Chapter 58
JUSTINE SUFFERED THAT night.
In her nightmares, she kept hearing the muffled sounds of someone crying, kept seeing the chewed lips of Leona Casa Madre, and kept reliving the knife fight with Carla. Twice she woke up shaking and in a cold sweat, unsure where she was. Twice she wondered about the brutal vividness of the nightmares, worse than the actual experience. Was she infected? Running a fever? Hallucinating?
She woke for a third time a few minutes before five, feeling Carla’s fingers around her throat, seeing the woman’s insane eyes and the shiv sticking out of her back. Justine lay there panting, trying to figure out why the nightmares would not quit.
And then she thought she knew. She recalled hearing about this kind of relentless cyclic dream from soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. Jack had had this very same sort of dream. The dreams were what had driven him to seek her out in the first place.
“I think I’m suffering from PTSD,” she said, as she sat up and turned on the light.
Post-traumatic stress disorder, rampant among vets, seen in cops and firefighters. And now her? Was that what was going on?
Justine pulled her legs up tight to her chest, realizing that the attack in the jail cell was the closest she’d ever come to dying, the closest she’d ever come to deadly violence. Once again she felt invaded, like a part of her, some basic innocence, had been ripped from her, leaving no visible wound other than the ones on her arm and upper chest.
The clinician in Justine clicked through the symptoms of PTSD that might affect her: recurring nightmares, hyper-vigilance, inability to sleep, inability to feel certain emotions, heavy drinking, heavy medicating, acting out sexually.
Her head ached. She was still tired but did not want to sleep again.
She got out of bed, got dressed for Crossfit, thought it would be good to go sweat the horrors away. She found a coffee shack open at five thirty, got a double-shot latte, and prayed that the workout of the day didn’t include running. She arrived at ten to six and parked across the street from the box, which, to her surprise, was already lit up. Usually Ronny, the trainer at the early class, arrived at the very last second. She went inside, finding Ronny talking excitedly on his cell. He hung up, looking shaken.
“You okay?” Justine asked.
“No,” the trainer said, puffing his lips. “My sister, she just went into labor, and her boyfriend left her. I said I’d be there for her.”
“Well, go on, then,” she said.
“I’ll have to cancel class,” he said.
“Go,” she said. “Give me the key. I’ll wait until ten past, tell whoever shows, lock the place up, and put the key back through the mail slot.”
Ronny hesitated but then ripped the key from a chain and took off. Justine looked around, thinking, Life goes on, doesn’t it? Bud Rankin dies. A baby is born.