Midnight Pass: A Lew Fonesca Novel (Lew Fonesca Novels) Read Online Free Page B

recognized as being very like my own.
    We didn’t talk about much, not who we were or where we came from. I told him I liked his playing. He told me he liked my baseball cap. I hadn’t seen him around for a while.
    The other homeless man in the park was black, in his thirties and almost always shirtless. He talked to himself a lot and I had talked to him once on the bench in front of the office where I was now heading. I had given him a cup of coffee. He had nodded something that might have been a thanks and had gone back to talking to himself. He, like I, was a man who preferred his own company.
    I entered Ann Horowitz’s office ten minutes late. Her inner door was open and I moved to it, holding out a coffee container and the white bag with the chocolate croissants.
    She was seated in her leather chair next to her desk. The office was small. Three chairs, three bookcases filled with works on psychology and history. History was Ann Horowitz’s passion.
    She took the coffee and fished into the bag for a croissant, placing it on a napkin she laid out on the desk. I sat in the brown leather recliner across from her and took off the lid of my coffee.
    “I thought you were going to bring almond,” she said.
    “They were out.”
    She looked at me as she held the croissant in her hand and said, “I’ll endure the hardship.”
    Ann is a psychologist. She took me on as a challenge and charged me twenty dollars a session if I could afford it, ten if I could only manage that, nothing less.
    Ann had come to Sarasota with her husband to retire a dozen years earlier, planning to write a book about forgotten Jewish figures in American history. She discovered that she would rather read and talk about them than write, and she also discovered that she missed working with people who challenged her.
    She kept looking at me as she bit into her croissant. The ritual had begun. I was uncomfortable with it. Ann said my discomfort indicated that I was making progress.
    “Discomfort will turn to return,” she had told me during my last visit. “We started with reluctance, got you almost to hostility, and now you have attained discomfort. Progress.”
    I sipped some coffee, took a deep breath, and softly said, “Catherine.”
    Ann nodded, put down her croissant, and pulled the lid off of her coffee container.
    “Which Catherine? Adele’s baby?”
    “My wife. Both maybe.”
    “Time for the question,” she said.
    I sighed and answered it before she could ask.
    “I am not suicidal. I do not want to kill myself.”
    “You said that the way the police give the Miranda rights on Law & Order .”
    “Doesn’t mean I don’t mean it.”
    “You want to be dead?”
    “Numb,” I said. “I want to be numb.”
    “You still want to hold on to your depression?”
    “Yes, I want to hold on to my depression.”
    “Would you be relieved or frightened if you knew you were about to die?
    “Die how?” I asked.
    “Hit by a car, shot by a bullet, know you have been fatally bitten by a coral snake.”
    “Relieved maybe. Maybe not. Hard to tell till it happens.”
    We had been here before and would be here again until the answers changed or she gave up. Ann is not the kind of person who gives up.
    “No anger yet?” she asked, finishing the last of her croissant. I had broken off half of mine. The second half lay on a napkin on the little table next to the recliner. A book lay on the table. There was always a book for patients to look at in case Ann had an emergency phone call or an urgent trip to the rest room. The current book was a little one with short paragraphs by William Bennett.
    “Lewis?”
    “No anger,” I said.
    “You are not ready to hate the man who killed your wife?”
    “Could have been a woman.”
    “Person,” said Ann, accepting the remaining half of my chocolate croissant I handed to her.
    “No anger. Nothing I can do with anger.”
    “But you can try to hide in your depression?”
    “I try. It’s hard work. You