Sleep No More

“John-”

“Just tell me one thing, you son of a bitch! Is Lily involved in this?”

Cole stood up, his face bright red. “Not anymore. But why do you even care about that?”

“Why do I care? Lily is all I care about. Lily and Annelise.”

Cole looked suddenly bereft. “Don’t say that.”

“Compared to Lily, you think I give a shit about you and your problems? You made a good living from this company, and you pissed it away on gambling and God knows what else. Now you want to take me down for murder so you can steal the company and get your ass out of a hole you dug yourself? And you use my wife to do it?”

Cole’s lower lip quivered, and the hurt in his eyes dwarfed the pain Waters had seen at the country club the previous day.

“You don’t understand!” he cried, taking Waters by the arms. “You’ve got to listen to me.”

Waters tried to pull free, but alcohol and dissipation had not completely sapped the strength of the old athlete in Cole.

“Let go, goddamn it!”

He was about to slam his knee into his partner’s groin when Cole sobbed and drove him back against the office wall like an offensive lineman. Waters’s head hit the painted bricks hard enough to blind him. The first thing he saw when the stars cleared was Cole staring at him like a madman begging for understanding.

“You don’t know anything about Lily!” Cole shouted. “You think you know her, Johnny, but you don’t!”

Johnny? Waters tried to think through the blur in his brain, but Cole kept talking, his face wet with tears and mucus, his right arm across Waters’s chest, pinning him to the wall. “Listen to me, Johnny. I’m trying to do what you told me to. But you don’t even care!”

Waters remained frozen.

“You lied!” Cole screamed. “You said you’d give up Lily and come to me if I went into another woman. But you were lying!”

Waters’s heart stuttered, then kicked off again with an arrhythmic beat that he feared would not sustain consciousness. He shut his eyes against confusion so profound that it felt like psychological whiplash.

“Say something!” Cole demanded. “Look at me!”

Waters opened his eyes. His partner’s face, livid a moment ago, was now pale, and his mouth worked in a silent struggle between rage and despair. Even as Waters’s emotions tried to convince him that Cole was only playing another scene in a drama written to deprive him of his sanity, cold reason forced him toward the awful truth. Cole was not that good an actor. He could dissemble in front of husbands whom he had cuckolded, but the pain and confusion in his face now were utterly foreign to the man Waters had known all his life. Cole Smith simply did not panic, and to mimic it like this was beyond him.

“Oh God,” Waters breathed. “No…”

A strange light suddenly shone out of Cole’s eyes, and his lips curled into something like a smile. Horror unlike anything Waters had known in his life turned his bowels to water. This morning, while he was talking to Penn or giving blood to the police, Mallory had followed his order of last night in a way that must have given her savage pleasure. As Lily, she had seduced Cole, and by this single act had both violated the wife Waters loved and robbed his best friend of his mind. The image of Cole thrusting inside his wife drove Waters to a point of fury that bordered on madness. He rammed his knee into Cole’s testicles, then slammed an uppercut into the soft area under his jaw. The big man fell back, gasping for air, and Waters retreated behind the desk. Two blows wouldn’t stop a man of Cole’s size for long, so he reached into Cole’s drawer and brought out the Magnum.357.

“Tell me what you did!” he shouted, aiming the gun at Cole. “You made Lily sleep with Cole, didn’t you?”

Cole tried to straighten up but could not. The blow to his groin had effectively crippled him. But he did raise his face, and when he did, Waters saw the light of triumph in his eyes.

“It wasn’t”-Cole gasped-“wasn’t like it was the first time they’d done it. It didn’t take much convincing to get your partner over to your house, Johnny. It took even less to get him to provide service in the bedroom. Lily bought a fifth of Johnnie Walker to warm him up. Then she fluttered her eyelashes and shed a few tears, and he was on her like a hound dog.”

“Lily never cheated on me with Cole!”

“Not after you were married. But Cole has very fond memories of Lily as a college freshman. Mostly because she’s your wife, I think. Lily wasn’t anything special in the sack, but she was young and firm. A nice diversion on a Friday night.”

Waters hoped this was one of Mallory’s lies, but the sick feeling in his stomach told him it probably wasn’t. He choked back a response and cocked the pistol’s plowshare hammer.

“And neither one of them ever told you about it,” Cole said. “The whole time you were falling in love with her, showing her off, telling Cole how great she was, he was thinking about the times he did her. That’s friendship, isn’t it?”

A strange sense of relief rolled through Waters. By trying so hard to damn Lily and Cole, Mallory had made him realize that both were innocent of anything beyond a college fling. There was no scam, no conspiracy. Both were pawns in Mallory’s twisted plan. Lily probably wouldn’t even remember having sex with Cole. Unless…like Eve, she had “awakened” to find herself naked and under Cole-

“Where’s Lily?” he asked. “Right now? Did you hurt her?”

“Why would I hurt her?” Cole asked. “What happens to Lily later doesn’t interest me, but I don’t want you to feel any guiltier than you have to when you come to me.”

“You swear she’s all right?”

“I don’t want to talk about her!” Cole snapped. “You told me you’d leave her, but she’s all you care about! You lied.”

“I wasn’t lying,” Waters replied calmly, trying to get his thoughts back on track. He let down the hammer and set the pistol on the desk. “What did you expect me to do? You’d blotted out my wife’s mind. You threatened my daughter’s life-”

“You threatened me first! You said you’d act like I was dead!”

You should be dead, Waters thought. “This is just like twenty years ago, Mallory. You don’t trust me to love you. You think you have to make me love you. But you can’t make anyone feel love. Love doesn’t work that way.”

“I know how love works!” Cole screamed. “I know how you felt with me when I was in Eve. You were lost inside me! You loved me then. And you will again.”

Waters wasn’t about to argue. If Mallory decided to hurt Lily and Annelise, he had no way to stop her. Certainly the police could do nothing to prevent it. He slid the.357 back in the drawer, closed his mind to the male face across the desk, and spoke as tenderly as he could.

“I always loved you, Mallory. And you always sabotaged us with your paranoia. But now…now I see that you’re doing what you promised. You left Lily alone, and you’re going to go into someone else. And I intend to keep my part of the bargain.”

Cole wiped his eyes and walked toward the desk. “But how long is it going to take? Who am I going to go into?”

“I don’t know yet. I have to find a woman I think I can live with.”

“What about Sybil?” Cole said, his eyes suddenly bright. “Cole already sleeps with her. Or he did until a month ago, anyway. She’s pretty, she’s only twenty-eight, she’s got a wonderful body…and no husband or kids to worry about. Nobody to ask questions. She’s perfect. I even know she’s fertile.”

“How do you know that?”

Cole’s face articulated pure sadness in a way that Waters had not seen since Cole was a child. “She got pregnant when she was in high school,” he said. “Her parents made her get rid of the baby.”

Waters didn’t want Mallory thinking about abortion. “Sybil could be the one,” he said. “But I don’t know yet.”

“I don’t want you to take too long. You know me, Johnny. I need intimacy.” Cole was coming around the desk now, and nothing about his bodily movement was familiar. He was like 250 pounds of graceful woman stuffed into