Wicked Lies Read Free

“Fucker told me I was going to die!” he cried as an excuse.
    “You can’t listen to him.”
    “I don’t. But he sure as hell predicts a whole lot of shit!”
    “What were you doing in his room?”
    “Picking up his tray. But I had to leave it in there. Hope the food rots!”
    He stomped off toward the guards’ station, which divided Halo Valley Security Hospital’s Side B from Side A, the gentler section, which housed patients who weren’t considered a serious threat to society. Zellman thought of Side A as an Alzheimer’s wing, though he would never say so aloud as they considered themselves to be a helluva lot more than institutional caretakers. He shook his head at the lot of them. Perception. So many people just didn’t get it.
    He had a key to Justice’s room himself, and he cautiously unlocked the door. Justice had never attacked him; he’d never attacked anyone since he’d been brought to the hospital, but the man had a history, oh, yes, indeedy he did.
    Now the patient stood on the far side of the room, disengaged from whatever little drama had occurred between him and Merkely. Justice was tall, dusty blond, and slim, almost skinny, but hard and tough as rawhide. He didn’t make eye contact as Zellman entered, but he flicked a look toward the meal tray, which had been untouched except for the apple.
    “That man is afraid of me,” Justice said, now in his sibilant voice. Always a faint hiss to his words. An affectation, Zellman thought.
    “Yes, he is.”
    “He always leaves the tray.”
    Zellman had a clipboard with a pen attached shoved under one arm. There were cameras in Justice’s one-room cell, tracking his every move. Zellman didn’t need to watch reams of film to remind himself of the content of each of their meetings. He wrote himself copious notes and typed up reports, which he suspected no one ever read. They all wanted to forget Justice Turnbull and his strangeness. When first brought to Halo Valley, he’d referred to the women he sought to harm as “Sister,” in his hissing way. “ Sssiissterrrs . . . , ” he would rasp. “ Have to kill them all! ” he’d warned. But a lot of that dramatic act had disappeared over time.
    Not that he wasn’t dangerous. Before his incarceration he’d killed and terrorized a number of women. He had also cut a swath through some peripheral people and had nearly slain his own mentally ill mother. She now lay in a twilight state in a care facility with no memory of the attack and not a lot of connection with the real world.
    “Justice,” Maurice Zellman said now in a stern, yet friendly, voice, one he’d cultivated over the years. “You’ve finally got clearance to have those medical tests run at Ocean Park Hospital. The van’s on its way here now. I’m warning you, though. If this stomach problem proves to be just a means to get out of Halo Valley, you’ll be further restricted. No more walks in the yard. No being outside and staring toward the sea.” Zellman heard his faintly mocking voice and clamped down on that. “No privileges.”
    Justice turned to look at him through clear blue eyes that were almost translucent. He was extraordinarily good-looking except . . . there was just something unnatural about him that made one hesitate upon meeting him. A reaction to something he emanated that Zellman had never quite put his finger on. Now his mouth was turned down at the corners and he winced slightly, as if he were in pain.
    Over time and in-depth sessions with him, Zellman had come to realize that some of Justice’s deeply rooted problems were because he’d been rejected and scorned. Rejected and scorned by women. Maybe even his own mother. The women of the Colony particularly bothered him. They might not be his sisters, per se, but he seemed to think they were. Was there any shared genetic makeup between them? Zellman thought it unlikely. Justice’s world was all of his own making.
    Still, Justice definitely believed the Siren