Hunting Michael Underwood

by L V Gaudet

  Clutching his bag, Jason slips through the mob of people cluttering the sidewalk next to the bus and heads off across the lot.

  I don’t know if he’ll still be there or if he’s still alive. It’s been a few years since I looked him up, and even then I never went to see him. It could have been a bogus address then for all I knew.

  It takes some time to get there, by local bus, subway, and then another local bus. Finally, with no sign of his final bus coming up the road, Jason decides to walk the remaining blocks.

  It will give me a chance to scope out the area, taking a circuitous route to the address. There shouldn’t be anyone watching, but my father taught me to always take those extra precautions.

  At last, Jason is almost there. He arrives at the street. The address is just across the street and a couple of buildings up.

  He stops. There he is, across the street, sweeping the sidewalk pavement in front of the building with a worn straw broom. It’s the kind of thing some old people do that doesn't really surprise the younger generation who think it’s senseless.

  The man who once seemed like he would be strong and proud forever is now a withered old dried up husk. Frail.

  “Why does the old man bother? It's the sidewalk, for Christ sake.”

  His mind swirls with things he should say, questions he wants to ask. After a moment to gather his courage, Jason crosses the street.

  The old man never looks up, not bothering to pause in his sweeping, his concentration on the sidewalk and appears to be oblivious to the middle-aged man approaching him. William McAllister has never been oblivious to anything happening around him.

  Jason stops at the edge of the sidewalk, leaving space between them, a safety zone. He opens his mouth to speak but the words that were in his head a moment to ago have suddenly evaporated.

  After all these years he is still afraid of his father.

  William McAllister speaks, still sweeping and not looking up at him.

  “I should have put you down that day with the rabbit. Should have put a bullet in your head that day we went to get rid of the coyotes. I knew then what you are.”

  Jason wants to say something. Hundreds of conversations had run through his mind for this first time seeing his father again after all these years. But now he is mute.

  He hates me. I knew it even then as a child, or maybe especially then. After Amy Dodds, Dad was never the same. He never forgave me for that or for being what I am.

  Jason can't find the words.

  William sweeps on. He knows it’s pointless sweeping a sidewalk that, by its very nature of being outside in a high traffic area, will always be dirty. It gives him something to do. It’s all he has, the last visage of having something useful to do; a useless old man.

  He finally pauses in his sweeping, but doesn’t look up. His eyes are steady, staring at the concrete he was sweeping; his face void of the scorn Jason knows must be in his heart for him.

  Jason wishes his father would look up, would look at him, but at the same time is relieved he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to have to meet his eyes.

  “What did you do this time?” William asks, moving the broom slowly and deliberately again, sweeping much slower now as if lost in thought, or maybe in a torrent of memories from a past that has long ago moved on without him.

  “I tried to help him,” Jason finally manages. “I went to stop him finally, once and for all. I couldn't,” he swallows, “. . . my own son.”

  William stops.

  “He's not your son. He's another man's son. You took him, stole another man's son.”

  Jason wants to look away, but he is trapped. He can only stare back at the man who will not even look at his own son, feeling awkward.

  “Why are you here?” William asks.

  “They're coming, the police, to talk to you and Mom.”

  The old man finally looks up, hatred in his eyes.

  “You brought this. You brought attention on yourself, on us, on her.”

  He spits on the ground as if he needs to get the foul taste of contempt out of his mouth.

  “What do you mean you lost him?” McNelly demands. His fist tightens its grip on his phone as he listens.

  He purses his lips and puffs out his moustache, making angry faces. If he could reach through the phone right now, he would throttle the person on the other end.

  His stomach recoils sourly with a sudden urge to eat something rot-gut that he knows he shouldn’t.

  He shakes his head at the defeat, listening.

  The person watching Jason McAllister at the rooming house has just broken the news to him that McAllister slipped out right from under their nose. No one has any idea where he went, only that he’s gone and hasn’t come back.

  “No, just stay there. I think I know where he’s going.”

  McNelly only has a hunch as to where McAllister is going, or rather to whom.

  My push worked. Jason McAllister is going to see his father. I was counting on him leading me to the old man. Then I would use the old man as leverage to find out where Michael Underwood is. That won’t happen now.

  Now I’ll have to find his father without him. And, I’ll run him in for breaking curfew and leaving the area.

  Billy the Kid’s feet pound the pavement, his breath coming rough and ragged. He wants nothing more than to look back and see if they are still there.

  He doesn’t dare. Looking back will only slow him down. He skids around a corner and keeps running.

  He thinks he got a glimpse of white out of the corner of his eye. He still won’t let himself look.

  “Come on, run!” he urges himself breathlessly, his heart simultaneously racing and choked in the tight fist of fear squeezing him.

  He grabs a railing with both hands and vaults it, the stamina of youth giving him an edge. But that edge is wearing thin, the breath burning in his lungs and a painful stitch cramping his side. He leaps down the wide stairs that cut a path down a hill through a park and towards the next street, taking them in as many steps at a time as he dares.

  At the bottom of the steps, he darts down a path to the left. He races into a parking garage there, not bothering with the door in the concrete frame and instead going over the fence made of steel tubing that would keep no one out. The fence is there in place of a concrete wall, allowing the exhaust fumes to dissipate into the air instead of trapping the lethal gas inside.

  His slapping sneakers echo loudly in the parking garage and his arms are pumping furiously as he charges through the concrete structure to the other side.

  Another steel tube fence blocks cars from driving over the edge where a ramp leads down to a lower level.

  Billy drops and skids as he races full tilt at the fence, banging himself painfully on it as he slips beneath, almost losing his footing as he drops to the lower floor on the other side.

  He puts his head down and charges on.

  Tires squeal somewhere in the parking garage and an engine rumbles, the sounds echoing hollowly.

  Billy reaches a door on the other side and pauses, finally letting himself turn and look behind him.

  He sees no movement.

  He opens the door carefully, cringing in fear it might make a sound.

  It opens only inches silently and then lets out a loud metal-wrenching squeal of ungreased hinges.

  Billy flinches and freezes. He doesn’t dare open the door wider and make more noise, but is sure he can’t fit in the narrow opening.

  He tries anyway, hinges squeaking at the slightest movement, gripping the door and pulling it tight against him to try to keep it from opening wider. It threatens him with another loud screech, but he manages to keep it to a duller groan.

  He carefully closes the door behind him, unable to stop it from banging as the door closer pulls against his efforts to close it silently, the door slipping in his fear sweat drenched hands.

  Billy almost cries out.

  He hurries down the stairs, trying to not let his feet pou
nd loudly on them, his footsteps echoing up and down the staircase.

  He goes through the door at the bottom, hearing the sound of a door opening a few levels above.

  The parking garage is on the edge of a hospital complex made of multiple old buildings, each added on decades apart over time. These basement levels are a sprawling maze of tunnels leading between this and other parking garages and the different hospital buildings. Also down here are the maintenance and boiler rooms for the buildings, the hospital laundry, and other seemingly secret underground hospital rooms that he could not guess at their purpose.

  Billy races through the tunnels, more lost than not, sure he can hear the sound of pursuit.

  He hits a dead end and looks around frantically.

  There is a service elevator, a set of double metal doors, and a large abandoned laundry cart on wheels filled with white towels and blue hospital gowns.

  He tries pulling at the doors, but they’re locked.

  He presses frantically at the elevator button. The up arrow, the only button there is, blinks for a fraction of a second then shuts off. The elevator must be shut down. Then he spots the key hole next to the button and realizes that you must need a key to unlock the elevator.

  With nowhere else to go, Billy sets his attention on the laundry cart. The idea is not appealing. What kind of bodily fluids might be on that stuff in there?

  He climbs in, burrowing under the dirty laundry. He clutches at himself, trying to stay perfectly motionless, holding his breath that tries to force its way in ragged exhausted gasps.

  He listens to the sounds that never die; the sounds of the bowels of a hospital.

  The sound of echoing footsteps grows louder and he holds his breath harder, trying to let his breath out only in shallow breaths through his nose.

  The footsteps come, pause, and leave.

  Terrified, Billy stays where he is.

  How long should I wait?

  He waits a long time, hours, hiding alone and scared in that cart of dirty laundry that had been forgotten down there.

  When he finally decides he can’t wait any longer and climbs out, he feels shaky. All Billy wants now is to find someplace safe to hide.

  He moves through corridor after corridor, turning down new routes in the endless rat’s maze

  “I’ve been down this way already.” He jogs down more corridors, each looking familiar.

  “I’m going in bloody circles.” He’s lost in the tunnels and panic washes through him.

  “What if I’m trapped down here forever? What if they find me because I can’t find the way out? What if I walk right into them?”

  He jogs down another corridor and the discovery at last of a door marked “EXIT” with the glowing red letters comes as both a relief and a new wave of fear.

  Billy stops and stares up at the sign, then at the door handle. “What if they’re up there waiting? I can’t stay down here forever.”

  He sucks in a breath and holds it, then opens the door and starts to make his way up the stairs and out into the night.

  When Billy breaches the door above, he sucks in the fresh cool night air. He has no idea what time it is or how long he stayed cowering in the dirty laundry cart.

  He keeps to the shadows, hiding wherever he can as he makes his way back to the only place he knows he might not be disturbed, the creeper’s room at the rooming house.

  He keeps vigilant watch for any sign of the white van.

  It’s not the first time he has seen it.

  Rumours live on the streets like the rats, skulking in dark places where they thrive. The rumours of the white van are only one of them.

  Jim heaves his frame breathlessly up the stairs of the precinct building. The streets are unusually quiet at this time of night. It always gives him an eerie sense, like it’s so still and quiet because something is about to happen.

  He reaches the second floor. The precinct is unusually quiet too. He passes the empty counter that serves as a place to greet visitors and take their complaints, and goes down the aisle between desks in the open room beyond.

  He enters the back office. Michael Underwood’s desk sits conspicuously empty, a constant reminder of the man who betrayed them all.

  “Jim,” Beth says from her desk, pulling his attention away from the empty desk. “I think I found what you are looking for.” She looks triumphant but tired. She had been holding this announcement in for hours waiting for the chance to tell him.

  “Which case?” He hopes it will be good news. “Jason McAllister’s neighbour,” he starts listing off some of his open cases, “the girl from the South end, or the missing pro?” That’s his term for a prostitute. “There is also a runaway pre-teen boy, and now our favourite psychopath killer, Jason McAllister, has gone AWOL.”

  Beth waves her hand in a dismissive motion.

  Jim stiffens, leaning forward.

  “You found him?” he is almost afraid to say it.

  “No, not him,” Beth waves him off again, “not Michael. I think I found William McAllister.”

  Jim’s stomach drops out from under him.

  Beth smirks at the expression on his face. “You didn’t think I could do it, did you?”

  Jim realizes he is standing there dumbly with his mouth open and closes it.

  “I could kiss you right now,” he blurts out, his face breaking into a huge grin, excited over the news.

  Beth makes a face showing her distaste at the idea. She knows he means it rhetorically.

  28Finding William McAllister

  Beth’s digging revealed that William McAllister is living in a single room apartment in a small decaying apartment building squeezed between larger buildings that were built around it when it managed to avoid the wrecking ball that took out the rest of the block for redevelopment years ago. The entire neighborhood is aged before its time and well worn with the abuse of decades of hard use.

  Of all the low income housing available in the area, it is among the lowest.

  Jim pulls into an open space up the street from the address Beth gave him. The car creaks and rocks on worn shocks and finally settles itself with a decided lean to the driver’s side, its engine ticking as it begins to cool.

  The door screeches as he opens it, the car tilting lower with his weight as he climbs out, and rocks back on its shocks to settle again, levelling out. The door hinges creak loudly with the effort of closing when he swings it closed.

  Jim pauses, looking up and down the street.

  He’s not familiar with the city or the neighbourhood, but the neighbourhood looks rough. Graffiti tags businesses and apartment buildings alike, garbage litters the ground, and he instantly spots at least three derelict buildings that had been abandoned to the rats, feral cats, and homeless squatters.

  A couple of homeless teen boys sitting three buildings up eye him warily. He notes they have their entire lives packed in a pair of large worn canvas army-style duffel bags that they probably got from an army surplus store and a morose looking dog with a heavy rope tied around its neck. Either the dog is used to its life as a hobo and has no interest or care in the world passing it by, or it is as hungry and tired as the boys look.

  Jim knows the dog is most likely stolen. No one is going to give a pair of drifter kids living on the street a dog.

  It’s not my problem. I’m here for more important things than busting a couple of runaway kids for canine theft.

  He knows the type all too well. They are on the move, travelling from one city to another for reasons only they know, always running from something.

  He’s not going to bother trying to pick them up either. They’d only run the moment he tried. He would never catch them. As much as it bothers him, he knows you can’t save them all.

  The boys get up, trying to act casual, grab their bags, and walk on the moment Jim starts walking in their direction.

  Jim walks past William McAllister’s apartment building, taking in its worn condition before entering it. The
narrow space left between it and the neighbouring buildings is not wide enough to slide more than a hand or maybe an arm though. He is sure he can see the ledges of window sills, the adjacent buildings blocking off both light and escape through the windows.

  The building is as run down on the inside as it is on the outside. It has the old urine stench of an old building that is not maintained. The mailboxes at the door look like they are broken into regularly; the doors and the entire front that swings open with the mailman’s key are bent and twisted where they’ve been pried open. Some of the hallway lights are burnt out or outright broken.

  As usual, Beth’s investigation was beyond thorough. She did not stop at finding the address. She went on to dig into who the other tenants of the building are, just in case he needs some extra leverage against any of them to get them to answer questions.

  If she were ever paired up with Lawrence, they would make a deadly team, Jim thinks. He can only shake his head in wonder at how she manages to find out so many details without apparently ever leaving her computer.

  The other residents vary.

  There is a drug addict who just came off his outreach program in a halfway house, sent out to fend for himself despite having the ability to do so on par with a child. He is already skirting returning to his former life of drugs and petty crimes to pay for the habit.

  On the second floor is a prostitute who just gained temporary freedom from her pimp, who is currently incarcerated. Failing in her attempts to get clean, she is still plying her trade, the only thing she knows how to do. She is little more than a slave trying hopelessly to grasp that false brass ring of freedom that she can never have.

  There is a newly separated man, kicked out of his home by his wife when she learned of his affair. To make things worse, now that he has no money to spend taking her out and buying her gifts, his girlfriend dumped him.

  There is a single mother with a baby, struggling to survive and unable to work because she has no one to look after her baby and can’t earn enough to support them on minimum wage.

  Other apartments sit empty.