Slow Burning Lies (18 page)

32

The next two weeks passed without any great event – and still with no more nightmares. Memories of those horrific visions were pushed to the back of Patrick’s mind where they appeared to be happy to rest, so he resisted the temptation to do as Beth had suggested and tell his doctor about them. In addition, those two weeks had started to dull the pain of losing Rozita.

Patrick worked diligently every day, went easy on the booze, and even started to sleep soundly.

He also made a point of avoiding Beth.

He wasn’t scared of her – merely what she might say to him. He was starting to get over things and didn’t need reminders of his problems. After what he’d been through, nobody knew the difference between dreams and reality better than him. He knew damn well she’d driven him to Wichita, found the school, crossed the river and got into the school grounds. Even the water stains from his unscheduled dip in the river were still on his boots. And most of all he knew what he did alone in the store room was no dream, and nothing Beth could say would change his mind. Of course, she could boil up a whole lot of red mist – and he didn’t want that again, so he simply didn’t give her the opportunity. Communication was restricted to functional to-the-point emails and cursory verbal exchanges, giving the impression he was merely sore about being snubbed for the New York conference.

It came to Thursday, the day before the conference. Beth came to see him – on his blind side so there was no escape.

‘So, are you doing much over weekend?’ she said.

What?
She said it like they were old friends who had never had a cross word between them.

‘What’s it to you?’ Patrick replied.

She shrugged. ‘Suit yourself.’

‘I will. Thanks.’ He carried on typing.

‘You’ve been avoiding me.’

He stopped typing and pulled away from his PC. ‘I think it’s best we don’t talk unless we need to.’

‘Okay, so I said things I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’

‘It’s not the things you said, Beth. It’s the
denying what happened
.’

‘Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree on that one. But until you move to another project you still work for me.’

Patrick lolled his head to one side like a disgruntled child.

‘We have to work together,’ she said. ‘Can we do that?’

‘Like you say, we have to.’

‘We do. So tell me. What are you up to?’

‘Working here tomorrow and in the evening travelling up to see my brother for the weekend.’

‘Brother?’

‘Yes. I have a brother. I told you before.’

‘Oh, yeah. Sure you did. Where did you say he lived?’

‘Seattle.’

‘That’s a heck of a long trip for a weekend.’

‘Just trying to keep in touch, that’s all.’

‘That’s very noble of you.’ Beth nodded slowly and gave him an upside down smile. ‘Just so long as you’re not hoping to go to New York tomorrow.’

‘Is that a question or an order?’

‘Hey. I need you in the office. I know you’re sore about not going to the conference. I’m just telling you it’s fully booked and OrSum doesn’t approve of gatecrashers.’

‘Well that doesn’t matter because I’m not going to New York.’

‘Good. I hope you have a good time in Seattle.’

Patrick forced a slim smile. ‘Thanks. I’ll try.’

‘Good. I have to leave now to pack and catch my flight.’

‘You’re leaving now?’

‘Perks of the job. Afternoon flight, evening meal, hotel stopover.’

‘How nice for you.’

‘Next year, Patrick. Next year.’

Beth left, and the afternoon started simply enough for Patrick. And within an hour he’d completed the overhaul of the Zombie Stomper scoring module.

He grabbed a coffee, surfed the net a little, took a walk, did some research on Seattle, then sat down to do a little more surfing, perhaps check out the sports grounds in Seattle.

It was then, with his mind idling, that he confronted something that had been nagging him for a few days: Beth told him there had been no killing in Wichita. It wouldn’t be too difficult to check that story out, just search on:
Buckthorn High School, Wichita, shooting.

The question was,
Did he really want to?

If his nightmare was now truly over, he was a happy man. Did he want to jeopardize that?

On the other hand, could he really go through the rest of his life not knowing whether he’d killed Rozita at school that day?

And a lifetime of wondering was a lot of wondering. He looked over both shoulders, typed the words in again and hit the Enter key.

He found absolutely nothing. Zilch. That’s to say, there were matches to the school, but no news stories of note, not even any mention of a Red Barrow Parade.

He carried out the search again and again, and tried a different search engine.

Still, he drew a complete blank on the events of that day.

Okay, so Beth had been correct, but how the hell could that be? She had gone down there with him, even persuaded him to go. No, she’d
taken
him there.

Again, nothing made sense. A break from his desk and a fix of caffeine might make him think straighter.

As he approached the vending machine the department secretary nipped in before him, and he took a moment to prepare himself for some sane – if humdrum – chat about weather, bad vending machine coffee, and what they were doing at the weekend. That took a minute, leaving a pause that needed filling.

‘You know when Paulo’s back?’ Patrick asked her.

‘Paulo? Paulo who?’

‘Paulo.’ Patrick pointed over to the desk next to his. ‘Paulo with no hair and thick glasses.’

‘Didn’t you hear? He’s left us, got a new job.’

‘Really? Where?’

‘Down Dallas way, I think.’

‘I thought he was on vacation. It must have been sudden.’

‘It was. He must have got a better offer, I guess. It happens.’

Patrick took a careful sip of coffee and gave the matter some thought. It wasn’t right. Paulo talked like he’d been at OrSum since growing out of short trousers, and seemed a company man through and through till the day he died. So why would he leave at all, let alone so suddenly? Patrick hardly knew him, so hadn’t expected an invite to some passing out ceremony, but a handshake and a chat about why he’d changed his mind about staying at OrSum until the day he retired might have been in order – Paulo seemed a decent guy like that.

‘Are you okay?’ the secretary asked with a sympathetic frown.

‘Oh, sorry. I was miles away. Yes. Hey, it’s been nice talking but I need to get on.’

On the way back he took a detour to Beth’s office. He tried the door. It was locked. He stood still for a few moments, gazing inside the window, starting again to wonder why Beth was denying what he knew to be true, then returned to his desk.

There he surfed the net just a little more, then went for another walk – a longer one this time – stopping off at the ornamental gardens that served as a breathing space for the employees. He sat on a bench in the shade cast by a heavy cloud, and thought some more about the past few weeks.

So many times he’d wondered whether he was going crazy, then found himself being dragged back to sanity, only to find the flipside of the record had been playing all along and he’d had to readjust his notions of what sanity was.

If the dreams where he’d committed those terrible crimes were simply that – dreams – then the last few weeks made some sort of sense. That is, up until Rozita. Where did she fit into his life?

The facts were indisputable in Patrick’s mind. In his dreams he’d met Rozita. She’d had nightmares where she’d committed atrocities. Those atrocities – at least two of them – had actually happened in Patrick’s real world. They definitely had – he’d checked them out on the TV news and on the internet at the time and they were real, with casualty figures and footage and reporters with concerned expressions. He’d told Beth all this and that’s why she’d driven him down to Wichita. And that’s why he’d killed Rozita – at least, the woman who was Rozita to him – the woman he loved. And it
was
love. Whichever world you counted as the real one there was still a great big chunk of him that was still in love with her.

And afterwards Beth had the nerve to say he didn’t kill Rozita? Like it was all some sort of charade to play along with his fantasy?

He had to admit Beth was right about one thing: there were no reports whatsoever about any incident at the Buckthorn High School in Wichita.

So why had she gone along with this ‘charade’ if that’s what she thought it was? Why would you goad someone into killing another person – even lending them your weapon – and then flatly deny it ever happened?

And where was Beth now? Was she really at the GameOn’05 conference like she’d said? And if she was, then why had she been so determined to keep Patrick away?

In the few minutes Patrick had been sitting on the bench the cloud had moved on and he spent a few minutes with the sun warming his face. Then he went back indoors.

‘Why do you need to know that?’ the secretary said to Patrick a few minutes later.

‘She asked me to give her a close of business update on this Zombie Stomper work I’ve been doing.’

‘Just email her – she’s picking up her emails.’

‘It’s a bit complicated to explain it all in an email. It’s just easier to talk to her, that’s all. Of course I’ll try her mobile but it’s better to have a plan B.’

The secretary swivelled her pursed lips to one side but said nothing.

‘Is there some big secret?’ Patrick said. ‘I think she’d appreciate it if you helped here.’

After a huff, the secretary’s fingers waltzed over the keyboard in front of her for a few seconds and stopped. ‘Okay, she’s staying at the Greenway Hotel, I think it’s between…’ She tapped away at the keyboard again, paused, and tapped some more.

‘No worries,’ Patrick said, nodding a thank you. ‘I’ll find it.’

He returned to his PC and checked out the location of the Greenway Hotel. Then he booked an early morning flight to New York.

Then he left to pack.

Only late that evening, when he’d ironed a shirt and dug his suit out, then left to catch the last hour at a jazz club, did something much more disturbing occur to him.

He’d shot Rozita – as truly as he’d done anything else in his life – and just discovered there was no record of it in the whole damn world. But what about the bullet train derailment in Japan and the drinking water sabotage by terrorists in Paris? He’d seen TV footage and found news reports of those.

Or had he?

He doubled back a couple of blocks to an all-night internet café he’d just passed.

He connected and searched again.

And searched.

And searched.

He was going mad all over again. He couldn’t find one single report about either of those incidents.

As far as Patrick’s real world was concerned they had simply never happened.

33

Patrick tried and failed to get some sleep that night, then got up well before dawn to catch his flight to New York.

Once he’d settled and the flight was underway, he found he had exactly the opposite problem. In the relaxed stuffiness of the cabin his head started to loll and he desperately wanted to sleep, but he didn’t dare. Although his nightmares had stopped some time ago it was impossible to tell if or when they would return, so falling asleep in the company of strangers – especially in such close quarters – wasn’t exactly desirable. Patrick figured waking up here sweaty and distressed from a scene where he was bombing, shooting, or knifing people might have a tendency to unnerve fellow passengers.

And so the thoughts and possibilities continued to churn over in his mind to no meaningful conclusion. However much he considered the facts (as he could remember them), and whichever angle he looked at them from, the only conclusion was that he hadn’t any idea what was going on, except that he was a fully paid up member of the screwed as a madman club.

Towards the end of the journey, now groggy from lack of sleep, his thoughts turned to what he was going to do in America’s biggest and brashest city. The glint of early morning sunbeams was just appearing on the horizon as they touched down, and Patrick’s mind turned to working out a plan of sorts. He wasn’t going to storm into Beth’s hotel and confront her – that would simply blow his cover, make him look a fool, and ensure he would find out precisely nothing.

He’d checked the conference schedule on the internet and so had some idea when she’d be leaving the hotel. The plan – such as it was – was to tail her from there to check she did actually attend the conference. After that the idea was pretty open: to keep his ears and eyes open for clues as to why she’d been so adamant he wasn’t to attend. If she simply went to the conference and attended seminars and new product demonstrations and mingled, then fine. At least it might settle some of his concerns, he might be able to assure himself he’d been overreacting.

And what if she didn’t go there and was up to something else? Well, he’d just have to face that battle if and when it happened.

At the airport Patrick followed the throng via the subway to midtown Manhattan, bought a pocket map, and set off on foot to find the Greenway Hotel.

Even at seven o’clock in the morning the metropolis felt like a bubbling cauldron. He had to weave and bob to avoid the streams of pedestrians that all seemed to be on their own individual life or death missions. He very soon learned not to stop moving, lost or not, on pain of getting shunted from behind. The only sounds were traffic and music peppered with the occasional shout because nobody talked – everyone was much too busy for that. By contrast the smells were startlingly varied: food of every variety, traffic fumes, perfumes and body odour, all melding into a concoction that represented civilisation at its zenith.

Of all these it was the smell of food that lingered in Patrick’s nostrils. After five blocks of walking he’d located the Greenway Hotel, and now he desperately need two things: something in his belly and a place to spend a couple of hours catching up on his sleep. But in a place of so much sensory overload where the hell could a person get any peace?

Just as there seemed no answer he came to something of an oasis in a city full to the gills with shops and shoppers. It was a large ornate public library. And there was more. On the street corner nearby was a hand pushcart sheltering underneath a large yellow and blue umbrella.

Patrick approached the man. ‘What have you got?’

‘Dirty water hotdogs or dirty water hotdogs,’ the man replied.

‘What?’

‘I said—’

‘Never mind,’ Patrick said reaching for his wallet. ‘Just give me one. No, give me two. And a Sprite.’

He retreated to a bench at the library wall and spent a few minutes devouring – but hardly tasting – the food.

After eating, he entered the library and was soon sitting at a cosy, out-of-the-way desk by the window on the top floor. He sat just far enough away from the desk so that he could lean forward, fold his arms onto it, and in turn nestle his weary head onto the warm fleshy pillow. He closed his eyes and started the slow, shallow breathing through his nose that told his brain to disengage now.

But although the tiredness made his head throb and it was ecstasy to be able to lock his eyes shut, the final click of the ‘disengage’ switch simply wouldn’t happen. It might have been the usual fear of waking up in a public place in the middle of a nightmare, or it might have been the adrenaline from the chase he knew he was about to start, it might even have been the uncertainty about what he might find out at the end of that chase, but whatever it was, he simply could not sleep, so settled for some quiet rest.

At nine o’clock his phone alarm went off and he spent a few minutes stretching his arms out and rubbing his eyes, then headed for the washroom. There he gave his face and the back of his neck a few stirring splashes of cold water, then left and headed for the Greenway Hotel.

Patrick bought the biggest newspaper available and took up sentry duty behind it across the road from the hotel entrance. He leaned back onto a wall, casually cross-legged, peering over his newspaper knowing full well he resembled a private eye from a 1950s B-movie. But it would do.

Sure enough, just after half past nine he saw Beth emerge from the hotel and get into a cab. He dropped the paper where he was and raced across the road, dodging cars and ignoring irate horns. He jumped into a cab too and told the driver to follow.

‘You okay, buddy?’ the driver said.

Patrick didn’t reply, just kept wide manic eyes on his quarry, and the driver shrugged his shoulders and stayed silent for the rest of the journey.

As they got nearer and nearer to the conference centre Patrick’s throat grew dry and his grip on the door handle tightened. He watched, unblinking, as Beth’s cab stopped outside it, and she got out and climbed the steps up to the foyer.

So perhaps she was just a genuine conference attendee after all – no tricks, no subterfuge, no secret anything. However, Beth had said the corporation were already taking too many people. Really? If there were, then they weren’t staying at the Greenway. And Patrick had come all this way. Surely he could delve a little deeper, if only to be certain there was nothing out of the ordinary happening.

Patrick paid the cab fare, still without a word to the driver – who looked twice at the cash Patrick had put in his hand before tutting and driving off – then slowly ascended the steps. He hid right behind a group of five, then stood outside pretending to be on his phone as they entered the glass doors. His eyes never left the five, and they all had their documentation checked by security before being allowed past the entrance desk. It was then that a sharp ‘excuse me’ made Patrick jolt, almost dropping his phone, before standing aside from the doorway. It was a man in a catering uniform, who walked through the door and past security without so much as a nod.

For twenty minutes Patrick walked either side of the complex to find an alternative – and less guarded – entrance, and failed. There was the front entrance, the staff entrance, and fire escapes that were alarmed. He hovered outside the staff entrance weighing up the pros and cons of setting off the alarm. Sure, all hell would let loose if he got in there, but he’d be inside and perhaps could hide in a washroom until they deemed it a false alarm and carried on. But, then again, perhaps there were cameras and he’d get arrested.

His train of thought was diverted by the few rogue members of catering staff who congregated outside in twos and threes for smoking breaks. The comings and goings filtered them down to three large men. A few words and laughs were exchanged. One mopped his brow, another pulled the front of his sweaty shirt out with fingertips like two joke breasts. It was fairly warm outside in the late summer morning, but obviously it was way hotter in the kitchen. Each of them draped their jackets on a small ornamental wall separating the drive from the complex gardens, and the third of their number lit three cigarettes and dealt two of them out.

Patrick hovered a little closer, but the men weren’t about to walk away from their jackets. He crouched down in the shaded cover of a tree, willing them to move off. Soon their cigarettes would have gone up in smoke and they would put their jackets back on and go in. He swore in frustration, then his eyes fell down to the mass of pebbles surrounding the tree trunk, right underneath him.

The three men suddenly grinned, threw their heads back and let out uninhibited roar of laughter. One stubbed his cigarette out. One of them noticed a noise from behind him – from the bottle recycling area a mere stone’s throw away, and threw a brief glance in that direction. A second man stubbed his cigarette out. One of them nodded to the door. The third man stubbed his cigarette out. They reached for their jackets.

Just then a cacophony of breaking glass made them instinctively turn. Then they all approached the bottle storage area, tentatively at first, then pointing to the shattered glass still settling, not really noticing the two guilty pebbles nearby. Voices were raised, shoulders were shrugged. One of them grabbed a nearby broom and made a half-hearted attempt to sweep the broken glass into a pile.

And soon there were more raised voices as they went to go back to work and found only two jackets where they had placed three just minutes before.

Patrick tried to keep his swagger the inconspicuous side of confident as he strolled past the security desk in the conference foyer. He didn’t look to the staff on the desk, and they didn’t call him back. He headed for the washroom where he took off the catering jacket in the privacy of a toilet cubicle and headed back to the conference’s main auditorium.

It was a sea of suits with the odd flotsam of a woman in a bright dress, the occasional jetsam of a renegade in a light casual jacket.

Patrick thought he mixed pretty well under the circumstances. The sleepless red-eye flight crumples and rough-sleeping sweat stains stood out less than he expected and he started to slip through the crowd like a pickpocket’s hands, drifting along the perimeter, carefully looking to the distance so he would spot Beth before she had a chance to spot him. An A4 conference guide held up to cover most of his face helped too.

He was lucky; he recognized her from behind by the colour and cut of her suit and the flouncy dancing of her hair whenever she moved her head.

For the next six hours Patrick hardly let her out of his sight. He stayed back in the shadows pretending to read sales literature while watching her every gesture and contact and manoeuvre. He saw her at the new software delivery methodology demonstration, at the hands-on tutorial of cutting edge graphics adaptors, at the roadmap for ergonomic games handsets, then followed her along the buffet meal at lunchtime before watching her at more of the same routine games conference displays right up to the end of the conference.

There was no getting over it. Beth was clean. There was nothing whatsoever suspicious about her behaviour or contacts. For her it had been yet another day out of the office; for him just one big useless waste of time.

It came to the conference close-out speech, this time a talk given by one or other of OrSum’s competitors, and it was also decision time for Patrick. Was it worth carrying on with his covert surveillance of Beth? As the whole shebang came to a close and the delegates started congregating around the exit, a few sales representatives in the display booths dotted around the perimeter continued the sales pitch to the bitter end. He had a few minutes to decide. Follow Beth out of the conference? Get in another taxi and check she went to the airport? Make sure she got on the flight to Chicago? None of that was likely to prove or disprove anything.

But it was the only thing he could think of.

He kept back a discreet distance, always behind her, always ready to hide behind another suit should she turn and look in his direction.

It was then he saw her.

Her.

She was standing by a sales booth, and was obviously working for VTA, whoever they were. She was a piece of eye candy to sweeten sales talk in what was a mostly male fraternity. Patrick was a mere five paces away from her but she was concentrating on her sales patter, not taking her eyes off the man she was pitching to. It gave Patrick a nauseous feeling. He breathed long and hard to quell the sickness rising from his stomach. Saliva pooled around his gums, threatening to spill out of his mouth, yet somehow his mouth was arid and sticky.

Her name tag said ‘Jennifer Lane’ but it was definitely her. She was wearing a light blue suit and her hair was raked back and tied in a bun, but the face and the figure were unmistakeable, not least of which was the mole, that beauty spot nestling comfortably to one side of her perfectly shaped nose, a single beautiful blemish on that otherwise perfect warm olive skin of hers.

He froze, staring at her for a few seconds, part of him wanting to hide from her, part of him willing her to look to him, to recognize him. But the only thing that happened was that a feeling of light-headedness washed over him, and with it came the dark threat of a blackout. He bolted, almost fighting his way out into the fresh air, then slipped onto the walkway to the side of the building, where he crouched down underneath the enormous air conditioning fans and covered his head.

The nightmare was not over.