Sleep No More

wasn’t sure enough to open a dialogue based on that assumption.

“Hey, Cole,” he said in a casual voice.

Cole’s smile disappeared. “Why do you do that?”

“What?”

“You know it’s me.”

Waters looked into the smoldering eyes. “I didn’t know for sure.”

“Now you do.”

He turned back to the rail and gazed over the river to Louisiana, flat farmland stretching to the horizon. He felt a hand on his shoulder.

“I want you to decide today,” Cole said. The hand squeezed his shoulder with a near-painful grip. “By the end of the day, Johnny.”

Waters turned to face his partner. “I’ve already decided.”

Cole’s finger went to his neck as though to twist his hair, but there was not enough hair to twist. “Who?”

“Sybil.”

The big man’s shoulders sagged with relief. “I’m so glad. I thought you might be thinking of someone else.”

“Sybil makes the most sense. She has no family to ask questions. No one that I know of, anyway.”

“She has an aunt in Houma. And a half-sister in Boutte. But she’s not close to either of them.”

Waters nodded. “I guess that’s it, then.”

An unfamiliar vulnerability entered Cole’s face. “Is that all you have to say? ‘I guess that’s it’?”

“You’re right. There’s a lot more. There’s Eve’s murder. Lily and Annelise. The EPA investigation.”

Cole huffed with exasperation. “Are you going to be in the office all day?”

“Except for lunch, I guess.”

“Good.” He leaned toward Waters’s face, then stopped himself. “I want to kiss you, Johnny. But I know it would make you uncomfortable.”

“Sybil won’t make me uncomfortable.”

Cole laughed softly. “I had a feeling she wouldn’t.”

Waters passed the remainder of the morning by pretending to work, mostly to keep up appearances for Sybil and any visitors who might stop by. Things needed to appear normal to the very end. Tragedy should appear to strike in the midst of humdrum existence. Oddly, he saw no further sign of Cole. Around noon, he heard his door open and looked up to find Sybil standing in it. She was smiling, and her eyes sparkled.

“What is it?” he asked, trying not to look her in the eye.

“I just wondered if you wanted me to keep holding all your calls.”

Waters nodded, doubting what she said was true. Sybil was practically glowing-she wanted to tell him something. But he could hardly look at her. Twenty-eight years old. Beautiful. Her whole life ahead of her. Why did she deserve to die more than Cole, who had squandered almost every blessing he’d ever been given? Because Waters hadn’t taken the time to get to know her well?

“Why do you look so happy?” he asked at last.

Sybil bounced on her toes like a giddy cheerleader. “Oh…I don’t know. It’s just a good day.”

A hollow feeling spread through his chest. “Anything to do with Cole?”

She looked at the ceiling, but her smile only broadened. “I don’t know what I should say.”

“It’s all right. Nobody’s getting fired, Sybil.”

She looked him in the eye, unable to contain her news any longer. “I’m seeing him tonight.”

Waters tried to keep his face impassive.

“John, he’s leaving his wife. He’s finally doing it!”

In that moment, Waters almost cracked. He had a sense that Mallory had told Sybil this out of cruelty, but then he reconsidered. Soldiers sometimes offered a doomed prisoner a cigarette or told him a joke before shooting him in the back of the head. A small kindness before the end.

“I’m glad for you, Sybil. I hope it’s the right thing for you.”

She nodded with the excitement of a young bride. “It is. I know it is.”

Waters could think of nothing to say.

“It is for him too,” Sybil added with sudden severity. “He’s been unhappy for so long.”

“Yes. He has.”

“Well…I guess I should get back to work.”

She smiled and went out, closing the door softly behind her.

Waters put his head down on his desk, already grieving for Sybil and for himself. Tonight. He had not expected Mallory to move so fast. If he went through with what he and Lily had planned, tonight he would lose a part of himself forever. Just as he had when he committed adultery with Eve. Only this time would be different. Not long ago, he had questioned his belief in an immortal soul. Today, he felt for the first time that his was in mortal peril.

He could remain in the office no longer. He stood, took his keys from the drawer, and walked down the hall to Cole’s office.

“I’m going home for lunch,” he said as he walked in.

Cole did not respond. He sat with his head on his desk, snoring loudly. Waters sensed that if he woke Cole now, he would find his old friend looking out of the familiar eyes. But he could not be sure. And if all went well, Cole would be himself again by tonight. That thought pushed Waters across the room to Cole’s side of the desk. He felt strangely compelled to lay his hand on his old friend’s shoulder, to give some parting gesture while Cole was actually Cole. He extended his right hand, then froze.

The desk drawer stood open about six inches, and Cole’s right hand lay in it. The fingers of that hand gripped the finely checkered butt of the.357 Magnum Waters had seen yesterday.

The thought that Cole might be this close to suicide stunned him. If he and Lily carried through with their plans for Sybil, and then Cole took his own life…the irony would be unendurable. But was it suicide Cole was planning? Perhaps he was holding the gun for protection. Maybe he was too afraid of Vegas enforcers to sleep without a gun in his hand. But somehow, Waters didn’t think that was it. Instinct told him that his friend, already stressed to the breaking point by his debts, now had blackouts, memory loss, and exhaustion to contend with, just as Lily had. Beyond this, Cole had knowingly slept with his best friend’s wife. If he had not been too drunk to remember this, even Cole would suffer intense guilt over such a transgression. Taken as a whole, all this might be enough to drive him to suicide.

Waters was thinking of trying to remove the gun from Cole’s hand when he saw an ugly scab on the inside of Cole’s left wrist. Bending at the waist, he saw that the scab was one of several wounds there, some so fresh the blood was still drying. At the center of the web of cuts were three deep, parallel gouges, much like those he had found beneath Eve’s watch. Only these were far worse.

The sight of those wounds caused a profound change within Waters. Though inflicted by Mallory, they seemed emblematic of the pain Cole had been carrying with him for the past several years. By choosing Sybil as their surrogate for Mallory’s murder, Waters and Lily had spared Cole. He would live on, making the same mistakes he had always made, searching for happiness and never finding it, and probably die young of a heart attack, or from the complications of the diabetes he so religiously ignored. It suddenly struck Waters how simple it would be to lift Cole’s gun hand, put the barrel of the Magnum to his temple, and pull the trigger. By the time Sybil came running in, Waters could be on the other side of the desk, gaping in shock and weeping genuine tears of grief. Mallory would be dead, and Cole’s death would be ruled a suicide. Hell, with Cole’s money troubles well known in town, no one would even question it. Cole kept a couple of Polo shirts in the closet across the room. Just to be safe, Waters would wrap his hand in one before he fired, to keep any powder residue off his hands.

He looked from the scars to the gun, then at the back of Cole’s big head. The growing bald spot there looked almost pathetically human. Cole’s got life insurance through the company, he thought. He had verified this himself, along with all other policies, after Cole had let the liability premium lapse. If the $500,000 death benefit were used to pay off Cole’s Vegas debts, that would leave a $150,000 balance, which Waters would have to pick up. He would also have to pay substantial sums on a regular basis to keep Cole’s wife and children living in even a shadow of the style to which they were accustomed. If I pull that trigger,