Let the Devil Sleep (2 page)

On top of everything else, it seemed to him that Madeleine had been watching him in recent weeks with a new kind of worry in her eyes—not the fleeting looks of pain and panic he’d seen in the hospital, or the alternating expressions of hopefulness and anxiety that had accompanied his early recovery, but something quieter and deeper—a half-hidden chronic dread, as if she were witnessing something terrible.

Still standing by the breakfast table, he finished his coffee in two large swallows. Then he carried the mug to the sink and let the hot water run into it. He could hear Madeleine down the hall in the mudroom, cleaning out the cat’s litter box. The cat had recently been added to the household at Madeleine’s initiative. Gurney wondered why. Was it to cheer him up? Engage him in the life of a creature other than himself? If so, it wasn’t working. He had no more interest in the cat than in anything else.

“I’m going to take a shower,” he announced.

He heard Madeleine say something in the mudroom that sounded like “Good.” He wasn’t sure that’s what she said, but he didn’t see any point in asking. He went into the bathroom and turned on the hot water.

A long, steamy shower—the energetic spray pelting his back minute after minute from the base of his neck down to the base of his spine, relaxing muscles, opening capillaries, clearing mind and sinuses—produced in him a feeling of well-being that was both wonderful and fleeting.

By the time he’d dressed again and returned to the French doors, a jangled sense of unease was already beginning to reassert itself. Madeleine was outside now on the bluestone patio. Beyond the patio was the small section of the pasture that had, through two years of frequent mowings, come to resemble a lawn. Clad in a rough barn jacket, orange sweatpants, and green rubber boots, she was working her way along the edge of the flagstones, stamping enthusiastically down on a spade every six inches, creating a clear demarcation, digging out the encroaching roots of the wild grasses. She gave him a look that seemed at first to convey an invitation for him to join in the project, then disappointment at his obvious reluctance to do so.

Irritated, he purposely looked away, his gaze drifting down the hillside to his green tractor parked by the barn.

She followed his line of sight. “I was wondering, could you use the tractor to smooth out the ruts?”

“Ruts?”

“Where we park the cars.”

“Sure …” he said hesitantly. “I guess.”

“It doesn’t have to be done right this minute.”

“Hmm.” All traces of equanimity from his shower were now gone,
as his train of thought shifted to the peculiar tractor problem he’d discovered a month ago and had largely put out of his mind—except for those paranoid moments when it drove him crazy.

Madeleine appeared to be studying him. She smiled, put down her spade, and walked around to the side door, evidently so she could take off her boots in the mudroom before coming into the kitchen.

He took a deep breath and stared at the tractor, wondering for the twentieth time about the mysteriously jammed brake. As if acting in malignant harmony, a dark cloud slowly obliterated the sun. Spring, it seemed, had come and gone.

T
he Gurney property was situated on the saddle of a ridge at the end of a rural road outside the Catskill village of Walnut Crossing. The old farmhouse was set on the gentle southern slope of the saddle. An overgrown pasture separated it from a large red barn and a deep pond ringed by cattails and willows, backed by a beech, maple, and black-cherry forest. To the north a second pasture rose along the ridgeline toward a pine forest and a string of small abandoned bluestone quarries that looked out over the next valley.

The weather had gone through the kind of dramatic about-face that was far more common in the Catskill Mountains than in New York City, where Dave and Madeleine had come from. The sky had become a featureless slaty blanket drawn over the hills. The temperature seemed to have dropped at least ten degrees in ten minutes.

A superfine sleet was beginning to fall. Gurney closed the French doors. As he pulled them tight to secure the latches, he felt a piercing pain in the right side of his stomach. A moment later another followed. This was something he was used to, nothing that three ibuprofens couldn’t suppress. He headed for the bathroom medicine cabinet, thinking that the worst part of it wasn’t the physical discomfort, the worst part was the feeling of vulnerability, the realization that the only reason he was alive was that he’d been lucky.

Luck was not a concept he liked. It seemed to him to be the fool’s substitute for competence. Random chance had saved his life, but random chance was not a trustworthy ally. He knew younger men who believed in good luck, relied on good luck, thought it was something they owned. But at the age of forty-eight, Gurney knew damn well
that luck is only luck, and the invisible hand that flips the coin is as cold as a corpse.

The pain in his side also reminded him that he’d been meaning to cancel his upcoming appointment with his neurologist in Binghamton. He’d had four appointments with the man in less than four months, and they seemed increasingly pointless, unless the only point was to send Gurney’s insurance company another bill.

He kept that phone number with his other medical numbers in his den desk. Instead of continuing into the bathroom for the ibuprofen, he went into the den to make the call. As he was entering the number, he was picturing the doctor: a preoccupied man in his late thirties, with wavy black hair already receding, small eyes, girlish mouth, weak chin, silky hands, manicured fingernails, expensive loafers, dismissive manner, and no visible interest in anything that Gurney thought or felt. The three women who inhabited his sleek, contemporary reception area seemed perpetually confused and irritated by the doctor, by his patients, and by the data on their computer screens.

The phone was answered on the fourth ring with an impatience verging on contempt. “Dr. Huffbarger’s office.”

“This is David Gurney, I have an upcoming appointment that I’d—”

The sharp voice cut him off. “Hold on, please.”

In the background he could hear a raised male voice that he thought for a moment belonged to an angry patient reeling off a long, urgent complaint—until a second voice asked a question and a third voice joined the fray in a similar tone of loud, fast-talking indignation—and Gurney realized that what he was hearing was the cable news channel that made sitting in Huffbarger’s waiting room insufferable.

“Hello?” said Gurney with a definite edge. “Anybody there?
Hello?
”

“Just a minute, please.”

The voices that he found so abrasively empty-headed continued in the background. He was about to hang up when the receptionist’s voice returned.

“Dr. Huffbarger’s office, can I help you?”

“Yes. This is David Gurney. I have an appointment I want to cancel.”

“The date?”

“A week from today at eleven-forty
A.M.
”

“Spell your name, please.”

He was about to question how many people had appointments on that same day at 11:40, but he spelled his name instead.

“And when do you wish to reschedule it?”

“I don’t. I’m just canceling it.”

“You’ll need to reschedule it.”

“What?”

“I can reschedule Dr. Huffbarger’s appointments, not cancel them.”

“But the fact is—”

She interrupted, sounding exasperated. “An existing appointment can’t be removed from the system without inserting a revised date. That’s the doctor’s policy.”

Gurney could feel his lips tightening with anger, way too much anger. “I don’t really care much about his system or his policy,” he said slowly, stiffly. “Consider my appointment canceled.”

“There will be a missed-appointment charge.”

“No there won’t. And if Huffbarger has a problem with that, tell him to call me.” He hung up, tense, feeling a twinge of chagrin at his childish twisting of the neurologist’s name.

He stared out the den window at the high pasture without really seeing it.

What the hell’s the matter with me?

A jab of pain in his right side offered a partial answer. It also reminded him that he’d been on his way to the medicine cabinet when he’d made his appointment-canceling detour.

He returned to the bathroom. He didn’t like the look of the man who looked back at him from the mirror on the cabinet door. His forehead was lined with worry, his skin colorless, his eyes dull and tired.

Christ.

He knew he had to get back to his daily exercise regimen—the sets of push-ups, chin-ups, sit-ups that had once kept him in better shape than most men half his age. But now the man in the mirror was looking every bit of forty-eight, and he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy about the daily messages of mortality his body was sending
him. He wasn’t happy about his descent from mere introversion into isolation. He wasn’t happy about … anything.

He took the ibuprofen bottle from its shelf, tapped three of the little brown pills into his hand, frowned at them, popped them into his mouth. As he was running the water, waiting for it to get cold, he heard the phone ringing in the den. Huffbarger, he thought. Or Huffbarger’s office. He made no move to answer it.
To hell with them
.

Then he heard Madeleine’s footsteps coming down from upstairs. A few moments later, she picked up the phone, just as the call was switching over to their ancient answering machine. He could hear her voice but couldn’t make out the words. He half-filled a small plastic cup with water and washed down the three pills that were starting to dissolve on his tongue.

He assumed that Madeleine was dealing with the Huffbarger problem. Which was fine with him. But then he heard her footsteps coming across the hall and into the bedroom. She walked through the open bathroom door, extending the phone handset toward him.

“For you,” she said, handing it to him and leaving the room.

Anticipating some unpleasantness from Huffbarger or one of his malcontent receptionists, Gurney’s tone was defensively curt. “Yes?”

There was a second of silence before the caller spoke.

“David?” The bright female voice was certainly familiar, but his memory failed to attach a name or a face to it.

“Yes,” he said, more pleasantly this time. “I’m sorry, but I can’t quite place—”

“Oh, how could you forget? Oh, I am so hurt,
Detective Gurney
!” the caller cried with jokey exaggeration—and suddenly the laughing timbre and inflection of the words conjured up the person: a wiry, clever, high-energy blonde with a Queens accent and a model’s cheekbones.

“Connie. Jesus. Connie Clarke. It’s been a while.”

“Six years, to be exact.”

“Six years. Jesus.” The number didn’t mean much to him, didn’t surprise him, but he didn’t know what else to say.

He remembered their connection with mixed feelings. A freelance journalist, Connie Clarke had written a laudatory article about him
for
New York
magazine after he’d solved the infamous Jason Strunk serial-murder case—just three years after he’d been promoted to detective first grade for solving the Jorge Kunzman serial-murder case. In fact, her article was a little too laudatory for comfort, dwelling as it did on his record number of homicide arrests and referring to him as the “NYPD Supercop”—a sobriquet that lent itself to scores of amusing variations created by his more imaginative colleagues.

“So how are things up there in peaceful retirement land?”

He could hear the grin in her question and assumed she knew about his unofficial involvement in the Mellery and Perry cases. “Sometimes more peaceful than other times.”

“Wow! Yeah! I guess that’s one way of putting it. You retire from the NYPD after twenty-five years, you’re up in the sleepy Catskills for about ten minutes, and all of a sudden you’re in the middle of one murder case after another. Seems to me you’re kind of a major-crime magnet. Wow! How does Madeleine feel about that?”

“You just had her on the phone. You should have asked her.”

Connie laughed as though he’d said something wonderfully witty.

“So between murder cases what’s your typical day like?”

“There’s not much to tell. It’s pretty uneventful. Madeleine stays busier than I do.”

“I’m having such a hard time picturing you in the middle of some kind of Norman Rockwell America. Dave making maple syrup. Dave making apple cider. Dave getting eggs from the henhouse.”

“I’m afraid not. No syrup, cider, or eggs.” What came to his mind was quite a different scenario describing the past six months.
Dave playing the hero. Dave getting shot. Dave recovering too goddamn slowly. Dave sitting around listening to the ringing in his own ears. Dave getting depressed, hostile, isolated. Dave viewing every proposed activity as an infuriating assault on his right to remain in a paralyzing funk. Dave wanting to have nothing to do with anything
.

“So what
will
you be doing today?”

“To be absolutely truthful with you, Connie, damn little. At most I’ll walk around the edges of the fields, maybe pick up some of the branches that blew down during the winter, maybe rake some fertilizer into the garden beds. Stuff like that.”

“Doesn’t sound so bad to me. I know people who’d give a lot to trade places with you.”

He didn’t answer, just let the silence drag out, thinking it might force her to get to the point of the call. There had to be a point. He remembered Connie as a cordial and talky woman, but she always had a purpose. Her mind, under that windblown blond mane, was always working.

“You’re wondering why I called you,” she said. “Right?”

“The question did cross my mind.”

“I called you because I want to ask you for a favor. A
huge
favor.”

Gurney thought for a moment, then laughed.

“What’s the joke?” She sounded momentarily off balance.

“You once told me that it’s always better to ask for a big favor than a small one, because small ones are easier to refuse.”