NINE

It was all Monk could do to keep from screaming.

He’d heard the stories about these MRI machines, but he’d had no idea.

And what made it even worse was that he had only himself to blame.

“What about claustrophobia?” the radiologist had asked him. “We can give you a sedative if it’s a problem. Or send you to a facility that uses the newer more open machines.” Monk had shaken his head, but what else could he do? He was an FBI agent, for God’s sake. How could he possibly admit to cowardice in the face of a routine medical exam?

Now, wedged inside a steel tube that enveloped him like a coffin, his head locked in a cage to keep it rigid, the only things Monk could move without violating the technician’s orders were his eyelids. The problem was that opening them only made it worse. The sight of the shiny metal just inches from his nose brought on a cold sweat that bathed Monk from head to toe.

He forced himself to breathe deeply, pulling the stale air in through his nose, blowing it out slowly past tighter and tighter lips. Let it go … let it happen. Forty-five minutes, the radiologist had told him, but he must not have heard right. Surely he’d been in here an hour already. Surely they’d made some kind of …

A metallic voice interrupted, distant in the headphones they’d attached over his ears to drown out the hammering of the magnets.

“Halfway there, Mr. Monk,” the technician told him. “You still okay?”

Monk scowled.

Halfway? Are you fucking kidding me?

He mumbled a response that must have satisfied the voice, because a moment later the banging started up again, like someone standing outside the tube with a wooden mallet, pounding like a madman trying to get through to him. Monk tried to ignore it. The trick was to think about something else, of course, but that wasn’t easy when you were locked into a machine that was scanning your brain, peeling away the layers as it searched for the reason behind your increasingly disturbing symptoms.

Drawing a deep breath through his nose, he went to work distracting himself. He thought about sex and tennis, about blow jobs and topspin backhands down the line. He tried to conjugate the dozen or so Spanish verbs he remembered from his childhood in San Diego, but gave up when he couldn’t get past tenemos to the third person plural. Three English words came a whole lot easier: fear, rage, and loneliness. Pillars of the human condition, a woman had once told him. Right now Monk knew she’d been right. He tried to drive her words from his mind. Tried not to admit to the fear, give in to the anger that it had come to this, or the lonely emptiness of his cold dark tube.

But it only got worse.

No matter what he tried to think about, his skin continued to crawl, the sweat running down his forehead into his eyes, soaking out of his armpits through the cotton fabric of his dark green golf shirt. He had no choice, Monk decided. He had to use Lisa early. He’d been trying to save fantasizing about his FBI agent girlfriend for later, in case it came down to shouting into his microphone for help, but he couldn’t wait. First he pictured Lisa’s face, imagined the herbal scent of the shampoo she used on her long brown hair. He visualized her naked body, the two of them in bed together. Saw her …

Suddenly Monk realized it wasn’t her … that it wasn’t Lisa Sands anymore.

That Lisa had somehow turned into Bethany Randall.

Christ, he thought. What was William Smith’s ex-fiancée doing in the middle of his fantasy?

He opened his eyes to kick Bethany out of his head, but she refused to leave. Suddenly he could see her with magical clarity, the two of them alone in a place they should never have been. Good God, Monk told himself, startled at the images, so vivid he was sure the radiology technician was watching right along with him. He opened his eyes again, but couldn’t keep them open. The steel surface just beyond the cage seemed to shrink even closer. It was either Bethany Randall or the tomb around him, and Monk didn’t have to think for even a millisecond to know which one he preferred. So he shut his eyes even tighter, let Bethany take him wherever she wanted to.

And where she took him was directly back to that night in the hot tub.

The three of them had gone skydiving earlier in the day. Bethany had grown up in a family of fliers and had been a pilot since her college days. Fixed wing, at first, but later on she’d flown helicopters and did a short stint in the right seat of a corporate jet. Early in their relationship she’d convinced William to take up skydiving, and William hadn’t had to work very hard to get Monk involved as well.

They’d spent the afternoon in Frederick, Maryland, jumping out of a small private airport in the woods outside the city: the same airport where Bethany kept her plane, a distinctive dark-blue and white Beechcraft Baron twin-engine with a bright red eagle painted on the rudder. Exhausted, they’d dragged themselves back to William’s house in Arlington for dinner. Before they could even think about eating they decided to have some drinks and unwind. They changed into swimsuits and climbed into the hot tub built into the back deck. William brought the booze with him to the hot tub, a big blue bottle of Bombay gin, along with a couple bottles of tonic and a bucket of ice. Enough of the good stuff to relax the entire neighborhood.

After an hour, however, and way too many drinks, the water got too hot for William. He left the tub to go to the kitchen and start the process of fixing something to eat, leaving Bethany and Monk behind.

Monk realized that Bethany had caught him staring at her, and that she was sliding around the circular edge of the hot tub to get closer, close enough now that she could reach out and touch him. He shrank from the sudden proximity, but not for long. Despite knowing better—despite being far too cocktailed to take on such danger—he felt himself moving even closer to the woman whose yellow thong bikini he couldn’t seem to ignore. Bethany Randall was a puzzle, he’d found himself thinking. How could a woman so demure in regular clothing be so deadly in a bikini?

For one thing, her body was absolutely flawless. Her legs seemed impossibly long in the high-cut swimsuit, and the flat ripple of her stomach only accentuated the bulk of her breasts in the wisp of a halter top.

Monk had been staring at her from the first moment they climbed into the hot tub, guardedly at first, but more and more brazen as the gin had worn away his resolve. That Bethany had noticed was certainly no surprise. Twenty-seven years old, she must have been dealing with men like him for at least a decade already. As though reading Monk’s mind, she leaned toward him. The ends of her wondrous red hair brushed her shoulders, damp with sweat. She lifted her glass and pointed with it toward where William had gone into the house to escape the heat of the water. Clearly as unbalanced by the gin as he was, her green eyes sparkled playfully as she slid an inch closer to Monk.

“William couldn’t take the heat,” she said, “and you look a little warm yourself.”

“I can take it if you can,” he told her. “A few more minutes anyway.”

She sipped her gin and tonic, held the icy glass against her cheek, then reached across and held the glass against his cheek as well. “How’s that?” she asked. “Better?”

“Much.” Monk held up his own glass, showed her that the ice had pretty much melted away. “But you better stay close.”

She chuckled, deep in her throat, then raised out of the water far enough to expose the top of her bikini. This time she applied her glass just above her right breast, and held it there for a moment. “Get up,” she ordered. “This is way better.”

Monk hoisted himself out of the water. Bethany transferred her glass to his chest and held it there until he slid back down. Jesus Christ, he thought, as he realized what was happening. What in the hell was he doing here? He slid a full three feet to his right. This wasn’t a date, for God’s sake! This was William’s fiancée. Sure, they’d been having a few problems, but that didn’t make her fair game. It was time to get out of this tub. To get out of this house and back to the safety of his own life.

But in the next second he realized he couldn’t.

That he was trapped by his own body.

He had sprung an erection, Monk realized. A hard-on he could use to pole-vault with, and much too protuberant to bring to Bethany’s attention. He slid away from her as he waited for it to shrink.

“Where are you going?” she wanted to know. “I can’t reach you over there.”

Before he could answer, she stood up. Now he could see the rest of her, the thong bikini bottom, the unmistakable area she’d shaved in order to wear it. His tongue seemed to thicken in his mouth. The bulge in his trunks grew even harder.

This time Bethany held her icy glass against the tiny gold ring in her pierced navel. “God, that’s good!” she said, her voice husky. “That’s really good!” She turned to him and held out the glass. “Get over here,” she ordered. “You’ve got to feel this.”

All Monk could do was shake his head. How in the hell had he gotten himself into this? How was he going to … Before he could complete the question, Bethany was gliding right up next to him. In the next instant he felt her body against his.

“Stand up!” she cried. “I won’t take no for an answer.”

She grabbed at the waist of his trunks to pull him to his feet, but she missed. Instead of his waist, she struck lower, then drew back, her eyes wide.

“My goodness, Puller,” she said. “I had no idea you were armed.” She paused. “And that you’re packing a magnum!”

She laughed softly, then stopped to stare directly into his eyes before hoisting herself directly onto his lap.

Monk shrank back, but only for an instant before his arms rose and circled her neck. Oh shit, he had time to think, before his mouth was on hers. And hers on his.

He felt her glass tumble from her hand down the side of his torso, into the water. He let his own glass go an instant later. Bethany’s tongue was in his mouth now, and his hand was groping for her thong. He tried to tell himself to stop, but not very forcefully, as she …

“Mr. Monk?”

Lost in his memory of that night—of William’s reaction when he’d stepped out of the kitchen and caught the two of them in the hot tub—Monk was slow to acknowledge the voice in his headphones. He felt someone tugging at his right foot, and heard the voice again, sharper this time.

“Mr. Monk! We’re finished!”

The table on which he lay began to slide out of the tube. Monk shook the fog from his head, blinking as he came out of the darkness into the bright fluorescent lights. A moment later the technician removed the restraints. Monk lifted his head and shoulders, rested for a moment on his elbows, then swung his legs over and stood. He took a step toward the door, but the stocky young man reached out and held his arm.

“Hold on a second,” he said. “You were in there a long time. Give your head a little time to get back to normal.”

“I’m fine,” Monk said. “Just point me toward the doctor’s office. Or wherever it is he’ll give me the results.”

The technician shook his head. “Not today. The films won’t be ready until tomorrow afternoon. Your doctor should have told you that.”

“Tomorrow?” Dr. Gordon hadn’t said a damned thing about that … had he? “Isn’t there some way to—”

The technician took Monk’s arm again and started him toward the door.

“Not if we want to be absolutely sure of the results,” he said. “I’m sure you’ve heard the old line: You can have it fast, or you can have it right.” He opened the door at the rear of the room. “Dr. Gordon will call you. You probably won’t even have to come back to his office.”

Monk nodded, then went through the door. He walked down a short corridor, through an archway, and out into the reception room. The receptionist, a thin, middle-aged woman, smiled as he passed, but said nothing. Trained, Monk guessed, to be careful with the people who came from the machines, people with problems that didn’t lend themselves easily to chitchat.

Out in the Saab, Monk sat behind the wheel for a few minutes, staring through the windshield. Tomorrow afternoon. Thirty-six hours before he’d know. Despite a temperature in the high eighties—much hotter inside the parked car—he felt a distinct chill. He tried to recognize the cognitive errors, to apply rationality to the problem, but the other part of his brain—the much more primitive limbic part—would not be stopped.

His final years with Pastor Monk, the long years before his father finally died, had been a struggle, and not just for Monk himself. Even though they’d never talked about it, he knew the retired preacher had been terrified, and Monk realized he was now beginning to understand why. Even a bastard could be scared shitless, and not just about dying. Dementia and the decline into full-on Alzheimer’s wasn’t simply a matter of dying. Just the thought made Monk queasy. There were no atheists in foxholes, and he didn’t imagine there were many in brain-scanning machines either. Dear God, he felt like saying. Please don’t turn me into my father. Please don’t let me turn into that.

He reached out and slid the key into the ignition, but didn’t have a chance to start the Saab before he was interrupted by the sound of knuckles banging against the passenger window. He turned to see William Smith’s face glaring in at him.