Hideout

by Jack Heath

  Suddenly inspired, she went over to the younger guy. He had long hair, stubble and a nice build. Muscular thighs.

  ‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said.

  He looked up. ‘You have?’

  ‘Yeah. From over there.’ Penny pointed to a spot that wouldn’t have been visible to him while he was using the rowing machine.

  The man released the handles and wiped his sweaty hands on his tank top.

  ‘You got good technique,’ Penny said.

  The guy smiled uncertainly. ‘Really? Thanks.’

  ‘I’m Penny.’

  ‘Albert.’

  He reached up to shake her hand, and Penny pressed her card into it. ‘Buy me a coffee sometime, Albert,’ she said, and winked. Then she walked away without a backwards glance.

  Whether he called her or not, he would remember that she had been here. Penny felt sure that he would tell the police she had been watching him the whole time he was working out. The male ego wouldn’t even let him consider the idea that she had noticed him only five seconds before interrupting him. Penny had seen suspects walk away with far shakier alibis.

  She walked out the front door, turning her face just enough that the security camera could identify her, but not so much that it would look like she was conscious of it. She had been clumsy at first, but already she was good at this.

  A few pedestrians were around as she jogged over to her patrol car. A fat old man with Woody Allen glasses watched her unlock the trunk and pull out her police jacket. He looked away as soon as she pulled it on. Didn’t mean he had done anything wrong. Being a police officer was like that. Most people avoided eye contact, as though the law couldn’t see them if they couldn’t see it.

  Penny went back up to the apartment. She was about to knock on the neighbour’s door, since the neighbour had made the call, but stopped herself just in time. Even if it wasn’t protocol, she had to enter the victim’s apartment first.

  ‘Police. Open up.’ She banged on Swaize’s door, like she didn’t know what was inside. For a second, she had the strange feeling that he would open the door, looking puzzled and worried. Like she had imagined the whole thing.

  He didn’t, of course. The neighbour stuck her head out the door just as Penny was getting out the snap gun again.

  Penny looked her right in the eye, confident that she wouldn’t be recognised. Maybe overconfident.

  ‘Stay inside, ma’am,’ Penny told her.

  The woman didn’t need any further encouragement. She vanished like a cat down a storm drain.

  Penny pushed Swaize’s door open. The noise of the TV hit her immediately. ‘Hello?’ she called out, in case the woman from next door could hear.

  After a couple of seconds, she turned off the TV. This put her fingerprints on the remote, which was fine. She was supposed to be here this time.

  ‘Hello?’ she called out again. She walked to the open bathroom door.

  The body was gone.

  Penny choked on her own spit. She moved a little further into the room. There it was, thank God. The body had just slumped down a little further into the tub. Softening—rigor mortis wouldn’t start for hours yet. The blood had all but washed away.

  Penny knocked on the open door and called out, ‘Mr Swaize?’ She made eye contact with the dead body as she did it. Like she could wake him up. Part of her wanted to undo this. No, that wasn’t quite right—part of her wanted to want to undo this. To be the kind of person who couldn’t kill a stranger in cold blood. Or tepid blood, at least, she thought, recalling the surge of panic leading up to his death.

  If wishes were horses, her ex would have said.

  Penny shoulder-barged the door so the neighbour would hear the thump. Then she pulled out her radio. ‘Dispatch? I got a dead body here. Looks accidental, but send forensics. You never know.’

  Albert, the guy from the gym, did call her in the end. The baby ruined their date by crying pretty much constantly. Penny couldn’t even drink her coffee, because the caffeine would get into her breast milk and keep the baby awake. Albert was talking about his job, and Penny got a sense that all his anecdotes were witty, but because she was distracted by the baby she only really learned that he was a paralegal. Convenient, she thought. I might need an attorney. All the forensics seemed to think Swaize’s death was an accident, but the official ruling hadn’t come down yet.

  Despite the awful date, Albert still said he wanted to see her again. Penny suggested her place, where she would be better able to keep the baby distracted. There were toys, and a crib.

  When he came over, he didn’t help feed the baby, change the diaper or put him to bed, but he was patient while Penny did. Far from being annoying, his lack of interest in the baby delighted Penny. When her old friends did call, they would never ask how Penny was—only the baby. Her mother was the same. Her doctor asked how she was doing, but then always added pompously, ‘The mother’s wellbeing affects the child’s, you know.’ But Albert was interested in her.

  Once the baby was asleep, she and Albert had sex. She pushed the clothes, toys and packets of wet wipes aside and rode him, right there on the sofa. She gripped his hair and he squeezed her ass. She thought it might be her last chance to have sex before she went to prison.

  She wasn’t sure when she had become convinced that she was going to get caught, but a sense of inevitability loomed: the feeling that her days with her baby were numbered. She had driven past the razor wire and hurricane fences of the Gatesville Unit several times, already wondering where in the facility she would be housed.

  She waited for someone to notice that she had played a minor role in Swaize’s original arrest. No one did. She waited for the neighbour to say that she looked like the woman who had been hanging around Swaize’s apartment before his death. The neighbour didn’t. She waited for someone to contact the gym and confirm her alibi. Nobody did.

  Albert never called again. She left a voicemail for him, and he didn’t get back to her. Maybe he was looking for a woman with less baggage. Or maybe the baggage was why he had wanted that second date—he might have thought a single mom would be keen for a commitment-free fuck. He’d gotten what he wanted, and left. Like they all do.

  She told herself it didn’t matter. She’d gotten what she wanted from him, too. And as it turned out, she didn’t even need his alibi. Penny’s boss called. The death had been ruled an accident.

  She was free.

  CHAPTER 34

  I fill your body as you listen to music in church. What am I?

  ‘How did you know Swaize would lock his bathroom door while he was showering?’ I ask.

  ‘Ex-cons always do,’ Penny says.

  ‘But what if he didn’t?’

  She smirks. ‘I guess I would have had to put a spring inside the slide-bolt mechanism, and hold it in the open position with a credit card.’

  ‘So … how did you get caught?’ I ask.

  ‘I didn’t,’ she says.

  I scan her face. I can usually tell when someone’s lying to me, but I don’t think she is. Her chin is up, the edges of her lips curled, eyes slightly narrowed, eyebrows raised. Pride, and anticipation.

  ‘You turned yourself in,’ I say.

  ‘My, you are a good guesser,’ she replies. ‘I see why my son picked you.’

  ‘Why would you commit the perfect crime and then confess?’

  She looks out the little window. ‘Guilt,’ she says simply. ‘That man’s life weighed on me more and more heavily. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. I had to make it right.’

  ‘But—’ I stop myself. This grinds against everything I know about criminal psychology. People don’t turn themselves in out of guilt. They do it out of fear. The fear of getting found out gets bigger and bigger, swallowing up their whole lives like the blob from a horror movie, until eventually they confess just so they won’t have to worry about it anymore.

  But Penny committed, in her mind, the perfect crime. There was no chance of gett
ing caught. And she doesn’t seem to have an anxious disposition—she wasn’t going to imagine new evidence that the police might find.

  ‘The Gatesville Unit wasn’t so bad,’ she muses. ‘The library was better stocked than my public library. Two hours outside per day—I never got that at work, or even in high school. And after my accident—’

  ‘What accident?’

  She doesn’t seem to hear me. ‘I got free physiotherapy. Citizens don’t have a right to free health care, but prisoners do. The Eighth Amendment—it’s considered cruel and unusual punishment to withhold it. Can you believe that? My whole life I worked my ass off for health care. Turns out all I had to do was get myself thrown in jail.’

  ‘What accident?’ I ask again.

  ‘Ah.’ Penny picks up a pen and starts tapping it on the desk. ‘There are rules for prison guards. They can’t make you stand up for too long, they can’t deprive you of sleep, et cetera. It’s in the Geneva Convention. Not so for the other prisoners who, believe it or not, didn’t take kindly to having a former cop in their midst. For my own protection I was moved to a segregation unit with the child molesters. They needed protection, too. The other prisoners attack them, to feel righteous. Making themselves into heroes. You know?’

  I think of the shed of tortured criminals in the backyard. ‘I know.’

  ‘But the paedophiles in seg don’t like me much either,’ Penny says, ‘because I’m there for murdering one of them. So they attack me. Always right after a meal, because there’s a lockdown after each fight and no one wants to go hungry. I got stabbed in the kitchen, punched in the shower, and one time someone tripped me at the top of the stairs. I went all the way down.’

  Penny hasn’t gotten up from her swivel chair the whole time we’ve been talking. I’m starting to think she can’t. That would explain why she never leaves this room—she can’t go down the stairs. No wonder such a small woman still makes the floorboards creak.

  ‘You said it was an accident,’ I remind her.

  ‘Force of habit. That was how it was recorded in the logbooks. And once it’s in there, you can’t change it and you shouldn’t try. Arguing looks bad to the parole board. I was denied twice.’

  You’d think a woman with her experience would know how to manipulate a parole board. Something clicks in my mind. There is another reason criminals turn themselves in. Not for fear, but to escape. A woman beaten by her husband might think she’s safer in prison. A man who’s made a powerful enemy might find freedom behind bars.

  I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate … They can’t make you stand up for too long, they can’t deprive you of sleep, et cetera.

  ‘You didn’t feel guilty,’ I say. ‘You just didn’t want to look after a kid anymore.’

  Penny shoots me a look that could turn people to stone. ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘That’s why you turned yourself in,’ I say. ‘That’s why you killed Swaize in the first place. Prison was your way out.’

  Penny tries to get up, like she’s forgotten about her broken spine. She collapses back into the chair and nearly falls off it—grabs the edges just in time.

  ‘I love my son,’ she says, so hatefully she’s almost spitting.

  ‘Even after he locked you up here?’ I say. ‘He’s punishing you, right? For leaving him.’

  Penny is trembling with fury. I must have reached the truth. People who are falsely accused get annoyed. People who are correctly accused get enraged.

  ‘Hey, I get it,’ I say, thinking of Kyle. ‘No judgement here. Kids can be a real pain in the ass. I—’

  Penny flings her pen at me. I duck. The pen cracks against the wall behind me and rolls back under the bed, where she’ll never be able to reach it on her own.

  ‘Get out,’ she snaps.

  ‘No problem.’ I head for the door. I’ve wasted too much time up here already. She hasn’t helped me identify Samson’s killer, or told me anything I can use to get Thistle and the other prisoners out.

  ‘Wait. I’m sorry.’ Penny rolls her chair after me. Her poise is gone. She still looks pissed, but also afraid of being left alone. No wonder she spent an hour stalling me with a shaggy dog story.

  ‘I haven’t told you what happened after I was released,’ she says.

  ‘I gotta go. Your son gave me a case to crack.’ And Thistle is waiting for me to rescue her. ‘So unless you know something about Samson’s murder …’

  Penny’s tongue is pinched between her teeth. She desperately wants me to stay, but she has nothing more to give up.

  ‘I’ll see you,’ I say.

  ‘No! Hang on.’

  I pause in the doorway.

  ‘Take a closer look at the body,’ she says finally. ‘And then come back, so we can talk more.’

  ‘Why?’

  She purses her lips, and says nothing.

  Ten minutes later I’m in the editing room, clicking my way through the security systems. I do want to take another look at Samson’s body—but first, I need to work out how to turn off the motion detector on the driveway. If I can’t, the Guards will be alerted before Thistle and the other prisoners are half a mile away. They might catch up to us in the van. Even if we get away, the Guards will be long gone before Thistle’s colleagues come back to arrest them.

  The labels are strings of random numbers. Unsearchable. Every time a rectangle goes dead in front of me, I realise that I’ve switched off a camera instead of the motion detector, and it takes a few precious seconds to turn it back on. If the Guards come down here before tonight, I don’t want them to notice anything has changed.

  On one of the screens, someone has left the voting results from the subscribers open. Baby Killer is still in the lead, with more than two-thirds of the votes now. If I don’t get Thistle out of here soon, the Guards will kill her.

  I click through the last of the switches. Now the motion detector is off. Theoretically.

  As I get up to leave, I glance back at the voting results. All those people, so desperate to watch Thistle die.

  When I click on her name, it gives me more details. The usernames of everyone who voted for her, and how many times they voted—users can buy extra votes, apparently. Some of them have spent hundreds of dollars to kill Thistle.

  The number of votes per user field looks editable. I click it, and change a one to a zero.

  It works. Thistle’s section of the pie chart shrinks from 71.22 per cent to 71.13 per cent.

  My jaw drops. I can save her right now.

  But only if I condemn one of the others.

  I look at the chart. Five prisoners. Whose head should I put on the chopping block?

  After Thistle, the Pedo has the most votes. But he’s not here. And Cedric told me that Emmanuel Goldstein, the fictional anti-mascot, was rumoured to be a child molester. Maybe the Pedo doesn’t even exist, in which case the Guards can’t kill him on camera.

  The Terrorist, Amar, is ranked third. I click through to find the people who voted for him, and I quickly give one of them five hundred extra votes.

  It’s enough. Now the Terrorist has 63 per cent of the vote, and Thistle’s share has shrunk to 28 per cent.

  I exit back to the screen I started with and step away from the computer. I tell myself I didn’t just kill Amar. I’m going to get him out of here tonight. I’m going to get them all out.

  Right?

  After I unearth the corner of the bedsheet, it takes all my strength to lift the rest of it off Samson’s body. Wet dirt is heavy. But it does a great job of preserving the dead.

  Exposed to the air, bodies go rotten fast. Decomposition starts four minutes after death. Internal organs begin turning to slush after only a day. The body bloats within three. Bloody foam leaks out the nose and mouth. It’s extremely unappetising.

  But Samson has been both chilled and compressed. Other than the colourless skin and the clods of dirt in his hair, he looks the same as how we found him in bed on Tuesday.

  I look around. Zara we
nt into the house a few minutes ago. Donnie’s in the slaughterhouse. No sign of anybody else.

  I lift Samson out of the hole and quickly fill it in. Anyone walking past would only think an animal had been scratching around here, if they looked. And no one ever does.

  I drag Samson out of sight into the trees, then I strip off his clothes and examine him. He’s pissed his pants, but that doesn’t necessarily mean he died scared; bladder muscles relax even after a peaceful death. Most people who appear to be in good shape are not, once you get their clothes off. That’s the point of clothes—to hide that gut you wish was flatter and those pectoral muscles you don’t have. The most beautiful person you know probably looks ridiculous under all that silk and nylon. But Samson is a rare exception. Splayed out on the forest floor in front of me, he looks like da Vinci’s drawing of the man in the circle.

  I roll him over. There’s an extra lump of bone at the back of his skull, probably from looking down at a phone too much while his skeleton was still forming. A couple of childhood scars; nothing recent. If Donnie had crushed Samson’s hand around the gun and twisted his arm upwards, forcing him to shoot himself, there would be signs. Squeezing his limbs, I can’t feel any broken tendons or dislocated joints. There isn’t any bruising, either.

  I take the kitchen knife off my belt, but hesitate. If I cut him open, I might lose control. And Thistle is barely a hundred yards from where I’m standing. She can’t see me, but knowing she’s there makes me want to do better.

  Can I really waste all this meat, though? Usually only a few parts are thrown out, like the bones and the brain; eating brains can give you Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human equivalent of mad cow. This time, the whole thing is—

  Wait. Back up. The brain.

  When I first saw the scene, there were hints that Samson had been shot with something other than the gun in his hand. There was no exit wound, which was unusual for a firearm of that calibre. If I can dig the bullet out of his brain, I can prove my hunch.