Fog Warning

a novella

Edward Lorn

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights.

For Matthew Pontiff and Kimberly Yerina

Chapter One:

The Good Doctor

1.

“I hurt all over, Doc. I think I got that fibromyalgia, you know?”

Doctor Brent Cummings eyed the morbidly obese man in the checkered shirt suspiciously while attempting to hide his disbelief. Melinda, one of Yorkshire Medical’s emergency room RNs, had given Brent fair warning about the patient in Room Three—Mr. John Effingham was what ER professionals liked to call a “seeker.” These types swooped in, feigning pain to score narcotics. When Melinda triaged the man, she’d found Effingham’s blood pressure and pulse to be stable. He’d weighed in at just over four hundred pounds and stood five-foot-nine. Effingham had proclaimed his pain to be a whopping eleven on a scale of one to ten, as if his agony were one of Spinal Tap’s amplifiers cranked to maximum output.

“And where do you hurt?” Brent pretended to read the man’s chart.

“All over, man.” Effingham slid his palms down his pudgy chest, over his swollen gut, and across his jeans-clad thighs. “From top to bottom. Been like this for…” His gaze traveled around the room: to the sterile jars beside the sink, across the linen cabinets, over the basin, to the DinaMap blood pressure machine in the corner playing silent witness to their palaver—his eyes lighted upon everything but Brent. “For damn near two weeks.”

“Why haven’t you seen your family doctor?”

“I don’t never got the time. I work all day, every day, and when I get off, they’s already closed. My GP don’t work on the weekends. He keeps postman’s hours.” While he said all this, Effingham continuously nodded, causing his second chin to inflate and deflate, as if he were a frog crooning for its mate.

“And he doesn’t have you on any medication?”

“I told you, I ain’t been able to see him.” Effingham seemed suddenly out of sorts, as if he hadn’t expected a need to answer questions.

“Perhaps, if the pain’s as bad as you say it is, you should take a day off work to be seen.” Brent smiled.

“Who’s got the funds to be skipping work for a doctor visit these days? Not all of us are millionaire doctors, you know.”

Brent took a long, careful breath. He exhaled at length. Here I go. “Mr. Effingham, you’ve been to this emergency room nine times in the past two months. I’m sure you understand that the ER isn’t the place for chronic pain management. I know you’ve been told this before because it’s in your chart. Now, I’m not saying you’re not in pain. What I’m saying is we cannot continue to—”

“You think I’m lying?” Effingham cocked his head and squinted. “You think I like coming all the way out here and sitting in that waiting room for four hours just so I can wait some more on this torture rack you call a bed just so I can get some temporary relief? What’s wrong with you?”

What’s wrong with me? Brent mused inwardly. That’s hilarious. “I’m sorry the wait was so long, but patients are seen by severity of case and not order of arrival. I’m sure you can understand how someone with a broken arm can take precedence over a man suffering from aches and pains.”

Effingham’s eyes popped wide.

Oops…

“Aches and pains! Aches and… you know what? You’re something, all right. Call yourself a doctor? Call yourself someone who’s s’posed to help the sick and injured? I’m hurtin’, man! Do somethin’ about it!” The sheet-covered vinyl cushion of the stretcher crackled in the grasp of Effingham’s curled fingers. His face darkened from red to deep purple, like a pressure cooker trying to keep a lid on its contents.

Sensing violence on the horizon, Brent felt his heart rate increase a notch. The man outweighed him by over two hundred pounds, and Brent had never been a fighter. Schoolyard tussles had always left him bloodied and bruised while the victor danced a jig around his beaten, trembling form.

“I can give you a shot,” Brent said quickly, almost stammering. He didn’t appreciate the tremor in his voice.

Effingham relaxed his grip on the stretcher’s cushion. “I’m allergic to NSAIDs. Give me heart palpitations… I can’t have no Toradol, is what I’m saying.”

“Right.” Brent tapped the orange allergy band on Effingham’s wrist. “Gotcha. Can you take Dilaudid and Phenergan?”

Effingham endeavored to suppress a smile but failed. Still, the grin lasted only a split second. “Yeah. I guess I ain’t never had no problems with that… that… what did you call it?”

You know damn well what it’s called.

“Dilaudid and Phenergan. One’s for pain, and the other combats the nausea that people sometimes feel when taking strong narcotic pain meds.” Brent made sure to emphasize strong and narcotic.

Effingham’s body seemed to deflate with relief, as if he’d already had the shot. Funny how all the pain in the world didn’t matter anymore once he knew the cure was coming.

Brent slapped on another smile. “Your nurse will be in shortly.”

2.

After handing Effingham’s discharge orders to Melinda, Brent sauntered to the restroom off the physician’s lounge. He locked the door behind him then withdrew a sandwich-sized Ziploc baggie from his trouser pocket. The nest of cotton batting inside served two purposes: to hide—albeit poorly—the contents and to protect them from his body heat, lest they melt. He unrolled the plastic, slid the blue zipper open, and fingered the cotton to the side. Forty small round green pills with “OC” engraved on one side and “80” on the other lay inside. Brent pinched one and dry swallowed it.

“Today, children, the word of the day is”—Brent grinned sadly into the mirror—“hypocrisy.”

He resealed and stuffed the baggie of opiates back into his pants pocket then ran a hand through his thinning brown hair. Forty is not the new thirty, he thought. He’d spent the last ten months working three-days-on-four-days-off shifts here at Yorkshire Medical, and the hectic routine of ER life, combined with the long hours, was starting to show. Deep bags lurked under his eyes like thumb impressions in Silly Putty, and he seemed to have a constant scowl when he wasn’t forcing a smile. One of his fellow doctors had called it his “Resting Bitch Face.” Brent called it “Drug Addiction.”

He was lucky to still have a license to practice medicine after that fiasco in Oakland two years prior. Four thousand miles away, in Bay’s End, Ohio, he’d started a new life. Well… a new existence anyway. His old work records had been sealed, thanks to a friend within the system, but that little girl vomiting blood onto her Mary Janes continued to haunt him.

He twirled the gold band on his left ring finger as he left the restroom and returned to the floor. Melinda was just coming out of the med room when Brent passed the nurses’ station on his way to check on the broken arm in Room Five. She had a capped syringe—obviously Effingham’s ordered cocktail of Euphoria and Friend-Again—and the patient’s discharge instructions clutched in one hand.

Brent had always found Melinda attractive. With her wavy black hair cut into a bob and her sultry hazel eyes, she reminded him of Catherine Zeta Jones. And she had the actress’s body to boot, even though it was mostly hidden by loose scrubs. He saw her in street clothes every once in a while—usually on payday when she dropped by the ER to chat up the people on other shifts after scoring her paycheck from Human Resources—and he was quite enamored with the way she painted on her jeans and stuffed herself into tight tops.

She waggled Effingham’s discharge papers at Brent. “He isn’t gonna be happy with the fact you didn’t write him a script to go home with. You know that, right?”

Brent shrugged and continued to Room Five. He knocked softly, three times, before entering.

Cory McMahon was hunched over and cradling his freshly casted forearm against his chest. The nine-year-old redhead glanced up, and Brent noticed, for the second time that night, how thick the freckles underscoring the boy’s eyes were. The kid smiled weakly then grimaced, as if grinning had caused his arm a great deal of pain.

Ms. McMahon—at least Brent assumed she was a Miss by the lack of a wedding band; then again, that didn’t mean much in this day and age—sat in the corner of the room, dressed in an IHOP uniform. She didn’t so much as look up when Brent walked in, as if her lacquered-pink fingernails held her hypnotized. She was a larger woman but evenly proportioned: heavy chest, flat but soft midsection, wide hips, slight second chin, and pudgy cheeks. Blond curls the circumference of soda cans framed her face, and eye shadow gave her face the same quality as a bored raccoon’s. She chewed gum, but shockingly, even though her jaws worked feverishly, opening and closing with every crashing assault on the pink wad in her mouth, she made not a sound. It was as if someone had hit the mute button on her.

“How are we doing in here?” Brent asked.

Ms. McMahon finally looked up but only to glance at her son. She continued to pay Brent not an ounce of mind.

“It still hurts.” Cory’s cheeks lifted, and his mouth turned into a flat, bloodless scar.

“Has the nurse been in with a pill?”

Ms. McMahon shook her head—the first sign that she noticed Brent’s presence.

“I’ll get her on that. I’m sending you home with Tylenol-3. It has codeine in it”—Brent glanced at the mother to check her reaction to the fact that he was sending her child home with a prescription for a controlled substance, but Ms. McMahon only continued to consult her nails—“and it’ll probably make you sleepy. You can have tomorrow off school—”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday,” Ms. McMahon mumbled without looking up.

“Right, sorry. Days become blurred around here. You know how night shifts can be.”

Ms. McMahon jerked her eyebrows up and down then rolled her eyes.

Brent addressed Cory: “You, mister, need to be more careful when climbing down from your bunk bed to use the bathroom in the middle of the night. Next time, that cast might just be on your head instead of your arm.”

“They cast your head when you bash your brains in?”

“Well, no, but—”

Ms. McMahon cut in. “He was trying to be funny, Cor. It was a joke.” She finally met Brent’s eyes. “How much longer’s this gonna take? I gotta get back to work.”

“I’ll have the nurse bring him that pill ASAP. You should be out of here in the next half hour.”

“Half hour?” she balked. “Why’s it gonna be so long?”

“We have to make sure Cory doesn’t have an allergic reaction to the medicine.”

“I’m losing tips every minute I’m—you know what? Fuck it.” She snapped her head in Cory’s direction. “I’m docking your allowance this week. If I ain’t making money, neither are you. This is what I get for leaving you home with your shithead father. Guess I’m gonna have t’leave you with Nana from now on.”

“I’ll see about that pill.” Brent left without another word.

3.

When he stepped out of Room Five, Brent noticed Plucky standing behind the nurses’ station with Room Twelve’s chart in his hands.

The Pakistan-born oncologist had the unfortunate luck to have the voice of Plucky Duck from the nineties cartoon show Tiny Toons. His mother, who was a radiologist Brent knew from consults he’d ordered during his stint at Yorkshire, was cursed with the same irritating faculties of utterance. Plucky’s real name was Laird Devonshire, but none of Plucky’s personal acquaintances at the hospital referred to him as such. Though Plucky and his mother had been born and raised in Pakistan, his father was a tried-and-true Brit. Herman Devonshire had been teaching in Karachi when he met Abida Mukesh. Herman and Abida’s love affair had been quick and fierce, or so Plucky would have people believe, and they were married only two months after their first date. Seven months after their marriage—leading one to believe Plucky’s conception might have been the reason for the wedding—Plucky came into the world with a quack.

“Hey, Brent,” Plucky said as Brent rounded the nurses’ station. “How it do?”

“What it be, bro?”

They bumped fists. It was quite sad, really—two men, both professionals in their forties, acting like kids on the street.

“How’s Georgia?”

At first, Brent didn’t know what Plucky was talking about. Then, Plucky held up the chart in his hand, and Brent nodded. Georgia Blake, a rather unlucky thirteen-year-old, had end-stage leukemia.

“About as you would expect,” Brent said. “Came in complaining of pains in her side. She’s in Twelve. Go have a look for yourself.”

Plucky nodded solemnly. Brent didn’t envy his friend’s habit of becoming so close to his patients. It seemed unlikely that an oncologist, given the mortality rate of cancer patients, would invest so much into patients he knew, without a shadow of a doubt, he would lose.

“Her birthday’s next month,” Plucky said. “With these results”—he shook the chart as if he were more disappointed than angry—“I doubt she’s going to see it. Do you pray, Brent?”

The question caught Brent off guard. He took several seconds to regroup. “Not if I have the choice. Sometimes I’ll say, ‘Lord, give me the strength,’ but I don’t think that counts, considering I don’t believe in the thing I’m talking to.”

“That’s odd.” Plucky quirked an eyebrow. “Then again, I guess it would be odder to hear someone saying, ‘Please, person in which I do not believe, help me through this hard time.’ I guess one fills in the blanks, as it were.”

“Whatever. Why are you concerned with whether or not I pray?”

Plucky shrugged. “This girl needs all the help she can get. I suppose that’s why.”

“You’re her doctor, boss. She’ll be fine,” Brent lied.

“Yeah, maybe she will. Miracles happen every day,” Plucky said, but Brent knew that was also a comfortable fib people told themselves.

Plucky ambled off toward Room Twelve. Georgia Blake’s chart swung languidly at his side, like a grandfather clock’s pendulum in slow motion.

Warmth stole over Brent, as if he were standing under the exhaust vent of a great engine. His mouth dried out, and his palms began to sweat. He ground his teeth, not enough to do damage, but enough for the feeling of enamel on enamel to make gooseflesh rise on his forearms. His stomach growled, and he smiled.

The OxyContin had finally kicked in.

4.

Up until a week ago, Brent had been ingesting forty milligrams of OxyContin four times a day. He’d been following that regimen for almost five months, having previously bumped up from fives to tens, then to twenties. His upward—or should it be downward?—spiral into higher doses was necessitated by a growing tolerance for the opiate. Currently, he had not grown acclimated to the new eighty-milligram strength of his preferred poison. He floated through the rest of the morning blissfully unaware that every one of Yorkshire Medical’s emergency room staff was staring distrustfully at him.

Effingham had not caused a scene and had left with a grin on his face. Brent had given the brute just enough time for the Dilaudid to kick in before having Melinda show the bearish man the door. Cory McMahon was discharged forty minutes later, after Melinda gave the boy his first Tylenol-3. With the most pressing patients gone and Georgia Blake under Plucky’s care, Brent could while away the final hours of his third day on shift.

Melinda was chatting with a mousy black girl—Brent thought the young lady’s name was Katisha or Bobeeisha or Banana-Fana-Fofisha or whatever, but he couldn’t be sure. He overheard mention of how Italian males were known to be just as well hung as black men before he tuned out their chatter.

His eyes glided to the clock above Room Nine’s door, and he was shocked to find the hour of his escape had come.

“Where’s Brandy?” he asked, hoping he hadn’t slurred. His tongue felt like tire tread, thick and scratchy.

“Huh?” Melinda asked, seeming caught off guard by his sudden out-of-context question.

“A… um… Dr. Harrison. Where is she?”

“She’s in Room Twelve with Plucky. You gave her report almost an hour ago. You… you all right, Brent?”

“Ayuh,” he said, unintentionally parroting her Mainer accent.

“Right,” Melinda said, stretching the word out into infinity.

“So I can go now.” It was not a question.

“I guess so. Look, I’m off in another hour.” Melinda twirled in her chair to face him. “You need a ride home?”

He leveled heavy eyes on her in an attempt to make eye contact. After the trouble in Oakland, Brent had stopped driving. He lived less than two miles from Yorkshire Medical, and if he cut through Rifle Park, he shaved off an additional quarter of a mile. Anytime someone asked him about his aversion to owning a car, he would complain about gas prices, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end.

“Nah.” He waved her off. “I’m just really, really tired. Been a long three days, you know? Plus, the girl in Twelve kinda depressed me.”

Am I talking? My lips are moving, but she’s not saying anything.

“If you’re sure,” she said.

Did she hesitate, or did I just imagine her hesitating? Can she sense the dope slogging through my veins? Can she smell medicinal aromas emanating from my pores? Am I starting to give off that cloying junkie stench of aged cinnamon and week-old sweat?

“I’m okay.” He smiled boyishly. “Positive.”

“Be careful out there, Dr. Brent,” said Banana-Fana-Fofisha in a thick Bostonian accent. “The fog’s kinda thick this morning. Look both ways when crossing the street and all that.”

5.

The little girl’s name was Veronica. She was seven years old when Brent killed her.

Life in Oakland had been pleasant enough until he’d murdered the girl. The judge might have called the accident manslaughter if Brent had ever seen a day in court, but at the heart of things, it had been murder—cold-blooded, heartless, senseless murder of the most dastardly kind.

The streets were slick with rain, and a heavy mist cloaked the world. Then, Brent had been up to four Oxy 20s a day, and they still weren’t doing the job. Before leaving for his practice that cold January morning, he’d swallowed two of them instead of a single dose then kissed his slumbering wife on the cheek. Brenda didn’t stir. The night before, she’d dipped into the Oxy supply with him, but her appetite, as well as her tolerance, was far greater than his. She’d swallowed four to Brent’s one. Then they’d fucked like drunken seahorses.

The drive to work normally lasted twenty minutes. The pills usually took thirty to kick in. He figured he would be cloud surfing by the time he sat down behind his expensive desk in his expensive office surrounded by expensive frames containing diplomas from expensive institutions. Brent had always had extravagant tastes. He figured that was part of the reason he’d married Brenda. She was high maintenance. And he could afford her.

He ran into a traffic jam on the Ten. The interstate had become a parking lot. He phoned his receptionist, who arrived an hour early every morning to drink coffee and socialize on Facebook while she should have been doing other clerical duties, to inform her he was going to be late. She gave him a waspish, “Uh huh,” and he disconnected.

Forty minutes later, traffic began to creep forward. Two miles down, Brent saw the reason for the delay. An ’80s-style Chevy van had eaten the ass of a smaller economy car and seemed to have gobbled up half of the tiny vehicle in front of it. The victimized automobile was undefinable as far as make and model were concerned. It looked like a hunk of junkyard leavings. The ambulances had obviously already come and gone, for no victims were on-site. Only a single police car remained. The officer who’d stayed behind had been tasked with measurements and other banal duties. Brent rolled past at no more than ten miles per hour, watching the officer. The Oxy had taken hold, and Brent saw the officer working in slow, fluid movements. Brent’s eyes drifted closed.

A horn bleated, and Brent, not knowing if the honk had been directed at him or not, accelerated. He was lucky no one was in front of him, ogling the scene as he had been, because his Audi would have shoved their rear bumper into the backseat as sure as flies swarm shit.

Brent thumbed the Sirius Satellite Radio controls on the steering wheel, selected a station that broadcasted the most offensive, thunderous hip-hop the world had to offer, and pried his eyes wide. He rolled down his window to let the crisp bay mist splash across his drooping face. He still had a ten-minute drive into work. Nodding off into a drug-induced slumber would not serve him well.

Four miles down, he drifted onto the off-ramp. He made a right on red without checking to see if the way was clear. Luckily, no one crashed into him. He passed the elementary school on the left, and even then, he hadn’t been bothered to learn the name of the place. It was just a building that housed children during the day. Morning traffic whizzed by, heading deeper into the city, but the way before him was almost devoid of other vehicles. He navigated into the turn lane and waited for a lull so that he could turn into the parking lot behind his office.

Whether it was impatience or the drugs, Brent couldn’t be certain, but the more cars that whizzed by, the more agitated he became. Where are all these fucking people going? Certainly, there weren’t this many people commuting at this time in this city at this moment. Because of this, Brent was focused on the steady stream of cars, trucks, and SUVs, and not on where he would be turning.

The break between cars was small but more than enough if he was quick. He trampled the accelerator. The Audi leaped forward. He spun the wheel to the left. He was going to make it. The nearest car was still a good twenty feet away when his tires hit the inlet.

Brent looked away from oncoming traffic, faced forward, and saw the girl dart out in front of him. Brent assumed she’d realized she wasn’t going to make it across the inlet before the car struck her because she stalled, turned, and settled a ghastly face of terror on him before she disappeared under the car. The tires rolled over her. Once. Twice. And then he hit the brakes.

He threw open the door and spilled out onto the concrete. Because he hadn’t put the car in park, the Audi continued to roll forward until it idled into the back wall of Brent’s office.

He tried to stand but stumbled and went sprawling. The world canted. He rolled with it. His heart thudded, drummed in his ears, as he crashed onto his side. He pushed himself up, feeling sick and dizzy, and staggered to the little girl twitching at the inlet.

She’d been laid out in a W shape, her legs bent back at such sharp angles that her mouth rested on the heel of one of her shoes. She bucked, and thick bloody vomit exploded from her mouth to spatter across her Mary Janes.

She was so small. Her ash-blond hair splayed out like a horse’s tail in the wind. A Dora the Explorer backpack was smashed between her and the concrete. Brent thought she couldn’t be any more than five.

Who let a child her age walk to school on her own?

Maria, Brent’s receptionist, flew from the rear entrance. She saw Brent and the little girl then began screaming.

It never crossed Brent’s mind to try to help the girl. Not that he could have done anything for her, but he would later regret not attempting CPR… or something. Anything. She was dead even before Maria ran back inside to call the police.

Brent loomed over the child, wondering how everything had gone so wrong, so quickly. He didn’t cry, but an icy ball froze his guts. I should be upset. I should be feeling something other than cold.

Cops and EMTs arrived and removed the child from the scene as if she were no more than litter in a gutter, wrapped up in a bag and carried off by the trash truck. Two cops questioned Brent, but all he could say was, “She just dashed out in front of me.”

It wasn’t a lie, but it felt like one.

Two Burger King employees had seen what went down from across the street. They corroborated Brent’s story. It was all just a sad tragedy. Such an unfortunate accident.

Because Brent was such a seemingly upright citizen, no one ever brought up the need for a urine or blood sample. For a time, he received hateful phone calls and nasty letters from the girl’s family. They even tried to sue him for wrongful death, but the case was settled out of court. Brent made sure those poor people would never have to work again.

Once upon a time, he had dosed for the thrill, for the gleeful escape the little pills provided. Then there came the time that he took them to forget Veronica, the little girl he’d bent into the shape of a W and left on the cold concrete to die.

Chapter Two:

The Doctor Will See You Now

1.

Yorkshire was a relatively new hospital. For six decades, Pointvilla County’s only medical facility was Mercy Medical, two towns over in Chestnut. In the late nineties, Bay’s End seemed to grow tired of being healthcare-less and erected the one-story emergency room/hospital. Brent had worked for one place that was smaller than Yorkshire—an offshoot of Kaiser Permanente in Rancho Cucamonga, California—during his residency. He sometimes mused that the building hadn’t been much more than a shack with stretchers. Yorkshire was nice, though, as was Bay’s End. He’d always loved the feel of a small town and the closeness residents of such places shared. This town, as with many other tiny cities across America, had its secrets and sordid past—a young woman had been found murdered in the underground tunnels of a derelict logging factory once upon a when—but Brent believed that was what made any good town worth living in. Neighbors without secrets obviously had something wrong with them.

Brent left the hospital by way of the ambulance bay, his hands stuffed in his leather coat and collar raised against the chilly, misty-morning air. He strode down Main, passing the old laundry facility and the closed knickknack shop next door to it. At Fir, he crossed the street and headed into the tree line of Rifle Park. His apartment complex was half a mile to the west, on Juniper, next door to a boys’ home, which had been built on the site of the old logging company.

The fog spun dervishes around him as if windmills churned the air in the distance. The smell of forest detritus and frequently used cat litter crept into his nose, and he was reminded of being a kid in Fontana, California, hunting earthworms behind his house. His buddy Gilbert—a skinny Mexican kid who would stand at the fence that separated their properties and holler Brent’s name until Brent finally came jogging down his patio steps to play catch over the chain-link—had said those earthworms smelled like “sheet,” and girls didn’t like boys who smelled like “sheet.” Brent figured that was the exact moment when he realized he wanted to be a doctor. A doctor’s work, he’d assumed, was a nice clean profession, and he would rarely smell like “sheet” if he grew up to be a man of medicine. After being crapped on over a dozen times since leaving medical school, Brent thought the error of his childhood outlook quite funny.

Shit was simply part of the deal. He dealt with human waste on a daily basis, no matter how high up the doctoral food chain he might climb. Even outrageously priced surgeons had to worry about whether or not their patients had finished their GoLYTELY prep the night before being hacked open and put back together with what amounted to human basket-weaving skills.

Brent sliced through the fog, skirting trees and fallen branches, until he came to the bonfire at the center of Rifle Park. His ears popped, and he massaged his jaw as he rounded the teepee of logs jutting from the fire pit.

Bay’s End’s annual Summer’s End bonfire was a month behind them, but Brent could still detect the aroma of charred wood coming from the belly of the huge pit. It wasn’t an unpleasant smell. It reminded him of campfires, blackened hotdogs, and scorched marshmallows that had to be blown out before they could be consumed.

A bare foot came into view—sunken in the grass like a head in a pillow. Brent stopped and stared at the foot, which was attached to an ankle, then a calf. Yet the rest of the leg was hidden by the massive pile of wood.

Brent slunk forward, back hunched, eyes wide. A bare thigh came into view. A small V of closely trimmed pubic hair. Blood on the abdomen. A puddle of the stuff surrounding the torso.

He halted. Breath kicked from him. Veronica flashed before his mind. He slapped the image away by fanning his hand in front of his face. He drew deep breaths, exhaling at length after each one.

A faint crackle of static sizzled in his ears, as if a television a few yards away had been unplugged from its cable. The sound caused him to grind his teeth. He hadn’t realized they were clenched. He opened his mouth, as if to say something to the corpse before him, then clamped his jaw closed. His teeth went to grinding again.

He took another unsteady step forward and spotted the woman’s pallid face. Her boyish hair and elven ears immediately reminded Brent of a pixie. Her face was frozen in a look of tremendous horror, as if she were witnessing violence committed against someone else and not herself. Her eyes stared.

The last thing Brent noticed—which was odd, considering he was a man—was her heavy breasts, which hung in her armpits like sandbags. Attached to one purple nipple was a clothespin.

Brent threw up into the cold bonfire.

2.

He struggled to get his cell phone from his pocket as he backed away from the savaged woman. He dialed emergency services, without ever taking his eyes off that clothespin. The woman’s abdomen and flank were pocked with multiple stab wounds, but they were nowhere near as disturbing as the clothespin. Somehow, those two small pieces of wood connected by a metal spring were the most horrific thing of all.

The cell remained corpse-quiet at his ear. He pulled the device away and glared at the phone. Not a single bar of service was to be had. Brent held the phone to the sky like Lady Liberty brandishing her torch.

The device seemed to mock him: “Nana-nana-boo-boo, you can’t have no service!”

“Goddamn, come on!” he cried.

He backed into a solid, immoveable object and shrieked. The cell flew from his hand as he whirled around. A massive oak stood in the place where he’d been just a second before. His breath came out in a bark of humorless laughter.

He scooped the cell phone from the dewy grass, wiped the screen on his shirt, and checked again for service bars.

Nothing.

He glanced over his shoulder, saw the pink foot sticking up from the grass, and began walking back toward Main Street with his phone held out in front of him. The bars wouldn’t fill. Brent exited the tree line, and his ears popped once more. Still gazing at the face of his phone, he watched as the empty bars filled instantly, five strong. He dialed 9-1-1 and slapped the cold screen to his ear.

“Pointvilla Emer—“

“Yes, hello? Yes, I’m Brent Cummings. Yes—” He paused, wondering why the hell he was starting every sentence with a positive statement, as if he were answering a questionnaire. “I’m a doctor with—Never mind. I’ve found a body. A woman in the park. She’s dead. Been dead a while, I would assume. She has a clothespin on her right breast.”

“Sir, I’ll need you to calm down. You’re talking too fast for me to catch everything. You say you’ve found a body?”

“Yes… um… dead. A dead body.”

“I’ll inform the police.” Her tone had changed dramatically, as if she were suspicious of Brent. “Can you stay on the line with me?”

“Yes, I can. Can you… um… tell them to hurry. I had to leave her. In the woods. I didn’t want to, but my phone, it… um… had no service.”

Do I sound guilty? He thought he did. His heart quickened, and his mouth became a desert wasteland.

“Please,” he said. “Tell them to hurry.”

3.

Brent waited at the curb, phone pressed to his ear, listening while the dispatcher made the required calls. She came back to him with several questions about his name and address. He rambled off the information, no longer pausing and stuttering like someone caught with blood on his hands.

Fifteen minutes later, the first police cruiser arrived: a black-and-white with the Bay’s End city seal on the doors. Brent told the dispatcher that the cops had arrived then disconnected the call.

A thin, middle-aged woman with a long brown ponytail and shocking blue eyes got out, rounded the car, and approached him. “I’m Officer Wales. What’s the problem?”

Brent was aghast. “They only sent one of you? I told the woman on the phone that I found a dead body. They only sent one person for a murder?”

“I was closest, sir. I assure you more officers are on their way.”

“Well… good,” was all Brent could think to say.

Officer Wales shifted her belt. “Take me to it.”

Brent led the cop back into the trees. He retraced his steps, moving deeper into the woods. Halfway there, he glanced down at his phone, which he had yet to put away, and saw the signal was steady at five bars. Of course, he thought, now you wanna act right.

“When did you find the body?” The cop’s voice sounded god-awful loud, as if she were speaking through a bullhorn.

“About twenty minutes ago. I had to walk back out to the road because my stupid phone couldn’t catch a signal.”

“Male or female? The body, that is?” She came up alongside him, momentarily brushing against his shoulder as they passed between two close-together trees.

“A woman. She… um… she had a clothespin on one of her nipples.”

“Say again?” Officer Wales asked.

“I found her naked. I mean, she was naked when I came across her. I didn’t take off her clothes.”

The officer stopped. Brent strode forward another two steps before turning to face her.

“No one said you removed her clothes, sir.” Her thoughts were painted all over her face. Her lowered eyebrows said he was acting funny. Her raised cheeks below squinted eyes proclaimed he was a person of interest. The tight, bloodless line that was her mouth screamed, “Guilty!”

“I’m just really shaken up. I swear I didn’t do anything. I only found her… um… twenty minutes ago.”

“Right,” she said. “Go on. Keep moving.”

As Brent turned, he made note that the officer had rested her hand on the butt of her service piece.

They reached the clearing where the bonfire was located a few minutes later. Brent sidestepped, trying to get a view of the foot jutting from the grass, but no matter how far around he went, he didn’t see it. He made a full revolution, and his heart crashed into his gut.

He eyed the impatient-looking cop standing with her hands on her hips and her head cocked and said, “She’s… um… she’s gone.”

4.

Brent made another revolution around the bonfire. Any sign that the woman had been there was gone. No blood. No indention in the grass caused by the weight of her body. He could see his own footprints in the green, but nothing body shaped. When he returned to where Officer Wales stood, he stopped and shook his head in disbelief.

“I saw her. I saw her right here.” He gauged the officer’s countenance and judged that she didn’t believe a word of what he was selling.

Her radio crackled to life. “Jenna, I’m here. What’s your twenty?”

She spoke into the small black box on her left shoulder. “I’m at the bonfire, Mark. Just head straight through the woods, perpendicular to my car.” She addressed Brent next. “We’ll just wait for the other officer, if that’s all right with you.”

“I don’t… um… I don’t know what’s going on. I know what I saw, and I saw a dead woman. Right here!” Brent shouted, thrusting his arm out to point at the place where the woman should have been.

“Right,” she said.

The fog had burned off some, revealing the entire clearing. Brent guesstimated that the entire area was a full acre. He’d wondered several times during his walks how the city kept the bonfire from catching the surrounding forest on fire. Flame was an unpredictable monster that seemed hell-bent on finding the nearest, most flammable object to consume. He studied the tree line, considering the very real possibility that someone had been lurking there, unseen, the entire time. Perhaps that person was still there, giggling, enjoying the sight of him running in circles in an attempt to locate the corpse that had somehow vanished.

Brent turned, intent on making another pass of the area surrounding the bonfire, but Wales stopped him.

“Why don’t you just stay here for the time being, okay?” Her hand was back on the butt of her gun.

“I can’t… I can’t even imagine how…” He couldn’t manage to finish his sentences without sounding guilty.

The irony was not lost on him. He’d been so calm and collected in the face of the police after running down a seven-year-old girl, but when he was completely innocent, he couldn’t even face one suspicious cop. And did he blame her for being leery of him? Not in the least. He was acting as if he’d done something wrong. That was a fact. His shock at having returned to find that not only had the corpse been removed, but that all evidence of its existence had disappeared as well, had rocked him to the core. He couldn’t even feel the effects of his Oxy anymore.

Ah, shit… the Oxy…

An officer in his twenties came out of the tree line a few minutes later. The man’s gelled ash-colored hair stuck up a half inch from his scalp. The man reminded Brent of Bart Simpson, grown up and pink, instead of the trademark Simpson yellow. The male officer had deep-set eyes and lacked any fat or muscle under the skin of his face. It was as if God had draped pallid skin over his skull then called it a day.

Brent had become wholly aware of the pills in his pocket, and he had to struggle not to reach for them.

“Whataya got?” Mark asked.

“This is Dr. Brent Cummings. Says he found a body out here, but we didn’t find anything on arrival. He’s been acting a little less than stable.”

Well, that wasn’t very professional, Brent thought. “Would you be acting normal if you’d called the cops out because you found a body and then the fucking thing just disappeared?”

“Watch the language, buddy,” Mark said calmly. “Just trying to find out what happened here, ’kay.”

“I found a dead woman is what happened. Now she’s gone. Someone’s fuck—someone’s messing with me.”

Wales leaned in and whispered into Mark’s ear. He nodded, took two steps forward, and squinted into Brent’s face.

“What’s the d—”

“Hush,” Mark said, still peering into Brent’s eyes. The officer leaned back, sighed, and said, “What are you on, buddy?”

“What do you mean?” The baggie in his pocket weighed as much as a cinderblock.

“Your pupils are the size of pencil lead, so what have you been taking? Been dipping into the narc cabinet at work, Doctor?” The smile that stretched across Mark’s face made it appear even more skeletal.

“I don’t—”

“Mind if I search you? You know, since you seem to not know what I’m talking about and all.”

“Why would you want to search me? You have no… um… no right to search me. I’ve done nothing wrong. I called you!” The pills in his pocket were so heavy they threatened to drop his pants.

Wales chimed in. “What we’re looking at here right now, Dr. Cummings, is a false report. Since it’s obvious you didn’t do this as a prank, all we’re left with is the conclusion that you actually believe you saw something. Perhaps you had a long night at work, or perhaps you’re under the influence of an illegal substance… or maybe a legal one. Somehow, I doubt you have a pill bottle in your pants, though.” She pointed to the bulge beneath his right pocket and gave Brent a sad smile.

“This is crazy. I didn’t do anything.”

“We can search you here or at the station,” Mark said. “Your choice.”

“You don’t have the right!” Brent was perspiring, and sweat leaked into his right eye. He swiped it away quickly and saw that his hand was shaking badly. “I was just doing what I thought was right. You can’t fault me for that, can you?”

Mark glanced over his shoulder at Wales, and she nodded.

Mark faced Brent once more. “Put your hands behind your back.” He pulled out his cuffs.

Brent whimpered. “No,” he whined as if he were a man who’d just been sentenced to death.

4.

They found the Oxy. Of course, they found the Oxy. Doctor or not, Brent knew it was illegal to have prescription medication, especially of the narcotic variety, on his person without a bottle containing his pertinent information on the label. Brent had no such bottle because he’d bought his stash from a young woman named Carly, who lived in the apartment next door to his.

The deal was simple: he wrote the script for the pills, then she filled it and sold them back to him. She made her rent money, and he wasn’t implicated in the crime by writing the script for himself. As long as he didn’t write her more than a month’s allotted amount, they were good. And when he ran out early, Brent wrote one for Mrs. Harkins, the old woman who lived below him. He made pharmacy runs for her twice a month and threw the Oxy script in with her other various medications when he needed to. It was risky, but he only used Harkins when he was desperate.

The Drug Enforcement Agency kept tabs on the distribution of class-one narcotics like overbearing parents monitoring children’s playtime. Since striking up his deal with Carly, Brent had written four prescriptions for OxyContin at ninety pills a bottle. He’d fallen short the second month he was in town and had worked his Mrs. Harkins scheme. Then he’d done the same a week ago. That was six scripts for two individuals who didn’t have a prior history with the drug, resulting in red flag number one. Mrs. Harkins’s general practitioner checked on all of her prescriptions every three months to make sure she was doing as he’d ordered, and he had found the most recent order of OxyContin disconcerting. Her GP had phoned to ask her if she’d been to the emergency room at Yorkshire in the past thirty days, and the woman hadn’t known what the doctor was talking about. The physician then phoned the DEA.

Prescription pads get stolen all the time, and Brent knew this, so he’d written each script and signed them a tad differently every time. Doctors ordered pads in bulk, so it could be months, or sometimes even years, before they noticed one was missing. Unfortunately, Brent had never imagined being found with drugs on his person. He was an upstanding ER doc with an impeccable work history. Nothing to worry about, right?

The information about Mrs. Harkins was given to Brent while he sat in a cold aluminum chair in Pointvilla County’s intake facility. Officer Wales had dropped him off, signed him over, and went on her merry way. Nine hours later, Brent was led to the room where he now stared across the table at two detectives: one of the heavy-gut variety and the other bird chested. Both men, in their mid-fifties, were in sour moods. No good-cop, bad-cop nonsense. He was sharing the room with two work-hardened dicks who looked as if they wanted his nuts for bar snacks.

“You can see how upsetting all this must have been for Mrs. Harkins. She’s very disappointed in you, Mr. Cummings.”

Brent made a mental note that he was now “Mr. Cummings” and not “Dr. Cummings” to these two angered detectives.

“You want to tell us again how you know nothing about these prescriptions written in your name?”

“I… um… I don’t want to get Carly in trouble.”

“Too late for that, Mr. Cummings.”

Mister again…

“I don’t have anything more to say. I want my lawyer. I want my one telephone call, too.”

The man with the heavy gut chortled. “Don’t they all? All right. Well, I guess you need to know that you’re being booked on suspicion of distributing a controlled substance. The judge will decide if you’re fit for bail. We should have that information in the morning.”

4.

One thought kept bounding around in his mind: You’re fucked.

And he was. There was no logical way out of this mess. He was finished in the medical profession. His license would be revoked, and he would lose his job. He had ninety thousand dollars in his savings account, but that wouldn’t last him a year. If Carly was pulled in, he would have her incarceration on his conscience. He didn’t even want to think about his own prison sentence. He was a good-looking man, and good-looking men behind bars were filled out like Internet quizzes on a nightly basis.

Yep. He was definitely, most assuredly, quite completely fucked.

Brent spent the night in a jail cell. He lay on the bottom bunk, surrounded by gunmetal-gray walls, a toilet without a tank, a standalone sink, and a steel stool set into the concrete floor. The top bunk was thankfully empty. He had no cellmate.

He’d used his one phone call to contact Plucky, who informed Brent that his shifts had already been covered. The word-of-mouth train had already left the station. Gossip around Yorkshire had labelled Brent a drug dealer on par with Scarface, and things weren’t looking good for him ever returning to the ER.

“No shit,” Brent had said. He was shocked Plucky had even answered his phone after seeing Pointvilla Correction pop up on his caller ID.

“You know, man, I knew about the pills. Wasn’t difficult to figure it out. Your mood changes, you change, when you’re on those things. You go from being a tight-ass to floaty, like a cloud. I see people under the influence of narcs all the time. I’m a cancer doctor, remember? Anyway, let me know when they give you an amount for your bail, and I guess I’ll come and get you.”

“You will?”

“I’m not going to leave you in there any longer than I have to. I watch Lock Up Raw, I know what happens to girls like you.”

“Funny,” Brent said.

“Listen, man, you’re a shithead. No doubt about that, so don’t think I’m doing this because I believe you’re innocent or something. I’m doing this because we all have pasts, and you need to make sure that this becomes just that. Your past. Right?”

“Yeah. Thanks, Pluck. Rehab or bust. Promise.”

“Don’t promise me anything. You’re an addict. Your promises are worth as much to me as a syphilitic whore who’s rolled back her prices.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“That ‘sorry’ means nothing, either. Just so you know.”

“Okay.”

“Bye, Brent.”

Hours later, he sat up in bed, threw his legs over the side, and ducked out from under the top bunk. He stretched and went to the six-inch-wide, two-foot-tall window. He gazed out into the trees of Marietta Woods, the patch of forest that connected Chestnut, Pointvilla, and Bay’s End. Somewhere out there was the tourist trap known as Waverly Chasm. He’d never been out there, and had no plans to, but he knew its general location.

Bright-white clouds rolled across the darkening sky, like shifting bandages on bruised skin. He’d lost all track of time, but he guesstimated it was around seven o’clock. Sleep was a distant concept to him, something he didn’t think he would be doing anytime soon.

His skin crawled, and he scratched at his right forearm. Things were only going to get worse. Without his pills, he would be huddled in a corner by morning, sweating and vomiting in equal amounts.

The dead woman by the bonfire skipped across his vision, and he flinched. With everything he’d gone through, she’d been the last thing on his mind. He wondered if the drugs had really been the culprit. Maybe he’d imagined the whole thing because he was high. That seemed unlikely. For one, the details were a little too high definition for him: her pixie ears and short-cropped hair, the various stab wounds, the heavy breasts hanging into the armpits, and the single clothespin on the nipple, as if the other had been lost or hadn’t been applied. Brent had never seen anything like it, not in real life or in a movie, and he didn’t think his mind could conjure such an image on its own. Secondly, he could still smell her: the oyster-like stench of her blood enhanced by the heavy mist surrounding them.

His gorge rose. He lurched to the commode and vomited into the calm waters below. Whether the violent spasms of his stomach were induced by the memory of the woman’s smell or the progression of his withdrawals, Brent didn’t know. He didn’t care, either. He simply threw up again, wiped his eyes, and went back to the window.

What the fuck am I going to do?

Chapter Three:

Under Observation

1.

Brent didn’t sleep for three full days. He occupied himself by staring at the view outside his window and studying a rather pleasant picture of a penis and balls that had been drawn on the bottom of the top bunk. And what a cock it was. Veiny, swollen, and dripping, the specimen was surely an object of desire for every inmate since the dawn of the penal system. Van Gogh it was not, but Picasso would have loved the disproportionate measurements of sack to shaft.

The compassionate nurse who’d questioned him about his medical history the day he was brought to Pointvilla County Jail had come by on the second day of his stay with a dose of methadone. The pill was a twenty-four-hour time-release type of deal, and he would receive one a day for as long as he was under the crushing fist of his withdrawals. This was a stop-gap measure, as most druggies who’d been using as long as Brent had would suffer seizures and other life-threatening symptoms. In short, he could die. Still, the methadone didn’t help him sleep, and by the morning of his bail hearing, he’d been awake for seventy-five hours.

Shackled, he trudged through the wide corridors of Pointvilla County Jail like a manacled zombie. He was led through numerous steel doors and multicolored pastel hallways before being taken to a small room with fifteen chairs. The chairs, set up in three rows of five, were all made of thick yellow plastic. Two other inmates—one of whom was female; Brent hadn’t known the jail was co-ed—sat in the front row, heads down, studying their footwear. Brent was made to sit next to the woman, in front of a television on a rollaway entertainment center—the kind that belonged in a high school sexual education classroom—that sat alongside a camera atop a tripod. The camera was hooked to a computer in the corner to Brent’s right. On the television was the image of a bald man with glasses, busy shuffling papers—a judge.

The bald man on the television screen didn’t seem interested in pleas of guilty or not guilty. He concerned himself only with court dates. He asked if each inmate in attendance knew why he or she was being held, and each did. Then he went on to reiterate why they were currently incarcerated, rendering his first question moot.

He set the woman’s bond at $5,000 and another man’s bail at $450, before leveling Brent with the whopping sum of $250,000.

Brent swiveled in his chair and thought for a moment that he would collapse to the floor.

“Any questions?” the judge asked.

“Yeah,” Brent said. “Can I request a gun? I’d like to swallow a bullet.”

The judge didn’t find him amusing.

Four hours later, Brent was escorted not back to his cell but to a different block altogether. He was forced to strip and don what the guards called a “turtle suit,” which was made of two different fleece-type materials that could be fastened to one another by Velcro. This was so he couldn’t hang himself with the arm or neck hole of his prison apparel. When he was whisked away to another cell that had nary a sharp edge to it—a bed with rounded corners, a sink and commode with curved edges, and a window with chicken wire woven through the glass—Brent realized how unfunny his comment about swallowing a bullet had been.

After the guards left, Brent groaned. “Fuck my life.”

2.

Another day and night passed, and on day four, Brent was released into Plucky’s custody. No bondsman was involved. Brent had no idea where his friend had come up with a quarter of a million dollars, but he was not about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Plucky drove in silence. Every once in a while, Brent looked down at the clothes he wore, the same ones he’d been arrested in, and considered how comfortable they were in comparison to that itchy turtle suit. He was also swimming in a particularly fuzzy sea of methadone. The jail nurse had been kind enough to give him his daily dose a mere hour before he was released. How sweet of her.

When they entered Bay’s End by way of Highway 607, Plucky asked, “Are you hungry?”

“Yeah” was all Brent said. He was still enamored by the comfort of his clothing.

They stopped at Wiley’s Sandwich Shop, an outdoor establishment that was nothing more than a shack surrounded by neon-green picnic benches. Plucky and Brent were the only customers. Brent sat on one of the benches while Plucky ordered two Philly cheesesteaks from the teenager behind the window. Brent read the specials on a foldaway sign that sat at the corner of the shack. Written in swooping lady cursive was a special on a sandwich called the Poor Man’s Club—bologna, salami, and liverwurst smothered in a bacon mayo and topped with lettuce and tomato—and a bag of fries, all for three and a quarter. What a deal! Brent wondered if the young woman behind the window had penned the special of the day. She seemed to be the only one in attendance capable of such.

Behind another pane of glass to the right of the order window, a fat Hispanic man was cleaning a grill with what looked like a sponge on the end of a lathe. Back and forth he went, his forearms rippling with straining muscles, steam from the wet hotplate encompassing his chubby jowls, his second chin dancing a jig above his man-tits. Surprisingly, the cook’s white uniform was immaculate, at least what Brent could see of it. He’d half expected the cook to be covered in grease and mustard stains, possibly from head to foot, but none of those items marred his clothing. Brent caught site of the health score, which was framed to the left of the window. He smiled when he read the big “100%” scrawled in red marker across the front.

Chances were good that he wouldn’t be adding an explosive case of E-coli to his current list of problems. Then again, methadone slowed down the digestive system. A gastric exorcism might not be a bad thing in the coming days.

Plucky came over and sat down opposite Brent. He laid his ticket on the table and sat staring at his friend.

“What?” Brent asked after a moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Now what are you on? And how did you get it? You look like a drunk in a hot tub, you’re so at rest,” Plucky said.

“Calm down. The nurse gave me methadone before I left. They didn’t want to worry about me seizing into a coma under their care.”

“What are you going to do now that you’re out? You’re under my strict observation. You know that, right? You’re not leaving my sight until your trial next month.”

“I know.”

“I suppose you want me to write you something? Like methadone or something stronger? Perhaps a script for a whole butt-load of OxyContin?”

Brent remained silent, gawping at his friend.

“I’m not going to do that, but I guess that’s what you want, right? The look on your face, man… that’s the most desperate thing I’ve ever seen.” There was no levity in Plucky’s gaze. He looked saddened, disappointed.

“I’m going to need something. You don’t have to write it, but I will find something. It’s not me, Plucky. It’s the disease.”

“Disease?” Plucky laughed. “You’re as bad as the smokers I treat for lung cancer. Fucking disease. Right, and Big Macs are a goddamn epidemic.”

“Look, I know I’m a shit. You don’t have to keep reminding me. I just… I don’t want to bite off my tongue in the middle of the night because I need a fix. Fuck… listen to me… ‘because I need a fix’? I sound like a street junkie.”

“Despite not living on the street, man, you’re still a junkie. Don’t fool yourself.”

“I guess I deserve that. So what do you suggest, oh caretaker of mine? Should I go cold turkey and hope for the best? Or are you going to feed my need?”

“Don’t say it like that. We’ll get you some methadone, yes, maybe even a valium or three, mainly because you look like you haven’t slept since you were born. Then we’ll see where to go from there.”

“I can’t take you seriously.”

“What? Why?” Plucky’s face crinkled in confusion.

“Because you sound like an animated duck. Where’s our fucking food?”

3.

Plucky made good on his promise. He wrote a prescription for a mild dose of methadone and an order of five valium on the strict grounds that Brent would stay with him for the following week. Brent would be allowed a whole methadone tablet on day one and an equal dose of Valium. Day two, Brent would receive half of each, and the process would continue to dwindle until Brent received nothing. Then his rehabilitation could truly begin. He was terrified of the future but ready to make the switch back to normal life. The last thing he wanted was to start his coming prison sentence balled up in a knot and jonesing.

After lunch, the two men stopped at the CVS on the corner of Main and Fir, the one directly across from Yorkshire Medical, and went inside. Brent followed Plucky into the pharmacy, where they waited in line behind three people.

Brent was staring at his shoes when he heard a soft voice say, “Excuse me.”

He glanced up and locked eyes with Banana-Fana-Fofisha, the girl who’d told him to look both ways before crossing the road the last time he’d seen her. She didn’t recognize him, or at the very least, she pretended not to. He nodded at her, and she smiled before disappearing down an aisle for analgesics.

His head swept back and forth as the line progressed. There was only one more person ahead of them, a plump old woman with a cane in her right hand. She leaned all her weight on that third leg, and her wrist on that side blanched, bloodless. He expected her to topple over at any moment. The hefty old woman paid for her purchases and stepped out of line.

Brent saw the dead woman behind the register and gasped, then swallowed errant spit. The pixie stared at him as he gawked, brain-dead, and petrified. She was clothed in the requisite CVS Pharmacy lackey’s uniform: plain white T-shirt, khaki pants, red vest with the store’s logo on her name badge. But what Brent saw, truly saw, was that she was naked. Despite the fact that she was upright, her heavy breasts hung in her armpits like half-full water balloons. The clothespin jutted from the nipple of one tit like an accusing finger—“You! You know I’m dead!” Her eyes showed their whites, and dark canyons lay underneath them. Not bags, but empty suitcases. Lividity pooled at the back of her neck, giving the flesh there a purple-bruise quality. She craned her neck to ask a question of the very alive person behind her, and Brent heard it crack as her tendons strained against the clutch of rigor.

“You’re dead,” he said then blinked.

The woman—Mya, according to her nametag—snapped back, front and center, and stabbed him with confused eyes. “Excuse me?”

“You’re dead,” he repeated.

“Brent, man, are you okay? You with me?” Plucky asked from ten thousand leagues under water.

“She’s dead,” Brent answered.

Only she wasn’t. Not anymore. Now she was alive, crisp and fresh, pink and full of blood, loose and devoid of the cement of death.

“What’s wrong with him?” Mya asked of Plucky, finally taking her eyes off Brent.

“He’s having a rough time. Brent, you okay?”

“She’s alive. Good fucking Christ, she’s alive!” He all but screamed the last bit, and Mya flinched.

“Is he dangerous?” she asked Plucky.

“I honestly don’t know. Come on, Brent. Let’s go. Okay? We’re going now, all right?”

“Yuh-yeah… going…”

Plucky laid the prescription in front of the startled woman, grabbed a pen from a cup beside the register, and jotted something on the reverse side of the square sheet. When he was done, he threaded his arm through Brent’s and tugged him away.

“Fill that for me, would you?” Plucky told the girl as he pulled Brent away. “His info’s on the back. Thanks!”

4.

Back in the car, Plucky said, “What the fuck was all that about?”

“She’s the reason they found the Oxy on me. She… she was the body I found. Did I tell you about the body? I found a body. Sweet fucking Christ, I found her body!” Brent’s heart beat ninety-to-nothing in his chest. He felt as if he’d consumed a pound of sugar. He’d never tried cocaine, but he imagined that was what it would have felt like. He caught the reflection of his eyes in the vanity mirror on the sun visor and slapped it closed.

Why the fuck was it open? Did I open it? He couldn’t remember. All he knew was he didn’t want to look at that wide-eyed madman anymore. Brent couldn’t stand the sight of himself.

“What are you talking about? What body?”

“I was walking home from the hospital and…” Even though he could not believe he hadn’t told Plucky the entire story as of yet, Brent relayed the whole thing, from beginning to end, leaving out not one detail, until the tale concluded with his arrest.

“She had a clothespin… on her nipple?” Plucky asked.

“Yeah,” Brent said.

“And you’re positive that was her? The girl behind the counter?” Plucky asked as he made a right onto Juniper. He didn’t sound as if he believed a word of what Brent had told him.

“Yeah. Mya. Her name was… is Mya. I saw it on her nametag. Wait. Why are we here?” Brent asked as they pulled into the parking lot of his apartment complex. “I thought I was staying with you.”

“You need clothes and stuff. Toiletries. Stop asking questions. Just do as I say.” Plucky parked beside none other than Mrs. Harkins’s wide-bodied Oldsmobile. The tank’s tires were encased in spiderwebs, and weeds had grown up through the concrete under the chassis. Brent had no idea why management allowed her car to stay, what with it being in such poor condition, but he’d mused that maybe she was screwing the owner of the complex. Geriatric sex, how hilarious.

“What’s so funny?” Plucky asked as he killed the engine.

“What? Nothing’s funny,” Brent said, laughing.

“Quit it. You’re acting even weirder than you should be, withdrawal or no withdrawal. Get out. And if you see any of your old neighbors, don’t so much as nod at them. Everybody here knows what you did.” Plucky started to get out.

Brent stopped him with a hand on his forearm. “How?”

“Mrs. Harkins knows everybody in this town, it would seem. She’s the one who called the hospital and spread your dirty laundry out for everyone to see. I can only imagine she told everyone here, as well. On a side note, did you have to use an old woman to score your shit? Talk about a shitty thing to do.”

“I wasn’t thinking.”

“When’s the last time you did that—thinking?”

“Many moons ago, kemosabe. Many moons ago.”

5.

Brent’s apartment smelled of dead things. A moldering banana and an empty can of sardines in the trash were among the culprits. Plucky tied off the bag and ran it out to the dumpster while Brent rooted through his closet.

If his luck stayed, he might skirt prison. How advantageous it had been that Plucky had decided Brent needed to stop by his apartment for clothes and toiletries. Quite advantageous, indeed. While Plucky ran the trash out, Brent pulled a shoebox from the corner of his closet. Inside was a pair of Gucci loafers he hadn’t worn in almost two years. Inside the loafers was his secret stash. Thirty Oxy forties, the leftovers from when he’d upped his dosage. He’d been a smart junkie—yes, he had.

He stuffed the baggie full of cotton and happiness into his front pocket, replaced the shoebox, and stood. He considered whether or not his friend would search him once they got to Plucky’s house. Of course he will. Plucky wasn’t stupid. In fact, his going to the dumpster might have been a test, a ruse, something to weed out whether or not Brent had a secret supply somewhere.

“Fuck!” Brent growled.

Brent slipped into the hallway, checked both ways, and rushed for the bathroom just as Plucky came back through the front door.

“Brent?” Plucky called as Brent eased the bathroom door shut.

“Yo!” he called back.

“Where ya at?”

“Dropping the Browns off at the Super Bowl.” He made what he felt was an adequate straining noise.

“You got company. Hurrying would be good.”

“Hurrying best I can.” He grunted accordingly.

“Well, hurry some more. I wasn’t supposed to bring you back here.”

Brent thought to ask why but decided on silence as he dropped his pants and shoved the baggie of pills into his asshole. There was pain, but he would live. He left an inch of plastic dangling from his pooper for easy access, pulled up his pants, washed his hands, and left the bathroom.

Plucky was waiting in the hallway. Mrs. Harkins was farther down the hall, hands on her heavy hips, head cocked to the side, rollers in her hair. She was accompanied by a man whose appearance almost screamed, “Cop!”

“She insisted I let her in.” Plucky hitched his chin toward the two at the end of the corridor. “And he’s a detective. Wants to talk to you about something. He wouldn’t tell me what.”

Brent swallowed hard and made his way into the living room.

“I’m so damn disappointed in you, Bob.” She’d always called Brent that, no matter how many times he had corrected her. “Why would you do such a thing to me? Filling pain medication and saying it was mine! What were you thinking? I suppose you’ll want to explain yourself to this fine young man. I guess he knows more than I do, huh? I don’t see why they let you out, a drughead like you! Good Lord in Heaven, you practically brought me down with you! How will I ever clear my name? The whole town’s talking, you horrible, detestable charlatan! The whole town!”

“Ma’am,” the detective said, “could I speak with Mr. Cummings alone for a minute? I’m sure he’s very sorry and will clear your name as soon as he can. In the meantime, I need to ask him a few questions.”

The detective’s soothing voice had a placating tone that would have coaxed a ravenous lion back into its cave. He was fortyish, around Brent’s age, and clean shaven, except for a finely trimmed mustache above his pink lips. When he smiled, Brent wanted to punch him. No one could be that handsome. He looked as if someone had teleported Magnum P.I. into modern times and dropped his ass off in Brent’s apartment. His suit wasn’t very Magnum, though. It was a brown, almost thrift-store type thing and smelled of cigarettes. A Marlboro cloud emanated from the dick like dust on Pigpen of Peanuts fame. The way his clothes offset his manly, mustachioed features created a contradiction Brent couldn’t quite nail down. Who the hell manicures themselves to such an exact detail as this guy and his facial hair but resorts to Goodwill leavings for clothes? Brent couldn’t fathom that mystery.

Mrs. Harkins harrumphed, turned, and strutted to the door. She stepped out and slammed it behind her. Brent had the feeling that wasn’t the last he would see of the old woman.

“Good. Now…” the dick said, smiling, “mind telling me about the dead woman and the clothespin?”

“Whoa,” Plucky said, and Brent seconded that statement wholeheartedly.

6.

The dick’s name was Paul Crumb. “No relation to Harry,” he’d said.

In response, Brent had laughed nervously, and Plucky had looked confused. Crumb explained that he had dropped by the jail the day before to speak with Brent, but because Brent was on suicide watch, he’d decided to return another day.

“Didn’t want to upset you further,” Crumb added.

They remained standing at the end of the hallway. None of them seemed willing to move more than an inch from side to side.

“Thank you,” Brent said. It was all he could think to say.

“Yesterday morning, Jenna Wales—the lady who arrested you—phoned in. She said she had some information about a case I was working, a murder investigation regarding a young woman. It’s been all over the news for the past two days. Girl’s name was Hillary Beddington. Know her?”

“No. Should I?” Brent’s heart rate spiked. Keith Moon was playing a drum solo in his chest.

“She was stabbed repeatedly and left on the side of the road, out on 607. Pretty girl.” Crumb’s features relaxed in sorrow. “Damn shame. But you see, the thing is, she was naked. And she had clothespins here,”—Crumb pointed to one nipple then the other—“and here. Nasty.”

“I didn’t do it.” Brent, once again, sounded as guilty as all hell.

Crumb offered him a dim smile. “I don’t think you did it, Mr. Cummings. If I did, you’d have never been released from custody. You see, the coroner puts her time of death around your second day in jail. Also, we have witnesses who have gone on record, saying you were at work for three days straight prior to your arrest, and Hillary went missing about the time your second day on started. So no, I don’t think you murdered her, but I’m apt to believe you know the person who did. You see,”—the man seemed to have an affinity for starting sentences with “You see”—“we released her name, along with the fact that she was stabbed, to the press, but the clothespins… well, that information was never divulged. When Officer Wales phoned me, she said she recalled you saying something about clothespins—”

“A clothespin,” Brent corrected. “The body I thought I saw had only one clothespin.”

“Fair enough. You say you thought you saw? Care to elaborate?”

“I have a… um… a um—”

“He has a drug problem,” Plucky finished. “It’s the reason why he was arrested. We’re going to work on getting him clean before his trial.”

“I see.” Crumb removed a steno pad from the inside of his thrift-shop jacket and flipped it open. “Care to tell me how it is you hallucinated finding a body that matched the specifics of a murder that actually occurred? If you don’t mind, I’m going to write down your every word. Verbatim. You see, I’m really good at shorthand.”

“Her name’s Mya—“

“Brent…” Plucky trailed off.

“No. What if he can stop whatever is going to happen to her? I mean, yeah, I thought I was hallucinating, Plucky, but what if… what if it was some kind of premonition?”

“I need to see about getting you a psych eval.” Plucky shook his head, as if in disappointment. “You did not precog the death of some pharmacy tech, Brent.”

“Hold on, guys,” Crumb said. “Back up. Who’s this Mya?”

“The woman I saw in the park. I saw her again today, at CVS, but she was very much alive. Her name was Mya—is Mya, and she’s all right. For now, at least.”

Crumb began scribbling in his notepad. “Interesting. Keep going.”

“There’s nothing else to say, really. She was dead in the park, and now she’s alive at CVS. What else can I tell you?”

Crumb ceased writing and looked up. “Well, you see, Mr. Cummings, Hillary Beddington isn’t the first girl we’ve found. Three more women have been found, dropped off in Pointvilla County, all stabbed to death, all… well endowed, up here,”—Crumb tapped his chest—“with clothespins attached to their areolas. You know, I spoke for quite some time with Officer Jenna Wales, and she said that the area lacked any evidence whatsoever that a crime had been committed. Then she hears about Ms. Beddington being found in the manner, which you said you found this pharmacy tech’s body, and all kinds of alarms go off. So she goes back out there. Still doesn’t find anything. That’s when she calls me. What I can’t wrap my brain around is how you’re connected to all this. Did you create this story in an attempt to turn in the killer, someone I’m assuming you know, only to change your mind at the last minute? And if you did, why do it with half a pharmacy in your pocket?”

Brent thought about the half a pharmacy currently resting near his colon and swallowed a lump in his throat. “I don’t know who killed these women, I promise. I legitimately thought I’d found a body. The drugs in my pocket were simply… well, it was horrible fucking timing is what it was. And that’s the truth. All of it.”

“Yeah, you see, I’m not one for psychic phenomena. Something’s rotten in Denmark—”

Brent absentmindedly squeezed his butt cheeks together, and the plastic baggie was sucked farther into his anal cavity.

“And I plan to find out what’s spoiled. Will you be here until your trial, Mr. Cummings?”

Brent hated the way he was now “Mister” instead of “Doctor” to everyone, even though he still had an active license to practice medicine. Or so he assumed. He hadn’t had time to check, really.

“No,” Brent said.

“He’ll be staying with me, so I can keep an eye on him. I bailed him out. He’s my responsibility for the time being,” said Plucky.

“Right. And your name and address and all that, please?”

Plucky relayed his real name, profession, office number, home and cell numbers, address, and even his car’s make, model, and plate information. Crumb jotted everything down in his notepad, his hand snapping around on the paper like a telegraph printer.

“Good deal,” the dick said as he flipped his tablet closed. “I’ll be in touch, gentlemen. Try not to leave the country, okay?” Crumb chuckled, and Brent forced himself to laugh along, although he found not an inch of any of this amusing.

Chapter Four:

Do No Harm             

1.

Later that evening, after they’d carried in all of the clothing and necessities Brent had grabbed from home, Plucky ordered a pizza and rented an episode of Game of Thrones from Amazon. Brent had never seen the show, but he found fantasy novels interesting enough, so he watched until the pie arrived.

They ate in the living room, using napkins as plates, while the final ten minutes of the HBO series played out. A character died, then another one, and Plucky said that happened at least once every ten minutes. There had also been plenty of nude women. To that, Plucky had said, “They should change the name of this show to Boobs and Beheadings. It’d fit better.”

Brent ate his pizza while doing some math. He’d told Plucky that he’d taken a crap back at his apartment, and that had been over three hours ago. He doubted Plucky would believe he had to shit again already. He could always say that he was blocked up and hadn’t been able to produce a Stinky Twinkie during his time on the commode, but he wondered if Plucky would fall for such a stupid thing. What if he questioned it? Brent might stumble all over his words, as he had out in the park while Officer Wales laid her hand on her gun and questioned him with her eyes.

These, Brent thought, are the ramblings of a drug addict’s mind. Just excuse yourself, go in the bathroom, squeeze out your supply, and be done with it!

“I gotta shit,” Brent said as he rose from the sofa. He crumpled his greasy napkin, walked into the kitchen, and dispensed of it in the bin next to the stainless-steel fridge.

“Don’t fall in,” Plucky said then took a bite of his pizza. Half the slice fell prey to Plucky’s crushing jaws.

In the bathroom, Brent dropped his pants and underwear then sat on the toilet. He leaned to one side, slipped two fingers down to his anus, found the tiniest piece of plastic, pinched that between thumb and forefinger, and pulled. His grasp didn’t hold, and the baggie took an express elevator to the top.

“Fuck!” he whispered.

He proceeded to give himself a proctology examination. Few tend to think of the noises they make while knuckle-deep in their own assholes, and thusly, they can grunt like a pig without realizing someone in the living room could hear them over the television. That was the case during Brent’s extraction campaign.

“You okay in there?” Plucky called.

Brent started, and the baggie crept up another inch.

“Yeah!” Brent hollered. “I’m… I’m just backed up is all!”

“Methadone will do that to you. Bran! You need some bran!”

“You wanna come in here and give me an enema?”

“Uh… no!”

“Then shut the fuck up!”

Brent, discouraged and feeling a little shitty in more ways than one, pulled his finger from his rectum and tried not to look at the digit. It felt slimy, so seeing it covered in waste wouldn’t do for his morale.

He reached over to the faucet on the tub, cranked the hot water, and let it run. When steam began to rise, he closed his eyes, leaned over, and stuck his finger in the scalding torrent. He planned to wash his hand properly once he was done, but he simply couldn’t stand the feel of the nasty on his index finger for a second longer.

He decided his next course of action would have to be extraction by force. Brent bent forward, pried his ass cheeks farther apart, and pushed like a woman giving birth. He strained and strained, but nothing came. He sat back, relaxed for a moment, then returned to his struggles. He gave one final push until the vein in one temple felt as if it might burst. He eased back.

Something gave way.

Something moved.

Followed by something more substantial.

Then a bullet train chased a balloon down the tracks.

The baggie splashed down, showering his cheeks with icy water, and a second later, God only knew how much built-up waste joined it. His backside felt as if someone in the toilet bowl had yanked a length of rope from his sphincter.

Holy fuck, when was the last time I shit?

When the movement finally ceased, Brent took a deep, soul-cleansing breath and wiped. He reached behind him and flushed.

Realization and panic drove him from the seat. He twisted, dropped to his knees, and plunged his arm into the thick brown matter of the swirling mess. He shoved deeper, cussing himself under his breath, and his fingers dove into the drain. He just managed to grasp the baggie before it rocketed down the pipe. Unmindful of the substantial amount of filth covering his arm, he yanked himself free of the churning cesspool, sat back against the side of the tub, and clutched the plastic bag full of happiness to his chest.

T’was a shitty situation, indeed.

Brent rose, undressed, and stepped into the bathtub. He started the shower and washed himself and his treasure in the spray. When he was adequately clean, he dried with the towel hanging from the rack in front of the toilet then hollered down to Plucky. “Bring me my clothes, will ya?”

“What happened?” his friend called back.

“I thought I was done… but I wasn’t. Pulled up my pants too soon. Just bring me my travel bag, okay?”

“On my way. Oh, and yuck! Big yuck!”

You can say that again.

While Plucky fetched Brent’s things, Brent dry-swallowed four 40s and immediately felt loads better. He recalled how he’d mused at Effingham’s body deflating in relief after the seeker found out Brent was going to give in and order him a shot, how knowing a high was on the way was sometimes all the cure an addict needed.

Plucky arrived with Brent’s travel case and a plastic grocery bag for the soiled garments. Brent cracked the door enough to allow his items entrance and thanked the man.

“The washer and dryer are in the garage, off the kitchen. I’m sure you can figure out how to use them. I need to run out and get your medicine. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

“Okay.” Brent closed the door.

“And, Brent?”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t think about sneaking out. The security system will be active. See you in a bit.”

“Whatever.”

“Oh, one last thing,” Plucky said from farther down the hallway. “You left your cell phone on the coffee table. I’m taking that with me, as well.”

“Huh? Why?”

“Wouldn’t want you calling any contacts and ruining your progress, now, would we?”

Brent looked at the open baggie sitting in the sink. No reason to, old buddy. At least not tonight.

2.

Brent dropped his travel bag in the guest room—a twenty-by-twenty cube wallpapered with white boat anchors on a sea-blue background; a bed sat in one corner, sealed tightly in nautical-inspired sheets and bedspread, but the room was otherwise devoid of furniture. He moved back out into the hall, soiled garments in tow, through the living room, and into the kitchen. Brent found the door that led into the garage. He hesitated, his hand hovering over the knob, while he considered whether or not the alarm system was connected to this particular ingress/egress. Figuring that Plucky wouldn’t have told him where to do his laundry if he couldn’t use the door, Brent twisted the knob and pushed.

The garage smelled of oiled machinery and fabric softener. The light from the kitchen spilled out into the empty space where a car would have been parked if Plucky were home, and the reflector on a bike’s front wheel glimmered from the far wall. A fine layer of dust, like ash, covered the middle bar and elevated gel-seat of the beach cruiser.

Brent patted the wall on the left, found no light switch, then hunted to his right. He located a rectangle case and clicked the flipper into the upward position. The area filled with a muted yellow light, like that of a porch’s bug lamp, and Brent descended the two steps into the garage.

The front-loading tier-style washer and dryer combination sat on the back wall. The controls were typical, and he had no trouble getting everything going. He shoved his shitty apparel into the washer’s waiting maw, slammed the door, and engaged the wash cycle. The machine whirred to life, much quieter than the Laundromat dinosaurs Brent used biweekly to do his own street clothes. All his work garments were dry-cleaned by a company out of Pointvilla that offered pickup and delivery.

“I won’t be using them again,” he said aloud. He balled up the empty plastic bag and went back into the kitchen, where he tossed the bag into the bin beside the fridge.

When he turned around, he was back in the fog.

The kitchen remained otherwise the same: sink on the front wall, window overlooking the dooryard, juicer sitting on the counter next to the basin, and stove to the right. He snapped his head to the left and gazed into the living room. From what he could tell, the fog hadn’t touched there. The way the wall of mist ended at the entrance to the living room seemed like a computer-generated optical illusion. If Brent looked even the slightest bit back to the right, toward the sink, the fog became all encompassing. But if he stared out into the main room, the haze seemed to disappear entirely.

Confused, he took a step forward.

Mya walked into the kitchen, just as dead as she’d been in the park four days prior. Brent yelped and backpedaled into the fridge. He reached behind him and clutched the edges of the refrigerator’s door. His nails bit into the rubber gasket.

Mya paid him no mind. She shuffled toward the garage door. He could hear her stiff joints working double-time against the rigor that had set in, the single clothespin dangling from her left nipple. Was it the same breast as before? He couldn’t remember. Her torso was once again pocked with multiple, leaking stab wounds. Her back, butt, and legs were purple with lividity, as they had been when he’d seen her in Rifle Park.

She stopped at the conjoining door, craned her neck, and met his eyes. Hers were milky cataracts, bereft of life. She raised one arm and made a come-hither gesture with her index finger.

Brent’s heart played across his ribs like a tin cup against the bars of a cell. There wasn’t enough air to be had in the kitchen. He took deeper breaths, but that only made him dizzy. He could smell the salty moisture of the air, and the ocean.

Bay’s End was nine hundred miles from the nearest body of salt water, but Brent wasn’t surprised to find the aroma saline in nature. It smelled of the bay. It smelled of Oakland, where he’d run over Veronica and gotten off as free as a bird.

Whatever this version of Mya the pharmacy tech was, it didn’t follow predictable ghostly paths. Instead of breezing through the garage door, which Brent had closed behind him, she grasped the knob and let herself out. Her ankles cracked and popped as she shambled down the steps.

Brent considered the possible safety of the living room. Everything seemed normal enough in that space devoid of fog, but he couldn’t be sure. After all, Mya had come from there. Or had she simply coalesced out of nothing… out of the mist?

He took a tentative step forward, away from the fridge, and leaned out. He watched Mya vanish from view, off to the right, heading toward the washer and dryer.

“Hello?” he asked stupidly. She hadn’t spoken yet, and there was nothing to say that she was even capable of speech in her present form.

“What do you want?” His voice sounded muffled, as if the fog were weighing down his vocals cords.

He took another step into the center of the kitchen. He still couldn’t see her.

A palpable sense of dread descended. He could feel the weight of his own fear settling, concrete-like, onto his shoulders. The fog meant to smother him.

He rushed forward, propelled by his own terror. He stumbled down the steps leading into the garage and went sprawling, skinning his palms on the concrete. He hissed, drew his scraped hands to each opposite pit, and clamped them under his arms.

Mya lingered by the washer/dryer combo, facing the back wall, swaying almost imperceptibly, as if to unheard music. The fog swirled around her. It seemed to be coming off her, as if she were creating it. The garage filled with gray mist. Brent could feel the dampness on his cheeks.

“What do you want? Goddamn it, stop fucking with me! Tell me what you want!”

Mya didn’t move. She stood bolt straight and as still as a column.

He pushed himself to standing and, with a great deal of caution, approached the dead woman. When he was within touching distance, he reached for her, only meaning to tap her shoulder, to prove to himself that she was nothing more than a hallucination or a figment of his imagination brought on by pain pills that hadn’t even had a chance to kick in yet.

When his forefinger touched the cold, dead skin, Mya faced him. She didn’t turn or make a single movement that Brent could see, but she faced him all the same. One second, she was staring at the wall, and the next, she was glaring at him with those milky cataracts.

Shocked, he took a step back.

Mya plucked the clothespin from her breast, dropped it to the floor, and winked out of existence.

He stood staring at the clothespin for some time, not moving, not speaking, blood from his scraped palms dripping onto the concrete and mixing with an oil stain.

After God only knew how long, he allowed himself to look up, to study the place where Mya had been facing only minutes before.

Sitting on a shelf beside the washer and dryer was another plastic grocery bag, not unlike the one he’d transported his soiled clothes in. Brent stepped over the pin on the floor and went to the shelf. The bag was tied in a single knot. He undid the handles, already knowing what he would find inside. It was a bit of fate. A little shot of destiny. But he was no less floored when he reached inside and withdrew a handful of clothespins.

“No… no…”

3.

He had to find a phone. Call the police. Call that dick. Crumb. Yeah, him. Hell, even a call to good old 9-1-1 would do if he couldn’t find Detective Paul Crumb’s number.

You’re being crazy. How many people do you think have clothespins in their house? Thousands… millions!

He didn’t like the sound of that voice. It was too calm. And it was stupid. Plucky had no use for clothespins. He had a dryer. Why hang out his laundry when he had artificial heat and a delicates cycle.

Plenty of people hang out their linen even though they have a dryer. Don’t jump to conclusions!

Then what about the dead girl? What about Mya? She was trying to tell him something. Was that all some weird coincidence, as well?

Plucky’s your friend, man. He’s no murderer. For fuck’s sake, he bailed you out of jail!

Why? Why had Plucky bailed him out of jail? Sure, they were friends, but that was before Brent had made it glaringly obvious that he was a shithead addict who’d used an old woman’s name to get his fix. So why, goddamn it? Why? Why did Plucky bail me out?

He has your cell phone…

The voice no longer seemed so self-assured and protective of Plucky. The voice had begun to sound worried.

He knows you’re a person of interest now, and even if you didn’t kill those other girls, you might have known who did… might have helped to conceal your good buddy all this time. After all, if he’s going to go down, why not you, too?

That didn’t make any sense. Did it?

Brent leaped into the kitchen, scanned the area, and found a phone jack on the wall next to the fridge, but he saw no phone. He dashed into the living room and hunted along the walls behind the sofa, under the end tables, and behind the television and entertainment center. Two jacks. No phone lines, though.

Not having a landline wasn’t so odd. A landline was just an unneeded bill, a waste of money, what with cell phones and computers and such. Besides, even if he had a home phone, do you think Plucky would have left one lying around for you?

“Shut up, and let me think!” he hollered at the empty room. He rushed to the front door and tried the knob. Locked. He twisted the handle and yanked. Nothing. He glared at the deadbolt then the keyhole. No thumb latch. He turned and sprinted down the hallway to the back door. Same thing. Keyhole in the deadbolt. No thumb latch.

You gotta get out of here. Break a window. The alarm will sound, and the cops will come. Go on! What are you waiting for!

He ran back into the living room. Sweat poured from his brow into his eyes. He glanced around, trying to find something heavy to ram through the pane of glass on the far wall. He grabbed the heavy ceramic lamp from an end table, snatched the cord from the wall, and struck a Heisman pose. The lamp shot through the air on a collision course with the window. Then it rebounded from the pane with a thwongggggg! and thudded to the floor.

“What the hell?”

This guy’s paranoid. Who has shatter-proof glass installed in their home?

A killer who might have to make a last stand inside his house, that’s who.

The garage door!

Brent twisted, and his feet became tangled. He crashed onto the carpeting, his abraded palms shrieking as they stretched over the coarse fibers. Pushing himself up, he stumbled into a gait not unlike a runner racing from the starting line.

He bolted for the garage. Inside the oily-smelling area, Brent found the automatic door controls next to the light switch. He pressed the open button, but nothing happened. He shoved his thumb into it again, and still nothing. Brent thought it must have been connected to the alarm system somehow. Or Plucky had a separate control on his person.

“Fuck!” Brent screamed.

You’re running out of time…

You don’t know that.

He went to go get your medicine, right? To CVS? To the place where Mya works? What if she’s just getting off… what then?

No…

Exactly.

Brent, feeling as if his options had run out, turned to go back inside, caught sight of the white cord with the shiny red plastic handle hanging down in front of the garage door.

You think?

It’s worth a shot!

Brent dashed to the cord, snatched the handle, and yanked. Something let loose above. He tugged the cord back across the expanse of the garage. The door rose into the ceiling effortlessly. He felt like giggling. When the door had reached its apex, he loosed the cable and took off for the new opening.

The door slammed shut. He skidded to a halt, but too late. He shouldered the door, and lightning raced across his collarbone, making him cry out.

What now?

I try again.

The second time, he didn’t bother with the cord. He bent, grabbed a section of the corrugated door, and hefted it up and over his head. It gave him no problems, and he was able to duck outside before it crashed down behind him.

A blanket of fog covered the world. Whether it was another vision or an actual bit of weather, Brent didn’t know. He took two quick steps down the driveway before stopping. A sense of urgency pulled him into the night, but rational thought prevailed. He repeated the process he’d used to exit the garage to enter it once again. This time, he grabbed the beach cruiser from the wall.

The washer’s alarm squealed, startling him. He needed to calm down. A heart attack wouldn’t be conducive to saving Mya. If he still had time to rescue her…

Why don’t you just bang on a neighbor’s door? Ask to use their phone.

No time.

You don’t know that.

Yeah, I do.

You don’t even have a weapon.

No time for one.

It’s your ass on the line…

Fuck off.

Brent honestly did not think time was on his side. The previous vision of Mya had been persistent. It was also out of place this time. He hadn’t been in the park, hadn’t stumbled across her. She’d come to him, needing him to act.

At least that was what he told himself.

Like the Wicked Witch through the winds of a tornado, Brent pedaled toward Rifle Park.

4.

Overall, he thought he knew what he was doing. He would ride in, save the day, and possibly redeem himself for every other thing he’d managed to ruin during in his shitty existence. If he could stop Plucky and save Mya, he might find attrition for his sins.

As he pedaled through the foggy night, he pictured Veronica vomiting blood onto her shoes. The image made him push harder, pedal faster, and he shot through the mist like a zipper through a cloud.

The Oxy kicked in two miles from Rifle Park. Warmth enveloped him, and the world swam in his vision. The road seemed to roll up in front of him, as if he were suddenly going uphill. Then it spooled out into eternity. Roll up. Reel back in. The fog inhaled. The pavement exhaled. The bike’s front tire leaned drastically to the right, and the road welcomed Brent’s face like a grater welcoming cheese.

4.

He stood in the fog, staring down at Veronica’s corpse. Blood trickled from the corner of the little girl’s mouth to pool between her cheek and the forest floor.

Forest floor?

Brent glanced around, confused. His head swam as the trees surrounding the clearing bled into one another to become an indistinguishable mass of brown and green, as if someone had dropped a bucket of turpentine on an oil painting. The bonfire lay to his left, the girl to his right, and everything seemed to sparkle, as if the entire area had been set upon by trigger-happy glitter faeries.

Veronica, her legs cocked out under her like checkmarks, began to rise. Instinctively, Brent took two quick steps back. The girl rose like the wheelchair ramp on a bus for the handicapped. When she was perpendicular to the ground, she swayed—a cobra tasting the air. Rivulets of blood flowed from her mouth. She looked like one of the vampires in the old Hammer films of which Brent’s father had been so fond.

“You killed me,” the girl said plainly. There was no vehemence in the statement, only fact. Her eyes stared straight ahead, to a place off to Brent’s right.

“I’m sorry,” Brent said, his voice quivering with fear.

The girl’s features crunched up in anger. “If you’re selling gods or goods, get the fuck out!” she barked.

Brent flinched at her words.

Slowly, she leaned back and stood, like a card table unfolding. Veronica passed Brent languidly, as if she were underwater. Her ash-blond hair swirled out behind her, dancing weightlessly through the fog.

Utterly baffled, he turned to watch her go. The closer she went to the running colors of the tree line, the less substantial she became. She swelled and bowed, as if he were looking at her reflection in a funhouse mirror. She became short and fat, tall and thin, then went all wobbly—a blocked cable channel on an old television set.

“You killed me,” she repeated as the melting watercolor forest consumed her. “And now you’ve killed her, too.”

4.

Brent awoke to a soft clicking sound and a heavy, squeezing pressure on his left biceps. The unknown presence bore down on him, cutting off the flow of blood to his hand. He cried out. Hands came out of the fog to hold him down. He bucked. kicked, and screamed, but his attackers were too many and too strong.

“For Christ’s sake, Brent, calm down!”

Melinda? he asked inwardly.

Light leaked in through his closed eyelids, as if someone were playing with a flashlight behind heavy curtains. He forced them all the way open and immediately wished he hadn’t. The room’s lighting blinded him, sending spots of brilliant blues, yellows, and reds skating across his vision.

His face was a white-hot ball of agony. It felt burned in several places, but mostly around the chin and cheeks. His tongue was a smoking briquette in the center of his mouth. He made to reach for his face, but his arm stopped halfway, restrained by a padded cuff around his wrist. He looked down at his torso, at the light blue-and-yellow-checkered Posey vest and the crisscrossing white belts that tied him down. Blue cuffs circled both of his wrists, and more white belts ran from those to disappear under the bedside.

“What the hell’s going on?” His voice slurred heavily, and he figured no one but himself could have understood him, so he repeated the question. The second time was no better. In fact, it was worse. Something to the tune of: “Hadda elsa oin un?”

“Don’t try to talk, Brent. Please. You’ll only do more damage.” Melinda stood off to one side, her hand on the DinaMap blood pressure cuff around his biceps—the python that had previously been strangling the life from his arm.

“Wha’ ’appen?”

“You were in an accident. Try not to talk.”

Brent realized she wouldn’t look his way. She was staring intently at the pressure cuff. He could see the muscles standing out in her neck; she was straining so hard not to look at him.

“An agga ent?” Why won’t my goddamned tongue move?

“Shut up.” Melinda finally looked at him. She flinched. Actually flinched.

His stomach plummeted a good twenty floors. “Wug wong?”

A lonesome tear slipped from Melinda’s eye, over her cheek, and into the cherry-red lipstick covering her mouth. It vanished there.

“You were… you were found in the road. You had an accident on your bike. You have multiple facial lacerations… and… and I need to get your blood pressure. So shut up and hold still.”

“’Hy am I regain?” He’d meant “Why am I restrained?” but something was full-on screwed as far as his face was concerned. Part of the problem was that he couldn’t open and close his mouth. He could only form words in the back of his throat. That worried him. He was afraid he might have broken his jaw. The funny thing was his mandible didn’t hurt. He’d attended plenty of broken jaws during his days as a resident and had set more than a dozen during his final year, the year the WWF, destined to become the WWE the year after, had held their Barnyard Bash at the San Bernardino Civic Center. Suddenly, everyone was The Rock or Mankind, bashing one another over the head with all sorts of solid objects. Brent recalled the twisted pain-filled features of several a poor bastard with a shattered jaw. So much as breathing in their direction caused them to cry out for God and Mary and Moses and their Auntie Caroline’s golden retriever. So why didn’t his jaw hurt?

“Wug wong wih I aw?”

“Oh, Brent…”

Dr. Brandy Harrison came in wearing a plastic face shield and gloves up to her elbows. His former co-worker seemed to be ready for surgery. But he wasn’t in an operating theater, and Brandy was no surgeon. His heart galloped in his chest, and his pulse quickened.

A single arc of arterial blood shot from just beyond his line of sight, across his legs, and splattered on the cabinets below the sink. Another gout followed, then another, the fountaining matching the beat of his heart.

“Shit, it’s loose again,” Brandy said, hurriedly working at a tray of sterilized instruments.

“Brent… Brent, look at me,” Melinda said in a soothing voice.

Brent acquiesced. Anything not to be looking at frazzled Dr. Harrison. Because Brandy Harrison seemed scared. And not much scared an ER doc of her caliber.

“Good. Now keep your eyes on me,” Melinda said, forcing a smile. Gouts of blood painted a Rembrandt across her breasts. She shrieked.

Brent groaned low in his throat. He pleaded to her with his eyes. “Wha wong wih ee?”

“Where’s anesthesia?” Brandy cried. “I need him out! For fuck’s sake, he shouldn’t be awake!”

5.

Any surgical patient could testify to the accuracy of what happened next.

Though Brent must have been awake for a good length of time before anesthesia put him back under, he remembered none of that period of minutes. Instead, his mind jumped spastically from showering Melinda’s chest in a fountain of atrial blood to waking up, heavy-lidded, in an intensive care suite, surrounded by clicking machinery anchored to aluminum poles. His eyes settled on the bags of clear fluid hanging there: lactated ringers and normal saline. A monitor beeped and hummed, displaying his vitals. His hands were still restrained, but the Posey vest was gone. He tried to sit up, to push himself farther up in bed, but his ass was filled with an amount of steel that could have sufficed in the construction of several New York skyscrapers. His tongue was rooted in place and proved unmovable, no matter how hard he tried to pry it from its moorings.

Attached to one pole, a pain pump whirred with a scheduled dose. The opiate flooded Brent’s system, and he began to float on a warm tide. Whatever they had him on was good. Damn good.

He drifted off into a blissfully dreamless sleep.

6.

Brent was in and out of consciousness for four days. The intensive care staff at Yorkshire kept him, for the most part, in a chemically induced stupor not a coma but close. When he was finally allowed to come back to reality for a period of more than ten minutes, Plucky welcomed him with a glowing smile.

At first, Brent was glad to see his colleague sitting in the geri-chair next to his bed and reading a Richard Laymon novel. Brent reached out to his good pal and waggled his fingers in a fair approximation of a hello. There was still something wrong with his tongue, and his mouth would follow none of his commands. He sweated under a heavy material that covered most of his face, and he assumed what clung to him were bandages.

Then, he recalled the bike. From there, his mind worked in reverse: the fog, the garage, the clothespins, the dead woman, the pills, the excavation of those pills from his anal cavity.

He began to shake his head, slowly at first then faster, until he was snapping his neck from side to side. Searing flashes of pain tore from his neck and into his temples, as if someone were preforming amateur facial surgery on him. He squealed, a high sound in the back of his throat, and Plucky finally looked up.

“There he is,” Plucky said as he closed his book. His index finger played bookmark for the time being. “Glad to see you back among the living.”

Guttural noises emanated from Brent, both growly and bubbling—a werewolf underwater. He clawed at his former friend, meaning to rend his flesh, if Plucky would simply be kind enough to scoot over a foot or so in Bent’s direction.

“You don’t look happy, man.” The smile etched across Plucky’s face was the most infuriating thing Brent had ever seen. “Should I call the nurse? Tell her you’re in pain? Having your jaw ripped clean-off your face can be such an unpleasant, agonizing thing, wouldn’t you say?”

All the fight left Brent in a rush of breath. He attempted to reach for his mouth, to the lower section of jaw that should be there—it had to be there!—but the restraints held his hands at bay.

“It’s going to be odd not hearing you run off at the mouth all the time. You know, I’ve been bullied all my life over this horrible fucking voice of mine, but somehow, I find your constant banter loads more annoying. To each his own, I suppose.”

And with that, Plucky went back to his book.

Brent flexed his jaw, yet he felt nothing move. He tried to flap his tongue. Nothing again. He sensed his tongue, but it wouldn’t respond to his commands. He wondered if his tongue was even attached anymore. Was he feeling what amputees called phantom limb syndrome? Plucky couldn’t be right. He was fucking with Brent. Toying with him. Making heavy a light situation. Brent attempted to bite down, but he felt not a single twitch of flesh or muscle or bone. If only he could move his hand.

“What I still can’t figure out is how you knew about Mya. That just boggles my mind, man,” Plucky said, without taking his eyes from his book. “She was all ready to go under the knife, as it were, but I had to delay because of your John Edwards impersonation. You really saw her”—Plucky glanced over, squinting—“didn’t you?”

Brent fumed, huffing and puffing through his nose—a raging bull in a red room.

“That’s some shit for Amazing Stories, I tell you. You know…” Plucky leaned in to whisper into Brent’s ear, “I’m still going to get the bitch. All you did with your little accident was delay the inevitable.”

Brent grabbed the front of Plucky’s shirt and yanked him down. Plucky’s nose smashed into the bedrail, and blood came. Plucky made nauseating gurgling sounds that were music to Brent’s ears. Brent yanked him down again, splitting Plucky’s forehead at the hairline. Plucky reared back, and Brent lost his grip. Plucky tumbled backward over the arm of the chair and out of view.

“You goddamn motherfucking asshole!” Plucky raged from behind the chair. Slowly, Brent’s former friend pulled himself up and back into view. Blood painted a fan pattern on the front of Plucky’s nice paisley-yellow polo tee. A snail trail of crimson leaked from Plucky’s brow and into his eye. He swiped it away and snapped red droplets onto the avocado-green geri-chair—a leprechaun with chicken pox.

“You’re going to go to sleep one of these nights and wake up dead the next morning, you son of a—”

“What’s going on in here?” A pallid nurse with jet-black hair, which only made her seem paler than she actually was, stood in the doorway, gazing over the scene, her face a study in confusion and anger.

Plucky drew a dark forearm across his leaking nose. “I fell out of my chair.”

“I heard cussing.” She eased the door closed as if barring Plucky from leaving right then.

“Wouldn’t you cuss if you fell out of a fucking chair?” Plucky barked mirthless laughter.

The nurse’s mouth began to work, but not a sound issued from her. Plucky squeezed by her, shoved the door open the rest of the way, and vanished into the hallway.

“Did you do that to him?” she asked Brent after a moment’s silence.

Brent nodded.

“Did he deserve it?”

He nodded more adamantly.

“Good. Let me go get a tech to clean this up. Are you in any pain? Should I bring you something?”

He nodded hard, as if his neck had been hooked up to a hydraulic press that was currently under the control of a hyperactive toddler.

Before the nurse could return with Brent’s beloved painkillers, the surgeon who had attempted to put his face back together visited Brent. The awkwardly proportioned sawbones was a tallish man, six-foot-five if an inch, and he wore the prerequisite flowing white lab coat over a blue dress shirt, blood-red tie, and charcoal slacks. His arms were forever long, like a monkey’s, and Brent fancied that this man could scratch his knees without so much as bending at the waist. His accent alluded to Hispanic heritage, but Brent had never been good with pinpointing Latin dialects.

“What we believe happened, Dr. Cummings”—had Brent been able to smile, a fierce grin would have spread across his face upon hearing that beloved prefix—“is that you took a rather nasty spill from your… bicycle, at a rather high rate of speed. You then struck a curb… have you ever heard of a curb-stomp, Dr. Cummings?”

Brent nodded. He’d seen American History X several times, and the scene involving Edward Norton’s boot and one unlucky guy’s head never failed to make him ill.

“Well, in theory, that’s what happened to you. Your lower jaw caught the edge of the curb, and it was… thusly… detached. I’m afraid we were unable to reattach it. You were in surgery for over twelve hours, but every attempt was impeded by your unstable condition. By the time we were able to debride your wounds and remove errant bone fragments, the flesh on your lower jaw had already begun to necrotize. A substantial amount of time had passed before someone came along and found you in the street, you understand, so there was not much we could do. We were all shocked you lived through the ordeal for as long as you did without immediate medical treatment.”

From there on, the surgeon’s words droned into nonsense. Brent wanted his pain meds. He wished to be under a cloud of sweet narcotic rain. He prayed the nurse would hurry up.

Chapter Five:

Isolation

1.

There’s an old saying: “God looks after drunks and children.”

Brent didn’t know if the good Lord included addicts in there with the winos, but he figured the man upstairs must. It was the only reason for Brent to be currently among the living. He recalled the geysers of arterial blood and wondered how in the hell he hadn’t bled to death on that curb. The doctor had said “a substantial amount of time” had passed before someone found him in the gutter, and all of Brent’s training told him that if he’d been bleeding like that for more than a few minutes, he should have been on the mortician’s slab, stone cold and getting to know old Rigor Mortis.

God looks after drunks and children.

God…

“Do you pray, Brent?” Plucky had asked him during a time that felt decades removed from the hospital bed he was laid up in. He couldn’t remember how he’d answered his psychotic friend, but as he gazed at a spot next to the television anchored to the wall across from him, Brent figured it was as good a time as any.

God, if you’re up there, how about you let me know what I’m supposed to do now? That’d be great. Thanks.

His ears popped.

From under the door, an undulating fog seeped into his hospital room. Brent cocked his eyes toward the ceiling, seeking the heavens. You gotta be kidding me.

He sat up a bit straighter in the bed. His back popped, each vertebrae crackling like buttons on a fat man’s trousers. He watched as the fog crept around his bed and under it then coated the floor space under the room’s only window. The fog climbed the bathroom door, blanketed the ceiling, and began reaching downward. Brent thought the spectral mist was what the formations of stalactites would look like if captured by time-lapse photography.

Soon, the fog completely filled the room, and Brent could smell the mossy aromas of old forest.

A bluish hand reached from the mist at the end of his bed; the rest of the figure was just out of sight, concealed in the gray. The index finger, its nail far too white at the tip and bruised purple at the bed, scratched along the edge of the footboard. Brent attempted to shove himself back, but his restrained hands moved him mere centimeters. The startling realization that he was trapped, tied to arm rails like some violent maniac, kick-started his heart and sent it crashing into his throat. He couldn’t breathe. Couldn’t scream. All he could manage was the slightest of whimpers.

The finger continued its slow progression along the smooth beige plastic of the footboard. It sounded like a viper hissing. Ssssssssssssssss…

“What do you want?” At least that was what he wanted to ask. He still hadn’t gotten used to not being able to talk properly, and his words came out sounding of nothing but vowels, edgeless mumblings drifting unimpeded from his throat.

A girl giggled off to his right.

Brent snapped his head in that direction. The bottom of his face exploded in fiery agony. Tears flooded his vision. He struggled against his restraints, trying to grab at his face. His whimpering escalated to a shrill caterwauling, his closest approximation of a lamenting banshee. Scorching pain trailed down his neck and spilled over his chest. Even his shoulder felt as if someone had dumped a bucket of acid over his clavicle.

A patter of soft footfalls raced from the right side of the room to the left. The girl’s laughter followed close on her heels. The door to Brent’s room swung open to bang against the cabinetry on the far wall.

The fog poured out into the hospital corridor like pillows from an overstuffed closet. Still, enough was left to keep whoever stood at the footboard cloaked in swirling mist.

The hand skipped from the footboard to the bottom handrail then, ever so slowly, up to the railing at Brent’s right arm. Trembling, he gazed into the fog in an attempt to make out features or even the rough shape of his ethereal visitor. But he could see nothing. Nothing but a hand jutting from a wall of puffy slate-colored mist.

Brent shimmied sideways, pressing himself up against the railing to his left. He wanted to be gone from whatever awaited him in the fog. Be it Mya, Veronica, or Mr. Boogedy from the old made-for-television Disney movie, he cared not. Whatever lay in wait for him could fuck right off and leave him well enough alone.

The hand disappeared into the fog, as if it had touched a red-hot skillet.

Brent’s face throbbed in time with his elevated heart rate. He concentrated on counting the beats, thinking that if he could take his mind off the fog and its inhabitants, he could will away his harassers. One hundred and seventy-five beats a minute. Maybe two hundred. Two-fifty. Sweet Jesus, I’m going to stroke out. He tried to inhale through his nose and exhale through his mouth, but the bandages made nasal breathing relatively impossible.

Flop sweat soaked his bandages, and he foolishly tried to swipe the perspiration from his brow.

Mother, Mary, and Joseph, my hand’s free!

He gazed down at the loose restraint dangling from his right hand and actually laughed. Something caught in his throat, and his chuckling devolved into spasming snorts akin to the sounds hogs make while fornicating.

He squeezed his eyes closed and fought to control his breathing. Once again, the bandages impeded his respirations, and for a minute, he thought he was going to hyperventilate. Finally, he began to settle down, and his breaths, even though still shallow, began coming farther apart.

Something tapped him on the left shoulder.

Once.

Twice.

A third time.

He refused to turn and acknowledge the presence over his shoulder. There was nothing back there. Couldn’t be. The headboard was flush with the wall, and there was no space for someone to be lurking back there with the oxygen spigot and sputum collector.

A fourth tap.

Then someone—something—latched on to his collarbone. Its fingers were like pliable icicles on the nape of his neck. A chill exuded from them, and the icy sensation was so strong, it seeped through his bandages to frost the back of his head.

“If you’re selling gods or goods,” a voice from the grave whispered in his ear, “get. The fuck. Out.”

Oh, God… oh, Jesus… ohgodohgodohgodohgodohgod!

Trembling uncontrollably, Brent reached across himself and down, snaking his free hand between the railing and the mattress. He fingered the slipknot on his remaining restraint, gripped the strap’s end, and tugged the binding loose.

The thing behind him wrung his shoulder like a dishcloth. Frigid digits dug into his skin, and it was all Brent could do to keep from passing out from sheer fright. Unmitigated terror boiled inside him. If it hadn’t been for the catheter, he would have soaked his sheets in torrents of urine.

Arctic breath breezed through his dressings and played over his ear. “You’ve little time, Dr. Cummings.”

One by one, the fingers of the unseen hand released their hold on him.

“Little time,” the icy thing repeated. “He’s going to kill me. And if he succeeds, it’ll be your fault. Just like Veronica, Dr. Cummings. Just. Like. Veronica.” The final word was a wintry gust on a snowy morning.

Brent yanked both restraints from his wrists, bent farther down the bed, and untied his feet. He ripped out his IV and draped it over the railing, letting its contents drip onto the floor. He squeezed through the small space between the footboard and the rails at the bottom of the bed, unhooked the quarter-full bag of urine from where it hung on the side of the bed, and carried it with him into the hallway.

He had no idea where he was going or what he planned to do when he got there, but he felt drawn into the empty hospital corridor, nonetheless.

Along the floor, fog roiled like foamy oceanic tides and seemed to lay out a path before him. He took a step in the direction the mist was headed, and the swirling fog progressed farther down the hallway.

Voices sounded behind him: someone telling another person that a patient needed to be turned. Footsteps on tile moved away.

Brent took a long, deep breath and followed the trail of fog to a door marked STAIRS. He pulled down on the handle and shoved the door inward. The mist flowed through the opening and down the stairwell. His face pounding and mind reeling, Brent began his descent in pursuit of the fog.

2.

The fog led him to the second floor, where it crept under a door. Brent eased open the door and stepped out into the oncology ward. The fog directed him to the doctors’ lounge off the nurses’ break room, which was empty and silent. The clock above the sink in the break room read fifteen minutes past three in the morning. He tried the door to the lounge and found it unlocked. He cautiously opened it and slithered inside.

Brent flipped the light switch on the wall beside the door, and the room brightened to reveal a cot on the far wall and two five-foot-tall lockers on the right. A sink, toilet, and walk-in shower lay to the left. The fog snaked toward the farthest locker and enveloped it, as if it were hugging an old friend.

Brent took a single step forward then stopped.

This is madness. There he was, chasing a sentient fog through a hospital after having his lower jawbone violently ripped from his face. He shouldn’t be alive, much less out of bed on some kind of quest through Oncology.

Was he dreaming? Hell, was he dead? Had he vacated his body to haunt the halls of Yorkshire Medical? And why there, of all places?

You’re either sound asleep, or your feet are about to start burning. Because there’s no room in heaven for addicts who murder little girls and get away with it. At least your old buddy Plucky will be there to keep you company. After all, you’re both killers…

Brent approached the steel rectangle. He gazed dumbly down at the combination lock barring him from accessing the contents of the locker.

“Nineteen…” a voice hissed.

Brent palmed the lock, spun the dial right two revolutions, and landed on the nineteen.

“Fifty-seven…”

Round to the left.

“Twenty-eight.”

Reverse a turn and a half. Pull and open.

“Gods or goods, Dr. Cummings.”

Get the fuck out, Brent thought as he yanked off the lock and opened the door.

Inside, he found a manila folder lying atop a Bible on the only shelf. He snatched it up and riffled the pages. Nothing but notations on patients. Ignoring the Bible, he replaced the folder and scanned the walls of the cabinet. On the back wall, a key ring with three keys hung from a question-mark-shaped hook. Brent removed the ring. One was obviously an ignition/door key for a Mercedes. Plucky drove a Mercedes. The other two looked like house keys. Brent recalled the fortress Plucky called home, and had he been capable of smiling, the good doctor thought his grin would have been roughly the size of a crescent moon right about then.

But now what? So what if he had the keys to Plucky’s abode? How was he going to get out of the hospital dressed in nothing but an open-ass gown and a bandaged face?

Oh, but the fog knew. The fog seemed to know a good deal of valuable information, indeed.

3.

Voices.

Close.

A man and a woman were in the break room. Footfalls approached the doctors’ lounge.

Brent’s heart thudded. He glanced furtively around the room. The semi-opaque shower door offered little in the way of a hiding spot. He definitely couldn’t fit inside the locker, so he eased its door closed and replaced the combination lock, giving it a spin to engage the mechanism.

The cot seemed the only available option. Would he be able to lie down and cover up before someone came in, and if he could, wouldn’t they question the identity of the person snuggled up under the sheets?

The fog rose, enveloping him. A heaviness settled on his chest and abdomen. He was being pushed toward the shower. Toward the one place he was sure to be found. His hand shot out, seeking the shower door.

No, a soft but stern thought commanded.

The fog pressed him up against the wall between the shower and the toilet. The crushing presence was so intense that Brent found it hard to breathe, as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him.

The handle on the lounge door snapped downward, and the door drifted inward.

“The Empire of Cunts called. They want their queen back,” said a man from the doorway, but no one had entered yet. Brent thought he recognized the man’s voice, but he couldn’t place a face or name to it.

“Real fucking funny, Ponzi.” The woman’s voice was monotone and gruff, and Brent thought she would have made a great Muppet.

“Whoa! Watch it with that Ponzi shit.”

“You just called me a queen of cunts, and you’re bitching about me calling you Ponzi? Get real. Grab your crap, and let’s get out of here before lab calls about another coagulated CBC.”

“If you wouldn’t wait umpteen million years before tubing to the lab, you wouldn’t have that problem. And yeah, I got a problem with you calling me Ponzi. I was a victim, not the perpetrator.”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, Brent thought. Come in or stay out. Get this over with!

As if acquiescing to his wishes, the door swung open another foot.

“Whatever… Ponzi.” The woman snorted.

“Tell me, does it take a vote to become Queen Cunt, or did some older cunt die, and you took her place?”

What the hell are these two doing?

“You know I could have your job because you called me that? Sexual harassment is no joke.”

“Harassment? How about, her ass meant… for me to touch it!” The man barked laughter, and Brent groaned.

Silence.

Had they heard him?

“Someone in here?” the man asked.

Yup. They’d heard him.

The door drifted open, and Brent laid eyes on a resident he’d worked with a handful of times over the past three months. The man’s name was Cooper, or Copper, or something like that. Cooper/Copper stood about five foot ten, had sandy-blond hair, and was thinner than a spent roll of paper towels. A cinnamon-colored unibrow connected his pinprick eyes, which were sunken and underscored with lavender bags the size of teacups. Residents, Brent knew from experience, didn’t sleep much.

Cooper/Copper’s beady little eyes floated over Brent, down the wall to the toilet, and over the sink. If Brent hadn’t known any better, he would have said the man couldn’t see him.

Do I know any better?

“Did you hear that?” Cooper/Copper asked the woman.

“Don’t change the subject—”

Cooper/Copper snapped back to look at his companion. “You didn’t hear someone moan? Like a zombie?”

“It was probably your stomach, you skinny shit. Eat a hamburger or something.”

The resident glanced back into the room and looked directly in Brent’s direction, yet his eyes never actually settled on Brent. Just flitted over him, as if Brent were nothing more than a stain on the wall.

The fog, Brent thought. It’s hiding me.

This revelation gave Brent a headache. He briefly considered what else the fog could do before he decided to focus back on the two people at the door. Cooper/Copper stepped fully into the doctor’s lounge, and a short, pudgy nurse in green scrubs—surgical staff, Brent assumed—walked in behind him. She had her salt-and-pepper hair tucked into a jade-colored shower cap, but several strands had fallen from the collection atop her head. She looked frazzled and beat; Brent figured she’d finished a lengthy tour in one operating room or another.

“Clayton… there’s no one in here. Grab your stuff, and let’s go.”

Clayton? Brent thought. Damn, I was way off.

“All right, already. Sheesh. This is what I get for doing Devonshire a solid.”

Brent’s pulse kicked up a notch. Plucky’s real name was Devonshire—Laird Devonshire. Then again, his parents’ names were Devonshire, as well. It could be any one of the three.

Yet Clayton moved toward Plucky’s locker, and it was Plucky’s combination lock that Clayton was interested in. The resident removed a sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his black scrubs and began twirling the numbers on the dial. After two failed attempts, Clayton succeeded on the third try. He pulled open the door, paused, and looked over his shoulder at the nurse.

“No keys,” said Clayton.

“Are you sure?” the nurse asked as she went to Clayton’s side.

“Do you see any keys?”

She shook her head, and more hair escaped containment. “Oh, well. Guess he’s stuck like Chuck, eh? Gonna have to call Triple-A to get into his fancy aw-toe-mo-beel. Sucks to be him.”

Had Plucky locked himself out of his car? Sure sounded like it. Once again, Brent felt like grinning.

After all, kidnapping and killing an unsuspecting woman was relatively impossible without a set of wheels.

4.

Once the resident and the nurse went about their merry way, Brent allowed the fog to lead him back out into the second-floor corridor. The fog boiled around him, covering him in its icy presence. He could still smell damp leaves and rotting bark.

Brent was drawn to the cold lift, aptly named because it was the elevator hospital staff used to transport the deceased from the hospital’s various wings to cold storage on the first floor, at the rear of the building. Whether or not the fog had cloaked him, Brent did not know, but he took precautions not to be seen, just in case.

Off the elevator, Brent navigated the silent halls that made up the employees-only sections of Yorkshire Medical: human resources, payroll, environmental services, clean storage, and the coolers that housed the dead until grieving families decided on other arrangements.

Brent passed the time clock he used to punch three days out of every week, and a heavy sense of nostalgia crushed him. He would never again practice medicine—not legally, at any rate—and that thought alone brought a dark depression upon him.

The Dilaudid he’d received before journeying into the fog had begun to take hold, and his pace slowed. His heart responded in kind, until he was posted up against a wall, suddenly crying.

Everything he’d worked so hard for, over a decade of schooling and specialty training, and for what? To become a disgraced physician who relied on narcotics to survive everyday existence? Had this really become his life?

He realized that moment was not the time or place for such an emotional breakdown, but it seemed his mind had other plans. The fog and its impatient beckoning would have to wait. He was a broken man, and just how broken was a thing he’d finally come to understand in that moment.

A flood of unwanted realizations slammed into him like hurricane-force tides crashing against storm-weakened pylons. With water-logged eyes, he studied the bag of piss he still carried, and somehow, that tea-brown fluid caused him to weep harder. Tears soaked his bandages. Snot choked him.

What the fuck is wrong with you? You’re a forty-year-old coward who’s running from his past, and you think you have any chance of saving some stranger from your psychopathic colleague and former friend? Ha! What a goddamned joke!

He had to get rid of that damn catheter. Clean storage is down here somewhere. He rounded a bend, took a left, and stopped at a door labeled: CLEAN ROOM. He stepped inside.

On a shelf at the back of the sterile room sat a box of syringes. He took one out, ripped open the cellophane, and dropped the plastic packaging to the floor. He yanked his gown to one side and found the Y connector on the tube that extended from his urethra. He screwed the syringe onto the end of the shorter tube and drew the saline from the balloon that currently resided in his bladder. That done, he was able to slide out the catheter with little more than a tickle. He left his bag of piss, tubing and all, in the middle of the room, beside the discarded syringe packaging. Whoever found his leavings was going to be thoroughly confused.

He exited the clean room and closed the door behind him.

Veronica’s ghost skipped past him, her flaxen hair spooling out behind her in that watery way, the backpack on her back bouncing in time with her steps.

“Tick, tock, tickety, tock. Time’s slipping away, Doc. Better be on your way, or someone’s gonna die today!” she sang as she frolicked down the empty corridor. “Tick, tock, tickety, tock—”

“I didn’t mean to kill you!” he cried. Of course, it didn’t quite come out the way he intended, what with him not having the lower section of his face, and all. More like: “I in ean oo ill oo!”

Veronica snapped to a halt in the middle of the hallway, twenty feet ahead of Brent. She bent backward at an extreme angle. He could hear her bones snapping like kindling in a fire. Her knees shattered, and she collapsed to the ground—her body once again in the shape of a W. She craned her neck so that she could meet his eyes.

“What’s left unfinished will soon be done, Doc. I’m already dead. She’s not.”

Brent shambled down the hall, his shoulder gliding along the cold wall at his side. Between sobs, he managed, “What would you have me do?”

“Nothing you haven’t done before.”

5.

Brent, sweating profusely due to the narcotics coursing through his bloodstream, shuffled out of the rear exit of Yorkshire Medical. The doors hissed behind him as the hydraulics thumped them closed.

Bay’s End wasn’t big enough to constitute a hospital with a parking deck, so staff parking was located at the back of the facility. Brent strode past the gated biohazard dumpsters, off the curb, and into the lot. Plucky’s red Mercedes C350, parked in the first row, was one of only five cars in attendance. Brent dug in the breast pocket of his hospital gown and retrieved the keys he’d stolen. He unlocked the car, slid in behind the wheel, and started her up.

Christian radio blared to life. He spun the dial on the stereo, silencing the hallelujahs. In his peripheral vision, he caught sight of the pale creature seated in the passenger seat.

Mya.

She stared ahead, naked and silent. One clothespin hung from her bruised left breast. She nodded once, as if to tell him it was time to go. Seeing her unsettled Brent, but he backed out all the same and was surprised to find he was no longer trembling in her presence. If she or the fog meant him harm, they’d had plenty of time to do the various unspeakable acts that Brent imagined them capable of.

He drove out of the parking lot and into the night, the quiet dead his only company.

Chapter Six:              

Is There a Doctor in the House?

1.

Brent pulled into Plucky’s driveway at 3:50 a.m. He killed the engine and got out. Though a steady phantom throbbing emanated from the lower section of his face, Brent felt numb everywhere else. Whether or not it was the Dilaudid still working, he didn’t know or care.

Mya’s spirit—or future spirit, if he failed; he didn’t know what else to call the apparition—was standing at Plucky’s front door when Brent ascended the steps. Thick fog encircled her feet, seemingly attached to her somehow. He’d given up trying to understand all the supernatural business at some point and had simply accepted it.

He unlocked the knob then the deadbolt, and the two of them entered. She stopped in the foyer, next to the control pad for the security system. He joined her in studying the box on the wall.

“One… eight… nine… nine.”

He punched in each number. The screen flashed: UNARMED.

Brent followed her through the house to the back door. Out into the backyard, she drifted toward a fourteen-foot shed at the rear fence. Brent didn’t want to go in. Mya didn’t seem to care what he wanted.

The second house key on the ring he’d stolen from Plucky’s locker gained him access to his former friend’s workshop.

Brent didn’t know what he’d expected. Perhaps bodies dangling from hooks, a la The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or maybe torture devices straight out of the Saw franchise, but he encountered neither of those scenarios. There was a table saw in one corner. A fine layer of sawdust coated the floor beneath the appliance. Woodworking tools hung from a pegboard on the wall opposite the door, and underneath them, a workbench, which was tidy aside from deep scratches in the tabletop. Below the workbench, on a shelf the length of the table itself, lay various projects. Some were unfinished, and others were shiny with sealant: three birdhouses, one without a roof; two slate-sided flowerpots; and what seemed like the makings of a dollhouse. A pile of clothespins sans the metal spring mechanisms that gave them their pinch sat in the middle of all this. Brent assumed Plucky had made the pins himself.

Off to Brent’s right, a curtain hung from the ceiling. Brent pulled aside the heavy green fabric and found Mya staring at a wall of photographs. Brent didn’t recognize the women in the pictures because Detective Crumb hadn’t shown Brent how these women had met their end, but Brent had enough to go on to realize he was staring at Plucky’s victims. Sadly, Brent couldn’t remember their names. The woman in the third and final photo was unfortunately all too familiar. In the picture, Mya was at the driver’s side door of a white Toyota sedan, obviously about to unlock it and get inside. Brent’s stomach twisted into a knot at the thought of this woman being stalked.

Above these photos was a single phrase written on the wall in black marker: DIRTY LAUNDRY.

Brent considered those two words for a minute. The phrase had so many possible meanings, but the most obvious was the literal sense. Plucky saw these women as objects to be cleansed. Suddenly, the clothespins made a terrible amount of sense. In some fashion, their murders were Plucky’s attempt to wash them clean. And when he was done, Plucky had hung them out to dry. Then why did Mya only have one clothespin? What was the significance of that?

She’s unfinished business.

But there was more than that to Mya, and Brent knew it. For one, why was the ghost of a woman who wasn’t even dead yet haunting him? To say that she didn’t make any sense was an understatement, at best.

Brent figured the best way to attack the situation was to hear it from the horse’s mouth, as it were.

“How are you here?” he asked the corpse at his side. The question was more projected thought than it was anything truly articulated.

Mya seemed to consider this. After a long moment, she shrugged. It was an odd thing to see—a dead naked woman with several stab wounds in her abdomen and a single clothespin dangling from one nipple shrugging nonchalantly.

“Am I imagining this?” Brent asked.

“Not all of it,” she said, and her words carried a tinny echo, as if she’d spoken to Brent from the opposite end of a length of metal tubing.

Brent blinked rapidly, as shocked by her ability to answer him as he was by her answer itself.

“And definitely not her.” Mya averted her gaze from Brent’s eyes and looked over his shoulder.

Turning around, Brent found Veronica sitting in the middle of the shed, her legs crossed in front of her. She looked so beautiful, so full of life. Nothing like the corpse he’d left on that cold concrete back in Oakland, or the one currently standing beside him.

The girl stared into him, almost through him. The sadness in her eyes was palpable.

“What does she want?” he asked of Mya.

“Probably the same thing I want. To see an end to this.”

“This? This what?”

“That, you’ll have to ask her,” Mya said. “When you two are done talking, there’s a box behind the table saw. You’re going to need what’s inside. Goodbye, Doc.”

2.

When Brent glanced over his shoulder, Mya—or Mya’s ghost, he still wasn’t sure what to call her—was gone. He faced forward once again and took three uneasy steps toward Veronica. He knelt before her and forced himself to meet her hazel eyes.

“Hello, Doc.” Her soft voice was as childlike as her features. Brent didn’t know why he’d expected anything else. She’d been struck down in her seventh year of life, been stripped of the chance to grow up, so why should her specter’s voice be anything other than childlike?

“I’m so sorry, Veronica. I didn’t mean to—”

“I think we’re past all that, don’t you?”

Brent nodded.

“Whether you meant to or not, you killed me. I’m dead because of you. And now, you’re the reason I can’t rest.”

“What? How am I keeping you from—”

“Quit with the questions. My mother always said there wasn’t such a thing as stupid questions, but you seem full of them.”

Brent was taken aback by the jab but figured he deserved it. Let her mock him. Hell, let her bash his brain in with one of the hammers hanging over the workbench, for all he cared. He owed her too much to fuss over her rude comments. He remained silent.

“Do you think I’m real? I guess that’s the first question. Because if you don’t, nothing I say will matter. So, do you believe that I’m sitting right here, right now, talking to you?”

“Yes.” He nodded as he answered.

“Do you pray, Doc?”

Brent twitched. The question seemed oddly out of place yet familiar. Hadn’t someone asked him this recently? At the hospital?

“Plucky asked me that same thing. My last morning at work, he asked if I prayed. Why’re you asking me?”

“Because what I tell you next depends on your opinion of God, and whether or not you two are on speaking terms.”

Brent swallowed. His throat clicked, it was so dry. “No. I don’t pray.”

“The morning you ran me over—”

Brent flinched, as if her words had slapped him across the face.

“A couple of missionaries from one of the local churches had knocked on the door. I answered. The chubby one started talking to me. He kept asking me if I believed in the big G-O-D, and I kept nodding my head, even though I didn’t know Christ from a hole in the head. While the chubby one talked up the Lord, I kept glancing at the sign hanging from our door. Before long, Momma came out of her room, asking who I was talking to. She shooed the Bible pushers off our porch, and I left for school. But I continued to think about that sign. Momma had put it there the previous weekend because some Jehovah’s Witnesses had talked her ear off, and she’d been late for her hair appointment because of it. Momma didn’t care too much for salesmen, either. Wanna guess what that sign said?”

“If you’re selling gods or goods…”

Veronica nodded. “You know, that was the last thing that went through my mind. I was thinking, ‘If you’re selling gods or goods, get the fuck out’ as you ran me down. Then there wasn’t a god, though. Only the fog.”

As if on cue, thick fog seeped into the shed from under the doors and around the window. It curled up between the two of them like a dog trying to stay warm in front of a fire. It seemed to breathe, rising and falling, pulsing with some arcane life.

“I don’t know if I’m a ghost or not, but I think I’m still here because you’re too dimwitted to let me move on. How selfish is that, huh? Somebody trapping someone in their world simply because they can’t let go of something they did. And now there’s Mya, lumbering along after me, wherever I go, like some lost puppy, already haunting me haunting you, and you haven’t even let her down yet. You suck, Doc. You really do.”

Brent shook his head. “I don’t believe this. This is crazy.”

“It’s not for you to believe, you egomaniac!” she screeched, her undead face suddenly full of bright blood. She settled almost instantly and sighed. “Don’t you get that yet? You need to stop thinking about yourself and start living your own life. I’m tired of living in your sorrow.”

“Then why does it matter whether or not I pray?”

“Because maybe,” Veronica said, her face still and somber, “if you believed in something bigger than yourself, you might finally allow yourself to be forgiven.”

“That’s what all this is about? Me forgiving myself?”

“No. It’s about you fixing something, something that has nothing to do with you.”

“I do that every day. Did, anyway. I was a doctor. I helped people. I fixed them.”

“Maybe in the beginning you did, Doc, but all that changed. The drugs ruined that. The only reason you continued to practice medicine after you killed me was because you needed your fix instead of fixing your need. In that way, my death was in vain.”

“And you want me to do what? Kill Plucky? I took an oath. Do no harm. I may not be a doctor anymore, but I can’t simply forget my training. I’m a physician, not a murderer. Why can’t I just call the cops?”

“Why haven’t you already?”

Brent wanted to say something—anything, really—but nothing came out. He honestly didn’t have a good reason for not calling the police, or, given his current incapacity for speech, dropping by the station with a written statement. Two words repeated in his mind: unfinished business. Perhaps he hadn’t contacted the authorities because he felt Plucky was his problem.

Was he really considering killing his former friend?

Nonsense.

Veronica said, “Do whatever you’re going to do, Doc. Time’s up.”

The fog rose from its place between them and blanketed the young girl. It flattened back to the ground, and Veronica was gone.

Brent stood. He pushed through the swirling mist and approached the table saw. He bent to look behind it. A wooden box that resembled a suitcase had been tucked away between the legs of the table and the tin wall of the shed. Brent tugged it out from its hideaway. He strode over to the workbench and laid the box atop it. He flipped two golden clasps and opened the lid.

He gazed over the contents of the box. Brent shuddered.

3.

Brent left the door to the shed wide open. He ambled across the backyard and returned to the house through the rear door, which he kept open as well. He made sure the front door was unlocked and ajar before laying the wooden box on the coffee table and heading to the guest room.

Plucky had not yet removed Brent’s things from the room. Brent yanked the duffel off the floor, tossed it onto the bed, and rummaged around inside to find the Ziploc baggie full of Oxys. He stuffed the plastic bag and its contents into the chest pocket of his hospital gown. He briefly considered changing into street clothes, but figured it was pointless at this juncture. He returned to the living room, where he waited on the couch for Plucky to arrive.

4.

As dawn’s first light bled through the picture window at the front of the house, the space between the slats of the venetian blinds cast golden lines across Brent’s thighs. He rubbed his eyes and wondered what was taking Plucky so long to get home. Sure, he’d locked himself out of his car, which Brent had then stolen, but that had been over three hours ago, according to the clock on the microwave.

He ran a hand over the bulge of his chest pocket—his pills. He could take a handful now and be done with the whole mess. How easy would it be to take that route? He would have to crush them and mix them in a drink for them to enter his system faster than he could vomit them back up, but it was possible. Plenty of celebs overdosed on narcotics every year. And what a way to go. Just drift right off to sleep. The ultimate middle finger to life.

The powers that be should change the name of opioid painkillers to Fukitall. Or Fukmuhlife.

Perhaps simply F-This. Now in bubblegum flavor! Can’t leave the kiddies out.

He stared at the bag resting in the palm of his right hand. He couldn’t remember removing them from the pocket of his gown. The little green pills beckoned him, and he would have easily answered their siren’s call if he hadn’t heard a car outside and seen the taxi pulling up to the curb.

Showtime.

Just to make sure, Brent waited until Plucky exited the rear door of the cab. He paid the fare and headed for the front of the house. Brent tucked away his pills once more, leaned forward, and opened the wooden box. He chose the filet knife from the other contents then went to the front door and hid behind it.

Surprisingly, his heart rate remained calm as he waited for his prey. His face didn’t hurt in the least, and his breathing came in smooth draws and releases.

In.

Out.

Serene.

Murderous.

“Brent?” Plucky called in that ridiculous voice of his. “You in there, buddy?”

Halcyon.

“This has kinda gotten out of hand, don’t you think?”

Tranquil.

“I don’t want to have to come in there and drag you out.”

Reposed.

Plucky sighed loudly.

Brent readied himself. He brought the filet knife, which Plucky had used on his victims, up over his head. As soon as his former friend strode into the house, Brent intended to bury the blade to the hilt in Plucky’s back.

Patience.

Nothing.

Not a sound. Not a footstep. Not a single clue that Plucky was coming or going. How much time had passed? A minute? Two? An eternity?

Brent’s heart began to beat faster. His breathing became quick and shallow.

Another thirty seconds flew by. Brent knew because he’d counted: one Mississippi, two Mississippi, three… four…

Where is he? Had Plucky decided not to enter the house? Was he currently out in the street, calling the cops concerning the intruder lurking behind his door? What right did he have to get away? To live without consequence? To deny Brent a means of forgiveness?

Suddenly, shaking all over, Brent lowered the knife. That’s that, then. He’d gone mad and was completely, utterly, insane. He was hiding behind his former friend’s front door, intending to drive a filet knife in between Plucky’s shoulder blades. The once doctor had devolved into a murderous psychopath. Killing Plucky was no cure. There was no cure.

What was I thinking? What the hell happened to me? My God, I’ve become a monster.

He couldn’t bring Veronica back from the dead. Or Plucky’s victims. Mya could be saved, but it didn’t have to be like this, with a man’s murder. Brent had been so close to crossing the line, to becoming what Plucky was. No matter what happened, he wouldn’t kill him. He couldn’t.

I am not this man.

Brent dropped the knife to the floor, where it stuck in the hard wood with a twaaang. Stepping out from behind the front door, he faced the panel that controlled the security system. Trembling, he thumbed the panic button. There were no alarms, no whooping sirens, only a flashing red light in the top right corner of the screen. He shambled to the sofa, flopped down, removed the contents of the box, and laid them out on the table.

Plucky stepped out of the hallway to Brent’s right. Brent saw him in his peripheral vision but did not react to his presence. A cell phone trilled. Plucky removed his phone from his pants pocket and answered, “Hello. No, everything’s all right. Yes. The password is pancakes. Thank you.”

Brent gazed over the items he’d laid out on the coffee table: his own cell phone, wallet, and house keys, along with a single clothespin, a syringe filled with an amber liquid, and a picture of Mya walking out of CVS.

After a moment’s silence, Plucky sighed. “You know, I figured you’d come here. When Clayton told me my keys weren’t in my locker, I assumed you were the culprit. And then I found out you’d pulled a disappearing act, and that kinda cemented it. By the way, thanks for not wrecking my car. I expected you to drive it off a cliff or something. I like that car.”

“I’m planning to pin Mya’s murder on you.” Plucky pointed. “All that in front of you is going to be found in your apartment with her blood smeared all over everything. Stranger things have happened, right? I mean, sure you have an alibi for the first bit of laundry I did, but you won’t have one for Mya. Maybe you know the killer after all, right? Maybe you were his apprentice, you know, before your arrest. Who knows, really? Send it over to Unsolved Mysteries and call it a day, right? After all, after I cut you up, they aren’t ever going to find your body.”

Brent craned his neck to look up at the man. “Uck oo.”

“Yeah, fuck you, too, Brent. You know, there was a time I liked you. I thought you were a decent guy. Then I find out about the drugs and the little girl you ran over out in Oakland, and I gotta say, it kinda spoiled my view of you.”

Plucky registered the shock on Brent’s face by saying, “What? You didn’t think anyone would find out? All I had to do was Google your goddamn name. Shocked the shit out of me that I’m the only one who checked up on you. You’d think the board of directors at Yorkshire would screen their applicants better, especially doctors. But nooooo! We have a drug-addicted child-killer running around our emergency room, and no one’s the wiser. Fucking shame, really.”

Brent faced the items on the table again. He focused on the picture of Mya. Tears came, scorching trails down his cheeks. He smeared them with the back of one hand.

“How does it feel, knowing you killed one and will be responsible for not stopping the death of the other?”

Brent did not try to answer. He only sat there, weeping. He removed the baggie from the chest pocket of his gown, slid open the zipper, and poured a handful of the small green dots into his palm. Whatever Plucky had in store for him, he didn’t want to feel any of it.

Plucky laughed. “Go on, then. I’ll allow you one last dose. Once an addict, always an addict. Am I right, or am I right?” Still chuckling, Plucky strode to the foyer, where he yanked the filet knife from the hardwood.

Brent tore the bandages from his face, revealing the horror show that had once been his mouth. He tilted his head back and dropped two dozen OxyContin 40mg into his throat. They went down surprisingly easily, considering he didn’t have a fluid chaser. He refilled his palm and repeated the process.

It won’t be long now.

Plucky sauntered back over to Brent. He pointed the wicked tip of the filet knife in Brent’s face. “Do you want me to wait until they kick in before I stick you full of holes?”

Brent shrugged. He had not a single fuck to give. His give-a-damn was officially broken.

“Well, I guess this is good—”

Pop! A hole opened above Plucky’s right eye. Blood dribbled over his eyebrow and onto his cheek. The eye rolled inward, as if to look at his nose, while the left one maintained its gaze on Brent. A breath later, Plucky collapsed into a heap at Brent’s feet. The man’s shoulders and feet twitched as life fled him.

Confused, shock already taking the reins of his mind, Brent looked up and into the open front door.

Mya, in a shooter’s stance and holding a smoking revolver, stood in the doorway, shaking. Her breaths came in quick succession, and she looked as if she might pass out at any second. Brent shoved up from the couch and went to her.

“He… he was… gonna… he was gonna kill you,” she said as she lowered the gun. “I… I had no… no choice. Right? Right?”

Brent nodded fervently.

“My God, your… your face.” She averted her eyes, staring at the twitching body behind him.

Brent grabbed her shoulders. “Ow?” he asked, internally damning his broken speech.

She glanced back at him. “What?”

“Ow? OW?” he pleaded, begging for her to understand.

“Wha—how? Do you mean how? How did I know? How did I find you?”

Again, Brent nodded, the bottom of his face afire with agony.

“You told me. You… in… in the fog.”

He released Mya’s shoulders and took two unsteady steps backward. He stumbled over Plucky’s calf and landed hard on his ass. He looked at the dead man, then to Mya. Her brow was knotted in confusion, twisted in fear.

Brent began to laugh—a slow chuckle escalating to bellowing guffaws. Something broke loose, and red soaked his gown.

She’d saved him. The fog had led her here to save him…

No. Not to save him. Brent Cummings had nothing to do with this.

Fog rolled in, snaking around Mya’s feet to form a pillar in front of Brent.

Veronica stepped forth, smiling. “Do you see? Do you finally see?”

Brent glanced at the empty baggie on the couch. His laughter dwindled until he was sobbing.

“Balance, Doc. It’s all about balance.”

In the foyer, Mya was talking, but Brent ignored her words. He gazed into Veronica’s eyes and saw. Understood.

Balance.

As he had so many other times in life, Brent rolled over and waited for the pills to kick in.

Also by Edward Lorn

Novels

BAY’S END

DASTARDLY BASTARD

LIFE AFTER DANE

HOPE FOR THE WICKED (Larry Laughlin #1)

PENNIES FOR THE DAMNED (Larry Laughlin #2)

Novellas, Novelettes, Short Stories, and Collections

THREE AFTER (Out of print)

WHAT THE DARK BRINGS

CRAWL

NO SUCH THING

WORLD’S GREATEST DAD

FULL MOON OVER CEDAR HILL

FOG WARNING

CRUELTY: A Serial Novel

Episode One

Episode Two

Episode Three

Episode Four

Episode Five

Cruelty (Episodes One - Five)

Episode Six

Episode Seven

Episode Eight

Episode Nine

Episode Ten

A Final Act of Cruelty (Episodes Six – Ten)

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