Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Eva cried, and she hugged you to make you feel better, but for her own comfort she turned to Rick. You can’t quite put into words how you felt then. It wasn’t jealousy, but more of a sense of redundancy. You were the person who used to check under her bed for dragons. You were there for her when she thought her world was falling apart after she backed the car into the garage wall. You hugged her until her tears dried up after the cat died. Now you’re the Broken Man, not the broken man of Eva’s song, but broken nonetheless. Eva has Rick now, and she is going to need him. And really, you should be thankful for that.

It was Rick’s idea to bring the wedding forward. Rick, who you didn’t like so much when you first met him because he pulled up in his car with that god-awful hip-hop music playing, which reminds me, J-Man (that’s my hip-hop name for you, and my hip-hop name for the Madness Journal is Maddy J.), reminds me that you hate, absolutely hate hip-hop music and if you’re listening to it in the future with your jeans halfway down your ass then you really are too far gone to be helped. You’re a Springsteen kind of guy. And the Stones. The Doors. You once wrote a whole novel listening to nothing but Pink Floyd. The music you listen to is immortal.

Rick. Rick and his damn hip-hop, blaring from the stereo like he was DJing the whole neighborhood. Eva in the passenger seat making goo-goo eyes at him, and you did good, J-Man, you didn’t tell him to turn it off otherwise you’d get your gun (nonexistent, mind you) and put a bullet into his stereo. He did not make a great first impression, and all you could think was that if this guy married your daughter and they had kids, that’s where your estate was going. Things got better after that—either the hip-hop was a phase, or Eva said something to him, because he kept the music low and started pulling up his jeans, and now—well, now you like him. He’s a good guy. They’ve been living together for the last two years, and now the wedding. Maybe it was Eva’s music that changed him.

Bringing the wedding forward is for you. Hard to walk Eva down the aisle and give her away if you can’t even remember her name. So your daughter, the most amazing girl, is shifting the biggest day of her life so you can enjoy it. It was going to be in a year or so, but now it’s going to be in a few months. A man more suspicious than you might think Rick wants to get a ring on her before your trip to the moon so he gets a cut of what you leave behind. He may as well—in a year’s time you’re not going to care either way.

So there you have it—already your wife and daughter are spending their evenings planning things, sometimes with Rick, sometimes without him, and sometimes Rick will come over and the two of you will watch whatever game is on TV, or play darts in the garage, just shooting the breeze. They’re struggling to find somewhere on short notice for the ceremony but are still hopeful.

Good news—Eva is getting married. You can’t believe how grown up she is now. Walking her down the aisle is going to be one of the proudest days of your life.

Bad news—Sandra mentioned selling the house. She’s trying to be practical. She wants to find somewhere smaller. You’ve added it to the I can’t believe it list. You told her no, that you want to stay here as long as you can. You told her you don’t want to go into a home, that there’s enough money and enough insurance to hire home care. She said okay, and that these things would be reassessed further down the line. You know what further down the line means—it’s going to be just like when she read the journal. She’s going to tell you that you’ve agreed all along to selling the place and that you’ve forgotten.

You will have to keep an eye on her.

By the time Saturday has rolled around, Jerry has come to understand the fundamentals behind his disease. His conversation with Nurse Hamilton is proof he killed somebody, and reading passages from his books over the last few days have shown him the way the world works. It’s about balance. There is, he believes, a reason he has Alzheimer’s, and understanding that reason is the first step on the path to being cured.

He steps into the hallway. He’s been told he woke up this morning a little confused, but this afternoon he knows who he is—fifty-year-old Jerry Grey, killer of one, at least one. He heads to the more common areas of the home, where others are watching TV or playing cards or comparing stories about grandchildren. TV has lost interest for him. It’s impossible to follow a show when you don’t know what happened the week before. There are couches and coffee tables and some people are talking, some are reading books, others are just staring ahead, lost in a thought either real or imagined, confused or not, chasing down a memory they can’t quite grab. There are wheelchairs parked against walls and crutches parked against couches. The TV is muted. There’s a show on about auctions and antiques, only they aren’t really antiques to the core demographic of this show, but items they grew up with.

Eric is busy, so Jerry waits. On a couch. By a window. Fifty-year-old Jerry Grey, killer of one, those words going around in his mind like a skipping record, until Eric is free and comes over.

“I need your help,” Jerry tells him.

“Whatever you need.”

“I need to get out of here.”

Eric doesn’t answer. He just gives Jerry one of those sad smiles everybody who works here knows how to deliver, a smile Jerry is getting pretty sick of seeing.

“Please, it’s important.”

“It doesn’t seem like you need my help to get out of here, Jerry—you’ve done it three times by yourself now.”

Three times, Jerry thinks, where he’s functioned enough to walk twenty miles but not functioned well enough to create the memory. Three times where he’s essentially been sleepwalking. Only it should be called wake-walking. He is Jerry Grey, fifty-year-old crime writer, killer of one. He is the resident wake-walker. Maybe more than three times, he thinks, if he’s snuck his way back in.

“What do you need to get out for?” Eric asks.

He’s been wondering how much to reveal, and has decided the best way forward is to tell Eric everything. There is no shame in needing help.

“I know why I have Alzheimer’s. It’s because the Universe is punishing me for the bad things I’ve done. I hurt somebody, maybe even more than just one person. The only hope I have of the Universe returning my memories is if I confess to my crimes. I have to go to the police.”

Eric’s smile has turned into a frown. Jerry remembers somebody telling him once that a frown uses more muscles. The guy who told him that got shot in the back of the head during a drug deal in the back room of a furniture factory. Jerry can remember his face going through all kinds of frowning as he knelt there as a gunman stood over him, telling him he had a number in mind that he was counting to, and when he got there he was going to pull the trigger. The number was twenty-nine, only the gunman didn’t say that, he just counted silently as the guy knelt in front of him shaking. Then there was the gunshot. The echo. There was little blood. How does Jerry know this? Is that who he killed?

“Is this about Suzan?” Eric asks.

Suzan. She was the first. “How do you know about Suzan?”

“We’ve had this conversation before, do you remember?”

Jerry shakes his head. If he remembered, he wouldn’t be here.

“It never happened,” Eric says, and he leans forward and puts his hand on Jerry’s arm. “These people you think you killed, it just didn’t happen. Nobody in your street was murdered. You never snuck into anybody’s house and killed them. There is no Suzan with a z.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because we checked. Where you grew up, nobody was murdered. Not in your neighborhood, hell, not even in your suburb.”

Jerry knows the words are true, they feel true, and his body floods with relief. The fear inside him settles. The same way learning he was a crime writer fit like a glove, so does learning he’s not a killer. There is no Suzan. There was no drug deal where he watched some guy get shot in the back of the head after the shooter counted to twenty-nine. They were in his books. He may not remember the details, but he knows he created these people.

Then it hits him. If he’s been a good guy all these years, then why the disease? If he didn’t kill anybody, then how can he repent? His future is as bleak as ever. “Then why am I being punished?”

“There is no why,” Eric says. “It’s just bad luck.”

“So I never killed anybody?”

“The thing is, Jerry, it’s all in the way you created these worlds—they all seem so real. People would read your books and they would become the main characters, they would see the world through their eyes, they would feel their thoughts. It’s no wonder it all seems real to you—it sure seems real to those who read you. It sure seemed real to me. Your books are amazing,” he says. “I’ve been a huge fan since book one.”

“It can’t just be bad luck,” Jerry says. “The Universe is balancing the scales for something.”

“Jerry—”

“I need to think about it,” he says. He stands up. “I think I’ll go rest a while.”

Eric stands up too. They start walking back towards Jerry’s room.

“Do you remember me telling you that I wanted to be a writer?” Eric asks.

Jerry shakes his head.

“I asked you for one piece of advice, and you said write what you know. I said that wasn’t always possible. Do you remember what you said?”

“No.”

“You said fake it. You said, did I really think Gene Roddenberry had been to Mars? Did I really think that Stephen King had been spooked by a vampire when he was a kid? Did I really think Bill and Ted knew how to travel in time? You said write what you know and fake the rest. You said throw some research in there too.”

“And how’s that working out for you?” Jerry asks.

“I’m still working here, aren’t I?” Eric says, then laughs. “The thing about Suzan is exactly that. You didn’t kill her, you just faked it, but she feels as real to you as she does to your readers. Now, you’re not going to try and sneak out again today, are you?”

“No.”

When Jerry gets into his room he sits down by the window. If he isn’t being punished, then what is it? A memory comes to him then, one so strong it could have happened yesterday. He’s sixteen years old, he’s at school and it’s career day and they’re all trying to figure what they want to do with their lives, as if a sixteen-year-old can possibly know. Only he did know. He’s having a conversation with a teacher, telling her he wants to be a writer. The teacher is telling him he needs to plan for a real future first, and to consider writing as a hobby. Jerry says he will do whatever it takes to make it happen. Is that what this is? The Universe taking his remaining years because it gave him the ones he wanted? Did he sell his soul?

“That’s not it,” he says, as much to himself as to the boy from nearly thirty-five years ago. It’s about Suzan with a z. Perhaps not her specifically, but somebody just like her. The sense he has killed somebody is just far too real to ignore.

DAY THIRTY

Hey, Future Jerry. How you been? Sorry you haven’t been in touch. You’ve been busy. You know how it is. Things to do. Places to be. People to forget. It’s been ten days since you last wrote. This whole thing, this whole Alzheimer’s hoopla, has been getting to you. Of course it has. You want to be super optimistic, and make light of it when you can, and fall into line with all the Everything is going to be fine ideology everybody is preaching, but you just can’t, so rather than face the world, you’ve been sleeping in every day, hardly ever getting up before lunchtime. It’s been a Who gives a fuck kind of week, whereas it should be a Let’s do everything you can while you still can kind of week. You should be out there hang gliding and visiting Egypt and going to rock concerts and bucket-listing your way through your final days, not sleeping in. Also, you’ve been drinking more. Don’t get the wrong idea—you’re not getting hammered every night—two or three drinks, enough to take the edge of. Sometimes four. Never more than five. Enough to help you sleep. You also like to take naps during the day too. There’s a couch in the office. The Thinking Couch. You’ll lie there sometimes and come up with ideas for the books, work on solutions, lie there and listen to Springsteen cranked so loud the pens will roll off the desk. The Thinking Couch has become your Napping Couch and the desk a coaster and the stereo hasn’t been on in over a week. Sandra keeps saying you shouldn’t mope so much, but hey, if you want to mope then you’ll mope. Grant a dying man his final wish, right? Because you’re dying. Of course you are. The mind will be gone ten or twenty or even thirty years before the body—and if that isn’t death, then what is? These days you also use the couch to hide the Madness Journal. You’re sure Sandra sneaks in here at night and looks for it, but you have no proof of that.

It hasn’t been all just lying on the couch in the office, though. You got the edit notes back from your editor a week ago. She’s a real sweetheart. What you want in an editor is the ability to give you bad news in a good way. It’s always in there, hidden in praise—if there was no praise you’d have given up long ago. But this one—this one was an effort for her, no doubt there. She’s suggested some changes, and wants you to fill in more of the blanks, some character background, stuff a few years ago you would have been chomping at the bit to change because, after all, editing is your favorite phase, partner. Why wouldn’t it be? You’ve built the house, and editing is picking the color scheme.

So yeah—that’s what you’ve been up to. Napping. Drinking. Editing. You finished the last of the three bottles of gin that Hans brought around. When you rang him he told you he brought around five, but you can’t find the other two. Sandra rang Doctor Goodstory today—you don’t know what she said to him, and don’t really care, to be honest, but she’s off picking up a prescription right now. She asked if you wanted to come along, as if you were her pet, and you just shook your head and lay down on the couch in the office instead. When she gets back she’ll try to cheer you up somehow, and you’ll do your best to pretend that it’s working. You’ll fake it. That’s something you tell people when they ask for advice on writing—people ask you all the time, you know, so be prepared for that. Even in your condition people will go rattling around in that brain of yours for some last nugget of hope, something that will make the difference between their manuscript hitting the bookshops or hitting the shredder. You usually say Write what you know and fake the rest. You might want to look out for people trying to pinch your ideas too—not that you’re going to care about that, but you should. After all, you wrote all those books and it made you crazy. All those worlds—all those people—the Universe is always expanding, that’s what the physicists say, all those worlds upon worlds as new ones are born, but one day all of that is going to change. One day the Universe will be as big as it can be, and then it will shrink. It will collapse. That’s what is happening to you. Your mind—those ideas—got as big as it could get, and now it’s collapsing.

Oh yeah, and your favorite nosy neighbor—Mrs. You Know Who (but in case you don’t, it’s Mrs. Smith—I’m not kidding, that really is her name)—came over yesterday. Sandra wasn’t home. She was out with Eva going ooh and ahh at napkins, and you were lying in your office staring at the ceiling. The house has a wireless doorbell that flashes a light that sits on your desk in your office, on account of you having the stereo dialed so loud you’d never hear the bell ring. In fact, because you always write with the stereo turned up, you had to have extra insulation installed in the walls so the music wouldn’t annoy Sandra or the neighbors. The entire room is soundproofed. You could shoot yourself in here and nobody would hear. So the doorbell light went off, and you went to the door in your robe and pajama bottoms and there she was, Mrs. Smith, and really have you ever seen her wearing something not saturated in pastel? Her clothes were in fashion sixty years ago and again thirty years ago, but are currently in the out-of-fashion stage of the cycle. Her lips were painted bright red in an attempt to distract from the many wrinkles lining her face, wrinkles deep enough to swallow a penny. She smells like cheap perfume, mixed in with a little bit of earth, as if she’s always out planting flowers in the garden or toiling through her husband’s grave.

She came over and she just wanted to have a quiet word, you know, just a brief in-your-ear mention that some of the neighbors—not her, mind you, not her at all, although she would have to agree with them, but some of the neighbors—have been talking. You live in a nice house, Jerry—and hopefully you’re still there now—a nice house on a nice street, an expensive street where people have expensive tastes and expensive cars and expensive lives, most of them working less than you or not at all, their working days behind them, retirement homes on the horizon. She came over to be polite, just to let you know that some, that some people are, well, a little—not angry, no, not angry, or upset—more worried, yes, Jerry, I would say worried, worried that your garden has gotten a little out of shape. And she did have a point—the lawn hasn’t been mowed in three weeks, the garden is full of stinging nettle, the roses need trimming back, and the yard is starting to look like jungle animals could be hiding in there. Mrs. Smith hasn’t been the only one to mention it. Sandra has mentioned it too. She’s been so busy with the wedding that she’s had no time to do any weeding, and anyway, taking care of the garden is your thing. Sandra has mentioned hiring a gardener, but every time she does you tell her no, that you’ll get onto it tomorrow. You’ve been very insistent on the matter, and Sandra understood when you explained it was important because hiring a gardener felt like it was opening Pandora’s box. First the gardener, then a maid, then a nurse, then somebody to shower you, somebody to clean your teeth. Hiring a gardener is bringing that Dark Tomorrow you’ve been fighting to put off one day closer.

I know things have been . . . difficult for you lately, Mrs. Smith said, and doesn’t that really just sum up the dementia beautifully? Difficult for you. Yeah, lady, really fucking difficult. Between Sandra being obsessed with the wedding and you being obsessed with the need to mope (gotta mope while you can still remember why life is worth moping about), the gardening has taken a backseat. She suggested you get a gardener. You wanted to suggest she mind her own business. You knew your house was letting down the street, this beautiful little Stepford Wives street where everything is just so, everything except your garden and your Big A. You told her you would take care of it. She said she was sure that you would.

That sums up day thirty. Sums up the first month.

It’s time for another nap. The gardening can wait.

Good news, bad news—you know what? I don’t really feel like doing that today.

His name is Jerry Cutter Henry Cutter, his name is Cutter Grey and he is an author and this is a nursing home and this is the real deal and he didn’t kill anybody even though he knows he did.

His name is Jerry Henry Cutter and he is an author and none of this is real.

His name is Jerry Jerry and he writes crime novels and none of this is real.

“Jerry?”

“My name is Jerry Cutter and I am—”

“Jerry, do you know who I am?”

He is sitting by the window looking out at the gardens. It’s sunny. There’s a rabbit out there, twenty yards away, hiding in the bushes, but he can see it, oh yes he can, hiding there watching him, watching him, stealing his thoughts, using its tiny little rabbit brain to steal Jerry’s thoughts to try and make its own brain bigger, stealing Jerry’s thoughts to write a novel of its own, a rabbit novel about rabbits.

“Jerry?”

Jerry turns towards the voice. Nurse Hamilton is standing over him. “He’s going to have to fake it,” Jerry says, because a rabbit can’t really know what he’s thinking.

“Jerry?”

“Yes I know who you are, goddamn it,” he says. “You’re the nurse who won’t shut up. Surely you have something better to do.”

She smiles at him, and why would she smile? “Jerry, there are a couple of policemen here who want to talk to you, is that okay?”

“Policemen from the books?”

“Policemen from real life,” she says.

He looks back towards the window. He’s not interested in the policemen. They can’t be as much fun as fictional ones. He can’t see the rabbit anymore, but he knows it’s still in the same bush, still watching him. It’s undercover! “Is the rabbit a policeman? Where’s Mom and Dad?”

The nurse doesn’t answer him. Instead she turns towards two men who are standing behind her who he hadn’t really noticed, and doesn’t really make much of an effort to notice them now. “I don’t think this is a good idea,” she says to them. “There are bad days and there are okay days. This is one of the bad ones,” she says, and Jerry has no idea what she means.

“It’s important,” one of the men says.

“Rabbit,” Jerry says.

“Look at him,” Nurse Hamilton says. “Anything he says can’t be trusted, not like this. He’s going to confess to a dozen crimes. Two dozen.”

“We’re only interested in one,” the man says.

“I know that, but he’s not going anywhere.”

“Isn’t he? He has before.”

“I had a rabbit when I was a kid,” Jerry says, and they all look at him and he feels the need to explain. “I owned it for two days before it escaped and ran away. It wasn’t my fault. I was seven years old and what seven-year-old is going to remember to shut the door on the rabbit hutch?” He stands up and puts his hands against the window. “That’s him!” He turns towards the nurse and the two men with her. “That’s Wally! Where’s Mom and Dad? They can help me catch him! Quick, we have to get out there!”

The nurse puts her hands on his shoulders. “Sit back down, Jerry, please, we’ll deal with the rabbit soon.”

“But—”

“Please, Jerry. Just do what I ask, okay?”

He looks out the window, then at the men behind the nurse. The way they are looking at him . . . he doesn’t like it. He sits down but keeps looking outside.

“We’ll keep a close eye on him,” Nurse Hamilton says to the men. “Perhaps you can come back tomorrow?”

“Hey, hey, Jerry, are you in there?” one of the men asks, and leans forward and taps Jerry on his forehead hard enough to hurt.

“Don’t,” Jerry says, and swipes at the man’s hand. Jerry doesn’t like him. Not at all.

“Hey, come on now, enough of that,” Nurse Hamilton says, and she reaches out and pulls the man’s hand away, then steps between him and Jerry, so all Jerry can see is the back of her cardigan.

“How do we know he’s not faking it?” that same man asks. “Faking the whole thing to get away with murdering—”

“Don’t say that around him,” Nurse Hamilton says, interrupting him.

“I didn’t murder Wally,” Jerry says, then looks back out the window. He doesn’t want to look at the men anymore. Just wants to find Wally. The rabbit is all he wants to think about.

“Now I’m going to have to ask you both to leave,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“Ring us if he gets any better today,” the first man says, and Jerry sees movement from their direction and turns to see that man handing a card to the nurse. He wonders if that man is a rabbit salesman. “If we don’t hear from you, we’ll come back tomorrow morning and try again.”

They watch the two men go, Jerry’s back to the window, and he can feel warmth from the sun as it comes through. He wants to go outside, but not while the two men are here. They may be rabbit salesmen, but that doesn’t make them good people. He decides he will wait for ten minutes. That’s a good amount of time for people to disappear. He thinks that some people can disappear off the face of the earth in less time than that, and he’s not sure why he would know something like that, let alone think it.

“Who were they?” he asks, once they’ve gone beyond the doors to the room.

“Just a couple of people who came to see how you are doing.”

“Rabbit salesmen?”

“No.”

“Friends?”

“Not exactly.”

“They don’t seem like friends,” he says. “I didn’t like them.”

“I didn’t like them either, Jerry.”

He turns back towards the window. “I want to go outside. I want to find Wally.”

“Let’s get you cleaned up first,” Nurse Hamilton says.

“Cleaned up? Why?”

“You’ve had an accident,” she says, and when he looks down he sees that he’s pissed himself, and when he looks back up he sees Wally running away, disappearing into the trees.