Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #4: Books 13-16 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [story read aloud .txt] 📗

Right beside my bed, beneath the window, was a large armchair, and in the chair was Dehan. Dehan was asleep and looked extremely beautiful. She was my wife; my wife and my partner.

I was a cop.

A detective. I was Detective John Stone, NYPD. And my partner in the chair was Carmen Dehan. I smiled and sat like that for maybe twenty minutes, looking out at the spring sunshine while she slept. Slowly things came back to me, piecemeal, but not a whole picture, and the thing that filled my mind the most was the cold, wet mud clinging to my face and my body, clogging my mouth and my nose.

After a while, I realized that Dehan had her eyes open and was watching me. She smiled at me.

“Hey, big guy.”

“Hi.”

“How are you feeling?”

“Pretty confused. How long have I been here?”

She looked at her watch. “About fifteen hours. How much do you remember?”

I shook my head. “Bits, pieces. It’s like it’s downloading but I have a modem from the ’90s.”

She frowned. “Really? What do you mean?”

I pointed at my head. “There are big, empty spaces, mainly about…” I paused. “Last night? The last couple of days.”

She stood and came to sit on my bed. She took my hand. It felt good. “What’s the last thing you remember, Stone?”

“I was in a cellar. I was tied to a table, on my back. There was somebody there, but I couldn’t see them. They put…” I hesitated, an enormous sleepiness overwhelming me. I fought it, looked into Dehan’s eyes and drew strength. “They put a cheese wire across my throat that was attached to a pulley.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and gripped my hand. When she’d opened them again she asked, “They? There was more than one of them?”

I shook my head. “There was only one. It’s hard to remember. Most of the time it was dark. I remember a black dress, black stockings, blond hair pulled back… It was…”

“A woman?”

“I remember a woman.” I sighed and shook my head. “I’m sorry, Dehan. That’s all I remember.”

“It wasn’t Penelope.”

“Penelope…”

“You remember Penelope?” She said it like there was a ‘surely’ tacked on the front. I stared out the window.

After a while, I said, “Madison. But she had an apartment in the city. Upper West Side, Riverside Drive.”

“Jesus, Stone! You remember the case?”

I stared at her for a long time. “Jack Connors? He was beheaded. Somebody cut off his head…”

“You have amnesia. Holy sh…”

“I’m sorry, Dehan.”

“Don’t be stupid. It’s not your fault. I can’t even imagine what you’ve been through. I’ll call the doctor.”

She left the room and I lay staring out the window, not seeing the trees or the fresh blue sky, but the darkness of my memories, and the impenetrable black spaces between them.

Jack Connors. He was in advertising. He’d gone out to lunch… No, not to lunch, to meet Penelope. He was going to her apartment. Like me. I went to her apartment. I was in her apartment, talking to her. She had lied, and cried. She was skilled at manipulating people’s emotions—men’s emotions. Had Jack gone there and spoken to her, like me?

I had left. Had he left too? I had left to go back to Dehan. Why had he left?

The door opened and Dehan came in with a young, balding man in jeans and a white coat. He looked like a butcher, only he had a stethoscope around his neck that proclaimed him a doctor.

“Good morning, Detective Stone, how are we feeling this morning?”

“Great. Can you answer a question for me?”

“Ask me the question and I’ll tell you if I can answer it.” He smiled like he’d said something funny and also wise.

I returned the smile and asked, “Why do doctors always talk in the first person plural?”

He laughed like I was a lovable old rogue. “I guess it’s a misguided attempt to create rapport. How are you feeling, Detective?”

Rapport.

“I feel fine, tired but good. I have big holes in my memory, though.” He frowned and I ignored him. “Rapport, is that an NLP thing?”

Now he looked surprised. “NLP?”

“Yeah, I read somewhere if you mirror a person, make them identify with you by the things you say and do, you will create rapport, and they will be easier to persuade.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s just one of those old bedside manner things. I am more interested in the holes in your memory. It’s not unusual after a traumatic experience to have a certain amount of amnesia. I don’t want you forcing your memory, Detective. The most likely thing is that it will come back in dribs and drabs all on its own, but if you force it, it will have the contrary effect. In any case, I am going to arrange for you to see a psychologist who specializes in trauma-induced amnesia.”

He made a note on a clipboard he was holding, and while he was writing, he asked me, “What is the last thing you remember?”

“I was in a cellar. I felt a bit high, like I’d been given something. The walls were bare brick. There was a lot of junk in boxes, there were steps leading up to a door, a bulb hanging from the ceiling. I was tied to a table with nylon rope, and there was a wire, like a piano wire, or a cheese cutter, across my throat, attached to a pulley on my right.”

Dehan went to the window and the doctor sat on a chair beside the bed. “Don’t strain yourself. If you feel at all distressed…”

“I’m OK. I want to remember. There was somebody there. The light was poor and my sight was kind of