Sleep No More (31 page)

Despite all his ruthless theorizing, Waters could not imagine that reality.

“When are you supposed to tell Mallory who to go into?”

“She was pressuring me when I saw Cole this afternoon.”

Lily’s cold eyes and set jaw showed the depth of her resolve. “Tell her tomorrow,” she said. “Tell her your answer is Sybil. And tell her not to waste time. You’ve been thinking about Sybil all night, and you want her.”

“Why the hurry?”

“The murder investigation. From what you told me, you could be arrested before supper tomorrow.”

“What if Cole sleeps with Sybil tomorrow? Will we be ready to deal with it?”

Lily sat on the bed in a posture of absolute concentration. He imagined this was how she looked when she knocked the top out of the CPA exam. “We’ll be ready,” she said. “It’s just a job. Like doing an audit. Drilling a well. We’ll plan every step. Then we’ll execute those steps in the safest, most efficient way possible. We’ll overlook nothing.”

Waters thought of Sybil Sonnier’s sincere eyes and her desire to please. Then he remembered a Nietzsche quote from college:
In revenge and in love, woman is more barbarous than man.
Looking at his wife’s face, a study of moral detachment chiseled in ice, he believed it. And for the first time, he sensed that he had come face-to-face with Mallory Candler’s match.

The morning sun was already high when Waters started up the back stairs to his office, his eyes burning from fatigue. After their discussion the night before, he and Lily had decided to put Annelise in their bed, and her constant shifting made sleep almost impossible. Likewise, Lily had decided to keep Ana home from school for the day. She didn’t want her vulnerable to Mallory in any way while Waters tried to manipulate Mallory into Sybil.

Waters paused at his office door, started to go down the hall to Cole’s, then went into his own. If he went into Cole’s office and found only his friend and partner, he did not know if he could keep his emotions in check. To see Cole unaware of the dark presence submerged beneath his conscious mind would be like talking to a friend who did not know he was dying of inoperable cancer.

Waters walked to his desk but did not sit down. Turning to the picture window, he opened the door that led to the balcony and went outside. The river flowed gunmetal gray today. Usually a rusty brown, it now looked dead and deep, like it could swallow anything dropped into it without a trace. The twin bridges moved with desultory traffic, log trucks and big diesels mostly. Some steel was being replaced on the eastbound span. Antlike workers crawled over the girders with surprising speed, and for fifty yards there was nothing but a makeshift guardrail to keep you from dropping eighty feet to the river below if you drifted over the line.

That’s what I’ve done,
Waters thought.
Drifted over the line. And now I’m a few short steps from prison.
That he had been pulled over the line would be a fact only in his own mind, not those of the jurors who would convict him. All that his recitation of the “facts” as he saw them might accomplish would be to get him sentenced to the state mental hospital at Whitfield rather than to Parchman Prison in the Delta.

“Johnny?”

He whirled and found Cole standing three feet behind him, clean-shaven and dressed in wool trousers, a custom-tailored shirt, and a silk tie. This and his use of “Johnny” made Waters think he was facing Mallory, but he 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,
he thought,
that’s the least I can do.

Somehow, this thought did not revolt him as he knew it should. The simple fact was, if he killed Mallory now, the danger to Lily and Annelise would end immediately. Cole would probably lose several years of life, but there was a strong chance that he might not live more than a few days anyway.

Waters prodded Cole’s shoulder.

His partner groaned but did not move.

With a strange sense of detachment, Waters went to the closet, took a red Polo shirt from it, wrapped it around his hand, and went back to the desk. Cole was still snoring.

Bending his knees, Waters laid his cotton-swathed hand over Cole’s and lifted the .357 into the air. There was a hitch in Cole’s breathing, but the snoring resumed. Very slowly, he moved the barrel against Cole’s temple and slipped his own finger inside the trigger guard. This close to his partner, he could smell Cole’s distinctive odor, a mix of sweat and aftershave and cigar smoke that Waters would know anywhere with his eyes closed.

God forgive me,
he thought, and began to squeeze the trigger.

Before he applied sufficient pressure to break the trigger, Waters saw a vision of a room filled with people. Older people mostly, row upon row of them, and a man in black was speaking about God. As he droned on, Waters turned in his pew and saw a lone boy like himself sitting between two adults. The boy was Cole Smith, a freckled thirteen years old, but his face held enough empathy for a man twice his size. The empathy was for John Waters, who had just lost his father.

Waters froze with the trigger near to breaking, and in that horrifying lacuna of time, he heard Sybil coming up the hall.

“Cole?” she called. “Hey, sleepyhead!”

He dropped Cole’s gun hand back into the drawer and tossed the Polo shirt under the desk.

“What are you doing?” Sybil asked from the doorway.

Waters nearly jumped out of his shoes. “Trying to be quiet. Cole’s still sleeping.”

“He’s been asleep half the morning.”

Waters quickly crossed to the door. “Maybe he drank too much last night.”

Sybil frowned like a future wife. “He’s not drinking tonight. He says things he doesn’t mean when he’s drunk. And I’ve had it with that. Tonight I’m getting the truth.”

Waters wanted to pat her arm, but he could not bring himself to touch her. He slipped past her and went into the hall. “I’m going home for lunch. I may not be back.”

Sybil nodded and peeked into Cole’s office. “Maybe I should wake him up.”

Waters looked over her shoulder and tried to calculate the probabilities of what would happen if she did. Who would awake? Cole? Or Mallory?

“I’d let him sleep,” he said, catching the scent of perfume from Sybil’s neck. “You want him rested and clearheaded tonight.”

She gave him a preoccupied nod. “You’re right. Hey, what were you looking for?”

“Oh…I lent him my dictation recorder yesterday. No big deal.”

She nodded again. “No scotch for that boy tonight.”

Leaving Sybil standing in Cole’s door, Waters walked to the back stairs, his mind focused on Lily and Annelise. That was the only way he would survive the night’s work.

Waters drove slowly through the darkness of North Union Street, Lily rigid in the seat beside him. Annelise lay asleep on the seat behind them, a gun under the seat beneath him. Large Victorian houses lined both sides of the road, their gingerbread trim strangely threatening in the night. He wasn’t driving his Land Cruiser or Lily’s Acura. An hour ago, Lily had dropped him a quarter mile from an oil field equipment lot on Liberty Road, where an old four-door pickup always sat with a key under the mat. It belonged to a well-checker Waters knew, a man he hadn’t spoken to for more than two years. That was one virtue of small towns. Things changed little, and when they did, they changed slowly.

He braked on the 1200 block, scanning the house fronts for numbers. Sybil Sonnier lived in a detached apartment behind one of the larger Victorians on North Union. Many single people preferred to live in these cozy quarters rather than take apartments in the homogeneous complexes around town.