Fever Dream Read online

“Are you the doctor?”

  “Yes. Dr. Rinaldi. And here’s Detective Lowrey, remember? You’re safe, Treva. It’s all right.”

  “Good.” She took another deep breath. “Good. I…I’m sorry, I think I went to sleep. I had a dream.”

  “A dream?”

  “It must’ve been a dream. I was in the bank…I work at the bank.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  Lowrey frowned down at me, but I just raised a warning finger. I couldn’t take the time to explain what I thought was happening.

  Treva was still in shock and unable to grasp the reality of what she’d witnessed in the bank. But unless I was wrong, she wanted—needed—to talk about what she’d seen. At the same time, she couldn’t cope with it. Not if it had really happened.

  So her unconscious was helping her cope. Making it seem as though what she’d experienced hadn’t been real at all, but rather just a dream. Some horrible dream.

  “You had a dream about the bank?”

  “Yes,” Treva said. “A bad dream.”

  “Can you remember the dream, Treva?”

  “I think so.” She shifted her shoulders under the blanket, sat up straighter. Readying herself for the effort. “We were all there, working. But it was quiet. No customers. Phyllis had just come back from lunch…”

  “Phyllis?”

  “Our head teller. Well, we call them associates now. She was showing me the watch her husband had gotten her for their anniversary. It had those fake diamonds…I forget what you call them…”

  I waited.

  Again her breathing grew shallow. Gently, so as not to alarm her, I laid my fingers on her wrist. Feeling for her pulse.

  “Suddenly, the front door banged open and this man came in. Wearing something on his face. Some kind of cloth, wrapped around his head. Like a mask. And he had a big gun. Before anyone could do or say anything, he aimed the gun at the two security cameras and shot them to pieces.”

  “Both video cameras?”

  “Yes. They’re on either side of the main floor. Then another man came in behind him, wearing the same kind of mask. He—they both had the same big guns. Phyllis had started screaming as soon as the first man came in, and now we all were. Screaming, I mean. And crying and…”

  She closed her eyes.

  “You’re right,” I said softly. “It was a bad dream. What did the gunmen do next?”

  Treva tilted her head up, but kept her eyes closed.

  “They shouted at us to step away from our desks, to come around to the front and get down on our knees. Hands on our heads. And not to move. They kept saying that over and over. ‘Don’t move, don’t nobody fucking move!’ But Bobby…”

  “Bobby Marks? The assistant manager?”

  She nodded, and finally opened her eyes.

  “Funny, he was the last one of us to get down on his knees. I mean, he was so slow about it, like he didn’t want to wrinkle his pants. Bobby was always so careful about his appearance. He liked tailored suits. And pocket handkerchiefs. You hardly see them anymore, but…”

  I paused. “What happened to Bobby?”

  “He…did what they said, but when he went to put his hands on his head, his glasses slipped off. The first masked man yelled at him, told him not to move. But Bobby, I guess he couldn’t help it, he reached down for the glasses, and this man…”

  Her voice caught. “Then…this man—he was tall, I remember—he just steps up to Bobby and puts his gun next to Bobby’s head and shoots. And there’s blood and stuff everywhere, and I’m kneeling right next to him, and—”

  Lowrey and I risked a quick glance at each other as Treva stopped abruptly.

  “Treva,” I began carefully. “What happened next?…In your dream…?”

  “The other masked man starts yelling at the tall one, really mad, saying it was stupid to shoot Bobby…I mean, we’re all weeping and moaning now, scared to death. Bobby’s blood is spreading all over the floor, and these two men are shouting at each other, cursing…I was afraid they—”

  Treva swallowed a couple times, hard.

  “Then…I don’t know how, but the alarm goes off, and the tall man waves his gun at the rest of us. Tells us we better shut the fuck up and stay put. Stay just where we are. Then he aims his gun at George—”

  “Who’s George?”

  “The bank guard. Real nice guy. He’s not doing anything wrong, he’s on his knees like the rest of us. Hands on his head. But the tall man warns him again not to move. Not to do something stupid.”

  I could feel Lowrey leaning in next to me, holding her breath, as though any sound might break the spell. Might interrupt Treva’s recounting of her dream.

  “This part’s kinda hazy,” Treva went on, “but I remember the second man, the shorter one, the alarm really freaks him out. He starts yelling, ‘Fuck this, man. Fuck this!’ And then he runs out of the bank, through the rear emergency exit door. The tall man yells after him, you know, ‘Come back, asshole! Get back here!” Stuff like that. But the guy’s gone, and the tall man is just standing there. Then I—”

  She stopped suddenly, took a long breath.

  I forced myself to stay calm. Patient. “Then what, Treva? Do you remember what happened next?”

  “Nothing happened next.”

  “But you got out of the bank. In your dream, didn’t the tall man release you? Let you leave the bank?”

  “Oh, I didn’t get out of the bank…I mean, after the other robber ran away, I just…that’s when I woke up…”

  A faint smile played on her lips.

  “That’s when I saw you, looking at me. You have a kind face, Doctor. Even with your beard.”

  I didn’t say anything, but just kept watching her eyes. They’d begun to go dull again, fading, as though the life were emptying out of them.

  “Can I go to sleep again?” she asked wearily.

  I stood up to find Lowrey staring down at Treva with an odd, unreadable expression on her face. Then, sighing, she very deliberately put her sunglasses back on. I couldn’t see her eyes as she looked at me.

  “She still hasn’t given us much. But at least—”

  Before Lowrey could say another word, a staccato volley of gunshots sounded from behind us. Hollow booms, like distant thunder.

  I whirled to see a small army of uniforms and SWAT guys swarm toward the First Allegheny building, shouting and cursing. Service weapons at the ready.

  The shots had come from inside the bank.

  Chapter Seven

  It was all over in less than a minute.

  Even before the first gunshots had faded, we could hear answering fire from the cops as they stormed the bank. The angry pop-pops, the shattering glass.

  Lowrey grabbed my arm and pulled me down next to where Treva sat, her mouth working furiously behind the folds of the blanket.

  “Stay with her!” Lowrey yelled at me, unholstering her service weapon.

  Before I could respond, another round of shots echoed sharply. Treva screamed, her hands shooting up out of the blanket to cover her ears.

  “It’s okay.” I put my arms around her.

  Lowrey gave us a last, alarmed look and ran in a crouch between the patrol cars, toward the bank.

  Holding the blanket tight around Treva, I craned my neck up and around to see what I could.

  At first, all I saw was the unfolding column of cops, moving at all angles, converging on the bank. Breaking down the doors, shooting the glass out from behind the broad barred windows. Splintered shards exploded, glittered like diamonds between drifting tendrils of gun smoke.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw something move on the roof of the building across from the bank.

  Still clutching Treva, I turned and squinted my eyes. Again, the blur of movement. Sunlight flashing off body armor. A SWAT sniper rifle, angled over the edge of the roof. Firing.

  Treva’s body shook with each round the sniper fired off. I ducked back down, huddled us lower, felt her tremors as s
he burrowed beneath the blanket.

  For what seemed an eternity we braced against a continuous, ear-pounding roar of gunfire, guttural cries, and exploding glass…

  Until, suddenly—

  Treva stirred in my arms, sniffling, and I gave her a little slack. She peered up at me. A questioning look.

  I’d noticed it, too. The silence.

  No more gunshots. No raised voices. Just an eerie, sticky silence that poured through the oppressive heat like molasses…

  I glanced once again up at the roof’s edge where the sniper was positioned. Or had been. He was gone, too.

  I looked back down at Treva, whose hand had come up to rub her forehead. “Was I dreaming again?”

  ***

  I was still helping her to her feet when an EMT guy wearing Kevlar over his medic blues came running up.

  “You guys all right?” Shaved head, mustache. Both sheened with sweat. Name tag on his shirt said “Karp.”

  “Can you get Treva here in the ambulance?”

  She shifted under my arm.

  “I want to stay with you.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, Treva. I just want the medic to check your vitals. Maybe give you something else to drink.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t like him.”

  Karp laughed. “Trust me, honey, I grow on people.” He held out his hand. “C’mon, now. Nothin’ to worry about.”

  I let her out of my embrace and turned to face her.

  “Look, Treva, I’m coming right back. Just go get in the ambulance and I’ll join you in a couple minutes. I’ll even ride with you to the hospital if you want.”

  “You will? Promise?” Voice as plaintive as a child’s.

  “Promise.”

  Again, that faint smile played on her lips. As though the thin, tinny sound of her own voice had amused her.

  She shifted uncomfortably in the thick blanket. Frowning, she pulled it off and gave it to the EMT tech. Ran her hands through her sweat-matted hair.

  “God, it’s so hot. I was roasting in that thing.”

  “I guess you don’t need it anymore.”

  She nodded gravely, and the smile fled.

  In just that single, simple exchange, we’d brought her back to the present. To the awareness, once again, of the horrors that she’d witnessed. And that she’d soon remember in all their cold, irrefutable reality.

  After a long pause, she looked away.

  “Is it all over?”

  “I think so,” I said.

  The EMT tech gave her what he thought was a reassuring smile, complete with gold tooth. “Sure it is, hon. Looks like everything’s secured.”

  He was right. Over his shoulder, I could see uniforms moving in and out through what was left of the bank’s open double-doors. Plainclothes cops, including the Assistant Chief, were coming out from behind cover to assemble at the entrance. CSU techs had already scrambled out of their windowless vans, trailing spools of crime scene tape. News crews were hustling into position.

  But when I looked back at Treva, all I saw was the color leaving her cheeks. Her breath coming in quick, shallow gasps.

  “So it really…Bobby’s really—”

  I lunged forward and caught her as she fainted.

  With a surprised grunt, Karp stepped to her other side and held her around the waist. “She’s shocky.”

  “You think?” Taking my frustration and worry out on the poor guy.

  He gave me a pained, embarrassed look, which I returned with what I hoped was an apologetic one.

  Then we carried Treva over to the EMT ambulance. After helping Karp get her settled on one of the two gurneys bolted to the floor inside, I left.

  Five minutes later, I took my first steps inside the bank, where the cops had just finished sorting the living from the dead.

  Chapter Eight

  The first thing I noticed was how cold it was.

  In contrast to the baking heat outside, the bank’s lobby was as cold as a walk-in freezer. The combination of air conditioning, marble floors and, no doubt, the familiar chill of staid, institutional respectability. A cool oasis amidst the turmoil of an uncertain world.

  On any other day, perhaps.

  Today, what I felt as I stepped carefully into the glass-strewn, bullet-scarred lobby was the claustrophobic encasement of a meat locker. The overwhelming stench of a slaughterhouse. The smell of blood and open wounds held captive by the frigid air.

  At first, I didn’t even register the cops on the scene. Polk and Lowrey. Uniforms milling around. CSU techs setting up their equipment. EMT clearing out, the medical examiner and his people coming in. Their wheeled beds, body bags, white sheets.

  In that feverish flurry of activity, nobody seemed to register me, either.

  I took another breath and found myself looking at the walls. Maybe to avoid looking down at the bodies. The walls spattered with blood, scarlet blotches that sprayed out in a curving pattern like thrown mud. That dripped slowly in rivulets to the floor like some living Pollock painting.

  Bits of flesh and bone fragments pitted the teller’s stations, the customer counters, the free-standing courtesy desk whose pen still dangled half-way to the floor from its silver chain.

  The first body I saw lay beneath it. A young East Indian woman, the top of her head blown off. Her wounds oozed blood that pooled on the cold marble beneath her. Spreading in waves to mingle obscenely with the blood of another, older woman lying three feet away.

  She wore a pale green blouse and gray pants, and had a gaping black hole where her face had been. Head thrown awkwardly back against a nest of blood-splattered hair. At the end of an outstretched arm was a smooth, manicured hand. An expensive-looking watch on her wrist. Was this Phyllis, wearing the anniversary present her husband had given her?

  Not a half-dozen feet away, a man lay sprawled on his back, arms and legs at odd angles. His Hugo Boss suit was flecked with blood and bits of flesh, but what drew my eye was the perfect triangle forming the tip of his white linen handkerchief, still neatly tucked into his jacket breast pocket. The tip itself stained pink.

  Bobby Marks, the assistant manager. Most of his face had survived the bullet that had cleaved off the back of his skull. Now it lay unnaturally flat against the floor, like a grotesquely comic theatrical mask, eyes and mouth opened wide with surprise.

  Suddenly I was all out of toughness, or stunned curiosity, or whatever the hell I wanted to call my state of mind. The room began to spin. I put out my hands, like a high-wire walker, and tried to get my bearings.

  “Hey!” A sharp, officious voice made me turn. I drew a couple more deep breaths. Reoriented myself.

  It was Lt. Stu Biegler from robbery/homicide, striding purposefully across the floor toward me. Not even glancing down at the body of Bobby Marks, other than to step carefully around the blood spreading beneath him.

  Thin and handsome in a useless, male-model kind of way, Biegler was easily forty but looked ten years younger. Though he carried himself in a way that seemed more callow than youthful.

  Now, planting his feet as though to establish his authority, he glared at me. “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Boy, I was getting tired of people asking me that.

  Not for the first time, though, anger helped me get a grip. Seemed like I was never in Biegler’s presence without wanting to punch his lights out. Not the kind of response you’d normally expect from your average mental health professional, but there it was. Sue me.

  “I was called to the scene, Lieutenant,” I said evenly. “Got a problem with that, take it up with the assistant chief.”

  “Don’t worry, I will. Last thing we need is some civilian fucking up our crime scene.”

  I indicated the bodies strewn about the lobby floor.

  “Looks like somebody already did that.”

  He was about to respond, when something he saw over my shoulder made his jaw tighten. Then, to my surprise, Biegler covered his mouth with his hand and
brushed past me toward the opened double-doors. His body in a kind of half-crouch, I could tell he was trying very hard not to be sick.

  I turned and got my first look at what Biegler had seen. Steeling myself, I came over to where Harry Polk stood, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. Staring down at what was left of the masked gunman.

  “Who got our perp?” Polk addressed the assistant medical examiner who squatted next to the body. His name tag said “Reynolds.” Middle-aged, balding, and bored.

  “According to the witness,” Reynolds said, “looks like we got him. I mean, SWAT did. Their sniper took him down.”

  Before Polk could stop me, I bent to take a closer look at the dead man. Most of his face had been sheared away by the sniper’s bullet, and what was left was still hidden by the singed fabric of his mask. A kind of thin, woven scarf that he’d wrapped around his head. It clung in bloody shreds to his exposed cheekbones, torn fragments dotting the ugly pattern of flesh and brains that fanned out from beneath his head on the smooth marble.

  Reynolds got awkwardly to his feet. “SWAT uses those nasty-ass hollow points. A head-hit pretty much turns everything into Hamburger Helper.”

  “Where’s his gun?” Polk said, pointing at a spot just beyond where the dead man’s outstretched palm lay still against the floor. “It was just here, right by his hand. A .357 Magnum. Musta dropped it when the sniper dropped him.”

  “CSU bagged and tagged it,” Reynolds said. “Already on its way to the lab. Lieutenant gave ’em the go-ahead.”

  “Sure he did.” Polk gave me a sour glance as I straightened up again. “Biegler can’t get this scene cleared fast enough. He’s probably hiding behind a black-and-white down the block, puking his guts out.”

  Polk turned back to Reynolds. “Tell me we caught a break and there was some ID on this guy.”

  “CSU didn’t find squat. No wallet, keys. Nothin’. Maybe we’ll get lucky when we run his prints. He could be in the database.”

  “Probably is. I can’t see some fuckin’ virgin trying a job this size. In broad daylight. Him and his partner.”

  “Maybe the partner’s the first-timer,” I said. “According to Treva Williams, the partner got spooked by the alarm and ran out. Left this guy on his own.”