Hangman

by Jack Heath

  Five guards follow Boyd into the room. They’re called ‘the tie-down team’. The man in charge is a beanbag-shaped guy with a squashed chin and a name badge that says Woodstock.

  The guards lead Nigel Boyd over to a green rubber bench covered with leather straps and brass buckles. They fold two rectangles out from the sides to go under his arms, then they tie his wrists to them like it’s a crucifixion. Boyd is sweating, but he doesn’t fight the guards as they strap him to the gurney. The doomed men never seem to struggle, even though they have nothing to lose.

  Soon Nigel Boyd is immobilised. He spent years driving a stolen ambulance around Houston and knocking people out with an ether-soaked dishrag. He used the ambulance like a mobile surgery, cutting up his victims and selling their organs on the black market. The director thinks Charlie Warner got a lung transplant from him, but he couldn’t prove it. Six years later, it’s Boyd’s turn on the gurney.

  ‘Raise the curtain,’ Woodstock tells one of the other guards as he tightens the final strap.

  ‘It’s already up.’

  ‘Shit.’ Woodstock looks over at the two windows, which are supposed to be covered with a curtain while the inmate is strapped down. He sees me watching and quickly looks away.

  The woman with the grey hair and the journal notices this. She sidles over and sits next to me.

  ‘Hey,’ she says gently. ‘Are you doing okay?’

  Definitely a reporter. Warming me up for an interview.

  I nod, giving her nothing.

  ‘Is he your…’ She gestures to Boyd, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

  ‘He’s not my anything,’ I say.

  The warden enters the execution chamber, along with a priest. The warden is a thin guy in a grey suit. His shaved head and long nose make him look like a bald eagle. He’s new. The priest I’ve seen many times before. He’s an old man with sad eyes, who staggers into the room as though he’s the one in leg-irons. He puts a pillow under Boyd’s head.

  There’s a moment of silence. The priest lays his hand on Boyd’s leg. Everyone in the execution chamber is watching the clock.

  ‘You never get used to it,’ the reporter says. ‘This is my twenty-first execution, and it still chills me to the bone.’

  I grunt.

  ‘You’re family?’ the reporter guesses.

  ‘I’m just the driver. I take the body to the disposal facility after.’

  She deflates. ‘Oh. They make you watch the executions?’

  ‘Hey, are you a reporter?’ I ask. ‘I got lots of stories. My whole family’s crazy. My brother, when he’s been drinking, he does some funny shit.’

  ‘Excuse me a second,’ the woman says. She pulls out her phone and moves to a different seat. Reporters don’t usually want to talk to anyone who wants to talk to them.

  I go back to watching Boyd. He’s hypnotic. So big, so muscular. The veins in his neck are pulsing but his cheeks have gone grey. Maybe he didn’t think it would go this far. The Supreme Court rejected his last appeal days ago, but he might have been waiting for a presidential pardon.

  In the dark subways of their unconscious minds, some people believe that no one else is real—that it’s all just a single-player video game, and the other characters don’t matter. Nigel Boyd can’t believe that he, the most important man in the universe, is about to die. Sometimes I wonder if I’m one of those people.

  The phone inside the execution chamber rings.

  The warden strides over to answer it. While everyone’s distracted, Woodstock adjusts the bag of IV fluid. His back is blocking the view from the window, but I know what he’s doing. He’s swapping the pentobarbital for a bag of suxamethonium chloride.

  Suxamethonium is harmless if swallowed, but paralyses the victim when injected—and it works even if the needle misses the vein. Doctors can’t perform lethal injections because of the Hippocratic oath, so the job is left to prison guards, who aren’t good at calculating doses or finding veins.

  Woodstock looks at me and gives a faint nod.

  I turn to see if the reporter noticed. She didn’t—she’s doodling in her journal. Her ‘chilled to the bone’ remark must have been for my benefit.

  The warden hangs up the phone. He’s gone grey too. He looks at Boyd and shakes his head.

  ‘Oh, fuck,’ Boyd says. ‘Oh, Jesus.’

  Tears well up in his eyes. He’s breathing hard and fast, as though trying to squeeze a lifetime of air into his last few minutes.

  ‘Proceed,’ the warden tells Woodstock.

  ‘Wait,’ Boyd says. ‘Please.’

  Woodstock won’t look him in the eye. He pushes the needle into Boyd’s radial artery.

  Boyd screams, so loud that the sound rattles the windows. Even the jaded reporter flinches.

  The bag of suxamethonium slowly deflates as the fluid is pumped into Boyd’s body. Boyd runs out of air and tries to scream again, but he can’t. The paralytic is already taking effect. His face goes slack. In half a minute, he’s gone completely still.

  His lawyer lets out a long, relieved sigh. He thinks it’s over.

  The priest is muttering something inaudible. The new warden looks like he’s about to throw up. Woodstock places a finger to Boyd’s throat, apparently checking for a pulse.

  ‘Time of death,’ he says, checking the clock, ‘eleven forty-seven pm.’

  Only he and I know that Boyd’s heart is still racing. He’s completely conscious, but the paralytic has frozen his lungs. He’s silently suffocating on the gurney.

  Woodstock and the other guards start loosening his straps. The reporter follows the lawyer and the bureaucrat out.

  I watch for a minute more, fascinated by Boyd’s limp form. Dead outside, alive and screaming inside. It’s the opposite of how he was before—dead within, alive on the surface. The drug has turned him inside out.

  The corridors of the Death House are designed so that the families of the victims don’t have to exit the same way as the families of the killers. But I see a few old people in the parking lot—still surrounded by the huge red walls of Huntsville prison—who I figure are the moms and dads of Boyd’s victims. A man with a waistcoat and a walking frame is sobbing. A woman in a frilly dress and a flower in her hair is leaning against a car. She looks faintly concussed. Another woman is talking to the reporter, who nods sympathetically while holding a phone up to record the audio.

  ‘It’s not enough,’ the grieving woman says. ‘It was so peaceful. My daughter didn’t die like that. It’s not enough.’

  I know how she feels. It’s never enough for me, either.

  As the last of the parents leaves, Woodstock emerges through a big set of double doors. He rolls out a different gurney with a body bag on it. The bag is made of white fabric so thin that I can see the shape of Nigel Boyd’s frozen face through it. The suxamethonium makes it impossible to tell if he’s still alive.

  I open the back of the windowless van. Haz-chem symbols are painted on both sides. Woodstock helps me fold up the legs of the gurney and slide it into the van. He hands me a sheaf of papers. If anyone were watching—and I don’t think anyone is—they would assume these were authorisation forms to get the body into the disposal facility.

  Woodstock doesn’t speak and doesn’t meet my gaze. He just turns around and hurries back into the Death House.

  I shut the van door, sealing the Ambulance Killer inside.

  CHAPTER 3

  What belongs to you, but is used mostly by others?

  It’s six days later. I brake at the stop sign, check left, and turn right from Hackett onto Jester, my beaten-up Mitsubishi casting a long shadow on the blacktop. I drive north-west until the building emerges from behind the pine trees—an obelisk of tinted-glass windows, ten storeys high, with the American and Texan flags billowing on twin poles out front.

  The radio bellows at me, advertising new phones, plastic surgery and kitchen renovations. I can’t afford any of those things, but I keep the volume way up. I’m not in
the mood to hear myself think.

  The Mitsubishi is cheap, common, and new enough to be in good repair. I found it in an outdoor lot near a Walmart. A doorstop and a coathanger opened the door; a flat-head screwdriver and a hammer smashed the locking pins in the ignition. I put the dings in myself with a wrench, so the old owners wouldn’t recognise it. I also switched the plates with another car—a purple Volkswagen with lots of bumper stickers, whose driver probably won’t notice the change.

  Even so, I’m careful. I never speed and I always signal. I decelerate gradually so no one rear-ends me. And I always park in places the cops wouldn’t think to look for a stolen car. Such as the Houston Field Office of the FBI.

  I switch the stereo off before I stop the engine. The battery’s half dead, so the car won’t start if the radio is on, or the headlights, or the AC. I leave the window part-way open so the cabin won’t become an oven in the sun. I put the civilian consultant lanyard around my neck. Seven minutes later I’m opening the door to Peter Luzhin’s office.

  Luzhin is a forty-eight-year-old man, nicknamed ‘Mr Burns’ because of the sideburns bristled down his cheeks. Six foot three, with wide shoulders and thick arms. A little flabby around the gut, the way ex-junkies sometimes are.

  He’s hunched over a laptop, but looks up as I enter. ‘Oh. It’s you.’

  I close the door behind me and sit on a barely cushioned chair.

  The name plate on his desk reads Director, Houston Field Office, Federal Bureau of Investigation, just in case I missed the plaque on the door. As usual, the framed photo of his family is facedown so I can’t see them, or maybe so they can’t see me.

  ‘New case,’ he says. ‘Cameron Hall, fourteen years old, last seen at four o’clock yesterday afternoon. There was a ransom call.’

  ‘Real?’

  ‘As far as we can tell.’

  ‘Rich parents?’

  ‘Parent.’ Luzhin taps the touchpad, trying to wake up the computer. Eventually he gives up. ‘His mother inherited some land from an uncle,’ he says. ‘Sold it to a health club in San Antonio. Used the money to buy a few up-market houses around Houston, and she’s renting them out. Probably takes home about two hundred grand per year.’

  Lucky her. I inherited diddly squat from my family.

  ‘Where’s the kid’s dad?’ I ask.

  ‘Pennsylvania. The mom—Annette Hall is her name—says it wasn’t his voice on the ransom call.’

  ‘He got a record?’ I say.

  ‘Still waiting to confirm that. The kid is clean. His mom got done for tax evasion two years back. Suspended sentence.’

  ‘Maybe Warner is fundraising for the trial.’ I’m spit-balling, but if the kidnapper isn’t the dad, it’s statistically likely to be someone in Charlie Warner’s organisation.

  Luzhin lifts his eyebrows. ‘Warner posted bail with a million dollars in cash.’

  ‘All the more reason to kidnap a rich kid.’

  ‘It’s not Warner.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  Luzhin hesitates.

  ‘You have someone on the inside,’ I guess. ‘If Warner gave the order, you would have heard it.’

  He won’t admit it, but his flaring nostrils tell me I’m right. I wonder how he got a volunteer. The last agent to go undercover in Warner’s gang was found hanging by his wrists from a tree branch over a river. His skin was slashed up—not enough to kill, but enough to bait the alligators below. By the time the cops got there, everything below his ribs was gone.

  ‘Stay away from Warner,’ Luzhin says. ‘I don’t want you messing up the trial.’

  ‘Fine. Who saw the kid last?’

  ‘Guy named Crudup. Music teacher at North Shore Middle School. The vic finished class, got on his bike, never made it home. The ransom demand came in around six last night. Annette Hall called 911 right after.’

  ‘Did the kidnappers tell her not to?’ I ask.

  ‘Of course. But we got plainclothes agents near the house. No one’s watching her except us.’

  ‘When’s she gotta pay by?’

  ‘Six tonight.’

  Twenty-four hours after the call is typical. Too short for a thorough search, but long enough to get a lot of money together. The clock on Luzhin’s wall reads 09.22. I have eight hours to figure this out.

  ‘You should’ve called me last night.’

  ‘I hoped I wouldn’t need you,’ he says.

  ‘You tapped the mom’s phone, right?’

  ‘Vasquez did it at eight pm. No calls since then.’

  ‘No existing leads?’

  Luzhin turns one of his hands over, like a magician, showing it to be empty.

  ‘You got a picture of the kid?’ I ask.

  He slides a folder across his desk. I pick it up and flick through the file until I find a photo. It’s a selfie, taken at a house party. In the background, kids drink out of red plastic cups. Cameron grins at me, jaw wide, eyebrows up. He’s Caucasian, with dirty-blond hair and dark eyes.

  People go missing all the time in Houston. The cops don’t have the funding to find them all, so they focus on the ones that’ll get the media attention. I’m not surprised my new case is a rich white kid.

  ‘Who’s my reward?’ I ask.

  Luzhin glances at the door, checking that it’s closed. His voice is low. ‘Foreign guy. Tanzanian. Forty-three. Convicted of a triple homicide eleven years ago. No family in the States.’

  ‘He speak English?’

  ‘Christ. Why does that matter?’

  I shrug.

  Luzhin isn’t a good guy. In his early days he wasn’t against hitting a suspect to make him confess, and he still turns a blind eye to the cops who do the same. He forges documents, bullies witnesses and bribes Woodstock—or blackmails him, I’m not sure which. But whenever he looks at me, there’s disgust in his eyes.

  ‘Before you go,’ he says, dodging the question, ‘Richmond still hasn’t been cleared for duty since Oswald Collins shot him. I’ve assigned you a new partner.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Special Agent Reese Thistle.’

  The one who wouldn’t let me into Billie Collins’ house, and then handcuffed me after I saved Billie’s life. ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’ll choose the new one.’

  ‘That’s not the deal.’

  ‘Our deal doesn’t say anything about who’s looking over my shoulder.’

  ‘I make the rules, not you. You got a problem with that, feel free to terminate our arrangement, along with all its perks. But if you stay, you can’t choose your own partner. Thistle already knows she’s been assigned to you.’

  ‘So what?’ I say. ‘Afraid of disappointing her?’

  ‘If I choose someone else because you threw a tantrum, she’ll find out. When the other agents hear that the field office director reshuffled his staff at your request, they’ll start asking questions. You want that?’

  He’s got me, and he knows it.

  ‘Stop wasting time,’ he says. ‘Find Cameron Hall.’ He turns back to his computer, which has finally woken up.

  As I walk out the door, I hear a clack as he puts the family photo back where it belongs.

  ‘Mr Blake.’

  I turn to see Agent Thistle hovering nearby. She’s not in uniform this time—she’s wearing a dark grey pantsuit over a maroon blouse, with flat leather shoes she can probably run in.

  ‘Good to see you again,’ she says without enthusiasm. ‘I’ll be assisting you on this investigation.’

  She means supervising. Monitoring. Her tone suggests she’s reading from a script and isn’t happy about her new assignment. That makes two of us.

  ‘On behalf of the Bureau, I want to thank you for—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ I say. ‘There’ll be time for this on the way.’

  ‘Sure. Where are we headed?’

  ‘Cameron Hall’s house.’

  ‘Agents have already swept it.’ She gestures to the file in my hand. ‘There’s a complete report.’


  ‘I want to see the house anyway.’

  ‘What do you think we’ll find?’

  ‘If I knew, I wouldn’t need to go.’

  •

  Thistle’s car is a standard FBI-issue Ford Crown Victoria Sedan. White. Several years old, but clean—on the outside, at least. I can smell old vomit on the back seat. My guess is Thistle arrested a drunk driver. The perp was probably from Louisiana, because if they hadn’t crossed state lines, it would have been a case for the Houston PD, not the FBI.

  Thistle turns the key and the Georgia Satellites start howling out of the speakers. She twists the volume down to zero. Dust blankets the built-in cigarette lighter.

  So, Reese Thistle is an unmarried non-smoker who likes eighties blues-rock. The car is running low on gas, so she must live in Houston—no commuter from further away than Liberty would let the needle fall below a quarter of a tank.

  Now that I’m seeing her side-on, I can tell she’s a violinist, and she plays left-handed. The callus on her neck from the instrument’s body is on the wrong side. This probably means she’s self-taught, since most left-handed violinists play to the right anyway. She’s a couple of years older than me, judging by her face. Maybe thirty-five. No kids, judging by her breasts.

  ‘Something wrong?’ she says, without looking at me.

  I turn back to the windshield. ‘Nothing.’

  ‘I’m sorry about last week.’ She twists the wheel, and the car zooms out of the parking lot. ‘I wasn’t sure what was going on, and I made a snap decision. Now I know the handcuffs were unnecessary.’

  ‘Don’t sweat it.’

  She waits for me to say more. I don’t.

  The air is soupy inside the car. I push my sleeves up my arms. Thistle glances over at the scar tissue which covers me from wrists to elbows, and then looks back at the road. She probably thinks the wounds are old oil burns.

  Cameron Hall lives with his mother in Cloverleaf, about a half-hour’s drive east. The squad car has GPS, but Thistle doesn’t switch it on. She takes a right off Jester onto the North Loop service road and merges into the I-610 with the confidence of someone who’s lived in Houston a long time.