The Inner Circle Read online

  “I appreciate the talking-penis analogy, but let’s be honest, Dallas—if I didn’t have Clementine with me this morning, I never would’ve even gotten in to see Nico.”

  “And that’s so bad?”

  “If Nico didn’t see that sheet, we wouldn’t’ve gotten here,” I point out, catching up to him and holding out the empty rock.

  “What’re you talking about?”

  “The coordinates. North 38 degrees, west 77 degrees—”

  “Go back,” Dallas says, stopping on the path. “You showed him the actual invisible ink sheet?”

  “No, I—” I pat my jacket pockets, then my jeans. Don’t tell me I—

  “What, Beecher? You gave Nico the sheet?”

  “Of course not. In the rush… we were so excited… I think I left it.”

  “You didn’t leave it, Beecher. He took it. Didn’t you see Silence of the Lambs? He absolutely took it—which means in your quest to figure out who’s messing with the President, you gave the full story to the mental patient who once tried to assassinate one!”

  I try to tell myself that Nico doesn’t know that the note was for Wallace, but it’s drowned out by the fact that there are only two types of people who ever come to see Nico: fellow crazies and desperate reporters.

  “You better pray he doesn’t have access to copiers or scanners,” Dallas says, reminding me exactly what’ll happen if Nico puts that sheet of paper in the hands of either of those two groups.

  I look downhill, checking for Clementine. She’s gone. In her place, all I see is Nico and the calm, measured way he said thank you when I left. He definitely took it.

  “Don’t tell me you’re going back to St. Elizabeths,” Dallas calls out, though he already knows the answer.

  “I have to,” I tell him as I pick up speed. “I need to get back what Nico took from us.”

  84

  It was something that the one with the ungroomed beard—Dallas—it was something Dallas had said.

  Squinting through the front windshield as the morning sun pinged off the piles of soot-capped snow, the barber couldn’t help but notice the sudden increase in the number of the neighborhood’s liquor stores and laundromats. Of course, there was a barbershop. There was always a barbershop, he knew, spying the hand-painted sign with the words Fades To Braids in big red letters.

  Kicking the brakes as he approached a red light, he didn’t regret holding back at the cemetery. He was ready. He’d made his peace. But when he heard those words leave Dallas’s lips, he knew there was still one box that needed to be checked.

  Twenty-six years ago, he’d acted in haste. Looking back at it, though, he didn’t regret that either. He did the best he could in the moment.

  Just as he was doing now.

  As the light winked green, he twisted the wheel into a sharp left turn, fishtailing for a split second in a mass of gray slush. As the car found traction, Laurent knew he was close.

  This was it.

  He knew it from the moment he saw the building in the distance.

  He knew it as he felt the straight-edge razor that still called to him from his pocket.

  He knew it as he saw—parked at the top of the hill—the silver car that Beecher had been driving.

  And he knew it when he spotted, just next to the main gate, the thin black letters that spelled out those same two words that had left Dallas’s lips back in the cemetery.

  St. Elizabeths.

  The greater good would finally be served.

  85

  It takes me nineteen minutes to drop Dallas at the Archives, eleven minutes to drive his silver Toyota back to St. Elizabeths, and a full forty seconds for me to stand outside, working on my story, before I push open the front door of Nico’s building.

  “I… hi… sorry… I think I left my notebook upstairs,” I say to the guard, feigning idiocy and holding up the temporary ID sticker that she gave me a little over an hour ago.

  The guard with the bad Dutch-boy hair rolls her eyes.

  “Just make it quick,” she says as a loud tunk opens the steel door, and I take my second trip of the day through the metal detector.

  “Don’t worry,” I tell her. “I’ll be lightning.”

  Trying hard to stand still, I fight my body as it follows the rhythmic sway of the rising elevator.

  An hour ago, when I was standing here, I was holding Clementine’s hand. Right now, I lean hard on that thought, though it does nothing to calm me.

  As the doors rumble open and I step out, the same black woman with the same big key ring is waiting for me.

  “Forgot your notebook, huh?” she asks with a laugh. “Hope there’s no phone numbers in there. You don’t want Nico calling your relatives.”

  I pretend to laugh along as she again opens the metal door and leads me down the hallway, back to the day room.

  “Christopher, can you help him out?” the woman asks, passing me to a heavy male nurse in a freshly starched white shirt. “We got some more visitors coming up right now.”

  As she leaves me behind, I take a quick scan of the fluorescent-lit day room: patients watching various TVs, nurses flipping through various clipboards, there’s even someone feeding coins into the soda machine. But as I check the Plexiglas round table in the corner…

  No Nico.

  “Who you here for again?” the heavy male nurse asks as he fluffs pillows and straightens one of the many saggy sofas.

  “Nico,” I say, holding up my ID sticker like it’s a badge. “I was here seeing Nico, but I think I left my notebook.”

  He does his own scan of the area, starting with the round table. He knows Nico’s routine.

  “I bet he’s in his room—711,” he says, pointing me to the swinging doors on the far left. “Don’t worry, you can go yourself. Nico’s got room visitor privileges.”

  “Yeah… no… I’ll be quick,” I say, taking off for the swinging doors and reminding myself what they first told me: This is a hospital, not a prison. But as I push the doors open and the bright day room narrows into the far smaller, far darker, far quieter hospital hallway, the sudden silence makes me all too aware of how alone I am back here.

  At the end of the hall is an internal metal staircase that’s blocked off by a thick glass door so no one on this floor can access it. I still hear the soft thud of footsteps as someone descends a few floors above.

  Counting room numbers, I walk past at least three patient rooms that have padlocks on the outside. One of them is locked, bolted tight. I don’t even want to know who’s in there.

  By the time I reach Room 711, I’m twisting out of my winter coat to stop the sweat. Nico’s door also has a padlock and is slightly ajar. The lights are on. But from what I can tell, no one’s inside.

  I look back over my shoulder. Through the cutaway in the swinging doors, the male nurse is still watching me.

  “Nico…?” I call out, tapping a knuckle softly on the door.

  No one answers.

  “Nico, you there?” I ask, knocking again.

  Still nothing.

  I know this moment. It’s just like the moment in the original SCIF: a scary door, an off-limits room, and a spectacularly clear opportunity. Back then, I told Orlando we shouldn’t be that guy in the horror movie who checks out the noise coming from the woods. The thing is, right now, I need what’s in those woods.

  Clenching my jaw, I give the door a slight push, and the whiff of rosewater perfume takes me back a dozen years. It’s the same smell as Clementine’s old house. As I lean forward, the nylon on my winter coat rubs the door like sandpaper. I crane my neck just enough to see—

  “What the hell you doing?” an angry voice snaps behind me.

  I spin around to find a tall brown-haired man—nurse… another nurse—standing there wearing plastic gloves and carrying a stack of Dixie cups in a long plastic sheath.

  “You got no business being back here!” the nurse scolds, plenty pissed.

  “The other nurse… the g
uy up front… in the white,” I stutter, pointing back the way I came. “He said Nico had visitor privileges.”

  “Christopher? Christopher ain’t no nurse! He runs the juice cart! And don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing…”

  “Doing? I-I’m not doing anything.”

  “You say that. But then every year or so, we still get one of you showing up, hoping to get an autograph or grab some personal item—last year, some guy put a Bible that he said belonged to Nico up on eBay. I know you think it’s cool, but you’ve got no idea how hard Nico’s working. It’s not easy for him, okay? Let the man live his damn life.”

  “I am. I want to. I’m… I’m just trying to get my notebook,” I tell him.

  “The what?”

  “My notebook. I was visiting with him earlier. Doing research. I think I left my notebook.”

  The nurse cocks his head, studying me for a full two seconds. He believes me. Pointing me back to the swinging doors of the day room, he explains, “Nico’s doing his janitor work in the RMB Building. You wanna ask him something, go find him there. You’re not going in his room without his okay. Now you know where RMB is?”

  “The redbrick building, right?” I say, rushing for the door, remembering where Nico feeds the cats. “I know exactly where it is.”

  86

  Nippy out today, huh?” a young guard with a big gold class ring asks as I shove my way out of the wind and into the toasty lobby of the redbrick RMB Building.

  “I’m from Wisconsin. This is summer for us,” I say, working extra hard to keep it light as I approach the desk and yet again scribble my name in a sign-in book. “So who’d you play for?” I add, motioning to the gold football that’s engraved into his ring.

  “Floyd County High School. Out in Virginia,” he says. “It’s class A, not AAA, but still… state champs.”

  “State champs,” I say with a nod, well aware that there’s only one thing I really care about from high school.

  “So you’re the Nico guy?” the guard asks.

  “Pardon?”

  “They called me from the other side—said you’d be coming. You’re the one looking for Nico, right?” Before I can answer, a lanky black woman with bright red statement glasses shoves open the locked metal door that leads to the rest of the building. After finding me outside Nico’s room, they’re not letting me get in this building unattended.

  “Vivian can take you back,” the guard says, motioning me through what looks like a brand-new metal detector. But as the red-glasses nurse swipes her ID against a snazzy new scanner to open the metal door, I’m all too aware that this building has a far more high-tech security system than the ancient giant key ring that the nurses rely on in the other one.

  “So you a reporter?” Red Glasses asks as she tugs the door open and invites me inside.

  “No… no… just… I’m doing some research,” I say, following behind her.

  “Like I said—a reporter,” she teases as I notice a sign on the wall that says:

  Gero-Psych Unit

  In the hallway, there’s an empty gurney, an empty wheelchair and a state-of-the-art rolling cart. Everything’s scrubbed neat as can be. Outrageously neat. Even without the industrial hand sanitizer dispensers along the walls, I know a hospital when I see one.

  “I didn’t realize you had a full medical unit back here,” I say as we pass an open room and I spot an elderly man in a hospital bed, hooked to various monitors and staring blankly at a TV.

  “Our population’s aging. We need someplace to take care of them. You should put that in one of your articles, rather than all the usual stuff you write about us.” She’s about to say something else, but as we reach our destination—the nurses’ desk that sits like an island at the center of the long suite—she stops and arches an eyebrow, looking confused.

  “Everything okay?” I ask.

  “Yeah, I just… Nico was just mopping back here.”

  I follow her gaze down to the floor. Sure enough, the tiles are still shiny and wet.

  “Gimme half a sec,” the nurse says, picking up the desk phone and quickly dialing a number. As she waits for it to ring, I trace the wet streaks on the floor to…

  There.

  Just a few feet ahead, along the tile, there’re two parallel streaks—from the wheels of a mop bucket rolling along the wet floor—that run like train tracks, then make a sharp right into one of the patient rooms.

  “Pam, you see Nico up there?” the nurse says into the phone.

  As she waits for an answer, I follow the streaks a few steps toward the open room. Inside, the lights are off, but there’s sunlight coming in from the window. Stretching my neck, I peek around the corner, into the room, and…

  Nothing. No mop bucket… no Nico… nothing but another patient hooked up to another set of machines.

  “Great—he’s up there?” the nurse says behind me, still talking on the phone. “Perfect. Great. Sure, please send him down.”

  As she hangs up the phone, I take one last glance at the patient in the bed. He’s maybe sixty or so, and propped on his side, facing me. It’s not by his choice. There are pillows stuffed behind his back. His body’s frozen, and his hands rest like a corpse’s at the center of his chest. They did the same thing when my mom had her heart surgery: turning him to prevent bedsores.

  The oddest part are the man’s eyes, which are small and red like a bat’s. As I step in the room, he’s staring right at me. I raise my hand to apologize for interrupting, but I quickly realize… he’s barely blinking.

  I tighten my own gaze. There’s nothing behind his eyes. He’s not seeing anything at all. He just lies there, his whole body as stiff as his arms on his—

  Wait.

  His arm. There’s something on his arm.

  My face goes hot, flushing with blood. Every bone in my body feels paper-thin and brittle, like a fishbone that’s easily snapped.

  I didn’t see it when I first walked in—I was too busy looking at his empty eyes—but there it is, faded and withered on the lower part of his forearm:

  A tattoo.

  A sagging, faded black tattoo.

  Of an eight-ball.

  87

  Twenty-six years ago

  Journey, Ohio

  That’ll be seventeen dollars and fifty-four—”

  “No… hold on… I got coupons,” the heavy customer with the thick neck interrupted, fishing out wads of crumpled coupons and handing them to the supermarket cashier.

  The cashier shook her head. “Son, you should’ve—” But as the cashier finally looked up and made eye contact, she realized the customer with the ripped black concert tee and the matching punk black Converse wasn’t a he. It was a she. “I… hurrr… lemme just… ring these up,” the cashier stuttered, quickly looking away.

  By now, after sixteen years of living with Turner syndrome, Minnie Wallace knew how people saw her. She was used to awkward stares. Just like she was used to the fact that as she stepped past the cashier and into the bagging area, every single bagboy in the store had somehow subtly made his way to one of the other cashier lanes.

  No way around it—people always disappoint, Minnie thought as she sorted cans of cheap tuna fish away from the cheap generic aspirin, and bagged the rest of her groceries herself.

  “New grand total… fifteen dollars and four cents,” the cashier announced, stealing another quick glance at Minnie’s broad chest and low, mannish hairline. Minnie caught that too, even as she brushed her black bowl-cut hair down against her forehead in the hopes of covering her face.

  With a final hug around the two brown bags of groceries, Minnie gripped them tightly to her chest, added a sharp lift, and headed for the automatic doors.

  Outside, the drab Ohio sky was still laced with a few slivers of pink as the sun gave way to dark.

  “Y’need some help?” a voice called out.

  “Huh?” Minnie asked, turning off balance and nearly dropping both bags.

  “He
re, lemme… Here,” a boy with far too much gel in his spiky brown hair said, taking control of both bags before they tumbled.

  “Man, these are heavy,” he teased with a warm smile as he walked next to her. “You’re strong.”

  Minnie stared, finally getting her first good look at his face. She knew him from school. He was a few years older from being left back. Twelfth grade. His name was Griffin.

  “Whattya want?” she asked, already suspicious.

  “Nothing. I was—You just looked like you needed—”

  “If you want my brother to buy you beer, go ask him yourself,” she said, knowing full well what Orson had been doing since he’d been back on spring break.

  “No… that’s not—Can you just listen?” he pleaded, readjusting the bags and revealing the tattoo on his forearm. A black eight-ball. “I just was hoping—I don’t know… maybe…” Griffin stopped at the corner, working hard on the words. “Maybe we could… maybe go out sometime?”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Sure… yeah. It’s just… I’ve seen you around school—always wearing that concert shirt—the Smiths,” he said as Minnie’s big cheeks burned red. “The Smiths are cool.”

  “Yeah, they’re… they’re kinda cool,” she replied, unable to do anything but look straight down, study her black Converse, and try extra hard to slide open her leather jacket so he could see her current English Beat concert tee, which was stretched tight by her round belly.

  “Yeah, English Beat’s cool too,” Griffin added, nodding his approval as he readjusted the brown paper bags and stole another glance at her.

  As they crossed the street, Griffin pointed to a parked black Dodge Aspen that had been repainted with a cheap paint job. “If you want, I can drive you home,” he offered.

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “I know,” he said, again peering over at her, this time for longer. “I’d like to. I’d really like to.”

  It wasn’t the offer that caught Minnie off guard. Or even his smile. It was the way he looked at her. Right at her. For sixteen years, unless someone was staring, no one looked at her.