Hangman

by Jack Heath

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘You don’t look okay. You’re limping, and favouring one arm. Your eyes are bloodshot. Have you slept?’

  ‘Sure. The kidnapper knocked me out.’

  ‘You should get a doctor to take a look at you.’

  ‘I don’t like doctors. Anyway, I want to talk to Cameron when he’s conscious.’

  ‘It’s over, Blake,’ she says. ‘You’ve done your job.’

  ‘For all we know, the kidnapper is choosing another victim as we speak.’

  ‘We have an APB out on his licence plate.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. It was a stolen car.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  It was the kind of car that I would steal. Old but common. Cheap but not distinctively so. ‘Just a feeling,’ I say.

  Thistle digs a hair tie out of her bag and starts pulling her hair into a ponytail. I feel a weird thrill at the realisation that she hasn’t finished getting dressed.

  ‘Either way,’ she says, ‘Luzhin brought you in to find the kid, and you’ve done that. We’ll take it from here. What do you think happened to Cameron’s hand?’

  ‘There was no key to the cuffs,’ I say. ‘And I couldn’t just leave him there.’

  ‘So you did…what, exactly?’

  ‘I broke his bones with a sledgehammer.’

  She gapes. ‘Christ!’

  I say, ‘There was no other way.’

  ‘I know, I’m just—most people wouldn’t have done that.’

  ‘How would most people have got him out?’

  ‘They wouldn’t have. They’d have left him.’

  She’s looking at me with something resembling respect. It makes me uncomfortable.

  ‘And he didn’t wake up?’ she says. ‘Even when you were smashing his hand in?’

  I shrug. ‘I tried to wake him first. I assume he’d been drugged with something.’

  ‘Well, the doctor says he’ll be playing the trumpet again in no time.’

  ‘And by no time, you mean…’

  ‘Three months, give or take. But he couldn’t play it for at least a month even if you hadn’t smashed his hand, because of the missing kidney. Puts too much stress on the diaphragm, or something.’

  ‘Plus, he’d be dead, possibly.’

  ‘Good point.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Well,’ she says, ‘you did real well. You found him less than eighteen hours after they put you on the case.’

  ‘Sixteen. But I only found him by getting kidnapped myself. I doubt they’ll give me the FBI star.’

  She puts her hand on my shoulder. ‘You got the kid—and yourself—out of there in one piece. That’s what counts.’

  ‘Three pieces,’ I say. ‘Me, him, and his kidney.’

  She laughs before she can stop herself. Richmond, my old babysitter, never laughed at my jokes. I think he found me morbid.

  We’re approached by someone who looks just old enough to be a doctor, but not old enough to be one whose judgment I would trust. ‘Cameron’s regained consciousness,’ he says.

  ‘Can we talk to him?’ Thistle asks.

  He shakes his head. ‘Not without parental consent. He’s a minor.’

  ‘Can you tell us if he’s okay?’

  ‘No sign of internal bleeding. Whoever removed the kidney did a damn fine job, and the surgical scar has healed right quick. You said the surgery was less than forty-eight hours ago?’

  ‘Less than twenty-four,’ Thistle says.

  ‘Incredible. I’ve never seen a wound heal that fast. The kid’s Wolverine, basically. Anyway, he wants to see you.’

  ‘You just said—’

  ‘Not you, I’m afraid.’ He points at me. ‘Just you. You’re the guy who saved him, right?’

  I feel a stab of unease. How much does Cameron remember? What if whatever the doctors injected him with reversed the memory-loss effects of the Rohypnol?

  Thistle sighs. ‘Go on, then. I’ll be here.’

  I leave her sitting on the couch and follow the doctor through the maze of disinfectant-scented halls. Thick doors, shatterproof glass, hard neon lights. I’m right at home. Park Plaza Hospital resembles the Death House, and not just on the surface. Many of the people here will die before they leave, gurneys under them, catheters in their arms.

  The doctor leads me to a private ward in the north wing. There’s a uniform outside the door. He says, ‘Morning.’

  The doctor holds up his ID.

  The uniform looks disappointed that we’re not pausing to chat. It’s almost 6 am—injured drunks have stopped coming in, visiting hours haven’t started yet, the patients are all asleep, the nurses are gliding around silently and invisibly. There’s no one for him to talk to, nothing to keep him awake. But he waves us through.

  Cameron’s head is slumped back against the pillow. An oxygen mask smothers his face. His hand is splinted and bandaged. A pulse monitor is perched on his fingertip like a thimble. His eyes are open, rolling from side to side. They settle on me.

  I wait, tense. Does he recognise me?

  The doctor says, ‘Cameron? This is Mr Blake. The guy you asked for.’

  ‘Oh,’ Cameron says.

  There’s a pause.

  ‘Thanks,’ he adds.

  Whatever drug they put him on, it’s not helping much.

  ‘Can you…’ He lifts a hand slowly, carefully, and pushes his mask up onto his head. ‘Can you give me a minute with Mr Blake? Alone?’

  The doctor looks at me and says, ‘Sure. But you gotta keep this on, okay?’

  He puts the mask back on Cameron’s face. ‘Just hit the call button if you need me,’ he says, more to me than to Cameron. Then he leaves.

  ‘So I guess I owe you a thankyou,’ Cameron says, but he doesn’t sound sure.

  Now that the doctor’s gone, I can’t think of a reason not to just ask. ‘How much do you remember?’

  ‘From the kidnapping?’

  ‘From the rescue.’

  ‘Rescue?’ he repeats. ‘Nothing.’

  I can’t tell if he’s lying. Maybe he really doesn’t remember anything. Or maybe he just wants me to think so, because he realises how dangerous I am—because he remembers everything.

  I say, ‘Sorry about your hand.’

  He stares down at the cast. ‘Can’t feel it. What happened?’

  ‘You were handcuffed. I couldn’t find the key.’

  ‘Oh.’ He still looks confused, but not confused enough to ask for more details. ‘So you’re a cop?’

  ‘No. But I work with the FBI sometimes.’

  He looks like he’s struggling with a tough decision, like he doesn’t know whether to trust me or not. Maybe to his conscious mind I’m a stranger, but to his subconscious, I’m a sledgehammer-wielding demon.

  ‘Mr Blake,’ he says, ‘I need—’

  Footsteps behind me. A voice. ‘Cameron?’

  I turn around. It’s Annette Hall, tears on her cheeks, looking so vulnerable you could forget she’s a racist child molester.

  ‘It’s me,’ she says. ‘Your mother.’

  That strikes me as strange—does she think he won’t recognise her? But he reacts the same way. ‘Mom?’ Like he’s not sure.

  She approaches him like a lover just returned after years abroad, not sure where she stands. She places a hand on his head, and says, ‘I’m so glad you’re okay.’

  I can’t tell anyone what I know about Cameron and his mother, because then I’d have to explain how I know it. Even if I did, what good would come of it? He’d grow up in foster care like I did, but worse, thanks to the journalists and their cameras. KIDNAP VICTIM’S MOTHER CHARGED WITH RAPE—no way would the media leave such good clickbait alone. And I’d find myself behind bars. FBI CONSULTANT DRUGGED VICTIM’S FRIEND.

  Trying to help people gets you shot at and stranded in the middle of nowhere while someone re-steals your car. Sorry, Cameron. I have my own problems.

  But there’s a dark, guilty ache
in my guts. Maybe the next time Cameron goes missing, we will find him buried in the backyard. Eleven percent of murder victims are killed by family members, and twenty-three percent are killed by their lovers. Annette Hall is both.

  Hall turns to face me. ‘Did you want something?’ Her voice wobbles angrily.

  Not the thankyou I expected. I guess the damage I did to her son’s hand outweighs the saving of the rest of him.

  ‘No,’ I say, and leave.

  •

  Thirty-six hours later I’m in the Huntsville prison parking lot. Huntsville is known as the Walls, which are its most distinctive feature. They’re made of bricks as red as blood and they stretch all the way up to the sky, where bored guards sit in distant watchtowers cradling assault rifles.

  When Woodstock eventually emerges through the double doors of the Death House, he’s struggling to push the gurney. The dead guy was six foot five and two hundred and twenty pounds. It took four minutes for the suxamethonium to take effect, immobilising his limbs and cutting off his air supply.

  It feels like I’m paralysed too. I keep forgetting to breathe. My heart is jumping. I’m always twitchy when I’m about to get my reward.

  The dead man came over here from Tanzania in 1997 and moved into a quiet suburb in Austin, where his neighbours, if you’d asked them at the time, would have told you he was a polite, funny guy who mostly kept to himself. And he was.

  If you asked those same neighbours now, they’d say they always knew there was something a bit off about him, and that they found him creepy at times. They didn’t, but nobody wants to believe that a guy who was dismembering and eating people in his basement could go to the local market and smile and wave and no one would suspect a thing.

  Anyone who lives in a big city has walked past at least one murderer. And they didn’t get chills. They didn’t look twice. They kept walking.

  I’ve never eaten a cannibal before. I’ll have to be extra careful to avoid the brain and the pituitary gland, which could give me kuru—the human equivalent of mad cow disease. At least his last physical said he didn’t have HIV or hepatitis.

  The dead man was christened ‘the Witch Doctor’ by Fox News after it came out that he was using the body parts of albino people in a potion that was supposed to bring good luck. Doesn’t look like it worked.

  Woodstock gives me the paperwork. I’ll be handing the same papers back to him, unchanged, when I return in a couple of hours. It’s a receipt from the disposal centre, supposedly proving that I dropped off a body there. Luzhin must have someone working for him at the other end, but I’ve never met them.

  Woodstock helps me load the gurney into the van. Through the body bag, I can feel that the Witch Doctor’s body is still warm. If I start eating soon, I can pretend he’s still alive. It took about half an hour for Boyd’s body to cool after his suffocation, but he was smaller.

  Woodstock and I are both puffing by the time the dead body is in the van.

  ‘He took a long time to go down,’ I say.

  ‘Shut up,’ Woodstock says, looking around for someone who might overhear us. Then he remembers who he’s talking to, and looks scared.

  ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I gotta go.’

  He runs back into the Death House. I get in the van and drive it through the prison gates. The guards sweep a mirror underneath to check that no escaped prisoners are clinging to the underside. They’re supposed to check inside too, but they don’t bother.

  I take 11th Street towards the I-45. Yesterday I went to Walmart and bought two big plastic tubs with airtight lids and stole a 1983 Chevrolet Malibu from the parking lot. I hid the tubs in a forest just off the interstate, halfway between here and Houston. I’ll be there in half an hour. Then I’ll eat for about forty-five minutes before I drive the empty van back, return the dummy paperwork to the prison, pick up the Malibu from the Huntsville lot and drive it back to pick up the tubs.

  I check the wing mirrors. It doesn’t look like I’m being followed. I never have been so far, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that someday Luzhin or Woodstock will turn on me.

  I look in the rear-view mirror just in time to see the body bag sit upright.

  ‘Motherfucker!’ I slam my foot on the brakes. The van skids off the road and bumps across the dirt towards a ditch. A strap comes loose, and the body bag rolls off the gurney. It slams into the wall, and the Witch Doctor makes a muffled grunt.

  The van stops just in time to avoid toppling into the ditch. I scramble out of my seat into the back of the van, my heart racing.

  The Witch Doctor is trying to tear open the body bag from inside. The material is thin, but the paralytic is making him clumsy. Woodstock must not have used enough of the poison for a man of this size. He might be brain damaged, but he’s very much alive.

  I try to grab him. He punches me through the bag—a blow to my ribs that leaves me wheezing. One of his kicking feet hits the handle of the back door. It pops open and he flops out onto the grass.

  He screams something that sounds like ‘Uniokoe!’ I don’t know if it’s a Tanzanian swearword or a plea for mercy or what. I leap out of the van and land on top of him. Still wrapped in the bag, he pushes me off and rolls sideways into the ditch.

  Approaching headlights illuminate the open van. Someone is coming.

  I pray that the car won’t stop. It’s a red Cadillac Escalade with a mud-spattered bumper. The brakes squeak as it approaches.

  I look down at the ditch. The Tanzanian is out of the driver’s sightline, but not out of earshot.

  The side window of the Escalade rolls down to reveal an apple-cheeked white guy in a trucker cap. He flashes a friendly smile.

  ‘You need help?’ he asks.

  I force a laugh, hoping the Witch Doctor will stay silent at the bottom of the ditch. ‘No thanks, pal. Just stretching my legs.’

  ‘Long drive?’

  ‘All the way from Little Rock.’ It’s a dumb lie—now he probably thinks I’m headed for the Mexican border. ‘Almost home, though,’ I add. ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘All right, then.’ He tips his hat. ‘You stay safe now.’ He closes the window and zooms back onto the highway.

  I exhale. That was too close. As soon as he’s out of sight, I jump down into the ditch.

  The Witch Doctor is gone. The empty body bag lies trampled in the mud.

  ‘Shit, shit, shit.’ I look around. He’s not anywhere along the shoulder of the highway, which means he ran into the forest.

  I give chase. I can’t see him, but I can make myself think like him. He didn’t try to flag down a car, because he doesn’t want to go back to Huntsville. So his plan is to hide. He’ll run for a while, heading for lower ground where the trees are thickest, and then, when he thinks he’s lost me, he’ll sneak into the darkest shadows he can find and stay there.

  I can’t let him get away. Someone will eventually find him and realise who he is. That will lead them to Woodstock, who will turn me in. Then it’ll be me at the Death House getting the needle.

  I run deeper and deeper into the woods. Moths buzz around me. Leaves scrape my face. The smell of rotting vegetation is thick in the air.

  Suddenly I see the Tanzanian. Stumbling down the hill, one leg dragging. He’s naked except for his tighty whities, which are clearly visible in the dark.

  I try to sneak up on him, but he hears me coming and turns. His eyes are wide with terror.

  ‘Is this hell?’ he asks.

  ‘It’s Texas,’ I say.

  Recognition flashes across his face. He must have noticed me behind the glass at his execution. He snatches up a rock and hurls it at my head.

  I catch the rock. It’s big and sharp—the impact jars my wrist. I hurl it right back at him, and it hits him in the throat. His Adam’s apple makes a crunching noise and he falls over backwards, gurgling.

  It’s a fatal blow. I can hear the blood crackling in his lungs. But I don’t wait for it to kill him. I pick up the rock and hit him again, hard. His
skull caves in and he goes limp.

  The adrenaline seeps away. I fall onto my hands and knees, exhausted. Invisible insects chitter in the gloom around me. The moon peeks between the trees. I can hear the distant highway.

  I’m miles away from my plastic tubs. The Tanzanian is too heavy to carry back to the van in one piece, and I don’t have my hacksaw with me. I’ll have to go back to the van, drive to the tubs, collect them and bring them back here.

  Hard work on an empty stomach. I peel off my clothes so they don’t get blood on them, and then I lick my lips and get started.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’m a butcher. I’m six feet tall, with size nine shoes. What do I weigh?

  I wake up on the couch. Not lying down. Sitting.

  This sometimes happens. At age twenty-one, I was fired. A couple weeks later I couldn’t make rent. I left without complaint when the real estate agent’s letter told me to and slept on a squeaky mattress in a roadside motel for a few nights before I couldn’t afford that either. The homeless shelters were full, and I wasn’t yet ready to sleep on the sidewalk. I felt sure that things would pick up before it came to that. Someone would hire me. I’d find another place to live. Things would balance out again.

  That’s why they call it a death spiral, not a death slope or a death line—or even a death row. The trajectory is curved, which means if you only look in the direction you’re facing, you won’t see where you’re actually going.

  I caught the overnight Greyhound to Dallas, because the bus was cheaper than a motel. I slept in my seat, or tried to. The next night, I caught the same bus back. By the third journey, I had no trouble sleeping while sitting upright—I was too tired not to.

  During the day I sat on fibreglass chairs in corridors, ten other desperate people on either side of me. We’d all somehow lost our jobs when the housing market collapsed, even though none of us worked in real estate. Washington rescued the banks, but not us.

  When my name was called I’d get up and step into the silence of the office, where I told the HR manager or recruitment officer or whoever that I hadn’t finished high school and that my only job experience was in fast food, but that I was loyal and polite and eager to work.