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  Yeah, well, ‘good things’ hadn’t been spending much time with Tyson Barrett as of late. He wanted to believe Skip. Believe that this new drug and a few days off was going to make a difference. Wanted to believe it more than ever. “You’re one hell of a salesman, Skip, you know that?”

  Tyson pulled the Corolla up to the cottage and killed the engine. He sat for a moment listening to the engine tick down in the late afternoon sun.

  His hand went to the ignition switch to remove the keys. He paused and then reached into his overnight bag and fished out the black Noxil case. Inside was a small jet injector and two dozen glass vials filled with a dark blue liquid.

  The instructions said to take one shot three times a day. The car’s digital clock read half past twelve. Tyson reached into the glove compartment, shuffled around for the granola bar he knew was in there somewhere, and when he finally found it, wolfed it down in three bites.

  Tyson then removed the injector, opened the back and slid one of the blue vials inside. He held the device to his temple, in mock suicide, before lowering the nozzle to his shoulder.

  “Here’s to new beginnings,” he said quietly and pulled the trigger. Tyson felt a tiny displacement of air, but otherwise, the process was painless.

  Although Dr. Stevens had assured him it should take several minutes for the medication to flow into his blood stream, the very act of injecting himself with a device straight out of Star Trek made him feel better already. He slid the keys from the ignition into his pocket and popped the trunk.

  The cottage’s interior did nothing to break with the quiet unassuming character he had seen driving up the gravel path. A glass door hinged open into a sunroom, the legs of wicker chairs peaking out from under white sheets. Beyond that a connected kitchen and living room with a stove fireplace and then a narrow hallway with three bedrooms, two on the left, one on the right.

  The master.

  That was where Tyson would sleep, he decided with uncharacteristic certainty. He dumped his bag on the king-size bed and watched it bounce jovially.

  It looked like so much fun he couldn’t resist doing it himself. Down he went falling onto the bed. When it settled, he turned on his side and peered into the hallway. The room opposite his had a large bay window which faced onto the lake. He could see a tiny orange and yellow sailboat cutting through the choppy spring water. Tyson drew in a deep breath and smiled. Noxil or not, for the first time in a long while he was happy.

  In the pocket of Tyson’s pants was a list of instructions for getting the place in order. He removed it and started reading.

  Dear Tyson,

  I wasn’t able to get to the lake ‘to stretch the old girl’s legs,’ as they say, so I want to thank you again for all your help. Included is a list of everything you’ll need for your brief stay.

  The electricity and the water will be off when you arrive. Turning them on is easy enough. Simply follow the path that leads under the deck and make a right at the first door, the second is just storage and some old tools that don’t see much action anymore. Inside, on the left wall, you’ll find one switch for the power and one for the water.

  Now for the boathouse. As you may already have seen, the boathouse is hardly lacking amenities—canoes, kayaks, even a motorboat, albeit ageing and stubborn at anything over 20mph—but surely enough for any half decent pleasure cruise. There’s also some snorkeling gear and a speargun, but you might find it easier to get your food at the local market in town. Oh, and in case anything should go wrong, there’s a list of emergency response numbers next to the phone, above where the life jackets and paddles are stored. Judy Stahl’s number should be there.

  As for sleeping arrangements, I’ll leave that up to you. However, you might think about taking the master bedroom since it has the largest and bounciest bed.

  Your friend,

  Skip

  Way ahead of you Skip. Way ahead of you.

  Tyson came awake some time later to the sound of a loon crying from the lake. He bolted up with a start. He had fallen into a blissful sleep filled with the kind of happy dreams you hope will never end. He swung himself off the bed and headed for the bathroom on a pair of wobbly legs. The cottage was dim and unfamiliar and it took Tyson a moment to realize he wasn’t at home. He was perhaps three-quarters of the way through the longest piss in history when the full weight of what had just happened came crashing down on him.

  That momentary lapse in attention was enough to pelt the seat with a thick stream of urine. The first commandment in his married life had been ‘thou shalt lift the toilet seat before taking a piss’ and when she had so conscientiously packed up his things and left them in a neat bundle by the front door, that was the first rule to go flying out the window.

  But it was the long piss that finally pulled the threads together in his mind.

  Holy shit, he had slept.

  For the first time in months he had shut his eyes and drifted off. And not just for an hour or two. That wasn’t an enormous feat in and of itself, but judging by the gunky build up in his mouth and the tingling feeling in his legs, he must have been out for a while. Those dark circles under his eyes also seemed to be fading, even if only by a shade or two. He took a closer look at his chin covered with a thick carpet of coarse stubble and suddenly felt like a character out of a Washington Irving novel.

  That was when the bomb in his head really went off. All that sleep and not a single nightmare. In fact, from what he could remember of his dreams—foggy and distant as they now seemed—they had been rather pleasant. One of them stood out above the rest. He was a child again and playing happily with his Han Solo and Chewbacca action figures. The dream had been incredibly vivid. As though all of his senses were turned on and a knob in his head set to full. It was coming back to him now, in glorious High Definition. Even down to Han’s missing left arm. An unfortunate wound that he had forgotten about until now. Sitting here awake, at least he thought he was awake, he was almost overcome by the smell of detergent from childhood T-shirts and hardwood floors lathered with buckets of industrial strength disinfectant. For a moment, he felt himself swimming between two competing worlds and it was only with a conscious act of willpower that he was able to pull himself back.

  And then another smell. One he didn’t like. Didn’t like one bit. The smell of pine trees wafting in the air and his nose curled up and his insides twisted like a basket full of coiled, hissing snakes.

  His overnight bag was on the bathroom counter. Nestled atop his Xanax and Valium and snuggled beside his asthma inhaler was the injector and the vials of Noxil. He plucked out one of the vials and studied it. A quiet smile made slow progress across his face.

  “This shit really works.”

  For the first time in nearly six months he had eked out an entire night’s sleep and this blue concoction—no more than a thimble full—had made that possible. It was all so hard to believe.

  The sense of bewildered elation stayed with him all the way to the local Grand Union and back. He would need supplies if he was to stay here for any length of time. A check-out girl named Candice gave him a smile and for the first time in a long while he had started to feel like himself again.

  Unsure of where things belonged, Tyson began putting his groceries away at random. Perishables in the fridge, canned goods and dried pastas in the pantry. Dish soap and sponges under the sink and a drying towel—he hadn’t been able to find one at the cottage for the life of him—in a drawer by the stove. He pulled that last drawer open and screamed, his hand flying into the air as though he’d been holding the tail of a scorpion. Inside sat two objects that belonged to a young child. Objects he knew very well. Action figures. Two of them. Han Solo and Chewbacca. Han’s left arm was missing.

  Tyson slammed the drawer closed with a bang. The flesh on his arms had pricked up. His eyes were wide and unbelieving. He was watching the drawer somehow expecting for it to pop open and fire its contents out at him. The room was suddenly tiny and claustrophobi
c and growing smaller every second. Tyson’s breathing was ratcheting up again and he rushed to the bathroom for his asthma inhaler.

  He was at the bathroom sink when it dawned on him, feeling dense for not seeing it before: a testament perhaps to how far down the can he had let himself fall. The whole thing had the nasty aftertaste of a Skip Williams’ special. A prank crude and elaborate enough to belong to one man and one man alone. Tyson stormed into the bedroom and got his phone. He would call Skip and tell him what an asshole he was. After all, hadn’t he come all this way to try and get his shit back together? Not to have his mind played with. The message light on his phone was blinking. He removed the key lock and saw eight messages waiting for him.

  Tyson stared disbelieving, convinced his phone must be acting up. The date was all wrong too. Hadn’t he arrived on the nineteenth? So why was his phone now reading the twenty-first? Where the hell had the twentieth gone? Had he been stone-dead asleep for thirty-six hours? His annoyance was starting to turn to fear.

  What in God’s name is going on here?

  With shaking fingers he pulled up Skip’s number. The line rang a handful of times before finally picking up. The voice on the other end sounded annoyed and drunk.

  “You’re a real smart ass, you know that, Skip?”

  “Who is this?”

  “The butt of your piss poor sense of humor, that’s who.”

  “Tyson?”

  Tyson peeled open the drawer and peeked inside. “I found the two little presents you left me and I gotta say, I’m not sure how you got your hands on them, but I don’t find it one bit funny. You’re gonna have to try harder than that…”

  “Presents? I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  Tyson swapped the phone to the other ear, suddenly not so sure of himself. A while back Tyson had seen Skip whack his thumb with a hammer and the worst thing that came out was a damnit. The word fuck just wasn’t in Skip’s vocabulary. A slow sinking feeling began to grip him that maybe Skip had nothing to do with the Han and Chewy dolls he’d found. Right behind that was another question. A disturbing question he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask. If Skip hadn’t done this, then who had?

  “You swear this wasn’t you. Leave something here for me to find wasn’t your idea of a hilarious joke to play on old Ty?”

  “Why would I do that when I need you back in one piece, not in a padded room in Sunnybrook with a view of the Hudson? I will, however, tell you what is definitely not a prank. Castleman called me today. Told me he and his associates decided to take a pass on Onesizefitsall.com. Says our business plan showed promise, but that he didn’t have faith in our professionalism. He wouldn’t say any more and I haven’t the foggiest idea what he’s talking about. I know I haven’t spoken to him since we pitched the company.” There was a pause on the other end of the line. A bad kind of pause and Tyson thought he knew what was going to come next. “You didn’t call him at any point in one of your delirious sleep deprived states did you?”

  “No, Skip, for Christ’s sake, of course I didn’t.” But there seemed to be large stretches in the last six months that were either blurry or wiped out completely. It was hard to get a firm handle on the world when you hadn’t caught so much as ten consecutive winks in months. Was it possible he had called Castleman’s office after their presentation to supplement a few sales figures he might have left out when it was his turn to speak? Possibly. Or was it more probable that Castleman had seen the dark lines ringing Tyson’s eyes and worried he was something of a druggy or worse, mentally unstable? He felt his throat tighten, found his hand reaching for the inhaler and stopped himself.

  “Looks like we just lost our million dollar financing. Unless you can pull stacks of fifties and hundreds out of your butt, we’re back to square one.”

  “What about O’Donnell and those two brothers of his? The ones that own the paving company.”

  “They’ve agreed to ten thousand each. But it’s barely a drop in the bucket. Listen Ty, you just sort yourself out and get back here as soon as you can.” Skip paused. His voice was softer now. “How are things going up there? I didn’t even ask about the…”

  “The Noxil?” Tyson said absently.

  “Yeah, is it working?”

  Tyson couldn’t quite bring himself to say yes. He slid open the kitchen drawer again. Han and Chewy were still there, their eyes tiny pinpoints of ink, nothing more. The drug was doing something all right. Anyone could see that. Just what that was, he couldn’t yet say.

  Chapter 5

  Hunter’s third day at Sunnybrook started out uneventfully. His instructions were simple enough: he was to shadow Dr. Bowes as he made his rounds of the seventh and eighth floors. Clearly Dr. Bowes’ job was, for all intents and purposes, more supervisory than medical. He conferred with nurses and orderlies, ensured patients received the proper dosage of medication and occasionally spoke with a patient or two. And if what Hunter had seen so far was anything to go by, occasionally was an overstatement. When Bowes would hear news that one of the patients had asked for him, he usually responded with the sigh of a lazy man who had grown accustomed to delegating the ‘uninteresting bits’ to his underlings.

  The way things were going, Hunter was becoming more and more certain that once these practice rounds were done, the bulk of Bowes’ daily grind and ‘uninteresting bits’ would fall to him. But shit always tended to roll downhill, didn’t it?

  Even some of the nurses weren’t immune to this mental hazing. On his first day, a big boned young nurse with a pretty face named Cindi Jaworski had slid into the cafeteria seat next to him at lunch.

  “So have you been to eight yet?” Her eyes were brimming with curiosity.

  Hunter nodded. In fact, he had just returned from H-16; Brenda’s room on the eighth floor.

  “When Dr. Bowes was giving you the grand tour…that’s what he likes to call it…did you ask him why eight has so few patients?”

  “Should I have?”

  “No, it’s a good thing you didn’t, cause he hates when newbies ask him that.”

  Hunter paused to consider what Cindi had just said. “I suppose I just assumed the criminally insane pop here was proportionate.”

  “Proportionate to what? There are thirty-four patients on eight. You thought all of New York State couldn’t produce more than thirty-four class-one whack jobs?” She was teasing him, of course, still Hunter thought he detected a touch of mockery in her tone. Perhaps more than a touch.

  “Maybe I assumed Sunnybrook had taken the spill-over from the Kirby in Manhattan.”

  “Despite what mister ‘do it my way or don’t do it at all’ thinks, it’s no secret around here that Bowes hates the eighth floor. Might be something you should ask him about, seeing as how you’ll be working up there quite a bit. Might even be the reason you were hired. To take eight off his hands.”

  By the early afternoon they had finished with seven and moved onto eight and Dr. Bowes’ mood seemed to suddenly shift. The man’s cocky swagger was gone. His steps were smaller and more cautious. Dare say, Hunter thought he was almost hesitant. A pattern that seemed to intensify as they approached room H-16.

  Inside Brenda Barrett’s dim and sparsely furnished cell, a single bed faced a small bookshelf, its contents neatly ordered. She was surrounded by machines and blinking lights and she looked like something out of a science fiction movie. An ageing ventilator by her bed kept her breathing. Beside that an EKG monitored her heart.

  On the way up, Bowes had told Hunter about the rounds. That every day someone came in to reposition Brenda.

  “Bedsores are always a problem,” Bowes had said. “But the real problem is that most of my orderlies are superstitious Latinos who routinely skip Brenda’s room altogether, leaving her to stew in her own…” Bowes paused searching for the least offensive word, “filth…at times for days on end.”

  There was something about this room the orderlies didn’t like. Hunter wondered if it had more to do with th
e woman lying in it than the room itself. She was still and quiet but then so was a Venus Fly Trap.

  Clak-clak-clak-clak-clak-clak.

  Bowes had started clicking his pen the minute they entered the room. His face was a mask of tension. Try as he might, Bowes couldn’t hide the fact that he was scared of this woman. But what could she have done to shake even a hardened professional drone like Bowes?

  Hunter watched her lying there with tubes snaking out of her mouth, looking like a ninety-seven pound hunk of inanimate flesh. You don’t get more powerless than this, he thought, and yet she seemed to have everyone at Sunnybrook running for the hills. Then a light went on in his head. This was a test. And Brenda was the big bad voodoo mamma who was meant to reveal him as a coward.

  Dr. Bowes was over by the EKG checking off boxes on a clipboard when a thin homely nurse burst into the room panting. “Doctor, I need you in H-4, Hillinger just bit his tongue off.”

  “Oh Jesus, not again.”

  There was a white blur as Bowes and the nurse tore from the room. He could hear their frantic footfalls receding down the impossibly long corridor until they were swallowed away by the room’s gloomy stillness. But it wasn’t entirely quiet of course. The respirator that was feeding oxygen into Brenda’s lungs was making a fine racket and he could hear the heart monitor going blip blip blip at the steady pace of her beating heart. For all intents and purposes, Dr. Hunter was alone, but somehow he didn’t feel that way.

  He snatched the clipboard that Bowes had flung onto the bed when he’d rushed off to check on Hillinger.

  Vital signs.

  Responsiveness.

  Looked like fairly standard stuff.

  Bowes had said Brenda was a three on the Glasgow scale which really was a polite way of saying she was about as active and coherent as piece of vegetable lasagna. Hunter took the flashlight pen out of his breast pocket and slid one of her eyelids back. Her pupils were dilated. He swung the light back and forth but her eyes never moved.