Page 32 of The Undead

“I know she went up to have a look at his room. She was pumped so full of painkillers she shouldn’t have been able to get up. She doesn’t know what the hell she saw,” I said. Nick nodded.

“Yeah, well, she’s the closest thing I got to a witness. Jeez, this is ridiculous.” Nick hesitated, then turned his head slightly to look at me. The sodium lights bathed his face in an unpleasantly sallow glow, picking out the deep-set dark eyes and making the olive skin gray. Not his best color. “Did she say anything to you, like maybe she described what she saw? Anything at all?”

“She said she didn’t see anything.”

“Nothing?”

“That’s what she said.” I hesitated, shoved a piece of paper from one side of the desk to the other. A hint of Sylvia’s floral perfume drifted through the room, but was drowned by the tide of Nick’s Old Spice. “I think she was holding something back. She—I don’t know. She didn’t tell me everything.”

Nick stared at me with dark, yellow-streaked eyes, and then nodded and looked out into the parking lot again. He sighed and drummed his fingers on the windowsill.

“Yeah, she does that a lot, Doc,” he muttered, and smiled for no reason. “Well, this case is a deader. Whatever Maggie thinks she knows—or knew before the drugs wore off—there’s no supporting evidence. It’s a big waste of time.”

Nick stretched. His neck cracked loudly in the silence. I stared down at my broken recorder and tried to subdue the anger that was welling up in me—but it wasn’t subduable.

“What do you mean, she does that a lot?” I asked him as he headed for the door. Nick stopped on a dime. He’d been waiting for the opening, and from the glint of pleasure in his eyes he’d been waiting a long time.

“I mean there’s a lot she forgets to tell you, Mikey. Like maybe you’re not around enough to take care of a cat, much less a wife. Like she’s been real lonely a lot of nights.” Nick’s smile stretched. I wanted to rip it off his face. “I kept her company. It was the least I could do for a partner”

“If you’re trying to say something, come out and say it,” I grated. He exploded into movement—not as fast as Adam, I thought critically, but fast enough to reach across the desk and grab my tie. He yanked me toward him with choking force.

“I’m saying, Mr. Medical Man, that I’m fucking your wife. Is that clear enough? I’ve been fucking her for two years, and you never even noticed. Jesus, Doc, you’re pathetic, you know? I’ll bet I made her scream more in a night than you have in eight years, you little shit.” Nick caught hold of his anger and smiled again—but the smile didn’t reach his cold dark eyes. His grip on my tie was not quite hard enough to cut off my air, but I felt like I was strangling anyway. Drowning. “Do us all a favor. Get a fucking divorce. This is just embarrassing.”

He let me go and shoved me back in my chair. Before I could get my balance back, he turned his back on me and stalked out of my office. The windows rattled from the force of the slamming door.

I bent forward and breathed against a wave of rage so hot it burned my heart into ash. He was lying. He had to be lying. I threw the broken recorder against the far wall, where it exploded in a flurry of plastic and metal shreds. The tape popped out and flopped to the carpet like a pilot ejecting from a downed fighter. I leaned forward and put my head down on my desk and gulped in deep breaths that didn’t help steady me at all.

I did the intelligent thing. I left.

Rage does funny things to you. I didn’t want to go home, but I drove there anyway. The house was still dark. Maggie wasn’t there. I sat in the car in the darkness and stared at the blind windows, trying to recapture some of the feeling of safety I used to derive from the sight of my own home; nothing came. Sylvia Reilly’s face floated phantomlike against my retinas, acid-green eyes too vivid for comfort. Nick’s face replaced it. Foster’s.

“Shit,” I hissed, and slammed the car into reverse. Streetlights slid by in a continuously breaking wave. On the freeway, thousands of cars crept in silent procession, a funeral for some unnamed one of them who, statistically, wouldn’t make it home at all. Across the freeway the lights of Southern Methodist University glowed a dear moonlight-white.

I wasn’t in the mood for academia. I turned in to the first bar I saw and claimed a table in the corner. The waitress was good enough to know I wasn’t there for casual drinking; she asked me if I wanted to run a tab, and I tossed her my gold card. She caught it deftly and brought me two tequila shots.

By the fifth one, the pain was starting to unwind from that ashy ruin that had once been my heart. I kept drinking. I went to number seven without feeling any sense of time passing. Drinking made my hearing unnaturally sharp, even as it dulled everything else. I leaned my cheek on one numb hand and watched two sorority girls dressed in the kind of tube-knit skin-right dresses that only hookers used to wear.

“—tell you, Jen, he’s incredible. I never saw any guy with that kind of staying power—”

“Sounds painful,” another girl said, deadpan. The first one giggled.

“Kind of. But Jesus, Jennifer, I was in heaven—”

Their voices faded as I downed number eight, and I found myself wishing they’d stay. Not so much for the intellectual stimulation of their conversation—though it was interesting—but because the echoing silence of my own thoughts.

I’d met Maggie while I was in medical school, carving up cadavers. She was rebellious and funny, knock-dead gorgeous in tight jeans and sweaters, and by the third date I was desperate. Desperate to get in her pants, desperate to know everything about her, desperate at the thought of not having her next to me for the rest of my life.

Then I got my sheepskin, and she got hers, and things began to slip … to where we were now, way downstream with lots of water over the bridge, not a fucking paddle in sight.

The waitress refused to answer my call again. Good thing. I’d taken to drawing smiley faces in spilled tequila. I felt very close to tears, as much as I felt close to anything through the woolly blanket of alcohol. Jesus, I was going to be sick in the morning.

A shadow fell over my table. Adam stood over me. His face was very, very pale, paler than it had been at the fairgrounds, and his eyes looked wide and dead. He raised one hand and pointed at me. I smiled loosely at him.

“Don’t move,” he whispered.

Why bother? Even if he hadn’t been pinning me there with his anger, the booze was like a ten-ton weight on my chest. Adam stood watching me with his hands jammed in the pockets of his brown leather jacket. He stared for a very long time, and red flashed in the depths of his eyes.

“Sylvia. How did you find her? How did you get her to come to the hospital?”

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