But fall asleep? No way. It would never happen.
But he did sleep, and when he did, his dreams came all night, nearly nonstop. They were vivid and colorful, free-form, filled with jagged shapes and menacing shadows and threatening monsters. Enemies he could not see or feel or touch assaulted him from all sides. He could hear them, though, and they taunted him, telling him they were going to tear him apart slowly, so that he could feel every limb as it was ripped from his agonized body, count every drop of blood as it spilled from his torn arteries onto the floor.
Interspersed among these nonspecific visions of impending doom were other, more detailed dreams. They were like subconscious commercials, breaking up the longer. television-show dreams that spelled out in excruciating detail Bill’s demise or, he thought later as he considered their significance, the demise of someone close to him.
Carli, of course.
The shorter dreams were different; they felt more like flashes of something resembling memory than actual scenarios containing a beginning, a middle, and an end. Repressed consciousness or some such similar psychobabble crap, perhaps.
The dreams continued on and off all night and finally, as dawn approached, Bill watched for what felt like hours, rather than just a couple of short seconds, as the man drove past in his repainted off-white box truck, the one with no identifying markings, the one that had obviously been repainted so it could not be identified. He stared and stared at the truck as it receded, hanging before his searching eyes forever as the I-90 Killer drove away. Something was not quite right, but Bill could not put his finger on what it might be. He felt frustrated and angry, like he was missing something of importance.
These short snippets of the remembered encounter were the mini-commercials interspersed with the longer dreams—the main event, nocturnally speaking—where his body was rent; ripped and torn apart painfully, agonizingly, his screams echoing on and on until they were all he could hear. They were everything. It was the longest night of Bill Ferguson’s life.
He awoke to the sound of his dying screams echoing through the tiny bedroom, wondering how many neighbors were cursing him, wondering when the cops were going to show up and serve him with a Disturbing the Peace citation. But they never did. He listened to his heart hammering in his chest as he wiped the sour perspiration from his face with his bed sheet and turned his pillow over, trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the uncomfortable slick of hot sweat.
Finally, as the first hint of dawn’s watery arrival began to pry its way into his bedroom, Bill raised the white flag of surrender against his subconscious. He threw off the bedcovers, listening to his joints creak and complain as he drew stiffly up to his full height and stumbled into the bathroom to brush his teeth and face the day.
He wondered if he had gotten more than ten or fifteen minutes of truly restful sleep. He doubted it. The entire, exhausting night was nothing more than a jumble of half-remembered nightmares and confusing dream sequences. Bill Ferguson was a man who rarely dreamed; or if he did, he certainly never remembered most of them. He normally awoke refreshed and invigorated.
Today, though, was just the opposite. He tried to make some kind of sense of the vivid nightmares as he dragged his toothbrush back and forth across his teeth and gums, doing his best to saw away the sickly taste of fear and foreboding, and mostly failing.
Bill walked down the short hallway to his kitchen, the worn vinyl flooring cool and refreshing on the soles of his feet. He started the coffee machine, hoping a good, strong shot of caffeine might reduce the pounding in his temples. If these dreams continued, he might have to invest in a new coffeemaker, one of the fancy models with a timer so the coffee would be ready for him, hot and fresh, when he stumbled out of bed after suffering through eight hours of tortured, sleepless misery.
The kitchen table felt foreign as he leaned on it with his elbows, holding the hot coffee with two hands in front of his face, blowing lightly on the steam rising in curlicue patterns off the top. He sipped his coffee and thought about Carli, presumably safe in her bed in Sandra and Howard’s house. He wondered what the I-90 Killer was doing right now and prayed to God Agent Canfield was right when she said the nut job had sought out Carli and written the letter only as some sort of cruel head game. He didn’t care about being messed with; he welcomed it, in fact, if it was all the perverted psycho had in mind. He could live with the strange dreams and the frightening nightmares of half-remembered significance if it meant only he, and not Carli, was being targeted.
But the problem was he couldn’t be positive that was the case. Sure, Agent Canfield was the professional, she had probably dealt with dozens of cases similar to this one or maybe, God forbid, even worse. And her take on the note made sense. But what if he really was spelling out his plans for the immediate future in that letter? What if he really was coming for Carli, just as he had stated in plain English?
If the sick bastard was coming for Carli, then his reasons were irrelevant, whether it was to get even with Bill or because Carli really did fit his twisted image of female perfection.
Because it was all Bill’s fault.
CHAPTER 25
THE DREAM IS ALWAYS the same. You swear you’re going to tell your mother what the man is doing to you at night, in the dark, when he comes to you while she is fast asleep and safe in her bed. You swear you’re going to tell her, but you never do.