by Paul Cleave
“That’s not a great choice of words,” the prime minister says, smiling. “It won’t be a new prime minister they’ll be voting for, but the same one.”
The moderator nods. “Yes, yes, I apologize for that, however we’ll know more later this year, won’t we? But the point is, the same day the people are voting for a government, they’re also voting on capital punishment. If you’re prime minister,” he says, looking at the leader of the opposition again, “will you allow that law to pass? Are you for capital punishment?”
The leader of the opposition’s face has reset back to its factory default, the look of a man who is happy and determined and knows how to run a country, a man who knows he’ll probably win just for not being bald. “Well, Jim, it doesn’t matter what I’m for, it’s what the people are for.”
“So you’re saying you’ll go with the will of the people. Is that right?” Jim asks.
“If there is an overwhelming demand to bring back the death penalty, then my government would certainly explore that option.”
“Explore?”
“Yes, exactly. We have to be careful,” he says. “If there was a referendum and the people decided they wanted never to pay taxes again, are you saying we should follow their will?”
Moderator Jim is nodding. “Yes, yes, I see your point. And you, Mr. Prime Minister?”
“If that’s what the people want,” the prime minister says, the studio lights gleaming off his head, “then we’ll make it happen. I promise. Because unlike my colleague’s example of a referendum on taxes, the death penalty is a reality. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but we all know we have to do it. Nobody wants killers out on the street, and that’s something we can do something about. We won’t be messing around with exploring options. It’s time we take a firm stand on crime. If the country votes to bring the death penalty in, then my government will make it a priority and have it introduced by the end of year. That’s a promise,” he says, and my skin goes cold as I stare at the TV set. This man wants to kill me. He’s giving me nothing to make me change my opinion about bald people. “Don’t make the assumption that we’re going to hang every criminal who goes through the court system. It will only be used in extreme cases.”
“Cases like Joe Middleton?” Jim asks.
Some of the guys around me whoop at the mention of my name and somebody slaps me on the shoulder and gives me a Way to go, Joe. But at this rate the way Joe is going to go is by hanging. My skin gets colder.
“Yes, I imagine so,” the prime minister says.
“And what about those already in the system?”
“They’ve been sentenced already,” the prime minister says, “and we can’t retroactively alter their sentences. What we can do, though, for future criminals, is make their sentences tougher.”
“So in the case of Middleton,” Jim says, “who I think you’d agree has become a catalyst for this entire pro- and anti-death movement, his trial starts next week. It may last two months, so it will be over around the same time as the election. Will his sentencing be held off until the bill is passed?”
The prime minister gives a small grin. “Jim, you’re getting ahead of yourself and also off topic.” Then he wags his finger at him, like a teacher telling off a child. “It’s a good try, but I won’t be drawn into a matter that shall be decided by the courts. I think you’ll find both myself and my opponent are here to debate the issues, not to debate how Joe Middleton’s trial should be run.”
“Go Joe,” somebody yells out from across the room, and I look up to see one of the smokers up on the bench giving me the thumbs-up. A couple of others start clapping. Caleb Cole is still staring at me as if the referendum is a pointless exercise because he’s going to kill me anyway.
The topic goes from me to the economy. They lose me about six words into it. Good economy or bad economy, prison life isn’t going to change. It’s not like we’re all going to declare bankruptcy and get evicted if things are bad, and it’s not like we’re getting champagne breakfasts if things are good.
I get up and move back into my cell. We’re only fifteen minutes away from being put into them anyway. I lie down on my cot and stare up at the ceiling and wonder just how it is I’ve come to be in here-the bad luck, the out-of-whack world that would have done this to me. I think back to times in the real world not so much more than a year ago, where things were good, where The Sally would bring me sandwiches at work and at night I would either visit my mom or somebody I had taken a fancy to. Then I think to that Sunday morning when The Sally showed up outside my apartment, where The Sally jumped on me when I tried to shoot myself, and then, like other times I’ve thought about this, I wonder whether or not she did the right thing.
Everybody hates me.
Everybody except Melissa.
I pick up the books and try to find her message.
Chapter Eighteen
The gun is still inside the fat suit. Right now Melissa has no weapon. Her keys are in the ignition. She can grab them. Stab Raphael with them a few times. Messy but effective, but loud too because he’ll scream, and people will see it, and suddenly she’s not driving out here with a partner in crime like she wanted, but driving out of here in the back of a police car. She’ll go for it and hope for the best, if that’s her only option. But right now she’ll play it out-see where things go. She has a good instinct for things, and right now it’s telling her this could be a good thing.
“You can start by explaining the outfit,” he says, pointing his thumb into the backseat. “Are you a reporter? You writing a book? Who are you really?”
“It’s none of that,” she says.
“I know a lot of the victims’ families,” he says. “Daniela Walker, we asked her husband along, him and the kids. He said no. But her parents came. They were even there tonight. You’d have known that if she really was your sister,” he says, and Melissa knew it at the time-she knew giving a name was a mistake, but he was good, way too good at not letting her know he knew it at the time. She’ll have to be careful about that. “So, let me ask you again, who are you really?”
“My name really is Stella,” she says.
“Bullshit.”
She shakes her head. “It’s true,” she says with enough conviction to convince him-or maybe he’s doing that thing again where he knows she’s lying, but is hiding it.
“But Joe Middleton didn’t kill your sister.”
“No,” she says. “He didn’t. But. .” she says, and she wipes at her face, smudges some of the raindrops across it and hopes it looks like tears, “but he did kill, kill my baby,” she says.
“Bullshit,” he says.
“It’s true,” she says. “He. . he raped me. Last year. I was pregnant. Three and a half months pregnant and I lost, I lost the baby,” she says. “It’s why I wear the. . wear the baby suit,” she says, “because I wanted nothing more than to be nine months pregnant, to be at that stage of giving life, but I never got there, I never got there because he killed my baby and my husband left me, he didn’t want to touch me after that because somehow he blamed me, and he hated me for not going to the police. So I’m sorry I lied, I’m sorry I wore a pregnancy suit, but I wear it because it makes me feel better, it makes me feel like things are the way they’re supposed to be, that my life stayed on the track I’d worked so hard to put it on. Only it isn’t, things aren’t the way they should be because that bastard hurt me, he took away my baby and he hurt me and I want him dead. I want him dead and I thought that if I came along here tonight maybe it would help me forgive him, or forgive myself, but all I want now more than ever is to put a bullet in him. A lot of bullets. I want him dead and I guess. . I guess I wanted to find somebody who felt the same way. I have a plan,” she says, “a plan to kill Joe, and I wanted. . I want somebody to help me do it.”
He says nothing. Five seconds go by. Ten. She’s sure he believes her. He’s just thinking it through. There are a few options, but not many.
“I’m. . I’m sorr
y,” he finally says.
“He killed my baby,” she says.
“You should have just told us.”
“Told you? What? Go in there and tell everybody I wear a pregnancy suit because I can’t face the fact my baby died, and how I sometimes pretend I’m still pregnant because it brings me comfort?”
He doesn’t answer. How can he?
She lets the silence build. The rain keeps hammering on the roof. The passenger door is still open and occasional gusts of wind bring water into the car. Raphael is playing out several scenarios in his head. She’s playing out different ones. His involve whether he should help her or walk away. Hers involve whether she should stab her keys into his eyes first or into his throat.
“And if you found somebody to help you, what then?”
“I don’t want there to be a trial. I want Joe dead, and I want to be the one to make it happen. I don’t want his lawyer getting him off on some technicality. I don’t want him being a free man and going into hiding. I want to kill him.”
“And you have a plan,” he says.
“A good plan.”
He’s slowly nodding the whole time she tells him this, nodding and rubbing a hand over his chin. And thinking. There’s a lot of thinking going on behind those designer glasses. “Twenty minutes,” he says. “I need twenty minutes to finish putting everything away and lock up. Wait here for me. I think we might have a few things to talk about. I think we have a few things. . in common.”
“Twenty minutes,” she says. “For you to call the police?”
“No,” he says, and she believes him. “Will you wait for me?”
She nods. She’ll wait. He gets out of the car. He closes the door and walks back toward the hall, head down and collar turned up as the rain hammers him. He reaches the step when another car pulls into the parking lot. He turns toward the lights that sweep across him, and holds his hand up to his face to shield his eyes.
The car comes to a stop. The engine dies. Carl Schroder steps out into the rain.
Chapter Nineteen
Raphael is tired.
He can’t remember the last time he had a good night’s sleep. He has had them since his daughter was murdered, but only when his body has become so exhausted all its core systems have shut down and it was either sleep or die. Often he’d hope it was the latter, only to wake up to find it was the former. Often he thinks of ways to change that. Life isn’t great when you wake up in the morning and think about what your friends will say about you at your funeral. It’s not great thinking about the way you’ll die, the best way to not make a mess for everybody, and there are a lot of ways-a lot of clever ways and a lot of simple ways. He has planned his suicide how many times? A hundred? A thousand? Once a day, sometimes five times a day, sometimes more. Sometimes he can’t figure out why he hasn’t done it already. It’s just a matter of time. He knows that. Whenever he hears about somebody who has killed himself, he thinks Seems like a good idea to me.
Of course he wants to be strong. Wants to be strong for his dead daughter, for his son-in-law, and of course for his grandchildren. Not that he ever sees any of them. Three months after Angela died, his son-in-law moved away. He took the kids with him and traveled to the other side of the world. He had family in England. In a small village somewhere. A village, he said, that didn’t harbor crazy people like Joe.
Raphael is more alone than he has ever been in his life.
He stands in the doorway and watches the car pulling into the parking lot. Probably some other poor bastard who’s lost somebody in this city. The car comes to a stop. One person climbs out. Then a second. Both of them flick their collars up against the rain and walk quickly toward him. Schroder and somebody else. His heart races a little. Police don’t come visiting unless they have bad news. His wife? Oh God, has his wife followed through on his fantasy? Has she upended a bottle of sleeping pills?
“Detective,” Raphael says, his voice a little shaky. He offers his hand.
“It’s no longer detective,” Schroder says, shaking it, “just Carl now. This is Detective Inspector Rebecca Kent,” he adds, and then says to Kent, “and this is Raphael Moore.”
He looks at Kent. Her hair is wet and strands are stuck to the side of her face. He has the urge to reach forward and stroke some of them away, and thinks he has that urge because Detective Kent is an extremely attractive woman.
“It’s an awful night,” he says, and he figures if he can just keep them talking about the inane, then he won’t have to hear about the real.
“You’ve just wrapped up a session?” Kent asks, and all three of them glance through the open doorway into the hall where there are six stragglers sipping coffee and talking. He wonders if the two detectives-no, wait, one detective and one no-longer-detective-recognize them. At some point over the last few years these people were all given bad news. It’s a bad-news kind of country, a worse-case-scenario kind of city.
“About ten minutes ago,” Raphael says, looking back at them now. “Has something happened? Is it my wife?”
Schroder shakes his head. “No, no, it’s not that kind of visit,” Schroder says.
Raphael breathes a sigh of relief. Thank God. He glances back inside. Hopefully the others will leave soon. Hopefully he can get rid of these two quickly. He wants to get back to Stella. Stella with her fake baby and her plan to kill Joe Middleton, and really, has there been a day that has gone by where he has not thought about murdering Middleton just as often as he’s thought about killing himself? “We haven’t seen you in a while, Carl.”
“I know. I’m sorry, I’ve been busy,” Schroder says.
Raphael doubts that’s it. In the beginning both he and Schroder thought it was good to have a police presence at the group, but it turned out they were wrong-it turned out a police presence gave the group somebody to blame.
“You should come back,” Raphael says. “It was helpful. It made the people here feel like they had a voice. So why are you here then? Something to do with Middleton? This about his trial?”
“In a way,” Schroder says, and he steps closer to the doorway, but the rain is still getting him. Raphael doesn’t make any more room. He wants to keep this meeting outside. Wants to keep it short.
“Was Tristan Walker one of your group?” Kent asks.
“Tristan Walker?” he asks. “To be honest,” he says, “I’m not so sure I’m comfortable telling you who comes along here. I mean, all of these people have the right to privacy,” he says, and the moment the words are out of his mouth he knows it makes no sense-half a minute ago he was asking Schroder to start coming back.
“Please, Raphael,” Schroder says, “don’t make this difficult for us. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t important.”
Raphael nods. “Why? Has he done something?”
“Did he come to the group?” Kent asks, and she flashes her smile at him and for a brief moment Raphael wants to tell her everything about his secret fantasy to wrap himself in plastic and hide himself beneath the house and take a bunch of pills so that nobody will ever find him, nobody will ever know what happened, so that he will have just disappeared from this life and this world. He imagines a lot of men would give in to that smile, and on other nights he would too. But not tonight. Not with Stella waiting for him, not with thoughts of killing Joe Middleton running around in his head.
“I contacted him a few times, but he always said no, then I stopped trying.”
“Why’d you stop trying?” Schroder asks.
Raphael shrugs. “Well, he wasn’t thrilled with me contacting him,” he says. “But then I heard a rumor and realized he wasn’t really the kind of person I wanted in this support group.”
“What kind of rumor?” Kent asks.
“I heard he used to beat his wife,” Raphael says, rubbing his hands to keep them warm. He heard it from another person in the group who heard it from a cousin or a neighbor or some such thing. “Is it true?”
“He’s never been charged,” Sc
hroder says, rubbing his hands too.
“That isn’t the same as you telling me it wasn’t true. So why are you here asking about him? Has he beaten somebody else up?”
“He was murdered this afternoon,” Kent says, burying her hands into her pockets.
“Oh,” Raphael says, and he takes a small step back. “Oh,” he repeats, and isn’t sure what else to add. He can’t say Good, he probably deserved it, because he doesn’t know for a fact that the guy was a wife beater, and even if he was, does that merit the death penalty? The appropriate sentiment comes to him in the end. “Shit.”
“Walker was due to testify at Middleton’s trial,” Schroder says. “Just like you are. And other family members of victims. You probably had a dozen people in your group tonight who are all testifying.”
Walker slowly nods. The rain every ten seconds or so washes over them as the wind pushes it sideways. He thinks about what it’s going to be like testifying. He’s thought about it a lot. He’s thought about how far he could make it from the witness box to Joe before somebody stopped him. He thought about how difficult it would be to smuggle a weapon into the building. About carving a knife out of wood or bone. He thought about how many men it would take to stop him. All those thoughts were only a fantasy-the best he knew he could do was form this group, help others, and starting next week they would protest.
“What are you saying?” Raphael asks. “You think some of us are targets too?”
“We can’t rule it out,” Kent says.
“Who would want to target us?”
“We don’t know,” Schroder says, but Raphael doesn’t believe him. Something in his voice makes Raphael think Schroder may have an idea.
“So what can I do?” Raphael asks.
“We were actually hoping to get here before the meeting was over,” Schroder says, “so we could talk to you all as a group.”
“Well, I know who some of them are,” Raphael says. “I can make a list. And we’re all meeting again on Monday.”