. We watch them to see what kinds of messages they’re sending out to their fans through their music. I keep a list of the most influential ones. Bob Dylan is on it, and that Negro guitar player—what’s his name?”

  “Hendrix?” said Ed.

  “Right. Morrison, he’s number three. And that screamy girl, Janis Joplin. There’s about twenty in all. But it’s just a list of people we’re interested in. They’re not in any danger, at least not from us. If the drugs and venereal disease do them in, well, that’s not my problem.”

  Lies, of course. Ed was amazed, in a detached way, at how easily they rolled off of Tom’s tongue. Had anything Kajdas ever said to him been true? But he knew he would get nothing more out of Tom on the subject. There was something more important on Ed’s mind. “Nathaniel told me something else.”

  A car door slammed in the parking lot around the front of the building. The rim of the sun was now well above the horizon. Tom looked over toward the parking lot, where a few hospital employees were arriving to relieve the night staff. Only the farthest corner of the lot was visible from where they stood; no one could see them. “The day shift is coming in,” Tom said. “They’ll find the body soon.”

  “He told me why he killed Eleanor.”

  Kajdas turned back to face him, suddenly tense again. “What did he say?” He said this in a voice that was, for the first time Ed could remember, suddenly empty of his characteristic self-confidence.

  It seemed to Ed that this was a good moment to make use of his gun. He drew it and pointed it at the center of Tom’s chest, making sure to keep Kajdas between him and the rapidly-filling parking lot. “He said he was trained to kill. By you.”

  Tom took a step backward. “I didn’t—He wasn’t...” He looked up at the sky to collect his thoughts, and started over. “Nathaniel was supposed to help with an operation I was working on.”

  “The man from Texas.”

  “Yes. How did you—? I was ordered to... Nathaniel wasn’t supposed to go after an innocent girl. He just—I don’t know what went wrong. We wound him up and he went in the wrong direction. If I’d known what would happen to her, I never would have done it.”

  “Where did the order come from?”

  “Wensel gave me the order.”

  “I know that. I’m asking you―”

  “I don’t know who Albert reports to. I know who the Bureau says he reports to, but things work a little different for us. We don’t work for Mr. Hoover. I don’t know any more than that.”

  “You must have an idea.”

  Kajdas shrugged. “In my line of work, we don’t ask those kinds of questions. We were asked to try an experiment. Find a beggar on the streets, hypnotize him, train him to kill, and give him a target. Then let him find his own way. We opened a shelter and let them stay for free, and we evaluated them while they were staying there. One of them, Nathaniel Gannim—I don’t even know if that was his real name—he fit the profile we were looking for. Can you please put that away?”

  “I’m not done with it.”

  “Ed,” Tom said, insisting rather than imploring, “Ed, please. Think about what you’re doing. This is going to end badly for you.”

  “You killed her,” Ed growled.

  Tom was exasperatingly calm for someone with a gun pointed at his face. That made Ed’s blood boil as much as anything else. “I don’t know why he went off the track,” Kajdas said. “Nathaniel had his own reasons for deciding to kill her. He would have done that no matter what I―”

  Two years of living with Eleanor had trained Ed to manage his temper, and he prided himself on his ability to keep calm under most circumstances. But his self-discipline had been failing him quite often lately, and this time it all went out the window at once. With a cry of rage he lunged at Tom, swinging the gun at his face with all his strength. Kajdas raised his arm to fend off the blow, but not in time. The pistol caught him across the cheekbone, spinning his head around. Droplets of blood flew through the air, spattering Tom’s clean white shirt. He stood there a moment, staring at Ed confusedly, so Ed hit him again.

  “Christ!” Tom said after the second blow, and he gripped Ed’s shirt front to hold him at an arm’s length. They struggled for a time as Ed attempted to continue whacking him with the gun while Tom dodged the blows. Then Kajdas managed to shove him backward against the car, knocking the wind out of him, and attempted to grab the gun. Ed, unable to pull in a breath, cocked the weapon and pushed the barrel against Tom’s chest.

  “Okay,” Tom breathed. He let go of Ed’s shirt. “Okay.”

  “Open the trunk!” The words came out of Ed’s throat as a pitiful groan rather than a command, but Kajdas obeyed. “Get in.”

  Tom wiped a rivulet of blood from his cheek. “In?”

  Ed merely narrowed his eyes. Kajdas, deciding after all that Ed was not to be messed with at the moment, clambered into the trunk and cu
rled up. Ed slammed the lid twice as hard as necessary and heard a muffled grunt from inside. Then he sat on the bumper, carefully released the hammer and tucked the gun away, and tried catch his breath. Now that he had managed to lock a Federal agent in the trunk of a vehicle, it occurred to him he had no idea what to do.

  The next thing that occurred to him was that he had locked the keys in the trunk with Tom. This interfered with what little plan he had had up to that point, which involved using Tom’s car as his means of getting out of Bakersfield.

  He was still coming to grips with this new problem when he looked up and saw someone walking over from the front of the building. The lack of sleep was muddling his brain. He felt like he should do something—run away, perhaps. But exhaustion took over. He sat there listlessly on the bumper and watched the man approach.

  “Are you all right?” the man called as he came within earshot. He was nicely dressed in a shirt and tie—a doctor, maybe. He eyed Ed’s face with a look of concern. Ed wondered what he must look like after the scuffle. “I thought I heard something going on over here.”

  A soft but unmistakable thump came from the trunk of the car.

  “I’m fine,” Ed replied.

  There was another thump, and the man, still walking closer, craned his neck to look at the car. “Is somebody in there?” he said.

  “Yeah.”

  The doctor nodded as though this was nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps this sort of thing happened all the time at the mental hospital. “Want to let him out?”

  “No,” said Ed, “I just finished putting him in there.”

  “Tell you what,” the man said cheerfully, “I’m going to go inside for a minute, but I’ll come right back to check on you. Can you wait here?”

  “Okay.”

  The doctor walked quickly back toward the front of the hospital, and as he neared the corner of the building he broke into a run. He would likely come back in a minute with some security guards or burly nurses like the one who had pushed Ed’s wheelchair that day. Ed put his face in his hands, resolved to wait for the inevitable. It didn’t matter much anyway; he had accomplished as much as he could of what he’d intended to do.

  “Get up!” The voice startled Ed so much that he was on his feet before he knew it. He looked around for its source, but there was no one there other than Tom in the trunk. And the voice hadn’t been Tom’s. It sounded like—

  “Move!”

  —but that was impossible. Ed bent to peek under the car. There was no one there. “I thought I killed you.”

  “Run!”

  “No, I did. I shot you. You couldn’t have survived that.”

  It was standing on the ground on the other side of the car, flickering rapidly and glaring at him. When it spoke, it faded to near-invisibility with each word. Each effort to speak seemed to take nearly all of its strength. “Run.” It pointed toward a distant line of trees with its little ceramic finger. “Run!” Then it disappeared and didn’t return.

  “Great,” Ed muttered. “That’s just great.” Favoring his aching right leg, he set off in a shambling run toward the trees.

  42

  Under a Green Blanket

  There was a high chain-link fence at the edge of the property. Ed nearly ran right into it before he knew it was there. He looked up and cursed. There was barbed wire, three parallel strings of it mounted on brackets that angled inward along the top of the fence. Running along the fence, he looked for a spot where he might be able to go over or under it. Some fifty feet further along he found a promising corner where two sections of fence met at an oblique angle. The lowest of the strings of barbed wire had come loose and flopped down against the far side of the fence, leaving a gap between the top of the fence and the middle wire that Ed thought he could fit through.

  He glanced back toward the sprawling hospital complex. The loading dock and Tom’s car were no longer visible—he had gone almost a quarter of the way around the back of the hospital. No one had come after him yet, but he was in plain sight and doubted he would get very far once they saw which way he’d gone.

  He scrambled up the fence. The climbing was not very difficult, but once he reached the top he wasn’t sure what to do next. He kicked a few times, got one arm over the top of the fence, and then spent what felt like a full minute getting his right leg over. The gap between the top of the fence and the middle wire was narrow enough that he could feel the pricks of metal poking through his clothes.

  He paused, balanced on top of the fence, and listened. There were voices coming from just around the corner of the building. They were looking for him.

  Ed gave one more mighty kick with his left leg and felt himself slowly losing his balance as his center of gravity shifted. He tumbled to the ground and landed with a grunt that would have been comical under different circumstances.

  Four men in uniforms came into view. Ed ducked low and hurried to the thicket, which he hoped would hide him from view. He crept through to the other side and broke into a run—or something approximating a run, since his discussion with Tom and his encounter with the fence had left him with a pain in his ribs.

  There were houses a few hundred yards further on. He cut through a back yard, awakening a hideous little yappy dog that chased him halfway down the street before giving up on him. Ed took this opportunity to stop and breathe. Once he was reasonably certain he wasn’t going to drop dead on the spot, he continued on at a less ambitious pace until he found himself at a major road. If he could get someone to stop and give him a ride, maybe he could get a few miles away from where the police would be looking for him. Whether anyone would be foolish enough to stop for a hitchhiker less than a mile from a mental hospital was a question he put out of his mind.

  All of this appeared to be useless conjecture anyway, since there were no cars on the road. Ed stood at the curb and squinted into the sun, now well above the horizon, and wondered how long it would take them to start searching the neighborhood. It was already getting hot. He didn’t think he could run any farther.

  A throaty growling sound came from the west. A minute later a car came over the hill. An ancient yellow two-door Dodge, it puttered down the street with the gut-vibrating growl of a vehicle badly in need of muffler work. Ed ran out to the middle of the street waving his arms like a crazy fugitive, but the driver, squinting into the sun, didn’t see him until she was practically on top of him. The woman slammed on her brakes—too late—and swerved at the same moment that Ed attempted to leap out of the way, and the corner of the Dodge’s bumper clipped his leg and sent him tumbling across the pavement.

  “Oh my God, oh my God!” the driver cried as she flung her door open and ran over to where Ed lay, coughing dust out of his lungs and taking a survey of his bones to see what was broken. After a moment he sat up and decided he must not be hurt very bad; the car had been almost stopped by the time it made contact with him. But he was awfully sore.

  “Need a ride,” Ed managed between coughs. “Help me?”

  The woman got down on her knees, getting dust all over her white clothes. “Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “What the hell are you doing, running out in the street like that? You could’ve been killed.”

  “I need a ride,” he said again.

  “Come to work with me. I can get you some help. It’s just up the road.”

  Ed let her help him to his feet. Blood was oozing out of small gashes in the palms of his hands, which he dabbed gingerly on his jeans. He groaned as he eased himself into the passenger seat. The woman got back in and shifted into gear, which took a bit of wrestling with the shifter. The radio was playing a news broadcast about a huge fire that had destroyed a local Scientology church in Los Angeles. She turned it off. “You work nearby?” Ed asked.

  “At the hospital, right around the corner. We can get you cleaned up.”

  “No!” He tugged on the handle and opened his door, but the car was already in motion. He looke
d over at the woman helplessly. She looked back at him, wide-eyed, and pulled the car over again.

  “I know you!” she said. “Ed, isn’t it?”

  He had been so preoccupied with recent events that he hadn’t really taken a good look at her. He did so now, and was surprised to see that she was the nurse who had spent so much time with him during his recovery. It started with a G. Gifford. No, Gilmore. Nurse Gilmore.

  “Janice,” she said, holding out her hand. Ed looked down at it and then back up at her face.

  “My hands are all bloody.”

  She withdrew her hand. “What are you doing back here?”

  Ed considered and discarded several possible answers. A police car passed them, lights flashing but no siren. A few seconds later another one went by. Both cars turned left at the road, a few hundred yards ahead, that led back to the hospital. Janice watched them go, then looked back at him with one raised eyebrow.

  “Let’s find a place to talk,” she said.

  She drove to a diner a few blocks away, and they sat down in a booth with Ed’s back to the window. A grouchy waitress scowled at them when they ordered two cups of coffee, which she slapped down on the table almost hard enough to crack the cups. Ed sopped up the spillage with a couple of napkins.

  “Okay,” said Nurse Gilmore, getting down to business, “I have some questions for you. And don’t give me any bullshit, ’cause I’ll probably lose my job just for having this conversation with you. Right?”

  Ed sighed. “Okay.”

  “Why are you here? Did they readmit you?”

  “No. I had to see somebody.”

  “Who?”

  “His name is Nathaniel.”

  “Is he another one of Tom Kajdas’ people?”

  Ed looked up from his coffee. He hadn’t taken a sip yet; the smell was making him feel a little sick. “Tom has people?”

  Janice narrowed her eyes. “Some of the doctors take their orders from him.”

  “This guy wasn’t a doctor. He was a—a patient.” That didn’t seem like the right word.