THE EASTER MAKE BELIEVERS

by Finn Bell

  I made the mistake of briefly resting earlier. I found a spot hidden from the track and sat down with my back propped against a tree. I had only meant to catch my breath. The next thing I knew I was jerking awake in a nauseous panic. I don’t even know how much time had passed, minutes, hours? But I was freezing and so incredibly stiff that I had to roll over and drag myself up to standing using the tree for support. The first steps I took were so achingly painful that I’ve kept moving ever since.

  Occasionally the path crosses a clearing and sometimes a patch of hard bright stars breaks through the clouds, shining down on me and casting just enough light to betray the billowing clouds of vapor my racing breath creates in the icy air. But it’s not enough for me to get any real idea of where I am or where I’m going. I could be running away from help, deeper into the wild, but I don’t know. And I can’t turn back because he’s behind me somewhere. I think.

  I don’t really know if he’s on this track or how close, or if he’s even following at all. It’s just a feeling that I can’t shake. Like he’s right here, watching even now. Once I outran the gunshots I didn’t stop and didn’t look back for a long time. The track I was on stuttered into nothing when it joined a stream so I ran along beside that, remembering that water runs downhill. Thinking that if I can follow the stream then maybe it will join a river or something. And if I follow that maybe I can get to a road or a bridge or a house, anything to get help. But the stream led to a gorge and about halfway down it became too rough for me to follow the water, forcing me to veer away from it and find an easier path down.

  By the time I get to the bottom I can’t find the stream, can’t even hear it anymore, so I just keep heading downhill. Then I stumble onto another trail, maybe it’s the same one I was on, maybe not. But it leads downhill so I follow it. It’s getting harder to keep moving, the shaking won’t stop now and my head aches and I’m getting these intense bouts of nausea that are coming on with more frequency.

  It doesn’t matter though. None of it. Because I won’t stop. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Because the sun is going to rise again. And I’ll see it and know everything will be ok.

  * * *

  THE STORM

  The journey across the Pacific has pared the storm down, making it much smaller but also much stronger as it forces its far-flung winds into a tightly spinning, heavy vortex. Clouds becoming darker and denser as they turn into each other in a freezing cauldron, silent staccato flashes of lightning crackling at its centre.

  As it reaches warmer waters it is briefly buffeted, lifted higher by the warmer air it treads on, helping it gain more height, speeding its passage even as it greedily sucks one last massive breath of cold from the higher, thinner atmosphere.

  Then finally, silently in the dark of night, it reaches land. The frozen earth below is now much colder than the sea that crashes upon it and the storm descends from the heights, freezing it harder still.

  It begins to slow as it climbs the hills and mountains, shedding speed with every step as it pushes further into the wild country. Blindly following the shape of the land, careening up a course worn out by millennia’s worth of lava and ice going the other way.

  Until at last, dragged almost to a stand-still, it sacrifices its waning momentum completely in one final, great leap, high across the Blue Mountains.

  Here and now its energy is utterly spent. It descends on the other side, pregnant still with the heavy taint of the diesel fire that launched it into the sky in the South Pole. But it’s tired now and like all storms, no matter how mighty they once were, needs to find somewhere to die.

  It finds Lawrence.

  The very first snowflake it births floats down gently, a lonely fall, landing unnoticed. Its impact a completely inconsequential event so miniscule that the person’s skin it melts against is not even able to sense it.

  But that will soon change.

  * * *

  TOBE AND NICK

  To my complete lack of surprise and familiar annoyance I find myself living out Maria’s prediction. Finally rolling out of bed just after 2:00 a.m. feeling even more tired than when I flopped down earlier. My mind having decided that instead of sleeping it would rather entertain me by replaying muddled loops of the past day until I hover, jerking between sleeping and waking, with the nagging certainty that I’m forgetting to do something important but unable to remember what it is.

  We have to be back in Lawrence at 5:00 a.m. so there’s no real point in trying anymore. Instead I stand in the dark, leaning on the kitchen counter and staring out at the street light as I drink the first of the coffees Maria accused me of, no use in even pretending I’m only going to have one today. The first half of the cup forms one of those quiet, blessedly thought-free moments that you know can’t last. My hands aren’t even trembling.

  It’s been years and I don’t know why I do it now but I fish out my wallet and take out the old photo of my dad. The yellow street light and the fading of time has been kind to it. It makes him look younger now, even younger than I am now. Then I think about Sam Black and James Chen. Fathers and sons. And I wonder if Margaret was on to something last night with all that talk about what happens if your parents don’t really love you. But then maybe I’m not a good person to ask.

  I don’t hate my dad. I don’t think I ever did. I never knew him. I don’t think of him or us at all anymore. And when I do it’s simply a fact, there’s no feeling attached to the memory anymore. It’s just a thing that happened long ago now. And I’m not sorry for what I did to him. I’ve made plenty of mistakes in my life but that wasn’t one of them. At all. But sometimes when I’m with Maria and her kids at school, or I’m talking to a kid somewhere, I’ll hear myself sounding like an adult talking to a kid. Like most parents do when they talk to children. And I’ll get this flash of feeling because I’ll have this moment where I realise it’s not that hard is it, to be kind to a child? To tell them what they need to hear.

  They just want to be happy. It’s like they come pre-programmed to love and trust people with all this built-in hope and faith and surplus joy for the world. And they can look at you and still see the best possible version of you even after you disappoint them. It’s not like kids hide themselves from people. They’re mostly all out there, ready to try every new thing, certain that you won’t let them down this time. They don’t really care what you look like, or if you have money or what your job is, they just want to have fun with you. They’ll basically give you the biggest possible benefit of the doubt, again and again and again, because they want to believe in you so badly.

  So if you’re even halfway sane, halfway decent, how do you fuck that up? How come there’s so many horror stories out there? Stories so much worse than mine. I guess this case got me thinking about these things again. Because you come to that point where you have to let shit go. I get that. Been there and done it. I honestly don’t have any anger or anything left inside me for my dad. I don’t need closure or forgiveness or anything anymore. He’s a stranger to me. I didn’t realise it when I was young but he always was. All my problems are my own. At some point, under the sheer weight of experience, you accept the simple fact that you can’t change the past. It’s only ever going to be exactly how it is.

  But it stays with you, all that stuff, just sits there inside you. Like some kind of potential gone stale, like a piece of you was never used, never grew up right. Everything that happened and everything that should have instead. And I don’t really know what you’re supposed to do with that.

  I’m startled out of my musings when my phone beeps.

  As I check it I see that Maria was right about Tobe too. There’s a message from him, asking if I’m up.

  “You got anything?” I ask, yawning as he answers on the first ring.

  “No. You?” Tobe says.

  “Same. But I say let’s head out. No sense waiting,” I say.

  “Head out where?” Tobe asks.

  “Swing by the station to get gea
red up, find out the latest and then Lawrence again, where else?” I say.

  “I’ll pick you up in 10 minutes,” Tobe says, ending the call.

  I’m already nursing another bad coffee and a strong headache, hunching into my coat in the freezing gloom as Tobe pulls up outside my house. I get in without a word. Even the simple action of getting in the car makes my tired limbs ache.

  The radio volume is turned high but there’s nothing happening and as I check through the reports on the computer I see there haven’t been any breaks in the case. Nothing we’ve missed. Except of course this means we’re still missing everything.

  It’s been more than 24 hours since we got the call out. James Chen is probably dead by now, I think. What’s strange is that at some point we’re going to come face to face with Remu Black again. It’s inevitable really, he’s a career gangster and we’re the cops who deal with him. None of us are going anywhere. It’ll be days or weeks maybe, but at some point we’ll look into his eyes while he’s telling us he didn’t kill James Chen. He’ll know we won’t believe him but he’ll also know we can’t prove it and he’ll walk.

  I don’t know why thinking about it bothers me so much, but I can already feel my hands start to tremble. There’s nothing new to it. Gangs make people disappear all the time, it’s not usually this messy but it happens most weeks. And it’s far from the first time we’ll see a guilty-as-sin killer go free while we watch helplessly. In reality, it’s just another day on the job. I look over at Tobe and can’t help noticing how tired he looks, older and thinner than yesterday. Maybe there’s only so many times you can do this before it starts getting to you.

  “Had a call from Father Ress last night after you left,” Tobe says, which stirs me from my thoughts. “About Sam Black.”

  “Something?” I ask.

  “Difficult to say. Father Ress knows him, knows all of them. If he sees them in prison and they stay in the city when they get released he tries to keep in touch, and he’s over at Mercy Hospital every week,” Tobe says.

  “Nothing like a captive audience,” I comment.

  “As it transpires he visited Sam Black less than two days ago, saw him on Wednesday evening around six. Aside from the hospital staff he would have been one of the last people to speak with him before he disappeared,” Tobe continues.

  “That would be four maybe five hours before the gangsters burst into the Chen’s house,” I say.

  “Indeed. And according to Father Ress, Sam Black was upset about something, not his usual self,” Tobe says.

  “You mean not the upset that comes with all the suffering and dying on his own that Nurse Miha said was his usual?” I ask.

  “Father Ress said Sam seemed anxious but he wouldn’t tell him anything. Said Sam asked him to hear his confession, which he’d never done before,” Tobe finishes.

  “And I’m guessing that’s going to stay between Sam, Father Ress and God,” I say. “Ok, could be that before all this happened, Remu or one of his brothers had a chat with dear old dad, told him about whatever they had planned in Lawrence and Sam didn’t like it. Then maybe Sam has a way of finding out that it went wrong – there were certainly enough call outs on the radio – and decides to go show the kids how gangstering gets done, one last time. Or it could be nothing,” I state, scanning through the reports on the screen again.

  “Still nothing new in the reports from Maud or the Tech team about how he managed to slip out of hospital or the city unnoticed, which seems suspicious given the amount of camera feeds we’ve got, but not impossible. They’re still working through the phone records to see if anyone we know was talking and where from before or after this went down but that never works these days. Until we know more it’s just more of the same,” I conclude.

  There were a few years just after cell phones and the rise of the internet where technology gave us a big advantage over the gangs. All of a sudden cops like Maud, sitting quietly behind a laptop somewhere, could find you, know where you’ve been, who you’ve been talking to and even what you said. But criminals learn fast too, so the more high tech we go the more low tech they become to avoid surveillance, reverting back to how things used to be done in the bad old days; no computers, no banks, no accounts. Messages passed along on paper and burned, code words and slang to cover the meaning of the decisions made at meetings in case we’re listening, learning where the cameras are across the city, even getting their men to destroy large swathes of them if they need to do something big undetected, and using cheap over-the-counter cell phones paid for in cash and thrown away at the end of every week. The better we get at finding them, the harder they hide. Same shit, different day.

  “It’s also Good Friday,” Tobe says.

  “Not where I’m sitting,” I reply.

  “No, I mean it’s Easter Weekend. It’s a holiday today, the start of the long weekend. Everything in the city will be busier than normal as people take extra days off before the start of the holiday. More pressure on cameras, phone traffic and the road blocks too,” Tobe explains. “And Martin said there’s a chance of snow.”

  “Figures,” I say, before sculling the last of my coffee.

  * * *

  Despite the early hour, the Lawrence we find when we arrive is already, or possibly even still, a busy mess of cops and locals, with added clusters of army reserves. Martin looks like he slept in his clothes, still wearing his Happy Hearts Daffodil Trust hat as he sits hunched over, staring out at the traffic jam by the main gate through the steam rising from a bowl of soup he’s holding just under his nose.

  “Cap,” I greet as we take the empty plastic lawn chairs next to him.

  “Will you look at this citizen,” Martin says to us without looking up, and whenever he uses the word citizen like that you know he doesn’t mean anything good. I notice now that the cause of the traffic jam is down to a long black funeral hearse towing a yellow, industrial-sized, trailer-mounted wood chipper. The driver had obviously tried to reverse and then found that the trailer decided to go in the opposite direction he or she intended, and in response to the growing hoots and yells was now executing a painstakingly slow 17-point turn that was blocking both lanes of traffic.

  “You know what I see?” Martin says, pausing to take a sip of his soup.

  “Finally a third option between burial and cremation?” I say, looking at the hearse and the wood chipper.

  “They’re all just going to watch and complain and not do anything about it. That’s people for you,” Martin continues as if he’s talking to himself. “That’s why it’s going to happen again.”

  “You want us to go help them Cap?” I ask.

  “Help? That’s worse than doing nothing. Someone should have gone and kicked their ass already. It’s the only thing that would make them think twice before doing something like that again,” Martin says. Life inside Martin’s head must be a blessedly simple place.

  “Have you been here all night Captain?” Tobe asks.

  “Had to for the look of it, because the media is camped just outside the gate,” Martin says. “And there’s still things to do. I caught the update about Sam Black, can you make anything of it?” he asks.

  “Nothing tangible,” Tobe says. “It’s a strange case. So many clues that don’t lead to anything.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. I’ve been reviewing all the calls we made from the start, even looked at the FLIR cam recording again, and I can’t see how we could have done anything different. They’ve all been good calls but it’s still not getting us anywhere. It’s like everything is working backwards. We know exactly what happened, we’re even sure who did it, but we don’t know what to do with any of it. This might actually be the biggest crime to happen under our noses where no one ever gets prosecuted,” Martin says.

  “The big reports in yet?” I ask.

  “Yes, but just more confirmations of stuff we already knew. Toxicology results in the autopsy report show the usual mess of uppers and downers. Looks like they
got loaded before they got going. You wonder how some of these guys can even stand up let alone do crime with the amount of drugs they’re on. Cause of death in all cases is gunshot. Ballistics and gunshot residue prove what we already knew too. All our kills were clean and we didn’t cause the explosion. Brian Kepu was shot by his friend in the kitchen, a finger spasm from the headshot.

  “Fire Service is saying they can’t find impact points on what’s left of the gas tanks by the kitchen or in the garden shed but that doesn’t mean anything really. The Fire Chief is going to sign off on the theory that Brian Kepu must have nicked the gas line with his earlier shooting, and then a spark when he shot Andrea Chen set it off. He thinks that shrapnel from the first explosion breached the tanks outside without igniting them, then a couple of seconds later the gas leak from that reached the flames from the house. Just bad luck for us,” Martin says.

  “Yup, and great luck for Remu. If he’d been just a little slower we could have been scraping him off the walls,” I remark.

  “Yeah but then we’d likely be doing the same with James Chen too, so count your blessings,” Martin says.

  “Ok, what do you want us to do now Cap?” I ask. “Start working gang families? We could try and put some pressure on people out there. Maybe someone will talk.”

  “No. You’ll just get in the way of Tom’s guys, they’ve got their own way of doing things,” Martin replies.

  “Anything come up in James Chen’s life?” Tobe asks.

  “No. He’s clean; his family, his friends, his previous business, all of it. We even have a clean current records check on him. Turns out Chen Optics & IT used to contract for us before he sold it. All above board, everything checks out. Maud and his team are still looking further back in James’ life for anything that could be a motive but I think if he had anything to offer the gangs we would have found it by now. Unless you’ve got a lot better with computers you’ll be no use to them either. Work the search grid for now, it may be the last chance we have. Weather service says we might get snow soon. Isn’t that just perfect, snow at fucking Easter,” Martin says.