Loving Time (48 page)

Gunn remembered Bobbie’s gentle way with the patients on his ward, how soft and kind he had been no matter how crazy and vicious and off the wall the patients had been. He had picked them up and put them down, wrapped them and unwrapped them like precious dolls, never, never hurt anyone.
She knew he’d been hurt over and over, but he had never hurt anyone else.

For hours Gunn lay rigid on her bed in her pull-on pants and several layers of tee shirts. She had not wanted to go to bed in case Bobbie called, even though she knew Bobbie would not call. He was mad at her for not destroying his file a long time ago, for keeping it there in the wall of files for somebody to find someday and use to put him out of the Centre. He’d been afraid of dying, homeless, on the street. No matter what she said to assure him such a thing would never happen, he had refused to believe her. He didn’t understand that the files were sacred. Gunn knew other people tampered with them, lost them, destroyed them, but she never would. That’s why she’d had to get Bobbie’s file from Dickey’s office and put it back. The whole point was to keep Bobbie out of it.

In the flickering light of the TV, Gunn shivered, even though the woman cop had pointed out it was warm in the building. Very warm. She turned off the TV and lay back on her bed, shivering in the dark. She worried about the toilet flushing in an apartment where no one was home and wondered if she was just a crazy old fool.

Her eyelids began to feel heavy, and she drifted off into a familiar nightmare. She dreamed her cozy little apartment—with all its overstuffed furniture, floral fabrics, pillows, and lace—burst into a wild, raging fire that forced her up against the leaded window, which she could not open. With the fire at her back, Gunn tried and tried, but the window would not budge. It was rusted shut.

She could hear the crackling flames eat up her couch, her rocking chair and the lace shawl hanging over the back, feel the heat press her against the frozen, leaded glass. Then a burst of cold air hit her face as the window opened. She whimpered with terror as the dream changed shape and she tried to wake up.

As she struggled in her dream, she heard a voice in her ear.
“Gunn, wake up.” Two powerful hands took her shoulders and shook her roughly.

She opened her eyes. “Bobbie?”

“Get up,” he ordered.

Gunn started crying. “Bobbie, please don’t be mad at me. I’ve been so worried.”

“I said, get up.”

“All right, all right.” She got up, pulled her tee shirts down over her hips, and scrubbed at the tears on her face.

“Go in there.” He marched her into the living room and sat her on her pretty couch. “What did you tell them?” he demanded.

Gunn’s mouth opened. “I didn’t tell them anything.”

“That’s not what they said.”

“Bobbie, I—did something bad.”

“You stupid bitch.” He kicked the couch.

She cringed at his anger. “Don’t be mad at me. I was afraid. I’m … still afraid.”

Bobbie’s eyes were cold. “That FBI guy you were so friendly with said you fingered me.”

Gunn’s eyes widened with shock. “I told them how good you were with the patients, how much they all liked you. That’s all I told them. Bobbie, that’s not how I was bad.”

“Oh, yeah, Gunn, how were you bad?”

Bobbie looked so mad. Gunn wrung her little hands, unsure how to say it. “I only wanted to help you. I didn’t mean to hurt anybody. I just did it—to help.”

She had no time to scream. He grabbed her and squeezed her neck until the roar of asphyxiation filled her ears. Her lungs screamed for air. She reached for Bobbie with both hands, couldn’t reach him, ended up clawing at the pillows and peeing in her pants. The next thing she knew, Bobbie was sprinkling her all over with water from the antique brass watering can that she never used for anything but decoration.

Gunn gasped, coughed, couldn’t catch her breath. She was
aware of being wet all over and stinking, tried to vomit. Nothing came up. Bobbie stood over her, his broad, freckled face and huge, bulky body a mountain. He held the watering can above her so that it continued to dribble all over her. His face was bloated, swollen with rage. She’d never seen anything like it. She looked around wildly for the cops. The cops had to be watching him, watching the building. She probed the throbbing bruises on her neck. She was terrified. Bobbie had described killing chickens like that, then cutting their heads off after they were dead. It occurred to her for the first time that he was crazy.

“Bobbie, don’t hurt me.… ” Her voice was a croak.

“I don’t
hurt
people.” His strange blue eyes pulsed with the death-rays of the voodoo people. He once told her people with eyes like that could kill.

“You don’t hurt people?” she whimpered.

He banged the watering can against the sofa arm.

“I’m a good person, loyal to a fault. I don’t
hurt
people.” He stuck his fingers in her face. “Do you hear me? I don’t hurt people.”

She wanted to throw up.

“I told you I don’t
hurt
people,” he insisted.

“You hurt me,” Gunn said softly. “You almost killed me, Bobbie.” Gunn hung her head.

“You hurt me, Gunn. Say you’re sorry.”

“You know I’m sorry.”

“
Nobody
says they’re sorry. They fuck you over. And then when they’re wrong they don’t say they’re sorry—You bitch! You set me up.”

“No, Bobbie, I was trying to save you.” Gunn started to cough and cry again.

“You set me up.”

“No.” He was wrong about that. She shook her head. She’d helped him. Tried so hard to help him. Her eyes jumped around, looking for something to save her from this.

“Loyal to a fault,” he spat at her. “I took care of you.”

The wrongness of this made Gunn shake her head. Bobbie was all mixed up. The truth was she, Gunn, had taken care of him, got him a job, brought his old mother up north, found her a place to stay, took care of her while she was sick. She’d given Bobbie money and seen that the old lady got buried right. It had been expensive, but she had done it for him. “Bobbie—” He was all wrong. She wanted this to stop now.

“Admit you set me up,” he said, his wrath erupting again.

“I’m sorry, Bobbie.… I feel real bad. I didn’t mean to kill Dr. Dickey. I just wanted him to get a little confused and forget about you. Please believe me, I didn’t know it would kill him.”

“You killed him?” Bobbie screamed.
“You?”

“I was trying to help you, Bobbie—”

“You … 
bitch
. You didn’t help me. You finished me!” He shook the watering can in her face. The water was all gone. Furiously, he slammed it down on the side of her face, splintering her nose and cheekbone. He hit her with it again, bashing her skull in with almost no effort. Then he dropped the watering can and without a backward glance returned to the bedroom, where Gunn never locked the leaded window because she was afraid of fire. He went down the fire escape and out through the garden.

A
pril drove her own car up to Ninety-ninth Street. Mike sat in the passenger seat, unusually quiet until they hit the block. She had a feeling he was upset because she hadn’t said she loved him, too. But who knew, maybe he had other things on his mind.

“I’ll go up and get her,” he said.

“It’s my call,” she protested. “I’ll go up. You wait in the car.”

“I’m not waiting in the car.”

Good sign, they were fighting again.

“Fine. How do you want to do it?” April asked.

“I go up. You sit in the car.”

“She’ll respond better if it’s me,” April argued.

“You want to both go up?”

“If I have no choice.” April parked the car at a hydrant. She switched the lights off and killed the motor. The night sky was overcast. Not many people out on the street. She got out of the car and spotted Andy running toward them from the alley by the building. He had the hood of his parka up and a scarf wrapped around his neck.

“He got away—” he panted. “Daveys went after him.”

“Fine, let Daveys deal,” Mike said.

Then they went up to Gunn’s apartment. Another old lady was standing in the hall, banging on Gunn’s door. “I heard him screaming at her. I called the police,” the old woman cried. “Gunn, it’s all right now. Open the door.”

A
light powder of snow filled the sky as Bobbie went over the wall into the garden of the house next door and disappeared. He didn’t think anybody had seen him come out onto the street six houses down, almost at the end of the block, and saw no shadow behind him. Somewhere behind him an asshole or two were huddled in the cold, watching the building he’d left. So he thought.

But he didn’t really care who was behind him. Like an animal seeking his lair, Bobbie was driven by a great urgency to get to the Centre, without any clear idea of what he would do when he got there. If only he got there, he knew he’d be all right. He was a survivor. He’d been trained in combat years ago and still knew how to fight and hide. If he got there he’d have some time to work things out. It would be many hours before anyone called Gunn. Maybe a whole day before anyone found her.

Bobbie hugged the side of the buildings on Riverside, keeping as far out of the lights as he could. He was still furious at Gunn for killing Dickey and then telling the Fed bastard
he
had done it. He was stunned by the magnitude of the betrayal. It was the worst betrayal ever, and now it seemed clear to him that Gunn had been at the bottom of all his troubles. Dickey hadn’t set him up a year ago. Dickey hadn’t gotten him fired from the job he liked. It was Gunn, all Gunn. She was the one they questioned about every case. She was the one who kept the files. She knew what was added and subtracted to every file and why. She had control of everyone through the things written in their files. She helped people get raises and get fired. She got him fired because it was a way to make him dependent on her, to need her. She even killed his helpless, innocent mother.

The wind picked up, whipping the fine, stinging snow into
Bobbie’s eyes. The storm whirled inside him, too, as he tried to make sense of all the bad things that had happened to him. The dumb old bitch had ruined his life, but God had raised His hand against her and now she was punished. With this analysis made, Bobbie tried to calm down and focus on survival. He told himself that if he could just go back to where he used to be safe, he’d be safe again.

Habit propelled him to the Centre, where he’d gone year after year, day and night—where the patients liked him and he’d been in control. At night no doctors were anywhere near the north dorm on the sixth floor where he used to work. Behind the glass wall in the nurses’ station sat just one nurse. There were maybe two or three aides for the whole floor. From midnight to seven-thirty or eight all the patients would be heavily medicated and asleep. Nobody would go in there; there he’d be safe.

As Bobbie moved quickly through the snow, he began to feel better. He had some time. Hours and hours to collect himself, to think. He didn’t have far to go and kept his thoughts on the sixth floor, the community-service area, where he’d worked for so many years. He needed to sit on a chair in the fourteen-bed ward in the north dorm and feel the patients sleeping all around him. They had always liked and responded to him, even the really crazy ones. He’d taken care of them. Now he’d see them again, and they would protect him for a little while, give him the space he had to have to think things over and get himself together. He knew he couldn’t go home again, and couldn’t go back to the basement room where the two cops had found him this morning. He kept thinking of that chair in the middle of the unit, where his silent, crazy family would be sleeping, and no cop or FBI asshole would ever find him.

Bobbie entered the hospital complex through the loading dock at the morgue. The guard in the tiny office with the windowed door had seen him before and didn’t even bother to wave him through. He traveled the musty corridors two stories
under the ground that twisted and turned and sloped downhill into the basement of the Psychiatric Centre.

No one ever challenged anyone at night There was no security on the graveyard shifts. Still, Bobbie played it safe and dropped into a supply closet to change into hospital whites. As he took his jacket and pants off, he noticed spots of blood on them. He changed, then buried the tainted clothes deep in a garbage can that was still full from the previous day’s waste. He checked his watch and came out of the closet. He felt fully in command of the situation. The halls were empty and silent; so was the elevator that took him up to the sixth floor.

The sixth floor was the community-service catchment area, the place where anyone could be admitted. People on welfare, homeless, beggars—all those who couldn’t pay for treatment or their stay in the hospital. They were admitted, stabilized with medication over a period of days or weeks. Then they were released. Out on the streets again, they stopped taking their medications and soon spun out of orbit again. Many of them had to be admitted over and over.

In Community Service they sometimes had people who couldn’t speak English, couldn’t speak a language anybody knew. Once they had some kind of illegal alien. No one knew where he came from or what language he spoke. No one could talk to him, and he didn’t even have a name.

Bobbie had chosen the last elevator on the bank, the one that wasn’t visible from the nurses’ station. He got off and saw a bent, graying head. He checked his watch. It was just after eleven. The nurse was probably going over the M.D.s’ order book. Eleven-thirty was the latest they gave medication. Most everybody was already juiced by then, but sometimes the doctors left special orders for problem patients. Before the nurse lifted her head, Bobbie ducked and turned left. He streaked past the small elevator hall. Then he straightened up, took another left, and strolled down the long, dim hallway, jubilant at being back where he belonged, safe and sound.