The Interrogation

by Thomas H. Cook

  Blunt brought the car to a halt and took another moment to think things through. The first unit had a white door, the number one slapped over the door in black paint. Blunt reasoned that unit twenty-seven would be near the end of the line. That part was simple. The hard part was where to hide the car. No road circled around the sheds, but the land behind them looked flat and weedy, easy enough to drive over. Worth it too, Blunt thought, in order to park the car behind unit twenty-seven just in case somebody came by, a night watchman maybe, or just some couple looking for a place to hump. He’d been around long enough to know that no place, no matter how deserted it looked, was ever really deserted. Somebody knew about it, used it for something. Just to be safe, he decided to wheel around to the back of the storage units, count them off one by one as he drove by, park directly behind twenty-seven. Good, he thought with satisfaction, that should work.

  And it did.

  So well that within seconds Blunt was safely inside the shed, following the beam of his flashlight along its four walls. Again Dunlap had dealt it straight. The space was empty except for a ratty old sack somebody had tossed into a corner and the brown leather briefcase Dunlap had deposited.

  So far so good, Blunt thought, dividing time into the only two categories he knew, when things were going well, as they were now, and when things were going badly, which was most of the time, especially at home, where, Blunt hoped, a nice piece of costume jewelry might serve to get the old lady to put out again.

  He closed in on the briefcase, his ear cocked for any sound other than the slight play of the wind on the surrounding fields, which he could hear as a steady whisper in the background.

  When he reached the briefcase, he squatted and opened it.

  So far, so good.

  The money rested in tidy stacks held together by thick rubber bands, and to Blunt’s untrained eye it looked plenty real. He jerked one of the bills from the pile and examined it in the light. How did they do it, he wondered, get it to look so a guy couldn’t possibly tell it was fake without whatever the government used to tell it was phony?

  He slipped the bill beneath the rubber band, then took out the first stack and ran his thumb along the edges. He’d seen people do this in movies, and pretend that after they’d done it, they knew exactly how much was in the stack. Exactly. To the buck. Blunt doubted that anyone could really do this, but he enjoyed pretending that he could. One thing was sure, they were all twenties, and there were probably forty or fifty in each stack, which came to … Blunt knew better than to trust his arithmetic any further, and tossed the short stack of bills back into the case. It was a lot, no doubt about it, probably the actual fifty grand Dunlap had claimed, though Blunt regretted that just to be on the safe side he hadn’t grabbed his cousin’s neck and squeezed. You better not be lying to me, Harry. That was the moment Dunlap would have hedged his bet, Blunt thought, that was the moment he’d have started sputtering about how, well, he really hadn’t actually counted it, but, hey, yeah, it was a lot, probably fifty grand give or take, and on and on and on, sputtering the way punks like him always did when they were trying to wriggle out of the spot they were in. Blunt had seen plenty of people that scared. He glanced at his watch. In an hour he’d be seeing another one. Imagine that, he thought, I got fifty grand here, and I still got to take that fucking pervert for a ride.

  With that thought, Blunt’s mood skidded to the side and went over a cliff. Jesus Christ, he thought, fifty grand and all he was going to get out of this deal was a lousy five hundred bucks. Who could buy a roadster for that? When you got right down to it, five hundred dollars wouldn’t buy shit. Chump change, he thought, his anger flaring now, feeling fucked, outsmarted even by his little junk-collecting prick of a cousin who wasn’t smart enough to get out of the goddamn rain.

  The idea came to him slowly, slithering into his brain. Who was really taking the big chance here? he asked himself. He was. After all, wasn’t he the one who now squatted in a filthy storage shed in Titus? Not Dunlap. If something happened, if something went wrong, what could that prick do about it? Nothing. And what had Dunlap actually done in the whole deal but take some hot cash off somebody else’s hands? Somebody who wasn’t risking his own goddamn neck to get his money back. Somebody like Dunlap. Another pussy. Then who was really getting fucked in this deal? Who was taking the real chances here? Who would take the fall if it all blew up? “Fucked,” Blunt snarled aloud, “I’m getting fucked in this.”

  Any way you cut it, he deserved more than a lousy five hundred dollars. How to get the extra bucks, that was the question. He could just tell the little prick straight out, I’m taking your five hundred too, so go fuck yourself. But Dunlap would start bawling about how he had to have the cash, how he was broke, how he couldn’t feed his fucking cat. Wait a minute, Blunt thought, just how dumb did Dunlap think he was, trying to get away with that one? You can smell a cat. You can smell cat piss if a guy has a cat. Dunlap, he decided, did not have no fucking cat. And a guy who’d lie about something like that, what kind of guy was that? A guy who’d lie about how much he was getting paid to stash the cash, that’s what, a guy like Dunlap, the fucking weasel.

  So what to do? Blunt asked himself. How could he get a bigger share of the money without getting Dunlap all whiny and crying and talking about his goddamn cat, which he didn’t have anyway, the lying bastard?

  A second idea formed in Blunt’s mind, and the beauty of it brought a smile that lingered happily on his face until he heard the soft rattle of a distant car.

  Shit!

  Hastily, he switched off his flashlight.

  Who the fuck could that be?

  He slunk into a dark corner and waited.

  Just my goddamn luck.

  An odd panic seized him as the sound of the car came closer and closer, bedeviling him with a frenzy of options that fizzled swiftly and reduced to one.

  He drew his pistol and waited, listening as the approaching engine grew louder and louder until it seemed to fire and rattle inside his own combusting brain.

  5:03 A.M., Titus, AJS Storage

  Pierce stopped the car and studied the darkened shed.

  Number twenty-seven was the third unit from the last, and appeared the most decrepit. The grass of the fields swept in around it, thick and high, a wall of reeds sprouting along its unpainted walls, their tips trembling delicately in the wind.

  “Wait here,” Pierce told Yearwood.

  The old man scowled. “Why?”

  “In case something happens.”

  “And suppose something does happen?” Yearwood asked. “To you, I mean. Do I still just sit here, or at that point would you like a little help?”

  Pierce waved his hand. “I’ll be back in a couple of minutes.”

  Then, with no further word, Pierce took his flashlight, got out of the car, and headed for the shed.

  As he approached it, he saw that although the door was tightly closed, there was no lock, no chain. He grasped the door but didn’t push it open. He did not know why he hesitated, only that something deep inside him had spoken quietly, issued in the silence of his mind a curiously tender command. Take a moment. Look around.

  And so he did.

  Standing at the door, his hand already on the handle, he stopped and peered out into the night. The fields were very dark, but in the light cast over them by the beams from his car, he could see a sweep of reeds swaying gently, their tips oddly golden in the light, and which, for all the pervading blackness, gave the fields a subtle hint of dawn, of the world rousing itself from a long night’s sleep. He thought of Anna, no doubt in bed at this hour. He knew that her first waking thought would be of Cathy, then of Smalls, and finally of himself, whom she’d trusted to make sure that Smalls would not get away. If he kept his promise, she might love him, and if he could feel such love again, he knew he could endure the rest. He looked back over the moonlit fields and for the first time since Debra’s death felt something good at the heart of things, earth’s promise
of replenishment. One more try, he told himself. One more.

  He faced the door, drew it open, and stepped inside the shed.

  The darkness inside was so thick it seemed syrupy, as if the air were not air at all but a heavy black oil. The light of the flashlight was a weak weapon against it, illuminating only one small area at a time, so that Pierce saw first the littered ground, then a lightbulb, and finally an old canvas sack, stained and worn, crumpled in the far corner of the shed.

  Pierce strode through the darkness to the bag, knelt, and shined his flashlight inside it. Proof, he thought almost prayerfully, let it be proof. He reached into the bag, heard a sudden rustle from behind him, then a blast, a shimmer of light, his fingers opening in a spasm of release, the proof dropping away, a thud of something in the darkness, moving away from him now, then the creak of the door, something moving toward him, drawing him from the gritty floor, holding him, a flame in the shadows, a silver aura, Yearwood. He felt his strength bundle together, every muscle, tendon, sinew unite in a single desperate effort, and he said, “Tell Cohen,” then his head lolled backward as he fell and fell, shattering as he fell, becoming millions of small particles, all of them tumbling in a glittering mist where there was no night, no day, but only, in the impossible distance, the silent border of dusk.

  5:07 A.M., Office of the Chief of Detectives

  Burke looked up from his desk as Cohen entered the room. “Come in, Cohen.”

  “You wanted to see me, Chief?” Cohen asked.

  “Yes,” Burke said. “The man Smalls claims to have seen after the murder. The one who was digging. Did he say anything more about him?”

  “No, sir.”

  “No details at all? Height? Weight? Hair color? You couldn’t get any more out of him?”

  Cohen shook his head.

  Burke reached for his wallet, opened it. “Show him this,” he said as he handed his son’s photograph to Cohen. “It might be the man he saw on the path, digging.”

  Cohen glanced at the photograph. “Who is this, sir?”

  “My son,” Burke answered.

  “But why would—”

  “Please, Detective, show it to Smalls. Let me know what he says.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Cohen left the room and Burke slumped forward, exhausted. Within a few minutes he would know. He thought of Scottie, saw him in the depths to which he had sunk, living on the streets or in some filthy back room on Cordelia Street. It was only his son’s final wrenching act he could not permit himself to imagine, a figure trudging behind a little girl, full of loathing and desperation, glancing around, looking for something to use, a limb, a brick … a strand of wire. He closed his eyes and with that gesture tried to seal off his mind, allow no more such images to penetrate it. For a moment he sat in that deep interior darkness. Then lights flickered and the parade began, the whole bloody chronicle of his days. They marched before him in a winding, endless line, women beaten to a pulp, children tied to beds, the whole savage course of his long career. He saw Mrs. Bennett and the ax, little Bobby Martin crouched on the stained toilet bowl. Dinah Sharpe was there, down to the broken fingernails, Stuart Bates just behind her, the child he’d knifed rotting in his arms. One by one they presented themselves, the dreary companions of his time on earth, Scottie the last of them, standing in stark relief, not as he was now, broken, dying, but as a little boy in shorts and T-shirt, lifting his empty, needful arms toward the father who had always refused him love.

  5:10 A.M., Dunlap’s Collectibles

  Eddie rapped at the door, then stepped back and waited for it to open.

  When it didn’t, he rapped a second time, harder.

  There was still no answer, and so he stomped back to where Siddell stood beside a mound of ragged clothing.

  “The fuck knows he’s supposed to bag this stuff,” Eddie snapped. “I’ve told him before. You don’t bag it, I don’t pick it up.”

  “So what do you want to do, then?” Siddell asked.

  Eddie shot a hostile glance at the darkened interior of Dunlap’s Collectibles. “He’s back there, the fuck. He just won’t come out ’cause he knows I’ll give him an earful.”

  “So go do it,” Siddell said. “I don’t want to stand here all night.”

  Eddie thought a moment, then decided. “Yeah, I will. I ain’t going to take it.” He strode back to the door, banged his fist hard against the doorjamb, banged it again and again, his fist red and sore by the time the door opened.

  “Jesus,” Dunlap whined. “Jesus Christ, keep it down, will you?”

  “Look at that.” Eddie thrust his arm toward the pile of clothing that lay in a sodden mass beside the curb. “You put that there?”

  “Yeah. So what?”

  “It ain’t bagged. It’s gotta be bagged.”

  “Look,” Dunlap explained. “It’s just a pile of old clothes. Some bum left them here. They were stinking up the place. So I—”

  “But it ain’t bagged, that’s what I’m telling you. It’s got to be bagged.”

  Behind Dunlap, a second man appeared. “Yeah, why is that, boss?” he asked mockingly.

  “’Cause that’s the way it is,” Eddie shot back.

  “Well, tell me, boss, what if my friend here doesn’t have any fucking bags?”

  “Then you don’t put nothing out until you got them.”

  “He’s just supposed to sit around and smell some bum’s stink?” the second man sneered.

  “What I’m telling you is, everything’s got to be bagged or I don’t got to pick it up.”

  The second man laughed. “Oh, yeah, boss? And what do you think I do if you don’t pick it up? Huh? I’ll tell you. I call Siddell Carting, and I say some little shitbag banged on my frigging door at five in the goddamn morning and gave me hell on account of some frigging bags, and if it ever happens again, I don’t pay Siddell Carting to pick up my garbage no more.” He brought his face close to Eddie’s. “And you maybe lose your frigging job, asshole.”

  Eddie stared at the man mutely.

  “So, there it is, boss,” the second man said. He pointed to the mound of clothing. “I don’t want to see that shit here when you leave, understand … boss?”

  The door slammed in Eddie’s face, and for a moment he faced it brokenly. Then he turned and headed back to where Terry Siddell stood beside the curb.

  “So what are we going to do, then?” Siddell demanded.

  Eddie shrugged. “We’ll pick it up this one time,” he said quietly.

  “Not me,” Siddell declared. “You can smell the piss from here.” He turned on his heel and stomped back to the truck.

  Eddie bent down and gathered the pile of clothes into his arms. The stench of sweat and urine nearly suffocated him, rushing him to get it done, all of it, the endless night’s ordeal, the clothes piled into the truck and then away from the man’s humiliating taunts, and home to the daughter who loved him, respected him, called him her hero each time he drew her into his otherwise empty arms. It’s for Laurie, he told himself as he tossed the smelly bundle into the truck. Just for Laurie, nobody else.

  5:19 A.M., Route 6

  “Set me up, the little prick,” Blunt muttered. He felt his fingers tighten around the serrated curve of the wheel as he imagined them around Dunlap’s neck. The only question was why the little prick had done it. What did he have to gain?

  Blunt went over it again and again, the sound of the car as it drew near, then a beam of light he’d barely been able to step out of as the man entered the shed.

  In all of this, only one thing seemed clear. No one had known that he was coming to that particular shed but Dunlap.

  “Set me up,” Blunt repeated in a low, vengeful murmur, “set me up, the prick.”

  Again Blunt tried to fathom Dunlap’s angle. He saw the man step into the shed, a black silhouette behind the yellow beam of the flashlight. He’d moved cautiously, as if expecting to be jumped, directing the light left and right until it had lit upon a canv
as bag in the corner of the shed. Then he’d bolted forward, as if he’d discovered a chest of gold.

  An old bag? Blunt asked himself, glancing now at the briefcase that rested beside him on the front seat. What the fuck had the guy wanted with some filthy old bag?

  He felt the swirling confusion of that moment in all its chaotic force. It was the darkness, he thought, the surprise. He’d never been able to deal with surprise. It was like his brain got tongue-tied, started sputtering orders faster than he could obey them. Other guys just looked surprise in the eye and dealt with whatever was in their faces. They maybe argued with it, or pushed it away, or dodged it somehow, this thing that came at them out of nowhere. If he could have done that, maybe the fucking guy would have just taken that goddamn bag and left the shed, and that would have been the end of it. But it was the surprise. He should have known better, that fucking guy. He should have known better than just bull in the way he did. Okay, so, I did what I had to, Blunt decided, okay, so, he got what he deserved.

  He saw the man tumble forward, curling over the bag like he was trying to protect it, shield it with his body, like it maybe was a kid or something. Why the fuck had he done that? He considered the question briefly, then gave up and returned his attention to Harry Dunlap, the ass-kicking that now raced toward him at sixty miles an hour.

  5:26 A.M., Interrogation Room 3

  Cohen placed the photograph of Scott Burke on the table and slid it over to Smalls.

  “I know I told you that I wasn’t going to ask any more questions about Cathy Lake. But I have just one more.”

  Smalls gave no indication that he’d heard Cohen’s voice. He sat, closed off, behind the high protective barricade.

  “The day Cathy was murdered. You said you saw a man on the trail, right? Jay, I want you to look carefully at this picture. Study it, try to remember what the man you saw looked like, and tell me if the man you saw could be the same man as the one in the photograph.”