by Jack Heath
I guess I am, if slave-trader is the baseline.
At the FBI field office, there was a fatalistic agent named Ruciani, although everyone called him Pope. Once, when I was waiting out the front for the automatic doors to open, he flicked a burning cigarette butt in my direction.
A younger agent nudged him. ‘Knock it off, Pope. Folks around here look up to you.’
‘Looking up to people is a waste of time.’ Ruciani spoke like he’d already forgotten I was there. ‘If you want to be happy, find someone to look down on.’
Zara and her friends seem to have taken that philosophy to its logical conclusion.
‘How do you know about those people in other countries?’ I ask her.
Zara waves this off. ‘I used to travel a lot for work. The point is, don’t hide your feelings. I wouldn’t want you to end up like Samson.’ Is her tone flirtatious, or threatening? It’s impossible to tell.
‘Right. Thanks.’ Talking to her is exhausting, especially with Cedric watching us. I go around the corner into the living room. Music is playing quietly from the hidden speakers—an acoustic version of a Lady Gaga song. I sink into the sofa. The fabric is smooth and the padding soft. It probably cost more than my house.
I close my eyes. I’m so tired. But I already know I won’t be able to sleep tonight. Not with Thistle chained up out there in the cold.
The pop and crackle from the fireplace is soothing, although I’m not sure why. Fire is dangerous. My lizard brain shouldn’t find it comforting. I don’t have a happy childhood filled with campfires to get nostalgic about. It can’t be media conditioning. Whenever you see a campfire on TV, something bad is about to come out of the woods right behind the campers.
And now that I think about it, this particular fire smells wrong. There’s a sour tang to the wood smoke. Something plastic.
I open my eyes and look over. Just flames. But the smell persists.
I find the remote and turn up the music. The guitar rattles and the cymbals splash. Someone’s left a half-full bottle of soda on the coffee table. I tip it onto the flames. There’s a loud hiss, but the music covers it. When the cloud of steam dissipates, I crouch next to the fireplace and peer in.
Nestled among the hot, damp coals, there are fragments of paper. Like someone tore up a document and threw it into the fire.
Most of the pieces are too small to be useful, but two parts are larger. I pluck out the closest one and flatten it beneath my shoe, extinguishing the burning edges. Dense text is printed on both sides. I have the left-hand side of a paragraph on one side, and the right-hand side on the other.
On the other large piece, a transparent film has half-peeled away, like it was printed on photo paper. That must have been the source of the smell. The side I can see is blank.
I reach in and quickly snatch it out. It singes my fingers and I drop it on the floor. It lands on the blank side, revealing the photo.
Most of the photo is taken up by a featureless grey backdrop. I can see the corner of a face—one eye, an ear, some hair.
It’s enough to recognise Donnie.
I listen for a second to make sure no one is coming, then I scan the text on the scorched document:
individual, prone to threats and violence. His relationship emotional as well as sexual, and could be exploited. His Donald (Snr) and Glenda Walton, do not appear to have two victims (see appendix B) have both contacted private leading to the engagement of Lila Preyat.
On the other side:
Subject is unsuitable for direct approach as an compromise the agent’s cover. But a third party particularly if his parents are unaware of in the field.
I read both extracts several times. I assume Donnie is the subject. Someone was keeping a file on him. But I’m struggling to fill in the blanks in the text.
So who burned it? Not Fred—he has a paper shredder in his room. And who wrote it?
Normally I would throw the papers back into the fire. Words are easy to remember, since they already have meaning. All I have to do is come up with mental images to remind me of the gaps. For ‘relationship … emotional’, I picture Donnie hugging his girlfriend and sobbing loudly. For ‘His … Donald’ I imagine him taking Trump for a walk on a leash, like a pet he owns. And so on.
But I can’t burn this. It’s proof of something, although I don’t yet know what.
I tuck the papers under my shirt. The hot corners sting my skin. When I walk through the kitchen and dining area, Cedric and Zara aren’t there. Maybe they’ve gone to bed. I sneak back into my room and close the door.
I need to conceal these papers somewhere. But my room could be searched at any time. Perhaps it already has been. A normal hiding place—in a drawer, on a high shelf—isn’t going to work. I’d like to smash a hole in a wall, but that would wake up the whole house, and I don’t have the materials to patch it up afterwards.
As I walk around the room, looking for ideas, I feel a draft of warm air near my feet. I look under the bed. There’s a heating vent down there.
As quietly as I can, I drag the bed sideways to access the vent. I should be able to drop the paper in, then nudge it out of sight around the bend. Safe enough.
But when I lift up the grille covering the vent, I discover a plastic-wrapped bundle inside. It looks a bit like one of the shrink-wrapped T-shirts you see in tourist traps.
I lift it out. Inside the plastic I can see an ash-grey powder. It’s too dark to be heroin or cocaine.
Underneath, I can see a second bag, and maybe another beneath that.
Whose room was this before mine? Do the Guards know this is here?
I sniff the package but can’t smell anything through the wrapping. I give it a gentle squeeze and some little white granules come to the surface among the grey.
The realisation comes so suddenly that I almost drop the package.
CHAPTER 25
The more I eat, the fatter you get. You’ll see a picture of me, then we’ll meet in person, and you’ll cry. What am I?
Rick Allister married his high school sweetheart, Lynne, and started hitting her as soon as she was pregnant. The first time was when he caught her smoking on the back porch. He slapped her so hard that she fell off her chair.
Rick apologised that night. He said the thought of his baby boy inhaling her smoke made him crazy, although they didn’t even know the sex of the baby at that stage.
‘When we had the twelve-week sonogram, it turned out he was right,’ Lynne Allister told me later. ‘I know the odds were fifty–fifty, but it made him seem omniscient. Like anything I did, he would know about.’
We were at a diner around the corner from the FBI field office. Lynne kept watching the windows behind me, scanning every face. She was Asian American, twenties, with arched eyebrows and coffee-stained teeth. Under her hoodie, the tendons in her neck stood out, like she was braced for a car crash.
It was two days after the Hermann Park protests. The road was still sprinkled with broken glass and scorch marks. No agents had come with me to the diner. Everyone was busy sorting through all the photos and video of the protestors.
The second time Rick hit her, Lynne said, it was because she’d eaten some brie. It could contain listeria, he snapped, which would harm his baby. That time he didn’t apologise.
‘I asked a maternal health nurse, and apparently getting punched in the head is more likely to harm the baby than eating cheese.’ Lynne took a thoughtful sip of her coffee. ‘But then she said, “Still don’t eat any soft cheese, though.” Can you believe that?’
As her belly got bigger and bigger, she made more and more excuses for Rick. He was stressed. Their finances weren’t great. He was working long hours to support her. She thought he’d stop hitting her when the baby was born.
And he did—for a while.
‘That first month, it was as if we were in high school again. We were so in love. Whenever he was home, we just lay in bed together looking at Joey, like he was a beautiful painting we’d pa
id a lot of money for. Newborns aren’t hard. They just sleep all the time. But when he started to get more active, Rick started to have problems with everything I did. If he thought the bathwater was too cold, he’d dump a bucket of it on my head. If he thought I hadn’t mashed the baby food up enough, he would throw it at me. “This wouldn’t hurt if it was mashed,” he’d say. Or one time I put the diaper on too tight, and he came up behind me and grabbed my skull and just squeezed. “You like that? Huh?”’
Whenever Lynne quoted her ex-husband, her voice was a hoarse whisper. I couldn’t work out if she was doing an impression of him or was worried about other people in the diner overhearing.
‘But I couldn’t leave him,’ she said. ‘Where would I go? My parents were back in Delaware. My friends, too. I couldn’t contact them without Rick knowing, because we shared a phone and an email address. I couldn’t even write a letter, because he was with me every time I left the house. I tried to talk to a work colleague, but she didn’t seem to believe me. Later, I found out that Rick had warned her in advance that I had a history of mental problems. I know, I know.’ She held up her hands. ‘This is all starting to sound familiar, right?’
I nodded. ‘Textbook.’
‘I’ve been doing some research about other women in my position,’ she continued. ‘Their husbands all did exactly the same things. Exactly. Is there a literal textbook? Required reading for all men—a step-by-step guide to controlling your wife?’
I said nothing.
‘Oh, don’t give me that not all men shit,’ she said, as if I had spoken. ‘This happens everywhere. Maybe not every man is an abuser, but every man has a responsibility to fix the problem.’
I kept my mouth shut. Boys at the group home had tried to sexually assault me. At school, I’d been beaten up and had my teeth knocked out. As an adult, I’d been threatened at gunpoint.
I knew from the FBI stats that men were three times more likely to be murdered or assaulted than women. But I also knew that ninety per cent of perpetrators were male, so I didn’t argue with her.
‘When did you decide to go to the police?’ I asked.
‘Joey was almost one. I woke up one night with Rick’s hands around my neck. He said I’d been snoring too loudly and it was disturbing the baby.’ For the first time, Lynne wasn’t watching the pedestrians outside. She was just staring at the cabinet where all the pies were stored, not seeing it. ‘He choked me out. When I woke up, I just knew: the next time he would kill me. There was nothing I could do to make him happy or calm him down. My best behaviour was never going to be good enough.’
‘But it took you a couple of weeks, is that correct?’ I’d seen the police report already.
‘Nine days,’ she said, a bit defensively. ‘He was on leave. I had to wait until he went back to work. As soon as he left for the day, I started packing a suitcase. Once I had it, I walked to Fulton Street and hailed a cab. Well, four cabs.’ She grimaced. ‘The first three wouldn’t take me. They didn’t have a baby seat. The fourth one didn’t either, but I begged the driver and he agreed to give me a ride to the police station. I told them the whole story. I got a restraining order. He came to the police station, but I didn’t have to see him. I hid in one of the interview rooms while he talked to the police.’ She shuddered. ‘He didn’t yell, or swear. He said he was worried about my mental health, and that I’d talked about hurting Joey. He sounded so reasonable. And I was there on my own, just whispering, “Don’t believe him, don’t believe him.”’ She exhaled. ‘Luckily, they didn’t.’
‘Who did you stay with?’
‘I spent a few nights in a women’s shelter on Waugh before I could get in touch with my parents. After that, they paid for a hotel for me.’
‘Here? You couldn’t get back to Delaware?’
‘Not legally. Joey was Rick’s son. I couldn’t take him interstate without his permission. Instead, my parents came to Houston to help look after Joey while I talked to a lawyer.’
‘Do you think that’s why he wanted to have a child?’ I asked. ‘To control you?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I get why you’re asking, but no. He really loved Joey.’
She was already using the past tense. Loved.
‘Did you see Rick anytime between then and Monday?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘Not until Monday.’
On Monday, Lynne finished work and took the elevator to the basement parking lot. Joey was with her, having spent all afternoon at the office day-care centre. Her mom had unexpectedly dropped him off at one o’clock that day, so she could take Lynne’s father to an appointment he’d forgotten about with an eye specialist. Lynne had found it hard to concentrate after that, knowing Joey was right downstairs, probably screaming because he was surrounded by strangers.
He was fine when she collected him, though. He waved at Lynne’s colleagues as they entered and left the elevator. They smiled and waved back but still avoided Lynne’s gaze. Thanks to Rick, a few people still thought she was crazy, and those who actually understood her situation were keeping their distance so they wouldn’t feel obliged to help.
When she got to the basement, Lynne loaded Joey into the car seat. He was in a squirmy mood. It was hard to buckle him in, but she got it done. She climbed into the driver’s seat, started the engine and drove up the ramp towards the boom gate. She swiped her pass and the gate creaked open. She rolled out onto the street. The last of the summer sunshine fell through the windshield, warming her arms. The trees in Hermann Park were beautifully green. She reached into one of the cup holders for her sunglasses.
Then the gunfire started.
She felt the first shot before she heard it—straight through her calf muscle and into the console between the car seats. She thought for a second that she’d been stung by a bee. Her worst nightmare was a bee in the car. It was only when the second shot punched through the car door and tunnelled through the seat beneath her that she realised what was happening. She frantically unbuckled the seatbelt and scrambled away from the door, into the passenger seat. The car rolled forwards across the street, driverless.
Two more shots rang out. Neither one hit the car. Then there was a pause. Police later concluded that the shooter was using a Remington R25 GII, which had only a four-round magazine. He was reloading.
People were screaming on the street. The car hit the kerb and lurched up. The radio babbled, unconcerned. Hot blood trickled down Lynne’s leg and into her shoe. She covered her head with her arms, shaking.
‘You know what the worst part is?’ Lynne told me. ‘Actually, the whole thing was the worst part. But here’s something I can’t stop thinking about: I didn’t climb into the back seat and try to shield Joey with my body. I didn’t think to do that.’
‘You were panicked,’ I said.
‘No shit. But I bet he blames me for not doing that. I bet he still thinks I’m a terrible mother. It—’ she rubbed her mouth with one hand, as though wiping away an angry word ‘—it drives me crazy.’
There was one more shot, and then nothing. Lynne was in the passenger seat, keeping her head below the windows. She pushed the stick into reverse and grabbed the wheel. She steered blind, trying to get the car out of the firing line, but still not sure where the firing line was. Pretty soon she hit something. A car alarm went off. Horns blasted all around. Sirens in the air. Joey was screaming. Lynne couldn’t hear herself think.
She shifted the stick into drive again. Rolled forwards. Steered the other way. Hit the same kerb. Screamed every swear word she could think of.
Then a cop banged on her window, scaring the shit out of her.
‘Ma’am,’ he said. ‘It’s okay. He’s gone.’
Within an hour, the FBI was there, fighting with the Houston PD for jurisdiction. It was a half-hearted argument, because no one actually wanted the case. I was there, too. No reason for me to be, but my handler, Richmond, had been called in, and he wasn’t supposed to leave me alone, so he brought me with him.
; A photographer with a thin moustache took a snap of me behind the police tape. I told him I’d sue his paper if they used the picture. It was an empty threat and he knew it. The photo ended up on the internet anyway.
By the time Richmond and I arrived, Lynne and Joey had already been loaded into an ambulance. They wouldn’t be going far—several medical centres bordered Hermann Park. I watched the ambulance disappear behind the jello mould-shaped spray of the Mecom Fountain.
The beat cops already knew where the shooter had been. A witness had seen him pop out of a manhole, like a prairie dog, at the mouth of an alley next to Lynne’s office. After that fifth shot, he disappeared into the labyrinth of maintenance tunnels under Houston. Now the alley was blocked by a police barricade, and Lynne’s car was being loaded onto a tow truck. There was blood on the ground where she’d gotten out of the car.
While Richmond and locals cops argued, I stared down at the blood, wondering if anyone would object to me touching it. The rain was slowly sweeping it towards lower ground. I shuffled after it, a twisting red snake in the water, until I found myself standing over the manhole. The bloody water trickled over the edge into the blackness.
My hands in my pockets, I listened to the sloshing and shouting of police below. They were unlikely to get anywhere. Sewer tunnels may be unpleasant, but they do a great job of covering tracks. Prints are quickly washed away and sniffer dogs are useless. I could have climbed down to help, but this wasn’t my case.
Still, I found myself wondering why the shooter had picked this spot. It was good for a quick getaway, sure—but not for the actual shooting. The angle was too low. It would have made more sense for him to use the vacant first floor of the building next door. He would have had a perfect view through Lynne’s windshield. After shooting her through the heart, he would have had time to jump down and disappear through the same manhole.