8 Hours to Die

by JR Carroll

  But truth was never far beneath the surface. He had sought it—and got his answer. Instead of pursuing it he should try to smooth it over, turn the clock back. Behave as if nothing had changed.

  He looked at Amy. She had lost interest in her meal. Her fingers twirled the stem of the wine glass. She would not meet his eye.

  Tim pushed his plate aside. He set his elbows on the table and lowered his face. All his worst fears were confirmed. He tried to collect his thoughts, but they were rushing in all directions at once.

  He sighed without realising he had done so.

  Then he made the big effort; pulled himself together.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ he said.

  The silent space that followed his words was interminable.

  He could see that she was thinking; turning over options in her mind. She sipped her wine, blinked a couple of times and looked at him across the glass.

  ‘Why not just drop it?’ she said unemotionally. ‘This does no good.’

  Tim thought: She’s not going to do anything or go anywhere. It’s just a fact of life, nothing more, that their marriage was in decline. But unless the situation was desperate most people limped on, simply because it was the easiest answer.

  Unless, of course, there was someone else in the frame.

  Tim couldn’t help himself. Still he had to know.

  ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’ he said.

  Amy twirled the glass. She didn’t seem at all taken aback by the question. ‘No.’

  Both as a cop and a lawyer, Tim was adept at judging whether people were being truthful. He studied Amy; looked for the tell-tale signs. There were none. But maybe she was a very good liar. She was certainly an excellent communicator, so perhaps lying with conviction came easily to her.

  ‘So we make the best of it,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, we make the best of it.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound much fun, does it?’

  Tim was thinking about a case several years ago in which a man had murdered his wife because she told him he was hopeless in bed and she was on with someone else. It was always stupid and dangerous to taunt someone in that way and sure enough, he beat her to death, stashed the body in his car, drove out to the bush and half buried her. She was found next morning and he was arrested the same day.

  He was not violent by nature, this wife killer; had been nothing but calm and peace loving, all his life. In fact he was so sensitive he had put a rug over his wife’s head while he bashed her to death with a piece of wood, so he would not be able to see the horrific injuries he was inflicting on her.

  At his trial he said he didn’t kill her in a fit of anger—he’d made a cool-headed decision that if he couldn’t have her, no one could. She was his wife, and that was that. And he missed her, every minute of every day. Somewhat ironically, because it was so coolly planned and carried out, it didn’t qualify as a crime of passion, for which he would have received a more lenient sentence.

  There wasn’t much of a defence. Down he went, for a long, long time.

  But as much as he loved Amy, Tim could never see himself going down that path. He would never even consider these possibilities or make any threats. He would cop it on the chin.

  Amy said, ‘Tim, you have exaggerated this out of all proportion. You asked me a question and I gave you an answer. There’s no need to wrestle it to the ground.’

  ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Forget everything I said. We’ll just … soldier on. Get over it.’

  He drank. Then he drank some more. He noticed Amy was putting it away too, more so than usual.

  As he grappled with his emotions, Tim began to believe that there was indeed the ghost of a chance that he could perhaps do something stupid, like that wife-murdering wretch for whom, at the time, he’d felt only contempt and a sliver of pity. Maybe it wasn’t that far-fetched after all … How many times in a domestic murder trial was one struck by the fact that the accused seemed such a normal person, a regular citizen who had led an unblemished life, and who had acted out of character in committing the crime?

  There’s no need to wrestle it to the ground.

  Through the developing red-wine haze, he became aware that Amy was looking quite coldly at him, as if his questions had driven her to the point where she had no feelings left for him at all.

  He wondered if they would ever make love again, or host dinner parties, or go to the pictures, or do any of the things that normal married couples did.

  Was it all over?

  What would he find if he searched her phone records, or her computer? Would there be text messages to a shadowy lover, someone she met in bars while he was poring over briefs and witness statements? Would there be suspicious emails, hidden folders deep inside the computer’s guts? It wouldn’t be hard to find out. Then he could …

  He shook off such crazed thoughts. He poured more wine, not even remembering having drunk the previous glass.

  If only he hadn’t started this idiotic, pointless game.

  ‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Why don’t we forget about all this? Go back to where we started.’

  She sipped, raised an eyebrow. ‘Think you can?’

  ‘Why not? Let’s give it a try. Then I’ll be the luckiest man alive.’

  ‘You’re not making much sense,’ she said. ‘And anyhow, what does luck have to do with it?’

  Tim’s face suddenly felt hot. He got up, pushing back his chair clumsily, and went to the kitchen sink. Turned on the cold tap, splashed his face, wiped off with a tea towel. The exterior light showed a patch of cleared area—hardly a garden or lawn—and the generator shed. Funny—you became so used to that generator throb you stopped hearing it. He turned away, towards Amy, about to say something witty—and then instinctively snapped his head back to the window.

  ‘What the fuck was that?’ he said.

  Amy didn’t say anything. She was deep in thought—or so it appeared.

  ‘I wish I had a cigarette,’ she said, for the second time that day.

  ‘Something’s out there,’ he said, peering past the patch of light into the darkness.

  ‘What do you mean, “something’s out there”?’

  ‘I mean, something’s out there. Something moved—across the yard—a second ago. I just caught it in the corner of my eye.’

  ‘That’s because you’re half pissed. You probably saw a bunyip.’

  ‘Maybe I am half pissed—but I’m not in la-la land. I saw something. It moved swiftly, from nowhere, and … disappeared again.’

  ‘Tim,’ she said. ‘Stop. You’re creeping me out.’

  ‘Maybe it was a bat swooping. Do we have bats around here?’

  ‘Sure we do. There are bats everywhere. You sure you haven’t any cigarettes stashed in the house somewhere?’

  ‘No cigarettes,’ he said. ‘Everything else but.’ He was still peering through the window with the tea towel in his hand. ‘The weirdest thing,’ he said to himself.

  ‘What’s so weird about a bat?’ she said.

  ‘It wasn’t a bat.’

  ‘How do you know what it was?’ she said, helping herself to more wine. ‘You have no idea. It was probably nothing. You dreamed it up in your heat-oppressed brain.’

  ‘It was something, all right. Too big for a bat. Too fast for a bunyip.’

  Next thing, Amy had crossed to the kitchen and was standing at the window beside him, wine glass in hand.

  ‘I don’t see anything,’ she said.

  In silence they both gazed out through the pool of light, into the cleared patch of ground and beyond, to the dense trees and shrubbery. Nothing moved.

  ‘Come on, Tim,’ she said. ‘Give it a rest. You’re a bit …’ She shrugged, unable to find the right word.

  Amy turned to go, and as she did so there was a knock at the door.

  They both jumped.

  ‘Shit a brick!’ Tim said.

  There came a second knock; then a third.

  They stared at each
other.

  ‘Should we answer it?’ Amy said. She certainly looked as if she had her doubts.

  Tim didn’t know what to say—or do.

  There came more knocking—more insistent this time.

  ‘Who the hell could it be?’ she said.

  ‘Maybe it’s your secret admirer,’ Tim said. ‘Come to claim his prize.’

  ‘Don’t be an idiot, Tim. I don’t like this, one bit. Nobody comes calling around here. And there’s no sign of a vehicle.’

  Tim moved to the door. ‘Better at least see who it is.’ He gestured for her to stay clear as he turned the door knob.

  The time was a tick off 7.53pm.

  11

  Following his run-in with the law, Sammy’s relations with his father became increasingly strained. One night at the dinner table, the old man launched a full-scale assault, accusing his son of being a no-good bum who had brought shame on the family name by bringing police to the door. All Sammy was interested in were his stupid mates and his stupid karate; he would never amount to anything in this world because he wasn’t prepared to work.

  ‘My friends respect me,’ Sammy replied. ‘Everyone respects me. But no one respects you. They laugh behind your back, because you are a hillbilly and a fat slob!’

  Sam senior threw a glass of wine in his son’s face. Sammy immediately jumped to his feet and assumed the classic karate stance.

  Things could’ve got out of hand except that Voula intervened, chastising her husband for abusing his own son instead of standing up for him.

  ‘He is your own flesh and blood,’ she said. ‘How can you treat him like this? It’s you who should be ashamed!’ Even if she saw him bash someone to death with her own eyes, Voula would defend Sammy to her last breath. He would always be her Adonis, no matter what.

  When Sammy stormed from the room, fuming with anger, she turned on the old man. He was shaking with rage.

  ‘See what you’ve done?’ she told him. ‘He hasn’t even finished his dinner. You made him lose his appetite!’

  ‘You are mad, woman,’ Sam shouted. ‘He talks about respect, your pig of a son, but he shows none to his father. What do you think of that?’

  Voula wasn’t having any of it. And so the argument raged on. Sammy’s sisters said nothing, but privately they agreed with their father.

  For his part, Sammy wished he could quit his rotten job and leave home, get into a flat with his mates, but he needed the money to make his monthly payments on the car. The situation with his father was barely tolerable, but he would just have to suck it up for a while longer.

  Getting his hands on some ready cash became a paramount concern for Sammy as time went by. Speeding fines, other traffic infringements and the high cost of his preferred lifestyle became increasingly burdensome. The fines he didn’t worry about—just threw the infringement notices in the bin, or stuffed them in his glove compartment. But then disaster struck: the Commodore’s transmission blew up. He didn’t have the two thousand dollars required to get it fixed, and no way was he going to crawl to his old man to stump up for it.

  The car sat in the front garden for months.

  Something had to be done. Without his wheels, he was lost.

  *

  One night at the pub he was moaning about his problems to his best mate, an apprentice plumber at a brewery who went by the name of Zed. Zed told him about a guy who dealt drugs, quite high up in the food chain, not just a street dealer. Zed was told he kept large amounts of cash and product in the house and he knew where the guy lived. Everyone did, it was a ’round-the-clock business. Was Sammy interested in exploring possibilities?

  Sammy was more than interested. He made Zed drive him to the Colyton address straight away. They found it after a few false starts. Zed knew it was the right place because there was a pair of sneakers hanging from the power lines out front, some sort of secret code to indicate the address of a dealer. Plus, there was a black Camaro in the driveway, a real drug dealer’s muscle car. Sammy thought he might as well boost the car too, do a thorough job. It just looked like a regular brick house, no obvious security system, no evidence of guard dogs, nothing. There was a light on in the front room.

  It was 11.30pm.

  Sammy wanted to go in then and there, the adrenaline already coursing through his alcohol-affected bloodstream.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘I’ll take care of the bastard, we find his stash and we’re gone in ten minutes. All you got to do is back me up. What could be easier?’

  Zed wasn’t so sure. For starters, they didn’t know how many people were in the house, whether they were armed, dangerous, whatever—Zed didn’t want to take that chance.

  They argued back and forth.

  ‘This is bullshit, man,’ Sammy said. ‘Why’d you tell me about it if you don’t have the balls to do anything?’

  ‘I got the balls,’ Zed said. ‘But I didn’t expect you’d want to do it right now.’

  ‘No time like right now,’ Sammy said quietly.

  Heavy silence.

  ‘What if he’s got family in there? Wife and kids?’ Zed said eventually.

  ‘We deal with it,’ Sammy told him.

  Zed gave him a look. ‘We deal with it? What’s that supposed to mean?’

  Before Sammy could reply, the front door opened and a man emerged. In the porch light he looked an older guy, mid-forties, medium build, long hair, nothing special; just a regular suburban Joe.

  He certainly didn’t look like a major drug dealer—but then what does a major drug dealer look like? They came in all shapes and sizes.

  Not that Sammy had ever met one.

  ‘That him?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Zed said. ‘I’ve never met him.’

  ‘Thought you said you knew this guy,’ Sammy said. He was becoming pissed with Zed.

  ‘I said I knew about him,’ Zed said. ‘From somebody at work. This guy, my mate, told me he always carries a big wad of cash and has lots of gear on the premises.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Frank,’ Zed said. ‘Frankie Matteo.’

  ‘And this is his house.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Zed answered. ‘Drove past it once. My mate pointed it out. That’s how I know about him.’

  The man named Frankie Matteo was putting out his rubbish bins. He placed them on the nature strip, looked up and down the street and went back inside without seeming to notice the car parked opposite, two guys eyeballing him, talking about taking him down.

  He shut the front door. The porch light went out.

  ‘Right,’ Sammy said. ‘This is it. Let’s go get Frankie.’ He was hyped; itching to get inside that house.

  By now Zed’s resistance had been worn right down. There was no point in arguing with Sammy when he was this determined. But his eyes widened when he saw Sammy pull out a butterfly knife from his back pocket.

  ‘Just for insurance,’ he told Zed. ‘Case he plays hardball.’ He started to open his door.

  ‘Wait on,’ Zed said. ‘We’ve got nothing to cover our faces.’

  ‘So what?’ Sammy said, holding the door open. ‘He doesn’t know you, or me. He can’t finger us. Anyhow, if he’s a drug dealer he’s not gonna call the cops, is he?’

  ‘S’pose not.’ But something bothered Zed all the same. Maybe it wouldn’t be cops they’d have to worry about. They might have to deal with people who didn’t care about the law.

  ‘Any other problems? Not turning chickenshit on me, are you?’ Sammy said.

  ‘Who said I was chickenshit?’ Zed replied in an overly aggressive way. Truth was, Zed felt sheepish. The whole thing was his idea, and he was the one with cold feet. Back at the pub it’d seemed a good idea, but now they were on the verge of doing it he wasn’t so sure. He wished he hadn’t mentioned it. But he had to go with it now, or lose face. Zed had no history of violent crime. He was about to find out all about it.

  They got out of the car and slipped across the road, went in the front ga
te and down the path to the porch.

  Sammy thumbed the doorbell.

  The butterfly knife, blade extended, was hidden behind his back.

  A quick glance at Zed told him he had the jitters, bad.

  He wondered how his sideman would stack up if things turned ugly. Zed had never done a day’s training in his life; most of his spare time he was either in the pub or on the bong. He had the pale, wasted face and vacant eyes of a bong addict. Sammy didn’t mind a toke of the weed himself, but he was nowhere near Zed’s league.

  Sammy knew he was up to this, even though he’d mostly fought in a dojo, with all the associated rules and restrictions. Apart from that he’d only bashed up citizens in the street who couldn’t fight their way out of a wet paper bag. But he was super-confident in any situation. Self-doubt did not live anywhere in his being. He was pumped and ready to hammer the bejesus out of this bastard if he didn’t cooperate.

  The door opened. Sammy was face-to-face with Frankie Matteo.

  Sammy saw that Frankie immediately realised he had trouble on his doorstep. There wasn’t fear in his eyes exactly—Sammy recognised fear in his opponents; it was a crucial factor when you were fighting someone—but something similar. Concern, maybe. Being a drug dealer he wouldn’t be surprised to get a late-night visitor, even one he didn’t recognise. Drug addicts came calling at all hours.

  In the second instant, Sammy shoved the door open so hard it smashed into Frankie’s nose, rocking him back on his heels. Blood flew from his face as Sammy and then Zed forced their way inside.

  In the third instant, before Frankie had regained his senses or even knew what was going on, Sammy caught him by the throat and rammed him against the wall, causing a vase of flowers on a small table to crash onto the floor. Frankie spluttered and gagged and spilled his blood over Sammy’s strong hand.

  A woman’s voice called out. ‘Frank? Frankie? Who is it? What’s—’

  She appeared from a room off the hallway—an attractive woman with long, honey-blonde hair. She immediately screamed.