Disclaimer:  I do not own any of these characters and am just playing around with them.

Beta Read by my cat Susie-Bean.

Wheezy

The guards on duty that day all watched the old man drag his oxygen tank toward the visitation area.  “Doctor Wheezy,” as Louie had dubbed him the first time he’d arrived, was there to visit his favorite, and only, patient.

Louie didn’t like the guy.  Not only was he creepy, but disrespectful as well.  He addressed the guards contemptuously, as if they were all beneath him.  He glared at Louie as he walked past him, and then sat across from John Doe.

“Do you mind?”  The old man asked in a low voice, a near growl, looking back at Louie.

Louie turned and walked out the door, locking it once he got outside.  From time to time he gazed back through the glass to watch the two men talk.

Wheezy was a psychiatrist.  Louie didn’t know if he was court appointed, since the man came all the way from Delaware to visit Doe.  Perhaps he was like the rest of them, curious to crack Doe and get inside the mysterious man’s mind to discover what secrets hid within.

Louie would give anything to eavesdrop just once.  Well, maybe not anything, but at least half a week’s paycheck.  He wanted to know what they talked about in that room.  He wanted to hear if Doe would say anything other than the insane stories he told Louie as he stood outside his cell.

“So, what did you do before you ended up in here?”  Louie had asked the first time he’d heard one of Doe’s fairy tales.

“I’m an aeronautical engineer.”  The man replied seriously.

“Is that so?”  Louie said in disbelief.  “What exactly do you engineer then?”

“I was working on a new propulsion system for the space shuttle.”  He replied.

Doe went into a lot of technical mumbo jumbo that went right over the career guard’s head.  Louie listened as the man explained and described all the aspects of his research and the preliminary testing failures and successes.

Later, Louie shared some of Doe’s story with the other guards and they stared at him with the same disbelief he’d had listening to the story himself.  They laughed it off, saying that an aeronautical engineer wouldn’t be capable of doing the things that Doe had been convicted of.  Louie had shrugged his shoulders and suggested that maybe the pressure had just gotten to Doe and he’d snapped.

A few days later, Louie returned to Doe’s cell and asked him to tell him more about the new space engines.  Doe had stared at him blankly and shook his head.

“No, I’m a concert pianist.”  He’d said in response and then had launched into a tale about his exploits in the world of music.

At that point, Louie had decided that Doe was an accomplished liar and was just screwing with him.  He even said that he heard voices in his head that told him what he was.  He listened to Doe spin yarns about what he supposedly did, only to change his mind as time passed.

When the doctor’s time was up, Louie and Harold returned Doe to his cell.  They closed the door and as always Doe had pulled a notebook seemingly out of thin air and was scribbling in it furiously.  Doe was oblivious to anyone when he was writing in his notebook.

Louie had looked for it during routine cell inspections, but could never find it.  He decided that it was Doe’s journal.  He itched to read what it said, but he could never make out the words.

Louie made a passing glance over the rest of the cell, at the pictures the prisoner had drawn and then at the man himself.  If he waited long enough, eventually Doe would give up some of his secrets.

To Be Continued…

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melvansickle@earthlink.net