Shadow Games (4 page)

Lilly Carlyle

III

F
amily Life
had once taped one of those "serious" episodes cast with one eye on an Emmy and one eye on even greater ratings.

In this episode,
Cobey's
nineteen-year-old sister had a breakdown and was sent to a mental hospital.

This was the first time
Cobey
had ever heard of electric-shock treatments, of how they strapped you down and zapped your brain with several thousand volts of electricity. Supposedly, the shock would bring you out of your deep depression.

Cobey
was seventeen at the time of the episode. For days he went around thinking of electric-shock as something like Frankenstein's monster, jagged blue bolts of electricity crisscrossing the air above the skull, the entire body convulsing. He'd also been told that in the early days of electric-shock the convulsions had been so severe that some people actually broke arms and legs; and a few even swallowed their tongues and strangled to death.

A
nd two days before his twenty-first birthday, early in his second year at
Menlow
Park Hospital,
Cobey
received his first electric-shock treatment, which some of the patients called "riding the lightning."

The odd thing was, it wasn't so bad, not really.
Cobey
went into this small, white room adjacent to the big, white operating room and he read magazines and he chatted with the other patients awaiting treatments and then a slender, very pretty nurse came into the room and called
Cobey's
name and then led him very sweetly into an anteroom where he was given a white hospital gown and told to lie down on a gurney. Then the same very pretty nurse, talking and smiling all the time, strapped
Cobey
down and pushed him into the operating room.

Seen from the gurney, the room was white and vast. It smelled of various tart medicines and it was so cold that
Cobey
could feel goose bumps all over his arms and legs.

Everything, from
Cobey's
perspective, was upside down, of course.

A doctor and three nurses peered down at him, their heads forming a semicircle.

The nurses were pretty. The doctor had wide, hairy nostrils.

"Do you know what Sodium
Pentathol
is?" the doctor asked. He had a beard and he was young and he sort of looked like a hippie.

"Truth serum?"
Cobey
said.

The doctor smiled. "Well, that's its popular name. We call it Sodium
Pentathol
. Nurse Irene is going to give you an injection of it. All you need to do is start counting backwards from one hundred. You'll never reach ninety-six."

Cobey
thought that was highly unlikely. Who couldn't count backwards from one hundred to ninety-six?

He couldn't.

He reached ninety-seven and the universe exploded. Freezing blackness—the darkness between the stars could be no colder or vaster—overwhelmed him and he ceased, at least as far as he knew, to exist.

Extinction.

He was next aware of struggling to open his eyes. Brightness pushed against his lids and a human voice rumbled something not quite understandable.

His eyes came open. He was in a sunny little room in
Menlow
Park Hospital. A beefy orderly in skintight white T-shirt and pants was talking to him.

There were various framed photographs that Lilly had put up on his first day here. "I want the staff to know you're somebody special, and I want you to know it, too," she'd said. The photos showed
Cobey
with different celebrities, including President Reagan, Michael Jackson and Morgan Fairchild. The
photos tried hard to make people think that
Cobey
and these people were good friends.

"How you
feelin
',
Cobey
?"

When he'd first come to
Menlow
Park, he'd suffered what Dr. Reeves had called hysterical amnesia. He couldn't remember much, sometimes not even his own name. Following electric-shock, he'd felt pretty much the same way.

"I...uh...feel all right, I guess."

"You did good,
Cobey
. Real good."

"Gosh, thanks."

Cobey
then started the difficult task of reconstructing the past few hours. Breakfast. Going downstairs in an elevator. A small, white room—counting backwards—and now...

"
Cobey
?"
Cobey
said. "That's my name?"

The man grinned. "Right.
Cobey
." Then he kind of punched
Cobey
playfully on the arm.

In all,
Cobey
had ten electric-shock treatments. It was felt by the staff that his spirits had improved at least slightly, and it was whispered, by the patients, that maybe the young TV star wasn't as aloof as they'd once thought, that maybe he'd just been depressed. God, if any of them had gone through what
Cobey
had in the back of that shopping mall...well, who wouldn't be depressed?

IV

O
n the morning he received Lilly Carlyle's letter, Dr. Robert Reeves interviewed four staffers about
Cobey's
recent behavior. Satisfied that the young man was indeed doing well, Reeves walked the hospital grounds looking for
Cobey
.

He found him on the tennis courts, playing doubles with an arsonist (his partner), a pedophile (who was also an eminent
minister), and a particularly vile wife-torturer (the man's millions having kept him from a real prison).

Reeves liked to hear the
thwock
of the ball as it went back and forth across the net, the sound echoing off the green bluffs surrounding the red brick hospital which most people thought resembled a small college campus. He liked to hear patients having fun.

Between matches, Reeves went up and asked if he could speak with
Cobey
.
Cobey
said sure.

"Well, it's lunch time," Reeves said. "How about walking over to the cafeteria with me?"

V

"Y
ou know you're up for review, right,
Cobey
?"

"
Yessir
."

They walked along.
Cobey
smiled when he saw a plump little squirrel toting a huge acorn along the edge of the sidewalk. As they approached the main building,
Cobey
could smell lunch. The food here was great. He felt a wonderful sense of belonging; and then he thought, ruefully,
I really must be crazy if I want a mental hospital as my alma mater
.

"The board pretty much acts on what I say," Reeves said. He was a tall man and, in his white medical jacket, he seemed even taller. He was bald and the top of his head looked as if he Simonized it every few days.

"
Yessir
,"
Cobey
said, sounding tentative. He had a hunch where this was going but he was afraid to hope that...

"I'm going to recommend that you be released to the custody of Lilly," Dr. Reeves said.

And then he stopped and put his hand out and
Cobey
shook it and thought,
oh, hell
, and threw his arms around Dr.
Reeves, his head reaching the middle of the medical man's chest.

"I'm going home!"
Cobey
said. "I'm going home!"

"Yes, you are," Dr. Reeves said. "And a man named Puckett is going to take you there."

Lunch that day was spaghetti, a particular favorite of
Cobey's
.

He sat across the table from Dr. Reeves and when Reeves wasn't smiling and talking with his mouth full,
Cobey
was.

Warm autumn sunshine slanted through the windows, touching
Cobey
, painting him warm and golden, a special creature.

It was, in all respects, a wonderful day.

I

T
wo-and-a-half weeks later, William James Puckett landed at Lambert International Airport in St. Louis, at which point he transferred to a Yellow Cab. He told the cabbie, a black man with an amiable face and shrewd, brown eyes, that he was headed for
Menlow
Park Hospital.

The driver glanced at him in the mirror again.

Patient or visitor?
the black man was obviously thinking. Then he smiled. He'd clearly decided that Puckett was a visitor.

On the way out to the hospital the news came on and there was a story about Richard M. Nixon planning another European trip.

And so, naturally enough, Puckett started thinking about his days as Nixon's bodyguard.

After college, and after Nam, Puckett found himself without a job but with an uncle who'd been a Secret Service man ever since Washington wore wooden teeth. "Hell, you might like it," his uncle kept saying, so Puckett—who was broke—said why not and flew into DC and took all the tests and kissed all the asses, and what do you know?

A year later he was assigned to guarding presidential candidate Richard Nixon.

He actually sort of liked the guy; which might be just a way of saying that he actually felt sorry for him because Nixon tried hard to be a regular guy, but his attempts were pathetic. Still, Puckett had never felt like a regular guy either, so despite the fact that all his people were Democrats, he developed a fondness for the sweaty little bastard.

In those days especially, guarding a national political figure was like going to war. In one spring Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy had been killed, and so the Secret Service
started treating their job like the hazardous duty gig it really was.

Before hitting a given city, you discussed which hospitals you'd take the wounded to. You packed smoke grenades and gas masks in case an assassin—or team of assassins—really got tricky. The guys in the war wagon, the car travelling just behind the candidate's vehicle, carried enough firepower to invade China, the agents packing Uzis and taping extra ammo to the ceiling. Several of the top agents, including Puckett, had been sent to Israel to train in commando tactics. Puckett had liked the Israelis and learned a lot from them.

With Nixon, Puckett would wade into a crowd, clearing the way for the candidate behind him. Puckett would immediately be assaulted by photographers and over-eager Nixon admirers. Blinded by strobes, jostled by people who were acting like stoned rock-concert crowds, Puckett kept his eyes moving constantly, looking for any sign of something wrong—a glint of sun off metal, a man reaching suspiciously inside his jacket, a woman starting to raise her arm in a curious way. If the real thing ever happened, his earpiece would burst out with
Gun left
or
Gun right
and then Puckett would be ripping his gun from its holster while the agent next to him tore open his briefcase and filled his hands with an Uzi all ready to fire.

At the end of their little sojourn, candidate Nixon had given Puckett a pair of gold cufflinks and a manly slug on the bicep.

Nixon went on to the White House and Watergate. Puckett stayed in the Service two more years and then went private.

The big international firms were just discovering the wonders of computers and a whole new world was opening up. Puckett wanted to be a part of that world. Around this same time, his wife informed him that she'd fallen in love with the family dentist and would be leaving and taking their four-year-old daughter with them and that Puckett could see his daughter whenever he wanted and she hoped there were no hard feelings
and that Puckett should not only look for a new woman but also—"to save embarrassment, Puckett, you know what I mean"—a new dentist. "Karl would just be real uncomfortable with you in his chair."

All Puckett could think about was the ancient, evil dentist drilling into Dustin Hoffman's teeth in
The Marathon Man
.

II

M
enlow
Park Hospital looked like a college campus, Puckett thought, filled with rolling green lawns and overhanging willows and oaks, and resplendent with lots of nubile young ladies from good, solid, Midwestern states.

He met first with Dr. Reeves, who told him that
Cobey
was in his care now and he hoped that Puckett was ready to assume complete responsibility. To that end, Reeves had Puckett sign several forms that made
Cobey
Puckett's total responsibility.