up again.
No!
Headlights lit up the alley.
NO! Please! I’m here! PLEASE!
Nikki’s silver Mercedes glided past them along the alley, then turned slowly into the street.
Rotted, scaly hands coiled themselves around Lisa’s neck from behind. In front of her eyes, the shiny blade glinted, already slick with her blood.
‘Where were we?’
The last noise Lisa Flannagan heard was the monster laughing.
Carter Berkeley III looked down at his expensively manicured nails and resisted the urge to bite them. What the hell was he doing here? He should be talking to the police, not a damn therapist.
Then he reminded himself that the police wouldn’t help him. The police didn’t believe him. No one did.
Carter thought about the two armed bodyguards he had waiting downstairs in the lobby, and tried to feel better. It didn’t work. Then he tried imagining his therapist naked. That did work, at least a little. Dr Nikki Roberts was a deeply sensual woman. Carter pictured her gray, pencil skirt pushed up roughly around her hips, and her prissy white blouse ripped open. He imagined her …
‘Carter? Are you with me?’
Her voice made him startle, then blush, then scowl. A highly successful investment banker, handsome, educated and rich, Carter was used to having people jump to his command and scuttle to gratify his every desire. Especially women. He did not appreciate being called out like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Tell me again what you think you saw last night,’ Dr Roberts said.
‘I don’t “think” I saw anything,’ Carter snapped. ‘I know what I saw, OK? I am not crazy.’ He ran a harassed hand through his thick blond hair.
‘I never suggested you were.’ The therapist’s voice was calm. ‘But even sane people can be mistaken some of the time, can’t they? I know I often am.’
‘Yeah, well I’m not,’ Carter growled.
Jesus. They’d all be sorry when he was dead. When these bastards finally got him and strung him up with electrical cord and beat him to death in some godforsaken dungeon. They’d all wish they’d listened then: the police, Dr Roberts, all of them.
Nikki leaned forward earnestly while her patient rambled on, expounding the same conspiracy theory he’d been peddling since he first started seeing her, more than a year ago. Carter Berkeley believed he was being stalked by unnamed assassins. He never offered any reason for this, still less any evidence, other than the elaborate imaginings of his brilliant but tortured mind. And yet, no matter how many logical paths Nikki led him down, Carter’s paranoid fears persisted. In fact, if anything, they were getting worse. Only last week he had informed Nikki solemnly that Trey Raymond, the sweet boy who ran her office and manned the front desk at Century Plaza, was a spy ‘working for the Mexicans’.
‘You can’t trust him. What do you really know about Trey, Dr Roberts?’
‘What do you know about him, Carter?’ Nikki countered.
‘Enough. I know enough,’ Carter pronounced, cryptically. Although, again, he offered no evidence to back this up.
I’m not making him better, Nikki thought sadly. I might actually be making him worse. Why am I even here?
She knew the answer to that, deep down. She was here – at work, in her office, seeing patients – because she had nowhere else to be. Nowhere else except home, alone, with no Doug, and no answers. That prospect was quite unbearable.
Unbearable …
The word took Nikki back.
It was only a year ago, but it felt like a lifetime.
Doug was smiling at her across the table at Luigi’s, wolfing down his spaghetti vongole as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, talking at a million miles an hour, the way he always did when the two of them were together.
‘“It’s unbearable.” What do people even mean when they say that?’ Doug asked Nikki. ‘My patients say it to me all the time: “It’s unbearable, Doc. I can’t bear it.” As if they have any alternative.’
Nikki and Doug Roberts had been married for seven years and together for almost three times that long. But the thrill of each other’s company, of talking and sharing ideas and feelings and experiences, never faded. No lunch date with Doug was ever dull.
‘I guess they’re speaking metaphorically,’ Nikki observed, toying with her own crab salad. Luigi’s food was delicious, but even the salads were rich. Doug might be incapable of gaining weight, but since she turned thirty-eight Nikki found increasingly that she had to watch her figure. There was nothing worse than thinking you might be pregnant at long last, only to realize that your rounded belly was actually ugly, middle-aged fat.
‘They mean that they don’t want to bear it. It hurts. Don’t forget, these are desperate addicts we’re talking about.’
‘You’re right.’ Doug nodded, slurping down the last of his pasta before reaching for the bread basket. ‘I guess I just get frustrated sometimes. Because, at the end of the day, it really is that black and white. Do you want to get better or not? Do you want to die or not? That’s it. That’s the choice.’
To an outsider, Doug Roberts might sound compassionless toward his junkie patients, but Nikki knew that he was anything but. He’d raced to meet her for lunch today directly from the latest meth and opioid clinic he was busy setting up in Venice with his good friend from med school, Haddon Defoe. Helping LA’s most hardened, most helpless addicts had become Doug Roberts’ passion, his life’s work.
‘Anyway, enough about me.’ He looked at Nikki lovingly. ‘How’s your morning been, sweetheart? Did you do another test?’
‘Not yet.’ Nikki looked down shyly at her half-eaten food. ‘Maybe tonight.’
‘Why not now?’ asked Doug.
‘Because. If it’s negative and I feel shitty, it might distract me from my afternoon clients,’ said Nikki.
Doug reached across the table and squeezed her hand. ‘It could be positive, honey. No reason why it shouldn’t be.’
‘Yup,’ Nikki forced a smile. ‘No reason.’
Except that the last six times we tried, it was negative. And with every month that passes my eggs are getting older and more worn out. And some cruel god out there, some malicious force beyond our control, seems to have decided that we’ll never become parents.
She and Doug had everything else, after all. A wonderful, loving marriage. Wealth. Status. Meaningful, rewarding careers. Great friends. Great family. In what alternate universe
