Praying for Sleep

that lady in Ridgeton. He sent her a note or something.”
    “What lady?”
    “Some broad at his trial, I don’t know. Adler asked me if Michael’d ever mentioned her.”
    “Did he?”
    “Not to me he didn’t.”
    “What about this note?”
    “I don’t know nothing about it. Adler said to keep quiet about that too.”
    “When did he send it to her?”
    “How the fuck should I know?”
    “What’s this woman’s name?”
    “You’re going to ruin me, aren’t you? I didn’t get your patient back and you’re going to fuck me over. Why don’t you just admit it?”
    “What’s her name, Stu?”
    “Liz something. Wait. Liz Atcheson, I think.”
    “Is there anything else you can tell me?”
    “No,” Lowe blurted so quickly all Kohler could do was fill the ensuing silence with his serene, unyielding gaze. The orderly finally said miserably, “Well, the wire.”
    “Wire?”
    “I told Adler and Grimes and they made me swear I wouldn’t say anything. Oh, Jesus . . . What a time I’ve had.”
    Kohler didn’t move. His red, stinging eyes gazed at Lowe, who said sotto voce, as if Ronald Adler were making this a threesome, “We didn’t fall.”
    “Tell me, Stu. Tell me.”
    “We could’ve jumped over that ravine easy. But Michael strung a trip wire for us. He knew we were coming. Strung a piece of fishline or bell wire and led us over it.”
    Kohler was dumbfounded. “What are you saying?”
    “What am I saying?” Lowe blurted furiously. “Aren’t you listening? Aren’t you listening ? I’m saying your patient may be off his brain candy and may be a schizo but he was fucking clever enough to lead us into a trap. And he damn near killed both of us.” The orderly sealed his testimony by clicking the television back on and slouched into the couch, refusing to say anything more.
     
    Passing over the Gunderson town line Trenton Heck braked deftly with his left foot as he skidded around a deer that stepped into the road and stopped to see what a collision with a one-ton pickup might do to her.
    He eased back into the right lane and continued caroming down Route 236. He was driving like a teenager and he knew it, even taking the extreme measure of strapping a very unhappy Emil into the passenger seat with the blue canvas seat belt, which the hound immediately began to chew through. Behind the truck swirled a wake of dust and bleached autumn leaves.
    “Stop,” Heck barked over the roar of the engine, knowing that “Don’t chew,” let alone “Leave that seat-belt be,” would register in Emil’s mind as mere human grunts, worth ignoring. The familiar command was pointless, however, and Heck let the matter go. “Good fellow,” Heck said in a rare moment of sentiment, and reached over to scratch the big head, which slipped away in irritation.
    “Damn,” he muttered, “I’m doing it again.” He realized that the hound’s evasive maneuver reminded him of the way Jill had dodged away from his embrace the day after she’d served him with papers.
    Got to stop thinking about that girl, he now ordered.
    But of course he didn’t.
    “Mental cruelty and abandonment,” Heck had read after the process server left. He hadn’t even comprehended at first what these documents were. Abandonment? He thought they meant Jill herself was being sued for leaving the scene of an accident. She was a terrible driver. Then like a firecracker going off inside him he understood. Heck had been little good for anything for the month after that. It seemed that all he did was work with Emil and spend hours debating the separation with Jill—or rather with Jill’s picture, since by then she’d moved out. Sitting on the bed where they’d romped so friskily he tried to recall her arguments. It seemed that he hadn’t upheld his end of a vague bargain that had been made the morning following one particularly romantic, playful night. Their seventh date. At sunrise he’d found her plowing through his kitchen cabinets, looking for the Bisquick mix, and he’d interrupted the frenzied search to blurt a proposal. Jill had squealed and in her eagerness to hug him dropped a bag of flour. It detonated with a large white mushroom cloud. With happiness in her eyes and a little-girl pout on her lips, she cried, talking at curious length about the home that had been denied her all her life.
    The marriage had been a stormy union, Heck was the first to admit. When you were on Jill’s side, heaven’s gate opened up and she