“We’re going upstairs?” Pope said, the alarm bright and shimmery in his eyes.
“Nobody needs to get hurt,” Frank reiterated.
“My wife’s a light sleeper.”
“Nobody else needs to get involved,” Frank said. “I just want to make sure the baby is safe.”
The doctor looked at him for a moment. “Okay, Frank, fine, let’s do that.”
“Go ahead, Doc.”
The child stirred suddenly in the doctor’s arms, its tiny lips pursing and suckling. Pope gazed down at the baby and said very softly, “If the child comes awake, Frank, her mother will be up in a second.”
“I give you my word I won’t hurt anybody.”
Pope looked up at Frank and nodded sheepishly. “Fair enough, Frank.”
“I’m going to need you to get moving, Doc,” Frank said, allowing just a trace of urgency to seep into his voice. He could sense his time ticking away with every low rattle of thunder outside.
What a shame it would be to blow it now, here in Pope’s house, especially after all bullets—both symbolic and literal—that Frank had dodged over the last forty-five minutes. Especially after making it through the netherworld of the sewer system, and then managing to get all the way over to Kyle’s faculty office at Loyola without getting nailed, and then managing to get into the office without setting off any alarms. And even then, it was a miracle that Frank’s old uniform had fit him so well, right down to the old radio mike he used to carry clipped to his shoulder. The trunk had been full of old threadbare memories, but thank God the moths had not yet gotten to his old patrol uniform.
“Okay, Frank, I’m going,” the doctor said finally, and started across the kitchen.
They made their way across the living room, and past Mary Ann Pope’s elaborate dining table. Candlesticks and Waterford crystal gleamed in the darkness. The air smelled of potpourri and lemon wax.
Frank kept the gun at waist level, holding it as discreetly as possible on the doctor in case one of the other uniforms surveilling the place happened to look in a window. They reached the staircase.
“The baby’s in the guest room at the top of the stairs,” Pope whispered.
“After you, Doc.”
They started up the carpeted steps.
Lightning flickered through the front drapes, hitting a chandelier at the top of the stairs, reflecting tiny spangles of light on the walls. Frank blinked away the fatigue, wiping his eyes with his free hand. He felt sick, yet energized by the tension. The tension was good. The tension was working in his favor.
“How are you feeling, Frank?” Pope asked in a low, gentle voice as he ascended the steps. Frank could see the back of the doctor’s head, the dim light accentuating the downy tufts of gray fuzz around his ears.
“Doc, if you could just stay quiet for next few minutes,” Frank whispered, “I’d really appreciate it.”
They reached the top of the stairs.
The second floor hallway was tastefully decorated, and also shrouded in shadows. The door to the baby’s room was closed, and Pope paused outside it. Frank shot a hand up, silencing him. Then Frank indicated that he would open the door. Thunder boomed outside, and Frank cringed. Every single creak, every footstep, every squeaking floorboard was lessening his odds of getting out of here without a firefight.
Reaching down and very carefully turning the doorknob, Frank opened the door and nodded at Pope.
Pope carried the child into the darkness of the room, over to a corner crib, and gently laid her down. It was one of those fold-up travel cribs with the plastic padding and metal frame. The baby settled into a corner with her thumb in her mouth. Pope sighed.
Out in the hallway, Frank heard a noise.
“What’s going on?!”
The voice was like an icicle stabbed between Frank’s shoulder blades.
Frank whirled and saw the middle-aged woman in a silk robe standing outside her bedroom door, about ten feet away, ringing her hands. Her eyes were taking everything in all at once, and they glinted with anger. “I thought you people were going to stay outside,” Mary Ann Pope said.
Frank let the gun fall to his side, out of the woman’s line of vision. “Yes ma’am,” he muttered, scrambling for words, searching for the appropriate response.
Henry Pope materialized in the guest room doorway, his crooked finger pressed against his lips. “Ssshhhh—honey, please,” he whispered. “I just got the baby to sleep.”
“What the hell is going on?” the matriarch demanded.
“Mrs. Pope—” Frank started.
“Honey,” the doctor jumped in. “This fine young man just needs to go over some things, security stuff.”
“At 5:30 in the morning?”
Pope nodded, and told her it was safer that way.
“Oh, stop it,” Mary Ann Pope said, waving the notion off like a bad smell.
“Honey, please,” the doctor pleaded.
“No, damnit, I’ve had it up to here with this disruptive nonsense. It’s one thing to post guards in front of the house, but this is ridiculous.”
Pope let out a nervous sigh.
Frank’s heart was racing. His hands were tingling. An idea was worming its way into his consciousness. “Actually, ma’am, what we’re going to need to do is borrow your husband for a few minutes.”
“Borrow him?”
“That’s correct, ma’am.” Frank gave her a terse smile. “No big deal, just another briefing down at the Twenty-fourth on this Frank Janus situation.”
Frank was edging closer to Pope, pushing the .38 against the old man’s leg, pressing the tiny metal sighting notch against Pope’s thigh just to drive home the point.
“Honey, look,” Pope said softly, looking the woman square in the eyes, “I realize I’m putting you through the wringer here, but this guy Janus was one of mine. And this is a bad one. The worst ever.”
An intense pause. Mary Ann Pope’s lined face in the dim light: world-weary eyes staring at her husband, turning things over in her mind.
“It won’t take long at all,” Pope added. “I’ll be back before anybody’s up.”
Another anguished pause.
Thunder rolled outside, and finally Mary Ann Pope pulled her robe tighter. “You’re telling me this nonsense is absolutely necessary?”
“I’m afraid it is, ma’am,” Frank told her. “In fact, I’m going to need your help.”
“My help?”
Frank could feel Pope’s urgent stare on the side of his face. The corridor felt narrower. The tension was squeezing Frank’s chest. “If it’s not too much trouble,” he said, “I’m going to need one of your raincoats, maybe a scarf or a hat, for the doctor to wear.”
The woman stared incredulously. “You want one of my raincoats for Henry?” The lines around her mouth deepened for a moment, her dishwater eyes narrowing. This was a woman who had suffered every kind of foolishness known to man.
Frank started to say, “The idea is to—”
“Is something wrong?”
Another voice came from across the hall, to Frank’s immediate left, and Frank whirled toward it. Another woman was standing in the dim light of another bedroom doorway. Thirty-ish, long, brown hair, oversized Chicago Bears T-shirt, she was probably the mother of the baby.
“It’s nothing, sweetheart,” Pope was saying, carefully closing the guest room door. “Mary Elizabeth is fine, sawing logs like good little squirt.”
“I heard voices,” the woman said, giving Frank a suspicious glance.
“Everything’s fine, ma’am,” Frank said, managing his officious smile. Inside he was seething with panic, his pulse thumping in his ears. He had to get the doctor out of there soon, before the whole house of cards came tumbling down. The only thing Frank had going for him was unpredictability. He knew the doctor didn’t want to involve his family in the machinations of a crazy man.
“They’re taking your father away again,” Mary Ann Pope informed her.
�
��They’re what?”
“It’s just a routine trip down to headquarters,” Frank said, then looked at Mary Ann Pope. “The only thing is, we need to sneak him out the back way in case there’s any danger.”
“What do you mean by danger?” she asked.
“Well—” Frank began.
“Darling, please!”
The doctor’s voice woke everybody up, the sudden display of nerves like a cold shower. Frank wondered if Pope was losing his composure.
Pope glowered at his wife. “Find something I can wear, and let’s get this thing over with!”
Mary Ann Pope stared at her husband for a moment, then turned in a huff and swished back into her bedroom.
Pope turned to his daughter. “You go back to sleep, Sarah, go on.”
“But Daddy—”
“Mary Elizabeth’s fine, sweetheart.”
The woman in the T-shirt let out a strained sigh, then retreated to her room. The door closed behind her with a resounding click.
Anguished silence returned to the hallway.
Pope said under his breath, “I don’t suppose you’re going to tell me where you’re taking me.”
“Somewhere quiet, where we can talk.”
“How are you possibly going to get past the black-and-whites downstairs?”
“Don’t worry about that, Doc.”
“I’m not worrying, I’m just saying—”
“Just keep playing along, and we’ll be outta here before you know it.”
“Why are you doing this, Frank?”
Frank looked at Pope’s gray face. “That’s exactly what I’m going to find out.”
Pope started to say something else when the matriarch suddenly emerged from the bedroom with her arms full of navy blue nylon and pink chiffon.
“I guess you can go ahead and rip these to shreds,” she said, offering the fabric to Frank.
Frank didn’t even have to look at them. “Excellent, thank you.”
Frank looked at the doctor, something unspoken passing between the two men.
Inside Frank, a clock was ticking.
PART IV
THE CLASSROOM OF BROKEN GLASS
“Strange, is it not? That of the myriads who
Before us passed the door of darkness through,
Not one returns to tell us of the road,
Which to discover we must travel too.”
— Omar Khayyam, Rubaiyat
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
At precisely 5:37 AM, a uniformed officer and a stooped figure in a woman’s navy blue raincoat emerged from the basement door of the Victorian two-story on Isabella Street.
The officer had his arm around the figure, and they climbed the mortar steps toward ground level with a brisk sort of purpose. The officer was careful to keep low, yanking his hostage along a row of large hemlocks bordering the side yard, avoiding the sight lines of the other cops in front.
The cop and the figure made their way across the slick grass and through the neighbor’s gate. From this point, they proceeded along the neighbor’s back fence and out the other side, shielding their faces from the rain.
They reached Fee Street, and caught the attention of the unmarked squad sitting under a streetlamp at the corner.
The two detectives inside the unmarked Ford simultaneously glanced up from their card game. One of them rhetorically asked what the fuck was going on, and then wiped the condensation from the windshield, squinting to see through the pre-dawn squalls. The other detective flipped on a searchlight, which was mounted near the side mirror, and swept the beam through the storm.
The light landed on the retreating uniform and the figure in the raincoat.
Frank Janus never broke his stride. He just waved at the unmarked squad with the kind of studied nonchalance that most cops acquire over many years on the job, and then he pointed at the doctor and made a quick gesture with his hand—
—because there’s a gesture known only among street cops, a sort of circular “winding” movement of the hand, with the index finger pointed upward. It’s the same sort of gesture that television floor-directors give their on-camera talent when something is running too long, meaning “wind it up,” but to cops, it means something quite different. Cops have many such gestures, but this one is a classic. It means, “I got this character under control, so don’t worry, I’m going to take care of it.”
The two detectives recognized the signal immediately and flashed their headlamps twice.
Frank threw a nod over his shoulder as he ushered the psychiatrist across Fee Street and down the sidewalk. It took about a minute and a half in the rain. Frank hurried the doctor through the gates of Riverlook Estates, then into the forest preserve that ran along the border of Sheridan Road and the lakefront.
The plan had worked.
It took the two detectives several minutes to realize something was off the beam, and several more minutes to radio back to one of the squads in front of the Pope place. The problem was, the other uniforms were all inside the house by that point, getting their asses chewed off by a livid Mary Ann Pope. And when the detectives finally learned what was going on, all hell had broken loose.
The two detectives made a valiant effort to save the day, hastily following Frank’s trail into the forest preserve, but it was too late.
By the time the detectives reached the tree line, Frank and Dr. Pope had already reached the Linden Avenue ‘El’ stop and were boarding the last train of the graveyard shift.
“After you, Doc—come on—down the steps.”
Frank was standing in the rain near a kiosk of graffiti-stained cement where an iron staircase descended into deeper shadows. His Colt was partially obscured under the hem of his uniform, and his heart was pounding. Pope was pausing on the first step, reluctant to go any further, still in his wife’s raincoat. The psychiatrist was soaked through to the skin, his gray hair pasted to his skull under his scarf, his pouchy eyes red from the wind.
“What is this place, Frank?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know,” Frank said, wiping his face with his free hand. “You know everything else about me.”
Thunder droned in the distance like a tired old man clearing his throat. The sky was the color of nicotine. The dawn had barely made a dent in the night, and the light was now a filthy shade of gray.
“I’m too old and too wet for games, Frank,” the doctor said.
“Come on, Doc—down the steps,” Frank said, then nudged Pope in the kidney.
The older man turned and trundled slowly down the iron stairs.
At the bottom of the staircase was a litter-strewn landing of cracked concrete. The smell of urine was strong, and there was a flattened carcass of something mashed into one corner—a pigeon or a rat. There was an unmarked door on the building side, padlocked and reinforced with burglar mesh.
“Are you going to tell me where we are?” Pope said, wiping the rain from his beard.
“An old haunt,” Frank said, digging a set of keys out of his belt. They were old keys from his patrol days. Very few of their corresponding locks still existed. But a couple of them—like the door in front of him—were still around.
“You wouldn’t say a word on the train, Frank, I think you owe me an explanation.”
“Stand over there, please, Doc.” Frank motioned the psychiatrist away from the door.
Pope obliged. “Don’t you think this has gone far enough?”
Frank found an old brass skeleton key and worked it into the rusty padlock. “Let’s get out of the rain, and then we can have our little talk.”
The padlock snapped. Frank pulled the lock apart, then pushed the door open.
They entered a vestibule that stank of pigeon droppings and pasty filth. It was too dark to see anything yet, but Frank remembered the place vividly. The odors and textures were pouring through him, evoking childhood memories. He was lightheaded. His groin throbbed as he urged the doctor through the shadows, their footsteps crackling on cind
ers. Frank kept the gun trained on Pope’s midsection.
“My brother and I used to come here as kids,” Frank told the psychiatrist as they approached a ragged velvet curtain. Filmed in dust, stiff as a board from age, the curtain hung in the corner across a doorway into the main room.
“Frank—”
“Years later,” Frank went on, “when I was walking a beat in the Twentieth, I ended up checking this place every night.”
Frank ushered the doctor through the curtain and into the past.
The Bijou was breathtaking, even in the darkness, even in its dilapidated condition. The size of an airplane hangar, with two tiers of box seats, and sweeping balconies, the place was crumbling like a ruined Greek temple. Frank heard his own voice echoing off the gilded walls: “At one point in our lives, this place was a sanctuary for me and my brother. You remember my brother, don’t you, Doc?”
“Frank, I never—”
“SHUT UP!” Frank boomed, his voice reverberating like a ghost trying to get out of the theater.
A flurry of whispers trailed after the sound, the voice of Frank’s Other, his murderous dark half. Then the whispers faded away.
Frank swallowed his emotions for a moment, gazing around the old movie palace. Thin shafts of daylight shone down from holes in the high ceiling. Half the seats were missing like rotted-out teeth. The once-golden walls were chipped and peeling, and a huge, tattered screen rose up in front, riddled with gouges and water marks. Frank and Kyle used to come here and watch Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing battle each other in The Curse of Frankenstein and The Mummy and Dr. Terror’s House of Horrors, and reality would be swallowed up on a wave of Jujubes and Dots and Good & Plentys.
Frank glanced over at the real Dr. Terror, standing there, dripping on the sticky floor, his long, pallid face framed by the soggy scarf, looking like some demented old charwoman from some lost Dickens story. Frank kept the gun raised and aimed at the psychiatrist.
The Sleep Police Page 18
