by Paul Cleave
The passenger runs around the side of the car and lines up another shot as I dive forward, getting behind a parked car and bang, metal is ripped out of the bodywork as I hit the ground. I get up and run, weaving between silver birch trees lining the street, waiting for the next shot, but there isn’t one, only footsteps as they pound the ground behind me.
The houses in the street are all similar, around ten years old, in great condition but a little tired, none of them-thankfully-with any front fences. I race over the front yard and down the side of a house, hitting the side gate with my shoulder, busting the latch holding it closed. I get through and the gate swings back and the top section explodes in a cloud of splinters from the next gunshot. I go left, cutting across the backyard, over the deck and past the french doors and a small sandpit that has bright yellow toy trucks in it. I reach the corner of the house and go left again, back toward the road. This time there’s a fence across, but no gate. I duck into the alcove by the back door. It’s a glass laundry door that I ram my fist through, the bandage around my hand protecting me from any cuts. The glass shatters into a thousand tiny pieces. I reach inside and unlock the door and spill into the house, my feet slipping on the glass. I go left into a hallway as the men come into the house behind me. Nobody’s home. I turn into a bedroom and shut the door behind me. I tip a chest of drawers across the doorway and a moment later it rattles as the men push against the door. The door wobbles in its frame as it’s kicked. I try opening the windows, but they have security latches and only open far enough to fit my arm through. I grab the nearest thing, which is a clock radio, and yank it from the power socket and thrash it against the window. It cracks on the third hit, then smashes on the fourth. A shot roars from the hallway and a large hole appears in the door, then the entire thing folds in on itself with one more kick. I don’t wait around to see the rest. I take a running jump where the window was and do my best to clear the glass, but end up dragging my right thigh along a shark tooth of glass jutting out from the frame.
I get straight to my feet and run toward the road, my shoe filling with blood. I hear tinkling glass as the man behind me breaks more of the glass out of the framework with the gun to make his jump easier. The front door of the house opens as I pass, and the man without the gun comes out, running hard at me. I put my head down and pump my arms and go as hard as I can, my feet pounding into the sidewalk, my foot splashing inside the shoe, creating a suction effect that squelches blood over the edge onto the ground. The only advantage I have is that these guys are wearing big heavy shoes and I’m not, and I figure my desire to survive is stronger than their desire to gun me down-though on that last part I’m not so sure. My legs are burning, my chest even more, every breath is like swallowing smoke.
I reach their car. Both doors are still open, the keys in the ignition, the motor running. I jump in and jam my foot on the clutch and accelerator and pop it into gear at the same time as he reaches me, pulling at my shoulder. I peel rubber, and as the car lurches forward the door slams hard on his fingers. He yelps, and as the car powers ahead, he falls forward too, dragged along beside the car. The window is still up but I can hear him screaming, can hear his knees scraping along the asphalt, his feet bouncing and kicking at it. I swerve left and right to shake him loose, the bones in his fingers breaking like gunfire. I take the car up to fifty. Then sixty. Still swerving, still trying to shake him loose.
No you’re not. If you wanted him gone you’d pop the door open and watch him fall away. You’re the one in control now.
I jam my foot hard on the brake and the car swerves. My passenger slingshots forward at the speed the car was doing two seconds before I jumped on the brakes. His hand bends all the way back on itself, the tops of his fingers against the back of his hand, then-schrip-a wet sound as the fingers come free-only they’re not free at all, they’re still in the door. Flesh tears from the base of his fingers and runs halfway up his forearm like an apple being peeled, muscle and tendons exposed, and then he’s free, flying and then rolling past the car out on the street, his hand reduced to a piece of meat with only a pinkie and a thumb. He hits the ground hard, rolls a few times, and comes to a stop with his bloody hand cradled against his chest. He doesn’t get up, just lies there, trying to figure out how things have gone so badly and why he’s in so much pain.
The car comes to a complete stop sideways on the road. The guy with the shotgun is running toward me, getting bigger in the view from the passenger window. He’s about two hundred meters away and could probably cover the distance in about nineteen seconds if he were an Olympic athlete and wearing running shoes, but he isn’t, he’s wearing jeans and heavy boots and carrying a shotgun and he’s built big, and none of that is helping him right now. I figure I have thirty seconds until he reaches me, but he doesn’t need to cover all that distance to put me back into range.
I gun the engine and the wheels spin up as I turn toward him, but I lose control; the car keeps turning and I end up facing away from him again. The engine stalls. The back windscreen explodes, a hailstorm of glass peppering the back of my seat and the dashboard as I hunker down. My hand finds the key and I twist it. A follow-up gunshot hits the rear wheel as the car comes back to life. I take off and the back of the car drops down as the tire shreds away. The ground vibrates through the rim and the chassis as I drive, pumping the blood out harder from my torn leg. There’s a high-pitched squeal from the back of the car, making me wince. The steering wheel fights with me, but I keep forward and then the car jumps up-boom dud-and the front wheel goes over the legs of the guy with the missing fingers, and then-schlock-as the rim with no tire goes over him.
I can hear his screams over the sound of the car. In the mirror, I see him roll to one side, but his left leg doesn’t move at all, it’s still on the ground, severed. His right leg goes with him, blood jutting toward the sky like a fountain. He drags himself, and gets about half a meter between him and his severed leg before giving up.
His partner runs right past him and takes another shot, but it doesn’t do any damage as I gun the engine, turn the wheel, and in a flurry of sparks, round the corner and leave them behind. I take the car up to sixty, race through a couple of intersections, take a hard right, and pull over.
I try calling Nat’s cell phone again. I’ve got blood on my hands somehow and it smears the buttons on the phone. I keep hitting the wrong ones and have to lean back and take a couple of deep breaths before trying again. My hands are shaking so badly I have to hold the phone in both of them to get it to work. There’s still no answer. Surely they’re okay. If something happened to them it would have happened at the house, not in public.
Jodie was killed in public.
So where does that leave me?
It leaves you and anybody close to you in danger.
The media coverage was extensive, so the men who killed Jodie certainly know all about me and think I’m coming after them. These people, they know I killed their friend. They know my dad gave me a name, and they suspect he gave me more than one.
I pull away from the curb. I find myself heading toward home, then decide it’s not the best place to go if I don’t want to be found. Could be the guy with the shotgun has made one phone call and another pair of men are descending on my house right now.
I change direction. The way the car is handling, with the wheel rim squealing on the road and my forearms burning from trying to control it, I probably wouldn’t have made it there anyway. Other cars slow down and people stare at me.
I pull over. I’ve put about two minutes between me and the shooter. When I open the door the three fingers that were jammed there are dislodged, all three connected by the back of the guy’s hand and a long piece of skin resembling torn wallpaper. They hit the ground, the middle finger tapping louder than the other two because of a silver ring on it. The ring has been flattened and has a skull on it; maybe that’s what kept his fingers from slipping out of the door. I climb out. My leg is covered in blood, my shoe so fu
ll of it now that it’s leaking through the material. I feel woozy and grab on to the side of the car to stay balanced. I try calling Nat again but there’s still no answer.
I get back into the car. There are dance-step footprints made up of blood on the ground where I was just standing. I start to feel dizzy, and then tired. I open the glove box and rummage through it. Tissues, a road map, a woman’s sunglasses. There’s a gym bag in the backseat covered in broken glass. It’s open, and I can see a woman’s clothes in there. Whoever this car belongs to, it sure as hell isn’t either of the men who showed up in it.
I rest my head back. Even with my eyes closed the world keeps swaying. I hold my hands on my leg and the blood is warm, the world fades and it takes me with it.
chapter thirty-three
New tax regulations were being standardized, Inland Revenue was desperate to take more money from those who were poor, rich, and everybody in between. There were seminars being run by enthusiastic men in suits, the kind of men you see on TV late at night selling home gyms and futuristic kitchen equipment. The fun part about the seminars was we all had to pay to go along and learn new skills so we could stay in line with the new tax laws-and of course the seminars were run by Inland Revenue staff-which was another way of them making money.
I was in a room of around a hundred people-you could look down the row you were sitting in and see that each person had about the same amount of boredom pinned to their faces, like we were all watching a twelve-hour mime show. I looked down the row and at the same time a woman was looking back. I offered one of those “weird, huh?” kind of smiles, and she offered a “this is bullshit but what are you going to do?” response. There was that awkward social mingling afterward, where we all stood around drinking orange juice and not touching the half-cooked sausage rolls. I think the food was deliberately inedible so it could be offered at the next seminar and the one after that-all cost-cutting measures. I introduced myself to the woman I’d made eye contact with. Her name was Jodie.
I was shy around women. I hadn’t really had much experience of them. I was afraid every woman I ever met was probably figuring I would try and cut them in half. Jodie didn’t seem to know anybody else-and I thought perhaps in her own way she was a little socially awkward too. All I knew was she was supercute and alone and her earlier smile had made me feel good about myself in some weird way. Before I knew it, I’d asked her out for dinner.
Our first date I spent in some nervous daze where I could hardly look her in the eye. Our second date we caught a movie and then sat in a café for hours-and again I have no idea what we talked about. All I knew was there was something about this woman that made me look forward to having a future.
Part of me thinks it’s happening right now-that first time I saw her, that first date, the first time we were in bed together. It’s a memory and a dream and at the same time it’s unwinding in front of me for the first time, all of it new and fresh and wonderful. Jodie is alive and in my world again and I want her to stay.
On our third date she’s different, but I can’t figure out how. Like when somebody wears glasses for the first time or gets their hair cut; it’s something subtle until they tell you, and then it becomes obvious.
Our fourth date-this one a lunch date-and again there’s a difference but I can’t get a read on it. She seems lighter, somehow. Not in the sense that she’s lost weight-but in another, hard-to-register kind of sense.
I’m reliving the fifth date when I realize what it is: she’s paler, almost translucent around the edges. On our sixth date the skin is grey under her eyes and the tips of her fingers have turned blue. By the next date her hair is messed up and her clothes wrinkled, and the skin on the back of her hands is baggy, it’s slipping, like she’s had her hands in hot water for ages. There are dark shapes beneath the surface of her face, bruise shapes that aren’t bruises, but something else. When we walk I put my hand on her back and it’s damp with blood. Her strides are awkward, her muscles are cramped, it’s as though she’s walking on heels for the first time. Her arms move stiffly.
Then, on a dinner date, she struggles to get the food into her mouth, and when she does she finds it impossible to chew. When she takes a sip of wine, it runs out of her mouth and down her chin, it pools onto the tablecloth and blossoms outward. Her skin is even greyer, and in some areas it’s coming away, revealing a darkness beneath. Dark spaghetti lines form in her features. We don’t go out much anymore after that one. We hardly even look at each other. And every time I touch her she is colder than before.
Then on our last date, a lunch date on a hot Friday afternoon ahead of a bank appointment, I realize the woman I’m with is dead. The skin has pulled back around her face, making her eyeballs bigger, drying out and cracking her lips, her nose a loose blister, and she smells of earth and worms and rot.
“You need to be careful, Eddie,” she says, and her mouth hardly moves when she speaks, her voice sounding like gravel has stuck in her throat. I can see her vocal cords moving behind the thin skin of her neck.
“What?”
“You have to choose what’s best for you.”
“I know.”
“And Sam.”
“I know.”
“Don’t let the monster choose for you.”
“What monster?”
She reaches across the table. I’m certain she’s trying to reach across from her world to my world, to come and get me. Her hand closes on mine, it’s cold and clammy, a loose glove of skin slipping back and forth. Her smile slips too, it drags her face down, widening her eyes, and there is something moving beneath the surface of them, something wormlike. When her lips part to carry on the conversation another hand tightens on my shoulder, another voice enters the mix, and the restaurant disappears, the menus fade to nothing. My wife clings to the moment for a few more seconds, the strain obvious in her decaying features. She is silhouetted against a perfect white background, like a glowing movie theater screen. Then she too disappears, fading into the light in a second.
I open my eyes. I’m still sitting in the car. A woman with grey hair pulled into a tight ponytail and a crisp white shirt with sharp edges is kneeling next to me applying pressure to my leg. A man has his hands on my shoulders, then he hooks me beneath my armpits, his fingers digging into me. The world shifts strangely as I’m lifted onto a gurney. I can see the man’s face and wonder if it’s the same paramedic who tried to save Jodie. More pressure is applied to my leg, and when I try to look down at my body I find I can’t. I can’t even lift my head without the urge to be sick. I stare up at the sky. Blue sky, no clouds, a perfect day to. . to what? To kill somebody? The two men who came after me certainly thought so.
I can feel the gurney moving but there’s no reference point in the sky so I can’t tell how fast we’re going, and the sensation is like dropping through the air on a roller coaster. The ambulance comes into view and I’m hoisted inside. An IV is punctured into my arm and more pressure is applied to the wound and people go to work. I close my eyes. The ambulance doors close and the sirens don’t come on.
Next time I open my eyes I’m in the hospital with the hallway lights whizzing by. There are two new faces above me. I’m wheeled into ER and stabbed a few times with needles and then my leg goes completely numb. My shoes are removed and my pants cut away. The blood is wiped off, revealing a deep gash, but the fact blood isn’t spraying out hopefully means no major arteries have been cut.
“Not as bad as it looks,” a doctor says, filling up a syringe. “We’ll have you up and about in no time. You’re not going to feel a thing,” he says, but he’s wrong. I mean, I can’t feel the needle and sutures pushing through my flesh, but I feel anger and fear and. . and something else.
Excitement.
No. I don’t think it’s that.
Yes it is. Stop lying to yourself. You’re excited because you took down one more man. Only five to go now. Put your hand up and be proud.
“Proud of what?” I mutter.
“What?” the doctor asks.
“Nothing.”
There’s no time to be proud.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” the doctor asks, when I try to get up.
“I have to get out of here.”
“The hell you do,” he says. “Mate, I haven’t even begun sewing you back together here.”
“I need to. .”
“Lay back down or you’re going to keep bleeding, and if you don’t bleed out you’ll get infected, and then you’ll lose your leg. That what you want?”
It isn’t what I want. He goes back to work, and is about halfway done when Schroder walks into the room.
chapter thirty-four
“You don’t remember who loaded the dye pack?”
Because they weren’t officially treating any of the bank staff as suspects, Landry and two other detectives were interviewing the other three people who went back to the vault, while Schroder dealt with the fourth-William Steiner. They were doing the interviews at the suspects’ houses-this gave the detectives a better chance to get a sense of who they were talking to; whether or not they looked like they could use a few extra hundred grand. Maybe they’d spot a bag full of money somewhere too.
Steiner was a man in his midthirties with a pale complexion that helped highlight the acne scars around his neck. He didn’t seem nervous, and before he could answer only the third question Schroder had time to ask-the one about who loaded the dye pack-Schroder’s cell phone started ringing.
“Excuse me a moment,” he said. He stood up from the living-room couch, stepped into the hallway, and opened the phone. He barely managed to get out two words before the information came racing in. Edward Hunter. A shoot-out. A dead man.