I sprint toward her car and throw open the door and grab Basque and beat him in the face, beat him like I did when I first arrested him back when I was a homicide detective. But now I do more. I drag him from the car and slam his head against the pavement again and again until he’s no longer moving.
Then I turn to the car and check on Lien-hua.
But I am too late.
Her head is lolling forward, her neck still strapped to the headrest. In desperation, I work the belt loose and pull her from the car and yell her name and start chest compressions and rescue breaths to get her breathing again.
And then, because it’s a dream, logic evaporates and Christie, my dead wife, is standing beside me, and I hear her say, “You waited too long, Pat.”
And as I watch, Lien-hua’s skin turns to bluish gray. Before my eyes, her moldering flesh becomes mottled with the color of death, her eyes stare unblinkingly at the sky, and her jaw drops open.
I stumble backward.
“No, Lien-hua, no!” I hear myself cry.
It’s too late, Pat. You waited too long!
Then Basque rises from the pavement, his face a mess of blood and jutting bones, and he brushes himself off and smiles. Then he shrinks, morphing into the form of a rabbit, and scampers away.
“Pat,” a voice calls. Christie. It must be Christie, because Lien-hua is dead.
They’re both dead! They’re—
“Pat?”
When I open my eyes, I’m in the hospital room and early morning light is seeping through the window. My heart is slamming hard against the inside of my chest, and shivers run through me as the dream world that seemed so real — that was so real — slowly fades into a memory that succeeds in already scarring my day.
“Pat, are you okay?” Lien-hua is staring at me concernedly. “You were shaking. In your sleep. I was calling for you.”
“Yes.” The dream still hovers around me. I try to calm my quick and tense breaths.
“You sure you’re alright?”
I flexed my fingers so she wouldn’t notice that they were shaking, then I laid them on my legs and repositioned myself so I could look at her. For her sake, I made myself smile.
“I’m okay.”
“You’re a terrible liar, Pat.”
“So Tessa tells me.”
Lien-hua knew I was a restless sleeper, that nightmares all too often chased me from real life into my dreams. “What happened in your dream?”
With her background in psychology and her expertise in profiling, she often asked me this question. Though I tended to view dreams as merely a way that my subconscious was sorting through my experiences from the day, she always seemed to pull something deeper from the images in them.
However, today I wasn’t about to tell her that I’d dreamt that she was dead and that it was my fault because I’d been too busy beating Basque to death.
“It’s okay,” I explained. “It was mostly about the things that happened last night.”
“They wouldn’t let you go.”
“No.” I took a deep breath and changed the subject. “How are you feeling today?”
“Pretty sore. So, tell me about your dream.”
“Lien-hua—”
“You cried out my name while you were sleeping. You said, ‘No! Lien-hua, no!’ What was happening, do you remember?”
I really did not want to do this. “Let’s just not worry about—”
“Humor me.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I said, “I dreamed you died.”
“I see.”
“And it was my fault — because I was preoccupied with Basque. But it means nothing. It was just a dream.”
A pause. “Yes. It was. So don’t worry about me, okay? I’m going to be alright.”
“I know. It’s just that—”
There was a knock at the door and a waifish Hispanic nurse pressed it open slightly but paused politely before entering. I made sure the blanket was covering my bare legs. She had a grin that was just way too broad for this time of day, and I whispered to Lien-hua, “Okay, I’m a little frightened.”
“Why’s that?”
“She’s got ‘I’m a Morning Person’ written all over her.”
“You stole that line from Tessa, I can tell.”
“That is possible, yes.”
Lien-hua invited the nurse in, she entered, greeted us enthusiastically, spent a few minutes checking Lien-hua’s vitals, then informed us that this was the day that the Lord had made. “Let us rejoice and be glad in it!” she chimed.
Admittedly, a little rejoicing and thanksgiving couldn’t hurt anything, but maybe not with this woman’s degree of chipperness.
Lien-hua asked her if they could up her pain meds, and the nurse agreed to see what she could do. “Would you like breakfast in the meantime?”
“I don’t really have an appetite right now.”
“Just call down when you’re ready.”
“Thanks.”
She gently patted Lien-hua’s shoulder. “Get some rest.”
“I will. Thanks.”
After Nurse Perky had excused herself and left the room whistling, Lien-hua and I were silent for a few moments.
“So, the pain,” I said, “it’s worse than it was yesterday?”
“Yes,” she told me. “It is.”
“Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. “No. But, just… thanks for being here.”
I wanted to help her, but felt inadequate, powerless. “Of course.”
She put her hand on mine. “By the way, I like you with the scruffy, five-o’clock-shadow look.”
I rubbed my hand across my face. Definitely some stubble there. “It’s been a couple five o’clocks by now.”
She saw me uneasily eyeing the IV needle in her arm. To put it mildly, needles are not my thing. Ever since I was a kid, they’ve made me more than a little squeamish.
“Don’t look at it, Pat. It’ll just make it worse.”
I shifted my gaze. “Right.”
“You’re not going to pass out on me now, are you?”
Well…
“Course not.” I brushed a strand of hair from her eye. “What about you? The pain?”
“I’ll be alright. It was a bit of a rough night, but I think I’ll feel better if I can get some more sleep.”
I’d had my phone on vibrate while I slept, and now I noticed a text from Angela Knight asking me to call her. Angela’s face was on the screen beside the text, and Lien-hua noticed. “Go ahead,” she said. “She usually gets off work at seven.”
Angela worked in the Bureau’s Cybercrime division and was one of the first people I always contacted when I needed some intel fast. Despite the fact that she was perpetually overworked and behind, she somehow always found a way to get me the information I needed when I needed it.
She was a bit of a character, though. She’d named her computer Lacey and referred to her as if she were a colleague rather than a machine. It made conversations a little awkward sometimes, and neither Lien-hua nor I had ever quite gotten used to it, but we’d learned it was best to just work with it.
I speed-dialed Angela’s number, and the phone rang eight times before she picked up. “This is Angela.” She sounded as weary as Lien-hua looked.
“Angela, it’s Pat. How’s Lacey?”
“Tired. How’s Lien-hua?”
“Recovering. I’m with her right now.”
“Can I talk with her?”
“Sure. I think so.”
I handed the phone to Lien-hua, and after she’d convinced Angela that — considering everything — she was doing well, I accepted the phone again and Angela said, “You wanted Saundra Weathers’s number. There’s no landline, but Lacey found an unlisted cell number.” She told it to me. “She lives in Chesapeake Beach, Maryland.”