Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  Jones had made Sheena stop at a car wash on the way to the hospital and spent ten dollars on fifteen minutes with a high-pressure hose. Most of the rented time was spent on the rear bumper.

  When Jones got back into the car, he saw that Willy was pale but still conscious. “We need to talk about what happened,” Jones said.

  “You mean get our story straight,” Sheena said. She was holding the wheel at ten and two hard enough to make her knuckles white.

  “Yeah.”

  Willy sucked in a breath and spoke through bared teeth. “I’m an old man with a broken hip. The story writes itself. Just drop me off at the door to the emergency room and let me do the talking.”

  “I meant about the body we left behind,” Sheena said.

  “What’s this we shit?” Willy said. “You sat in the car. Nothing that happened in that room had anything to do with you.”

  “Is that how the cops would see it?”

  Willy managed a snort that he regretted. “This one thinks she’s Bonnie Parker all of a sudden.”

  “Who?”

  “Bonnie and Clyde,” Willy said.

  “Like the Jay-Z song? I thought that was based on a movie.”

  “The movie was about two real people running from the cops,” Jones said.

  “Did they get caught?”

  “Sort of,” Jones said.

  “What does sort of mean?”

  “Died in a hail of gunfire,” Willy said.

  Sheena stared through the windshield. “Perfect.”

  Willy pulled himself up so that Sheena could see his face in the rear-view. “That was different. That was about money.”

  “So?”

  “People care about money. No one cares about a pimp trafficking underage girls.”

  “So we just walk away like nothing happened.”

  Willy flopped back on the seat and pushed the beads of sweat that had formed on his forehead into his hair. “I’m glad we got that all settled. Now, can you please drop me off at the hospital. I can handle everything except the surgery.”

  Jones could tell Sheena didn’t like it, but she didn’t have a better argument, so she pulled out of the bay and accelerated hard toward the street. When the hospital was in sight, Willy said, “Put me down out front and don’t look back. I’ll tell the cops it was a hit and run and you two were just a couple of Good Samaritans.”

  “No one is going to believe that. Good Samaritans wouldn’t leave you on the pavement,” Sheena said.

  “Let me worry about that.”

  * * *

  They didn’t drop Willy off. Jones pointed at the visitor’s lot and Sheena found a space. Willy propped himself up on an elbow when the Jeep came to a stop and craned his neck to see out the window. “No, no, no, no. This wasn’t the plan.”

  “We’re not going to leave you on the ground,” Jones said.

  Willy flopped back onto the seat. “This is stupid.”

  “We walked away from what happened at the motel. I’m not walking away from you too.”

  Willy turned his head toward Sheena. “Kid, you don’t owe me anything. You don’t even know a thing about me.”

  “I know you showed up tonight for Lauren, and that means I know everything I need to know about you.”

  Willy opened his mouth to complain and Sheena shut him down. “If you want to be on the pavement so damn much, get out and crawl your ass over there. Otherwise, shut up.”

  Willy smiled. “I like you, Sheena. You sound just my daughter.”

  “I like you too. All that bitching makes you sound like my mother.”

  Willy laughed and then groaned in pain. “Fine, fine. We’ll do it your way.”

  Jones found a wheelchair and rolled the old bank robber into the emergency room. Jones let Willy charm the intake nurses while he made a call to Irene. Jones pulled out his phone and saw that he had missed five calls. Jones made the call to Irene first and then checked his voicemail. The first message was from Scopes, so were the next three. The messages were all variations of the same theme. The game was over and he needed to turn himself in. The last message was from Dan Pembleton.

  “It’s Dan Pembleton. Ruth Verne called me and told me that you would be in need of my services again. She has paid my retainer and told me, in no uncertain terms, that I am to provide you with anything you require whenever you may require it. I will be waiting for your call.”

  Jones waited until Irene showed up and put in a few more minutes to give her time to get all the yelling out of her system. When the doctors let her in to see her father, Jones went back to the Jeep. Sheena saw him coming and shifted across to the passenger seat. She didn’t say a word when he pulled out of the lot and accelerated hard in the opposite direction of her apartment building, and she said nothing when Jones sped through a red light. Jones barely noticed the quiet; his only thoughts were of getting home and what he would find when he got there. He was disappointed. Tony’s BMW wasn’t in his driveway and Lauren wasn’t waiting on his doorstep with his wallet and his license.

  Jones profanely broke the silence before he yanked the keys out of the ignition and left Sheena in the Jeep. He opened the door and walked into the kitchen without taking his shoes off. He wrote a short note on the back of a bill lying next to the phone and put it into an envelope. He wrote Lauren’s name across the front, taped the envelope to the front door, and got back into the Jeep. Sheena didn’t ask about the envelope; she didn’t say a word until Jones pulled to the curb in front of a hydrant near her building.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “About the cops?”

  Sheena shook her head. “No. I should be terrified about getting caught, but it’s not that. I was at first, but that went away. I’m scared because I don’t feel anything. I should feel something after what we did.”

  “What did we do?”

  “We killed a man.”

  Jones turned to look at Sheena. The tough woman with all of the tattoos suddenly looked smaller than the birds on her arm. “That happened, but that’s not what we did,” Jones said.

  “What did we do?”

  “We saved the girl.”

  Sheena thought about it while she dragged her finger through the fog that had started to build on the window. “Maybe that’s the problem. I’m not even sure we saved her. We don’t even know where she is.”

  “She’s alive.”

  “And that’s supposed to be enough?”

  “The girl who wrote that message on the door thought there was only one way out of the life she was living. The girl I met tonight wanted something else. She wasn’t looking for a way out. She wanted a way through.”

  “Through to what?”

  “Something on the other side of the life she had. Something that put her old life at her back.”

  “So we just have to hope that she’s headed somewhere better?”

  “There are worse things than hope.”

  Sheena took a long time to weigh Jones’ words. When she nodded, Jones saw in her eyes that she understood. She opened the door, and Jones felt the tentacles of the night air wrap around him. Sheena put a foot on the pavement and straddled the line between one world and another. She looked back at Jones. “Will I see you again?”

  “No.”

  Sheena’s nostril’s flared. “Oh. So it’s case closed, time to move on.”

  “I’ve tried to keep moving this past week, but there’s nowhere else to run,” Jones said. “At first, I was just running from what was coming, but then I realized that I wasn’t running away—I was racing toward something else. Trying to move fast enough to get to the end before I ran out of track.” Jones shook his head. “There’s no track left for me.”

  Sheena put her other foot on the pavement and got out of the Jeep. She paused with her hand on the door and met Jo
nes’ eyes. “I’m sorry.”

  Jones thought of Lauren somewhere out there in a stolen car driving away from Tony and he smiled. “Not me. I was fast enough.”

  39

  Scopes arrested Jones the second he stepped into the police station and he had him in front of a judge the next day. Pembleton put up a good fight, but Scopes was ready for it. He and the Crown lawyers presented the judge with all the ways Jones had recently lied to police and the judge was not amused. He denied Jones bail and dismissed every one of Pembleton’s objections. After the gavel struck the block, Pembleton provided a short one-word apology that seemed sincere. Jones leaned in close to Pembleton and spoke quietly in his ear. He had known what the outcome would be the second he saw the look on Scopes’ face when he turned himself in, so he wasn’t surprised, or in need of consolation. He needed only one thing. Pembleton listened and then sat motionless as he considered what Jones had said. The lawyer said, “I’ll take care of it,” just as the bailiff took Jones by the elbow.

  Jones said, “Thank you,” and then he let the bailiff lead him away.

  A week passed before Jones saw Pembleton again. The lawyer was waiting in a meeting room with his briefcase open and the desk littered with files. The guard walked Jones into the room and told him that he had half an hour. When the door closed, Jones and Pembleton spoke at the same time.

  “How are you holding up?”

  “Did you find her?”

  Pembleton was smart enough to know that Jones wasn’t going to answer his question, so he answered the one posed to him. “No, she wasn’t there. The key you left in the envelope was still taped to your door when I got there. As you instructed, I took it and left a note with everything she would need to contact me directly. She has not called. Before I arrived, I drove by your house. The letter I left is still there on the door.”

  Jones slapped the table. “Damn it.”

  Pembleton tapped his pen on the table. “Does that note that you made me leave on your door have anything to do with your case?”

  “Not this one.”

  “Then you need to forget about it. I’ve been familiarizing myself with your case, your real case, and you are in some deep, deep shit.”

  “That a legal term?”

  “It’s a fact. Don’t let my expensive shoes fool you. I spend most of my days wading around in deep shit. I can get you out, but I need you to pick up a fucking shovel because I can’t be the only one digging. We have twenty-eight minutes and I can’t waste them on things that aren’t about my case.”

  Jones nodded. “What do you need?”

  Pembleton opened a file folder and began flipping pages. “Let’s start at the beginning.”

  The guard banged on the door twenty-seven minutes later to let Jones and Pembleton know that they had one minute left.

  Pembleton put his pen down. “I think we made some good progress.”

  “I want to talk to Ruth.”

  The lawyer frowned. “I’m afraid that isn’t possible.”

  “Tell her I asked to speak with her,” Jones said. “Please.”

  “I will, but I don’t think it will change anything.”

  The guard opened the door, and Jones stood. “Thanks.”

  Pembleton gave him a small smile. “See you next week.”

  40

  Pembleton came back week after week. Each week he greeted Jones the same way. “No and no.” No Lauren had not tried to contact him, and no Ruth did not want to speak with him.

  After hearing the same message six times, Jones should have developed a callous, but the news still hurt each time. He was not without other visitors; his brother Tom had come to the prison once. He walked into the interview room determined to contrast the hopelessness that covered almost every square inch of the facility. Tom was upbeat and witty, but Jones could tell exactly how much his brother hated talking to him through the glass by how much he spoke about their father. Over the last ten years, Tom had never once said a thing about their father that wasn’t related directly to sustaining his existence. But over the prison phone, Tom spoke on and on about their old man as though he were the kind of dad that people saw on TGIF sitcoms, and not the kind of dad in after school specials. Tom had mined his memories for every funny story and pleasant memory just so they could talk about that and not about the charges and whether or not they were true. When the guard banged on the door to let them know that they had one minute left, Jones saw a flash of relief on Tom’s face. Before his brother left, Jones told him that he didn’t need to come back anytime soon. He told Tom that he would have his hands full taking care of their father on his own, and he would rather him focus on that. The words weren’t untrue and that made them easier for Tom to accept. He said he would visit the next month and Jones knew he would.

  The trial had been set for July, and Jones still had three months to go. Pembleton gained confidence in his ability to mount a solid defence with each visit, but Jones did not share his opinion.

  “I killed him. The cops have a witness who can put me there.”

  “You put six bullets in the man. There’s no doubt you killed him,” Pembleton said. “I’m not arguing that case. The case I’m arguing is should you go to jail for it. Kevin McGregor was clean on paper, but I don’t deal strictly in paper. People are better on the stand than any report, and McGregor’s ex-wife and child should prove quite interesting. When this is over, you might just get the key to the city.”

  Pembleton had taken the case for Ruth, but the sudden onrush of publicity had locked him in. The arrest and its connection to Adam’s abduction had been major news. Pembleton didn’t mention it, but it was impossible to hide—even from a man in jail. The common room played one channel all day, and Jones had seen Pembleton on it more than once.

  * * *

  Two months from trial, Jones walked into the meeting room to see Pembleton smiling. He pointed at Jones with a finger gun and dropped his thumb twice. “No and no,” he said.

  “So why are you smiling?”

  “Because I got a yes. From McGregor’s kid. Dylan is twenty, and he thinks you are a hero.”

  “What did you ask him?”

  “If I could have a forensic team go through his house.”

  “I thought his mother moved him west after the divorce.”

  Pembleton smiled. “She did. His father kept the house. His mother never fought him on it. Her only priority was getting her son away from his father. So McGregor lived alone in the house until you killed him in it.”

  Jones stared at Pembleton. “You’re still smiling.”

  “Most people hate lawyers,” he said.

  “I get that.”

  “It’s funny. Most people hate us so much that they do their best to avoid us even when they shouldn’t. You would be amazed how many people avoid getting a will because of how much they hate lawyers.”

  Jones saw where Pembleton was going. “Dylan inherited the house.”

  Pembleton smiled even wider. “Bingo. He isn’t going to move back to Toronto. He has a life in Vancouver. I told him that I could assist with some of the legal work involved in selling the house if he would let me have a team spend a few days going over it.”

  “The police already turned that place inside out. If there was anything to find, they would have found it.”

  “You’re absolutely right. If there was something to find in the house, the cops would have definitely found it.” He smiled again. “But what if what they were looking for wasn’t in the house?”

  “What did you find?”

  Pembleton held up two fingers. “Two more bodies.”

  Jones breath caught in his throat. “Where?”

  “McGregor had not planned on killing Adam. At least, he hadn’t planned on doing it that day. Putting his body inside the wall was an impulsive decision. It was sloppy, but it worked. I don’t know
if killing Adam woke something inside him or if it became a high he started chasing. I’m no psychologist.” Pembleton leaned across the table on his elbow and pointed a finger at Jones. “What I do know is that the next time he killed a boy, he had a plan. He used a shed in the backyard instead of the basement and concrete instead of bricks. He built the shed on posts instead of a pad. He must have made it with killing in mind, because the floor was constructed in such a way that he could easily remove it to access the ground underneath. He built a small box for the body, placed it under the shed, and filled it with cement.” Pembleton sat back in his chair. “And when it worked, he did it again.”

  Jones felt sick. “Who were they?”

  “No idea yet. Identification is going to have to be done by dental work and that takes time. What I do know is that the Crown is getting nervous. They called my office yesterday to talk about a plea.”

  “What are they offering?” Jones said.

  Pembleton rolled his eyes. “I didn’t even let the conversation get that far. If they are calling, it means they know that they are losing.”

  “Call them back and hear them out,” Jones said.

  “Their offer doesn’t matter because we’re not interested.”

  “I am,” Jones said.

  “You can’t be serious. We are winning here.”

  “This isn’t a game that can be won, Dan. I put a man on his knees and pulled the trigger, and they know it. They aren’t going to just let me walk away from that.”

  Pembleton waived his hand. “Of course the Crown won’t walk away. I don’t need them to. Their job is the same as mine—to argue a case in front of twelve men and women. It’s the jury who has all the power, and they are the only ones I care about. McGregor was a monster. You killed a monster. When I tell the jury about everything that was found in that house, there is not a single person on this earth who would send you to prison.”