скачать книгу бесплатно
The therapist’s mellow, soothing voice broke Lisa’s reverie. She looked at the clock on the wall.
‘Oh my God, you’re right. Time passes so fast in here, it’s crazy. Do you find that, Dr Roberts?’
Nikki smiled diplomatically. ‘Sometimes.’
Lisa Flannagan stood up to leave.
‘Don’t you have a coat?’ Nikki asked. ‘It’s pouring out there.’
‘Is it?’ Lisa hadn’t noticed the pounding on the windows.
She was dressed in a tiny denim miniskirt that barely skimmed the top of her thighs, and a tank top with the words ‘ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE’ emblazoned on the front, a garment so tiny it would have struggled to adequately cover a child’s chest, never mind Lisa’s ample bosom.
‘You’ll be soaked to the bone out there,’ said Nikki. Standing up, she reached for her own trench coat, hanging on the back of the door. ‘Here. Take mine.’
Lisa hesitated. ‘Don’t you need it?’
Nikki shook her head. ‘I’m parked downstairs. I can take the elevator right to my car. You can return it at our next session.’
‘Well, if you’re sure …’ Lisa took the coat, smiling broadly. ‘That is so kind of you, Dr Roberts. Really.’
She took the therapist’s hand and squeezed it. It was little gestures like that, going the extra mile, that really set Dr Roberts apart from other therapists. She wasn’t in this for the money. She actually cared about her patients. She cares about me.
Outside in the alley behind the Century Plaza Medical Building it was cold, wet and dark. His legs ached from crouching for so long. His skin burned and so did his throat. Every breath felt like he was gargling razor blades, and every drop of rain felt like acid, a tiny burning dagger slicing into his frayed nerves. When it was over, he would get what he needed. Pain, unimaginable pain, would be replaced with exquisite ecstasy. It wouldn’t last long, but that didn’t matter. Nothing lasted long.
The streets of Century City were full of cars, but the slick sidewalks were deserted. No one walked in LA, especially not in the rain.
She did, though. Usually.
Sometimes.
Would she come out tonight?
Come out, come out, wherever you are!
There she was. Suddenly. Too suddenly. He wasn’t ready.
His heart began to pound.
She belted her coat and put her head down against the rain. No umbrella. She was walking fast, crossing the opening to the alley.
‘Help!’ He tried to shout, but his voice was so raspy. Would she hear him? She had to hear him! ‘Help me!’
Lisa Flannagan turned. There was a figure, a man, or maybe a boy – he was tiny – slumped beside some trash cans.
‘Please!’ he called again. ‘Call 911. I’ve been stabbed.’
‘Oh my God!’ Pulling out her phone, Lisa moved towards him, already punching out the numbers. ‘What happened? Are you OK?’
He was bent double, clutching his stomach. That must be where the knife had gone in. She squatted down beside him. He was wearing a hoodie that was soaking wet, covering his face and hair.
‘Emergency, what service do you require?’
‘Police,’ Lisa blurted into her phone. ‘And ambulance.’ She touched the boy lightly on the top of his lolling head. ‘Don’t panic. Help’s on the way. Where are you hurt?’
He looked up and grinned. Lisa felt the vomit rise up inside her. The face beneath the hood wasn’t human. It was the face of a monster, green and rotted, strips of flesh literally curling off the bones and hanging down, like the skin of some rancid fruit. She opened her mouth to scream, but no sound came out.
‘Ma’am, can you give me your location?’
He recognized the terror in her eyes as she crouched over him, open-mouthed. Still grinning, he plunged the blade deep into her abdomen and twisted. Oh, the scream came then all right! Loud and piercing and horrified. He pulled out the knife and plunged again, so hard that his fist followed the blade somewhere deep inside her, somewhere warm and wet and enticing.
‘Ma’am, can you hear me? Ma’am? What’s happening? Can you tell me where you are?’
Dr Nikki Roberts leaned back against the soft leather of her Mercedes X-Class seats and waited for the garage doors to open.
Traffic permitting, she’d be back home in Brentwood in twenty minutes. Another long, empty evening stretched ahead, but she would fill it with mindless television and a bottle of Newton unfiltered Merlot and Ambien and sleep, and it would pass. Everything would pass.
Nikki felt guilty. She’d only been half-present during today’s session with Lisa. Maybe even less than half. That wasn’t fair, whether she liked the patient or not.
The garage doors inched open, agonizingly slowly.
Nikki edged the car forwards, towards the alley.
Doors. Garage doors!
Lisa heard the grinding of mechanical gears and the close, familiar rev of an engine. Blood was pouring from her stomach and chest. Not oozing but pouring, like milk from a jug. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t stand or run. She could only scream, and she did, again and again and again, each time the monster sliced into her arms and breasts and thighs. He wasn’t even trying to kill her any more. At least, not quickly. He was playing with her, like a cat with a mouse, delighting in the agony he was causing, in shredding her perfect body, piece by tiny piece.
The engine grew louder. Hope soared in Lisa’s heart.
Someone’s coming. Maybe it’s Dr Roberts? Please God, let her see me!
She drew in her breath and screamed, surely the loudest scream anyone had ever made in their lives. She could hear her own blood bubbling in the back of her throat and feel her eyes bulge as if they might burst from their sockets. Headlamps swept over her and the monster, lit them up like a stage spotlight.
The stabbing stopped.
So did the engine.
Lisa sobbed with relief. She’s seen me! She heard the monster’s knife clatter to the floor. She could feel her pulse slowing, and waited for her attacker to run, or for the car door to open.
Seconds passed. Two. Five. Ten …
Nothing happened.
Wait … what’s going on?
The car’s engine started up again.
No!
Headlights lit up the alley.
NO! Please! I’m here! PLEASE!
Nikki’s silver Mercedes glided past them along the alley, then turned slowly into the street.
Rotted, scaly hands coiled themselves around Lisa’s neck from behind. In front of her eyes, the shiny blade glinted, already slick with her blood.
‘Where were we?’
The last noise Lisa Flannagan heard was the monster laughing.
CHAPTER FOUR (#ulink_4a181dc4-85f6-56cd-a01b-5831faaba979)
Carter Berkeley III looked down at his expensively manicured nails and resisted the urge to bite them. What the hell was he doing here? He should be talking to the police, not a damn therapist.
Then he reminded himself that the police wouldn’t help him. The police didn’t believe him. No one did.
Carter thought about the two armed bodyguards he had waiting downstairs in the lobby, and tried to feel better. It didn’t work. Then he tried imagining his therapist naked. That did work, at least a little. Dr Nikki Roberts was a deeply sensual woman. Carter pictured her gray, pencil skirt pushed up roughly around her hips, and her prissy white blouse ripped open. He imagined her …
‘Carter? Are you with me?’
Her voice made him startle, then blush, then scowl. A highly successful investment banker, handsome, educated and rich, Carter was used to having people jump to his command and scuttle to gratify his every desire. Especially women. He did not appreciate being called out like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Tell me again what you think you saw last night,’ Dr Roberts said.
‘I don’t “think” I saw anything,’ Carter snapped. ‘I know what I saw, OK? I am not crazy.’ He ran a harassed hand through his thick blond hair.
‘I never suggested you were.’ The therapist’s voice was calm. ‘But even sane people can be mistaken some of the time, can’t they? I know I often am.’
‘Yeah, well I’m not,’ Carter growled.
Jesus. They’d all be sorry when he was dead. When these bastards finally got him and strung him up with electrical cord and beat him to death in some godforsaken dungeon. They’d all wish they’d listened then: the police, Dr Roberts, all of them.
Nikki leaned forward earnestly while her patient rambled on, expounding the same conspiracy theory he’d been peddling since he first started seeing her, more than a year ago. Carter Berkeley believed he was being stalked by unnamed assassins. He never offered any reason for this, still less any evidence, other than the elaborate imaginings of his brilliant but tortured mind. And yet, no matter how many logical paths Nikki led him down, Carter’s paranoid fears persisted. In fact, if anything, they were getting worse. Only last week he had informed Nikki solemnly that Trey Raymond, the sweet boy who ran her office and manned the front desk at Century Plaza, was a spy ‘working for the Mexicans’.
‘You can’t trust him. What do you really know about Trey, Dr Roberts?’
‘What do you know about him, Carter?’ Nikki countered.
‘Enough. I know enough,’ Carter pronounced, cryptically. Although, again, he offered no evidence to back this up.
I’m not making him better, Nikki thought sadly. I might actually be making him worse. Why am I even here?
She knew the answer to that, deep down. She was here – at work, in her office, seeing patients – because she had nowhere else to be. Nowhere else except home, alone, with no Doug, and no answers. That prospect was quite unbearable.
Unbearable …
The word took Nikki back.
It was only a year ago, but it felt like a lifetime.
Doug was smiling at her across the table at Luigi’s, wolfing down his spaghetti vongole as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, talking at a million miles an hour, the way he always did when the two of them were together.
‘“It’s unbearable.” What do people even mean when they say that?’ Doug asked Nikki. ‘My patients say it to me all the time: “It’s unbearable, Doc. I can’t bear it.” As if they have any alternative.’
Nikki and Doug Roberts had been married for seven years and together for almost three times that long. But the thrill of each other’s company, of talking and sharing ideas and feelings and experiences, never faded. No lunch date with Doug was ever dull.
‘I guess they’re speaking metaphorically,’ Nikki observed, toying with her own crab salad. Luigi’s food was delicious, but even the salads were rich. Doug might be incapable of gaining weight, but since she turned thirty-eight Nikki found increasingly that she had to watch her figure. There was nothing worse than thinking you might be pregnant at long last, only to realize that your rounded belly was actually ugly, middle-aged fat.
‘They mean that they don’t want to bear it. It hurts. Don’t forget, these are desperate addicts we’re talking about.’
‘You’re right.’ Doug nodded, slurping down the last of his pasta before reaching for the bread basket. ‘I guess I just get frustrated sometimes. Because, at the end of the day, it really is that black and white. Do you want to get better or not? Do you want to die or not? That’s it. That’s the choice.’
To an outsider, Doug Roberts might sound compassionless toward his junkie patients, but Nikki knew that he was anything but. He’d raced to meet her for lunch today directly from the latest meth and opioid clinic he was busy setting up in Venice with his good friend from med school, Haddon Defoe. Helping LA’s most hardened, most helpless addicts had become Doug Roberts’ passion, his life’s work.
‘Anyway, enough about me.’ He looked at Nikki lovingly. ‘How’s your morning been, sweetheart? Did you do another test?’
‘Not yet.’ Nikki looked down shyly at her half-eaten food. ‘Maybe tonight.’
‘Why not now?’ asked Doug.
‘Because. If it’s negative and I feel shitty, it might distract me from my afternoon clients,’ said Nikki.
Doug reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘It could be positive, honey. No reason why it shouldn’t be.’
‘Yup,’ Nikki forced a smile. ‘No reason.’
Except that the last six times we tried, it was negative. And with every month that passes my eggs are getting older and more worn out. And some cruel god out there, some malicious force beyond our control, seems to have decided that we’ll never become parents.
She and Doug had everything else, after all. A wonderful, loving marriage. Wealth. Status. Meaningful, rewarding careers. Great friends. Great family. In what alternate universe did they deserve children, as well as all that?
‘I love you, Nik,’ Doug said softly.
‘I love you, too.’
‘It’ll happen. We still have time. So much time.’
That’s right, thought Nikki. We still have time.
‘Dr Roberts?’ Carter Berkeley sounded irritated. ‘Were you even listening to me?’
‘Of course.’ Nikki dutifully repeated everything her client had just said. She’d long ago learned the knack of ‘surface listening’, using one’s brain to multitask, in this case memorizing Carter’s words whilst actively focusing on something else entirely. It was a trick Doug had taught her.
Why did everything seem to come back to Doug?
‘Now, as we’re almost out of time, I suggest we finish up with a mindfulness exercise,’ Nikki told Carter, deftly regaining control of the session. ‘If you don’t mind putting your feet flat on the floor …’
Once Carter Berkeley had left, Nikki wandered out into the lobby.
