Falling Awake

dream world, incidents and objects are often weighted differently than they are in the waking realm. A small detail that meant nothing when he looked at it in the light of day can assume great significance here.
So he looks at the scene very closely as the cars fly past. He sees Lawson sitting at his big, government-issue desk, bald head gleaming in the light of the fluorescent lamps, reaching for the phone.
    “I’ll be with you in a minute,” Lawson says. “Gotta call Beth.”
    The cars zoom past the image, whip through a loop-the-loop and careen toward another scene.
    Lawson again. He is just hanging up the desk phone. “Beth says she checked the hospital computer records, herself. The body they mistakenly handed over to the funeral home was Scargill. She did a DNA match using some blood they took in the ER. Cause of death was severe head trauma. Looks like he caught some fallout from the explosion. . . .”
    The cars sweep past the scene, round another swooping curve and drop straight down into a twisting stretch of track. Adrenaline slams through him.

    t he carriage turns down a narrow lane. Dark stone buildings loom on either side of the passage. There are lights in some of the windows. She catches glimpses of people moving about inside the rooms. One of them turns to look at her. She recognizes Gavin Hardy. He is wearing one of his favorite Las Vegas tee shirts.
She can see that he is seated at a card table. There is someone beside him, a familiar figure with a beaky nose, sharp blue eyes and a mane of unkempt white hair.
    “Hi, Isabel.” Gavin waves cheerfully. “I finally made it back to Vegas. Look who’s here. The Old Man himself. But the SOB doesn’t even see me. So what else is new, huh? He’s got a good hand, though, and since he’s not paying any attention, I think maybe I’ll help myself to one of his cards.”
    The carriage rolls past the window. She looks into the next room and sees Martin Belvedere slumped over his desk. The door to his inner office is closed. As she watches it opens. But it is Randolph who walks into the scene, not her. He smiles.
    “Going to be some big changes at the center now that my father is gone,” Randolph says. “No more lemon yogurt.”
    She continues to stare into the dream chamber and realizes she is peering into a seemingly bottomless well of night.
    She hears the rattle of harness and the iron-shod hooves of the horses striking the paving stones. The carriage starts to roll forward. But just as the scene starts to slip away she sees a shadowyfigure move in the hall behind Randolph. He is not alone at the scene of the crime. She leans forward, trying to get a clear picture of the other person but the darkness of the hall is too deep.
    Somewhere in the distance her dream lover calls her name, shattering the trance.
    “Isabel . . .”
    She came out of the dream with a suddenness that evidently annoyed Sphinx. He lashed his tail.
    “Ellis?” She sat up slowly, shaking off the trancelike effects of the Level Five dream.
    “Sorry, honey.” Ellis moved in the shadows, reaching out to switch on one of the reading lamps. “Didn’t realize you were asleep.”
    “It’s okay.” She swung her feet to the floor and pushed her hair back behind her ears. “I was dreaming.”
    “Yeah?” He watched her with dark curiosity. “Regular or extreme?”
    “Extreme. Gavin Hardy and Martin Belvedere featured prominently. What about you? Any luck?”
    “Yeah, but if I’m right, the problem is even bigger than I thought.” He lowered himself into the wing-back chair. Controlled tension radiated from him. His eyes were sharp and cold. “I went into the dream to search for possible patterns involving Scargill and the men he used from that behavior modification program at the Brackleton Correctional Facility. But the images that kept recurring did not involve him or the prison.”

    “What did you see?”
    “Lawson,” Ellis said. “Sitting at his desk, his phone in his hand. He had either just talked to Beth or he was about to talk to her.”
    “Go on.”
    “He tells her everything. She’s still his partner, even if they are having problems at the moment. He couldn’t run his operation without her.”
    “Back up, you’re going too fast for me.”
    Reflectively, Ellis massaged his right shoulder with his left hand. “If I’m right about Scargill faking his own death, he had one real big issue to worry about after he staged his grand