The Book Doctor: A Psychological Thriller

by Britney King

  But sometimes, even if you enjoy it, it doesn’t mean it’s always convenient. Most things people love rarely fit neatly in the confines of their lives. More often than not, they have to make them fit.

  It’s possible this isn’t making any sense. Stick with me. It’s not easy describing your desires to another. People make a real mess of it. At any rate, I’ll do my best.

  Let’s say, other than cake, you really, really like deep dish pizza. Picture it—the kind with the gooey cheese that oozes, stringing out, adorning your fingers as you attempt to shove it in your mouth. The kind with the perfect crust and the sauce that bubbles on top. Now, imagine the best you’ve ever had.

  If you really, really like pizza, as I do, it’s obvious that you’d enjoy it from time to time. Same with cake, but it’s more socially acceptable to pig out on pizza. It’s a meal versus a dessert. But everyone knows too much of a good thing quickly becomes a bad thing. Sustenance can be risky if you’re not careful—as evidenced by the extra inches that tend to creep up around your gut after you’ve indulged.

  More than likely, it would do you well to go for a salad, but if a pizza is calling your name, and it’s something you love, it’s really difficult to abstain over the long haul. And sometimes you just have to have it, for no other reason than you simply cannot get it out of your mind.

  That’s what killing is like. Sometimes I can’t not do it. It’s like a craving— it’s a void that has to be filled. Other times it’s merely the path of least resistance, something that needs to be done in order to take care of business and get on with the rest of my life.

  This was one of those times.

  Bobby Simmons lived in a nice house, though too big for just one person, if you ask me. A waste, but then, that pretty much sums him up.

  It was dark out, a moonless sky buried in the clouds. It was hot and muggy. Restless kind of weather. The kind that makes you want to do terrible things.

  Unfortunately, he had an alarm system. One of those fancy kinds, the kind that are not easily disabled. He was a paranoid fuck, through and through.

  Gated, closed off, buttoned up, just like the owner, his house was practically a fortress. I know. I’d been given the grand tour. The panic room I did not see with my own two eyes. I heard about it secondhand.

  Beside his bed rested a 9 mm and a dog that is essentially a pony, trained to attack on command. That’s the kind of guy he was. What she saw in him, I have no idea.

  Preferably, if I had the time or the initiative, I wouldn’t have handled it like I did. I would have thoroughly enjoyed breaking and entering, sedating a small horse, and force-feeding pills down a man’s throat.

  Alas, sometimes shortcuts are the way to go. Sometimes any pizza will do because you just want pizza. The end result will be the same. He knew a thing or two about that. She didn’t love him, anyhow. If she had, she wouldn’t have been sleeping with Nick Golding, cliff-jumper extraordinaire. Nor would she have been sleeping with me. His death will no doubt send her running back.

  Ideally, I wouldn’t kill two people who can be tied together, but then, life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. Personally, I blame six degrees of separation. I assure you, it makes it pretty hard. Harder still if the woman you’re in love with has a sex addiction and fucks anything that breathes.

  But, like the weather, it is what it is.

  At 5:02 a.m. on the dot, Bobby Simmons exited his front gate, headed east with his one hundred and eighty pound, four-legged running mate. I did not set out on foot. I remained in the comfort of my vehicle. Letting him get a running start, I watched the clock, counting down the minutes until my life improved.

  At 5:04, I put the car into drive. By 5:05, I’d run him down. In the rearview mirror, he looked like I’d imagined, perfectly splayed out on the pavement, lifeless. Meanwhile, man’s best friend sniffed the roses in a neighboring yard.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Liam shows up for work the following morning whistling—I assume on account of the girl. If only I were feeling so chipper. The sound of his engine had me up a little before four this morning. It was sometime after six when he returned, emerging from his car with coffee and bagels. He brought them over with him when he came. His haul included several everything bagels, complete with cream cheese. Eve’s favorite. It makes me wonder how he could know this about her. How much has she told him?

  She was up and about this morning and seems slightly more herself. Maybe the bagels helped. Whatever it is, I’m glad for the improvement. I could use a bit of a reprieve. It’s crunch time on the manuscript, and I’m going to have to make a run into town to pick up her medicine.

  Her doctor advised me to ease off the sedatives a little, which I don’t have a choice on, considering I’m running low and he’s hesitant to refill the prescription without seeing her in his office. It would be a nightmare to get her there in this state. She’s been hardly coherent. And quite frankly, I don’t have the time to spare.

  Unfortunately, mental illness does not care about deadlines or careers, or fitting into a neat little block on a calendar.

  Instead, the doctor has another medication in mind that he thinks might help. It’s a new drug, but if it keeps Eve from killing herself or burning down the house, I’m game.

  “What does she do in that room all day?” Liam asks, catching me off guard, pulling me back to the here and now.

  “She watches her programs.”

  “Programs?”

  Sometimes I forget his age. “Her TV shows.”

  “All day?”

  “She has a schedule,” I say, which is the truth. What I don’t say is that she stares at the TV catatonically and most of the time, when she’s in a low place, cannot recount a single detail about what she’s seen.

  His bottom lip juts out. “That’s wild.”

  “After lunch,” I tell him, “I’m going to have to take a break and run into town.”

  “Mind if I join you?”

  I scan my inbox. I wonder if he’d like to handle my fan mail. There are hundreds of new emails; I simply cannot keep up. “It’s fine.”

  “You don’t look like you’re going anywhere very fast with your foot that way.”

  “I managed a walk around the grounds yesterday, didn’t I?”

  He scoffs. “A very, very slow one.”

  “I recall you having to jog to catch up.”

  “Suit yourself,” he tells me. “But if you change your mind, we can take my car.”

  My car is fast. But it’s not as fast, nor as new, as Liam’s. I don’t particularly fancy myself to be the kind of man who is distracted by shiny things. But I’m a man, nonetheless. And I envy that car. This, and, I’d rather not leave him here alone with my wife.

  The sun reflects off the pavement in hazy waves. Even before noon it has turned out to be a stifling hot day. “You want to drive?” Liam asks, pretending to toss his keys in my direction.

  “Better not,” I answer with a nod toward my foot. As I slowly make my way around the Audi, I reflect that Liam is right, I probably wouldn’t get far if left to my own devices. My foot is noticeably sorer than it was yesterday. Stopping to breathe into the pain, I notice a long scratch and a large dent on the passenger side of the car. Liam notices me looking, concern written on his face.

  “You gonna make it?”

  “Yeah,” I say, bracing myself against the hood of the car. “What happened?”

  “Hit a deer the other day.” He shakes his head from side to side. “Bastard darted right out in front of me.”

  When I don’t say anything he waves a hand in the air, “Ah well, you know. That’s what insurance is for.”

  Once we get out on the road, it’s easy to see how Liam could damage his car. He’s a terrible driver. Not only is he reckless, he appears to have zero qualms about getting us killed.

  “Slow down!” I shout. He has the top down, music blaring. It takes me repeating myself twice and slugging him in the shoulder
before he hears me.

  Squinting, I think I see something up ahead. Although, because Liam is driving like a bat out of hell, whatever I thought I saw is suddenly behind us, fading fast in the passenger side mirror. “Turn around,” I tell him, waving my hands.

  He turns the music down. “Huh?”

  “Turn the car around,” I say at the top of my lungs.

  He slows and then does a spin, going far too fast. When the car is facing the opposite direction, he laughs and says, “You mean like that?”

  He’s a goddamned child. If he doesn’t crash the car, I may die of a heart attack.

  “What are we doing?” He stares at me quizzically. “Did you forget your wallet?”

  I point. “Slowly,” I say. “Take it about twenty. Then two hundred yards that-a-way stop.”

  He does as I ask, coming to a slow stop not far from the boy who is sitting on the side of the road, squatted down in the grass.

  “There,” I say to Liam. “That’s what we’re doing.”

  His eyes shift. “What the fuck? That’s a kid.”

  Opening the door, I extend my hand. The boy is hesitant. He doesn’t know me in this context. He’s used to seeing me on foot. He backs away. “Come on,” I wave. “It’s me, George.”

  He doesn’t budge. “You want to go home?”

  To my surprise, he shakes his head. I can’t blame him. I don’t want to go there either. Liam holds out a bottle of Tic Tacs. He shakes some into my palm. I offer them to the boy. His little hand reaches out from the brush. I start to refuse him, to tell him to get in the car and then he can have them, but I think better of it at the last second. I’m sure he’s scared enough as it is. At the same time, I know I can’t walk him home. Not with my foot in this condition.

  “Ask him if he wants ice cream,” Liam says with a nudge.

  “Have you got any ice cream?” I ask, glancing around the interior of the car, intending to look as ridiculous as he sounds.

  “No. I don’t know…I’ve seen it in the movies. Isn’t that how you get kids in the car?”

  “How should I know?”

  His brow knits together. “I just assumed this isn’t the first time you’ve found him on the side of the road.”

  Liam is good at making a point. “I don’t think we should take him home right away. Let’s make his parents sweat it out.”

  “I have a better idea. Let’s take him to the police station and tell the cops we found a lost kid.”

  “Ah,” Liam says. “Irony.”

  I shrug.

  He peers out the passenger door and then looks at me, his face impassive. “First, we have to get him in the car.”

  “Hey kid,” I say. “You want to go get ice cream?”

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  The boy babbles in the back seat, and I don’t know why, but it physically hurts. I haven’t been around children much since my own were little. That’s sort of the thing about having kids—once you no longer do, unless your vocation has to do with teaching, there aren’t a lot of opportunities to be around them, even if you wanted to. Especially as a man.

  I think about my children a lot. Where would they be now, what would they be like? I think about how they would essentially be different people, all grown up, not very much at all like the kids I knew.

  With Jenny it was different. She was older when she died, and I got a bit of a glimpse into what adulthood with her would have been like.

  Jennifer was Eve’s daughter through and through. She not only inherited her mother’s looks, she inherited her mental illness too. The boys’ deaths were unexpected, like curve balls, to use a familiar expression. But Jenny’s was different. It was slower to evolve. Most people that kill themselves don’t succeed on the first try, and Jenny was no exception.

  We spent nearly $100,000 on facilities and treatments, trying to make her better. Like Eve, she would improve for a while. But never for long. Her manic periods were always extreme. Maybe this had to do with the fact that she was a female adolescent. I don’t know. But Jenny’s rough patches were never pretty. Jenny wasn’t a particularly happy child before the boys died, but she was never happy afterward.

  I resented her, of course. I resented her for not being mine, for not appreciating the life I was trying to give her. I resented the fact that she was alive and miserable, when her brothers did not get the chance to be either of those things.

  So when she told me she was going to take her own life that final time, when she said that she’d find a way to get the pills, or the knife or the rope, I didn’t try to stop her. I didn’t put her in her seventh consecutive facility. I didn’t listen to Eve, who said we should.

  I knew Jenny was right. It’s impossible to keep every item that a person might use to kill themselves out of reach forever. I just hadn’t thought it would happen like it did.

  There’s a small town in between where we live and the city. Hamilton has three restaurants, several fast food joints, a small grocery store, a bank, a pharmacy, and of course, a bar. Normally, I use the pharmacy in the city on account that some of Eve’s medications require compounding—and also the privacy it allows. Everyone knows everyone out here, and people talk. There’s not much else to do.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the long drive on account of work, about two and a half hours round-trip, give or take traffic, nor did I want to leave Eve alone for that long. So I’m not entirely upset to have found the boy. Even though we need the medication, postponing the trip into the city is not the worst thing that could have happened.

  The boy speaks gibberish, pointing out the window as we pass the old hardware store. It closed up a few months ago after old man Stott died. His kids had moved on to bigger and better things, to live their lives elsewhere, and without anyone to run it, it dried up.

  The bank has changed hands several times, but it keeps going, as banks have a way of doing.

  Next to the bank is the drugstore. It’s an old-school pharmacy, the kind with a soda fountain that serves root beer floats, banana splits, milkshakes, and ice cream of all kinds. By the early 1920s, almost every drugstore had a soda fountain. Due to prohibition, which began in 1919, bars were closing and people needed a place to socialize. This place was born of that time.

  “It’s rather charming, don’t you think?” Liam says, glancing at the boy in the rearview mirror as he pulls into a parking spot up front. “Almost makes me think maybe I could live out here in the boonies.”

  We used to bring the kids here when they were little. Sometimes in the evenings, Eve would make me promise, after a long day, that I’d drive them into town to get root beer floats. She’d bribe them with it to keep them out of her hair. I don’t think I appreciated her enough back then, what she did, raising them, tending to their needs and mine too.

  I suppose it’s tough to see things as they are when we’re in the thick of it. All I know is that my career was demanding, it was all-consuming and in hindsight I can see that there wasn’t enough of me left over for her, or for them.

  Inside the shop we grab ice cream. “Lovely family,” Mrs. Thompson remarks as the boy spins round and round on the barstool. She’s feeble, and her memory is half gone, but she shows up to work every day, and I suppose that’s what keeps her going.

  Nevertheless, it strikes me that under different circumstances, she could be right. I could be doing this very thing with my son and grandson. A long time ago, I did research for a novel about parallel universes, and while I don’t know if they exist, I’d like to think there are other versions of Eve and I out there somewhere, happy with our children. Children who are alive. Children who are having children of their own. In some ways it’s easy to imagine. In others it feels very far away. The part of me who existed as a father then is not in the same place as the person I am now. His growth was stunted when life as he knew it was cut off.

  I send Liam next door to the dime store to buy the kid a new pair of shoes. The boy devours the ice cream, so I buy him a chees
eburger and fries. He eats all of it and half of mine too.

  Later, when we take him home, his old man is passed out on the porch drunk. He stirs at the sound of Liam’s tires crunching on the gravel road.

  “Let me deal with this,” Liam says, as I reach for the door handle.

  Through the windshield I watch as Liam walks the kid up to the porch, even though I warn him not to. I have a feeling this is a very bad idea. Next thing I know, the hood of Liam’s car is riddled with bullet holes.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  ‘The Book Doctor’

  Journal Entry

  He was a filthy bastard, that’s for sure. A rotten heap of human waste. A kink in the chain of existence. It’s an anomaly that he’d made it this long, but somehow he had. Lucky me.

  First, I parked outside the bar and waited. While I waited, I had a lot of time for research, a lot of time to inscribe the pages of this journal. So much time.

  He was a last call kind of guy, which was no big shocker. It was better for me, anyhow. If he was nice and drunk, there wouldn’t be a lot of fight left in him. Even so, it was surprising what he could do. Rednecks are built that way. They’re certainly tougher than they look. This I found out the hard way.

  A half hour before closing time, I punctured the rear tire on the passenger side of his truck. In the dark, I doubted he’d notice. I was also betting even once he realized he had a flat, that he’d be drunk enough to make the dumb move of trying to make it home. It’s not easy to change a tire when you’re properly sloshed.

  I should have known this wouldn’t deter him. He wasn’t the brightest of the bunch. I came upon him crouched over his tire, surveying the situation. It felt like sweet karma, considering the damage I’d seen him inflict.

  I’d imagined clubbing him with his own tire iron. But there’s a saying about the best laid plans, and I know better than to marry one scenario; this is a broad universe with infinite possibilities, even when it comes to hillbillies.