Chapter Seventeen
Dr. Sheila’s apartment building is ridiculously easy to get into. There’s no doorman, so Jack’s able to breeze right in. He looks around the simple lobby. He thought Dr. Sheila could afford much better than this. Maybe the crazy business isn’t as booming as he thought it was, though the need is definitely there. More CEO’s needed to get their heads checked out.
There’s a barred door separating the stairs leading up to the apartments. It’s locked. Jack waits around for a few moments, making sure to stay out of view of the cameras that he can clearly identify in the corners of the ceiling. His opportunity comes when a petite older woman makes her way down the stairs with her cane. She opens the door, struggling under the weight.
“Let me help you,” Jack says, opening the door wider for her.
“Thank you, young man,” she says, then cuts through the lobby out of the front door.
Jack holds his smile until she’s gone, then bounds up the stairs. His head is still swimming from the cocaine. It gives him a jacked up feeling of invincibility. Jack missed feeling like this, like nothing could touch him, and he could get away with anything.
The coke hasn’t entirely gotten rid of the voices in his head like Jack had hoped. It only made them louder, more demanding. Not knowing who to trust is slowly driving him insane. He’s well aware of that. The only person that can give him the answers he needs is himself. To access the memories locked away in his mind, he needs Dr. Sheila.
Jack’s never been to Dr. Sheila’s apartment before. He’s memorized the address from the self-help books she used to send him all the time. He stops in front of her apartment door, trying to decide what he should say. Should he claim to be a delivery man? No, then she would just look out of the peephole and see that he’s not.
He could be up front, announce that he’s Jack Larsen, and that he’s having an emergency. He’s her patient, she’ll have to open up.
Or, she’ll call the cops right away.
Jack could kick the door down. In his drug addled mind, it sounds like a good idea. Without giving it much more thought, he lifts his leg, and hurls his foot into the door. The latch rips away from the frame, and the door swings open. Jack realizes it wasn’t locked to begin with.
He walks in and sees Dr. Sheila fumbling through her purse, a look of pure terror on her face. Finally, she locates her pepper spray, and drops the purse to her feet. She holds the tiny vial in front of her, trembling.
“Hello, doctor,” Jack says, cockily.
Dr. Sheila lowers the pepper spray so she can study him more closely. “Jack?” She breathes out sharply through her nose, her fear replaced by annoyance. “I would’ve let you in. You didn’t have to kick my door in.”
Jack closes the door behind him, taking a moment to make it flush with the frame. No one’s in the hallway, which is good.
“You would’ve let me in?” Jack eyes the pepper spray she’s still gripping. “You’re not just saying that now that I’m already in?”
She gives him a half-cocked smile, the one she gives when she’s had enough of his shit. “No, Jack. I’m glad you came to me. You’re my patient. Your well-being is my number one priority.” She makes a big show of picking up her purse, and stowing the pepper spray inside. She gestures to the chic living room clad in white and dark purple, just like her office. “Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Would you like some tea?”
“No, thank you,” Jack says, cringing at the absurdity of this exchange. This is not the time to be talking about oolong.
“Where have you been?” Sheila asks.
“I don’t want to get into all that,” Jack says. “We need to move fast.”
“You’re using.” She squints at him, studying his face. “I can see it in your eyes.”
Jack jerks his gaze away. “I need it to level out. Now’s not the time, doctor. I need coke to think.”
“That’s rationalization.”
“This isn’t a session.” Jack hardens his face at her. His hand goes to the knife he carries in his pocket. He hopes he doesn’t have to use it. “I need something very specific from you. I need to know what happened the night my father died.”
Dr. Sheila places a compassionate hand on his knee. “That’s what everyone’s trying to figure out. If you cooperate with the police-“
“No. I need to know what I saw, what I witnessed. What I did.”
Dr. Sheila curtly shakes her head. “I know what you’re asking, Jack. I told you, I’m not doing memory work again.”
“You will.” Jack’s voice is so gruff and low, he barely recognizes it.
Dr. Sheila purses her lips with resolve. “It’s too dangerous. You go away, far away. It’s not like with my other clients. You turn into someone else. I won’t subject myself to that.”
“If I don’t find out the truth, I’ll die,” Jack says. “I can’t take this anymore.” He leans into her, she cowers back. “Do it.”
“I can help you.” Dr. Sheila backs away slowly. “Let me call someone who can help you.”
“No.” Panic explodes in Jack’s stomach, causing his hand to thrust out and grab her wrist. He holds her tightly in place while he takes the knife out of his pocket. He holds the blade up for her to see. Dr. Sheila begins to tremble, and her skin becomes clammy. It’s strange to see the usually confident doctor in this state of emotion. Usually, she gives very little indication that she’s human. “You’ll do it,” Jack growls. “Or I kill you.”
“You wouldn’t.”
“I’m on the edge here, doctor, looking over the side. Don’t think I’m bluffing. That would be a fatal mistake.” He brings the knife closer to her face, twisting the blade to mime what he’d do to her.
Dr. Sheila agrees to cooperate. Jack watches her closely as he lies on the couch, making himself comfortable. Though she’s recovered most of her composure, she’s still pale. Jack is mostly sure he wouldn’t have gone through with it, he wouldn’t have killed her.
“I’ll try to stay in control,” Jack says, hoping to calm her nerves.
“No, you won’t.”
He looks at her pleadingly. “I wouldn’t have come here if I wasn’t desperate. Thank you for helping me.” He turns the knife around in his hand, holding the blade, and offers her the handle. “Take it. Don’t let me hurt you.”
Dr. Sheila puffs out her chest stubbornly while she eyes the blade. Finally, she takes it from him, nodding her head.
“Okay, Jack.”
Dr. Sheila asks Jack to envision his mind as a house with many floors and rooms. She leads him through a guided meditation that has him winding down stairways and inspecting dark corners. With his brain cells still fried from the coke, he finds it easier than normal to fall into a relaxed state. Dr. Sheila counts down from one hundred, her voice low and gentle. Each number buries his conscious mind more deeply, allowing the subconscious to come forward.
“You come to a heavy wooden door at the end of a hallway. Behind that door is Club 64, the night your father was murdered. Open the door, Jack.”
Jack uses his psychic arms to open the door. She’s right. It’s heavy. His muscles strain as he pushes it.
“What do you see?”
“I have her bent over the sink. I’m pulling her hair, fucking her from behind.”
“Who? The waitress?”
“Chloe,” Jack growls. Only she doesn’t look like she did that night. Her face is grainy and blurred, like the picture Joel had shown him. “I pick her up and sit her on the sink, and start fucking her again. That’s how it ripped off the wall.” The memories tumble and merge together. Nothing happens exactly chronologically. A large, boulder like figure appears. “The bouncer’s here. He’s telling me to leave. He grabs me by the shirt, holds his fist in my face.”
“What do you do?”
“I leave. She comes with me.”
“Chloe? That’s new. Where do you two go?”
Jack tries to concentrate, to make sense of the jumbled images fluttering in his mind’s eye. “We go to my father’s office. She says I’m lying about having a yacht. I’m going to prove her wrong.”
“You’re at your father’s office now, Jack. Is Chloe with you?”
“She’s on the street, filming me.”
“What happens in the office?”
The darkness grows deeper. Jack feels like he’s on a level closer to hell. It’s hot. He’s starting to sweat. He attempts to produce the sound he hears in his mind. It’s guttural and wet.
“What does that mean? That gargling?” Dr. Sheila asks.
“That’s the sound he’s making. He’s choking on his own blood.”
“What are you doing?”
“Having a drink.”
“Was he like that when you got there?”
Jack struggles to focus, to put the pieces of the puzzle together.
“Is there anyone else there, Jack? Are you alone?”
Jack scans the room in his brain. Every corner is dripping with darkness. He feels alone. He starts to panic. The weight of his own body is unbearable. His muscles flex as if he’s on his hands and knees, crawling through thick mud. Every movement requires considerable exertion. His throat seizes up. He’s choking, not from lack of air, but from the thick, iron tinged substance that oozes slowly down his throat. His father materializes in front of him. Jack Larsen Senior is a mangled version of himself. Veins that should be neatly contained are opened and leaking, pumping blood meant for the heart into the carpet beneath the body. Jack looks at his own hands. They are covered with blood, and they’re gripping the gun. In the next instant, Jack is lying in that thick puddle of blood. The soaked carpet squishes beneath him. He tries to touch his head, but there’s nothing there above his nose, just empty space. There’s someone in the leather armchair. Their legs are crossed casually. They’re clinking the ice cubes in a tumbler filled with brown liquid.
“Wake up, Jack.”
Pain cuts through the darkness, sharp and raw, across Jack’s throat. It forces his eyes open. He’s out of the mansion in his brain, and back in Dr. Sheila’s apartment. But he’s not lying on the couch. Dr. Sheila is on the floor beneath him. She has the knife against his throat.
“Jack,” she says, testing his consciousness.
Jack blinks, shakes his head, trying to wake up completely. Dr. Sheila pulls the knife away, and he sits back on his knees. His neck is wet. He puts his hand there, and pulls away blood. Dr. Sheila backs away from him, holding the knife in front of her. Jack looks at her calmly.
“I did it. I killed him.”
*
Detective Simon is hungry, and he has to go to the bathroom. He’s too old for stakeouts, though he can’t rightly complain. He’s off the clock, and all of this is his own making. His eyes are trained on the entrance of the apartment building, strained and squinting against the sun. He’s waiting for Jack. He doesn’t plan on following Jack any further. He wants to talk to Dr. Sheila.
Jack flies down the front steps and quickly gets into his car. Detective Simon thinks he sees blood stains smeared across Jack’s neck, but he can’t be sure. He picks up his cell phone, and dials Dr. Sheila.
“Got anything for me now?” he says when she answers.
*
Amber had retreated into a public library, hoping to find a remote corner full of dusty books where she could curl into a ball and disappear. This particular branch has undergone a recent technological update. There are no books, only rows of computers. Amber sits in front of one. She plans to click on the screen, and act like she’s working, but she can’t bring herself to do even that.
All she has energy for is to sit at the desk, ignoring her reflection in the computer screen. Her conversation with Eva plays on a loop in her head. She’s waiting for it to seem real.
Eva recognized Jack. She knew his real name. Amber has no reason to doubt Eva’s story.
Jack’s a rapist, possibly a murderer.
Amber thought she could stand by Jack through anything, that she could tolerate his demons, but what he did to Eva is too far. She thinks back to all they’ve been through together, and the true devotion Jack has shown to her. She can’t square that with the evil billionaire who hurt women like Eva, “women,” because if there’s one, there has to be others. Maybe Jack isn’t who she thought he was. Maybe he’s been lying to her the entire time, manipulating her beliefs. Is she just another one of his victims?
“Ma’am, is everything all right?”
Amber turns to see a young librarian standing behind her. She wears the customary thick black glasses, and her pretty blonde hair is long and loose.
“Yes,” Amber says, her voice slightly robotic.
The librarian adjusts her glasses, leans down, and speaks softly. “I can call someone for you if you like.”
“That’s-“ Amber stands up abruptly. Her arm gets caught in a cord, and she takes the keyboard with her. It clatters at her feet. “That’s all right,” Amber continues. “I was just leaving.”
She rushes down the rows of computers, out of the front door, and stumbles down the steps. She feels the intense need to “get away” again, the need that’s nagged her all her life. “Get away” from White Oak and its small town tedium, “get away” from Eva’s story, “get away” from the well meaning librarian.
“Get away” from Jack?
Even after what’s been brought to light, the thought makes Amber’s chest constrict with sorrow. She looks around at where she is, and realizes she’s walking straight to the apartment, back to him.
She won’t get away from Jack just yet. She wants to hear what he has to say first.
Amber turns onto the block of the apartment, and immediately spots Detective Simon mulling around the front entrance. It’s dusk. The street lamps have just switched on. Simon’s white hair reflects the yellowish light.
He’s not the person Amber wants to see right now. She’d rather forget about him all together.
“Go home,” she barks at him, then marches up the stairs.
Simon follows her. “You can’t ignore me like that. We have a deal. I’ve done a fuckton of work for you.”
Tears blur her eyes as she punches in the code. “Don’t you see? Everything’s gone to shit. We’re all fucked.” The buzzer sounds. She pushes the door open, closing it quickly before Simon can follow her in.
“He’s not home,” Simon yells through the bars.
Amber stops in her tracks, then slowly turns around. She glances out of the front gate and sees that the car’s not in the same spot where it was earlier.
“Do you know where he is?” she asks.
“I know where he was,” Simon says. “He went to see his therapist. He held a knife to her throat, forced her to do some kind of hypnosis on him. He wanted to recover memories from that night, and he did.” Simon grips the bars like a caged animal. “The verdict is in, Amber. He did it.”
“He saw that?”
“Pretty much.” Detective Simon loosens his grip, his shoulders slumping. “I know I’ll never see the money I was promised. On top of that, I’ll probably go to prison. But I still have a conscious. I can’t let you carry on with Jack Larsen. You should leave, go back to wherever you came from. I’ll make sure your name never comes up in the trial.”
Amber wants to grill him, ask him a million questions about what he’s alleging. But suddenly, she’s out of energy. She can no longer hold onto something that keeps slipping through her hands. With Jack, she’d try to convince herself that she was more than some upstate bumpkin, but it was all illusion.
“Are you going to turn him in?” Amber asks flatly.
Simon brings his hand to the back of his neck, swinging his head down. “I haven’t figured out what do yet.”
Amber approaches the door, her narrowed eyes piercing through the bars. “If you do, I’ll make sure your superiors find out about our arrangement. We’re all complicit, Detective Simon.”
In response, Detective Simon kicks the door. He hops on one foot, cursing at the pain. Amber turns her back on him and goes up the stairs.
Once she’s in the apartment, tears are streaming down her face. She looks in every room. Jack isn’t here, and chances are, she’ll never see him again. If she’s lucky, all of this will become a memory, one to entertain her while she pours coffee in the White Oak diner.
She packs quickly, shoving all of her belongings haphazardly into a duffel bag. She finds a pen and a piece of paper. She hunches over the kitchen counter, struggling to find the words. Tears slide down her nose, and a few stain the paper. All that comes to her is two words.
I’m sorry.
Amber tears her eyes away from the scrawled letters. With the duffel bag slung over her shoulder, she takes one last look at the apartment she and Jack shared. She had been happy here, if only for a short time. This was supposed to be a beginning, what catapulted her into another life. But it was nothing more than a mistake made by a naive small town girl. She closes the door, feeling the thunk it makes deep inside of her stomach. She goes down the hallway and knocks on Eva’s apartment.
“I have to leave,” Amber says when Eva answers.
Eva nods, outstretches her arm, and invites Amber inside.
*
The air is biting cold on the bank of the East River. Jack stares into the glass surface of the water, watching his reflection ripple and scatter, come back together, then disperse again. Vehicles zoom across the Queensboro Bridge overhead. Jack gives a passing wonder at who operates the cars, trucks, and occasional motorcycles. He feels removed from them, like an alien presence on a distant planet. But hasn’t he always been? He’d never left the gilded world he’d been born into, the towering skyscrapers, exclusive schools and clubs, stand-ins for the peak of Mount Olympus, until he was forced to flee. Even as a fugitive, he’s privileged. Another man wouldn’t have the resources to bribe a detective, or friends who own buildings where they could hide out.
He snorts the rest of the coke, then throws the plastic wrap into the river. The lapping waves are interrupted temporarily before the great body of water swallows the plastic whole.
The small and weak are no match, Jack thinks.
His father’s lessons echo hollowly in his mind. Since the time he could walk, Jack has been taught that he’s special. He’s been divinely chosen to be wealthy and male, and the predecessor of a long line of the fittest who survived better than everyone else.
Joel had laughed when Jack suggested that his father might speak out about the Bangladeshi boy’s death, and Jack knows why. It is a laughable thought, that Jack Larsen Senior would advocate for someone else, actively work against his own benefit. That’s not the man his father was, or the man he taught his son to be. A real man is ruthless, out for himself and his own. He doesn’t have time to consider the frivolous feelings of others. Jack’s father applied these rules to his business, as well as his marriage. He screwed every female secretary and intern that walked through his office doors, and even a few executives. He did simply because he wanted to, and he could.
Is that why I killed him? Jack wonders. Because I wanted to, and I could?
The cocaine has fully invaded his veins, a slender white snake curling through his body. Crouching over the ledge, Jack wonders how quickly he would sink. He imagines being immediately seized by the freezing cold, his lungs going frigid in his chest, his throat closing up. How long would the pain last, before the sweet release of death freed him from this prison?
What would the headlines say when they dragged his body from the river? How would internet commentators eviscerate him for being a spoiled rich boy? What will his life add up to in the end? He’s left nothing behind but an endless chain of carelessly disregarded plastic wrap, dusted with the remains of cocaine. He’s done nothing of value, or worth, never shared a real emotion with another human being.
Until Amber, of course. What Amber’s awakened inside of him is both intoxicating and terrifying. Jack’s run head first into what he’s always avoided, a connection with someone else, a responsibility towards someone else. With Amber, he doesn’t have free reign to only care about himself.
She’s better off without me. I don’t deserve her.
Jack’s reflection ripples beneath him. He stares into the dark cold water while he teeters forward on his toes, preparing to jump. The memories unearthed with Dr. Sheila flash before his eyes. In Jack’s mind, he’s already given up. He’s already dead. He doesn’t fight the dark flashes that play like an avant-garde film in his mind. No, he welcomes them. This is his atonement, his penance, in case nothing waits for him after the darkness falls.
Again, he’s in the office with the terrible, pungent stench of dying flesh. Again, he hears the sound, that gurgling sound. But his father’s not alive, not with half of his head lying scattered on the floor. The sound comes from an automatic response in the throat, muscles continuing to fire signals without the brain for instruction.
Jack leans forward slightly, waiting for the momentum to take over, for gravity to guide him effortlessly to his death.
Jack tries to picture his father before he was shot, when his nose, eyes, and forehead were intact. He wants a glimpse of his father before Jack himself dies. He tries to access the memory just before the trigger was pulled.
He can’t. The memory doesn’t exist. Jack realizes this just as he’s tipping over the ledge. He tries to right himself, but it’s too late. He’s falling, falling, beyond his control. When he realizes all is lost, an image of Amber flashes in his mind, of Amber, wearing the waitress uniform, her face round and innocent, but there was a flicker in her eyes that Jack had recognized.
Jack throws his arms out, hoping to catch something. His left hand wraps around the bar of the ledge. He doesn’t have good grip, but it’s enough to stop his descent. The surface of the river is less than a foot from his swinging feet. He’s strong, but his body is heavy. Already, his arm trembles from the strain.
Just let go, coward.
It would be so easy, to simply loosen his grip. He dangles there for a moment.
He was dead when you got there.
Jack clenches his right hand, sending energy down his arm.
You didn’t pull the trigger.
He swings his legs beneath him, trying to get his other arm up to the ledge.
Someone else was there.
He manages to swing his right arm up to the ledge, and grasps another bar. He grits his teeth, growling as he pulls his massive body up. His muscles burn with exertion, but he doesn’t stop. He flips over the ledge and lays there like a fish. His heart pounds, furiously pumping adrenaline through his veins. The cocaine spins around in his brain. He stares up at the blinking stars, feeling as if he’s melting into the darkness. He allows his body to relax, for his conscious mind to drop its guard. He hears the gurgling sound again.
And then he remembers, the missing piece.
Jack sees him, the black clothed figure, standing behind his father’s body. Jack sees him lift his fingers to his lips, telling Jack not to make a sound. Jack feels himself nod to the killer in compliance. After he pours himself a scotch, he toasts the man in black.
Jack’s eyes fly open. The stars are brighter, the rumblings of the engines on the bridge above, louder. His body is alive, his mind is alert. He is sure of one thing.
He didn’t kill his father.