by Paul Cleave
The night has darkened considerably since I arrived, making the Christmas lights on the surrounding houses appear brighter. They’re not bright enough to light me up as I stand against the side of my car finally relieving the pain from my bladder by emptying it on the lawn. It’s either that or piss myself in the car. A half dozen plastic Santas stare down at me, mounted on roofs, all thinking the same thing-that they’d rather be somewhere else.
When I’m done I slouch in the driver’s seat and discover there are two steering wheels ahead of me and two roads, but they merge into one when I put my left hand over my right eye. Small drops of rain appear on the windscreen. Gerald Painter is still inside his house with his family, and he’s probably still crying. I put a hand on my chest to check my heartbeat, thinking that it ought to be racing, but it’s not. I could have been a killer right now, and if the monster had his way, I would be. The question is, how long can I keep it quiet for? No, wait-the real question is, do I want it to be quiet?
I fold my arms onto the steering wheel and rest my head on them. I close my eyes for a few moments, and when I open them again it’s to the sound of tapping on the driver’s-side window and it’s pouring with rain outside.
chapter twenty-one
“What the hell are you doing here, Edward?” he asks, and part of him, a small part, already knows. Or suspects. The warning Benson Barlow gave him has been stuck in his head all day, a warning that hasn’t been easy to dismiss-especially since Edward visited his father today and now he’s parked only two houses away from the security guard injured during the robbery.
“Who. . who’s that?” Edward asks, and he lifts his hand up to shield his eyes even though there’s no real light.
“Come on, I’m giving you a lift home.”
“What?”
“Get out and move into the passenger seat,” he says, and opens the door for him. “And hurry up. I’m getting drenched out here.”
Edward gets out. He gasps in a lungful of air which pains him, he doubles over, then he gets onto his hands and starts gagging. A puddle of vomit appears. The rain is coming down hard and from nowhere-certainly nobody in the weather forecasting world predicted it. The back of Edward’s shirt is already soaked through. He waits a bit while Edward coughs, and when it seems like the man is never going to get back up, he reaches down and grabs his shoulder. “Come on, we have to go.”
He helps Edward to his feet, careful not to step in any vomit. Edward twists his body so he can see up the street. There is a patrol car parked about twenty meters away. Schroder leads him around to the passenger side where there are more rain-washed puddles of vomit.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Schroder asks.
“I was sleeping.”
“Are they the same clothes you were wearing at the bank?”
“Maybe.”
“They’re covered in your wife’s blood.”
“Are they?”
“Get in,” Schroder says, unamused. Edward gets in the passenger side and Schroder races around and gets in behind the wheel. An hour ago all he had to do was move and he broke out in a sweat. Now he’s shivering. The inside of the car fogs up and he turns on the air-conditioning to clear the windscreen. The car that brought him here follows. He turns on the wipers. Already the rain is easing up, and by the time he’s driven a couple of blocks it’s almost completely stopped.
“Look, Edward,” he says, his tone softer now, “I know you want answers, but coming here isn’t the place where you’ll find them.”
“I know.”
“Then why’d you come?”
“I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh. Gerald Painter had nothing to do with the robbery. He’s a victim as much as anybody.”
“Not as much as Jodie,” Edward answers, and Schroder knows it’s a good point.
“Look, I know it’s hard, and the situation is shit, but you gotta man up. You’ve got a little girl that’s depending on you.”
“I know that,” Edward says. “People don’t need to remind me. You think my wife getting killed makes me forget about Sam?”
“Of course not. Problem is you do need reminding. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be here right now. You wouldn’t be drunk and one step away from killing yourself in a car accident.”
“Why’d you come here?” Edward asks.
“Gerald Painter’s wife called us. She said you came to visit him tonight, and according to her it wasn’t exactly a social call. Why’d you show up?”
“Why don’t you ask her?”
“She doesn’t know, and Gerald Painter isn’t saying much, but I have to tell you, Edward, I don’t like your being here. And you’re drunk and you’re wearing the clothes with your wife’s blood on them. Mrs. Painter isn’t the only one who called you in-another neighbor saw you stumbling to your car and pissing on the lawn. The constables in the patrol car back there, they came here to take you away. Me being here, this is a favor, Edward. I’m here to take you home and keep you out of jail for the night. I’m here to stop you from making any further mistakes.”
“You want my thanks now? How about you earn it by finding the men who killed Jodie?”
“Why did you come here?” Schroder asks.
“I don’t know.”
“I think you know.”
Edward shrugs.
“I think you blame Painter for not doing enough to save your wife. I think you wanted to make him hurt for what happened, and then you got here and found he already was hurting and that none of this was his fault. I think if you hadn’t made that realization then right now I wouldn’t be doing you any favors. We’d be having a very different conversation.”
Edward says nothing, just stares out the window at the night. Schroder stays quiet for a bit, thinking about Benson Barlow and the shrink’s warning.
“I have a friend,” Schroder says, “that you remind me of in a way. He looked into something he shouldn’t have, and it cost him. Same thing happened to him that’s happening to you. He thought drinking was the answer, but it screwed him up, screwed with his judgment. He went out one night in his car and ran into a woman, almost killed her. That shit will happen to you if you don’t get a grip on things. My friend, he was a cop once who knew better. You’ll end up falling into an abyss right alongside him, and his abyss now has him in jail. He’s locked away for six months for what he did. That what you want? To leave your little girl for six months?”
Edward doesn’t answer him.
“Or it’ll be worse. You’ll head out driving and you’ll have your daughter with you. You’ll drag her into that abyss and get her killed.”
Still nothing.
“Look, Edward, we’ll get the men who did this. These people, they always get caught. Always.”
“And you always let them go,” Edward says. “Isn’t that it? You’ll find these guys and you’ll find you’ve dealt with them before, locked them away before, and let them right out.”
“It’s not like that,” he says.
“Isn’t it? How about you explain it to me.”
“We kept your father locked away.”
“But he’s the only one, right? Everybody else gets tossed back out onto the street to do whatever it is they want to do.”
“You think I don’t know that? You think it’s easy being a cop in this city? What would. .,” he trails off. “Look, what’s the alternative? That we don’t try? You know how many cops we’re losing every year because nobody wants to try anymore? The last year, Edward, the last year has been damn hard. With all that’s happened-hell, even I have days where I want to give up. It’s what this city does. It produces these people. It catches them, takes them into its prisons, then churns them back out harder and rougher than they were going in. But we’re trying, Edward, and we’re making progress. Things will change. We’re doing the best we can with what we have, and I promise you, we’ll get the men who killed your wife. And I promise you they will pay.”
“People think
I’m the same as him,” I say.
“What?”
“My father. They think I’m the same as him. People recognize me from the news and think I’m going to be the next big serial killer.”
“No one recognizes you from the news, Edward,” he says, remembering what Barlow said. “That was twenty years ago. And you weren’t to blame for anything then.”
“People are ready to convict me, they want to send me away for life. They’re frightened of me. But these men, why aren’t we frightened of them enough to keep them locked away forever? When you find them, Detective, and lock them away, what then? How long until you have to find them again for killing somebody else’s wife? Three years? Five?”
“I promise they’ll pay, Edward,” he says.
They reach the house and Schroder pulls into the driveway and they both climb out. The car following pulls up to the curb, its tires scraping against it. The wheels have splashed rain and dirt off the road onto the bottom half of the car.
They walk to the front door and Schroder unlocks it.
“What happened to your friend?” Edward asks.
“Huh?”
“The friend you were telling me about. He was looking into something. He ever sober up and find it?”
“Yeah. He found it, and people died because of it.”
“He lose his family to bank robbers?”
“I’ll keep these tonight,” Schroder says, and he rattles the keys. “You can pick them up from the station in the morning. Where are the spares?”
“I don’t have any.”
“Everybody has spare keys.”
“Not me ’cause I never lose them.”
“Okay, Edward. Go and get some sleep,” he says. “Don’t do anything else stupid tonight. Don’t make me regret helping you out.” He closes the door and heads to the other car and drives away.
chapter twenty-two
I take a leak, find the spare keys, take another leak, grab a beer, grab a jacket, and within ten minutes of being dropped off home I’m back on the road, which is better than jail, which is where I thought Schroder was going to take me for what the monster had wanted me to do tonight. The spare keys have Jodie’s car key too, and for a few seconds I can’t figure out which one to jam into the ignition.
The car is harder to control than normal and there must be something wrong with it. I’m steering straight but the car keeps veering off to the left, and other times off to the right. It’s not the time to have a faulty car-the road ahead of me isn’t exactly laid out clearly because my vision is shot to hell. Everything is blurry, and when I squint I end up seeing double. I lose control of the car and hit the curb and come to a stop. I can see my house in the rear-vision mirror-I’ve only driven about thirty meters.
I give it another go, slower this time, more focused. There is even less traffic on the road now. A few people are out shopping since the malls are still open, Christmas extending the closing hours till midnight. Statistically, some of these people will go bankrupt over the Christmas season. Statistically, many of them will come home to find their homes have been burgled, or they’ll walk out of a mall to find their cars have been stolen. Statistically, one of these people will show up dead on some grass verge in the morning and Schroder’s caseload will become that much heavier for it.
I’m not familiar with the area and get lost on the way to the cemetery. I run a couple of red lights by accident, but I also end up sitting at a few green lights, which I figure balances the equation. I make it there safely and turn into the cemetery driveway. There is no detail in the church, only an absence of light, a dark shape somewhat darker than the night around it. I keep driving ahead and quickly become lost. I haven’t been out here since Jodie was buried, and then I was following everybody else. Now it’s a maze. The church disappears behind the line of trees, then it’s graves and grass everywhere, broken up by more trees. Maybe this is why it’s called the Garden City-the view is fucking fantastic when you’re dead.
I drive around for about five minutes before deciding I can cover more ground on foot. I grab the beer and get out and lean against the car to open it, but slide right off the wet surface. I hit the ground and scrape my knees and drop the beer and it takes me a minute to find it. I walk among the plots searching for Jodie, even calling out to her after a few minutes. In the end I’m too tired to keep going. I sit down and lean against a grave that’s not as old as the others. The grass is very wet and the water leaches into my pants. There are gaps in the cloud cover letting moonlight through but I can’t see any moon. A light breeze pushes my wet clothes against my skin. I pop open the beer and it fizzes up from the earlier fall. What doesn’t froth out keeps me warm as the night continues to cool around me. I talk to Jodie even though the person beneath me isn’t Jodie, but someone who died a few months ago in his early twenties, according to the script on the stone, but it doesn’t say anything else about him-maybe nobody cared enough, or maybe people were glad he died.
“I’m so sorry, Jodie,” I say. “For everything. I’m sorry you died. I’m sorry it was my fault. I’m sorry I smashed the plates against the kitchen wall.”
Jodie and the guy beneath me ignore me. The cemetery is deathly quiet but scenic. The sky is clearing, the veil of cloud is pulled back revealing thousands of stars. They light up the night, silhouetting the trees, shining down on the grounds where Death and a few of the friends he’s made over the years are buried all around me. The breeze becomes warm again and strong too, coming from the northwest over the Port Hills, which are lit up with street- and house lights, whipping across acres of tussock and grass and rock before sweeping down into the city. By the time it reaches the cemetery it’s picking up leaves and petals and throwing them about, it blows dirt into my eyes and I have to turn my back to it. Pretty soon the stars dim and I can no longer taste beer. I wake up what ought to be only a few minutes later, but must be several hours since the moon has been replaced by the sun. The bright light hits my eyes so hard it almost knocks a hole in the back of my head. I roll onto my side to bury my head into my pillow but there’s only grass and a cement marker. I rub my eyes and have no idea where I am for about two seconds, then it all rushes back to me. The breeze has died back down. I figure I’m one of many who have fallen asleep with a bottle of something out here with their loved ones cold in the ground. My clothes smell of sweat and vomit and Jodie’s blood.
My body is aching as I stand up, the muscles stiff and sore. I’m not sure where my car is so I pick a direction and walk. Nothing is familiar as everything looks the same. I walk for twenty minutes in an expanding circle before finding it. The keys are still in the ignition. There are already a couple of mourners who throw me suspicious glances, probably because I look like I just crawled out of one of the graves here. The cemetery is in need of a caretaker-the lawns are too long and the gardens are being overrun by a crime wave of weeds. One side of the car is in bright sun, the other has wet leaves stuck to it.
I take the backstreets home instead of the main ones, figuring they’ll be quicker, and figuring wrong. I pass a couple of people building fences, others mowing lawns, summertime activities that seem a world away from the world I live in now. When I finally make it, I race into the bathroom and take a leak doing my best to hit the bowl and not the floor and my feet. I’m pretty sure I’m draining off the only fluids I have in my body.
I stagger through to the kitchen and open the fridge. The milk has expired but it seems to taste okay and I drink half a glass of it before deciding milk is the absolute last thing I want right now. I look at the beer. Strike that-milk ain’t that bad after all.
I lean against the kitchen bench, disoriented and lost, like I don’t belong here, and that makes it harder for me to remember exactly what happened last night. Part of me doesn’t even feel like I’m back home: I’m stuck somewhere, maybe in some purgatory where the milk is always expired and my mouth is dry and my tongue sticks to the roof of it. Even my teeth are sore from grinding t
hem in my sleep. I hang the bloody bank clothes back up before taking a long shower. It revives me a bit, at least physically, but mentally I’m exhausted as the memories of last night trickle back in.
Mostly I’m ashamed by it all.
My heart quickens as I recall pulling the knife up short of cutting Painter. I want to throw up again. I have no idea why in the hell I even went to Gerald Painter’s house. No idea what the plan was. If I’d killed Gerald Painter, would the monster have kept me sober, or abandoned me when that first splash of blood arced up onto the ceiling? What would have happened to his wife and daughter if they’d walked in on me?
I tidy the kitchen, opening up and draining the remaining beer and wine down the sink. I remember what else Schroder said last night, then more importantly I remember what I said to him, and those memories seem to collide in a nice little way that jumbles everything up, and suddenly what my dad said to me as he walked away makes sense-It’s okay to listen to the voice.
I’m still a bit drunk, and I might be over the limit, but the world doesn’t sway around much as I drive through it. I find a park near the police station. My keys are waiting for me in the foyer behind the reception desk. They don’t ask me any questions about last night. All they do is ask for ID to make sure the keys belong to me. Schroder isn’t around. He’s probably at the beach somewhere or getting the last of his shopping done while Jodie lies cold in the ground. I realize I haven’t got Sam anything yet either for Christmas-me and Jodie always left that kind of thing till the last few days. There’s a guy out in front of the station with a sandwich board over his shoulders, he’s holding up a Bible and preaching his views in an abusive tone and I wonder if he knows Henry the homeless guy.