Roses Are Red

pool game’s over now, Mr. Anderson. Please put the stick down.”
    “You think you can make me put down this cue stick? Probably do, if you think I’m a puss.”
    I held my mental health–worker whistle to my mouth. “I’m new here and I need the work. I don’t want any trouble.”
    “Well then, you came to the wrong goddamn hellhole, man,” he said. “You’re the fucking priss. Whistle-blower.”
    Anderson tossed the pool cue onto the table and he stalked toward the door. He bumped my shoulder on the way.
    “Watch your mouth,
nigger
,” he said, spitting as he spoke the words.
    I didn’t give Anderson any more ground. I grabbed him, spun him around, surprised the hell out of him. I let him feel the strength in my arms and shoulders. I stared him down. I wanted to see what happened if he was provoked.
    “You watch
your
mouth,” I said in the softest whisper. “You be very, very careful around me.”
    I released my grip on Cletus Anderson and he spun away. I watched the large man leave the pool room — and I kind of hoped he was the Mastermind.

Chapter 101
    THE WORST POSSIBILITY I COULD IMAGINE so far was that the Mastermind might disappear and never be heard from again. Hunting for the Mastermind had become more like Waiting for the Mastermind, or maybe even Praying for the Mastermind to do something that would lead us to him.
    Shifts at the veterans hospital began with a thirty-minute nursing-report-cum-coffee-klatch. During the meeting each patient was talked about briefly, and privilege changes noted. The report buzzwords were
affect, compliance, interaction,
and, of course,
PTSD.
At least half the men on the wards suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder.
    The shift report ended, and my day began. The psychiatric aide’s main duty is to interact with patients. I was doing that, and it reminded me of why I’d gone into psychology in the first place.
    Actually, a lot of my past life was rushing back, especially my feelings for and understanding of the terrible power of trauma. So many of these men suffered from it. For them, the world no longer seemed safe or manageable. People around them didn’t seem trustworthy or dependable. Self-doubt and guilt were always present. Faith and spirituality were nonexistent.
Why had the Mastermind chosen this place to hide?
    During the eight-hour shift I had a number of specific duties: sharps check at seven (I had to count all the silverware in the kitchen; if anything was missing, which was rare, rooms would be searched); one-on-one specials at eight with a patient named Copeland, who was considered extremely suicidal; fifteen-minute checks starting at nine, checking the whereabouts of all the patients every fifteen minutes and putting a mark by their names on a blackboard in the hallway outside the nurses’ station); and baskets (somebody had to empty the garbage).
    Each time I went to the blackboard I gave the most likely suspects a slightly bolder chalk mark. At the end of my hour on checks, I found that I had seven candidates on my hot list.
    A patient named James Gallagher was on the list simply because he roughly fit the physical description of the Mastermind. He was tall enough, thick chested, and seemed reasonably alert and bright. That alone made him a suspect.
    Frederic Szabo had full town privileges, but he was a timid soul and I doubted that he was a killer. Since Vietnam he’d been drifting around the country and had never held a job for more than a few weeks. Occasionally, he spit at hospital staff, but that was the worst offense he seemed capable of.
    Stephen Bowen had full town privileges and had once been a promising infantry captain in Vietnam. He suffered from PTSD and had been in and out of veterans hospitals since 1971. He took pride in saying that he’d never held a “real job” since he left the military.
    David Hale had been a policeman in Maryland for two years, before he began having paranoid thoughts that every Asian person he saw on the streets had been put there to kill him.
    Michael Fescoe had worked for two banks in Washington, but he seemed too spaced-out to balance his own checkbook. Maybe he was faking PTSD, but his therapist at the hospital didn’t think so.
    Cletus Anderson fit the Mastermind’s general physical description. I didn’t like him. And he was violent. But Anderson hadn’t done a thing to make me suspect he could actually be the Mastermind. Quite the contrary.
    Just before shift change, Betsey