Cemetery Lake: A Thriller

by Paul Cleave

  “But first you’re going to be charged with DUI. You’ll be escorted down to court later this morning. I’m going to do you a favor and let you wait here rather than back down in the cells. But it’s the last favor I’m ever going to do for you.”

  He leaves me alone. I rest my head in my arms and manage to get two hours of sleep before the same two guys who brought me upstairs take me out to a patrol car and drive me to the courts. The day is wet and cold and gray. The drive is depressing. We make no conversation and the driver has the window cranked down halfway so the cold air keeps blasting me. I watch the world go by, feeling so disconnected from it I’m not sure if I’ll ever make it back.

  I’m kept in the holding cells with a whole bunch of people whose futures are about to be determined by the same people about to determine mine. My headache hurts and so do the wounds. I’m given a court-appointed lawyer who doesn’t introduce himself so I don’t get his name, and he talks low and quickly to me in the two minutes we have before my arraignment.

  In court I stand in the dock with my head down and listen to the charges. I know how it all works. This is the same thing that happened to Quentin James. The judge sets bail and says that if it can’t be paid they will hold me. I can’t pay the bail. I’m taken back to the cells, the plan being that sometime in the middle of the afternoon I’ll be transferred to prison. I need a drink.

  The holding cells are full of people who have done shitty things too, some worse than me, others not as bad, but we’re the dregs of society. We all sit on benches and keep ourselves to ourselves. The entire place smells like urine. I don’t know how much time passes before one of the court security officers opens up the holding cell and tells me to follow him—all I know is that the next step in the chain isn’t going to be any prettier than this one.

  “Your bail’s been made,” he says, surprising me.

  “Made? Who by?”

  “Your lawyer.”

  I slow down my walking and almost come to a stop. He glances back at me and tells me to keep up.

  “I don’t even know my lawyer,” I tell him.

  “Yeah, well, it’s not the same guy,” the officer says, shrugging. “You got a new lawyer now. Means you might have a chance at a real legal defense.”

  We go through a few doors and I’m asked to sign some forms. Before I can, a guy in an expensive-looking suit comes to greet me. The suit is so sharp it’s hard to believe he’d dare sit down for fear of it wrinkling, but it isn’t as sharp as his smile.

  “Theo,” he says, stepping forward and pumping my hand so vigorously it’s suspicious. “Glad to finally meet you.”

  “Glad?”

  “Well, of course the circumstances are awkward,” he says. “Not dire, but with your past they shouldn’t be anything we can’t handle.”

  He introduces himself as Donovan Green. He stands over my shoulder as I sign the series of forms in front of me. The officers hand me over my wallet and my watch and my phone. The phone is dead.

  Green walks me outside toward a black BMW in the far corner of the parking lot between a high concrete wall and a dark blue SUV with tinted windows and mud splashed up the sides. The day is cool and the breeze makes the exposed grazes on my body sting. I pick up the pace a little to get to his car faster.

  “Who hired you?” I ask.

  He doesn’t slow down. Just keeps on walking like a man on a mission. “You mean you don’t know?”

  “I have my suspicions,” I answer, but truthfully I don’t have any idea.

  “You still have friends in the department,” he says, and the line is starting to sound all too familiar.

  “I wouldn’t have thought so,” I tell him. “Listen, thanks for bailing me out, and I appreciate all you’re going to do for me, but all I want right now is to go to the hospital.”

  He doesn’t pause. Just keeps walking. “The hospital? Injuries hurting, huh?”

  “I want to see the woman I hurt.”

  He slows down. He comes to a stop and turns toward me, his back now to his car. “I don’t understand,” he says. “You want to see her?”

  “It’s not that hard to understand,” I tell him. “I want to see how she’s doing. I’m the reason she’s in there.”

  “I’m well aware of why she’s in there,” he says, a little too harshly. “Look, Theo, it’s just not a good idea.”

  “I need to see her.”

  He shrugs, like he no longer cares, but he also keeps staring at me. Hard. “Okay,” he says. “It’s your idea. I don’t agree with it, but let’s go.”

  We reach his car. It turns out it’s the dark SUV and not the BMW. He puts his briefcase down while he digs into his pocket for his keys. He checks one, then the other, and I know how the routine goes when you can never find them.

  “Must be in the briefcase,” he says, and he pops it open. “Yep, here we go.” He unarms the car and the doors pop open. “Hop on in,” he says.

  I climb inside. The interior is comfortable and warm. A small fantasy plays out in my mind, and in this fantasy I climb into the backseat and lie down and get a few hours of sleep. Green plays around with his briefcase before opening his door. Then he leans in. He’s pointing something at me.

  “Whoa, wait a . . .”

  But it’s all I can say before he pulls the trigger. My body jerks back, my head cracks into the window beside me, and the world goes black.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  The blackout lasts only a moment. I come to and the pain in my head from the impact helps to numb the pain flowing through my body, but only for a few more seconds. The two catch up and the electricity raging along my spine from the Taser gun takes over. Tiny dots have flown out from the Taser, they’re confetti-like and all have serial numbers on them; they’re part of the design so the police can track where they’ve been fired and by whom. Of course that’s no good if the Taser has been stolen or bought illegally. Green says something, but I can’t hear him. Two barbs are buried into my chest, delivering hundreds or even thousands of volts. He turns the gun off, but there’s no relief. He rips the barbs out. The pain drops, but I still can’t move. Blood drips from the barbs onto my shirt. He wraps the cords around the unit and drops it into his briefcase. Then he moves into the seat behind me, pops my seat so I’m leaning back, and drags me into the back of the SUV. It’s like my fantasy is going to come true after all.

  He takes some plastic ziplock ties from his briefcase, rolls me onto my front, and a moment later I can hear the little notches clicking into place. I can’t fight him. All I can do is stare ahead in whichever direction he leaves me facing. He moves back to the front. The engine starts, and we roll forward. I try to sit up, but can’t, though some feeling is begging to return. The tinted windows mean nobody can see in. I can’t speak and don’t know what I’d ask if I could.

  I can hear other cars. I can hear people talking on the street. The hustle and bustle of city life. But my lawyer doesn’t say a word. He’s still on that mission he looked like he was on when striding across the parking lot. I can smell upholstery and sweat. I can taste blood. My arms and legs are tingling. I can tighten my fists and wiggle my toes. The cramp in my muscles starts to relax. I try to struggle against the plastic ties, but it’s no good. They dig into my wrists and ankles.

  “Where are we going?” I ask, the words coming out smoother than I would have thought.

  “You tried to kill my daughter.”

  So my words may be smooth, but his words don’t make sense. “What?”

  “My daughter, you asshole. You ran into her last night and now she might die.”

  I don’t answer him. I think about Quentin James, I think about how what I did last night was just like what he did to my family. I think about how the transition from Theodore Tate’s life into Quentin James’s is complete. “I’m sorry,” I tell him.

  “Shut up,” he says.

  “Where are you taking me?” I ask.

  “I said shut up!” he shouts, and
he pulls over and reaches toward me.

  Christ, there’s a needle in his hand.

  “You struggle and it’s only going to be worse,” he says, and he’s right because I do struggle and it does get worse. The needle breaks off in my arm before he can push any of the fluid into me. “Bastard,” he yells, then he starts clubbing me in the head with something, I don’t know what, and everything goes dim as the darkness rushes back.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  I have no idea where we are. In the woods, somewhere. He must have carried me here from the SUV. Or more likely dragged me, since the backs of my shoes have a buildup of mud and leaves on them. The surroundings remind me of where I was two years ago when I was the one holding the gun and not the one under the barrel of it. I am lying on my side, the wet dirt cold against my body. There are hundreds of trees and ferns and rocks, and there is a light rain. My cell phone is in a dozen pieces on the ground ahead of me.

  The world comes into sharper focus and that’s a problem, because in the center of my view is my lawyer. He’s no longer wearing the suit. The gun looks like a nine millimeter. I figure it’s loaded to the max and this guy looks like he’s in the mood to prove it.

  He notices me staring at the gun, then he turns it in his hand and looks at the side of it, as if he’s seeing it for the first time.

  “It’s amazing what you can get for a few thousand dollars when you’re motivated enough,” he says, and I can tell from the look of him and where we are that he is, without a doubt, extremely motivated. “All you need is to be prepared to spend a few hours in the worst part of town. Guns, Tasers—there’s no limit when you’ve got the cash. And the desire.”

  My hands are still bound behind me. I tuck my legs beneath me and manage to get onto my knees. The Taser pain is gone, but not the pain from the beating the guy gave me to knock me out. I have to blink heavily every few seconds just to keep things from going fuzzy, and it’s a struggle to stay balanced. The broken needle is still in my arm. Blood is running down my face. It’s getting dark. Must be around four o’clock. Maybe five. Or maybe it’s not getting dark at all, and it’s just my brain shutting down.

  “What do you want?” I ask, though I already know.

  “What do you think I want?”

  I think about what he said in the car. About his daughter. “It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah huh. You think being sorry negates all of this?” he asks. “You think if she dies your sorries will help me sleep at night?”

  I close my eyes while he talks to me. His words are very similar to the ones I said to Quentin James, only for him I didn’t use a What if because Emily was already dead. I wasn’t waiting on more information on which to base my decision. Nothing was going to change. One difference is I didn’t bind Quentin with plastic ties. I held him at gunpoint and made him walk. I made him carry a shovel because I wanted him to know how it felt to be a victim. I wanted him to know that the feeling he had, that he was about to die, was the same feeling I’d had every day since the accident and what I would feel every day for the rest of my life. Hell, for me it was worse. I already had died, and it was because of him. Father Julian used to come around to my house and we’d talk about that feeling, and I knew the only way to feel any better was to make the man who had done this pay. I couldn’t tell Julian that, but I suspect he knew. That day in the woods Quentin James prayed for a God who wouldn’t show up. I made James dig a grave, and all along he cried and told me it was an accident, he told me he wished he could change time, he told me it was Quentin James the drinker who had killed my daughter and not the man holding the shovel. The man holding the shovel was going to get better. He was going to seek help. He would go to jail and he would live with what he had done, and he would get better.

  I’m a different person when it happens, he’d told me. I’m no longer me.

  But I didn’t care; my wife was no longer what she had been, and my daughter was no longer alive, and therefore I was no longer me too. I watched as the sweat began to expand in circles from his armpits over his shirt, even though it was cold out. Dirt was sticking to his face, to his hands; he rolled up his sleeves and dirt began to stick there too. I told him it was too late, that it didn’t matter what he said now, that being sorry wasn’t going to change the past and wouldn’t prevent the future. He cried. He begged for his life. He tried to make me change my mind, but it didn’t matter. I was never going to let his justifications and sick excuses stop what was coming, and I’d made that decision before heading out there. I had to. I had to. It was the only way to go through with it, and the only way to save others from him.

  Now my perspective is changing. Maybe the same damn thing that got me here is the same thing that happened to him. I never looked into his history. Never learned whether his family had died, never learned what drove him to drinking. There was way too much anger for that. He stood in the grave and he cried as I leveled the pistol at him. He told me he was sorry, and I told him that was enough, that I didn’t want to hear any more, that it was time to take responsibility. Through all his fear there must have been some hope I was going to let him go. I was hoping he would accept it, that he would shut up and make peace with his maker and just accept it. But he didn’t.

  Quentin James was still begging for his life when I shot him in the head. It didn’t feel as good as I thought it would. I imagine it didn’t hurt as much as he feared. One moment he was staring down the barrel of my gun, the next moment he was slumped in the dirt.

  I shuffled his body so it was nice and snug in the grave he’d dug, and then I buried him. I walked away without giving him a prayer or spitting on his grave. There was just a smooth transition between shoveling dirt and then turning away. A smooth transition between going from father to killer. I carried the shovel back to my car, drove away, and have never been back.

  Unless I’m back here now. These could be the same woods.

  “It was an accident,” I repeat.

  My lawyer is nodding. “You had a daughter,” he says. “It’s all over the news now. How the hell can you, of all people, drive while completely tanked?”

  It’s a good question. One with a complicated answer. One that involves me accidently killing a man who dug up my dead daughter. One that involves a priest who once tried to help me, and is now hiding the truth from me. I don’t tell him any of this. Instead I say, “There’s no shovel.”

  “What?”

  “There’s no shovel,” I repeat. “You should have made me bring a shovel.”

  “What for?”

  “What do you think?”

  He nods. He’s figured it out. “You think I care whether I bury you or not? You think I care whether you’re ever found?”

  “You should,” I tell him.

  “Yeah? Why’s that?”

  “Because you’re going to throw away your life,” I tell him. “I deserve what I get, but you don’t deserve to be punished.”

  He takes a small step back. I’d rather he come forward. I’d rather he was pointing the gun at my head. Rather he did us both a favor and got this over with.

  “What?” he asks.

  I look from the barrel and into his eyes. “Just pull the trigger.”

  “I’m going to.”

  “Yeah, you’re saying it, but you’re still talking about it,” I say. “Look, for what it’s worth, I’m sorry. But if you’re waiting for me to beg for my life, I’m not going to. You might want that, but it’ll only make it harder. It’ll haunt you. The fact is you’ll shoot me and you’ll discover it wasn’t satisfying. You’ll feel nothing. At least that’s how it was for me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Could be different for you,” I say. “Your daughter’s alive, right? Rather than being with her, you decided to come out here and be with me. You’ve got your priorities wrong. You could have brought me out here anytime.” There’s a wedding ring on his finger. “Your wife and daughter, they need you now.”

 
“Shut up,” he says. “Don’t tell me what my family needs.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “What?”

  “Your daughter,” I say. “Her name. I don’t know anything about her.”

  “You don’t deserve to know it.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I tell him. “But I feel if you’re going to kill me I think I ought to know her name.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Just pull the trigger.”

  “What’s your hurry?” he asks.

  “I don’t know,” I say, and it’s true. “I really don’t know.”

  “You don’t think I’m going to do it, do you?”

  “What do you want me to say?” I ask. “You want me to say something that will sway your decision? How about this? Your daughter could have died, but she didn’t. She’s fighting for her life and she’s still with you. Does that make a difference? Of course it does. You’d have to be stupid not to recognize it. Do I deserve to die for that? That’s up to you. Me, I’m at that stage where it doesn’t matter either way.”

  He says nothing for a few seconds. None of the anger has disappeared from his features. In fact he looks even angrier. “How dare you.”

  “What?”

  “How dare you kneel there and act like a Goddamn martyr,” he says. “How dare you act like you’re the one who’s the victim, like you’re the one having a bad day. Don’t you get it? Don’t you get what you almost did?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Yeah, you’re good at taking responsibility, right? But all you’re doing is trying to mess up my reasons for bringing you out here. Why don’t you just shut up, huh? Shut up and let me decide for myself what I’m going to do,” he says. “This is my life we’re talking about. My sixteen-year-old daughter you tried to kill. How dare you kneel there acting as if you don’t care whether you live or die. Show some respect and at least beg for your life, right? Make me feel something. Make me want to hate you even more, make me want to hate what I’m doing.”

  “I’m sorry about your daughter,” I tell him. “I really am.”