Praying for Sleep

21

“Where’d you find this?”

Under the bed, up a tree, in between Mona the Moaner’s legs…

Peter Grimes didn’t respond and to his great relief the hospital director seemed to forget the question.

“My God. He’s been talking to DMH for three months? Three fucking months! And look at all of this. Look!” Adler seemed almost more astonished at the volume of paperwork that Richard Kohler had generated than by the contents of those papers.

Grimes noticed that his boss was touching the sheets rather gingerly, as if afraid of getting his fingerprints on them. This was perhaps Grimes’s imagination but it made the young doctor extremely uncomfortable-largely because it seemed like an excellent idea, one he wished had occurred to him earlier, before he’d left the evidence of his identity imprinted all over the documents.

Adler looked up, his thoughts hovering, and to keep him from asking again where the papers had come from, Grimes read from the sheet that happened to be faceup in front of the two men. “ ‘Dear Dr. Kohler: Further to your proposal dated September 30 of this year, we are pleased to inform you that the Finance Division of the State Department of Mental Health has provisionally agreed to fund a program for inpatient treatment of severely psychotic individuals according to the guidelines you have set forth in the aforementioned proposal…’ ”

“Goddamn him,” Adler interjected with such vehemence that Grimes was afraid to stop reading.

“ ‘A preliminary budget of 1.7 million dollars covering the first year’s financial needs for your program has been provisionally approved. As agreed, funding will come from existing allocations to the state mental-health hospital system, in order to bypass the necessity of a public referendum.’ ”

But stop he did when Adler muttered “bypass” as if it were an obscenity and snatched away the sheet to read the final paragraph himself. “ ‘This is to confirm that your proposal is conditioned upon approval by the Board of Physicians of the State Department of Mental Health, following your final presentation of the six case studies and verbatims upon which your proposal was based (Allenton, Grosz, Hrubek, McMillan, Green, Yvenesky). A representative of the Board will contact you directly regarding times for oral presentations of those case studies… ’ ”

Adler slammed the paper to the desk and Grimes decided that, while his fingerprint paranoia was perhaps misplaced, the hospital director should be somewhat more careful. If Kohler noticed damaged pages he might complain of a suspected theft-to which, Grimes was painfully aware, there’d been a witness. A half hour before, the assistant had summoned an irritable Slavic janitor to open the door of Kohler’s office. Not a seasoned burglar, Grimes had neglected to send him away and had failed to notice that the squat man planted himself on the threshold to watch with amusement the young doctor’s heist from start to finish.

“Our money. He’s getting our money, on top of everything else! And, look at this. Look at it, Grimes. He’s using our patients to fuck us! He’s selling us out-our patients, our money-for his program.”

Adler grabbed the phone and made a call.

As he gazed out the window, Grimes considered Kohler’s scheme and he was both shocked and impressed. Kohler had used Michael Hrubek as a shining example of how his combination of drugs, delusion therapy and milieu resocialization treatment could produce dramatic improvements in chronic, dangerous schizophrenic patients. The Department of Mental Health had agreed to give Kohler a great deal of money and let him create a little fiefdom-carved out of Marsden hospital itself, at Adler’s expense no less. But of course if Hrubek wasn’t captured quietly, if he injured or killed someone, the DMH Board of Physicians would abort Kohler’s plan as unworkable and dangerous.

Still, it was an admirable scheme, Grimes thought, and he regretted playing a part in the downfall of a talented man, one who probably would’ve been a better choice to hitch his star to-if of course Kohler’s career had survived this evening. Which it surely would not.

The rain spattered the greasy windows. A huge wail of wind ended in a crash of plate glass from somewhere in the courtyard below. Several other patients had joined Patient 223-81 and a chorus of frightened wailing filled the halls. Grimes looked absently out the window and tried to avoid thinking about the effect on patients if a tornado touched down nearby.

Adler slammed down the phone and looked at him. “He’s not at the halfway house. Some son of a bitch tipped him off.”

“Who, Kohler?”

“He got a call a couple hours ago. He’s out there. He’s after Hrubek right now.”

“By himself?”

“He has to go by himself. He has to get Hrubek to come back like a quiet little lamb. Then he’ll claim he simply walked up to him and asked him to come home. And the son of a bitch will. After Kohler hits him with a taser or a tranquilizer gun… Shit! The break-in.”

“I’m sorry?” the assistant asked cautiously.

“Security said somebody broke into the pharmacy tonight.”

“Right. Well, they said it was a car accident, looked like. We won’t know till morning if anything’s missing.”

“Oh, something’s missing, you can bet on it. That son of a bitch lifted a tranquilizer gun. He’s going to…” Adler spat out, “Jesus, he’s going to make Hrubek look like the fucking little puppy I’ve said he is all along. Jesus Lord.”

Grimes impersonated a fish again, chewing water urgently, and wondered aloud what they might do next.

“I want to be ready to preempt the press. If this…” He tried out several words for size before saying, “If this situation becomes critical-”

“If it’s a worst case.”

“Yes, if it’s worst-case, we’ll have to go public immediately. I want a release. Write it up-”

“A press release?”

“What else would I mean? Can you draft one up? Subject, verb. Subject, verb. That too much for you? And let’s go over it, you and me. Say that, unbeknownst to staff, no, say unbeknownst to administrators and officials, a private physician with privileges here gave Hrubek access to all wards, which allowed him to escape. Say ‘with privileges’; don’t say ‘attending.’ Let’s confuse the morons. Then say that this was in defiance-”

“ Defiance?”

“-of clear instructions that any transfer of Section 403 patients must be approved by the office of the director before they go into any milieu, group, or off-ward therapy.”

Instructions, yes, well, his assistant stammered. But there were no instructions to that effect, were there? Oh, it made sense, yes. There probably should be, yes. But at the moment there were none.

“The memo,” Adler said impatiently. “Don’t you remember? The 1978 memo?”

Grimes glanced out the window. Adler was referring to a directive that required notice to the director’s office before criminally insane patients could be moved into medium- or low-security wings, even temporarily-if, for instance, the showers on E Ward weren’t working. While this was a rule, yes, it was observed only by the most (Grimes allowed himself the diagnosis) anal-retentive of the doctors at Marsden.

“This seems a little…” Now words evaded Assistant Grimes.

“And put a copy in here. What’s the matter?”

“I just… The issue isn’t really access, is it?”

“Well, what is the issue?” Adler said this with a sneer in his voice and Grimes had an urge to call him a schoolmarm, which certainly would have cost him his job faster than jokes about rape.

“Kohler doing delusion therapy. That’s what set Hrubek off. That’s what we can hang him with.”

This was, Adler reflected, a good point. Hrubek’s roaming the halls near the morgue was essentially the orderlies’ fault. They missed his medicine stockpile and they were careless with Callaghan’s body. But Kohler’s sin, as Grimes accurately pointed out, was far more serious. He had somehow awakened Hrubek’s desire to escape. The means were largely irrelevant. Those fantasies ought to have been tucked away inside Hrubek, tucked away very deeply-or, better yet, behaviorially conditioned out of him. Say what you might, electrodes and food could turns rats into quite model animals. Why, witness young Grimes…

Still, the hospital director assessed, Kohler’s errors would be tough to sell to the public-simple people who would want simple answers in the event that Hrubek knifed a trooper to death or raped a girl. He thanked Grimes for his insight and then added, “Let’s just lay the access issue at our friend’s feet, shall we? By the time it’s all sorted out, he’ll be everybody’s whipping boy, and no one’ll really care exactly what he did.”

And his assistant, pleased to have been patted on the head, nodded instantly.

“Don’t be too specific. We have to massage the facts. Say, because of his involvement in Kohler’s program Hrubek was free to get into the freezer, the morgue and the loading dock. None of the other Section 403 criminally insane have that access. That’s true, isn’t it?”

It was, Grimes confirmed.

“But for his involvement in the program he never would’ve escaped. Sine qua non.”

“You want me to say that?”

“Well, not ‘sine qua non,’ obviously. You know what I’m saying? You get the picture? And don’t use Kohler’s name. Not at first. Make it sound like we’re concerned about, you know…”

“His reputation?”

“Good. Yes, his reputation.”

The only mechanic answering the phone tonight was in Roenville, about fifteen miles west on Route 236. The man chuckled and answered that sure he had a truck but it’d be four or five hours before he could get somebody over to Ridgeton.

“Already got three roads out in this part of the county alone. And my men’re getting a wreck off Putnam Valley Highway. Injuries. Mess of ’em. Hell of a night. Just one hell of a night. So, you wanna go on the list?”

Lis said, “That’s okay,” and hung up. She then called the Ridgeton Sheriff ’s Department.

“Why, hello, Mrs. Atcheson,” the dispatcher answered respectfully. The woman’s daughter was in Lis’s class; parents tended to address her as formally as their children did. “How you weatherin’ the storm tonight? So to speak. Ha. It’s something, isn’t it?”

“We’re getting by. Say, Peg, is Stan around?”

“Nup, not a soul here. Everybody’s out. Even Fred Bertholder, and he’s got the flu like nobody oughta have. And they didn’t cancel that rock concert like they oughta’ve. Can you believe that? A lotta youngsters got stranded. What a mess.”

“Have you heard anything from Marsden hospital, about Hrubek?”

“Who’d that be?”

“That man who escaped tonight.”

“Oh, him. You know, Stan called the state police about that just ’fore he went out. He’s in Massachusetts.”

“Hrubek? In Massachusetts?”

“Yes’m.”

“You’re sure?”

“They tracked him to the state line then our boys had to call off the search. Handed it over to the Mass troopers. They’re top-notch at finding people even though they don’t have any sense of humor. That’s what Stan says.”

“Have they…? Have they found him?”

“I don’t know. The storm’ll hit there in an hour, hour and a half, so I don’t suppose a drugged-up psycho’s a real high priority but that’s me speaking not them. They might not take to madmen from out of state. Being so serious and all. You know, Mrs. Atcheson, been meaning to speak to you about that C-minus Amy got.”

“Could we talk about it next week, Peg?”

“Absolutely. It’s just that Irv coached her like a demon, and he reads all the time. Knows his literature, and I don’t mean just schlock either. He read Last of the Mohicans even before it was a movie.”

“Next week?”

“Absolutely. Good night to you, Mrs. Atcheson.”

She hung up and wandered out to Portia, who stood sipping a Coke on a small screened-in porch off the kitchen. They didn’t use the place much for entertaining. The sun never reached it, and the view of the yard and lake was all but cut off by a tall growth of juniper.

“This is pretty,” her sister commented, running her hand along an elaborate railing of mahogany, carved in the shapes of flowers, vines and leaves. The wind blew an aerated mist of icy rain toward the house and the women stepped back suddenly.

“That’s right, you haven’t seen it.”

Lis had noticed the balustrade at an upstate demolition site and knew at once that she had to have it. In one of her brashest moments she’d laid quick, cold dollars into the ponderous hands of the wrecking-crew captain. It was probably an illicit deal, for he turned his back as she dragged off the delicate sculpture, which she then spent another two thousand dollars incorporating into the railing here.

Friends wondered why such a beautiful piece of woodwork accented a dark, out-of-the-way porch like this. But the carving had one frequent admirer: Lis herself spent many nights here, bedded down in a chaise longue she’d commandeered for the times when the insomnia was particularly bad. The porch was open on three sides. If there was wind the breezes flowed over her as she lay beneath the blankets and if there was rain the sound was hypnotic. Even when Owen was away on business, she’d often come down here. She supposed it was risky, being alone and so exposed to the night. Yet the game of finding sleep is a crucible of trade-offs and an insomniac can’t afford the luxury of separating slumber and vulnerability.

“I heard,” Portia said. “No tow truck?”

“Nope.”

“Can we walk?”

“Two miles? In this rain and wind?” Lis laughed. “Rather not.”

“What about Hrubek?”

“Supposedly in Massachusetts.”

“So why don’t we just sit it out? Get a fire going and tell ghost stories?”

If only they’d left twenty minutes sooner… Angrily Lis remembered Kohler. If he hadn’t stopped by, they’d be at the Inn by now. She felt a chill thinking that it was as if Michael Hrubek had sent an agent to detain her.

Portia asked, “Well? We’re staying?”

Overhead the wind sliced through the treetops with a hissing sound-the noise electric trains make-of motion not propulsion. The rain pounded the soaked earth.

“No,” Lis said finally, “we’re leaving. Let’s get some shovels and dig out the car.”

Animals are far easier than humans to pursue for long distances, for three reasons: They eat whenever they’re hungry. They don’t control elimination of wastes. They have limited options for locomotion.

The world at large, Trenton Heck reflected, may have considered Michael Hrubek an animal but so far his journey west had all the trappings of a trip by a damn clever human being.

Heck was in despair. The driving rain had virtually erased all the airborne scent and he could find no other evidence of Hrubek’s trail. Emil had quartered again and again over the highway and surrounding fields for an hour and had found nothing.

But now, just outside of Cloverton, Heck found that the madman had lapsed momentarily. His animal’s impulse to eat had overcome his need for evasion.

At first Heck didn’t think anything of the Hostess doughnut box lying in the driveway of the old gas station. Then he noticed it wasn’t empty. This said to him that it couldn’t have been there more than a half hour. No self-respecting raccoon, he concluded, would let pastry sit uneaten for longer than that.

As Heck and Emil walked up to the box, the dog immediately tensed. Heck knew this had nothing to do with a canine fondness for sugar and grease, and he scanned the ground carefully. There! Hrubek’s boot prints, just visible on the concrete apron near the pumps. All right! His heart thudded at this good luck. Just west of the station Heck found a tread mark in the dirt beside the highway. For some reason Hrubek was now keeping to the shoulder and in the rain it was easy to follow the tread by sight. Heck and Emil returned to the truck and drove west. He saw that the track continued only for another hundred yards or so then cut suddenly across the highway, aiming directly for a long driveway or private road.

Heck stopped the truck and got Emil harnessed up, once again short-lined because of Heck’s fear of the traps. He picked up the scent immediately and together man and dog crashed through brush, the hound in heaven-his coat glistening with misty rain, his lungs filling with great gulps of cool air, his familiar master beside him, his simple dog’s mind and solid body doing what God had created them for.

As they ran, Heck remembered another dog who loved fields, Sally Dodgeson’s St. Anne-Emil’s predecessor.

Sal was a smarter dog than Emil and with a faster gait and lither step. Those last two qualities, however, had been her downfall; she developed the curse of large working dogs, hip dysplasia. Heck retired her early and spent the bulk of his-and Jill’s-sparse savings on operations. The surgery was not successful and it was a terrible thing to watch Sal, a young invalid, staring at the fields she’d loved to run through. Often she made pathetic attempts to escape and Heck would have to go retrieve the struggling animal, carrying her in his arms, his heart as broken as hers. The condition and the pain that accompanied it grew worse.

On the last visit to the vet Heck himself took the syringe from the doctor and injected the lethal dosage. Oh, it was a hard thing to do, and he wept, but Trenton Heck would let no stranger put down a dog of his.

When he returned home, Jill asked, too improvidently for his taste, “Would you cry for me that way?”

Heck was stung but he told her the truth and said of course he would. But the timing of his response was somehow off and Jill got huffy. She went out that night with her girlfriends, a batch of fun-loving waitresses, and he mourned alone, which was his preference anyway. The next morning at seven, Jill having returned just three hours before, Heck arose by himself and went to the breeder to talk about bloodhound pups.

Heck had used a classic dog-handler’s trick to pick Emil out of a litter of five mournful-looking, irresistibly adorable bloodhound puppies. The breeder set up a piece of quarter-inch plywood next to the pen where the young pups were playing. In the middle of the board was a tiny hole. Heck crept up to the wood sheet and, unseen by the litter, watched through the hole as they rolled and nipped and tried out their long legs. In a few minutes one of the puppies lifted his head with a spark of curiosity in his eyes-a glint clearly visible despite the folds of skin that nearly obscured them. He tilted his head back and looked around then stumbled toward the hole behind which was Trenton Heck’s right eye. The dog sniffed the alien scent for two minutes before becoming bored and returning to romp with his sorrowful-faced brothers and sisters.

The next day Heck did the same thing and again the ungainly puppy, tripping over his huge ears and paws, was drawn to investigate-while his siblings slept or played, oblivious to the intruder. When, the next week, the dog passed the scent test three for three, Trenton Heck stood, scooped up the dog and, one-handed, wrote a very large check to the breeder.

When Emil was twelve months old, the training started. Heck used only inductive training-dispensing rewards, never punishing. During the first six months of this work Heck’s slacks stank of the meaty dog treats. Then he weaned the dog off food and onto praise as a reward tool. The training was a thousand times harder on Heck than on Emil, who had only to learn what commands to obey and to grasp how those words related to using his nose to do what it wanted to anyway.

Heck on the other hand had to make sure the training remained fun. Smart dogs like Emil get bored easily and Heck was forced to devise ways to keep the scenting interesting but feasible. Knowing when to stop for the day, figuring out when Emil was frustrated or horny or in a bad mood-those were his tasks. He had to pick scent articles that were challenging but not impossible (a scrap of leather was too easy; Bic pens and Jill’s trashy romance novels too hard).

Heck, who at the time had a full-time trooper job and a wife who ate up much of his time, would rise at 4:00 a.m. to train his hound-a hardship for him but not for Emil, who woke immediately and joyously, knowing he was on his way to the fields. Oh, Trenton Heck worked. He knew the old tracking adage: “If you’re not handling the dog right, it’s your fault. If the dog’s not tracking right, it’s your fault.”

But Emil did track right. He had a remarkable nose-one of the few, in his vet’s estimation, that were two or three million times more sensitive than a human nose. He learned fast and the hound so exploited his nature that Heck, whose marriage was rocky and whose job was going nowhere, occasionally felt bad watching this astonishing dog and lamented that he himself had no consuming skill or drive to match Emil’s.

After six months of training, Emil could follow a mile-and-a-half trail in record time, shaming the German shepherds that were the troop’s unofficial trackers. By age two Emil had his American Kennel Club TD classification and a month later Heck took him up to Ontario, where he was awarded his Tracking Dog Excellent certification by pursuing a stranger over a thousand-yard trail that was five hours old, never hesitating on the turns or the cross-tracks meant to confuse the hound. After the TDE rating Emil more or less joined Haversham’s troop, to which Heck was assigned, though the state technically had no budget for dogs. The troop did, however, spring for membership (dog and man) in the National Police Bloodhound Association, which two years ago gave Emil the famed Cleopatra Award for finding a lost boy who’d fallen into the Marsden River and been swept downstream in a heavy current, after which he’d wandered deep into a state park. The trail, through water, marsh, cornfields and forest, was 158 hours old-a record for the state.

Heck had taken to reading a lot about bloodhounds and believed that Emil was the descendant (spiritual, there being no true lineage) of the greatest of all tracking bloodhounds, Nick Carter, who was run by Captain Volney Mullikin down in Kentucky at the turn of the century, a dog credited with more than 650 finds resulting in criminal convictions.

Emil himself had put a fair number of people behind bars. Much tracking work involves trailing suspects from crime scenes or linking weapons or loot to defendants. Emil, because of his AKC papers and his solid history of tracking, was a permitted “witness,” though he appeared on the stand through his spokesman, one Trenton Heck. Most of the dog’s assignments, however, involved locating escapees like Michael Hrubek.

Tonight in fact it was the anticipated triumph in tracking down the psycho and earning Heck his reward that preoccupied him as they pushed through the brush. He should have had his mind on what he was doing though for he didn’t see the spring trap until Emil stepped right onto it.

“No!” he cried, jerking back hard on the line, pulling the hound off balance. “Oh, no! What’d I do?” But Emil had already fallen sideways onto the large Ottawa Manufacturing trap. He yelped in pain.

“Oh, Jesus, Emil…” Heck dropped to his knees over the animal, thinking about splints and the emergency vet clinics, frighteningly aware that he had no bandages or tourniquets to staunch the flow of blood from a severed vein or artery. As he reached for his dog, however, his trooper instincts took over and he realized that the trap might be a diversion.

He’s waiting for me-it’s a trick!

Heck flicked rain from his eyes, lifting the Walther, and spun about, wondering from which direction the madman would come charging at him. He paused momentarily, debated and when he heard nothing turned back to Emil. He’d have to risk an attack; he wasn’t going to leave the dog unattended. Holstering the gun he reached for Emil, Heck’s hands shaking and his heart only now beginning to pulse quickly in the aftermath of the fright. But the dog suddenly shook himself snootily and stood upright, unharmed.

What had happened? Heck gazed at the animal, who, as far as he could tell, had landed square on the burnished trigger plate of the trap.

Then he understood-the jaws had been sprung before Emil stepped on the trigger.

“Oh, Lord.” He gripped the dog around his neck and hugged him hard. “Lord.” The dog eased back and shook his head, embarrassment now piled on top of his indignation.

Heck crouched down and examined the trap. It was identical to those at the shop on Route 118. Hrubek obviously had set it. But how had it been sprung? There were two possibilities, Heck supposed. First, that a small animal, its head lower than the steel jaws, had bounded onto the trigger and set it off. The second possibility was that someone had come by, seen the trap and popped it with a stick or rock. This, Heck decided, was the likely explanation-because next to the trap he saw several bootprints in the mud. One set was Hrubek’s. But someone else had been here as well. He looked closely at the prints and his heart plummeted.

“Oh, damn!” he whispered bitterly.

He recognized the sole. He’d seen these prints-of expensive L. L. Bean outdoorsman’s boots-earlier in the evening, not far from the overhang where he and Emil had picked up Hrubek’s westward trail, miles back.

So I’ve got some competition here.

Who is it? he wondered. A plainclothes trooper or cops maybe. Or more likely-and more troubling-a bounty hunter like Heck himself, seeking the reward money. Heck thought of Adler. Had he sent an orderly to find the patient? Was the hospital director playing a game of ends against the middle?

With the stake being Heck’s reward money?

He rose and, clutching his gun, examined the two men’s tracks carefully. Hrubek had continued south along the private road. The other tracker was coming from that direction and heading back toward Route 236. He’d done so after Hrubek-some of his prints covered the madman’s-and he’d been running, as if he’d learned where Hrubek was headed and was in pursuit. Heck followed the L. L. Bean prints to the highway and found where the man had stopped and studied a tread mark, left recently by a heavy car. The tracker had then sprinted to the shoulder of Route 236, where he’d climbed into a vehicle and hurried west, spinning his wheels furiously. From the tread marks it was clear that the man was driving a truck with four-wheel drive.

The scene told him that Michael Hrubek had got himself a vehicle and was probably just minutes ahead of this other pursuer.

Heck looked around the turbulent night sky and saw a distant flash of silent lightning. He wiped the rain from his face. He debated for a long moment and finally concluded he had no choice. Even Emil couldn’t track prey inside a moving car. Heck would speed west down the highway, relying on luck to reveal some sign of the prey’s whereabouts.

“I’ll leave the belt off, Emil,” Heck said, leading the dog into the pickup. “But you sit tight. We’re gonna waste some fuel here.”

The hound sank down on Heck’s outstretched leg, and as the truck sped onto the highway with a gassy roar, closed his droopy eyelids and dozed off.