Hangman

by Jack Heath

  ‘Please,’ he says. ‘I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I feel it in my gut every day. Don’t make me do it again.’

  Him and me, back to back. He doesn’t want to kill, but he has to. I want to, and I can’t.

  ‘Get out of here,’ I say. ‘Before somebody sees you.’

  After a moment, the leather seat creaks and he walks past me without a word. The door jingles as he leaves.

  I lounge there with my coffee for another ten minutes before the girl arrives, which makes her twenty minutes early. And it is a girl, not a woman. I doubt there’s nine months between her age and that of the boy in the picture. Twin sister? They have a similar body type, and while her hair is brown, it looks like it’s dyed. She wears a dark dress which is too wide in the hips and too loose in the chest to be anything but a hand-me-down. She looks like she’s here for her first job interview.

  I hold up my hand, and she comes over. Her hopeful look fades as she looks me up and down. I’m used to that.

  ‘You the one who put up the posters?’ I ask.

  She nods. ‘I’m JJ. Can you take me to where you saw Robert?’

  Robert. ‘Robert got a last name?’

  ‘Shea. EA, not AY.’

  ‘You got a last name?’

  ‘Austin, like the city. Can you take me there or not?’

  Not his sister, then. And since I never saw Robert, I can’t take her anywhere that will be any use. ‘I told you, it was in Cloverleaf. Andorra Lane. Does Robert live near there?’

  Austin shakes her head. ‘He’s from Westside. He goes to Paul Revere Middle School, catches the same bus as me.’

  Catches the bus, not driven. Probably means his parents aren’t as rich as Cameron’s. Different neighbourhoods, different levels of wealth—I’m struggling to find more than a superficial link between the two boys.

  I say, ‘If your last name is Austin, why do you call yourself JJ?’

  ‘My real name’s Jane.’

  ‘Jane Austin?’

  ‘Right. So I go by JJ. When exactly did you see Robert?’

  ‘I don’t know, about a week ago.’ I like not having an FBI-appointed babysitter. It means I can lie as much as I want.

  Austin scrunches a napkin into a ball. Her cheeks look deliciously puffy—I shut my eyes and exhale slowly. I’ve eaten only recently, but like any addiction, feeding the craving only makes it stronger.

  ‘Weekday, weekend?’ she is saying. ‘What time of day?’

  ‘Mid-afternoon. Weekday. Must have been Friday. When did he go missing?’

  ‘Just before that,’ she says. ‘He didn’t come to school on Thursday.’

  I rescued Cameron about one o’clock Thursday morning. If it’s the same kidnapper, he must have gone hunting for a replacement pretty much as soon as he discovered Cameron was gone. He probably grabbed Robert from the bus stop on his way to school.

  ‘How do you know him?’ I ask.

  ‘I’m his girlfriend.’

  ‘How long have you been together?’

  ‘What’s that got to do with anything?’

  I shrug. ‘It could show how likely he is to run off without telling you.’

  Her face goes cherry-red. ‘Two years,’ she says. Like a challenge.

  Always be suspicious of round numbers, Mrs Radfield once told me. They’re usually made up.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘How long have you really been going out with him?’

  She looks away. ‘Fine—almost three months. But I know him, all right? I know everything about him.’

  ‘What does he do on school nights?’

  ‘Jujitsu on Mondays and Wednesdays. Bass lessons on Fridays.’

  I’d like to push her further, but she already looks suspicious that I’m asking so many questions. ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘You got a better picture of him?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Just the one from the poster, but I have it in colour.’

  ‘Got it with you? On your phone, maybe?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who are his other friends?’

  Her eyes narrow. ‘Why?’

  ‘They might have a better picture.’

  She shrugs. ‘He’s popular. He gets along with everyone. So, you’re not sure it was him that you saw?’

  I’ve learned all I can from this girl. And she’s just handed me an excuse to leave.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘In fact, I’m pretty sure it was somebody else.’

  Then, before the shock can register on her face, I get up and walk out, leaving her to pick up the check.

  I feel bad about it—but this way, she thinks I just used her for a free coffee. She won’t go telling people I was asking about Robert.

  She looks out the window at me. Not angry; hurt and confused, like a kicked dog. But she’ll cheer up when I find him.

  School is done for the day, so I can’t track down any of Robert’s friends. And I have no way of knowing where he gets his bass lessons, so my first stop would be his jujitsu class. There can’t be many of them in this town, right?

  Wrong. It takes me almost half an hour to find a payphone—there aren’t many around these days—and the phone book inside lists a dozen gyms which offer jujitsu classes. It would take days to go to each one pretending to know Robert, asking if anyone is close to him, and questioning them if they are. But I can’t just call and ask if Robert trained there. Gyms clam up when someone asks about that, same as any other private institution…

  Unless they’re talking to a cop.

  I put a quarter in the payphone and dial Thistle. Her phone rings twice, and then I hang up. The quarter jingles into the change box, and I put it back in my pocket.

  The phone booth smells like piss. It reminds me of the youth shelters I used to hang around in, where pregnant girls would come to cry and drunks would shit on the bathroom floor.

  I only have to wait a few seconds before the payphone rings. I answer it. ‘Thistle, it’s Blake.’

  ‘Calling me and hanging up? Creepy,’ she says, but she doesn’t sound like she means it.

  ‘Didn’t have much change,’ I say. ‘Listen, I need a favour.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘The missing kid’s name is Robert Shea. He does jujitsu on Mondays and Wednesdays, and I want to find out where.’

  ‘There can’t be that many gyms that—’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but there’s at least twelve. I was thinking you could maybe call them, ask for a membership list.’

  ‘Under what pretext?’

  I shrug. ‘Whatever. Surveying for new recruits?’

  ‘Okay, I’ll work that bit out on my own. But you gotta do something for me.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Let me take you out to dinner sometime,’ she says.

  I hesitate. I can just hear her soft, quiet breaths.

  ‘To congratulate you for finding Cameron,’ she says. ‘And hopefully Robert by then.’

  I don’t like giving people too many opportunities to work out my secrets. The less time I spend with Thistle, the safer I am. But…

  ‘Come on,’ she says, sounding almost nervous. ‘You look like you could use a decent meal.’

  And I’m thinking, You got no idea.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I’d like that. You choose the place.’

  ‘Great. Day after tomorrow? I’ll call you when I’ve made a reservation.’

  ‘Or if you’ve found Robert’s gym.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘One more thing—officially, this isn’t a case. I’m not supposed to be working on it.’

  ‘My lips are sealed,’ she says.

  •

  I open my front door to find a fist-sized hole in the living room wall. John Johnson is staring out the window with an old Colt .45 clenched in his hand. His knuckles are bleeding, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

  Most people who take AAS, anabolic-androgenic steroids, do it because they want to look like Schwarzenegger. But a few people—the kind who buy from my roommate—jus
t like the high. It makes you feel like a superhero, like you could just pick up a car and chuck it over a house if you wanted to.

  AAS is basically fake testosterone. In small doses it makes you bigger, stronger, hairier. Your voice gets deeper. But take too much, and the dark side of masculinity starts to appear. You start to get hostile, paranoid, violent. They call it roid rage, and this is what it looks like. It also makes your balls shrink, which just makes you even more angry and paranoid.

  Johnson drips on the carpet, the blood blossoming into a rosy stain on the floor.

  ‘Tim,’ he says. ‘Where the fuck have you been?’

  Whatever I say, he’ll find some reason to get mad about it. But ignoring him will piss him off even more. I decide to give him the least possible ammunition.

  ‘Working,’ I say.

  ‘Well, while you were out working, guess who came by?’ He pauses, apparently expecting me to know.

  ‘The cops?’

  His head whips around so fast I’m surprised his neck doesn’t snap. ‘Cops? You’ve seen cops hanging round here?’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Sorry, just guessing.’

  ‘Why would you guess cops?’ he snarls. Veins bulge in his arms.

  ‘What? No, man, I said “Cox”. You know, Dudley Cox? From college?’

  There’s no such person, and people with roid rage are easily confused. Just as I’d hoped, he rewinds the conversation back to before I made my clumsy guess. ‘Patrick,’ he says. He turns back to the window. ‘Fucking Patrick was here.’

  I have no idea who Patrick is. ‘Shit,’ I say noncommittally.

  He says nothing. Then, just as I’m retreating towards my room: ‘What the hell is that in the freezer?’

  Damn it. He must have unwrapped the Witch Doctor. Fortunately, not much of him is left. I’ve eaten the face and the chest, and gnawed the flesh off the hands, feet and one of the arms. I put his digestive tract and his brain down the garbage disposal—those parts are poisonous.

  ‘It’s bear,’ I say. ‘Don’t tell anyone. They’re endangered.’

  He looks impressed. ‘You killed a bear?’

  I shake my head. ‘Not me. My uncle. He got off a lucky shot, then wasn’t sure what to do with the body. Asked if I wanted it. You want to try some?’

  He wrinkles his nose. ‘Bear meat? No thanks.’

  He’ll swallow pills which have been cut with powdered acid, but he won’t try bear meat. More for me. I go into my room and close the door, wondering where I can hide my next victim.

  CHAPTER 11

  I am brown. I have a head and a tail but no body. What am I?

  Five years ago, I peered through the window of a clothes store and saw a living skeleton. He wore paint-stained slacks and gloves that were leopard-spotted with holes. His skin was cracked by the heat like an old sidewalk, and his eyes were swollen with hunger. His body was wasting precious energy to grow a tangled beard.

  The man turned out to be my reflection in the window.

  I hadn’t eaten since last Friday, when I found a stack of pizza boxes beside a dumpster. No pizza in them, but strips of cheese, ketchup smudges, a few bacon chips. My body was already eating itself. It had finished the fat and started on the muscle, desperate to feed my heart and brain. I was slightly less hungry than I had been yesterday, and I could still think clearly enough to know this was a bad sign. My stomach was shrivelling up, leaving less empty space to ache with. My breath had gone bad like old milk.

  When the clothes shop closed I drifted to the nearest cross-street, looking for somewhere with more pedestrians. But foot-traffic was rare in this part of Houston at this time of night. I was shivering even though it was the middle of summer and I had a dirty sleeping-bag. You’re much more likely to catch the flu when you’re starving.

  ‘Spare change?’ I held out my cup as a woman approached. ‘Please.’

  The woman kept her eyes straight ahead, hands jammed in her pockets, sparkling heels striking the pavement like a ticking clock. Perhaps she was a sex worker—one of Charlie Warner’s brothels was just around the corner. Then again, she might just have been lost. Soon she was gone, and the street was empty again but for the wind and me.

  Sometimes, when you have nowhere to live and nothing to eat, you start to wonder if you’re dead. Maybe when you slept on that bench you never woke up. The cops took your body away in the night, and now you’re just a ghost, haunting a street corner, asking for change from people who can’t see or hear you. Homeless people talk to themselves because nobody else will.

  But tonight, the hunger didn’t let me believe I was dead. A ghost wouldn’t feel this much pain.

  I’d counted the pennies and nickels in my cup so many times I could tell them all apart by their scratches and stains. Only a dollar and twenty-nine cents, after two days. Yesterday, nine people told me to get a job. Like I hadn’t thought of that. Like I had chosen to starve myself, out of laziness. Like anyone would ever hire a homeless guy who looked and smelled like I did.

  Just one more quarter would be enough for a burger at the Jack in the Box two blocks over.

  Somebody else appeared further up the street, headed my way. ‘Spare change?’ I asked, though the guy didn’t look the type to give anything. His teeth were chipped, his shirt grimy, his shoes peeling—only a couple of rungs above me on the poverty ladder, so he probably couldn’t afford to give much. But he didn’t look away or cross to the other side of the street. Sometimes the poor folk were the most sympathetic.

  He approached me, reached into his pocket, and pulled out a 9mm Luger.

  ‘Hand it over,’ he said.

  More confused than scared, I said, ‘Hand what over?’ I didn’t own anything.

  His voice was quiet. ‘The cup.’

  I looked around. No sign of anyone else coming. Nothing and no one to stop him taking whatever he wanted.

  ‘Come on, man,’ I said. ‘I’m starving.’

  ‘You don’t think I’ll shoot you?’ he said. He pressed the barrel to my forehead. When I was a kid, I used to play a game where I’d push a penny against that exact spot, let go, and see how far I could run before it fell off.

  ‘I will fuck you up,’ he was saying. ‘I will blow your brains out if you don’t give me that fucking cup.’

  I looked down at the dollar and twenty-nine cents I’d collected.

  He screamed at me, ‘Fucking hand it over, asshole!’

  I pushed the gun aside and lunged at him. The gun went off next to my ear as I chomped down on his throat.

  He was a human firehose—the blood just sprayed out of him, covering us both. His hands fumbled at my chest like those of a clumsy lover. Just one bite and the fight was already draining out of him, his shocked eyes getting that blank emptiness that only comes with death. The blood slowed to a trickle as he staggered and fell into the puddle where he lay still among the scattered coins.

  I snatched up his gun and pointed it at him, fighting to keep the barrel steady. After a minute, I crept closer and prodded his shoulder with my foot. He moved like a sack of beans.

  It didn’t feel real. Even as I stared down at the body, I wasn’t sure it was there. Because if it was, then I was a killer.

  Killers were bad people. And I was just a decent guy down on his luck. Wasn’t I?

  ‘What the fuck?’

  I whirled around to see another man pointing a gun at me—this one bigger and better dressed than the mugger. He looked at the dead man’s ripped throat, and then at the blood dribbling down my chin. His eyes were bulging like he was in space without a helmet.

  ‘Don’t move,’ he said. ‘Don’t…holy shit. Don’t move.’

  I didn’t. I’m not sure I could have if I wanted to. A fugue of sensations swept over me, the street unnaturally bright and loud.

  The big man, recovering from the shock, said, ‘Turn around. Get on your knees and interlace your fingers behind your head.’

  I didn’t. My eyes drifted back down to the dead man.
I was still so hungry.

  ‘Turn around,’ the big guy said again, edging closer. Droplets of sweat were weaving down through his sideburns.

  But I couldn’t stop looking at all the delicious redness.

  My nose exploded across my face as the big man pistol-whipped me. I fell backwards, the world spinning like it was on a tilt-a-whirl, but before he could grab me, I pointed the mugger’s gun at him.

  ‘Back off,’ I roared.

  He stepped back, but kept his pistol trained on my head.

  ‘Drop the gun,’ he said.

  ‘No,’ I replied.

  There was a pause.

  I didn’t want to hurt him. But if I lowered the 9mm, he could shoot me without fear of me shooting back.

  When he opened his mouth, things got much worse.

  ‘I’m arresting you under suspicion of first-degree murder,’ he said. ‘You have the right to remain silent. You have the right to an attorney. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be provided for you by the state. Do you understand these rights as I have read them to you?’

  ‘You’re no cop,’ I said. But he had spoken quickly enough to have said those words hundreds of times before.

  ‘I fucking am. Put the gun down.’

  ‘Let’s see your badge.’

  He reached into his pocket, slowly, and pulled out a cell phone.

  ‘If you are a cop,’ I said, ‘then you really don’t want to make that call.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said, and dialled with his thumb.

  The words tumbled from my mouth. ‘You’re not in uniform. You’re off-duty. When your bosses ask what you were doing without your badge or your cuffs, half a block from the busiest brothel in Houston, what are you going to say?’

  ‘I’m thinking they’ll be more interested in you, somehow.’ But he didn’t hit the call button. Prostitution is illegal in Texas.

  ‘What about your wife? Will she be more interested in me?’

  It was a lucky guess. He wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but married men usually don’t when they hire sex workers.

  ‘I took a drive,’ he said. ‘It’s a free country.’