“Jesus.”
“I’ll be in a black-and-white pulled over to the side on Oakton. Do you understand?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“I need you to bring a few things: something I can wear, jeans, a T-shirt, anything. And your insurance card, and your IDs with your maiden name on them.”
“Okay—um—”
“Go there now, Chloe! Now!”
Hypovolemic shock is a tricky thing. The state of physical collapse caused by a person losing more than one-fifth of their total blood volume, it manifests itself first as clammy skin, a feeble pulse, and too-rapid heartbeat. But these symptoms are subtle, and are complicated by similar symptoms brought on by panic reactions in the midst of profuse bleeding. A person who is going into hypovolemic shock may not know it until it is too late. The body will simply shut down. In other words, it simply bleeds out.
Frank was flirting with the edges of hypovolemic shock when his ex-wife arrived with the duffel bag. Her whippet-thin body bundled in a yellow rain slicker, her streaked blonde hair looking like a wet rat, Chloe Driscoll took one look at Frank through the car window and went as white as skim milk. He had pieces of his bloody shirttail wound around his wrists, and his breathing was labored. He assured her that he would explain everything once they had stopped the bleeding and gotten him back on track. He told her exactly what he needed her to do. Chloe listened intently while she worked him out of the bloody togs and into a waterproof windbreaker, T-shirt and khakis that she had brought from her attic.
Then she quickly ushered him through the rain and into the ER pedestrian entrance.
A third-year resident happened to be walking past reception when Frank came shuffling in. The doctor quickly called for a triage nurse and rolled Frank into the first available trauma room.
The fluorescent light shrieked down at Frank while they worked on him. The doctor cleaned and examined Frank’s wrists, then put pressure bandages on the wounds while the nurse started an IV push. They took his vitals, and they did a type and cross-match. The noise was like a metallic carnival in Frank’s head. His blood pressure was borderline, and his heart was speeding along at 140 bpm. The doctor decided to transfuse a few units of whole blood into Frank just to be safe, and keep his vitals monitored until he was out of the woods. Frank fought to stay alert while they sewed him up with dissolving ligatures. The final tally was forty-six stitches—eighteen on one wrist, twenty-eight on the other.
While all this was going on, Chloe was out in reception, feeding a bunch of lies into the system. She told them Frank’s name was David Driscoll, and she gave them a bunch of bogus background on him, and she put everything on her own insurance card.
It was a lucky break that it was such a slow night in the ER: the whole process took less than a half an hour.
“I’m scared shitless, Frank,” Chloe whispered at him in the recovery area after the nurse had pulled a privacy curtain around Frank’s gurney.
“Keep your voice down, please,” Frank said. He was sitting up against the inclined backrest, his wrists thickly bandaged. An IV drip was still connected to him, the soft pulse of the cardio monitor next to the bed. His vision smeared and unfocused, his head full of cotton, Frank was so woozy now he felt almost buoyant.
“They’re sending a shrink down here to talk to you,” Chloe whispered. “From the psych ward.”
Frank looked down at the IV puncture above the knuckles of his right hand. He had never removed one from his own body before, but he had seen the EMT’s do it many times. “I’ll be long gone before he gets here,” he murmured.
Chloe grabbed his arm. “Are you gonna tell me what’s going on, or do I have to read about it tomorrow in the papers?”
“Calm down, Chloe.”
“Calm down? Calm down? Are you serious?”
Frank gave her a hard look. “I’m in trouble, Chloe. I’m being framed. That’s all I can tell you. I didn’t kill my brother.”
Chloe put her hand to her mouth, looking away, her eyes wet all of a sudden. “I heard about Kyle.”
Frank swallowed a twinge of agony. “I’m gonna find out who did it.”
“Who’s framing you, Frank?”
“I think Henry Pope has something to do with it.”
Chloe looked at him. “Who?”
“Pope, the shrink at Area Six.”
“The stress management guy?”
Frank nodded. “I need time to figure it out.”
“Why would he frame you?”
“Maybe he’s protecting somebody. I don’t know. I’m going to find out.”
“But why you?”
“Because—I don’t know—because I’m frameable.”
She sighed nervously, glancing at the edge of the curtain. “You’re frameable because of what? Your problems?” She looked back at him, a weird shimmer of emotion in her eyes. “Because of your history?”
Frank felt a tug of regret. “Chloe, I never meant to—”
“Don’t,” she said suddenly. “I don’t want to go back down that road. Not right now.”
“I was a nightmare to live with; I realize that.”
“Frank, please—”
“All I’m saying is, I’m sorry I made it so difficult for you.” His eyes were welling up. There was a lump in his throat. “You tried to make it work.”
Chloe was looking away, saying nothing.
“I really am sorry, Chloe,” Frank added softly before his voice broke.
She leaned closer, reaching out and touching his hair. “I know, Frank.”
He touched her hand. “It was never you.”
“Frank—”
“No, I’m serious.” He looked at his bandaged wrists. “I wasn’t ready to be married.”
She shrugged. “Who knows why things fall apart.”
Frank looked at her, a tear rolling down his cheek. “I really blew it, Chloe.” He closed his eyes and let the grief shudder through him. “My brother’s gone,” he uttered in a strangled whisper.
Chloe leaned down and put her arms around him. “I’m so sorry, Frank.”
Frank sobbed in her arms for a moment, the pain seeping out of every pore.
A few moments passed. Outside the curtain: amplified voices, crepe-soled shoes squeaking on the tiles.
Finally Chloe glanced down at his bandages. “Why would you do something like that, Frank?” She gently ran a slender fingertip along his self-inflicted wounds. “Why would you do that?”
He looked down at his bandages. “Funny thing is, I didn’t do it.”
She wiped her eyes, then gave him a quizzical look. “What do you mean?”
“It happened while I was in a blackout.” He wiped his face with the back of his hand. “I would never try to kill myself. Not consciously, at least.”
“Jesus, Frank.”
“I know,” he sighed, lying back on the gurney, closing his eyes.
“You’re exhausted.”
“Tell me about it.”
“You need some sleep,” she said.
Frank shivered suddenly, a cold finger running down his spine.
Something sparked in his midbrain like a snippet of static electricity, a single frame of a motion picture running too fast through a projector, flashing shards of images across Frank’s mind-screen: the bloody blade of a carving knife.
Frank sat up and looked at her. “What did you say?”
“What?” Chloe looked puzzled.
“Just now. What did you just say?”
She shrugged. “I said—um—what?—you look like you need some sleep?”
Frank froze for a moment, the vague sensation of biting too hard on an ice cube throbbing at his temples. Something was sizzling in the back of his brain like an electrical terminal arcing, and all at once, a series of synapses were firing inside him, and he was stricken with a realization. He tried to speak, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Frank, you’re scaring me—what’s the matter?” Chloe was staring at him.
/> “‘You need some sleep,’” Frank murmured, hardly aware that he had spoken.
“What?!” Chloe said.
Frank didn’t reply. He was rigid against the backrest, caught in the grip of a revelation, a surreal revelation. It was like stepping back from an enormous, abstract mural done in the pointillist style, which at first appears as a wash of tiny, meaningless colored dots, but begins to take shape the further away one goes. Soon Frank saw the whole puzzle stitched together in his mind. “‘You need some sleep,’” he repeated under his breath.
Suddenly, in one terrible flood of recognition, it all struck him at once.
“My God,” he uttered in a voice barely above a whisper. “My God, my God, my God—”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
“What? What is it, Frank?” Chloe’s eyes were big and filled with dread.
The revelation slammed down on Frank like a hatchet cleaving through his skull. Pain erupted in his head, throbbing in his wrists, shooting down his spine. He was like a computer overloading. He saw stars, and his guts clenched up, and he had to hold onto the guardrail just to steady himself. “That’s what Pope said,” he uttered breathlessly.
“Who?”
“Pope—Pope!—the shrink, the police shrink! That’s what he said to me—”
“I don’t understand what you’re—”
“He said it to me in the van, and he said it at the hospital! He said it over the phone!”
“So?”
“He said I could use some sleep, and I thought I was just hallucinating!” Frank reached over and lowered the railing, then sat up on the edge of the bed. “I gotta get outta here, I gotta get outta here right now.”
“What’s going on, Frank? I don’t get it.”
“That’s how he’s been doing it!” Frank said, grabbing her arm, his IV stand jiggling. “It’s goddamn Pope, it’s him, it’s Pope! I know how he’s been doing it!”
“Doing what?”
“Making all the—”
Frank abruptly froze up, his words catching in his throat. A noise was echoing down the hallway, raising the hackles on the back of his neck. Heavy footsteps were coming, slowly, deliberately toward his cubicle.
“Frank, what are you doing?! Frank?!” Chloe was backing away.
Frank was detaching his IV drip, unscrewing the tube from the needle puncture, leaving the collar taped to his arm. “I need you to do one more thing for me,” he whispered, climbing out of the gurney.
He dropped to the floor, lowering into a crouch, the tiles cool on the soles of his bare feet. His head spun wildly, his vision blurring, his balance compromised from the blood loss.
“You’re leaving?” Chloe said.
“I have to get outta here, Chloe,” Frank said, searching for his shoes.
“What do I tell the shrink?”
“Tell him whatever—tell him you went to the bathroom, came back and I was gone,” Frank said, finding his shoes, slipping his feet into them, then buckling his pants, and staring at the thin cotton chiffon of the privacy curtain. “I need you to find that small anvil trunk in the attic for me, okay? Can you do that for me?”
Chloe chewed on her lip, glancing over her shoulder.
“Chloe, come on, come on!” Frank was getting frantic, his flesh crawling. He pulled on his windbreaker.
The ponderous footsteps were approaching, but these were no ordinary footsteps. These were huge wooden pilings being driven into the floor, the footsteps of a giant, vibrating the very foundation, shaking IV bottles and instrument trays. They were about fifteen or twenty feet away now, and they were coming down the aisle with such casual purpose, such indifference, they seemed like a force of nature.
Frank recognized these footsteps as a dog recognizes an ultra-sonic whistle.
“Small trunk? The one with all the tax stuff in it?” Chloe was saying.
“No, no, no—the small black one—the hard one—the one with the metal corners.”
“Why in God’s name—?”
“Chloe, just do it!” Frank hissed, squeezing her arm. A shadow was climbing up the curtain. A familiar figure silhouetted by the fluorescent light.
“Okay, okay, the black trunk,” Chloe was whispering. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“I want you to drop it off for me,” Frank said, then hurried around the gurney to the opposite side of the curtain.
He glanced through a narrow gap in the curtain and saw the back corridor bathed in jaundiced light, crowded with idle equipment. The recovery room looked fairly deserted: a half a dozen other empty cubicles, a row of gurneys lined up against the wall like a used car lot.
“Where, Frank? Where?”
He turned and saw the shadow rising up as big as the Golem against the thin curtain. “Corner of Kedzie and Foster,” he whispered furiously, “near North Park, there’s a footbridge across the river. Put it under the south entrance. Okay? You got that? The Foster side, under the bridge. Okay?”
Chloe nodded.
The curtain shivered—
—and Frank whirled around and slipped out the rear of the cubicle.
The voice came from long ago and far away—yet sounded as clear and articulate as someone whispering into Frank’s ear, directly into his auditory canal, straight down into his nervous system. The voice was deep and rich and authoritative in its stentorian baritone, a booming, modulated clarion that cast out at Frank like a gigantic bell: FRANK JANUS!—HALT!!
Startled by the voice, Frank slipped on a wet tile and tumbled to the floor.
He landed on his side, a fist of pain hitting the bridge of his nose, sending stars across his line of vision. He slammed into an equipment cart, sending a portable EEG, three IV stands and several coils of cable careening to the floor. A specimen bottle shattered.
He struggled back to his feet immediately, hurling himself toward the exit.
Ahead of him the corridor seemed to stretch like taffy, the dirty tile flowing under him, the green light forming a tunnel around him. His legs were moving in slow motion. He could hear the whisking sound of iron slipping out of a leather holster behind him, the telltale metallic CLICK! of a hammer being pulled back on a service revolver.
He didn’t want to look back over his shoulder but he couldn’t stop himself.
They were emerging from the gap in the curtain like huge, dark blue sharks breaking the surface of the ocean, throwing a wake of thin fabric on either side, their broad shoulders the size of steamer trunks, their uniforms gleaming in the sick green light. They came toward him, marching in lockstep, their faces obscured in the shadows beneath the brims of their hats.
Frank turned and raced toward the end of the corridor, terror shrieking in his brain.
He could see the exit ahead of him, about ten feet away, an illusion of sorts, so close, yet so far out of his grasp. It was a huge gray door marked EMERGENCY EXIT in red letters, and it had a metal bar across it, the words ALARM WILL SOUND, stamped in the metal.
If Frank could only make it through this door without being captured by the monsters in blue.
“HALT, FRANK!” one of them cried, drawing a gigantic service revolver, his voice like a battering ram. The other one pulled a huge black baton.
Frank lunged at the door, head lowered, forearms up like a football lineman.
He smashed into the metal release bar, and the door sprung open with loud iron clang.
Frank hurtled across a small landing, then fell headlong down a short flight of stairs. A loud warning buzzer erupted in the still air, filling the stairwell with a sharp, keening tone as Frank hit the bottom step, then slid across another landing, crashing hard into the wall.
Pain blasted through Frank’s pelvis and lower back, several of his stitches ripping open, but he was driven by terror now, an engine chugging toward one inexorable purpose, and he managed to climb back to his feet.
He crabbed down the remaining steps toward the outer emergency door.
Behind him, the sleep police w
ere coming down the stairs. Broad shoulders churning, boots crashing down the steps, both of them were running now. Their shadowy faces were either grimacing or grinning—it was hard to see anything in the darkness under their hat brims other than a couple of crescents of sharp white teeth.
At the bottom the staircase, Frank shoved the doors open and stumbled out into the dark alley behind the hospital, the door slamming shut behind him.
The sky seemed to bellow at him as he staggered through the rain. Thunder laughed uproariously in his face, the lightning giggling at him. He raced toward the mouth of the alley, his brain blazing.
Within moments, he had escaped into the night.
“My husband’s going through a difficult time,” Chloe was saying, standing outside the curtained cubicle. The emergency alarm had just mercifully shut off. Chloe was trying to control her shaking by keeping her skinny arms folded across her chest, but she had a feeling she wasn’t fooling anyone. She was dying for a cigarette.
“We’ll have to fill out a report,” the little shrink in the crew-neck sweater was saying. He was an officious little twit, and Chloe loathed him immediately. “And we’ll have to file a copy with the police,” he added.
“I don’t know why he took off like that,” Chloe said, her nervous gaze drifting over her shoulder toward the overturned equipment cart.
“Does your husband have a history of this kind of behavior?” the twit doctor was asking, writing something on his metal clipboard.
“Do we have to bring the police into this?” Chloe said suddenly.
“I’m afraid so, Ms. Driscoll.”
“My husband’s a law-abiding citizen,” Chloe said, marveling at the spontaneous bullshit coming out of her mouth. She had no idea what she was supposed to say. She wondered if the shrink could see her trembling.
The shrink started to say something else when the sound of sneakers squeaking on the tile floor cut him off.
A pair of orderlies was returning from the stairwell at the end of the corridor. They were stepping over the fallen medical gear and broken glass, shaking their heads in dismay. The one on the left was a middle-aged, balding black man dressed in hospital greens with a tuft of gray hair around his skull like a cottony halo. The one on the right was a younger man with terrible acne, also dressed in drab green togs. They both wore chagrinned expressions.
The Sleep Police Page 15
