by Paul Cleave
That had been ten minutes ago. The drive into town was quicker than the last few days, most people having finished their shopping by now.
“Quite some mess, Edward,” he says, stepping around the doctor and looking down at the leg.
“It’ll heal.”
“I’m not talking about the leg. I’m talking about the scene you left behind.”
Hunter is nervous. His hands are shaking and his eyes are big and he looks like he’s wired on amphetamines. “I had to leave it behind,” he answers. “If I hadn’t got out of there I’d be dead right now.”
Schroder nods. It’s what he’d heard, and it’s what the evidence supports. His next trip from here will be to the scene. “A lot of people watched you running for your life,” he says. “A lot of witnesses.”
“Any of them feel the urge to help?” Edward asks.
“What do you think?”
“I think you’re here when you should be out there, looking for Jodie’s killers.”
Schroder ignores the remark. “I think you’re lucky you’re still alive,” he says, “and that luck will run out if you don’t tell me the truth.”
“I want to see my daughter.”
“Sure, Edward, no problem. As soon as you’re done telling me what happened.”
“I want to see her now.”
“Where is she?”
“She’s with her grandparents. I don’t know where they are.”
“Where are they supposed to be?” Schroder asks. Is there a chance the men who went after Edward would also go after his daughter? No. . surely not. .
“I don’t know. At their house.”
Schroder’s stomach sinks. He tightens his features and tries to hide his concern. “And you haven’t heard from them?”
“That’s what I’m telling you.”
He takes his cell phone out and heads a few meters away. While it rings, he watches the doctor, who so far has said nothing since he arrived, just kept on stitching. He’s probably heard similar stories a hundred times already. Schroder passes the information about Sam on to the detectives at the scene then goes back to Edward.
“Okay, we’re going to send somebody to bring her in here,” he says, trying not to sound concerned. “In the meantime, tell me what happened.”
Edward tells him what happened from the moment Schroder dropped him off to fleeing the scene in the stolen car, running over one of his attackers on the way.
“Okay, okay, that’s good, Edward. What I really need you to do now is tell me what happened last night. Don’t make me wait for the blood results. We don’t have the luxury of time anymore, especially now that these people are coming for you.”
“I don’t know anything, except two men were trying to kill me. With all the people that called the cops, and the gunfire, and the blood and chaos, nobody got there in time to arrest the second guy, am I right?”
“Look, Edward, the car is going to show up all sorts of prints. The dead man wasn’t wearing gloves, so the shooter probably wasn’t either. Their plan would have been to wipe the car down or burn it. We’ll find him, and that will lead to the others. All of them. What’s the verdict?” he asks, turning toward the doctor.
“Nothing major. It’s a deep laceration and he’s lost some blood,” the doctor says. “We’ll bandage it up and keep him on a drip for a few more hours-but no reason we can’t release him tonight. However, he’ll have to stay off his feet for a couple of days.”
“Come on, Edward,” Schroder says as the doctor leaves them, “you’re in some deep shit here. You absolutely have to tell me what happened last night with Greensly.”
“You mean Kingsly,” Edward finishes, and the look of horror at his mistake appears immediately.
Schroder slowly shakes his head back and forth a couple of times. In some weird way he feels betrayed. He really wanted to believe Hunter was innocent.
“Kingsly,” Schroder says, and he hangs on the word for a few seconds. “That’s right, Edward. Not Greensly, but Kingsly. I never told you his name and the media don’t know it yet. There’s only one way you could have known that name, Edward, and that’s if your father gave it to you.”
“He gave me the name, but I never went there.”
Schroder knows he did. He knows he went there and maybe he didn’t intend to kill him, or maybe he did-either way the result was the same, and no matter how you look at it it’s completely unfair. Right now Edward Hunter should be celebrating Christmas Eve with his wife and daughter. Easiest thing to do now is to get Hunter to confess, then take him into custody.
“Look, Edward,” he says, keeping his voice low, “here’s the thing-the last two years have been hell. Too many goddamn psychopaths running around. Two long years, and I’m tired, real tired of this shit. I look at this city and I want to believe it’s a good city, and it is, it really is, there’s still a lot of good here, Edward, a lot worth defending. So many people, they think this city has turned to shit, but it hasn’t. It’s my city, I love this city-but, like I keep telling you, it’s on a precipice. Thing is, it doesn’t have to fall. We can save this city, it can be returned to the way it was. Looking back, there are things I wish I’d done differently. Things that could have-expedited investigations. Things that could have saved lives. If I could do it all over, there are rules I would’ve broken. Sometimes the ends can justify the means, you know? Sometimes you have to do bad things for the greater good. Bad things to save the city.
“Killing Kingsly, that was a bad thing, but you helped defend the city by doing it. What you have to do is say he attacked you and you defended yourself. A jury isn’t going to convict you on that, not when they know this son of a bitch helped kill your wife. Some scriptwriter will come along and ask to make a movie about it. And me-if it’d been my family that was hurt, I’d have done the same thing. You can’t keep denying you were there, Edward, the blood will prove it. And these people after you, they’ll keep coming. Let me take you into custody. Let me help you.”
Edward turns his gaze from Schroder to the ceiling and stares at it for a long moment.
“Bring me my daughter first. I want to see her,” Edward answers, “then we’ll talk.”
The curtain opens up and a nurse pushes forward a cart full of bandages and gauze pads. She smiles at Edward. “Looks nasty,” she says, “but we’ll get you up and about in no time. This won’t take long,” she adds.
“I’ll leave you to it,” Schroder says.
“Bring me Sam.”
“I will. I promise,” he answers, hoping it isn’t already too late.
chapter thirty-five
It’s another messy crime scene, the kind of scene where the killers had no real idea what they were doing. The house most of the action took place in belongs to a family with a couple of kids, who were lucky enough to be at the beach instead of at home. Schroder knows it easily could have been a whole lot different-knows the medical examiner could just as easily have been sending more than one station wagon. There’s broken glass out the front and broken glass around the back and a busted-up door inside and blood in various places on the driveway and the sidewalk. There are holes in fences and in the side of a parked car from the shots fired.
The street has been closed off, limiting the view to only the neighbors. Even the reporters are being held back, their cameras in range but not much for them to see. The victim has been covered up, and the shape of the body shielded by patrol cars. It makes for a nice backdrop for the cameras, but nothing more. The car the two men stole and that Hunter escaped in has already been loaded onto the back of a flatbed truck and is on its way to the police station to be examined.
“So the shooter killed his partner,” Schroder says, and Sheldon, the medical examiner, nods slowly, as if scared any quick movement will tear a muscle.
“One shot in the face,” he says. “One shot in each hand.”
“Confirms what witnesses said.”
“Hell of a way to go,” Sheldon says.
“Left leg completely severed, right leg half severed, half crushed. I’d have rated his chances as somewhere between extremely slim and none.”
Unable to take his partner with him, and worried they could be identified, the shooter had taken steps to try and hide the identity of the dying man by blasting away his face and fingerprints. It didn’t work: the forensics team have already emptied the victim’s pockets, turning up some coins, a cigarette lighter, and a packet of smokes-all of which have clear fingerprints on them. They’ll have a name within the next two hours. Plus they’ve got the car with another whole set of prints to narrow down. He looks over at the bump in the canvas sheet over the body where the severed leg is. The very bottom of it, with a shoe still attached, is sticking out from underneath, the canvas not big enough to hide the blood on the street. It looks like the guy was attacked by a bear.
“Jesus,” Landry says, coming over as Sheldon leaves. “The Hunter family must really be cursed.”
“Where are we on the interviews?”
“Still working on it. Surveillance from the vault doesn’t suggest anything one way or the other. Just shows four panicked people stuffing money into bags,” Landry says.
“Yeah, well, combined with the names we’re going to get from this, I think by the end of the day we’re going to know who all the players are. No sign of the in-laws and daughter?” Schroder asks.
“None. You really think these men have her?”
“Doubtful. I think they’re somewhere completely unaware of the danger they could be in. Anyway, I don’t see any real reason for the robbers to go after Hunter’s daughter. It gets them nothing-all it does is put them at risk.”
“And Hunter?”
“He’s freaked out, but he’s doing okay.”
“He give anything up about Kingsly?”
“Nothing,” Schroder answers.
“You think he did it?”
“The bank robbers sure as hell think so. Both Hunters in one day. We have to find his daughter. Hunter said he’d talk once we got her safe.”
“Every patrol car in the city has a description of them. We’ll have her soon.”
“I hope so,” Schroder says, “for everybody’s sake.”
chapter thirty-six
They wheel me into another room when the stitches are done. Each stitch as it went in made me stronger. There are three other men in here in different states of pain and misery. One has both legs in casts, suspended above him. A man in his seventies is snoring, a bald patch with stitches on the side of his head. The third man is reading a magazine and coughing every fifteen seconds. There are two cops outside the door, either there to protect me or to stop me from fleeing. I think about my dad-he’s in a different ward with cops of his own.
My leg hurts a lot. After an hour, a nurse comes in and holds up a chart with five “happy faces” on it. The first face is yellow and smiling. The last one is purple and has a large frown and an upside-down smile. The three faces between range in color from yellow to purple, their expressions from somewhat happy to pretty much unhappy.
“Point to the one that represents how you feel,” she says.
I look for the happy face of the guy who had his wife murdered last week but he isn’t on there. “Just give me some painkillers,” I say, “and I’ll be fine.”
The nurse, who is overweight with breasts the size of bowling balls, gives me one more chance to get it right. “Point,” she repeats.
I point to the smiley face. “Can I go now?”
“Soon,” she says. “Now take these,” and she hands me a small plastic cup with pills in it. I shake the two pills into my palm and she gives me a cup of water. “Drink,” she says, as if I couldn’t figure out the next step by myself. Then she takes my blood pressure and seems neither pleased nor concerned by the result. I don’t understand the numbers.
“We’ve found your daughter,” Schroder says, coming into the ward, and for the briefest of seconds I’m terrified, absolutely shit-scared because I don’t know how he’s going to finish that sentence. They found her at the park and she was playing on a swing with Mr. Fluff ’n’ Stuff, or they found her covered in blood with her throat cut? Schroder’s pause is so brief, so hardly noticeable, but for me it lasts a lifetime. “They’d gone to the movies. They’re at home now.”
“So. . so they’re okay?”
“They’re okay. But they thought it might scare her too much to bring her down here to the hospital. We’ve got a man at their house to keep an eye on them until we get there.”
“Just the one?”
“It’s Christmas Eve,” he says. “One’s all we can spare, but it will be enough. You’re the target, not them.”
He tosses me a pair of pants that are old but are at least in better shape than mine. He also has a pair of sneakers that aren’t full of blood, so I don’t complain. The nurse with the bowling-ball breasts comes back and unhooks the IV from my arm.
“Ten minutes,” Schroder says. “That’s the deal. I give you ten minutes with your daughter, and then you’re coming to the station to tell me everything.”
The pain is instant when I stand; my leg throbs and I almost collapse. All the blood drains in one direction and I get light-headed. The nurse pushes me back toward the bed but I regain myself and straighten up. “See?” I say, pointing at my face. “A happy smile. I’m fine.”
“You don’t look fine.”
“I will be.”
It takes me longer than usual to get dressed, and instead of walking out of the hospital they push me out in a wheelchair. All the people that seemed to be around this afternoon have gone home for Christmas. We pass only two nurses on the way out and an orderly and nobody else, not even any visitors. Everything that was in my pockets is handed to me in a white paper bag. I don’t bother opening it. At the hospital doors I leave the wheelchair behind. My leg is tight with all the new stitching.
Schroder is parked in one of the handicapped spots close to the door. The parking lot is empty except for two other cars. I think he’s about to put me in the back of the car, but he lets me ride up front. He knows I’ve killed two people within the last twenty-four hours, and I’m sure he’ll try to prove it once he gets me into an interrogation room. I have no idea how, but the day has stretched into night. I’m no longer wearing my watch-I don’t even know if it’s in the paper bag, or if I lost it in the excitement of the day, or maybe one of the paramedics stole it. It must be around 9:30.
There’s a warm breeze. Clear sky. Perfect weather conditions for Santa, and if I were home with Sam, if I still had a family life, we’d watch TV together and watch Santa’s approach to New Zealand, her excitement building at the presents to come. I still haven’t got anything for her, but Nat and Diana took care of that, picking up and wrapping some gifts. The malls are closed and I’d like to have got her something myself. Jesus, I’m a bad father. How can I have not made an effort to pick her something up? Some toys, a doll, something to make her feel better. I’m focusing on revenge and not on the things that matter.
Revenge matters.
“You talk about defending the city like this is a war,” I say, staring out the windows as we drive through town where drunk teenagers are roaming the streets.
“I could rant on about this city for the next five hours and it wouldn’t be anything you didn’t already know,” he says. “There are thousands and thousands who live here, ignorant of the violence that is seething in the soul of this city, until one day it reaches out and pulls them down. You probably knew about it because of your dad. But it wasn’t until last week that you really cared.”
“I always cared. No matter what you think, I hate my father for what he did. I hate him for this inheritance he left me.”
We reach my in-laws’ street and approach the patch of ground where the man I ran over was shot and killed. There isn’t any crime scene tape up anyw
here. They probably had to roll it up as quick as they could and use it somewhere else. There would have been media and cops all over the place, but now they’re gone, and there’s nothing here to suggest what happened this afternoon. It’s too dark to tell, but I’m sure the blood has been hosed away. I wonder if they picked the dead man up first, or his leg. I wonder how much a leg weighs.
From the paper bag, a cell phone rings.
Not my cell phone because I don’t recognize the ringtone.
“You gonna get that?” Schroder asks.
I unfold the top of the bag and reach inside. The phone I took from Kingsly is lit up.
“Hello?” I say, my heart thumping.
“Listen carefully. You say one more word and I’m going to kill your little girl.”
“Who. .”
“Shut up,” he says. “One more word and she’s dead. I’m not kidding around. Now, tell me yes if you understand.”
My mind goes completely blank, then everything rushes at me from the darkness, the bank robbery, the bodies, my daughter. . my daughter what? “Yes,” I say, the word hard to form through my dry mouth and I have to catch my breath. My hand is shaking and Schroder is too focused on driving to notice. He pulls in behind the cop car.
“Your girl, she’s ours now. We own her. And unless you do exactly as I say, you’ll never see her again. You get what I mean?”
“Yes,” I say. I break out in a sweat.
“Good. Let me know when Schroder gets out of the car.”
“Wait here while I have a quick word with the officer,” Schroder says, mostly to himself because I’m not really listening to him. I nod.
“He’s gone,” I say.
“In a moment he’s about to run into the house. I want you to go with him. When he reaches for his cell phone I want you to take it off him.”
“You understand I’m in police custody.”
“Of course we know, we’ve been watching you all afternoon,” the voice says. “All the more incentive for you not to miss the right moment, Eddie. Don’t mess it up. You’ll get more instructions once you’re inside. Now go!” He hangs up as Schroder runs back toward me.