Falling Awake

doing it for over two decades. You’re a survivor, Lawson.”
    “So are you,” Lawson shot back a little too smoothly. “And the bottom line here is that we both need Isabel Wright.”
    “Yeah, I know. You don’t have to remind me.”
    “I’ll make this job worth your while, like I always do. Easy money, pal. All you have to do is track her down, feel out the situation to see if she’s talked to anyone and then convince her to come work here at Frey-Salter. How hard can it be?”
    “What makes you think she’ll want to work for you?”
    “Not a lot of openings for fired Level Five dream analysts,” Lawson said. “Hell, most people don’t even know there is such a thing. She’s thirty-three, never been married and, according to Beth, hasn’t dated seriously in months. All indications are that she’s ameek, lonely, nervous little spinster who lives for her work. Martin Belvedere once told me that she often spent her nights sleeping on a cot in her office. She’s probably anxious as hell now that she no longer has a nice little office to call her own.”
    Ellis did not take his eyes off the photo. “A meek, lonely, nervous little spinster, huh?”
    “You don’t sound convinced.”
    “She might be meek. She might be lonely. She might be a spinster. But whatever else she is, I seriously doubt that she’s the nervous type.”
    “What makes you say that?”
    “Hell, Lawson, given the kinds of dreams you and I have asked her to decode this past year, she must have nerves of steel.”
    There was a short pause on the other end. Somewhere in the midst of the long silence, Ellis became aware of an unpleasant, burning smell.
    The soy sausages. He had neglected to turn off the burner.
    “Damn.” Straightening suddenly, he seized a towel, wrapped it around the handle of the frying pan and whipped the singed phony sausages off the stove. Smoke wafted across the kitchen. Alarmed that it would set off the detector, he opened a window.
    “Everything okay there?” Lawson asked.
    “I just burned lunch.”
    “You still sticking to that mostly vegetarian diet you started a while back?”
    “Yeah.”

    “Don’t see how you can stand all that healthy green stuff. Doesn’t seem natural, you know?”
    “You get used to it after a while.” Sort of. He still wasn’t sure how he felt about the fake sausages.
    “A man’s gotta have protein. How can you survive without the basic nutrients in good barbeque?”
    “I still eat a little fish. Could we get back to the subject of Isabel Wright?”
    “I was about to say that I’ve had a lot more experience with the research-oriented personality type than you have. Trust me, that kind can deal with stuff that would make a hardened agent shudder as long as they only have to look at it in a lab setting. Put them in the field and they fall apart, sure, but they’re happy as Santa’s little elves when they’re surrounded by their computers and their instruments.”
    Jack Lawson was right ninety-nine percent of the time when it came to judging other people, Ellis reflected. It was one of the things that made Lawson so good at his job.
    But one percent of the time he was wrong. When Lawson did make mistakes, they tended to be big ones.
    Ellis was pretty sure that Lawson was wrong about Isabel Wright. He had picked up enough telltale hints and nuances to know that when she decoded his dreams, she didn’t do it from some safe, detached academic place. He did not think she was immune to the violence embedded in the really bad dreams he sent to her to analyze.

    “What if Isabel Wright doesn’t want to work for you?” Ellis asked. “Got a fallback plan?”
    “Don’t need one. You’re going to convince her that Frey-Salter would be a terrific career move. Tell her about the medical benefits.”
    Absently Ellis rolled his right shoulder, trying to ease the dull ache. He’d already had two operations on it and the orthopedic surgeon was talking enthusiastically about eventually doing a complete joint replacement. The doctors had assured him that there was a high probability that arthritis would set in a couple of decades earlier than normal because of the damage done by the bullet.
    “Forget it, Lawson, you don’t want me to go into the details of Frey-Salter’s fabulous medical benefits. My viewpoint on that subject is a little skewed, due to the fact that I nearly got killed working for you.”
    “So push the retirement plan, instead. I don’t care what you