Hangman

by Jack Heath

The house is a junk heap. The fence has been broken and mended in so many places that now it’s made out of five different kinds of wood. The windows look like frosted glass, but they’re not—that’s just cobwebs. A rusty peg is nailed into the front lawn, like maybe a dog was tied up there once.

  I drive past and leave the Chevy a block away. Parking a stolen car outside the FBI field office is one thing. Leaving it right outside a suspect’s house during a police search is quite another. Cops will be running the plates of any car left nearby.

  I jog back to the house, step onto the rickety wooden porch and knock on the door.

  ‘Timothy Blake,’ I yell. ‘Luzhin sent me.’

  The door opens to reveal a woman in a white plastic suit that covers everything except her face and hands, which are gloved. It even covers her shoes. She looks like a giant baby in a onesie.

  ‘You can’t come in like that,’ she says, and closes the door.

  I’m just about to knock again when she opens it and hands me a suit like the one she’s wearing. I step into it and start pulling it up over my legs.

  ‘Can I keep this?’

  ‘Why?’

  I shrug. ‘It’s cool.’ It’d be better than my raincoat.

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘We don’t have the funding for replacements. I’m going to need it back. You can keep these, though.’ She hands me a pair of latex gloves.

  ‘Great.’

  She steps aside, and I enter the house.

  The inside isn’t much of an improvement on the front. Nails protrude from the ceiling. The drafts have swept mouse droppings into crannies between bookshelves and walls. The shelves have no books on them—just shoe-boxes and almost-empty coffee mugs.

  ‘You find anything yet?’ I ask the woman.

  ‘Yep. Dust. Lots and lots of dust.’

  She looks stressed. It’s probably harder to catalogue a dirty house than a clean one.

  ‘Anything that might tell you where he’s taken his victims?’

  ‘All I can tell you is that it’s not here. No blood spatter, no powder residue.’

  ‘What about wear and tear on the pipes? Anybody been chained to them?’

  ‘Nope. Just dust.’

  She walks away into another room, where I can hear cameras clicking and low voices.

  I walk in the other direction, up the hallway to the two bedrooms. One has a bed that isn’t much more than a stretcher and a lowboy with an ashtray on it. A mousetrap waits under the bed. No bait.

  I open the top drawer of the lowboy and find two pairs of jeans and three T-shirts. The labels make them about the right size for the guy I saw stealing the ransom money.

  In the second drawer I find a woollen coat and a hoodie. We can get Philip Hall’s DNA from these, unless he washed them thoroughly. Judging by the rest of the house, he probably didn’t.

  The other bedroom has been converted into an office, sort of. There’s a plastic table covered with papers in the corner, next to a swivel chair with a missing wheel that looks like third-hand government surplus.

  I start sifting through the papers. A property deed for the house, some electricity and gas bills, a bank statement. The statement has been used to flatten a spider.

  ‘Be quick with them.’ The woman has sneaked up on me again. ‘We need to take them away.’

  ‘Any reference to Cameron Hall or Robert Shea in them?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The victims.’

  ‘Oh. We don’t get told about the crimes. They send us a memo with the address, and we come in and turn the place upside down. But I don’t remember seeing those names anywhere.’

  I grunt. I don’t see them either, but something has caught my eye: another property deed. The address matches the warehouse where I found Cameron.

  I hold it up. ‘Make sure Luzhin sees this.’

  ‘Sure,’ the woman says, but I can tell what she’s thinking: Don’t tell me how to do my job.

  ‘Seriously,’ I say. ‘Out of all the evidence you got so far, this is the most important.’

  ‘I heard you,’ she says. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Either she will or she won’t—no point repeating myself. I go out to the living room, where a CSI tech is taking pictures while another scribbles on the labels of a sheaf of Ziploc bags.

  A single wooden chair sits at an angle beside a dining table with an old TV on it. The only other furniture is a beanbag, but not much else would fit.

  The room is joined to a kitchen, if you can call it that. There’s kitchens, there’s kitchenettes, and then there’s this. It’s a stove, a sink, and about two square feet of bench space.

  ‘Find anything good?’ I ask.

  The photographer ignores me. The bagger says, ‘That’s for someone else to decide.’

  ‘Have you run the black light over everything yet?’

  ‘Yep. Nothing.’

  Interesting. Philip Hall can’t go back to the warehouse, but he isn’t keeping his victims here either. Only two property deeds. Where else could he have taken them?

  ‘Do we know what kind of car Philip Hall drives?’

  ‘Who?’ the woman asks.

  I can’t believe this. ‘The guy whose house you’re in.’

  ‘Like I said, we just get the addresses. I don’t know about his car, I don’t know about his victims, I don’t know what his favourite kind of cereal is. It’s not like the bullshit you see on TV—we don’t solve crimes, we just collect data. Okay?’

  ‘Okay. So I guess that data doesn’t include the tyre tracks in the driveway.’

  The techs look at one another.

  ‘We’re getting to that,’ the photographer says.

  ‘Glad to hear it.’ I peel off my gloves as I walk to the front door, and throw them onto the porch. I leave my plastic suit in a pile and head back out to the car.

  I look down as I pass the driveway. Thick tracks. Big tyres. I’m thinking Philip Hall has a van. Windowless. Probably white. A Dodge Sprinter, maybe, with a turbodiesel engine and room for three thousand pounds in cargo. Plenty of space for the three Sheas, if they’re still alive.

  Maybe I should go back inside and call Luzhin, tell him my theory. But I didn’t see a landline in the house, and those CSI techs didn’t seem likely to lend me a cell phone—

  A thought almost trips me over as I walk back towards my car. Yesterday I called Luzhin from Cameron’s house. Why didn’t the bug Vasquez planted record the conversation?

  He must have installed it wrong. But I’ve never known Vasquez to make a mistake.

  The puzzle pieces rotate in my head, slotting into empty spaces, popping back out when they don’t fit. I’m so preoccupied that I don’t notice the cop standing next to my stolen Chevy until I’m too close to turn away.

  He’s overweight, balding. Somewhere in his late thirties. What looks like a G17 on his hip—one of the two million Glock pistols that sit in glove compartments and in shoe-boxes on top shelves of closets and in police armouries all over the world, capable of shooting nine-millimetre Parabellums at twelve hundred feet per second.

  He’s levering open the trunk of my car.

  This is not standard procedure. You see a suspicious car, you run the plates. If it comes back as stolen, you call a tow truck. You don’t break into the trunk unless you’ve had a tip-off that something is inside.

  That tip-off can only have come from someone who had a reason to be nearby and saw me arrive. Someone who knows what I look like and has reason to sabotage my investigation. Someone like Philip Hall.

  Just as I’m wondering why he would tell the cops to search my car, the trunk pops open.

  The cop yelps and stumbles backwards. The sour fumes of death spill out of the trunk. Flies materialise out of nowhere, buzzing in ever-tightening spirals towards the body inside.

  I get a quick glimpse—enough to see that the dead man’s T-shirt is soaked with blood, his chest slashed to ribbons but his face intact. He stares at me sadly. I don’t recognise him.
>
  I can’t help but step closer. I’m just another fly, eager to take advantage of someone else’s bad luck.

  The cop sees me staring at the body. Not sickened, not horrified—hungry.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, reaching for his gun. ‘Hey, you!’

  His voice is like a defibrillator, shocking me back to consciousness. My brain switches on, and I realise how much trouble I’m in. I waste a split second wondering if I can convince him that I’m just a rubberneck who has nothing to do with the car or the body.

  Then I turn and run.

  I have a head start of about ten yards. The Glock’s effective range is more like fifty. But this is a residential area, with plenty of cover. I swerve towards one of the houses before he can squeeze off a shot.

  My feet slap against the driveway. A chain-link gate separates it from the backyard—I jump over it like an Olympic hurdler. Hopefully I’m in better shape than the cop is.

  He’s puffing into a radio behind me, ‘Ten ninety-six, we got a ten ninety-six, over.’ He’s requesting backup. If I don’t lose him soon, I’ll get pincered.

  The backyard has a small aluminium shed, which I quickly dismiss as a hiding place because of the padlock on the door. Instead I run to the hedge at the rear of the property and hurl myself into it. The branches scrape at my cheeks and eyelids as I climb over the picket fence buried within it.

  Another backyard. Scraggly garden. Swimming pool barely larger than a spa, covered by a tarpaulin. No chlorine smell, which usually means salted water.

  The cop will expect me to go right, along the path. Instead I go left, hop up onto the retaining wall, and leap towards the high fence. Splinters dig into my palms as I scramble over it and drop onto the grass on the other side.

  I crouch silently for a moment. The cop was still behind the hedge when I climbed over here, so he didn’t see me do it. But if I move, he’ll hear me and be back on my trail.

  Over the pounding of my heart, I can just make out the sound of his shoes clacking against the path. ‘Goddamn it, where are you?’ Can’t tell if he’s talking to me or his backup. But he’s moving further away.

  A dog barks. I turn my head to see a huge brown poodle bounding towards me, teeth bared. Shit. Even if I don’t get maimed, the cop’s likely to hear the racket.

  The worst thing to do when a dog attacks is run away, even when there isn’t a cop waiting with handcuffs at the ready. Dogs can run at thirty miles an hour. Even Olympic sprinters can’t match that.

  Instead, I move towards the dog, trying to confuse it, scare it, make it think I’m bigger and scarier than I am.

  It doesn’t work. The poodle is an eighty-pound monster, nothing but muscle and adrenaline. I’m running straight at it, making the fiercest face I can, but it just runs faster, and soon it’s leaping through the air, flying at me, jaws first.

  Fending off a stray dog was one of the first skills I learned when I was homeless. In a way, it’s easier than fighting a man—a dog’s only weapon is its teeth.

  But it’s like chess. I have to sacrifice something to win.

  I hold up my forearm, and the poodle clamps onto it with its fangs. It’s like sticking my arm into a rosebush filled with hornets. My blood leaks into the poodle’s mouth, and for a moment, it thinks it’s won.

  Then I shove my arm forwards, choking it.

  At this point, the dog has a choice—let go, or asphyxiate. Most dogs are too dumb to give up, and this one is no exception. It whines as I push it backwards, eyes rolling in terror. Saliva gurgles in its windpipe. Its legs are quivering.

  I don’t want to kill the poodle. I don’t even want it unconscious. So I curl my free hand into a fist and belt it in the side of the head, momentarily stunning it. Its jaws spring open and it staggers drunkenly sideways.

  I run for the brick wall at the far end of the yard. I’ve reached it by the time the dog starts barking again—not at me, this time, but at the cop, who’s climbing the fence. I clamber over the wall and sacrifice a precious second looking back.

  The cop is halfway over the fence, but he’s stopped. The dog is snarling and snapping at his heel. Unlike me, his life isn’t on the line, just his pay cheque.

  I’ve seen enough. I keep running, and running, and running. Soon I’m in someone’s driveway, and then I’m out on another road again.

  I pass an open garage. No one inside. I have no tools to steal the car, but a bicycle leans against the cinder-block wall. I run in, snatch it up, and carry it back onto the road. Then I jump on and pedal my ass off. Soon I’m riding hands-free so I can squeeze the bite on my arm, stemming the blood flow.

  Five minutes later a patrol car zooms past in the opposite direction, sirens shrieking. I’m outside the search radius.

  But that cop knows what I look like. He knows what car I was driving. He knows I’m wounded, and he can get DNA from the blood I left on the fence. It won’t take his colleagues long to track me down.

  CHAPTER 18

  A man takes his son to a doctor. The doctor says, ‘I cannot treat this boy—he is my son.’ How is this possible?

  By the time I get back to my house, the bleeding has almost stopped, but my hand is stuck to my forearm. It’s like peeling off a giant bandaid when I remove it so I can get to my keys.

  I leave blood on the handle when I open the door, and on the deadlocks when I close it again. I go into the bathroom, flick on the light, twist the faucet and listen to the hot-water tank rattle as it heats up. When the water is warm enough, I stick my arm under it and rinse the wound.

  The punctures are narrow enough to pinch closed, and they’re not deep enough to reveal the yellowish fatty tissue. No need for stitches or staples. I lather my hands up with soap and start rubbing it into the holes in my arm. It burns as I push it in.

  You’re much better off getting bitten by a dog than by a person, I tell myself. The bacteria that lives in a dog’s mouth is mostly the kind that doesn’t affect humans. I’m sure I read that somewhere.

  Once I’m done washing the wound, I check in the cabinet for some gauze. There’s none.

  I go to the line, where my other shirt was hung out to dry yesterday. It’s probably the cleanest bit of fabric in the house, so I tear off the sleeve and pull it over my arm.

  It’s too loose. I get the stapler from my roommate’s room—he used to use it for sealing Ziploc bags, so he could be sure they hadn’t been opened. I pull the severed sleeve tight around my forearm and staple the fold shut. Then I jiggle my arm around, checking that the makeshift bandage doesn’t move. Good enough.

  I rummage through my roommate’s wardrobe until I find a suitably generic sweater. Grey fabric, thin. It fits okay.

  I wish Johnson had left some antibiotics behind, but I’ve looked through all his things—his filing cabinet, his address book, his drugs—and found nothing useful.

  Right now, the cops will be scraping my blood off the fence and my hair off the headrest in the car. Soon they’ll be searching databases for my DNA. I’ve been careful, so I’m hoping they won’t find any matches. But you can only eat so many people before someone notices. Maybe I left a trace somewhere. Maybe some cop has been hunting me for years, and this is his big break.

  I wiped down the steering wheel, the stick shift and the handle before I got out of the car. I always do. But they might still get lucky with a partial print or two. Those will match my civilian consultant file at the FBI.

  I’m guessing that was Robert Shea’s adoptive father in the trunk of my car. By dumping it there, Philip Hall has put me in the frame for Robert’s disappearance, and therefore Cameron’s abduction. No one saw Philip Hall abduct me from my home. No one saw his car as he took me to the warehouse where Cameron was imprisoned. The cops saw another man take the bag of cash outside the Walmart, but they’ll say he was my accomplice. And Philip Hall doesn’t know this, but when forensics search my house, they’ll find human remains. I’ll get the needle, and Philip will go free.

  But it will ta
ke them three days to get the results from the print and DNA search. If I can find Philip Hall, Robert Shea and his adoptive mother before then, the cops will stop circling me. Luzhin can use his paperwork wizardry to keep me in the clear.

  First things first. The cop could provide a decent description of me to a sketch artist. I need a makeover.

  I take a pair of scissors from the kitchen, return to the bathroom mirror and start hacking off my hair. Thick clumps fall between the blood droplets on the floor. It looks like a cat attacked a bird in here.

  I consider going all the way to the skin, but decide it’s not a good idea. Short hair just means a haircut. If I go bald, those who know me might wonder why.

  I remove a bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the cupboard under the sink, squeeze my eyes shut and pour some over my scalp. When it starts to burn, I splash water on my hair and rub it with soapy hands until the peroxide is gone.

  I towel my head dry and look in the mirror again. My hair’s a little lighter, but not so much that you’d assume I’d bleached it. Perfect. If this cannibal-detective thing doesn’t work out, I could become a hairdresser.

  Three days to find Philip Hall. I have no idea where he is. There’s someone who might be able to help, but it’s risky. I might get killed just for asking.

  •

  I’m waiting at a bus stop, sweating under the sun. If it were summer, you’d be able to smell the asphalt. One time I saw some out-of-towners—cameras on straps around their necks, brand-new souvenir T-shirts with the Texas Longhorns logo—standing around a local woman as she poured some bottled pancake mix onto the sidewalk, just to show them how it hissed and bubbled. I hung around long enough to eat the pancake after they’d gone, closing my eyes and trying to imagine the grit was cracked pepper.

  Lobbyists for the auto industry have ensured that buses are rare in Houston, and not cheap. But the cops will be looking at all car thefts near the scene of my almost-arrest. If I steal some wheels now, I’ll have to ditch them again almost straight away.

  A bus squeaks to a halt by the kerb, and I get on. The driver is a male forty-something who looks like a sixty-something. Like me, he has aged in dog years. I feed a couple of my roommate’s bills into the ticket machine, and it slurps them up.