Praying for Sleep by Jeffery Deaver Read Free Book Online Page A

in contemplation. The taste of his wife returned and he wondered if he'd get an erection. He didn't, and he said to Haversham, "The escape was the fault of the orderlies. They'll be disciplined."
    "Seems to me, they have been. At least the one with the broken arm."
    "Listen, Don, can we do this one quietly?"
    The captain grinned. "Why, scared of a little publicity, Mr. Three in Two Years?"
    Adler paused then spoke in a low voice that barely broke above the ghostly wail that still rilled the halls. "Now, listen to me, Captain. You quit jerking my chain. I've got close to a thousand of the most unfortunate people in the Northeast in my care and money to treat about one-quarter of 'em. I can —"
    "All right now."
    "— I can make some of their lives better and I can protect the general populace from them. I'm doing the fucking best I can with the fucking money I've got. Don't tell me that you haven't had troopers cut back too."
    "Well, I have. That's a fact."
    "If this escape becomes a big deal some prick of a reporter's going to run with it and then maybe there goes more money or maybe the state'll even look into closing down this place."
    Adler's arm swept toward the wards filled with his hapless charges — some asleep, some plotting, some howling, some floating through nightmares of madness or perhaps even dreaming dreams of sanity. "If that happens then half those people'll be wandering around outside and they're going to be your problem, not mine."
    "Simmer down now, doc." Haversham, whose law-enforcement career like most senior officers' was informed more by his skills at self-preservation than detection, said, "Tell me the God's truth. You say a low-security patient wandered away, that's what I'll go with. But you tell me he's dangerous, it'll be a whole different ball game. What's it gonna be?"
    Adler hiked up his waistband. He wondered if his wife was at home masturbating as ardently as Billie Lind Prescott. "Hrubek's half-comatose," Adler spoke directly into the eyes of Peter Grimes.
    The young assistant nodded numbly and added, "He's stumbling around in a daze like a gin-drunk fool," and wondered what on earth possessed him to say that.
    "Okay," Haversham said with finality. "I'll send it out as a missing-patient notice. You got some fellow wandered off and you're worried about his welfare. That'll make sure it's not scanner-feed. These boys and girls they call reporters round here won't even notice it, not with a storm gonna take off roofs."
    "I appreciate this, Don."
    "Now let me ask. You got some bucks to spend?"
    "How's that?"
    "There's somebody I'm thinking might be a help. But he ain't cheap."
    "We're a state hospital," Adler said. "We don't have much money."
    "That may be true. But one thing you do have is an escaped nutzo who happens to look like Attila the effing Hun. So, what about it? You gonna hear me out?"
    "Oh, by all means, Captain. By all means."
----
    A cold and anxious Michael Hrubek stood on broad, naked feet in the center of a large rectangle of ruined grass. His hands gripped the waistband of his muddy and dew-stained shorts, and he stared at the shabby building before him.
    The small shop — taxidermy, trapping and hunting supplies — was surrounded by chicken wire suspended from rusted posts with Baggie twist ties. Much of the mesh was squashed to the ground in a way that for some reason depressed Hrubek profoundly.
    He had run all the way from the site of the attack on the orderlies to this cluster of lights, ghostly in the fog: a truck stop, which contained this shop, a diner, a gas station and an antique store. Positive he was being pursued by the Secret Service, Hrubek wanted to keep moving. But, as he'd announced aloud to himself, a naked man'd be "too damn obvious. Make no mistake about that."
    He'd then noticed a window in this outdoors shop and that had decided the matter.
    He now stood in the exact spot where he'd been frozen in place for the past few minutes, gazing into the store