The Glass House (24 page)

“To your face? We had to use a lot of steroids. The steroids do that.”

“Will it—”

“Go away? Hard to know.”

A lie.

“No it's not. Will it go away?”

She sighed, then said, “If we take you off the steroids it will eventually go away.”

A truth.

“But if we take you off the steroids your body won't be able to fight.”

“Fight what?”

“You've had huge radiation doses. They've killed off almost all of your immune system. So you're vulnerable to almost any bacteria or viral attack.”

A truth. A terrifying truth.

“Why so much radiation?”

“Because you were dying.”

A quick and accurate ten bars of Handel's Trio Sonata filled the room. “Thank you very much, Nurse. I'll take it from here.”

It was the grey-haired freak—William Jennings Connelly playing his old cello.

The nurse packed up quickly and left. Seth allowed his eyes to survey the room. An expensive hotel suite—older, like the spooky old Canadian Pacific hotels.

“Where—”

“Coronado Island, San Diego. The honeymoon suite.” He rosined his bow and then put it and his cello onto a large piece of memory foam, which he wrapped around the ancient instrument. As he did he said, “Costs a fortune, but I thought you deserved a treat.”

“How long—”

“Since our last encounter? Some time. You fainted—actually gave me quite a scare and no end of trouble. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a hospital bed and all this equipment into the elevator of an old hotel?”

Seth hit the red button on the morphine pump and mainlined a strong hit of the drug. He felt it numb the place where the snake had entered his liver. Then he felt its glow move through his body. For an instant he thought,
Just pump and pump and all this is over. The swans get to lament and the condor takes me—and it's done.
Finita la musica!

Then he felt the surprising cold of William Jennings' fingers as they pried the morphine drip out of his hand. “No. No, no, no—this will not do. Not do at all. You have much to do before you get to seek oblivion. You owe me, young man—you owe me and you're going to pay me in the only currency that matters.”

Seth felt himself floating up from the bottom of a deep pool. “And what currency is that?” he managed to ask.

“Teach me to dream so I can feel the way you feel.”

It was coming back to Seth. The key was still in his back pocket. A smile creased his puffy face. “Take me to the ancient tree. Take me there.”

“Okay,” WJ said as he none too gently pulled the IVs out of Seth's bruised and slack arms.

Seth willed himself to throw the blankets from his bed. When he went to stand he wobbled but quickly found his balance.

“Don't stare. Not nice,” he barked. Father/son—good. “Give me a second, I've gotta pee.”

WJ looked at him, then nodded.

Seth hobbled to the bathroom and ran the water as he used the nurse's pencil to draw a tiny Joshua tree by the mirror over the sink. He flushed the toilet and came back in the room, reaching for the stand-up lamp by the door to steady himself.

“Hey, maybe we should—” Son/father—even better.

“Now! Let's go now. And take your stupid old cello with us.”

LINWOOD DIDN'T KNOCK ON THE
door of Decker's tiny bedroom—he simply pushed it open and announced, “You need to understand something.”

Decker had no idea what time it was, but it was well after sunset—well after his final pie dish had been washed and dried. “What? What do I need to understand?”

The big man didn't answer, simply turned and left the room.

Decker threw on some clothes and followed him out into the desert.

Neither man spoke for a very long time. Finally Linwood said, “Good.”

“What's good?”

“That you've learned not to talk much.”

“Thanks. I guess.”

“Do you see the eyes?” Linwood asked.

Decker had been aware of dozens of sets of eyes travelling on either side of them for some time. There wasn't enough moonlight to see bodies but enough to catch the flicker of starlight off the dogs' pupils. “Yes.”

“Wild dogs. They're here, always here, always watching, always waiting. For a stumble, an arrhythmic step, an off beat to tell them that their time has come.”

“Their time?”

“Yes, their time. All things have their time.”

Their path,
Decker thought—although he knew beyond knowing that it was not his thought. It was Seth's.

“They are the inevitable in every man's life—and I'm not talking about taxes.”

And that was it for the conversation. They walked until dawn, and not a word further passed between them. And when they got back to Solitaire, Decker headed into the bakery and began the first of his thousand kowtows of the day.

THE WAREHOUSE THAT HAD HOUSED
the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic had stood empty for some time before Yslan and Emerson got there. The odd tatter of yellow police tape fluttered in the early morning breeze.

They moved quickly through the faux outer rooms, noting where cameras and microphones must have been. When she pushed on the walls, some of them pivoted away. She quickly made her way down the hall, throwing open doors as she went. All led to the massive emptiness of the warehouse behind them.
Doors to nowhere
, she thought. Then she got to the door at the very end of the hallway. And threw it open.

This was different, no warehouse—a real room with a bed and a closet and a few medical monitors that still bleeped and blopped. She quickly established two things. First, that this had been Seth Roberts' room. Second, that it had been tossed by a pro. Evidently, from the holes in the wall, an angry pro.

She swore softly and took out her BlackBerry. When her call was answered, she didn't wait for the formalities, she just launched right in. “Did you toss the room at the Wellness Dream Clinic?”

“No, of course not,” Mr. T protested. “I was there to protect our asset—as you ordered me to do.”

“Then who tossed the kid's room?”

“Harrison I suppose.”

“Harrison? Leonard Harrison?”

“And nice to hear from you too, Special Agent Hicks.”

“Fuck that.”

“Fuck what?”

“Didn't it ever occur to you to tell me that Harrison was out at the San Francisco Wellness Dream Clinic?”

“No. Because it never occurred to me that you didn't know he was there. He was your boss, not mine.”

“Right.”

“And he was on NSA business.”

“No, he wasn't.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, oh. So tell me what the fuck Harrison did at the clinic.”

“Well, I'm not completely sure, cause I was protecting our asset.”

“Roberts? Decker Roberts?”

“Yeah, that's how I came across the old Toronto homicide cop.”

“And you drugged him and sent him to me rather than telling me to come out there?”

“Harrison said that's what you wanted.”

“And you didn't think—Oh, never mind. Tell me exactly what Harrison did at the clinic.”

And Mr. T did. Harrison arriving angry, spending a lot of time in the room at the end of the hall, then in the open warehouse.

“And where were you during all this?”

“Where my superior officer told me to be—with the drugged ex–homicide cop who tried to kill Roberts. Our asset.”

Yslan thought for a moment, then asked, “Did he say anything?”

“When?”

“Whenever.”

“Harrison wasn't very talkative. Told us to drug—”

“Yes, the ex-homicide cop. Then what?”

“Something about had I seen the boy.”

“He said that?”

“Yeah, some nonsense about the boy, the boy, number one, the boy. The man was clearly on something. Breathing the ozone with a straw, if you ask me.”

“When?”

“When what?”

“When did he say that?”

“At the end.”

“After he left the room at the end of the hall?”

“Yeah. Sure.”

“Is it yes or no?”

“Yes, after he left the room at the end of the hall.”

She hit disconnect, pocketed her phone and looked at Seth's room. Number 1's room.

She looked at the two large holes in the wall—cheap drywall, but it still needed some force to puncture them. She found a tile that had been pulled up—no doubt someone looking for a hiding place in the floor. The small bedside table had been turned over and the drawers emptied. She found the contents scattered in a corner. Two expensive pens, one almost empty, the other full of ink.

“Have you been writing, Seth?” she said aloud.

It was then that she saw the pen drawing on the wall. It was of a large unusually shaped tree—or was it a Victorian-style gaslight?

She righted the bed and saw that the pillows had been slit open—of course, good technique. The bed had been stripped and the mattress T-cut—more good technique.

“The kid's room?” Emerson asked.

She nodded, although she was unsure whether a twenty-something was still considered a kid.

“Nice tree,” Emerson said, pointing at the pen drawing on the wall. Then he started into the speech that Mallory had written for him. “You know trees have a mythological significance . . .”

Yslan ignored the rest of what she thought of as Emerson's self-serving exegesis and concentrated on the image on the wall. She remembered Decker's one acting-class lecture on art. There had only been one, so it stood out as anomaly, since he often repeated concepts for his actors, but not this concept. He quoted Gertrude Stein's response to criticism of art: “If you enjoy it, you understand it. In an attempt to understand art we miss the meaning.” Then he went on to criticize the Steins themselves, saying, “The Steins surrounded themselves in their Paris salon with Picassos, Matisses, Renoirs, Bonnards, Manguins, Nadelmans, Morgan Russells and Cézannes—paintings, sketches, letters, memorabilia of all sorts—just to get a whiff, a passing tendril of something else. Paintings are reachings—elongated fingers trying to touch that something else.” That had engendered a flurry of questions about this something else, but Decker had sidestepped them and gotten on with the class. In fact, Yslan hadn't thought about that lecture until this very moment, staring at Seth's drawing. She adjusted the light in the room and continued to ignore Emerson's endless lecture. In the dimmer light she saw what she thought she'd sensed before. She'd seen something like this tree. Where? Then it hit her. All those months ago when she was in Namibia, grabbing Decker to take him back to help with the bombing investigation at Ancaster College in upper New York State. On their long silent drive to the airport in Windhoek she'd stopped to allow the men to relieve themselves by the side of the road, and there, on the very top of one of the few hills, was a single tree—not so unlike the one on the wall of Seth Roberts' room.

She turned to Emerson, who was still standing in the door frame. His lips had stopped moving. Good. Then she tilted her head to the right.

“Am I out of focus?” Emerson asked.

“No,” she said, “but . . .”

“What?”

“Stand still, Emerson.”

“Like this?” he said, striking a pose.

“No, just at ease.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah. You are perfectly symmetrical, aren't you?”

“What?”

“Nothing. Start in the warehouse, I'll be there in a second.”

Emerson turned and left.

Yslan slowly approached the door frame. Emerson was a perfect specimen. Exactly symmetrical—that's why he was so beautiful. But if that was the case, why did it seem that the midsection of the left side of the door frame bulged towards him? She ran her hand slowly along the cheap lumber of the frame and felt it. “Clever, Seth, very clever,” she said aloud. She pulled back the wood strip on the left side of the door frame and there it was—a three by five Moleskine notebook.

She glanced at the door, then sat on the upturned bed and opened the small black book.

It was divided into three sections, each carefully titled: “Out of the Forest,” “In the Clearing” and “To the Glass House.”

She read it carefully, cover to cover. There was a reference to two books he'd written and left on the hard drive of a library computer at the University of Victoria—and a poem on the very last page. She read that twice, then looked at the pen-drawn tree on the wall. “Maybe,” she whispered. “He's a resourceful boy, so just maybe this is the way.” Then she stopped herself. How long had she been saying what she thought out loud? She didn't know. But it had to stop—now.

YSLAN LEFT SETH'S ROOM AND
saw Emerson reading from his BlackBerry. “What?” she asked.

He quickly erased the text message from Mallory—
Has she found the tree drawing?
—and turned it to her. She read the ad there calling for actors to play in a new reality show called
The Institution.

“So? That's what Garreth Laurence told us.” She took a quick look at Emerson. He didn't look all that good. She dismissed the notion and turned to the room and thought,
It's why the walls pivot and there are concealed camera ports, hidden microphones—all interesting, but not all that helpful in trying to figure out what happened here.
She knew from Mr. T that Harrison had been there, but where the mysterious WJ was, who the fuck knew. She pushed against the wall behind the receptionist's desk and it pivoted out of the way to reveal the large empty warehouse space. She allowed her feet to lead her. She forced herself not to think, just to follow instinct. She walked into the vast, empty warehouse. Then she stopped and turned back to the set of the fake reality TV show,
The Institution.
She saw Emerson standing by the fake receptionist's desk and a thought hit her. Fake reality? Where's the truth in a fake reality TV show? And how the hell did the words “fake” and “reality” go together? More Brooklyn/Yankees. And
more to the point, why were they trying to go together in her mind?