Praying for Sleep

to this mission doesn’t lessen Adler’s growing panic one bit. He gasps as the elevator, summoned from below, grinds downward. He hears a patient somewhere utter a guttural moan of infinite, inexpressible sorrow. As this sound strokes his neck, he places one foot before the other and doggedly starts walking.
    No, no—Michael Hrubek has no need to kill him. Michael Hrubek doesn’t even know him personally. Michael Hrubek couldn’t have made the journey back to the hospital in this short time, even if he did feel like eviscerating the director.
    Dr. Ronald Adler the veteran of the state mental-health-hospital system, Dr. Ronald Adler the fair-tomiddlin’ graduate of a provincial medical school—these Dr. Ronald Adlers believe that he’s probably safe.
    Yet the man whose head was entwined between his wife’s fragrant legs earlier in the night, the man who mediates board-meeting conflicts far better than he cures madness, the man who now pads down this murky, stone hallway— these Ronald Adlers are paralyzed by the sound of his own gritty footsteps.
    Please, don’t let me die.
    His office now seems miles away, and he gazes at the white trapezoid of light falling onto the concrete from his open doorway. He continues on, passing one of the arterial corridors, and exhales a fast astonished laugh at his inability to turn and look down it. If he does he will see a Technicolor film clip of Michael Hrubek reaching into Adler’s mouth. The hospital director cannot purge from his thoughts the passages of Hrubek’s transcripts he read earlier in the evening. He recalls in particular detail the patient’s lively discussion of locating and rupturing a spleen.
    Enough. Please!
    Adler passes by the corridor safely but a new worry intrudes—that he’ll lose control of his bladder. He’s insanely furious at his wife—for gripping his cock earlier in the evening and unwittingly putting in mind the now-consuming fear of incontinence. He must urinate. He absolutely must. But the men’s room is a lengthy way down the corridor he now approaches. The restrooms are dark this time of night. He considers pissing against the wall.
    I don’t want to die.
    He hears footsteps. No, yes? Whose are they?
    The ghosts of one woman and two troopers.
    What’s that sound >
    Hah, they’re his own feet. Or perhaps not. He pictures the urinal. He turns toward it and begins to walk through the dim hall, and as he does a thought comes to mind: that Michael Hrubek’s escape tugs at everything he’s ever done wrong as a doctor. The escape is the crib sheets that accompanied him into organic-chemistry exams, it’s the charts he misplaced, the misprescribed medications, the aneurysms he forgot to inquire about before dispensing large dosages of Nardil. The madman’s escape is like lifting a twenty-pound line and watching rise from a murky pond some diseased fish snagged by your hook, bloated and near death—a prize you regret ever seeking, a token you wish would forever go away.
     
    “Listen to me, you son of a bitch,” Haversham growled, after he hung up the telephone. His audience—the hospital director and a glazed-eyed Peter Grimes—stared at him numbly. A grating rain fell heavily on the windows of Adler’s office. The wind screamed.
    “We just got ourselves another notice,” Haversham continued. “This one’s from Ridgeton. Seems there’s a report somebody crashed into a truck and drove it off the road. Both drivers disappeared into the woods. The truck got hit was registered to Owen Atcheson.”
    “Owen—?”
    “The husband of that woman testified against Hrubek. The fellow who was here before.”
    So now, maybe four dead.
    “They know for a fact it was Hrubek who did it?”
    “They think. They don’t know. That’s what we need you for.”
    “Oh, Jesus,” Adler muttered. He touched his eyes and pushed until he heard soft pops of pressure beneath the lids. “Four dead,” he whispered.
    “It’s up to you, Doc. We need to know where to put our resources.”
    What was he talking about? Resources?
    “No cuddly-pup psychocrap. I want a straight answer. We’ve had two reports—Boyleston and Amtrak, or Ridgeton and that woman testified against him. Where’s he headed?”
    Adler gazed at him blankly.
    “I think they want to know where to send their men, sir,” Grimes explained delicately.
    “That’s the problem, yeah. Two reports. They don’t jibe. Nobody knows jack shit for certain.”
    Adler looked from