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  “Looks like I struck a nerve,” Kyle said, smiling.

  Eddie raised his beer and tapped Kyle’s. “Here’s to the mysteries of parenting, another pillar in life’s foundation where we don’t have a goddamn clue about what the hell we’re doing.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He had a problem. He knew it. The highs were becoming too short, the withdrawals lasting too long, and both were happening too often.

  And he hadn’t gotten nearly enough from the last hit. That was clear from the lackluster performance. He needed more. His body was craving another one. But he had to stall. There were still a few days to go. He couldn’t do it. Not yet.

  He dragged himself off the couch where he’d been sleeping most of the day and made his way to the bathroom. Flicking on the switch, he winced against the bright light of the four bulbs above the sink shooting through his shrinking pupils like a dagger digging into his skull. But he let it happen. He wanted to see who he was becoming. And when his eyes adjusted enough to see the image reflecting off the mirror, he saw bloodshot eyes, sunken cheeks, thick stubble.

  An addict.

  That’s what he was. Corin was right; there was no question about it. He could rationalize the reasons, justify the need, but he knew in his heart that he’d become hooked and couldn’t give it up. He needed it. Craved it. Even if it was killing him.

  He still tried to convince himself that he’d stop soon, maybe in the fall. Maybe then he’d cut back and begin stretching it out.

  But it was so tough to think about quitting when he was enjoying it so much. And it wasn’t the rush or the high that was doing it. He’d been there before. This time it was different. This time he was making up for lost time, for a lost life, and being forgiven in the process. And he needed it. More than he ever knew. And he couldn’t, wouldn’t, let it get away.

  No, he thought as he splashed some cold water on his face, he wasn’t going stop. He knew that.

  But he still had a heart. He still cared. And he didn’t enjoy the sacrifices needed for what had to be done. But he’d learned to deal with them years ago.

  Compartmentalization was the key, a trick he learned back in high school when he’d found a book his father had lying around. A book by Dale Carnegie, the master of self-motivation. The chapter on compartmentalizing was the only one that stuck with him. Carnegie essentially said that you had to compartmentalize worrisome thoughts in order to not be overcome by them, tuck them away and don’t mesh them with other parts of your life. Kind of like what great athletes did—forget the strikeout from the last at-bat, don’t think about the ten consecutive shots you just missed or the catches you just dropped. Tuck them away. Forget about them and go into the next at-bat, the next shot, or the next catch with a clear and free mind. Compartmentalize. Don’t have a conscience. And that’s what he did. It was the only way he was able to function. Especially when he knew he needed the young and healthy rather than the strung out and sick, whose minds and bodies were too ravaged from the wear and tear of age and abuse, for the process to work.

  And he needed it to work. He couldn’t let life pass him by with so many regrets. The older he became, the more he realized the opportunity passing him by. He wanted to be a part of what had eluded him, what his path up to this point hadn’t let him do.

  There wouldn’t be many more chances.

  He saw how quickly things could turn with just one bad outing; they were already talking about sending him down. After all the good, one bad outing had already started the chatter. They wouldn’t stand for another one. He knew that. He was too much of an unknown, too much of a risk. He had to be on. They wouldn’t have the patience with him. They’d chalk his past performances up to luck and everything would be tossed out the window.

  And there was no way he was going to let that happen. Not now.

  They expected excellence, and that’s what he’d give them. Nothing less.

  So he’d endure the pain, the aches, and then he’d get his fix in a few days, this time taking it all. Then he’d do his thing and once again soak in the roars of the crowd as they chanted his name, something he realized he needed more than he ever imagined.

  And if the girl woke up, something he doubted, or turned out to be anything but a vegetable, something he doubted even more, he’d take care of her. Same with the man if he ever piped up.

  No loose ends.

  He’d been too careful to make sure there was no connection. He wasn’t about to let one slipup ruin it.

  And if he didn’t do it, he was sure Corin would.

  The man had too much of an investment to see things go any other way.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Kyle checked his watch as he walked down the hallway. Still fifteen minutes before noon. He’d been nervous and edgy all day, not at all looking forward to meeting Allie’s uncle. He kept going back and forth with what the man really wanted, thinking Eddie was right, he couldn’t possibly really believe Allie was attacked. It didn’t make sense. Kyle had even called Tom again and was able to find out there was absolutely nothing out of the ordinary in Allie’s blood work. Bottom line was she just had a burst aneurysm. That was it. They happened.

  So what the hell could her uncle possibly want? Kyle wondered. Did he really want to confront Kyle like Eddie thought? Did he know about the texts?

  As Kyle made his way to the small, modest office Hunter College afforded him, squeezing past the lone bookshelf against the wall and brushing up against the framed What About Bob? poster (a gift from Eddie), he thought about the consequences of what would happen if Liam knew about the texts. He could not only kiss his job at his little corner of the New York City University goodbye, but probably his license as well. The Trotter incident already had him on a bit of thin ice with the Board. If they found out that he was also trying to sleep with one of his students and had essentially abandoned her the night she had a hemorrhage, the story would likely push them over the edge and cause them to revoke his license, maybe even more.

  But as he nestled into the creaky chair behind a pressed wood desk that could’ve easily been found on Craigslist for five dollars, he tried to calm down, reminding himself he hadn’t done anything wrong. He never slept with her. Didn’t even kiss her. And he’d told the EMTs everything he knew, everything except for the man in the alley. What else was he supposed to do?

  Deep breaths, he said to himself, trying to slow down his spiraling thoughts. Deep breaths. He closed his eyes and slowly drew in long, full breaths. But instead of taking him to the calm place he was seeking, instead of stranding him on a breezy beach in the Pacific with an ice cold Corona in his hand as he watched the waves crash onto shore one after the other, his thoughts went where they almost always went nowadays when he didn’t consciously occupy his mind with other thoughts—to Henry Trotter.

  Henry had been a new patient of Kyle’s, but his story was like so many of Kyle’s other patients. He was white, rich and looking to ease the guilt he felt for cheating on his wife, looking to Kyle to give him a free pass. It wasn’t the clientele Kyle had wanted when he first entered private practice, but it was what he fell into. And once Sheila told him she’d been cheating on him, he realized it was what he’d fallen into at home as well.

  Kyle knew he probably should’ve taken a break from practicing after she dropped her bombshell. But he didn’t. He did the exact opposite. He threw himself into his work, knowing the last thing he wanted was to be alone with his thoughts. Alone with images of his wife sleeping with another man, with the idea that he wouldn’t get to see his daughter every single day, with the reality that his life would never be the same again.

  But the last thing he should’ve been doing was giving advice to others. Especially his clients, people who were doing exactly what his wife had done. People cut from the same cloth. People like Henry Trotter.

  Instead of going into his typical routine with Henry during their first session and exploring and analyzing the deeper issues behind why Henry was cheat
ing, Kyle came right out and told Henry to “man up.” Told him it wasn’t right to keep his wife in the dark. He should either leave or stop fucking other women.

  And the latter is exactly what Henry did. He broke up with his girlfriend.

  Or, at least, that’s what the newspaper accounts said. Kyle didn’t know for sure. Henry never made it back for his follow-up session.

  He was killed only a few days later.

  According to the reports, Henry was shot in the crotch as soon as he walked through his girlfriend’s door after she’d begged him to come over because she wasn’t handling the breakup well. She let him suffer for a good while, maybe as long as twenty minutes the reports said, before finally ending his life by shooting him in the head. She then jammed the gun in her own mouth and put a bullet through her brain.

  Kyle wondered if Henry thought about him at all that night while he lay there writhing in pain as blood gushed out of him. Wondered if during those moments when he knew his life was over, when he knew he’d never see his kids again, he cursed Kyle for the advice he’d given, and cursed himself for listening.

  They were thoughts and images that Kyle couldn’t tuck away, no corner of his mind deep enough, or strong enough, to contain them.

  They haunted him. He couldn’t help but feel responsible, especially because it could have all been avoided. The girlfriend was unstable. Had a history of it. If Kyle had delved into it a little more, he probably would’ve uncovered it and guided Henry a little more carefully. But he hadn’t. He’d been blinded by his own adulterous wife’s actions.

  He’d been careless, something someone in his profession should never be.

  The human psyche was far too fragile, and his role far too powerful.

  So he didn’t blame Henry’s family for suing him. He screwed up. He even wrote to the State Board, telling them what had happened. They cleared him of any wrongdoing; didn’t even take long. But the decision wasn’t good enough. Not for him, and not for the family Henry left behind.

  “The summer classes really bring out the hotties.”

  Kyle looked up, the voice jolting him away from his mental meanderings about Trotter.

  In the doorway, head turned as he looked down the hall, was a pudgy man standing no taller than five-six with thick, dark, curly hair atop a round, chubby face spotted by a scraggly beard. The man had small, puffy eyes behind thick lenses and was wearing a faded blue Spider-Man T-shirt with sweat stains at the underarms. He had on oversized khaki shorts and Birkenstock sandals, revealing gnarled, overgrown toenails.

  Kyle didn’t need the introduction to know exactly who it was.

  It was Allie’s uncle, Liam Murdock.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “I’m serious,” Liam said as he entered Kyle’s office. “They look like they’re wearing less than they’d be if they were at the beach.”

  The comment immediately caused Kyle’s antenna to spring up. Was Liam trying to catch him in some sort of trap? Trying to get him to admit that, yes, his eyes wandered and that, yes, some of the shorts his students wore had less material than the underwear underneath (for those even wearing underwear) and the cleavage spilling out of their skintight shirts demanded that anyone with a penis (and even those without) take a long hard gaze? Was he trying to see if Kyle was some kind of pervert who preyed upon his students?

  Kyle couldn’t tell as he stood to greet the man, looking his disheveled appearance up and down.

  And Liam didn’t give anything away. He simply flashed a wide smile and returned Kyle’s greeting with a hearty handshake.

  “I’m sorry about what happened to your niece,” Kyle said.

  “Allie’s a good kid,” Liam said as he took a seat in the wobbly chair across from Kyle’s desk. “The best.”

  “I didn’t know her well, but she definitely had a—”

  “Didn’t?” Liam interrupted, his puffy eyes narrowing a bit. “She’s not dead, you know.”

  “I … I know,” Kyle stammered. “I was just saying that before this happened I didn’t know her well.”

  “Well, you’ll get your opportunity,” Liam said. “Because she’s gonna come out of it and be fine. And whoever did this to her is gonna pay.”

  Kyle took a seat. “You mentioned that on the phone,” he said. “That she was attacked. And I have to be honest, I still don’t get what you’re saying. How could she have been attacked? Do you think there was a noxious gas or something?”

  “A gas? No,” Liam said, looking Kyle straight in the eyes, a mask of seriousness covering his fleshy forty-two-year-old face. “And I can’t take credit for the theory on my own. One of the Crusaders told me to check her phone, and that’s when I came up with the texts between the two of you and saw the one about Sheldrake.”

  “What’s a Crusader?” Kyle asked, his nerves on edge as Liam spoke about checking Allie’s phone, thinking Liam had to know about the erased texts, but wondering why he wasn’t saying anything about them, wondering what his angle was.

  “A Crusader of the Cape,” Liam answered.

  “Cape? Like Cape Cod?”

  “No. Cape like one you wear. It’s a play on words. You know, like Batman, the Caped Crusader. We call ourselves the Crusaders of the Cape.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Just some of us randoms.”

  “Random what?”

  “Comic book store owners.”

  Kyle nodded, not sure whether to be put at ease that Liam’s cohorts were comic shop owners, or on higher alert because they were also probably tech geeks. But he played along. “So what is it then? What do you think attacked her?”

  “Who, not what. Who.”

  “Okay, who attacked her, and what did they attack her with?”

  Liam leaned back in the wobbly chair. “Not sure who yet.”

  Kyle swallowed back his frustration and pursed his lips, feeling as if he’d been transported into an Abbott and Costello routine. “Okay, then what was she attacked with?” Which is what I just asked.

  “Energy transfer. Or, in this case I guess, energy disruption.”

  Kyle stared at him, waiting for more. But there wasn’t any. “I’m not following.”

  “It goes back to Sheldrake,” Liam said. “The man who discovered morphic fields and proved that the energy our minds create extends beyond the confines of our skull.”

  “I’m not really sure Sheldrake proved anything, but even so, how could a morphic field have caused a burst aneurysm. And why would you even go there?”

  “Because of the others. That’s what made me really suspicious.”

  “What others?”

  “The people I told you about who’ve been killed.”

  “Right,” Kyle said, remembering Liam mentioning that on the phone. “What happened there? Who are the others?”

  “In the past two months, there have been four people under the age of twenty-five who have died from a burst aneurysm. And that doesn’t include Allie.” Liam paused, waiting for a reaction from Kyle that never came. “That just shouldn’t be happening,” he explained. “Something’s going on.”

  “What shouldn’t be happening?”

  “That so many young people are dying from strokes in such a short span of time.”

  Kyle rubbed his cheek. “I agree that it’s unusual,” he said, having just read the stats while searching the Internet the other night, “but why does that lead you to think that people are being murdered?”

  “Because it’s more than just unusual,” Liam said. “And it’s more than just very unusual. It’s impossibly unusual. It shouldn’t be happening. Not to these people. Even in a city as big as Manhattan, this shouldn’t be happening. It’s too much of a coincidence. Way too much. These guys weren’t only all young, but they didn’t have any health problems. Trust me, it’s just not possible. Something’s going on. These deaths didn’t just happen. They were killed. They were definitely killed.”

  “I can see how it might be a statistical anomaly, but th
ose things happen.”

  “Not like this, they don’t. Do you have any idea what the numbers say? Try this—it’s a known statistical fact that about two people in Manhattan die a month because of a brain hemorrhage. Two. That’s it. And all of them are at least in their thirties, and usually much friggin’ older. Like really old.”

  “All of them?”

  “Pretty much. And the ones who aren’t old are sick, or drunks, or get clocked upside the head. But the ones I’m talking about, the four in the last two months, they were all in their twenties. Their early twenties.”

  “But these types of statistical anomalies do happen every so often,” Kyle repeated.

  “Not like this.”

  “And how do you know the other incidents weren’t due to accidental overdoses?” Kyle asked. “Or an illness?”

  “They weren’t. I know they weren’t,” Liam said.

  Kyle sat there silently, slowly becoming convinced that Liam really did think Allie had been attacked and wasn’t there about the texts he’d deleted.

  “Crazy, right?” Liam asked, his scraggly beard stretching out as he grinned. “Blows your effing mind away, doesn’t it? And I bet the only reason why Allie didn’t die was because her mind was too aware of what was going on because she’d been seeing a Giver. Thank friggin’ God for that.”

  Kyle found it odd that Liam refrained from cursing in conversation the same way he did on his Facebook posts. Then he hit Liam with the obvious point he thought the man was missing. “What about the possibility that the aneurysms all just coincidentally ruptured from natural causes?”