Hangman

by Jack Heath

  The car up ahead of me, the only other one on the road, slows down. The hitchhiker looks hopeful at first, and then grateful, but the car speeds up again with a growl. She stares down at the blacktop through eyes dulled by the glare of the sun.

  Maybe the driver thought she was pretty until he got close. It happens.

  There’s no one else around. She could be stuck out here for hours if I don’t give her a ride. It’s been a long time since I’ve walked down mile after mile of highway with my thumb out, but not so long that I don’t remember the sweaty brow and the aching feet and the pounding head.

  I slow down.

  An idea rises, uninvited: if she didn’t make it home, no one could trace it back to me.

  That thought carries my foot from the brake to the accelerator. A ride with me could do much more damage than a few hours plodding through the heat. But I saw her disappointment when the last car passed her, and I don’t want to see it again. I pull up onto the shoulder a few yards ahead of her.

  ‘She’ll come to no harm,’ I tell myself. A direct order.

  She runs up to the window, a smile on her cracked lips.

  ‘Where you headed?’ I ask.

  She points a Browning .45 at me. ‘Out of the car.’ Her voice is croaky as a crow’s.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ I say.

  She waggles the gun. I don’t move. She points it at the sky and pulls the trigger. The gunshot booms around the empty desert, and then she points it at me again.

  ‘You just cost me a bullet,’ she says. ‘Two’s my limit.’

  I unbuckle my seatbelt and open the door. She might shoot me anyway, drag me into the shrubbery and leave me to feed the coywolves, so as I can’t report the carjacking and get her caught. That would be the smart thing to do.

  But she might have a conscience. ‘I tried to help you,’ I say.

  Her expression doesn’t change. ‘Cry me a river.’

  I circle around the front of the car. So does she, and we meet in the middle.

  ‘Give me your phone,’ she says.

  ‘Those bullets aren’t big,’ I reply.

  She pokes my chest with the hot muzzle. Too close to miss if I try anything. ‘Big enough.’

  ‘They’ll kill me, that’s for sure,’ I say. ‘But it won’t be quick. Even if you use up the seven rounds you have left, I’ll stay up for five seconds, maybe ten. Enough to snap your little neck.’

  She holds my gaze. We’re both thinking hard.

  ‘Give me your fucking phone,’ she says again. Stalling.

  ‘I don’t have a phone,’ I say. ‘See?’

  Carefully, I turn out my pockets. Some dollar bills fall to the road. She looks down at them, giving me an opportunity to grab her hair and peel off her scalp. I don’t take it.

  ‘The car’s yours,’ I say. ‘The money’s mine. Don’t shoot me, and I won’t strangle you.’ Not the most eloquent treaty, but clear enough.

  ‘Turn around.’

  ‘No.’

  After a pause, she nods. Edges around towards the driver’s-side door. I follow her. If I give her too much space, I’m no longer dangerous and she can shoot me safely.

  She gets in. Closes the door. I run back behind the car, putting the rear windshield between us. It won’t stop a bullet, but it might stop her pulling the trigger. A stolen car isn’t worth much with a smashed window.

  She floors the accelerator and the car zooms off, tyres crackling. I watch her spin the steering wheel and swerve into a U-turn, and then I realise what she’s doing and start running.

  The fender rushes past, just missing me as I throw myself off the highway and land hard on the dirt. The car skids to a halt and I roll sideways as the woman opens fire out the window. Five bullets kick up the dust beside me before the gun clicks empty.

  I lie still, holding my breath, my eardrums strumming. If she thinks I’m dead, she may get out to hide the body, giving me a chance to reclaim my ride.

  No such luck. The car roars away and I get to my feet, coughing up dust, in time to watch it disappear over the horizon.

  She’s driving fast. Maybe she’ll get pulled over and discover that the car was reported stolen by its actual owner months ago.

  Maybe not. I’ll never know. I start walking along the highway and stick out my thumb.

  •

  The guy who stops is a big black bowling ball of a man, driving a car that’s three decades old and hasn’t got any better with age. The paint job is the same colour as the mud on the fender, and the faux-wood covering is peeling off the plastic on the inside.

  ‘Now just what in hell do you think you’re doing?’ the bowling ball asks, a cigarette waggling in his mouth.

  ‘Walking,’ I say. My voice is hoarse.

  ‘Walking? No one’s walked in Texas since Jesse James, buddy. Get in.’

  He opens the door. I’m suspicious of him—mostly for his lack of suspicion about me. I don’t want to get in a car that would have me as a passenger. But that attitude won’t get me far, and he’s the first person to stop in the two hours I’ve been walking.

  I get in.

  As he pulls back out onto the highway, he asks where I’m headed. I tell him, and he says he can get me the whole way there. Then he wants to know how I got to where he found me without a car.

  ‘Broke down,’ I say. ‘About three miles back.’ He strikes me as the kind of guy who might insist on calling the cops for me if he finds out I’ve been jacked.

  ‘I didn’t see your car,’ he says. ‘But I can turn around. I used to be an auto-electrician—maybe I can fix it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but it’ll need to be towed. Fanbelt snapped and the radiator burst.’

  ‘Shit. Why didn’t you hitch a ride with the tow truck?’

  ‘Never called one. No phone.’

  ‘Mine’s in the glove compartment,’ he says. ‘Want to call one now?’

  I shake my head. ‘My roommate has a car trailer. I’ll borrow it when I get there.’

  ‘Well, it’s your call. Or lack thereof.’ He laughs.

  Talking hurts my throat, so I ask him what he’s been doing since he gave up auto-electrics. He says he drives a cement mixer, which is easy work so long as you get the truck to its destination less than ninety minutes after it’s been loaded up. The job, he says, only gets hard if the concrete does. His name is Walter Bouchet.

  Before he started working on cars, he was a preacher. I ask why he gave that up, and he tells me he wasn’t very good at it. His congregation kept right on lying and stealing no matter what he did.

  ‘Are you supposed to stop them?’ I ask. ‘I thought you were just supposed to forgive them.’

  ‘That’s more a Catholic thing,’ he says. ‘I was a Baptist.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Bouchet tells me that after one man sprayed a swastika on the church wall and blamed it on his own son when he was accused, he quit. ‘To hell with them,’ he says. ‘Literally.’

  He laughs again, and I humour him. Literally.

  It’s getting dark by the time his car squeaks and rumbles to a halt in my driveway. My roommate’s van is parked on the grass, but I doubt it’ll be here long. He works nights.

  ‘Where’s the trailer?’ Bouchet asks.

  ‘Around the back.’

  ‘Need a hand hooking it up?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Well,’ he says, ‘nice to meet you.’

  I shake his hand and tell him never to pull over for a woman carrying a shopping basket. He chuckles as though I’ve made a pun, and drives away into the twilight.

  I walk to the front door and jam a key into one rusted lock, then another, then another. The door groans open. I walk in.

  My roommate is on the sofa, staring at the TV like it’s a hypnotist’s watch. His pupils are the size of pennies. Based on the sweat on his brow and the way he’s stroking the couch next to him, I’d say he’s had a couple of tablets of ecstasy.

  Perhaps he has a new supplier.
I’ve heard him bragging that he never sells anything unless he can personally vouch for the quality. Then again, I’ve also heard him claiming to be ‘the almighty butterfly king’. Whoever the new supplier is, I bet they buy from—or work for—Charlie Warner, just like the old one did.

  My roommate and I first met in the cramped waiting room of a real-estate agent who specialised in overcharging people for scummy share houses after they’d run out of better options. I introduced myself. The man who became my roommate didn’t. I asked him what his name was and he thought about it, then said, ‘John.’ When, later, the agent wanted a last name to put on the rental agreement, he said, ‘Johnson,’ and glared at the man, as if daring him to question it.

  Despite the drugs and the paranoia, John’s not the worst roommate I’ve ever had. The one before him was a fast-talking pyromaniac named Jesse, who used to kidnap the neighbours’ cats and bury them in the backyard.

  With a shock, I realise the guy talking on the TV is Luzhin, standing in front of the field office. There’s a picture of Cameron in the corner of the screen. ‘If anyone has seen Cameron or has any other information, we urge you to come forward,’ Luzhin says, squinting against the sun. ‘Also, if you’d like to contribute funds to our missing persons investigative team, you can donate cash at any branch office, or with a credit card by calling…’

  I guess the kidnapper knows what Annette Hall told us, so Luzhin figures we may as well get the public on our side.

  ‘I can feel it in my feet,’ my roommate says suddenly.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I reply, and leave him to it.

  Someone called for him yesterday, but I won’t give him the message now. He wouldn’t remember, then he’d claim I didn’t tell him, call me a liar, and tell one of the hundreds of junkies dependent on him to attack me while I slept.

  Johnson doesn’t like me writing things down—he sees it as surveillance—but today it seems like the best option. I pick up a newspaper and tear off a strip, write Gemma called on it, and stick it to the fridge door under a magnet that advertises a carpet cleaner I can’t ever imagine calling, since the house has no carpet. Then I open the fridge to grab some stale bread.

  There’s a big chest freezer on the other side of the kitchen. The meat inside no longer resembles the Ambulance Killer. The pieces are softball-sized, too small to be recognisable as human. The head, hands and feet are distinctive, so I keep them taped up in a cardboard box under everything else in the freezer.

  Since he no longer looks human, I have to make him taste human. I put a tiny bit of salt on the fillets along with some ground-up pregnancy vitamins. These include copper, which will make the fillet taste bloody again. I microwave it for forty-eight seconds.

  While I wait for the microwave, I munch on the stale bread. This stops me from getting sick—a person can’t live on meat alone.

  When the fillets are heated to exactly ninety-eight degrees, I unlock my bedroom door and go inside. Stepping over the maze of half-finished jigsaw puzzles, I make my way over to the mattress on the floor and sit down, chewing as I go. The springs creak under me.

  A pile of jumbled Rubik’s Cubes looms beside the bed. I pick up the one on top and start working on it. People assume only geniuses can solve Rubik’s Cubes, but all you need is pattern recognition and a good memory. You have to see which squares are already in the right places, and remember which sequences of turns will end up moving only the others.

  It takes me about two minutes to solve the cube. I would have done it quicker, but the mechanism inside is rusty, and I won’t get paid if I break it.

  Three years ago I went to an internet cafe and set up a profile on a social networking site. My username was hangman—puzzlesolver was taken—and in the About me section I wrote that I could solve any puzzle in two weeks. Anyone who wanted to use this service could post the puzzle with a reply-paid envelope and a twenty-dollar bill to my PO box. If I couldn’t solve it, I’d send double their money back on receipt of the solution.

  This started out as a money-laundering operation. The FBI wasn’t paying me, so I survived by selling credit card numbers on Russian web forums. The puzzles were only supposed to make me look legit if the IRS ever came knocking. I didn’t expect to have any actual customers, and for the first few months I was right. But word got around, and now I get sent three or four puzzles a week. Jumbled Rubik’s Cubes are quite common. Jigsaw puzzles, too—I glue the pieces in place before I mail them back. Sometimes I get those weird metal and wood things where the goal is to disassemble them. And I get a huge number of riddles.

  I put down the solved cube and take a handful of paper scraps off another pile. The first one reads: Who is my son’s only sister’s only husband’s only mother-in-law’s only husband’s only mother-in-law?

  Another reads: Each morning I lie at your feet, every morning and afternoon I follow no matter how fast you run, yet I abandon you at noon. What am I?

  A third says: You may find me in the sun, and yet I’m never out of darkness. I am the beginning of sorrow and the end of sickness. You cannot express happiness without me, nor misery. I am always in risk, yet never in danger. What am I?

  I pick up a pen, scribble on my palm until the ink starts flowing, and then I write on each sheet of paper. Your mother. A shadow. The letter S. Too easy.

  I’ll never get rich doing this. But it pays about a third of my rent, fills the cars I steal with gas, and runs my space heater in winter. It sure beats begging, sleeping on benches and living on scraps from trash cans, like I used to do.

  Sometimes I find myself wondering what I’ll do in the long term. I live so close to the edge that an illness or a car accident would push me off. But my lethal hobby is all-consuming. I can’t spend much time thinking about anything before my mind is tugged back towards the Death House like a dog on an ever-tightening leash.

  I solve a few more riddles and two more Rubik’s Cubes, and I start another jigsaw. None of these tasks are urgent. I’ve still got at least a week to return each of them to the owners. I’m just killing time, waiting for night to fall.

  In the shadows creeping from the east people are eating dinner, watching those interchangeable crime shows that come on at nine, then switching off their TVs and going to bed. They’re reading, taking Valium, turning over. The windows on my street go dark, one by one.

  It’s time to go.

  In the front room I find Johnson still on the sofa, but he’s stopped groping it. He must be coming around. And he has company.

  Harry Crudup, the music teacher, has a tourniquet around his arm and a teaspoon in his hand. He looks at me, as motionless as a startled deer.

  ‘Uh, hi there,’ I say.

  He nods curtly.

  ‘What a coincidence, you two being friends.’

  ‘Fuck off,’ Johnson says.

  I hold Crudup’s gaze for a moment longer. I never saw you if you never saw me. Then I take a plastic bottle from the cupboard and fill it with water, trying to shake off a sense of disappointment. I shouldn’t judge him. His addiction is probably safer than mine.

  I make a cup of coffee with cream, three sugars and a pinch of salt. I do it noisily, partly so I can pretend I don’t hear what they’re doing, partly so they both notice that I’m not up to anything suspicious. A drug dealer and an addict aren’t a good alibi, but they’re better than nothing.

  A hand falls on my shoulder.

  I spin around to see Crudup, too close. I raise my hand to grab his throat and then realise he’s not threatening me—the drugs have messed up his sense of personal space.

  ‘If you were me,’ he says, ‘then you’d be me.’

  This sounds like typical user nonsense, so I say, ‘Yeah.’

  ‘No,’ he says. I can smell tobacco on his breath. ‘You don’t get it. You think you’re better than me.’

  Even genocidal dictators at least believe themselves to be doing the right thing, which makes them better men than me. ‘I don’t,’ I say.

 
‘Damn right you’re not,’ he says, mishearing me. ‘You ever put a project off until the last minute? Ever give up on a diet? If you’ve ever hit your fucking snooze button, then you could be an addict. You would be, if someone offered you the drugs and you were unhappy enough to take them.’

  I pick up the coffee mug and take a sip. It burns my lips, and I set it back down.

  ‘It’s not about drugs,’ Crudup continues, a longing in his voice. ‘It’s about willpower. There’s no such thing as an addict. Just a man in difficult circumstances. Now all I have is the guitar and the needle.’

  ‘I forgive you,’ I tell him, since that seems to be what he’s asking for.

  He offers his worn-out smile and says, ‘How can you? I can’t forgive myself.’

  He doesn’t say anything more after that, so I pick up the steaming mug and the bottle and squeeze past him. Carrying them back to my bedroom, I leave them on the floor, close the door almost all the way, and watch Crudup’s shadow.

  He stands where I left him for more than a minute. Then he shuffles out of the kitchen and back into the living room.

  I wait for the creaking of the sofa’s springs before I tiptoe back down the corridor to Johnson’s bedroom. He’s surprisingly neat, at least compared to his clients. The CDs by the stereo aren’t alphabetised, but they are squared away between a pair of bookends. The clean clothes are in the lowboy, the dirty ones in a laundry basket.

  The shelves are crammed with books, but I’m not fooled. At least ten percent of those volumes have been hollowed out to hold cash or drugs. One of the others is an address book. The rest are just camouflage. Several are in Spanish, which Johnson doesn’t speak as far as I know.

  Silently, I remove and open a few books. It doesn’t take long to find what I need. Hundreds of white tablets, twelve in each packet, circular, innocuous, a cross in the centre. The label, printed at a hospital in Ecatepec, says Flunitrazepam.

  Addicts take these to make a fix of smack seem more potent, or to ease the crash after a night of coke or meth. But flunitrazepam is most famous for a different purpose, and under a different name.

  Rohypnol. The date-rape drug.