Wicked Lies Read Free Page A

Song occupants were the Chosen Ones, while he was kept outside the gates. Locked out. Barred. Left with a mother who had been spiraling into mental illness most of her adult life, Zellman guessed. Who knew about his father? Certainly not Justice or anyone Zellman had ever talked to.
    Not a great childhood by any stretch of the imagination.
    “Can we go now?” Justice stared at him hard.
    Zellman nodded. Justice wore loose gray pants and a white shirt, the regulated outfit for the patients on Side B. “I need to get the handcuffs, first. Sorry.”
    Justice asked softly, “From the guard?”
    “Yes.”
    “I won’t try to escape.”
    “It’s hospital policy.”
    A spasm crossed his face, and he clutched a palm to his stomach. “This pain is killing me.”
    Zellman considered the man. Inside the van Justice would be chained around the waist and locked to the side of the vehicle for the ride to Ocean Park. The handcuffs were merely an extra precaution. Sure, it would be against protocol to give him this small freedom as they made their way to the van—against the most basic rule of the hospital. But the stomach pain Justice had been complaining of was definitely worsening, and anyway, Zellman knew when someone was telling the truth and when they were lying. It was just . . . his gift. Justice was telling the truth.
    It would take time to get the damned handcuffs, time and effort. And Maurice disliked Bill Merkely almost as much as Justice did. “Come on, then,” he said. “Hurry up.”
    Justice’s expression brightened a little, the most anyone could ever scare out of him. He was in gray felt slippers, and he eagerly walked through the door ahead of Zellman. There were precautions overhead in the hall: big, glossy, mirrored half circles that housed hidden cameras. Justice looked up at them as they passed, and Zellman smiled to himself. There would be hell to pay later when the handcuff protocol breach was noticed. Dr. Jean Dayton, a mild-mannered little brown bird with a permanent scowl, would scream her pinched-tight ass off.
    They walked along the hall together and, side by side, clambered up the utilitarian metal stairway that led to the ground level. At the top it was a short walk toward a set of gunmetal gray, locked double doors with small windows filled with wire netting—doors that led to the outside. They stood together just inside, looking through the windows, waiting while a white hospital van with the Ocean Park logo pulled under the portico beyond. Daylight was disappearing, the fading sun fingering stripes of dark gold along the grass that fanned out on the far side of the portico, night still an hour or so away.
    As Zellman watched, the driver, an orderly from Ocean Park, jumped from the van. The man would be expecting Justice to be handcuffed, and with a faint feather of remorse touching his skin, Zellman turned to Justice and opened his mouth to . . . what? Ask him to be good?
    Swift as lightning, Justice snatched Zellman’s clipboard and pen away from him. The clipboard clattered to the floor, and while Zellman goggled in surprise, Justice jammed the pen deep into Zellman’s throat and out again. Twice.
    Blood spurted in a geyser.
    “Wha? Wha? Wha?” Zellman burbled.
    The door opened and the driver stepped in. Justice grabbed the man by his head and slammed it into the metal door. Once, twice, three times. More blood. Pints of it.
    “Keys,” Justice demanded.
    “Van . . . van,” the man mumbled, his eyes rolling around in his head.
    And like that, Justice was gone.
    Shoved aside and tossed to the floor like a rag doll, Zellman clutched at his throat helplessly, blood squeezing through his fingers. Shocked and outraged that Justice had lied. About the stomach pain. About needing to go to the hospital. About every damned thing!
    And he, Dr. Maurice Zellman, a doctor of psychiatry, a member of Mensa, had believed him. Worse than the sting of pain at his throat, the bite of his own damned pen,