Beth was at a loss. He wasn’t making any sense. Other than curt hellos in the office-which was thankfully big enough for some distance-they hadn’t spoken in over a month.
“Peter, listen to me. This isn’t about us. It’s Jen. I think someone may have-”
“Jen’s dead, Beth.”
Another slap. Followed by a rolling wave of nausea.
“She’s been missing for almost a year,” he said. “And we all know what that means.”
“How can you say something like that? That’s crazy.”
“Listen to me. Take a look around you. What do you see?”
“I-”
“Just do it, Beth. Look around.”
Thoroughly confused now, her migraine going into overdrive, Beth looked around the hallway, but it was the same as before. Clean, well lit Wait. No. Not the same.
Through doubling vision, she could see that on the far side of the corridor was what looked like a…
…a nurses’ station.
What the hell?
How could she have missed that?
Turning back to the phone, she discovered that it wasn’t a pay phone at all. Just a small black box mounted on the wall, with no coin slot. A sign next to it read: PATIENT USE ONLY.
And when she glanced down at her clothes, she realized that she, too, was wearing a robe.
She started to tremble.
“Peter, what…?”
“You’re not in Mexico, Beth. You’re in a private rehabilitation clinic in Los Angeles. Jen disappeared almost a year ago and is presumed dead.”
“What?” Beth cried. “That’s impossible. I just saw her-”
“No. You need to focus. Concentrate on the here and now.”
“What are you talking about? Peter, what’s going on?”
“You’re hallucinating,” he said.
“How can that be? That’s crazy.”
Then all at once she realized that it wasn’t so crazy after all, as the corridor around her came into sharp focus, Playa Azul and the police station and the cruise ship and Jen all sliding down a dark memory hole.
And all she could hear was Peter:
“Someone shot you, Beth. Someone shot you in the head.”
Patient’s Journal
Day 58?
10:20 A.M.
I don’t remember the shooting, but I’ll never forget the pain.
That’s what I wrote two days ago.
But I was wrong. I do forget.
And not just the pain, but about where I am. Why I’m here.
Thanks to the bullet fragments lodged in my brain, and the damage to the surrounding tissue, to the three hemorrhagic strokes that I’m lucky to have survived, I’m often whisked away to another place and time. A hallucination so real that I actually believe I’m living it.
Or re living it.
Those two days with Jen did happen.
I know that. They will forever be a part of me.
But for some reason, I can’t seem to get beyond them. I live them over and over, each time as vivid as the last, and the only thing keeping me sane are these few lucid moments when I look around me and see a hospital room. When I can stare down at these words I’ve written and know that there is a part of me fighting this thing, struggling to push through the membrane, to move beyond the darkness into the light.
And while I can remember the pain at these moments, the spiked-heel, hot white pain in my head and the fire in my chest as I lay on wet pavement listening to a distant radio, I can’t for the life of me remember how I got there.
Or how I wound up here.
The last real, fully formed memory I have is of standing in that Mexican police station, nearly a year ago, feeling hurt and frustrated and angry.
But most of all worried.
About a girl I grew up with. A girl I took care of during the worst moments of our lives.
A girl I failed at the most crucial moment of all.
She wasn’t perfect, but neither am I. She was family. The only family I had. And despite our differences, I loved her. I still love her.
And each time I learn that she’s gone is as potent and as heartbreaking as the last.
The doctors tell me that their science is imperfect. That the study of the brain is still a work in progress and they can’t be sure that I’ll ever again be whole. Or that the nightmare I keep reliving will ever stop.
I am trapped, it seems, in my own private hell.
Alone.
Afraid.
And wanting to die.
PART TWO
44
Vargas breathed a sigh of relief when Mr. Blister put the flashlight away.
He’d had visions of joining Harmon and the Ainsworths on the ground, but Mr. Blister seemed to have either forgotten his suspicions or simply dismissed them, and went about cleaning up his mess.
Taking hold of Harmon’s arms, Mr. Blister dragged him out of view behind the cars, then reappeared on the steps, dropping him inside the house.
A moment later, he returned for Junior, then Ainsworth. After dragging them into the living room, he came back outside, climbed into Harmon’s cruiser, and started it, driving around toward the back of the house.
A good strategy, Vargas thought. Hide the bodies, get the cop’s car out of sight, and the chances of anyone finding them within the next couple days were pretty remote. This egg ranch had obviously long been out of business, and while Harmon’s disappearance would eventually trigger a search, Vargas figured it would be a while before they thought of Ainsworth. Plenty enough time for Mr. Blister and whoever he worked for to finish covering their tracks-which probably wouldn’t be all that difficult.
What Vargas had learned in his years as a reporter was that nearly 40 percent of all crimes go unsolved in this country. And in a border town, cop murder or not, the percentages grow even higher.
The moment Harmon’s cruiser rolled out of view, Vargas jumped to his feet, scrambled through the warehouse doorway and around the side of the building. A precautionary measure, just in case Mr. Blister got suspicious again and decided to use his flashlight.
Vargas waited there for several minutes before he heard shuffling sounds in the yard, then the slam of a
