Twice Dying by Neil McMahon Page A

of skull pierced her brain.
    Who had assaulted two ex-wives and several other girlfriends in a similar way. Who tested significantly above normal in intelligence, with two years of college and a history of success as an electronics salesman. Who was ruled schizophrenic, but whose powers of persuasion had kept a string of women unwilling to testify against him.
    Whose falsified psychiatric evaluation was her first inkling that Francis Jephson had been coaching a selected few.
    Garlick, soon to be released.
    Alison turned back inside and stopped short, almost running into a man passing by. He raisedhis hands apologetically and she smiled, but the thought flashed across her mind, as it had with Jephson, that he had moved too quickly, that she had caught him at something covert.
    Perhaps, standing behind her, listening.
    “Didn’t mean to scare you, Dr. Chapley.”
    Harold Henley was the chief public service officer, a euphemism for guard. He stood six four and weighed close to three hundred pounds. He moved deliberately and spoke softly, and was the only person on the ward the NGIs feared as much as each other.
    Abruptly, she wondered if he knew what Jephson had been doing, knew what she had found out. Harold had worked more than a decade at Clevinger, and not much in this small world escaped him.
    “I’m a little jumpy today, Harold.”
    “Yeah?”
    Rattled, she grasped for a diversion.
    “I’m on the run from the law. I shot my boyfriend.”
    A flicker of respect showed in his eyes, as if she might lead a more interesting life than he had imagined.
    “Fine example you set. You supposed to be showing these people how to act.”
    “He was insensitive. He treated me like an object and never did the dishes. There’s not a court in the land would convict me.”
    Harold grinned fiercely. “Worse than that.They’d sentence you to some kind of codependency group.”
    She walked on toward her office. He paced beside her, a thick fold of ebony skin bulging above his blue uniform collar as his head swiveled to scan the hall. His radio and nightstick hung like a child’s toys on his massive hips.
    Attendants and techs passed by on missions real or feigned. The hallway’s interior colors gave the sense of having been put together out of leftovers from other buildings: the walls flat gray, the trim pink, the linoleum, heaved and uneven from decades of settling, a vague tan. The sharp smell of pine antiseptic cleaner blended with, but did not cover, the decades-old reek of urine and unwashed bodies. There were no handrails for the handicapped, for fear they would be torn off and used as weapons. Pastel floral prints, intended to be soothing, were immovably affixed. The kitchen had never contained a stove or sharp utensils.
    She said, “You still want to sell that Buick?”
    Harold’s interest quickened. “You finally ready to get you a real car?”
    “The Mercedes is a money sink,” she admitted, “but I love it. Another bad relationship.”
    “Huh.” He ruminated, then said, “Buick’s gone. Ain’t no money in cars.”
    “So what next?”
    “Apartment building.”
    “An
apartment
building?”
    He looked both embarrassed and proud. “You get in for next to nothing. Live there and manage till you own it. Then you buy another one.”
    “I never realized it was quite that easy.” She unlocked her office door.
    “You got to know some people. So next time you looking for an apartment, Alison, you tell Harold.”
    With others around, he was the essence of formality. But alone, he would call her by her first name, lapsing into street accent to shade the L into a W and drop the I. It was a sound personalized and gently possessive. Early on, perhaps the first moment she had walked on the ward, Harold had decided that here, in this place, she was his.
    She smiled again. “You’ll be my first call.”
    Her office door, like the others on the ward, locked itself behind her. She exhaled, annoyed at herself for her