The Inside Dark

by James Hankins

“I broke my arm. The ulna. It’s the smaller bone in the forearm, on the side with the little finger. Broke three ribs, too. Spent two hours in the hospital last night. Got this cast,” he said, raising his arm a little. “Nothing they could do for the ribs, though. Just gotta try not to take deep breaths.”

  Whoosh, whir, click, whoosh.

  “I coughed on the drive home and nearly screamed.”

  Whoosh. Whir.

  “Carolyn said she saw me on the news.” He looked at the dark screen of the small television mounted high on the wall opposite the bed. Its blank face was as empty as his father’s. “I guess Rose probably did this morning, too,” he said, referring to another of his father’s regular nurses.

  Click, hum, whoosh.

  “Sorry I haven’t seen much of you the past day or two. I’ve been busy, unfortunately. You’d know that if you watched the news . . . and could understand it. All they’re talking about is how I escaped from Crackerjack. This other guy and me. I’m a little famous right now. I have no desire to be famous, Dad.”

  Whoosh. Whir.

  “The other guy—Jason Swike—he seems like a decent person. Since he went missing last week they’ve run a lot of stories about him on the news. He’s got a wife in a wheelchair. And a kid with Down syndrome, like Stevie had. I assume you remember Stevie, Dad. Anyway, his kid has some rare blood disease on top of that.” Ian shook his head. “This guy, Jason, he’s had things tough the last few years.”

  Whoosh. Click.

  “He reminds me a lot of Johnny. A lot. You wouldn’t believe it.” A pause, then, “I can’t stop wondering whether you remember any of us, Dad. Any of your sons. Me, Johnny, Stevie.”

  Nothing.

  “Anyway, him reminding me so much of Johnny—he has red hair, like Johnny had, but there’s other things, too—I started to feel sorry for him. A wife in a wheelchair, a sick kid with Down syndrome like Stevie had. I felt sorry for all of them. I miss Johnny and Stevie.”

  He watched his father breathe through his tubes for another few minutes, then he stood.

  “I guess I should empty that catheter bag.”

  After he’d hung the empty bag on the side of the bed again and washed his hands, he headed for the door. Before he left the room, he flicked a wall switch, turning off the lights. He had no idea whether his father knew the difference between light and dark at this point, even though, by pure chance, his eyes were open at the moment, but it saved electricity to turn them off, so he did.

  “I’m heading down to eat some dinner, Dad. I’ll come and say good night later.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  “Just a few more questions, Mr. Swike,” Detective Briggs said. “And really, I’m sorry to make you go over all of this again. I know you answered a lot of these questions yesterday when you first came out of that stable, but as you know, this case is a whopper. Gotta have all our i’s dotted and our t’s crossed.”

  “That’s okay,” Jason said. “I barely remember going over it the first time.”

  It was true. When the authorities had swarmed the stable the day before, Jason was in rough shape. He could hardly keep his eyes open. When someone started asking him questions, he’d done his best to answer, hoping that he was being helpful. Eventually paramedics arrived, and the next thing he remembered was waking up in the hospital.

  Briggs was sitting in the chair by the door, where he’d been sitting for the past half hour, asking questions with a ballpoint pen in one hand and a little notebook in the other.

  “I’m sorry I can’t remember more,” Jason said. “But everything is just so . . . hazy.”

  “I realize that. Again, I appreciate your trying.”

  “I just want to get out of here. I want to see my family. I haven’t even talked to my wife yet, my son. I was barely awake before you started interviewing me.”

  “We’re almost done for now, I promise. Then you can call your ex-wife.”

  “She’s my wife, not my ex.”

  Briggs paused, flipped back a few pages in his notebook. “Of course. Sorry. Anyway, I know you work as a copywriter . . .”

  “At the Barker Creative Agency, yeah.”

  “But I understand you’re also an author.”

  Jason nodded.

  “Crime novels, right?”

  “Crime, mystery, suspense . . . the lines tend to blur.”

  “That’s pretty cool.”

  It’s cool when you’re selling books, Jason thought, when editors know your name, when people are talking about turning your crime thriller into a movie, when you still have an agent. It’s not quite so cool when the film deal disappears and the only book you wrote that anyone read went out of print two years ago and is harder to find than a copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and even the digital version of it doesn’t sell enough copies each month to buy you a tank of gas.

  “Mr. Swike? Did you hear me?”

  “Oh, sorry. I’m still a bit . . . What was the question?”

  “How many books do you have out there?”

  “Just one. So far,” he added quickly. He didn’t count the two self-published thrillers—if that term actually applied—that he’d tried unsuccessfully to peddle to the masses. He didn’t think there was anything wrong with self-published books generally—he’d read some good ones—but there must be something wrong with his, as virtually no one bought them.

  “Got another one coming out soon?”

  “Not that soon,” he said, thinking about the dozen or so pages of notes he’d jotted down a few months ago, random thoughts on a vague idea he’d come up with for a murder mystery that had seemed marginally intriguing back then. But the concept hadn’t held even his own interest for more than a week; he couldn’t imagine it holding anyone else’s for the time it took to read an entire novel. So he’d stuffed the notes in a drawer and hadn’t glanced at them since. “I’m working on a new one, though.”

  “I imagine this would make a pretty good story. What you went through the past few days.”

  “I suppose.”

  “Be a good one to get your career back on track, I bet. ‘Real-life crime writer kills serial killer.’ I’d sure buy that one.”

  Jason shouldn’t have been surprised that Briggs had done a little homework on him, and that would be all it took—a little—to learn that his writing career had stalled.

  “I haven’t had much time to think about my writing the last couple of days,” he said.

  Briggs nodded and looked down at his little notebook. Flipped back a few pages. “So, when Mr. Cobb and the suspect—”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “The guy that I . . . the suspect. What was his name?”

  “Wallace Barton.”

  Jason nodded.

  Briggs continued. “So, when they crashed into the corral where you were being held . . .”

  The questions kept coming and Jason did his best to answer them. The events of yesterday afternoon were jumbled in his mind, like snippets of Super 8mm film dropped in a pile on a table and spliced back together in random order. He saw images, flashes of movement. He heard sounds: whistling, screaming, a skull cracking. And though his mind knew the order in which they must have occurred, it took some effort to assemble them that way. He recounted how Cobb and Crackerjack landed on him, with Cobb on top and Barton on his back between them; how they were fighting; how Cobb sounded panicky, saying he wouldn’t be able to hold the guy for long . . .

  “How is he, by the way?” Jason asked. “Cobb.”

  “Broken arm, a few busted ribs. Spent a couple of hours in the ER. He’ll be okay. Might have some bad dreams for a while, but he’ll be all right.”

  Jason figured he had some nightmares ahead of him, too.

  “You were saying?” Briggs prompted.

  “Oh, yeah, just that Cobb was screaming for me to help, sounding scared and desperate now, so I grabbed the hammer from the floor.”

  “With which hand?”

&nb
sp; “Excuse me?”

  “Which hand did you grab the hammer with?”

  “Uh, my right, I guess.”

  “And?”

  “And . . .” He paused. He could still feel the worn-smooth wooden handle in his grip. “And I hit him. Crackerjack. I mean, Barton.”

  “How many times?”

  Jason closed his eyes, thinking. “Twice maybe. Could have been three times.”

  “Where’d you hit him?”

  “His head.”

  “His head? His whole head?”

  “The side of his head.” When Briggs didn’t reply, he added, “The right side, I guess.”

  Briggs made a few notes.

  Jason asked, “How did Cobb get free?” The detective looked up. “One minute, I heard him screaming not far away”—unbidden, a snapshot popped into his mind, an image of the wooden table in the corral, with its leather straps and the dark stains on its surface—“and the next, he tackled Crackerjack on top of me. How did he get loose?”

  “Apparently, the suspect left one of the restraints binding him a little loose and Mr. Cobb was able to free one hand long enough to grab a mallet from a nearby table and strike the suspect’s hand. During that distraction, Mr. Cobb got loose from the other restraints. Then the two of them went at it, fighting each other through the stable until Mr. Cobb forced the suspect into your corral.”

  With a broken arm and three broken ribs, Jason thought. Wow.

  Briggs glanced down at his notes again. He asked several more questions to fill in some holes, sometimes repeating ones he’d already asked. At last, he said, “So, Mr. Swike, Wallace Barton held you for the better part of five days but didn’t harm you, other than his failure to give you food or enough water. But he started his torture of Mr. Cobb the same day he brought him to the stable. Strange. And you say he never spoke to you?”

  “Barton? No, not once. I never even saw him until . . .”

  “So why keep you prisoner for several days but torture Mr. Cobb almost right away?”

  “Maybe he had a better face for painting?” It seemed unlikely, but Jason couldn’t think of a better explanation.

  Briggs wrote something in his little book.

  “I’m glad he’s all right,” Jason said. “Cobb, I mean. I’m glad he’s okay. He saved my life.”

  The detective closed his notebook and slipped it into the pocket of his suit jacket. “That’s funny. He says you’re the one who saved him. According to him, you’re the hero.”

  Really?

  “No hero. I was just trying to stay alive.”

  “Well, a lot of people would disagree with you. Including the media. Have you watched the news yet?”

  Jason shook his head.

  “They’re calling you both heroes.”

  He didn’t feel like a hero. “I’m just happy that Barton is . . . that Crackerjack won’t be killing anyone else.”

  Briggs stood and walked over to Jason’s bedside. “Glad you’re okay, Mr. Swike. I’ll be in touch.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and placed it on the nightstand. “If you think of anything else before then, give me a call.”

  Jason nodded. “Again, I’m sorry I can’t be more helpful right now.”

  “Maybe more will come to you over time.”

  “No offense, Detective, but I hope not.”

  Briggs nodded. “Understandable. Have a good night.”

  Before the detective’s shadow on the floor outside his room had even slid from view, Jason had the telephone receiver in his hand and was dialing Sophie’s number. When he heard his wife’s voice on the line, he couldn’t speak for a moment. Finally he said, “It’s me.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He’d had to wait to be discharged until the doctors had completed their evening rounds, but shortly after 7:30 p.m., Jason glided through the hospital hallway in a wheelchair, feeling a bit silly. He was perfectly capable of walking out on his own two legs, but hospital regulations required that he leave the building in a wheelchair, so there he was, rolling along with Ben Britton pushing from behind. It wasn’t like Sophie could have picked him up. Her driving days ended on a dark stretch of wet road a little more than two years ago. And Jason would never consider asking his mother-in-law to do it. So Ben Britton, his closest friend since the seventh grade, was the obvious choice.

  “I think people are looking at me,” Jason said when they were halfway across the semicrowded lobby, heading toward the hospital’s front doors.

  “Well,” Ben said, “I noticed more than a few stares, but I think they’re looking at me. This is a brand-new suit.”

  God, he was glad to see Ben. It had taken his friend no more than five minutes to get a laugh out of him.

  “I just thought maybe they’d seen something on TV about me. The nurses kept telling me it’s practically the only story on the news.”

  “Oh, get over yourself. You think you’re my only friend who took down a serial killer lately?”

  “I’m not?”

  “Third this month.”

  With a few dozen eyes trailing them, they exited through a set of automatic doors. Jason spotted Ben’s blue RAV4 at the curb in a patient loading-and-unloading zone, and they were soon pulling out of the hospital lot.

  Jason looked over at Ben behind the wheel. It struck him that he had come close to never seeing his friend again. “I have to admit,” he said, “that’s a pretty sharp suit.”

  “I appreciate the honesty. I know that can’t have been easy for you. And in the same spirit, I’ll admit that it’s possible, however unlikely, that those people were looking at you and not me. The Crackerjack story’s a big one, I confess. And I hesitate to say this because you won’t be able to fit your swelled head out of the car again, but a lot of people are calling you guys heroes.”

  Detective Briggs had mentioned that, too, so Jason wasn’t surprised. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

  Neither of them said anything for a few moments before he again looked over at Ben, who had taken his eyes off the road for a moment and seemed to be scrutinizing him. “You’re okay, right?” Ben asked.

  “Yeah, I’m okay.”

  “Good. I don’t want to get weepy and drip tears all over this suit—twenty-two hundred bucks, can you believe it?—but I have to say . . . if that guy had killed you, I would have been peeved. Want to talk about it?”

  “Not really. Not yet anyway.”

  “Damn. I wanted you to talk about it.”

  “Maybe in a couple of days.”

  After a few minutes of forced small talk about how bad hospital food is and how embarrassingly revealing those johnnies are, Jason asked, “Did you talk to Sophie at all while I was . . .”

  “I called her a couple of times to check on her.”

  “Did she . . . was she . . . upset?”

  “Hmm, not that I could tell. Seemed fine to me. Hey, did you hear the Sox are thinking of bringing that kid up from Triple-A? The guy supposedly throws a hundred five miles an hour.”

  “Seriously? She wasn’t at all—”

  “Of course she was, Jason. Her ex, the father of her child, was missing for days. How could she not be upset?”

  He hated when people called Sophie his ex, because she wasn’t, not technically, and Ben should have known better. But he let it go.

  “Did you talk to my mother-in-law?” he asked.

  “Yeah, she answered the phone both times. Now, she didn’t seem too upset about you.”

  Sophie lived in the house that she and Jason had bought in their second year of marriage, and which Jason still co-owned. After the accident, she’d asked her mother to move in with them. For Jason’s good, she said. To help with Max. Two months later, when Sophie came home from rehab and asked Jason to move out, Janice stayed. Though Sophie had never been a needy person, her restriction to a wheelchair forced her to realize she would need help. And Janice, who had been a widow for more than a decade, was more than happy to take Jason’s place.


  He wondered how much Sophie had told her mother about the night of the crash . . . or the way she insisted on remembering it anyway.

  Unconsciously, he touched the slight depression on his scalp under his hair, a few inches above his left temple, a reminder of the head injury that left him unable to remember the accident clearly. He could recall things leading up to it, flashes of motion, snippets of sound, but most of what he knew about that horrible moment came from Sophie—and he simply could not believe her version of it.

  He’d never have done what she believed she’d stopped him from doing. Maybe he’d let the car drift a little rounding that bend, but if she hadn’t jerked the wheel to avoid the stranger on the shoulder—the action that cost them control of the vehicle and caused the crash—he certainly would have steered away from the man himself. It was beyond frustrating that she didn’t believe that. It was inconceivable.

  That night had cost them their marriage.

  And it had nearly cost him his relationship with his son. For the first few months after he’d moved out, Sophie had tried to keep Max away from him.

  I saw your face, Jason. I saw your eyes. You were heading right for that man.

  You’re wrong, Sophie. Why in hell would I do that? I’d never hurt anyone on purpose. And I’d sure as hell never hurt you or Max.

  Over time she seemed to grow a little more comfortable with Jason spending time with their son, though she never allowed him to take the boy out of the house. And she always stayed close by, no farther than the next room. He’d thought about taking her to court, but though her feelings toward him had so obviously changed, he’d never stopped loving her and didn’t want to fight. All that mattered was that he saw his son. He hoped she’d come around someday and see him the way she had in the early part of their marriage, but in the meantime, at least they’d stopped talking about it. They’d reached a place where the issue or disagreement or whatever it was, while unlikely to ever go away entirely, was at least relegated to subtext.

  “Home sweet home,” Ben said as they pulled in to the service alley behind Jason’s apartment building, derailing Jason’s train of thought, for which he was thankful.