“I just wanted you to know that overdoses could be lethal.”
“I’m aware of that,” Ricky said. “But too much of anything can kill you.”
The pharmacist considered this a joke and laughed. “Well, I suppose so, but with some things, at least we’d go out with a smile on our face. My delivery guy will be over with these within the hour. You want me to put these on your account? It’s been a while since you used it.”
Ricky thought for a moment, then said, “Yes. Absolutely.” He felt an abrupt twinge of pain within him, as if the man had inadvertently sliced Ricky’s heart with the most innocent of questions. Ricky knew the last time he’d used the account at the pharmacy had been for his wife, as she lay dying, for morphine to help mask her pain. That had been at least three years earlier.
He stepped on the memory, trying to mentally crush it beneath his sole. He took a deep breath and said, “And have the deliveryman ring the doorbell in exactly this fashion, please: three short rings, three long rings, three short rings. That way I’ll know it’s him and open up.”
The pharmacist seemed to think for an instant, before asking, “Isn’t that Morse code for S.O.S.?”
“Correct,” Ricky answered.
He hung up the telephone and sat back hard, his head filling with visions of his wife in her final days. This was too painful for him, so he turned slightly and his eyes traveled down to the desktop. He noticed that the list of relatives that Rumplestiltskin had sent him was prominently placed in the center of his blotter and in a dizzying moment of doubt, Ricky did not recall leaving it in that location. He reached out slowly, pulling the sheet of paper toward him, suddenly filling with the images of the young people in the pictures that Virgil had thrust across the dinner table at him. He started to examine the names on the page, trying to connect the faces with the letters waving like heat above a highway in front of him. He tried to steel himself, knowing that he needed to make the connection, that this was important, that someone’s life might be in a balance that they knew nothing about.
As he tried to focus, he looked down.
A sensation of confusion slid through him. He started to look about, his eyes darting back and forth rapidly, as an unsettling surge quickened within him. He felt his mouth go dry and his stomach churned with sudden nausea.
He picked up notes, paper pads, and other debris from his desk, searching.
But in the same instant, he knew that what he wanted was gone.
Rumplestiltskin’s first letter, describing the parameters of the game and containing the first clue, had been removed from his desktop. The physical evidence of the threat to Ricky had disappeared. All that remained, he knew immediately, was the reality.
Chapter Thirteen
He drew another X through a day on the calendar and then wrote down two telephone numbers on a pad in front of him. The first number was for Detective Riggins of the New York City Transit Authority Police. The second was a number he had not used in years, and had his doubts that it was still functional, but it was a number he had decided to call regardless. It was for Dr. William Lewis. Twenty-five years earlier, Dr. Lewis had been his training analyst, the physician who undertook Ricky’s own analysis, while Ricky was obtaining his certificate. It is a curious facet of psychoanalysis that everyone who wants to practice the treatment must undergo the treatment. A heart surgeon would not offer up his own chest to a scalpel as part of his training, but an analyst does.
The two numbers, he thought, represented polar opposites of help. He was unsure whether either would actually be able to provide any, but despite Rumplestiltskin’s recommendation that he keep all the events to himself, he was no longer sure he could do that. He needed to talk to someone. But who? was an elusive question.
The detective answered her phone on the second ring simply by brusquely speaking her last name: “Riggins.”
“Detective, this is Doctor Frederick Starks. You will recall we spoke last week about the death of one of my patients…”
There was a momentary hesitation, not one defined by difficulty in recognition, but more a pause created by surprise. “Sure, doctor. I sent you over a copy of the suicide note we uncovered the other day. I thought that made things pretty clear-cut. What’s bothering you now?”
“I wonder if I might speak with you about some of the circumstances surrounding Mr. Zimmerman’s death?”
“What sort of circumstances, doctor?”
“I’d prefer not to speak on the phone.”
The detective laughed briefly, as if amused. “That sounds terribly melodramatic, doctor. But sure. You want to come here?”
“I presume there’s a location there where we can speak privately?”
“Of course. We have a nasty little interview room where we extract confessions from various criminal suspects. More or less the same thing you do in your office, just a little less civilized and a lot more rapid…”
Ricky flagged a cab on the corner, which he had take him north some ten blocks, dropping him at the corner of Madison and 96th Street. He walked into the first store he could see, a women’s shoe store, spent exactly ninety seconds examining the shoes, simultaneously peering through the plate glass window surreptitiously, awaiting the light on the corner to change. As soon as it did, he exited, walked across the street and flagged down another cab. He instructed this driver to head south, all the way to Grand Central Station.
Grand Central wasn’t particularly crowded for midday in the summer. A steady flow of people dispersed through the cavernous interior toward commuter trains or subway connections, avoiding the occasional singing or mumbling homeless person wandering about near the entranceways, ignoring the large vibrant advertisements that seemed to fill the station with an otherworldly light. Ricky entered the stream of people trying to hesitate as little as possible in their transit through the way station. It was a place where people tried not to show indecision, and he joined that parade of determined, directed folks, all wearing that midtown steel-and-iron look, that seemed to armor them from all the other people, so that everyone traveling was like a little emotional island all to themselves, inwardly anchored, not adrift, not floating, but moving steadily with a distinct and recognizable current. He, on the other hand, was inwardly aimless, but pretending. He took the first subway train to arrive, heading west, rode it a single stop, then bounded from the train swiftly, rising out from the stifling underground into the questionable superheated air of the street and again flagging the first cab he could spot. He made certain that the cab was pointed south, which was the opposite from where he was heading. He wanted the cabbie to make an around-the-block trip, heading down a side street, dodging through delivery trucks, all the time with Ricky peering through the rear window, watching who might come up behind him.