by Matt Rogers
‘You were something, that’s for sure. I can tell from the way you speak.’
‘I can’t say what I was.’
‘The military?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Ah, U.S. military,’ Dawes said. ‘Big macho man. What are you doing all the way out here?’
‘I retired.’
‘Retiring doesn’t usually mean travelling halfway across the world and ending up here.’
‘I wanted to see the world.’
‘Your standards have hit the ground floor if you’ve resorted to exploring Jameson. Especially harassing local women.’
‘I wasn’t harassing her.’
‘That’s not what she said.’
They knew nothing about the package she delivered, King thought. Kate had decided not to inform them of anything he had asked her.
‘She’s very reactionary,’ he said. ‘I simply knocked on her door to ask her something. She panicked.’
‘What did you ask her?’ Kitchener said.
King hesitated. It would not be wise to divulge anything he knew so far. A slip-up could lead to the location of the bodies in the metal-work factory. He wanted prying eyes as far away from there as possible. If they were discovered, things would turn serious very fast.
‘I was chatting to Billy earlier today…’ he started.
‘Post office Billy?’ Kitchener interrupted.
‘Are there multiple Billy’s in this town?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘That’s a dumb question then.’
She gave him the evil eye. ‘Continue.’
‘We talked about a lot of things. He told me that Kate was a regular at his post office. He told me she was single. I thought I’d head over and introduce myself. That’s all.’
‘You realise how that might intimidate people?’ Dawes said. ‘Especially someone of your size.’
‘I do. But I was nothing but pleasant. I apologise if my actions were taken out of context.’
‘That’s a weird thing to do,’ Dawes said. ‘Knock on a total stranger’s door because one of the locals mentioned her.’
‘I’m sorry if you think that.’
‘I don’t know if I believe it.’
‘I couldn’t imagine why.’
‘It seems like there’s more to you than that,’ Kitchener said. ‘Where have you been staying?’
‘Last night I stayed at the motel. I don’t know what it’s called. The one on the left when you come into town.’
‘Where did you come from?’
‘I walked from Queensbridge.’
‘That’s a long walk.’
‘I stopped at Ale House. The pub near here.’
‘How late was this?’
‘Around midnight.’
‘Late to be walking through the woods,’ Dawes said.
‘I can handle myself.’
‘Did you run into anyone?’ Kitchener said.
‘Not a soul.’
She stood up from the table. ‘I think we’re done here. Ms Cooper seemed more spooked than scared for her safety. We’ll let you go, but we have to note that we brought you in. Give us five minutes to sort that out. Okay?’
‘Not a problem.’
‘Just to make her comfortable, please don’t go back there,’ Dawes said. ‘Makes this whole thing easier.’
‘Not a problem,’ King repeated. ‘I’ll be on my way soon anyway. I don’t like to spend too long in one place.’
Dawes nodded.
They shuffled out.
Silence.
King took the time to ponder over what he had so far. Two construction workers murdered by hitmen. A terrified local woman who had delivered a package to the post office and then panicked when questioned about it.
So far, that was it. Kate was the only lead he had, and the likelihood that she would open up to King about her experience was dangerously close to zero. It was a reluctant conclusion to come to, but he began to accept that there was not enough information he could acquire about the situation to achieve anything meaningful. Not without resorting to desperate measures.
It was time to move on.
He made up his mind to leave Jameson when the steel door of the interview room opened and a man stepped in. A police officer King had not seen before. His features were plain. Black slicked-back hair, a pale complexion and wider-than-usual eyes. His beady pupils flicked around the contents of the room, taking everything in. He sat down opposite King, where Dawes had previously sat.
Then everything changed.
CHAPTER 14
‘Afternoon, sir,’ the man said. His accent was strange. Australian, but slightly off. As if he were disguising his natural voice.
The breast pocket of his blue uniform was bare. No name badge.
‘Afternoon,’ King said. ‘Who are you?’
‘I’m Officer Brandt. I’ve just got a few questions for you.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ve heard that you were picked up outside Kate Cooper’s house. Is that correct?’
‘Correct.’
‘May I ask what you were doing there?’
‘I already explained this to the other two.’
‘I’d like you to clarify it to me, please.’
‘Why?’
A scornful smile spread across Brandt’s face. King had never seen an expression so fake.
‘Just for procedure, sir.’
‘I stopped in to say hello.’
‘Is that it? Nothing else?’
‘That’s it.’
‘What were you doing at the post office earlier today?’
King kept his mouth shut. Something was off. Kitchener and Dawes had talked informally. They had said they were letting him go. Their general demeanour did not align with the man sitting across from him, who was re-iterating many of the same questions King had heard a minute earlier.
‘Hey!’ he roared. He screamed the word at the top of his lungs. It reverberated around the walls of the small room. Deafening. He was sure the entire station heard it.
Instantly, Officer Brandt panicked. His pale skin turned a shade paler. His eyes boggled in their sockets. Like a deer caught in headlights. He kicked his chair back in one visceral motion, wrenched the door open and disappeared from sight.
Gone in seconds.
King sat still, waiting for movement. It didn’t take long. He heard urgent footsteps in the hallway outside, from the opposite direction Brandt had fled. Then Kitchener and Dawes burst into the room. They knew something was awry. King could see it in their eyes.
‘What?’ Dawes said instantly.
‘Who just came in here?’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’ Kitchener said.
‘One of your officers just tried to question me.’
The pair exchanged a glance.
‘We haven’t talked to any of the other officers since you got here,’ Dawes said.
‘Then who’s Brandt?’ King said.
The pair visibly froze.
‘What the fuck?’ Dawes said, his professional demeanour gone. ‘How do you know that name?’
‘A man just came into this room and started asking me questions you two had already asked. Said he was Officer Brandt. Seemed like he was doing his own investigation. He left when I caused a commotion.’
‘Brandt didn’t show up for work yesterday,’ Kitchener said. ‘We haven’t been able to get a hold of him since.’
‘Well, he’s here now.’
‘Why would he come back without showing his face?’
‘Oh, shit,’ Dawes said, coming to the realisation at the same time as King.
‘That wasn’t Brandt,’ they said in unison.
From the end of the hallway came the sound of a door slamming. It echoed through the station. An urgent noise. The sound of someone fleeing.
Kitchener went pale. ‘Stay here.’
She and Dawes turned and bolted out of the room. The steel door swung shut behind them
. King heard it click closed. He stood up and reached for the handle, but it didn’t budge. Locked. He was trapped until someone came to get him.
Which would prove disastrous if Brandt’s imposter killed everyone in the station.
King felt his pulse quicken. He realised that the conspiracy in Jameson was significantly larger than he had originally thought. The man who’d just questioned him had worn the uniform of a missing policeman. That meant the two hitmen from the night before were merely pawns. A single cog in a larger machine. He knew this feeling all too well. He had felt it many times before.
The revelation that he was onto something.
And it was in that moment he knew he would not leave Jameson until he had answers.
He sat back down at the table and waited for activity. Attempting to break through a locked metal door would achieve nothing.
Movement outside. His ears picked up the sound faster than most people. Being prepared for combat put King into a mental state of heightened senses and constant readiness. Every slight sound was amplified tenfold. That was how he heard the footsteps before the door opened.
Brandt’s imposter stepped into the room. King registered the man’s wide eyes and the determined, icy look on his face. Then a millisecond later his gaze darted to the pistol in his right hand. He wasted no time mulling over possibilities. As soon as he saw the weapon he exploded with the force of a raging bull.
He tensed his legs and powered up off the chair. Brandt started to flinch. He’d been in the process of raising the gun, and the burst of movement from King made him jolt. King got both his hands underneath the metal table and wrenched it off the floor.
Lifted by the inhuman power that comes with a surge of adrenalin, one end of the table rocketed off the ground and hit the man clean, accompanied by a dull thunk. The impact threw him back across the room. He maintained balance for less than a second, then toppled out the open doorway. King heard the clatter of a handgun skittering across concrete and knew he had disarmed the man.
The table landed on its side and slid for a moment, spurred on by the momentum of the heave. It came to rest on one side of the room. King stepped over one of the table legs blocking his path and moved out into the hallway.
Kitchener and Dawes were nowhere to be seen. The imposter was unconscious, knocked senseless by the massive power of the contact. He would come to soon. And he would have a headache for a week. King stepped over his body, picked up the pistol he had dropped and tucked it into his own waistband. A Beretta M9, he noted. American. Not the standard issue for the Victorian Police, that was for sure. This wasn’t Brandt’s gun. It was the imposter’s … whoever he was.
I have to leave.
The events occurring in the shadows of Jameson were serious. Incredibly serious. Whoever was behind this had just broken into a police station to try and get answers out of him. When that had failed, they’d attempted to kill him. He was now in significantly more danger than before. They knew who he was. The two officers who brought him here were good people, but they wouldn’t get answers. Not within the boundaries of the law. That much he knew.
It was time to do something drastic.
He knew other officers would arrive any second. Whether it be the man in the lobby, or Kitchener, or Dawes. He turned right out of the interview room and moved fast and quiet down the hallway, leaving the imposter knocked out cold on the linoleum floor. He did not care who found him there. Or what they did with him.
There was no sign of life in this section of the station. He guessed the Jameson Police Department was short-staffed as it was. Perhaps there were only four officers in the whole place. It was a reasonably large building.
King knew he could vanish effortlessly.
He glimpsed natural light in the gap underneath a wooden door. A way out. He tried the handle. It opened, leading to a evidence room almost entirely devoid of evidence. He saw empty metal shelves lining the walls and a bare concrete floor. A rectangular window was positioned high at the far end of the room.
He could fit through.
He strode past the shelving until he was directly underneath the window. Suddenly, he heard muffled voices from the centre of the station.
Female: ‘Holy shit. This guy’s wearing Brandt’s uniform.’
Male: ‘Where’d King go?’
Female: ‘I don’t know … what the hell! Who moved the table?’
Male: ‘Fuck, what’s happening?’
Kitchener and Dawes. Even from the other end of the building King could sense their panic. Their inexperience. Small-town cops weren’t supposed to deal with situations such as these. They were supposed to take care of speeding tickets and unpaid rent and other menial tasks. Nothing to the degree of missing police officers, and mysterious strangers, and assassinations.
They meant well. But they could not help. King accepted the fact that he would have to deal with this matter himself.
He reached up and tried the window. Locked. He took a deep breath, wrapped his fingers around the handle and gave it a vicious pull. Accompanied by the sound of a flimsy bolt snapping, the window pane flew up. There was just enough room to fit a man through. He gripped the bottom of the windowsill and levered himself up, utilising his upper body strength. In one swift motion he shimmied head-first through the open window and outside the building.
It was a sizeable drop to the dirt. King squeezed one leg out and let go of the ledge, falling silently to the ground. He landed like a cat and straightened, getting his bearings.
He was somewhere around the rear of the police station. The back of the building was nondescript, made of brick and entirely flat. The window he’d escaped through seemed to be the only one on this side of the station. The area was small and claustrophobic, like a prison yard. It didn’t look like it had been tended to in years. Weeds sprouted from the base of a high wooden fence and the grass itself was overgrown and brown. On the other side of the fence, the tall pines of the forest cast shadows across the ground.
It was late afternoon. The chaotic events of the day had made time pass quickly. It shocked him to think that less than twenty-four hours earlier, he had been trekking the road from Queensbridge with not a worry on his mind.
But he would not leave these questions unanswered. Not now. He was in too deep. There was one person who could at least fill in some blanks, which would hopefully result in an explanation for the deaths he had witnessed last night.
Kate Cooper.
As he scaled the fence and dropped down into the woods behind the police station, he came to the grim conclusion that she would not give him answers voluntarily. Especially since she had seen him taken away in a police car not an hour earlier.
He sighed. Desperate times called for desperate measures.
He would have to kidnap her.
CHAPTER 15
‘Absolutely fucking not,’ Billy said, standing on the other side of the same familiar back room. An empty paper plate sat on the table in front of King, previously piled high with chicken cacciatore. He’d graciously accepted the offer of leftovers and wolfed the meal down without hesitation. It had been necessary after the afternoon hike.
The trek back to Jameson had taken hours longer than he’d anticipated. Not long after heading into the forest he’d considered doubling back to the police station. The endless rows of pine trees had begun to induce claustrophobia, to the point where he thought he would never make it out of the forest. Sticking to the main roads would have been a better option, even if it ran the risk of discovery by the police, or a group of furious bikers, or whoever the hell else wanted him dead. That number seemed to be increasing exponentially with each passing day. King wondered how many enemies he would have by the time he left Jameson.
If he could leave.
‘Billy, I need your car,’ he repeated. ‘And I might need to keep it this time.’
‘It’s all I’ve got, man.’
‘I know.’
‘Like, I appreciate everything you
did for me. For all of us. But I can’t.’
‘And normally I would just accept that and move on.’
‘Normally?’
‘There’s something going on in this town. I don’t know exactly what, but people are dying.’
‘Dying?’ Billy said. ‘The hell are you talking about?’
King pondered for a second. Could he trust this man? He took one look at the post office owner, scared out of his mind, desperately seeking answers. He could.
‘I didn’t tell you this when we first met, but I saw something on the way into town last night.’
‘What?’
‘A couple of construction workers. They were shot.’
Billy’s jaw visibly loosened. ‘This is Jameson. Nothing goes on here.’
‘Something is. And the more I think about it the more worried I get.’
‘What if you take my car and end up getting killed? I’ll never get it back.’
‘That would end up a little worse for me than losing your car would be for you.’
‘I know, but…’
‘If I make it through this alive, I’ll return it.’
‘Why don’t you just leave?’
King cocked his head. ‘Leave?’
Billy waved an arm in the air, gesturing to his surroundings. ‘This town. Whatever’s going on. It has nothing to do with you. You live off the grid anyway. Just keep walking. Forget you ever saw anything.’
‘I can’t do that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t. It’s hard to explain.’
‘You take it upon yourself to help people. It’s not your responsibility.’
King snatched a set of keys off the table between them. ‘I know it’s not. But I’m still doing it.’
‘What exactly are you doing with my car?’
‘I really can’t say.’
‘Why?’
‘You wouldn’t approve.’
Billy nodded, refusing to probe any further. King figured the man was taking effort to distance himself from the situation. The less he knew, the better.
‘Alright, King,’ Billy said. ‘I’m only doing this because of what you did for me.’
‘I know.’
‘Will I see you again?’