Chapter 3

CASE FILES - PERSONAL NOTES - PATIENTS 53 & 54 - DAY 1 (CONTINUED)

As I drove toward Joe’s apartment, I took Sherrie even deeper into trance, and twice more, I had her envision an encounter in which he tried so impotently to wrest control away from me. In each case, she reacted by laughing louder and longer than she had before. For many minutes during that drive, however, I was silent, as I tried to imagine how I would play my own part in this little production. (Isn’t it odd how far astray our carefully rehearsed plans can go in reality?) By sheer luck, I found a parking space right in front of the building, and I led her inside and up the stairs. I had timed it to perfection. Joe had evidently just gotten home to an empty apartment, and he was purple with rage as he jerked open the door to my firm knock.

Looking back at what transpired, with the exception of Sherrie’s part in my little scheme, absolutely nothing went as I had imagined it would. As for good old Joe himself, I had assumed a sort of gangling, geeky sort of fellow that was a bit of a bumbling idiot, at least where hypnosis was concerned. In point of fact, however, was just about everything I despise in a human being. He was a gruff, swaggering bully that relied on his tall, muscular body and his abrasive personality to intimidate those around him. He was still dressed in a white shirt and a black tie that had the logo of a downtown department store embossed on it. He had a “high and tight” haircut that sort of gave him a military look, but his demeanor would never have allowed him the ability to exist in a regimented environment. His green eyes flared as he used the back of his right forearm to shove me roughly aside and grab Sherrie by the forearm. I hit the doorframe hard, then stumbled awkwardly into the living room as the girl’s body was pulled past me and inside.

“You goddamned slut!” he screeched. “Where have you been? Where’s the other one? Who the hell is this bozo?” He slapped her hard across her left cheek, making her sway back in his grasp. He glared at me, but then gave me the small satisfaction of exhibiting a little confusion at Sherrie’s expression. Despite the flaming red cheek, she was smiling up at him, almost expectantly. “What the fuck is the matter with you, bitch?” he screamed. “Answer me!” He raised his hand to strike her again.

I don’t really remember advancing toward him. I mean, the guy had at least four or five inches on me, and probably fifty pounds. I reached up and grabbed his wrist. “That’s enough of that, Mr. Cromp,” I said louder than I had wanted.

He turned his attention to me with a glare of pure hate, obviously believing that sheer malevolence would be enough to deal with me. When that didn’t work, he wrenched his arm free with little effort, balling his hand into a fist, but unable to bring that weapon to bear because of the proximity of the girl between us. “Who the fuck are you?” he growled. “What did you do to her?”

“I’m her doctor,” I responded, trying to make it sound offhand. “Now, let the girl go, and we’ll talk about this.”

“Fuck off!” he responded. Since he wasn’t in a position to take a swing at me, he put a palm on my chest and pushed hard, sending me staggering backwards. Then he turned his attention back to Sherrie. She, in turn, simply smiled up at him, obviously hoping that he’d say or do something further. “Listen ... bitch!” he snarled, and it dawned on me that he had wanted to use her name, but hadn’t know which one she was. “What the shit’s gotten into you?” Again, he seemed flustered that she wasn’t cowering or begging. In fact, she was actually leaning forward in obvious anticipation. “Rocky Mountain oysters!” he said distinctly.

And Sherrie dissolved into utter, uncontrollable, uproarious peals of laughter. So shocked was Joe by this reaction, that he let go of her arm, and she sank to her knees amid peels of hysterical mirth.

“What the goddamned fuck did you do to her?” Joe hissed above the ringing giggles. He glared at me for long seconds, then purposefully began backing up, away from me. He pointed a threatening finger. “You are trespassing!” he said, his rage barely contained. It took me a second to see where this was all about to go. Hanging on the wall behind him was a large plaque displaying a Boston Red Sox logo. A baseball was perched on a stubby Formica stand, and it was autographed by somebody in a scrawl of blue ink. Below the plaque hung a baseball bat between two hooks.

“Sherrie!” I cried. “Stop! Come to me now!” In less than five seconds, she had stopped her laughter and stood next to me expectantly. “Go down to the car. Wait for me there. Go now!”

“Yes, doctor,” she said clearly, and she immediately walked to the still-open door.

“Don’t you fucking dare, you bitch!” Joe screamed. “Stop, dammit!” But she was already gone. The door made a decisive sound of finality as it slammed. The bat was in his hands now, and he advanced toward me. “I am going to fucking kill you!”

I stood my ground. “You dumbshit,” I told him flatly, and he paused, regarding me. “Don’t you know your two hypnotic slaves’ names?”

He stood about eight feet away from me, regarding me with a sneer. “What the fuck do I care?” He started slapping the end of the bat into his open palm and looked tough, though I could tell that I’d flustered him a little.

“The one that’s not here; her name’s Merrie Russo. Ring any bells?”

“No. Should it?”

“Russo. You can find it in the dictionary somewhere between ‘L’ and ‘M.’ That’s ‘L” for La Cosa Nostra; and ‘M’ for Mafia. She’s Bryon Russo’s wife, and she’s in the hospital. She tried to kill herself with sleeping pills.”

“What?” He stopped playing with the bat and let it hang at his side. “Now, wait a minute. I didn’t do that. I only gave the broad what she wanted. I swear, I only treated her with respect.”

“Yes,” I said levelly. “Respect. I saw the bruises.”

“No,” he protested. “ Honest. I have this talent, see? I hypnotize girls, and they love it, I swear. They beg me to do it. No kidding.”

“Damn amateur,” I grumbled. It wasn’t worth my time to explain. I looked at him, and I realized that I truly hated this man. What he had done to those two girls could not go unpunished. “I promised Mr. Russo that I’d eliminate the treat,” I continued. “It’s time to do that now.” His eyes went wide.

I had practiced just once earlier, outside my office, after I had gotten back from my little errand, just before I returned to Sherrie while she was listening to my recorded hypnosis session. And now, in that apartment, it almost seemed nature. I reached under my left lapel with my right hand and I unsnapped the holster strap with the back of my thumb; then I drew the 9 mm Ruger P95 and pointed it at the center of Joe’s chest. Oddly, Joe wasn’t really looking at the gun at all, except for a brief glance. His eyes were fixed firmly on mine. With a loud clatter, the bat hit the tiled floor, and both of his hands were extended in front of him, palms forward.

“Wait!” he said. There was a look in his eyes unlike anything I’d ever witnessed. I would like to have studied it. Professionally, that is. But instead, I pulled the trigger.

Now, when a person loses consciousness, he will fall in whichever direction he happens to be leaning at the moment. Most people fall forward, simply because when we are standing upright, we balance close to our heels, but maintain control by leaning toward the balls of our feet. But in this particular case, Joe fell straight down. His knees sort of splayed apart, and his legs twisted him around half a turn. His butt hit his heels, he bounced back up a little, and he toppled left onto his back, his head hitting the floor hard. I looked down on him dispassionately, observing the puddle growing steadily underneath his sprawled, limp body; and several disturbing thoughts ran through my head. I’m not sure why, but as I thought them, I walked calmly toward the bathroom, the gun clutched in my right hand.

One: Why the hell had I pulled the trigger? I hadn’t meant to, certainly. Had I? I mean, I couldn’t deny the amount of hatred I had toward the man ... probably more than I’d ever felt toward any other person. And, don’t get me wrong ... I have hated before. There was a man who, five or six years before, had stolen a woman away that I loved dearly. Well ... that’s not quite accurate. Actually, it was I who was trying to steal the woman away from him. But that’s rather beside the point. The truth of the matter is, I had hated him. But not as much as I hated dear old Joe, who was now lying there in the living room. But I hadn’t meant to, I swear. And that brings us to number

Two: If that was the case ... if I was so impulsive as to do something like that, how far gone was I into the maw of madness? I mean, let’s face it: all of this falderal about being a mad evil doctor ... do you think I’ve just been kidding about that? Did you think I was really sane? And if I was, indeed, mad: it must be an observable phenomenon. He had certainly seen something, hadn’t he? By the startled expression he had when he’d looked into my eyes, he’d seen something that scared the bejesus out of him. I mean, it had been so compelling that he couldn’t even look into the barrel of that loaded gun. I gazed into the bathroom mirror now, but the eyes that were looking back at me appeared just as they always had. So ... the action had been calculated ... it must have been. Otherwise

Three: Why had I purchased the gun? I looked down at it now, lying pointed toward my left, in the palm of my right hand. All it had taken was a quick web search on my computer, followed by a phone call and then writing a check for seven hundred dollars. Easy. Simple. For you readers out there who live beyond the boundaries of the United States (and some who do live here), that might not seem quite ... right. I mean, there are laws that restrict access to guns (registration, background checks and whatnot). But those only apply when you purchase something through retail gun stores. Go beyond that venue, and there are no restrictions. None. Zippo. And that pertains to madmen purchasing guns. All very legal. Oh yes, I was in violation of concealed carry laws by wearing the holster and handgun beneath my jacket; but, of course, if no officer of the law stopped me and asked to see a permit, I had no problem. Of course, all of that is neither here nor there. It’s all superfluous. The question remains: if I hadn’t figured on using the gun, why the hell had I bought it? And if I had planned to use it, it was only logical that I would pull the trigger. I mean, I had never owned a gun before ... and I had never used one. But everybody knows the principal of the thing. If you want the bullet to kill somebody, you point it and you pull the trigger. And that brought us to our final question.

Four: Why hadn’t the gun fired? I’d done everything the guy that sold it to me said I should do, right? I’d even practiced drawing it from the holster. But when I pulled it, the trigger hadn’t even budged. Not one little bit. It was as if it had been jammed mechanically in the forward position, and no amount of pull was going to make it move, not even a smidgeon.

And then I figured it out. It was that little lever slidey thingy above of the rear part of the trigger guard. Oh, yes ... the guy had specifically pointed that out. The safety switch thing. He’d even had a little something to say about it. Slide it forward so that the red dot showed, and the bullets would go forward ... out the barrel when you fired it. Slide it back, and they wouldn’t. The gun was safe. Huh. I used my right thumb and slid the switch forward. Easy. Simple. There was no need to fire it now, of course. I slid the switch back again.

(You know ... I think I might have mislead the reader about something earlier. Back there about four or five paragraphs ago ... when I told you about pulling that trigger. I think I might have left out the part about the gun not firing. Sorry about that. I was accurate in my description, though. Good old Joe had seen something in my eyes; and whatever it was, it had caused him to faint dead away (if you’ll pardon the pun). Ah ... and that growing puddle beneath him? He’d lost control of his bladder. Once again, sorry about not being more specific; but it simply wasn’t germane to what I was feeling at the moment ... that being numbers one through three, above. Those were the real problems here. Number four was just sort of an add-on conundrum. And I STILL hadn’t figured all of it out. Oh well.)

I filled a glass with water from the sink, and I went back to the living room, where Joe remained stretched out on the cold floor. Slowly, I poured the contents of the glass onto his face from an altitude of four feet; and after about ten ounces, he came to sputtering consciousness. He blinked several times before his eyes locked onto my face and he regained that strange scared-as-shit countenance. Rather than passing out again, however, he jerked himself into a sitting position, then used the heels of both feet to scoot himself backwards, away from me, before coming to a thudding stop against the wall, directly below the plaque, where the baseball bat had once been. The baseball fell and hit him perfectly in the center of the top of his head, which, looking back on it, probably should have been classified as one of the funniest things I’d ever seen in my life, but he didn’t even crack a smile, and neither did I. I walked quietly toward him while he continued to work his feet ineffectually in an attempt to escape me, but he finally fell still, shivering, while I squatted in front of him, facing him.

I used the gun offhandedly for emphasis, gesturing with it, as if I’d forgotten that it was even there. “Joe, we need to talk. I think that maybe you misinterpreted me. You see, when I said that I intended to eliminate the threat, I meant to give you a choice. In two hours, you will no longer live in Providence, Rhode Island. And by that, I mean that if you are still in Providence, Rhode Island, you will no longer be alive. And also by that, I mean that if you are still alive, it is only because you are outside the city limits. And, if you ever ... ever ... come back to this city ... or, of course, anywhere else near either of those two women, ever again ... I will make certain that your life ends. Do you understand these options as I’ve explained them to you, Joe?”

Joe’s mouth opened and closed a few times. “Yes,” he croaked, finally.

“Any questions?”

“No,” he said as I stood up. “I mean ... yes ... sir,” he spoke up quickly. I graced him with a questioning expression. “Um ... where else might the girls be?” he stuttered. Now, I let my expression change. He held up his hands, defensively. “I mean ... if I’m going to avoid them ... where shouldn’t I go?”

“Ah.” I nodded. “I’d avoid Chicago, New York, Boston and the entirety of New Jersey,” I told him. “The Russo family has ... um ... business interests there. Any other questions?”

“No sir,” he said distinctly. Then, for the first time, he seemed to notice the dampness between his legs. He touched himself there, raised his hand and sniffed his fingers. “Oh no,” he mumbled. “Oh shit.”

I turned toward the door. “When you leave, you might get the impression that you’re being followed. There will be a very good reason for that feeling. The sensation might stick with you for awhile. But ... as long as you’re travelling away from here, you won’t be harmed.” I paused and turned back to him. “You do own a car, don’t you?”

“Y ... yes.”

As nonchalantly as I knew how, I holstered the automatic and hoped that I looked at least a little like I knew what I was doing. I opened the door, then paused to look back over my shoulder at him. “I won’t have your bank accounts suspended for twenty-four hours. Draw out what money you have quickly.” I tried to give him a look of hatred; but suddenly, I found him only pathetic. “Do you have any idea just how lucky you are, Joe?”

He responded to that, but I didn’t hear it ... only the slam of the door behind me. As I walked down the stairs, I looked at my hands. Funny ... a few minutes ago, they had been shaking, but when I started talking to Joe, they’d steadied right out. I shrugged it off and continued to my car. Sherrie looked up at me as I opened my driver’s side door, and she started to ask me something, but I held up a finger to hush her; then I took out my cell phone and hit the number for a contact. I knew it would be answered, despite the lateness of the afternoon.

“Yes, doctor, what can I do for you?” a man answered. Of course, they would have their caller ID personalized for their business contacts.

“Do you know that apartment you found for me yesterday?” I asked.

“Mr. Cromp on Spruce Street?”

“Yes, that’s the one. Mr. Cromp will not be remaining long in our fair city. In point of fact, he will be leaving in about an hour. I would like to have him followed ... just to make sure he makes the trip safely.”

“Hmm. I assume that he will be driving his...” I heard the tapping of a computer keyboard in the background. “ ... green 1995 Lincoln.”

I smiled. “I don’t know the make of car, but that ... sounds about right. I would also appreciate it if Mr. Cromp knew he was being followed. Could you arrange that?”

There was a long pause. “Doctor, you haven’t been a client of ours for very long. May I ask why you have pressured this man to leave Providence?”

I considered this. “He harassed two patients of mine. One is the wife of a friend.”

“And this friend, doctor ... would it happen to be Bryon Russo?”

I took a breath. “Holy shit. You guys really are on top of things.”

“It is ... um ... healthy to keep track of one’s competitors, doctor. Bryon Russo is not deeply involved in his family’s businesses, but we wouldn’t want it to appear that we were ... interfering in their affairs.”

“I guarantee you that I am authorized to act on Mr. Russo’s behalf,” I told the man.

There was another pause. “Very well, doctor. We will make sure that Mr. Cromp is properly escorted out of the city. Further, we will let you know where his travels take him. After awhile, he will discover that tracking devices have been planted in his car and personal effects.”

“That sounds ... um ... more than adequate. Please send me a bill for your services.”

“This one’s on the house, doctor. We will contact Mr. Russo and let him know that we have acted on your behalf. We find it ... advantageous to perform mutual professional services from time to time. Oh, and doctor ... we have the final report on the woman in Washington for you. We’ll send it to your office tomorrow by messenger.”

“Thank you,” I told him. “Goodbye.”

I turned toward the girl and was a little surprised to notice that her level of trance appeared as deep as it had been during our lunch date. “Sherrie, I’d like you to close your eyes for me again, please. Thank you. And now, take a deep breath and go even deeper than you are now. Yes, that’s it. Very good. Now, tell me please, how deep are you?”

“I am deeper than I’ve ever been before, doctor. I think I am as deep as I can go.”

“Very good. And now, Sherrie, I am going to tell you something that you must accept as absolute truth. It is the truth, and you must realize that. I have taken all control that Joe Cromp has over you and Merrie, and I have completely eliminated it. It no longer exists. He has no hold over you, and he will be unable to hypnotize you, ever again. His control has vanished ... now and forever. Do you understand this? Do you know it to be true?”

“Yes, doctor. Joe will never hypnotize me again. He has no control over me.”

“I am going to count to three, Sherrie. And when you hear me say three, you will awaken, feeling better than you have in a long, long time. You will feel wonderful, and you will remember everything that has happened to you while you have been under my control ... everything you have said, and everything that I have told you. You will remember and understand what I’ve done to you, and what I’ve made you do. You will remember everything. But above all else, you will know, absolutely and with total certainty, that Joe Cromp’s hold over you has been broken forever. Do you understand?”

She was smiling now. “Yes, doctor.”

“One two three. Fully awake, now. Happy and content.”

She threw herself at me, hugging me around the neck, despite the obstacles between us, including the car’s emergency brake. I felt tears on the side of my neck. “Oh, doctor. Oh, thank you, doctor!” She suddenly stiffened and drew away. “We have to tell Merrie! We have to go to her, and you have to make her understand, too! You have to tell her that it’s all over!”

I reached over and took her hand. “She’ll be alright for tonight,” I told her. I gave her hand a little squeeze, then let go and started the car. “ Bryon will protect her. It will give him a chance to feel that he’s is once again in charge of her safety.” I checked traffic and pulled away from the curb. “And ... it will give our friend, Mr. Cromp, the time he needs to get away. I suppose I owe him that.”

She reached over and put a hand on my arm. “Doctor, what’s wrong?”

I shrugged. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

Now she was gripping my arm with her hand. “That’s the first lie you’ve told me today. Something is wrong! Something happened while you were in there! Did he do something to you?”

“No ... he didn’t do anything to me. I did it to myself.” I took a deep breath. My hands were shaking again. “I ... I think I need to talk to someone about it.” I stole a peek at her. “I don’t think you can fully comprehend.”

She sat back and smiled. “I think you’d be surprised by how much I can comprehend. And ... I know how to make you tell me. You won’t believe how much a man tells a melted woman after she makes him melt, as well. Whatever has caused you this pain, we can find it. And ... once you know what it is, you can get rid of it.”