Unsound (A Lei Crime Companion Novel)

by Neal, Toby

  The feeling of hope dying felt so bad I wished I’d never had it in the first place.

  “Dinner’s ready,” Russell Pruitt said. He carried two steaming plates of pasta and shrimp to the table along with a battery-operated lamp.

  I was still ashamed of my hunger but resigned as I kept the sleeping bag over my legs and transferred myself to the bench in front of the battle-scarred table.

  “Mmm. Smells delicious,” I said, and meant it.

  “Good. We’ll start therapy after dinner,” Russell Pruitt said. “Eat up. You’ll need your strength.”

  Chapter 12

  I got back onto my bunk after dinner, my booted feet still hidden in the sleeping bag.

  “It’s good to get comfortable for our talk, Russell. Not too many places to sit—why don’t you just lie down on your bunk?”

  He appeared to think this over, a crease appearing between black untamed brows as he collected the plates. His features showed some of the characteristics of gigantism—a protruding forehead with prominent brow ridges, a vast underslung jaw. My brain finally supplied the medical name for his condition: acromegaly.

  His grayish color was a little better after eating (I’d had a bowl of the pasta, and he’d eaten the remainder of the pot), and he’d drunk a quart or so of water as well. I reminded myself he’d hiked down the Sliding Sands today. Russell Pruitt had to be getting tired.

  “It’s my habit to take notes while we talk. Is that all right?” I asked. I wanted to establish my authority position again after the drinking incident. Taking notes and listening was also where I felt most comfortable.

  “Of course.” Russell Pruitt set the dishes in the sink, ran water over them, and lumbered to his bunk. He folded himself into its short, narrow space, lying on his side, those glassy-bright eyes on me as I picked up the folder with Freitas’s profiles inside.

  “I’ll just use the back of these papers here.”

  “I’m interested in what you think of those profiles,” he said. “They must be suspects in a case of yours.” How had he had time to so thoroughly search my things?

  “It’s a consultation,” I said carefully, lifting my knees and setting the folder on them to write. “Confidential. This is your time. Now, you said this was a matter of life and death.”

  “Yes. A matter of my life and your death,” Russell Pruitt replied.

  “Hmm,” I said, writing “making veiled threats” on the paper. “That sounds serious. Tell me about what’s brought this on.” My heart beat triple speed, and the vodka and pasta weren’t mixing well. I belched, hoping I wasn’t going to vomit.

  “I’ve got some health issues. I need to sort them out, come to some conclusions.”

  “The stakes clearly couldn’t be higher. Why don’t you tell me where this all began for you.” I needed to keep him talking as long as possible, and keep him liking and respecting me. Hopefully I could drag the therapy out until someone came looking for me—four more days. The thought made my bladder loosen.

  “I found out I had gigantism when I was thirteen. Can you imagine what it’s like to be a normal kid, then suddenly find yourself six feet tall within just a few months?”

  “No, I can’t imagine,” I said honestly. “Tell me more about what that was like.”

  “I was in unspeakable pain because my bones and sinews grew too fast. I have stretch marks in my skin.” He pushed up a sleeve so I could see striations lining the insides of his arms, like the laddering of a snag in a nylon stocking. “I was teased and picked on. The bullies all wanted to fight me because I was so big, and I had no idea how to fight.”

  “You were overwhelmed emotionally by the changes in your body as you grew too fast, and it attracted unwelcome aggressive attention,” I said, reflecting back both the content and emotion of his tale. I found myself feeling compassion for this tormented young man; at the same time, I was burning with my own questions: Why me? Why now? Why this way?

  “Yes, that’s it exactly. I became a freak, almost overnight, and it came at a very bad time for me.” He closed his eyes in a long pause, and I couldn’t wait any longer.

  “That must have been terrible, and I want to know everything about what led you to this point. But earlier in the evening, I had two questions for you, and you said you’d answer them after we ate. I’m still wondering about those questions. Do you remember what they were?”

  “I do.” Russell Pruitt rolled onto his back, his blue-jeaned legs folded and still so long the tops of his knees brushed the underside of the top bunk. “It’s all part of the story. I’ll answer the easiest one first. I tracked your cell phone. I hacked your carrier, bought a phone tracker app, and had it ping your phone’s location. I knew everywhere you went, and I knew when it went off the grid at the top of Haleakala. I knew you must have hiked in. The only gamble was which cabin you’d headed for, but this one was the most logical choice for someone not in the greatest shape physically.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling deflated by this practical solution to what had seemed an impenetrable puzzle. “So you have some computer skills too.”

  “I’m very good. If only curing myself could be done on computer.”

  “What’s wrong with you, exactly?”

  “I’m doing all the hormone therapies that are best practice for this syndrome, but damage was done to my heart and internal organs when I was younger and everything was growing too fast. I didn’t have parents looking out for me.”

  “Tell me about that,” I said, making a note: “No parents. Hacker. Tracked my cell phone.” I realized I was actually very interested in his story.

  “I don’t think I’m ready to tell you about that. But I will tell you about your clients.”

  “What about them?” I looked up at him, feeling protectiveness rise up in me.

  “I wanted to know what kind of people you saw in your practice. Who thought you were a good enough psychologist to work with. It was an interesting piece of research.”

  I breathed through a wave of nausea. “How did you do that?”

  “Now, if I told you that, I’d have to kill you.” He snorted a laugh that sounded boyish and young. But he wasn’t a kid, and it wasn’t cute. “I particularly like the Southern chick. She’s a bit of a psychopath herself, running around stealing stuff with that fluffy hair and the dog. I wanted to take the dog, but he would have been a hassle. I felt sorry for Mrs. Kunia too. Didn’t know depression was so prevalent in older people.”

  “Mrs. Kunia has had a lot of grief,” I said. “Please leave my clients alone. They’re just people like you, people trying to work through problems.” I thought of the “World’s Greatest Grandma” mug. “Did you take items from them and leave them for me to find?”

  “That’s it exactly.”

  “Why?”

  “I was curious about them, about your practice. I wanted you to figure out what was going on, but you weren’t getting it.”

  “Like a stalker.”

  “No, like a psychology student doing fieldwork. Work I wanted to share with you.”

  “Clients have rights. Their privacy and confidentiality is protected. Studying them because of me—it violates every code of our profession.” My voice trembled with conviction and outrage, and I burped again, feeling the shrimp dinner pressing up against my esophagus. I set the folder aside. “I don’t feel well. I don’t think I’m used to all this rich food. Can we take a break? Can I just sit outside a moment, see if the nausea passes? I don’t want to throw up right here.”

  He turned his head and looked at me a long moment, considering. The sun was long gone, and the dark was palpable beyond the windows. I gulped, trying to settle the roiling of my stomach, and he must have seen my symptoms were real because he got up with frightening swiftness and went to the combination lock, spun it with a memorized combination, and opened the door. A square of starlit liberty gleamed before me, light from the lantern falling on the lush grass in front of the stoop.

  I kicked the sle
eping bag off and stumbled to the door, wild to get outside and try to run—but as I passed, he caught hold of my hair, bringing me up short with my own momentum. He reached back and picked up my sleeping bag, still holding my hair. My head bent back, my face pulled achingly tight, and tears of pain and disappointment started in my eyes as he walked behind me to the top step, following me down onto the grass.

  “Get into your sleeping bag,” he said gently. “You might get cold.” I also couldn’t run with the sleeping bag on. I obeyed, drew it up to my waist. He let go of my hair, a relief so intense it felt like pleasure.

  We sat. The nene were gone, back to where they roosted at night, and the stars flamed in a timeless Milky Way rainbow overhead. Russell Pruitt closed the door behind us, and I did some relaxation breathing, calming my nausea, and slowly lay back on the short, thick grass, folding my arms under my head. He did the same, and we both looked at the vast infinity of space.

  I was momentarily disoriented, feeling so close to those stars, as if gravity would suspend its bondage and I might fall out into them, drifting away forever among those spinning balls of light and energy. Thin air and no light pollution made me feel like I was on a space station. I reached a hand over to touch the prickly softness of the grass as an anchor.

  “I wonder where we go when we die,” Russell Pruitt said.

  “I wonder too. What do you think about that?”

  “I kind of like the idea of living forever,” he said, and there was infinite sadness in his big, slow voice. “But I don’t believe it.”

  “Why not?”

  “It just seems like a child’s wishful thinking, and I’m not a child. I just wish I had longer to figure these things out.”

  “You’ve implied several times that this is a matter of life and death and that you didn’t have long to figure things out. Tell me what’s going on.” In the dark, side by side, our conversation took on a new intimacy, as if I were the priest and he in the confessional beside me. It felt comfortable, like he was any other client coming to me for help.

  “I’m dying. Congestive heart failure. My heart is enlarged and weak from overexpansion; whole parts of it are dead. The doctors give me a few months to live—and I’m not a candidate for transplant because of the gigantism.”

  “I’ve heard there are heart problems with your diagnosis. I’m so sorry. Getting down to the cabin must have been a tremendous strain.” I thought of my own travail. His must have been even worse.

  “You have no idea. I had to take nitro when I got here, and rest. Almost didn’t make it.”

  “So that leads me to the second question I asked you before. Why have you followed me? Why not just make an appointment?”

  “Because.” He sighed, a long slow sigh into the chill night air. “Because I knew I had to confront you at some point with how you’d destroyed my life, and I was worried you’d come down here to commit suicide.”

  I closed my eyes, unable to really process this—there were too many missing pieces. I racked my brain. Nothing about him—his name, his appearance—was familiar, and yet he seemed to blame me for something. “I wonder how I could have destroyed your life.”

  He didn’t answer.

  “You have good instincts,” I finally said. “But no. I’m not suicidal.” Constance’s voice in my head cried, Denial, but I ignored her. Most of me really did want to live. “I came here because I want to get sober. I want to get past my divorce and to adjust to the empty house with my son, Chris, gone to college.”

  “Well, that’s good, at least.”

  “It was until you got here. Insisting on therapy.” The words popped out before I could stop them, and I could swear they were spoken in Constance’s voice.

  “All part of what’s meant to be, Dr. Wilson.”

  Another long silence spun out between us, and I thought about how all we are is energy trapped in different forms, subatomic particles vibrating in arbitrary patterns. We’re all the same at the particle level, even him and me.

  “So you said you wanted to confront me. Why didn’t you just make an appointment? I would have been happy to see you. To try to help you.”

  “I want you to suffer,” he said. “I want you to feel the loneliness, fear, and pain I felt. Just a little of it. I wanted you to figure out that I knew everything about you.”

  I breathed through the surge in my heart rate. “What purpose would that serve?” I said, when I was sure my voice would be coolly interested and nothing more.

  “Justice. It’s about justice.”

  What did he mean? I didn’t know all the facts—he still wasn’t telling me everything.

  “So. Help me understand here.” Back to motivational interviewing, a technique for exploring ambivalence and breaking through illogic. “You start ‘investigating’ me, tracking me. You follow and ambush me and take me prisoner when I’m ill and trying to change my life so you can get some therapy you’ve decided you need. What part of that is about justice?”

  “Shut up!” he yelled. He stood in a surge of mountainous strength, took hold of my sleeping bag, and hauled me back into the cabin, bumping and flailing up the steps. He flung me in the direction of my bunk. I rolled and fetched up against the leg of the bed. I lay there, my cheek against the worn and pockmarked floor, the wind knocked out of me, looking at the dust bunnies hiding deep under the bunk against the wall.

  I heard the thump of the front door closing, muttering as he slammed the hasp and lock home, floor-shaking stomps as he went into the kitchen—and then ordinary splashing as he washed the dishes.

  I was going to need to go along with his version of reality. I saw that now. This wasn’t real therapy, where my job was to gently rattle clients’ cages and help them see their lives from a new perspective.

  This was keeping the giant happy so I could live another day.

  I was afraid to move and was still winded from the back of the step knocking the air out of my lungs as he’d dragged me up them. I slowly turned my head to observe him, but I didn’t move otherwise. I wondered how his heart was dealing with the strain of the last few minutes, and in a moment I had my answer—he staggered back across the big room and fell onto his bunk, fumbling for something in his pocket.

  “Pills,” Russell Pruitt gasped, his face a bluish gray in the pale light of the lantern. “Help me.”

  Chapter 13

  I wondered if he would conveniently die while I waited and watched—but if he didn’t, he would punish me for not helping. So I moved, but haltingly, as if crippled by pain, pushing myself up in the sleeping bag, unzipping slowly.

  He fumbled and gasped, dropping the pill bottle of what I assumed was nitroglycerin, and it landed on the floor and rolled under his bunk.

  My eyes on his, I pushed the sleeping bag down and then crawled across the floor toward him, reaching under the bed for the pills. Pressing down hard and twisting the childproof cap, I shook two out into my palm. He opened his mouth like an enormous baby bird, lifting his tongue, and I set the two nitro tablets under it. He closed his mouth and fell back onto the bed, and I crawled away.

  It occurred to me that this was my chance to escape, if only I could restrain him, or arm myself, or both. I jumped up and hurried into the kitchen, yanking open one of the drawers for the piece of rope I remembered seeing. I took the big butcher knife out of the dish rack and the piece of rope and ran back to Russell Pruitt.

  He was lying on his back, his breath rattling in his lungs, his color still bad. I’d made a loop with the rope, and I slid it over one of his massive hands, an awkward move with the knife in my other hand.

  His eyes fluttered open, and I dropped the knife, reaching across him to grab his other hand, pulling them together and wrestling the loop over them. I pulled it tighter, my hands slippery with sweat, and threw the loose end around the tier of the bunk.

  He sat up, swinging his tied hands like a baseball bat, and I dodged out of the way, kicking the knife far across the floor, where it skittered und
er one of the bunks. He surged to his feet, and I danced away around the corner of the bunk, wrapping the rope around the bed support, bracing one foot on the bunk and pulling with all my might to try to drag him down and tie him to the bunk.

  He roared like a Bengal tiger and yanked with all his giantness, and the rope ripped through my hands, tearing my palms. In a few blurred and terrible moments, I was back in the sleeping bag with the selfsame rope wrapped around my neck at the top of the bag to seal me in. He’d tied it in a square knot, just loose enough for me to breathe and no more. I thought of the scene in The Hobbit where all the dwarves were trussed in bags beside the fire by the trolls. I wanted to laugh. I must be losing it.

  “You’re lucky we aren’t done with our therapy,” he said, sitting back on his haunches, panting, those oversized hands hanging between his knees. “Don’t try that again.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  I woke in the predawn of day four having to pee. I’d slept very well, trussed like a sausage in my bag. Maybe it was the dose of booze he’d fed me; maybe it was a whole new level of tiredness from all the exertions of the day. The night marchers never appeared, my crawlies were gone, and even the headache had dissipated. Only a few bruises from hitting the steps and rope abrasions on my hands hurt today.

  If I didn’t tell Pruitt that we were supposed to leave for Holua Cabin today, the other campers might come—and I could tell them I was a prisoner. This heartening idea gave me the courage to call across the giant’s rumbling snores: “Russell Pruitt. I have to pee. Russell. Pruitt!”

  He woke on the last yell and sat up carefully to avoid hitting his head on the bottom bunk. I had a sense he’d had a rough night of it, with at least a foot of him hanging off the end of the bunk.

  “What?” he said, rubbing his hand across his face.

  “I have to pee.”

  “You always have to pee.”

  “I know it seems like that. But I’ve been drinking a lot of water, trying to flush the booze out.”