Sleepwalker Page 7

  “Mindy said no one ever would have guessed in a million years that the guy was a homicidal maniac,” Randi goes on.

  “I know, but . . . Jerry wasn’t like that. He was kind of bumbling and dim-witted and . . . I don’t know. What’s the point of even talking about it? It’s over.”

  “Exactly. You can’t beat yourself up over one lapse in character judgment. You’ve had a great track record ever since, right? I mean, you married Mack, and you have me for a best friend . . .” Randi offers her most charming smile.

  Allison has to laugh, but she’s still feeling inexplicably uneasy inside, remembering what it was like to see a figure looming in her bedroom in the dead of night.

  She just prays she’ll never experience sheer terror like that again.

  But of course you won’t, because Jerry Thompson is dead and no one else in this world has any reason to harm you.

  It’s strictly by choice that Chuck Nowak has worked the third shift for most of his seventeen-year career as a corrections officer at Sullivan Correctional. He’s always been a night owl; he’d much rather work until seven in the morning than get up at that ungodly hour to start the day.

  Not only that, but if you’re going to be locked up with a few hundred dangerous felons, you’re better off doing it after lights out, when the vast majority of them are asleep.

  The only drawback to the night shift: the love of his life—his wife, Cora, whom he married a few years ago—is a nine-to-five medical receptionist across the river in Beacon. Five days every week, they’re ships passing.

  But the other two days make it all worthwhile. Chuck likes nothing better, weekend afternoons, than to strap on his helmet and ride off into the Catskills on his Harley with Cora’s arms—one of which is tattooed with a “CN2” inside a heart, to symbolize their identical initials—wrapped around his waist.

  Unfortunately, this isn’t one of those days.

  The Harley is sitting in the garage and the keys to his pickup are in his pocket as he enjoys a last smoke on the small back deck of the house he and Cora rent in Newburgh.

  Dusk is falling and he notes the sharp chill in the air that wasn’t here yesterday. Off in the distance, the pleasant buzz of a speedboat cruising the Hudson gives way to police sirens, signifying another wave of gang violence.

  The neighborhood is sandwiched between the Hudson River and a notorious stretch of dilapidated, drug-infested row houses. Kids kill each other and anyone else who gets in the way—happens every day, every night in this city.

  Having grown up here, Chuck didn’t plan on ever leaving, but lately, he’s been thinking they might have to. Now that the escalating crime from the adjoining neighborhood is creeping into their own, he worries about Cora being home alone every night; worries, too, about her driving through seedy neighborhoods on her way to and from work.

  Plus, their commutes are getting longer because there’s more traffic around, especially on weekends. On this final Friday night of the summer, throngs of city people will be making their way up to weekend retreats in the Catskills. It will probably take him over an hour to get to work, even on the back roads.

  If they lived closer to the prison, he and Cora would have more time together—that’s what he told her.

  “How so? Closer to the prison means further from my job.”

  “You can always get a new job near Fallsburg.”

  “Or we can move across the river and you can become a CO at the prison in Fishkill,” she returned.

  She’s a strong-willed woman, Cora. That’s one of the things he loves about her. Most of the time.

  He’s not going anywhere. He’s been at Sullivan for too long to just start fresh someplace else. He’s paid his dues—and then some.

  Never a dull moment on the job, that’s for damned sure.

  He thinks back to last weekend’s big excitement. One of the inmates on the block decided to kill himself on Chuck’s watch. Son of a bitch gulped down a cup of orange juice laced with cleaning fluid. It wasn’t a pretty way to go, that’s for damned sure.

  The inmate, Jerry Thompson, didn’t leave a note or anything. But Doobie Jones, the prisoner who occupies the adjoining cell, claimed that he’d been talking about suicide for a while.

  “Guess he just finally gave up,” Doobie commented in a tone that made Chuck look sharply at his face.

  The guy is a vicious, manipulative psychopath responsible for the deaths of at least a dozen people on the outside. Chuck wouldn’t put it past him to commit another murder, just for kicks, while behind bars.

  “Wonder where he got the orange juice?” Doobie mused on with an evil gleam in his eye.

  Never mind that. Where the hell did Jerry get the cleaning fluid? He wasn’t on kitchen or bathroom duty.

  But Doobie was.

  Yeah, Chuck has his suspicions, but he’ll keep them to himself. So the world is rid of one more serial killer. No great loss, right?

  He takes one last drag on his Marlboro, stubs it out with his steel-toed boot, and kicks it into the shrubbery beneath the deck.

  Time to head to work.

  He’d been hoping Cora would show up before he left—once in a while on a Friday, she manages to leave work early enough to see him—but he can’t afford to wait any longer.

  He closes the slider leading out to the deck and locks it. Then he sets a yardstick into the metal groove to keep the door from opening, an added measure of security, should anyone try to break in.

  Cora says it’s a joke—“If someone really wanted to get in, he could just break the window next to the door, climb on in, and help himself to our stuff.”

  She’s right. All the more reason to consider moving.

  Chuck opens the fridge and looks for the lunch he packed earlier in the insulated bag embossed with a white “CN.” Cora ordered it for him this summer, and one for herself, too.

  Both are blue. “Mix and match,” she told him. “Isn’t it nice to have the same initials?”

  Yeah, it’s nice. Everything about being married to Cora is nice.

  He takes the bag from the fridge, turns on a living room lamp so that his wife won’t have to walk into a dark house alone, and steps out the front door.

  The sirens are still wailing. God knows he’s used to the sound, but for some reason it’s really getting to him tonight.

  Crossing the small, sparse patch of grass, he feels increasingly uneasy, as though something bad is about to happen.

  Or maybe it’s more a feeling that he’s not alone.

  His work at the prison has taught him well. You learn, when you’re locked behind steel doors with hundreds of depraved, lethal predators, never to ignore your instincts. Frowning, he looks at the windows of the neighboring houses, half expecting to spot someone looking out at him, but there’s no evidence of that. Not that he can see, anyway.

  Still . . .

  Something is off.

  He pictures Cora in her little Toyota crossing the Newburgh-Beacon Bridge with all that weaving traffic, and he worries. He can’t help it. There are a lot of crazy drivers out there who might have stopped for happy hour to kick off the weekend.

  He can’t bear the thought of anything happening to her. She’s all he has in this world—and all he needs.

  His concern evaporates a few moments later when a pair of headlights swing into the driveway just as he’s putting the keys into the ignition.

  Cora parks her car beside his pickup, jumps out, and scurries toward him with her own insulated lunch bag dangling from her hand. She’s wearing a conservative top and slacks and comfort shoes, but five minutes from now, he knows, she’ll have changed into slim-fitting jeans, black biker boots, and a short-sleeved shirt that reveals her tattoos. Her glorious dyed-black hair—the same shade as what’s left of his own—will be released from its clip to tumble down her shoulders.

  God, he loves this woman.

  He climbs quickly out of the truck and greets her with a fierce embrace and a passionate kiss. />
  “Mmmm,” she says, “I wish you weren’t leaving.”

  “Me too. But I’ll be back, baby.”

  She sighs and tilts her forehead against his. “I know. I just miss you when you’re gone.”

  “I miss you more. You’re my everything.”

  “You’re mine.”

  It’s how they always say good-bye. They smile at each other and exchange one last kiss.

  Then Chuck climbs behind the wheel and watches her until she’s disappeared inside, safe and sound for the night.

  Interesting.

  Concealed in the shadows of an overgrown rhododendron, Jamie ponders what just happened.

  Ever since a chatty—for a price—prison deliveryman informed her that Charles Nowak was the main guard on Jerry’s cell block that fateful night, Jamie has been plotting the man’s death. Suddenly, though, the plan seems unnecessarily lackluster.

  You’re my everything.

  Those words had reached Jamie’s ears loud and clear.

  Food for thought.

  Guess life wouldn’t be much worth living without your everything, now would it, Charlie?

  Sometimes, death isn’t the worst punishment a person can endure.

  Don’t I know it.

  A light flicks on inside the house, pooling from the window right above Jamie’s head. Standing on tiptoes, she glimpses the room—a bedroom—and Charlie’s wife walking right toward the window.

  For one hair-raising moment, Jamie is certain she’s been spotted.

  The woman reaches toward the glass.

  But her hand goes to the window lock between the top and bottom panes. She turns it and lifts the sash from the bottom, opening the window a few inches.

  Well, how about that? It’s like she’s inviting you in . . . but of course she can’t see you. The light puts a glare on the glass.

  No, she has no idea someone is lurking out here in the night, watching her.

  Just like the others.

  Kristina . . . Marianne . . .

  They had no idea that someone was watching them through the window. They both died because of what they did to Jerry.

  This woman . . .

  She’ll die because her husband helped to kill him.

  Yes. She’ll die. Not him.

  She’ll die tonight.

  And then Charles Nowak will know what it’s like to lose someone you love.

  “Mack?”

  He jumps, startled, and turns to see Allison standing in the doorway of the sunroom.

  In her hand is a glass of diet iced tea. She buys it by the gallon and drinks it every night before bed—not the healthiest habit, she admits. But she’s been doing it for years, long before they moved to the land of health fanatics who would just as soon lace a drink with strychnine as they would ingest artificial sweeteners and caffeine.

  She’s changed from jeans, a T-shirt, and sneakers to sweats and slippers. It’s harder and harder to recall the fashionista he first met ten years ago—but that’s fine with him. She was a little too glamorous, he thought when they first started dating, and that intimidated him. He was, after all, a middle-class kid from Jersey.

  Little did he know, back then, that Allison was a welfare kid from the Midwest.

  “Sorry,” she says, “I didn’t mean to scare you. I got the kids down. What are you doing?”

  He shrugs. “Just checking out the color. It looks pretty good, doesn’t it?”

  “The paint?” She smiles. “It looks great. Hudson was right. It is a happy shade, you know?”

  “Yeah.” Mack had been hoping, when he detoured into the sunroom on his way from the living room to the kitchen with an empty glass, that some of this golden happiness would seep into him. But standing here, all he feels is the same monochromatic melancholy that flooded him around Labor Day and refuses to recede.

  It will, though, eventually. It always does.

  For now, he’ll just have to live with it.

  “We need to get those back up tomorrow,” Allison gestures at the corner where he’d piled the window shades before he started painting.

  “I don’t know . . . don’t you think it’s kind of nice to have them uncovered? It lets the sun in.”

  “During the day. But right now . . .” She indicates the three walls of exposed glass. “Anyone can see in.”

  “Only if they happen to be standing in our yard. It’s not like there’s a clear view from the street.”

  That’s one reason this house was so appealing to them when they bought it, having grown weary of the lack of privacy when they lived in the city. Here, dense, tall hedgerows effectively screen the borders of the property.

  Catching sight of the expression on his wife’s face, Mack sighs. “What?”

  She shrugs.

  He sighs again.

  “The thing is, Mack . . . I mean, you just never know who might be out there looking in.”

  “Well, I do know that if they’re out there, they shouldn’t be. It’s private property.”

  She just looks at him.

  Okay. So she learned the hard way when Jerry Thompson invaded her bedroom that private property isn’t always a safe haven.

  Ordinarily, he’d offer her some kind of reassurance. Right now, though, he just doesn’t have it in him. He’s utterly depleted. Sleepless night after sleepless night will do that to a person.

  “I really want the shades back up,” she says. “Please?”

  “Right now?”

  The last thing he feels like doing right now is installing—or even discussing—window shades. All he wants is to climb into bed and put this emotionally grueling week behind him.

  Such a simple concept: a nightly reprieve from the rigors of this world.

  For him, a frustratingly elusive one.

  “You can’t keep going like this,” Dr. Cuthbert cautioned him the other day, “without eventually paying a terrible price.”

  The physician then ran through a litany of potential problems created by sleep deprivation, from crankiness to a weakened immune system to what might happen to his family—or someone else’s—if he continues to get behind the wheel in a state of chronic exhaustion.

  “Would you drive your children if you’d had a couple of drinks, James?”

  He bristled. “Never. And please call me Mack.” No one—not even his mother—has ever called him by his given name.

  “Mack, drowsy driving causes over one hundred thousand traffic accidents every year. I could show you horrific photos of accident scenes where—”

  “That’s okay,” Mack cut in. “I believe you. That’s why I’m here. I’ve been doing all the things you suggested and nothing works. I need something else, some kind of serious help with this.”

  As he had early on, Dr. Cuthbert recommended the kind of help that comes in an orange prescription bottle.

  Mack still wasn’t crazy about the idea.

  “Why are you so opposed to pharmaceutical intervention?” the doctor asked.

  There were two reasons, and he didn’t really want to get into the first one: that Allison’s wariness about any kind of medication—thanks to her mother’s deadly habit—has rubbed off on him over the years.

  He did tell the doctor his other reservation: that after trying various over-the-counter sleep aids in the past, he always woke up feeling like his brain was swathed in cotton batting, and the grogginess lasted well into the next day.

  “This medication isn’t like that,” Dr. Cuthbert promised. “You’ll wake up feeling refreshed.”

  Mack fervently hopes so. But just in case, he’s held off taking it until a night—like tonight—when he doesn’t have to set an early alarm.

  “Mack.” Allison touches his arm, and he looks up to see her watching him, her blue eyes concerned. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine.” He doesn’t shake her hand off, exactly, but he does move his arm to rub his burning eyes with his thumb and forefingers.

  Translation: I’m not fine,
and I don’t want to be touched.

  To her credit, she doesn’t hold it against him, just takes a thoughtful sip of her iced tea.

  The best thing about Allison—one of the best things—is that she always instinctively gives him plenty of space when he needs it. That, and she doesn’t call him an asshole when he probably deserves it.

  “Here—give me your glass,” she says. “I’m about to start the dishwasher. What was in it?”

  “Water. Why?”

  “Because you can’t mix alcohol with Dormipram, and I know you’re planning to take it tonight. I just wanted to make sure.”

  “It was just water,” he says again, piqued at the implication, which is . . . ?

  What? It’s not like she made any accusation.

  Still, he’s feeling defensive.

  “Sometimes you have a bourbon on Friday night,” she points out.

  That’s true; it’s something he looks forward to after a hard week at work.

  “So?”

  He wants to bite his tongue the moment that word rolls off it.

  Carrie used to say it all the time, in just that tone. So? So? He couldn’t stand it when she did that, and he’s always made a point never to do it himself.

  Then why am I saying it now?

  Probably because he’s had Carrie on the brain, thanks to all the reminders, and maybe he’s channeling bad energy—her bad energy.

  Never speak ill of the dead, his Irish grandmother used to say—but she never mentioned that it was wrong to merely think ill of them.

  Mack attempts—somewhat unsuccessfully—to soften his tone. “What’s wrong with having a bourbon once in a while? You drink diet iced tea every night. That’s not great for you, either.”

  No, and it pisses him off that she can glibly ingest caffeine—which, hello, happens to be a drug!—right before bed and then sleep like a baby.

  “Nothing, Mack. I didn’t say anything was wrong with a bourbon.”

  To be fair to her, not only did she not say it, but she really didn’t imply it, either.

  “The reason I didn’t have a drink tonight,” he goes on, not in the mood for fair, “is that I have to take the damned medicine that the damned doctor you made me see is making me take even though we all know it’s not going to help. Okay?”