‘Ma’am, can you hear me? Ma’am? What’s happening? Can you tell me where you are?’
Dr Nikki Roberts leaned back against the soft leather of her Mercedes X-Class seats and waited for the garage doors to open.
Traffic permitting, she’d be back home in Brentwood in twenty minutes. Another long, empty evening stretched ahead, but she would fill it with mindless television and a bottle of Newton unfiltered Merlot and Ambien and sleep, and it would pass. Everything would pass.
Nikki felt guilty. She’d only been half-present during today’s session with Lisa. Maybe even less than half. That wasn’t fair, whether she liked the patient or not.
The garage doors inched open, agonizingly slowly.
Nikki edged the car forwards, towards the alley.
Doors. Garage doors!
Lisa heard the grinding of mechanical gears and the close, familiar rev of an engine. Blood was pouring from her stomach and chest. Not oozing but pouring, like milk from a jug. She couldn’t move. Couldn’t stand or run. She could only scream, and she did, again and again and again, each time the monster sliced into her arms and breasts and thighs. He wasn’t even trying to kill her any more. At least, not quickly. He was playing with her, like a cat with a mouse, delighting in the agony he was causing, in shredding her perfect body, piece by tiny piece.
The engine grew louder. Hope soared in Lisa’s heart.
Someone’s coming. Maybe it’s Dr Roberts? Please God, let her see me!
She drew in her breath and screamed, surely the loudest scream anyone had ever made in their lives. She could hear her own blood bubbling in the back of her throat and feel her eyes bulge as if they might burst from their sockets. Headlamps swept over her and the monster, lit them up like a stage spotlight.
The stabbing stopped.
So did the engine.
Lisa sobbed with relief. She’s seen me! She heard the monster’s knife clatter to the floor. She could feel her pulse slowing, and waited for her attacker to run, or for the car door to open.
Seconds passed. Two. Five. Ten …
Nothing happened.
Wait … what’s going on?
The car’s engine started up again.
No!
Headlights lit up the alley.
NO! Please! I’m here! PLEASE!
Nikki’s silver Mercedes glided past them along the alley, then turned slowly into the street.
Rotted, scaly hands coiled themselves around Lisa’s neck from behind. In front of her eyes, the shiny blade glinted, already slick with her blood.
‘Where were we?’
The last noise Lisa Flannagan heard was the monster laughing.
Carter Berkeley III looked down at his expensively manicured nails and resisted the urge to bite them. What the hell was he doing here? He should be talking to the police, not a damn therapist.
Then he reminded himself that the police wouldn’t help him. The police didn’t believe him. No one did.
Carter thought about the two armed bodyguards he had waiting downstairs in the lobby, and tried to feel better. It didn’t work. Then he tried imagining his therapist naked. That did work, at least a little. Dr Nikki Roberts was a deeply sensual woman. Carter pictured her gray, pencil skirt pushed up roughly around her hips, and her prissy white blouse ripped open. He imagined her …
‘Carter? Are you with me?’
Her voice made him startle, then blush, then scowl. A highly successful investment banker, handsome, educated and rich, Carter was used to having people jump to his command and scuttle to gratify his every desire. Especially women. He did not appreciate being called out like a naughty schoolboy.
‘Tell me again what you think you saw last night,’ Dr Roberts said.
‘I don’t “think” I saw anything,’ Carter snapped. ‘I know what I saw, OK? I am not crazy.’ He ran a harassed hand through his thick blond hair.
‘I never suggested you were.’ The therapist’s voice was calm. ‘But even sane people can be mistaken some of the time, can’t they? I know I often am.’
‘Yeah, well I’m not,’ Carter growled.
Jesus. They’d all be sorry when he was dead. When these bastards finally got him and strung him up with electrical cord and beat him to death in some godforsaken dungeon. They’d all wish they’d listened then: the police, Dr Roberts, all of them.
Nikki leaned forward earnestly while her patient rambled on, expounding the same conspiracy theory he’d been peddling since he first started seeing her, more than a year ago. Carter Berkeley believed he was being stalked by unnamed assassins. He never offered any reason for this, still less any evidence, other than the elaborate imaginings of his brilliant but tortured mind. And yet, no matter how many logical paths Nikki led him down, Carter’s paranoid fears persisted. In fact, if anything, they were getting worse. Only last week he had informed Nikki solemnly that Trey Raymond, the sweet boy who ran her office and manned the front desk at Century Plaza, was a spy ‘working for the Mexicans’.
‘You can’t trust him. What do you really know about Trey, Dr Roberts?’
‘What do you know about him, Carter?’ Nikki countered.
‘Enough. I know enough,’ Carter pronounced, cryptically. Although, again, he offered no evidence to back this up.
I’m not making him better, Nikki thought sadly. I might actually be making him worse. Why am I even here?
She knew the answer to that, deep down. She was here – at work, in her office, seeing patients – because she had nowhere else to be. Nowhere else except home, alone, with no Doug, and no answers. That prospect was quite unbearable.
Unbearable …
The word took Nikki back.
It was only a year ago, but it felt like a lifetime.
Doug was smiling at her across the table at Luigi’s, wolfing down his spaghetti vongole as if he hadn’t eaten in weeks, talking at a million miles an hour, the way he always did when the two of them were together.
‘“It’s unbearable.” What do people even mean when they say that?’ Doug asked Nikki. ‘My patients say it to me all the time: “It’s unbearable, Doc. I can’t bear it.” As if they have any alternative.’
Nikki and Doug Roberts had been married for seven years and together for almost three times that long. But the thrill of each other’s company, of talking and sharing ideas and feelings and experiences, never faded. No lunch date with Doug was ever dull.
‘I guess they’re speaking metaphorically,’ Nikki observed, toying with her own crab salad. Luigi’s food was delicious, but even the salads were rich. Doug might be incapable of gaining weight, but since she turned thirty-eight Nikki found increasingly that she had to watch her figure. There was nothing worse than thinking you might be pregnant at long last, only to realize that your rounded belly was actually ugly, middle-aged fat.
‘They mean that they don’t want to