Hangman

by Jack Heath

  She nods, and I realise that her offer wasn’t genuine. If I’d said yes, she might have thought I killed John Johnson to get his job, or at least his stash. I inadvertently passed the test.

  ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘I’ll ask around about Philip Hall in exchange for everything you know about the guys who took your roommate. Deal?’

  ‘Deal,’ I say.

  She holds out her hand to shake—and then withdraws it. ‘I’m a woman of my word,’ she says. ‘This is your last chance to back out. You better take it, if you have nothing good to give me. Or else there will be hell to pay. Got that?’

  I hold out my hand. She shakes it.

  Her second-in-command, the bearded guy, speaks. ‘I should get started, I guess.’

  ‘You should,’ Warner says. ‘Call me when you’ve found Philip Hall.’

  He leaves, and she turns back to me. ‘Tell me what you know.’

  ‘There were two of them,’ I say. ‘Male. Both in grey suits. One about a hundred seventy pounds and six-one, Caucasian, black hair. The other only five-eleven, but more like a hundred eighty pounds. Also Caucasian, but with brown hair and a silver stud in his right ear. They drove a white 1983 Chevrolet Malibu.’

  This sounds like a lot of information, but it’s not. Those are common heights and weights, which is why I chose them. But Warner will want something more concrete. ‘You got a pen?’ I ask.

  She’s already taking one from her desk. ‘Go ahead.’

  I give her the plate numbers of the car I stole—the one with the body in the boot. But I give her the numbers it had before I switched the plates. That way, when she gets her mole inside the police to look it up, she’ll discover the car was reported stolen days before John Johnson went missing, giving my story some credibility.

  ‘That all you got?’ she says.

  ‘Sorry. I didn’t hear anything they said, and I didn’t follow the car.’

  ‘Your roommate—he go with them willingly?’

  ‘That’s what it looked like. Maybe he thought they worked for you.’

  ‘Maybe. Maybe not.’ She looks at her watch. ‘I have another appointment.’

  Before I realise what this means, the black bag covers my head again. Someone has crept up behind me.

  ‘Thanks for your help,’ I say as someone hauls me out the door.

  •

  When I’m in the car again, I ask the driver if he can drop me off at my house rather than taking me back to the Noir. He or she doesn’t reply, so it’s not until I feel the vehicle come to a stop twenty minutes later and the bag is pulled off my head that I realise I’m at home.

  The other passenger unlocks the door and uncuffs me. I’ve barely climbed out onto the kerb before the car zooms off into the night.

  I take a deep, shaky breath. I’m not dead. But I feel like Adam, right after taking a bite from the snake’s apple.

  I unlock my front door, step inside, and walk straight over to the telephone. I start dialling Luzhin, and then change my mind and call Thistle instead.

  I am expecting her answering machine, but she picks up on the second ring. ‘Thistle.’

  ‘I have an anonymous tip for you,’ I say.

  ‘Blake? Is that you?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be very anonymous if I told you, would it?’

  She laughs. ‘I guess not. What can I do for you?’

  ‘You got a pen?’

  ‘Sure.’

  I give her the same licence plate number I gave Warner. ‘Sometime within the next couple of days, someone is going to search the police database for those numbers. That someone is working for Charlie Warner.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Nope.’

  Her voice goes serious. ‘How could you possibly know that?’

  ‘Officially, I don’t know it, because knowing it could get me killed. That’s why this is an anonymous tip. And it’s why you’ll have to get some other evidence against the mole before charging them.’

  ‘Got it. Are you okay?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because people who run into Charlie Warner tend to wind up feeding alligators.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ I say. ‘Just find that mole.’

  ‘Sure thing. Call me if there’s anything else you need.’

  I hang up. I’ve just framed a non-existent drug lord for my roommate’s murder, exposed a mole in the police force and arranged for the kidnapper of two teenage boys and their families to be tracked down.

  All things considered, not a bad night out.

  •

  The next afternoon, I find Maurice Vasquez at the field office hunched over a transcript, scribbling on it with a ballpoint pen.

  ‘Goddamn typists,’ he says. ‘Can’t spell for shit. How hard is it to work out an apostrophe?’

  ‘I’d have thought grammar would be the least of your worries,’ I say.

  ‘Wrong. A misplaced apostrophe can change the whole meaning of a sentence. Sometimes it’s enough for a defence attorney to get reasonable doubt.’ He looks up. ‘Did you want something?’

  ‘That bug I was asking about. You sure you installed it right?’

  ‘I didn’t install it. But it was hooked up in all the right places. Why?’

  If it wasn’t Vasquez, that makes mechanical failure a whole lot more likely. ‘Luzhin said he told you to install it.’

  ‘He did. But one of the other techs got around to it first.’

  ‘Do you know which one?’

  He sighs. ‘No. I just opened the phone, found the bug already inside, checked it was connected properly, and closed it again. Why?’

  A flame is taking hold in my stomach. ‘No reason,’ I say. ‘Just seems weird, days and days of recorded silence.’

  ‘I know it’s frustrating,’ Vasquez replies, ‘but like I said, I’ll ask Luzhin to call you if I find anything at all. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Later.’

  He picks up his pen and resumes his apostrophe-adding. I walk away, looking for Thistle.

  There haven’t been a lot of lucky breaks in this case, so I’m trying not to get my hopes up. But it’s hard. This feels like the lead that could unravel the whole thing and bring Philip Hall into my reach.

  I find Thistle in her cubicle, typing an email. I knock on the wall to get her attention.

  She spins around in her chair. Her mouth pulls into a smile. ‘Timothy! You’ve changed your hair. I like it.’

  Her lips are the prettiest thing in this world, and for a second I almost forget what I came here to tell her. ‘Thanks. You got a minute?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘I just spoke to Maurice Vasquez. He says that the bug he put in Annette Hall’s phone never recorded anything except silence. But—’

  ‘What happened to your arm?’

  I look down and see that a corner of my makeshift bandage is poking out from under my sleeve.

  ‘Got bit by a dog,’ I say. ‘A poodle, believe it or not.’

  ‘Jesus,’ she says, and then slaps her hand across her mouth, horrified. It takes me a moment to remember that she thinks I’m Catholic.

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ I say.

  ‘Did you go to the doctor?’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘You need antibiotics. If that gets infected—’

  ‘I can’t afford a doctor.’

  I regret the words as soon as I’ve said them. I don’t want Thistle to know how poor I am. But she barely blinks.

  ‘I’ve got a friend who’s an ophthalmologist,’ she says. ‘She owes me a favour.’

  ‘My eyes are fine.’

  ‘She can prescribe something. For free.’

  ‘Fine, sure. Can I speak my piece now?’

  She nods.

  ‘Vasquez says he never installed the bug—he opened the phone and it was already there. He thinks one of the other FBI techs planted it first. I think it was someone else, and that’s why nothing is getting recorded.’

  ‘S
omeone else like who?’

  ‘Like Child Protective Services.’

  ‘You think someone noticed Annette Hall’s racism and called the CPS?’ she says, deadpan.

  This is risky. I have to hint at what I know without explaining how I know it.

  ‘I have a hunch,’ I say. ‘Do you trust me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. No hesitation.

  ‘You remember how weird Jim Epps acted when we talked to him?’

  ‘Cameron’s friend? Yeah.’

  ‘I think he suspected Annette Hall of molesting her son, and I think he—or maybe someone else with similar suspicions—called the CPS. Then I think they got a warrant to bug Cameron’s home.’

  Thistle stares at me. ‘You got any evidence for this?’ she asks finally. ‘It’s a long shot.’

  Not as long as she thinks. ‘Other than a general feeling from Jim, Annette and Cameron,’ I say, ‘I have nothing.’

  ‘Feelings aren’t worth much in court,’ Thistle says, considering the idea. The fingers of her right hand are twitching, as though she’s playing the viola again.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘But if I’m right, then the CPS bug would have got the original call.’

  ‘And we could get the techs on to it.’ Thistle’s eyes have started to sparkle. ‘They could work out where the ransom demand was recorded.’

  ‘I have no official power,’ I say. ‘You’d have to make the call to the CPS.’

  ‘I’ll get a phone number,’ she says. ‘But I doubt it’ll belong to anyone important. We might have to fire escape somebody.’

  I don’t know what that means, but it sounds like she’s on board. ‘No problem.’

  •

  When I worked the grill at McDonald’s as a teenager, there was a vegetarian girl who took orders out the front. It was the manager’s policy to have female staff using the registers and male staff doing the cooking and cleaning. ‘Tits behind the counter,’ he said, more than once. ‘Tits sell burgers.’

  I never spoke to the girl, but that didn’t stop her talking to me, mostly about her pet rabbit. ‘Last night I let Hedges out of her cage,’ she said, grinning, ‘and she ran under my bed. By the time I found her this morning, she’d eaten my diary.’ Or: ‘You know, when she was just a baby, she used to sleep in my shoe?’

  It wasn’t just the rabbit. She’d enquire about other people’s pets too. If someone told her about a kitten attacking a shoelace, she’d laugh and laugh.

  I hadn’t been there long when she quit. Rosy-cheeked, she told us she was going to work full-time for PETA. ‘As an unpaid volunteer,’ she said, ‘at first. But hopefully later they’ll start paying me. And it isn’t about the money, of course.’

  It struck me at the time how different our lives must be if she could afford to increase her hours and reduce her pay cheque. But I didn’t say anything, and then she was gone.

  I kept flipping patties, week after week, watching the meat bubble and hiss. The manager hired a new young woman who kept a blob of gum stuck under the counter and put it in her mouth when he wasn’t watching.

  Fourteen months later, the vegetarian came back as a customer. None of the other staff had been working there long enough to remember her, and she didn’t see me—I just recognised her voice.

  ‘I used to work here,’ she told the man she’d come in with. ‘Before I volunteered at PETA.’

  ‘You were in PETA?’

  She snorted. ‘They had me doing lethal injections on dogs with bad backs and killing mice so they could feed them to snakes and birds. I lasted three weeks.’

  When she got the front of the line, she ordered a quarter pounder.

  This Child Protection Services agent reminds me of her. Not visually—he’s thirty-ish, white and slender, with eyes as dark as gutter puddles. It’s more how he sounds than how he looks.

  ‘I’d like to help,’ he says, as though he’s said those words a thousand times before and means them a little less each time. His voice is thick and hoarse, like he’s been coughing. ‘But I can’t give out the details of ongoing investigations.’

  People join the CPS because they like kids. Then they spend every day taking them away from their parents while they scream and cry. Idealism to nihilism in a few short years.

  ‘We’re not interested in the kid’s personal history,’ Thistle says. ‘Or what it was that made you concerned for his welfare, or who you suspect of doing whatever it is you think they’ve done. We just need to know if you bugged his phone.’

  ‘That would be a detail of an ongoing investigation. I can’t give that information out.’

  ‘To the public, sure. But we’re the FBI.’ Thistle touches the badge on her belt, as if the guy might have forgotten it was there. ‘Anything you tell us stays a secret.’

  My stomach is roaring like the engine room of a cruise ship. The CPS agent wouldn’t make much of a meal, but I want him anyway. I haven’t eaten in too long. John Johnson was a skinny drug addict. Not like those big, soft death row inmates. The hunger is making it hard to focus.

  ‘It’s not about who you are,’ he says. ‘And it’s not about secrets. There are rules, and I have to follow them.’

  ‘Well, we have rules too. They say that if we don’t get an answer today, we come back tomorrow with a subpoena. That subpoena comes with its own set of rules, which says that when we give it to you, you have to drop everything and go looking for the information we need. Not one of your subordinates—you.’

  She looks around the room, at the papers smeared across his desk, the calendar with scribbles on every square. ‘And I’m guessing you’re too busy to want that. You’re also not going to want Cameron Hall’s information spread around any further than it has to be. But requesting subpoenas is a fairly noisy process.’

  ‘I’m sure that won’t be necessary,’ the guy says. ‘If you’ll just give me some contact information—’

  ‘What for?’ I put in. ‘We’re right here.’

  ‘What I mean is, so someone can call you with a solution to the problem.’

  ‘We’re on the clock here,’ Thistle says. ‘There’s a kid missing. We can’t afford to be sitting by the phone.’

  ‘It won’t take long,’ the guy says. ‘I just need to make a few calls.’

  ‘Oh, okay.’ Thistle looks at me. ‘So we’ll just wait outside then?’

  ‘Sure,’ I say.

  We step out onto the blue-green-grey-chequered carpet of the hall and pull the door shut behind us. Under the chatter of the TV hanging from the wall, I can hear an indistinct mumbling as the guy calls his boss.

  It’s the same as calling a phone company, Thistle explained to me in the car on the way here. If you want to talk to the operations manager, the worst thing you can do is ask for them. Whoever picks up the phone will block you, because they know their place: a buffer between the public and anyone important.

  ‘What you gotta do instead,’ Thistle said, ‘is make a request that the person you’re talking to has no power to grant, like a refund. Make enough of a fuss that they’ll be desperate to palm you off onto their superior. It’s a sneaky way to the top—I call it “fire escaping”.’

  ‘It’s taking a while,’ I say. ‘That’s a bad sign.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ Thistle replies. ‘The boss could already be off looking for the answers we need.’

  ‘But we don’t just need to know about the bugged phone. We need to hear the recording.’

  ‘One thing at a time, Scary Tim,’ she says.

  My stomach gurgles. I can still taste Thistle’s lips on mine from the other night. I shut my eyes.

  ‘You okay?’ she asks.

  Before I can reply, a woman with a pearl necklace walks down the corridor towards us. A firm smile is fixed on her round face. ‘Agent Thistle?’ she says. ‘Mr Blake?’

  ‘That would be us,’ Thistle says.

  ‘I’m Georgia Palenna,’ she says. ‘I’m the assistant director. Sorry about the confusion.’

&nbs
p; She seems to be pretending that the guy we’ve been talking to just didn’t understand what we wanted.

  ‘No problem,’ Thistle says, playing along.

  ‘I gather you need approval to see some case notes?’

  ‘Yes: Cameron Hall. You have them?’

  Palenna laughs politely. ‘Not on me. But I can confirm, in confidence, that a listening device was installed in his residence by a CPS operative.’

  Thistle shoots an impressed glance my way, before saying, ‘Thanks. Did it record anything?’

  ‘I’m not aware of its activity. We don’t have enough active devices to justify a twenty-four-hour surveillance team—the recordings are listened to only when the agent in charge of the case checks it.’

  ‘We’re going to need to hear everything that was recorded.’ She’s telling, not asking. Trying to make it impossible for Palenna to say no.

  It doesn’t work. ‘I’m afraid that won’t be possible. That sort of material—’

  ‘Would already be in our possession,’ I say, ‘if you hadn’t stopped the FBI from bugging the phone.’

  ‘The CPS can hardly be held responsible for an FBI agent mistaking a wiretap for one of their own.’

  ‘You can be held responsible for what happens to the kidnapped kid, since sharing the recordings could save him.’

  ‘The bug thing would be embarrassing for the FBI,’ Thistle says. ‘But a dead child would be worse for CPS.’

  ‘For everybody,’ I say.

  ‘Especially the child,’ Thistle adds.

  Palenna’s smile has been replaced by an equally practised look of concern.

  ‘Of course I will do everything I can to help any child,’ she says, ‘within the bounds of the law. It’s the latter part that’s problematic.’

  ‘We are the law,’ Thistle says, as though she’s always wanted to speak those words. ‘Like I told your colleague, I’m happy to get a subpoena—but that wipes out our chance of getting this done quickly and quietly.’

  Palenna looks at us for a long time, and then nods. ‘Wait here.’ She walks away, pulling out her cell and dialling.

  ‘Fire escaping really works,’ I whisper to Thistle.

  ‘I know, right?’

  We watch Palenna talking in the distance, her eyes to the ceiling, one hand on her hip.