Authors: Eileen Dreyer

Head Games (41 page)

BOOK: Head Games

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Footsteps again, she thought. But it wasn't her heart this time. She could hear that banging away at hyperspeed. Besides, the feet were shuffling, trying to be quiet.

No, she thought, blinking a couple of times. She had to be nuts. She was imagining help because she so desperately needed it.

Please, God, she thought, breathless with sudden, stupid hope. Don't let me waste this effort on a Thorazine-fed hallucination.

“You'll be just fine soonâ” Kenny began to say.

Molly heard a whisper of movement behind her from Kenny, saw Patrick's eyes dilate. She couldn't give them the chance to finish.

Then she saw the shoes on the steps above Patrick. And damn it if she didn't know those shoes, too.

“Oh, fuck!” she cried in instinctive anger. “Frank, get out of here! Get help!”

He was walking right down into a cave just for her.

“Down here!” he yelled and began to run.

Patrick lurched to his feet. Kenny hesitated a fraction of a second. Molly bunched her muscles, pushed off with her feet, and slammed the chair straight backward.

The chair flew over. Kenny flew over. The table of instruments flew over. Molly's head slammed first into Kenny's chest and then the stone floor. Sparks shot across her field of vision, and she thought she heard elephants. She actually felt the chair sag, like sat-on glasses. Moving on reflex and instinct, she struggled to roll, to impede Kenny's movements as he hollered and flailed like a tipped turtle.

Molly heard Patrick break for the knives that slid across the floor. From the sounds of the scuffle, Frank caught up with him just beyond where Molly was fighting for her life. And damn if Frank wasn't laughing when he brought Patrick down.

Were there more shoes on the stairs? Molly heard something. Her
field of vision encompassed the floor, a side wall, and a scatter of shiny surgical instruments.

And Kenny. Wild-eyed, spitting, cursing Kenny, who smelled worse than cat piss and had somehow found his gun again.

Molly saw him get hold of it and turn toward Frank. She was not going to let him kill Frank. She wasn't. Even as the new round of Thorazine settled on her like thick soup, she fought like a dog, trying to tangle Kenny up enough that he couldn't get a shot off.

“Get Patrick â¦ out of here!” she gasped, head-butting Kenny into a bloody nose. Hers. It cleared her head just enough to enable her to roll right over on him.

Kenny reached out his fingers and Molly kneed him in the groin. She figured the coffee drinkers on South Grand could hear him shriek. She kept trying to free her arms even as she was becoming convinced they didn't belong to her. She was running out of breath. She was running out of time. And Kenny was going for the gun again.

“Frank, dammit! Get out of the way!”

That wasn't her voice, was it? She wasn't sure. She was busy trying to find that soft center on Kenny again.

“No!” he was screaming in her ear like an animal. “No, you can't do this! No!”

She was face-to-face with him now so she could see the spittle at the corners of his mouth, the stark whites of his sclera as he pulled himself free of the chair and came into contact with her knees, her feet, any part of her she could delay him with. She saw the glint of metal instruments scattered over the floor and refused to consider what they'd been for.

Except for the drill, halfway beneath Kenny's shoulder. She knew damn well what that drill was for, and she meant to keep him away from it.

Another solid roll into Kenny and the chair began to disintegrate. The ropes sagged, and Molly fought harder. Kenny scratched at her eyes, pummeled her face. Bit at her like a cornered cat. Molly didn't feel any of it.

“Frank!” somebody yelled. “Look out!”

Molly was distracted just long enough to give Kenny leverage. She should have known better than to worry about Frank. When she caught sight of him, he was tossing Patrick aside like a bad date and spinning
toward her. And the maniac was laughing again. He was in a cave, cuing up to dance with a psychopath, and he was laughing.

“We got him, St. Mol!” he called, hands out.

They didn't get him in time. Frank froze no more than two feet away. Molly felt a slither of steel alongside her throat and stopped breathing. Kenny rasped loudly enough for them both.

Molly was amazed. She was furious. She finally caught sight of more feet, more legs, and saw that some of these were in uniform. And there in the front she saw a flash of Baitshop's anxious face.

God, Molly thought. She's in her pajamas. Doesn't she ever wear anything normal?

And then, almost too close to losing the fight against the Thorazine to care, Molly remembered that Kenny didn't consider himself finished.

“Get outta here!” Kenny screeched in Molly's left ear as the knife lifted away, just enough.

“No!” she heard Baitshop scream as the footsteps thundered. “Don't!”

Molly turned too late.

Kenny had evidently decided that if he couldn't have Molly be part of him, she couldn't be part of anyone else, either. Molly had figured he'd make the statement with a gun. She should have known better. She'd read his history, after all. She'd read all their histories.

He made it with a butcher knife.

He slammed it straight into her chest.

Molly felt the jarring impact all the way to her spine. She heard the yells. She saw Kenny straighten, a look of pure triumph on his face, and she heard a gunshot. Kenny's chest exploded and he dropped like a rock.

Molly lay in a heap, still tangled with the chair, knowing vaguely that something was very, very wrong inside and remembering almost as an afterthought that there was a knife in her lung. She managed to tell somebody to make sure they left that knife in until they got her to somebody's ED. Frank, maybe. Looking as panicked as she'd ever seen Frank, which made her want to tell him it was only fair. God knew she'd spent enough panic on him. She apologized instead. And she thanked him for braving that cave, just for her.

And then, just as the Thorazine pulled her away from the comprehension
that the knife was suddenly hurting like hell, she saw what she'd come to see.

Frank moved a little to the side, and Molly realized that she was lying eye to eye with Kenny. And no matter what anybody else believed later, she saw the life go out of those pretty blue eyes.

What she saw there, she realized, was the logical end to The Game. When Kenny died, his eyes looked no different, because the light there had died years ago.

Epilogue

By the time Molly came off the respirator she missed most of the postgame activity. Kenny had been autopsied and sent to his mother in Akron for burial. His mother had given several interviews about her perfectly normal son and blown her cover when Kenny's history of child abuse was discovered. Frank had gone back to work, Kathy settled into her new office in the St. Louis office of the FBI, and Rhett into his new role as ex-lover of Sasha Petrovich.

As for Sasha, she had, after all, recognized the distress signal Molly had flashed. Being a smart girl she knew better than to hie off into danger without help. She'd called 911 from her cell phone. An APB had gone out and all Molly's friends had joined forces with the police to search for her little Toyota.

It had been Frank who had broken it. He'd been heading to Sam's to notify the old man when he'd seen Patrick sneak out of the driveway in Sam's car. And Frank, who knew more about troubled boys than most people should, had notified the troops and followed.

It was Baitshop who had fired the fatal shot, and Baitshop who admitted that what had saved Molly's life had been Frank's quick reaction and the fact that Patrick had left Kenny's trap-door ajar.

Kenny had been right. If they hadn't seen it, they never would have found his special hiding place until they'd brought the dozers to the backyards. So far, twenty-four skulls had been discovered.

Molly learned all this when Sam invited them all to her hospital room to celebrate Hanukkah with him. He brought dreidels and kuchen, and the
staff fashioned a no-smoking-area menorah out of penlights to decorate Molly's room.

The next day Frank brought his kids, mother-in-law, and a tree to pass out gifts. Any other year, only the fact that she still sprouted tubes would have prevented Molly from running down the hall to escape. This year, she sang the “Dreidel Song” and “Deck the Halls” and allowed the kids to supply her with party hats.

Her gift from Sam was more tchotchkes from his collection, and from the kids macaroni Christmas tree ornaments. Her gift from Frank showed up her first day out of ICU, when Molly woke up to find a chubby, cherubic, blond guy sitting at her bedside watching Jerry Springer on TV.

“Hear you're looking for a good shrink,” he said.

Molly glared at him. “What are you, twelve?”

His smile was older than pain. “Twelve and a half. But I'm not in any twelve-step programs, I've never been accused of sexual misconduct, I don't find myself fixated on articles of women's clothing, and I believe that electric shock therapy is medieval.” His grin suddenly reminded her a lot of Frank. “I also did my postdoctoral work on âPost-Traumatic Stress Disorder in the Vietnam Era Veteran.' Questions?”

Holding on to every staple in her chest, she laughed. “Alphabetically or chronologically?”

So she told him about a little boy named Kenny. She talked about sad John Michael Murphy, and his sweet-eyed son Johnny, who hadn't lived until spring. And she found a quiet repository for her old nightmares and new insights.

Frank brought her home ten days later to an empty house and an almost frantic Magnum. That Molly could almost deal with. It was the sorrowing Sam she couldn't handle.

“I should rip my shirt,” he insisted, as he eased her into a chair at her kitchen table.

Molly smiled. “Don't disown anybody for me, Sam. It's been good for me, actually.”

“Good for you?” he demanded, his eyebrows bristling so hard they almost took flight. “
Gottenyu
,
taibeleh
, how could this be good for you? You're slumped like an old man at the table, and your name is always linked with that monster.”

That monster she still, oddly, felt sorry for. Molly reached out to Sam, tears in her eyes. “It taught me all those maudlin old lessons, like what's important and what's not. And how high on the important list my friends are.”

Now Sam was wiping tears off his papier-mÃ¢chÃ© face. “I'll never forgive him,” he said, and Molly knew he wasn't talking about Kenny.

Molly could only sigh. “Never forgive his parents, Sam,” she said. “Pray for him. Maybe there's still a chance.”

If there was a chance, Patrick was going to get it. The Protector of the Rice Tariffs had finally shown up to collect his son inches ahead of notoriety and hustle him off to a private, posh, protected psychiatric hospital in D.C. Molly's only regret was that she hadn't been conscious at the time so she could fully apprise her brother of his culpability in the matter.

“Now, go on home, you two,” she said. “I think what I'd really like after two weeks in a hospital is peace and quiet.”

Sam bristled again. “But,
taibeleh
â”

Frank was right there, a hand on the old man's shoulder. “We'll wait till she falls on the floor and can't reach the phone, and then we'll show up and make fun of her.”

Sam didn't think he was funny. Molly was holding her chest again. “Thanks for the moral support, Frank.”

“Moral support, hell, St. Molly. Be thankful I didn't bring the kids to hug you good-bye.”

Sam gave Molly a kiss that made her think he was afraid the top of her head would break. Considering the fact that it still hurt only a little less than her left lung, he probably wasn't that far off the mark.

And then Frank took his turn. He didn't kiss the top of her head. “Ya know,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “I've seen you naked too, now.”

She should have shoved him out the door. She laughed and kissed him back. “Wanna compare scars, big boy?”

His eyebrows lifted. “Now?”

“We compare scars now,” she assured him, “that's all we're gonna do.”

He kissed her one final time. “If there's one thing I do well, it's wait.”

For a long time after they left, Molly just sat at the table, enjoying the emptiness. No staff, no grand rounds with every doctor on the planet staring at the railroad tracks up her sternum, no surprise visits from friends and police.

Silence. Blessed, sweet silence.

Damn, she thought, with a new grin. I do like the house.

There was just one more thing she had to do to get her life back again. She had to get off her overused butt and clean out Patrick's room.

She didn't want to. She wanted to leave him in that amorphous place where her lost friends from Nam still lived. Half real, as if she'd imagined them, so that losing them didn't hurt quite so badly.

She'd lost Patrick. Maybe she'd never had him; she didn't know. She just knew that whatever snakes lived in that handsome head, he was one of The Game's losers. Confused, frustrated, frightened, enraged. Destined to destruction.

Maybe if Kenny hadn't come along, he wouldn't have been so seduced by such violence. Maybe if he could get far enough away, he might stand a chance. Baitshop had been furious that Patrick hadn't stood trial as an accomplice. Molly didn't have a clue if she was right. She didn't know whether prison would help Patrick or this fancy-ass teen town he was heading for. She just knew that she ached for those flashes of brilliance, of vulnerability, of light. And she knew without a doubt that no matter what happened, Patrick was beyond her ability to help.

Oh well, she thought, lurching unsteadily to her feet. No use putting it off. Magnum, curiously subdued, followed her upstairs as if making sure she didn't fulfill Frank's promise. Molly got to the top of the steps and opened Patrick's door, her poor sore heart tripping unsteadily, her hands even shakier.

God, she didn't want to do this. It was like throwing him away for good.

But she couldn't keep him here.

She got his athletic bag and began stuffing in his clothes, his scent, his magazines. A boy's room, nothing more. Molly wanted him back. She wanted another try. She knew it wouldn't do her or him any good.

She was stripping his bed when she pulled a magazine from beneath the mattress.

Penthouse.

Big deal. After clearing out all the
Hustler
s, Molly couldn't figure out why Patrick would hide a lousy
Penthouse
. She reached in beneath the mattress and discovered a nest of them and gave a yank.

Paper fluttered, glossy and explicit and uninspired. Molly bent to pick it up and then caught sight of one of the pages.

She froze where she was, her hand inches from the photo, her head suddenly spinning.

She should throw it away without looking. She should get the hell out of this room.

She couldn't.

Slowly, carefully, she sat down. She flipped through the first
Penthouse
and then checked one more. Then another.

The pictures weren't that bad. It was what Patrick had done to them that was threatening to bring up Molly's lunch. The pictures had been slashed, heads missing, eyes gouged, weapons drawn with the same heavy hand that had written her notes. Violent, obscene, terrifying. So classic, Molly simply couldn't breathe.

So she'd been wrong again. It hadn't been Kenny who had brought Patrick to that last stage. Patrick had been practicing for a long time.

Sobbing with the effort, Molly got to her feet. She called Washington, D.C., information and got the number for that hospital they'd sent Patrick to. She'd left the magazines on the floor, but she couldn't look at them. She couldn't face what Patrick had been practicing in the privacy of his room.

“This is Ms. Armbruster,” a quiet, comfortable voice introduced herself when Molly finally got the extension she requested. “I'm working with Patrick. Is there something I can do for you?”

Yes, Molly wanted to say. I want you to face him. I want you to look deep and find what I failed to find.

“I'm sending you something,” she said instead. “Something I found in his room.”

Molly sucked in a breath, another. She couldn't quite get the words out, because what those magazines betrayed was the fact that they hadn't killed the worst monster.

They'd let him loose.