Stone Cold

by Dean Crawford

  ‘We’ve been so wrapped up in ourselves that we haven’t been able to share the load,’ Angela said. ‘We’re always focusing internally on our own struggles and not talking about them like we should, not clearing the air enough.’

  Griffin nodded, shrugged his shoulders. ‘I guess I’m guilty of that.’

  ‘Me too,’ Angela admitted. ‘Things get to the point where neither of us thinks the other is listening any more, or is even capable of listening or understanding any more, and before you know it, zip – ping and we’re breaking up.’

  ‘I don’t want that,’ Griffin said.

  ‘Nor do I,’ Angela agreed. ‘I’ve never wanted that. I want my husband, I want our life together.’

  ‘You want me to leave the force?’ Griffin asked. ‘I can do it, if you need me to.’

  ‘Like hell,’ Angela said. ‘I want you out there catching bad–guys because that’s what you do. It’s what you’ve always done.’

  Griffin looked at his champagne for what felt like a long time. ‘I kept going back,’ he said.

  He sensed rather than saw his wife tense, as though she instinctively knew that something was coming that she had not heard before.

  ‘Going back where?’

  Griffin felt some of the tight knot in his chest tremble and loosen as he spoke through lips that seemed suddenly numb.

  ‘Back to where I shot the kid,’ he managed.

  Angela waited a few moments before she replied. ‘Why?’

  ‘To try and figure out what went wrong. What I could have done differently. Why it was that the bullet just had to hit her instead of the asshole with the gun. Just two eighths of an inch to the right, Angie. Two eighths. I measured it myself. If that bullet had gone out of my gun a fraction of an inch to the right we’d have been celebrating the death of the abductor and the safety of that little girl.’

  ‘But it didn’t,’ Angela said. ‘There’s nothing that you could have done about that.’

  ‘I know.’

  Angela chose her words with care. ‘Is that what’s really been bothering you?’

  ‘I didn’t know it until now,’ Griffin said. ‘I know I didn’t kill her, and I know that the guilt over what happened is natural but misplaced. I know it wasn’t my fault. But why, Angie? If there’s any justice in the universe, why would an innocent little girl die and a drug–addled, murdering biker live?’

  Angela sighed. ‘Because the only justice we have is what we make for ourselves. This world can be both heaven and hell – it’s how we make it that determines how it turns out. You’re one of the people trying to make it closer to heaven than to hell and you’re heavily outnumbered by the opposition.’

  Griffin nodded but his expression was fixed into a grimace of disbelief.

  ‘It makes me wonder if it’s worthwhile, you know?’

  Angela reached across to hold Griffin’s hand.

  ‘The reason you, and all people like you, do what you do is because if you didn’t then we wouldn’t be sitting here. This restaurant wouldn’t exist. We’d be living in countries like Afghanistan or Sierra Leone, where you can die for just going to school or having money or believing in somebody else’s wrong god. Without people like you, we’d all be unlucky.’

  Griffin, his head bowed as he listened, looked up at his wife. ‘This is why I love you.’

  Angela smiled and squeezed back. ‘And I you. I want this life, even with its tragedies, because it’s so much better than the alternative. I want to be married to you, a cop, in a safe country where our child can grow up and have a future.’

  Griffin nodded, squeezed Angela’s hand back, and then his train of thought ground to a halt.

  ‘Child?’ Griffin echoed.

  Angela said nothing as she smiled across the table at him. Griffin felt his heart skip a beat, felt a hot flush tingle across his face and down his spine.

  ‘Oh, Angie,’ was all he could say, his lips numb. ‘Why didn’t you…?’

  ‘I’ve been too afraid to say anything,’ she replied. ‘I haven’t known if we have a future together, Scott.’

  Griffin closed his eyes and shook his head, cursed himself. He looked back up at Angela.

  ‘We’ve always got a future together,’ he said. ‘I may be a world class asshole but I’m not going to run away from you. I just need some time, is all.’

  ‘I know,’ Angela said. ‘That’s why I went to my sister’s, to give you some space. It was all I could think of to do.’

  Griffin felt pain sting the corners of his eyes as he fought to keep his face from collapsing.

  ‘How long?’ he asked.

  ‘Ten weeks,’ Angela replied. ‘I had to tell you because I’ll be having a scan again in a few weeks. We can decide if we want to know whether it’s a boy or a girl later.’

  Griffin felt something escape from his lips that was somewhere between a cough and a cry. His eyes flooded and he felt like an asshole yet again but this time it was for all the right reasons as he covered his face with his hand.

  Angela was beside him in an instant and he threw his arms around her and pulled her close to him.

  ‘It’s up to you,’ he managed to mumble into her shoulder. ‘You decide. You’re carrying the load.’

  Angela laughed as she held him. ‘Always the poet, Scott.’

  A waitress hurried up beside them. ‘Are you guys okay?’

  Griffin nodded, the smile still plastered over his face. ‘Sorry, I get real emotional about champagne.’

  Griffin took his seat opposite his wife as every muscle and fibre in his body seemed to unwind and the poison infecting him leaked away with his tears.

  ***

  38

  Kathryn froze as she saw Stephen standing behind her.

  The rain tumbling from the darkening sky glistened in his hair. His shirt was drenched, raindrops falling from the tips of his fingers in one hand and from the barrel of a .38 pistol held tightly in the other.

  Kathryn jumped behind Sheila’s recliner and pointed at him. ‘I knew it,’ she snapped. ‘I followed him here yesterday.’

  ‘Dale!’ Sheila yelped. ‘What the hell is going on?!’

  Kathryn felt a lump clench her throat. Her legs felt as though they had taken root in the concrete floor of the storage unit beneath her, her brain clouded in a dense fog of fear as she found herself transfixed by the pistol in Stephen’s hand. Suddenly, and with a terrible clarity, she realised how Scott Griffin must have felt when facing down armed gunmen in the line of duty. She still had not moved. Neither had Stephen.

  ‘Dale!’ Sheila shrieked.

  Stephen remained silent and still, but he blinked his gaze away from Kathryn and seemed to notice Sheila for the first time. A grim, almost rueful smile spread across the clean line of his jaw as though a dangerous thought had flickered through his mind and was trying to escape from his lips. He took a pace forward into the storage unit.

  ‘Stephen,’ Kathryn whispered.

  The name had fallen from her lips as though of its own accord. She didn’t even realise that she had spoken until she heard her own voice in her ears. Stephen looked at her, a fearsome gaze touched with a maniacal glint of humour, as though somehow he was both enraged and delighted at the same time. He shook his head.

  ‘My name is Dale McKenzie.’

  His voice was low, charged with a live current of menace. The index finger of his right hand stroked the cold, wet metal of the pistol as he loomed in the entrance.

  Sheila glared at her husband. ‘What are you doing?’

  Kathryn swallowed, her throat dry and painful as she managed to force more words out past her lips.

  ‘Who is Stephen?’ she asked the man standing before them.

  Dale stared at her for a moment longer, the smile still fixed to his face as rainwater streamed down his black hair.

  ‘My brother,’ he replied, sounding distant, suddenly hollow as words tumbled from his lips. ‘He died when he was six. We were both orphans, Kathryn. T
hey handed his papers to me after he died. I kept them to remember him by. They’ve come in most helpful for many, many years.’

  Kathryn shivered. ‘Why?’

  Dale stared at her for several long seconds, and then Kathryn flinched as he suddenly burst out laughing. The confined storage unit amplified his deep laughs and made them shockingly loud, even above the drumming of the rain.

  ‘Why?’ Dale echoed, and then his voice turned cruel, and in a blink of an eye Kathryn realised that Stephen was gone forever. ‘Why the fuck not?! Two lives, the chance to live any way I wish. To leave either of them at any time I please. To pick the best and make it my own. You really think I need a reason, or permission, to use my dead brother’s identity to have a little fun of my own?’

  Beside Kathryn, Sheila seemed to coil up like a cobra in her chair as she screeched at him. ‘You adulterous bastard!’

  Kathryn tried to keep calm as she spoke, but her eyes kept flicking down to the pistol Dale held close to his thigh.

  ‘Your fun ruins people’s lives,’ she managed to utter.

  ‘What lives?’ Dale spat, and looked her up and down as though she had crawled from under a rock. ‘You don’t have a life Kathryn.’

  It was as though he had shot her already. Kathryn felt a dense pall of shame and grief descend around her as she realised that everything she had done had been for nothing. All of the months of study, all of the money she had scrimped and saved, all of the times she had consoled “Stephen” on his misfortunes at work, all of the long nights and the long days and the charade and deceptions that she had planned and the misery of modern life, all of it and so much more, all for a lie, for a man who did not exist, for a liar, a cheat and a polygamous, murderous bastard.

  The rage came all of its own accord.

  Kathryn launched herself at Dale McKenzie with a shriek of hatred. She saw the briefest glimmer of surprise and panic flicker behind his eyes just as she plunged her hands into them and raked her nails with insane fury down his face.

  Dale screamed and swung one hard forearm up and into her. Kathryn felt the world spin and the breath rush from her lungs as the blow connected with her belly. Dale swung her round as she clung to his face and she felt him hurl her backwards. The metal wall of the storage unit slammed into the back of her head and her vision starred as her legs crumpled beneath her.

  Dale loomed up and something whipped past in front of Kathryn’s face.

  The hand smacked across her lips and Kathryn slumped sideways out of the storage unit into the rain as pain ripped across her lips and cheek and throbbed through her skull. She tried to haul herself further out of the storage unit, to make herself visible to anybody outside, but strong hands gripped her ankles and hauled her back inside.

  Dale strode past her and pressed a button on the wall of the unit. Instantly, the electric shutter doors rattled down until they closed and Dale hit a switch on the wall, illuminating a small light bulb at the back of the unit. Kathryn struggled to pull herself up onto her knees and she heard Dale’s voice frighteningly close behind her.

  ‘You never did get it, did you Kathryn?’ he growled. ‘You couldn’t quite understand it, despite everything you’ve done since. All those little games you’ve played, but not once did you stop to consider the fact that you were never my main play.’

  Kathryn struggled to think straight, her voice strangled and poisoned with rage. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Poor little Kathryn Stone,’ Dale snapped, ‘all alone in the world, acting as though everybody in life owes you a favour. Just like all the rest, you figured that you were the most important one. Hell, you probably haven’t even realised that you were not the only one.’

  Kathryn was about to reply, but it was Sheila’s voice that broke through.

  ‘Dale, what the hell are you talking about?’

  Dale was still towering over Kathryn, but now he seemed to remember that Sheila was there. He stepped back and turned to look at his wife, still strapped to the chair.

  ‘Don’t play dumb with me,’ Dale snapped. ‘You, you’re the other way around. You had a chance in life. You earned a fortune. Yet you still spend it wallowing and bitching about how the world has dealt you a bad hand. Look at you. Even now you’re wearing clothes that Kathryn here couldn’t afford with an entire month’s salary.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ Sheila complained.

  ‘No, I know you don’t Sheila,’ Dale agreed, stalking toward her. ‘That’s because you’ve never understood. I can’t stand you, Sheila. I can’t stand either of you. You’re both upstanding examples of how not to live a life: one crawling through the dirt just to make ends meet, the other drowning in money and doing nothing but complain about it.’

  Dale stood back and looked at them both, as though satisfied with his assessment. Kathryn squinted at him.

  ‘You’ve done this before,’ she said finally.

  ‘Many, many times,’ Dale replied. There was pride in his voice, as though he were relating courageous military service or the glory days of his youth. ‘You see, there’s one thing that all three of us have in common, one thing that we share. We’re all orphans. I know how it feels to face the world alone, and I know how to turn that to my advantage.’

  Kathryn, her throat still dry, coughed bitterly. ‘You target orphans.’

  ‘No family to defend them,’ Dale sneered, ‘no other relations to inherit their money, a natural fear of the big bad world around them.’ He chuckled. ‘You should have found yourself a nice man to marry, Kathryn. You’d have been a lot safer.’

  Kathryn stared at Dale for a long moment.

  ‘I did find a nice man,’ she snarled. ‘But it turns out he died a long time ago and I ended up with his heartless bastard brother. Too bad it was Stephen who passed away and not you.’

  Dale’s face twisted upon itself as he stormed across to her.

  ‘Dale!’ The shout was loud enough to freeze Dale in his tracks. Sheila glowered at him from her seat. ‘Stop this right now!’ Dale peered over his shoulder at his wife as Kathryn watched. ‘Untie me this instant!’

  Dale backed away from Kathryn and straightened as he looked down at Sheila.

  ‘Now, why would I do that?’

  There was genuine hurt on Sheila’s face. ‘Why wouldn’t you?’

  Dale chuckled again as he looked at the pistol he held in his hand. ‘Do you really think I’d bring this with me if I had any intention at all of letting either of you go?’

  Sheila’s face collapsed into panic. ‘Dale, this is ridiculous! You haven’t hurt anybody yet. There is still a way out of this for you, right? You can walk away, Dale. I won’t press charges.’

  Dale raised an eyebrow at her. ‘Against whom?’

  ‘Anybody!’ Sheila yelped. ‘I just want this to be over with!’

  ‘So do I, Sheila,’ Dale said calmly.

  ‘I haven’t done anything!’ Sheila screamed. ‘I’ve been abducted and now you’re threatening to kill me!’

  ‘I haven’t abducted anybody,’ Dale replied calmly. ‘You have Kathryn here to thank for that.’

  Sheila blustered a fearful laugh. ‘You really think that I’m going to buy that, now?’

  Dale shook his head as he strolled over to his trapped wife and replied.

  ‘Oh Sheila, you’re right. That’s what makes this whole thing so tragic, but I can assure you that Kathryn here has not been in league with me at all.’

  ‘Tragic how?’ Sheila gasped in horror.

  ‘I wasn’t going to kill you,’ Dale said. ‘I would happily have just taken all of your money and disappeared. That was my plan, you see. That’s what I do. It’s only when somebody else interferes that things get messy. And now it’s Kathryn here who will kill you.’

  Sheila’s panic mutated grotesquely into panic. ‘What the hell are you talking about?!’

  ‘I need Kathryn,’ Dale went on calmly. ‘You see, worthless piece of trash that she is, she is an essential part of my exit
strategy.’

  Sheila’s arm whipped out from the restraints and Kathryn saw something thin and nasty in her hand flash in the light. Dale flinched away, caught off guard, but he was not quick enough. The needle–sharp pin, clasped in Sheila’s enraged fist, punctured Dale’s eyeball and he screamed in agony as he spun away, his hands flying to his face.

  ‘Get me out of here!’ Sheila screamed at Kathryn.

  ***

  39

  Kathryn lurched to her feet and dashed toward Sheila. Dale, still screaming, whirled and swung the pistol in his hand at Kathryn’s face. The butt of the weapon hit her square across her temple and she reeled sideways into the metal wall of the unit and collapsed, her vision starring.

  Kathryn turned, her face slumped against the cold metal wall as she tried to haul herself back up to her feet.

  She looked over her shoulder in time to see a grimacing Dale, one hand covering his injured eye, lift his right boot and smash it down with all of his might onto the back of her left ankle.

  White pain shrieked through her leg as she heard her ankle crunch as though she had stepped in deep gravel. Kathryn sucked in a lungful of air and screamed as agony pulsed through her and she slumped onto the cold, wet floor of the storage unit. Dale stood over her crumpled body. The rainwater on his face mixed with the bloody scratches she had gouged into his flesh and the blood spilling from his punctured eye, dripping from his chin in scarlet globules that stained her shirt as he aimed the pistol down at her.

  Kathryn fought for something to say, anything to distract him further.

  ‘How did you know I was here?’ she asked.

  ‘You keep the finest company,’ Dale snarled with a cruel smile. ‘Or used to.’

  Kathryn’s guts plunged inside her. ‘Ally,’ she gasped. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘She squealed like a pig,’ Dale replied, ‘sold you out in a matter of seconds. I don’t suppose she’ll survive long enough to learn about what’s happened to you.’