Hangman

by Jack Heath

  •

  I dream that I’m in the execution chamber at Huntsville. I’m wearing my school clothes, with their tarnished buttons and patched knees. My upper lip is crusted with snot.

  A severed arm is lying on the gurney, fat and juicy. The wrist is hooked through a handcuff.

  A puddle of blood surrounds the broken elbow joint. The bone glistens like a freshly glazed pastry. I walk over, pick up the arm, and take a bite out of the hand.

  It rears up like an eel, tendons bulging, nails scratching at my eyes. I scream and wrestle with it, tumbling to the floor. It grabs for my throat but gets my jaw instead, and I clamp my teeth down on the fingers. An electric shock stutters through my body as my mouth fills up with blood.

  I jolt awake, and bump my knee on the steering wheel.

  I’m sitting in Warner’s van in the parking lot near Crudup’s house. The engine is off. I had only intended to close my eyes for a minute. It’s still dark. I can’t have slept for long.

  The taste of human flesh is still on my tongue. Too salty to be just part of the dream. I open the door, and the interior light clicks on.

  My left hand is dark and sticky. There are tooth-shaped gouges all over it. I’ve been eating my own hand in my sleep. Moaning, I pull off my shirt and wrap it around my hand. There’s no pain, but I can already feel a tingling as the limb wakes up. It’s going to be agonising in a few minutes.

  I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the rear-view mirror. Blood is crusted around my mouth, my nose is crooked, sawdust is caked in my hair. My cheeks are singed pink from the explosion.

  On the plus side, I no longer look much like the sketch artist’s depiction of me.

  I reach for the key to start the engine. Then I stop. There’s nowhere in the world to go.

  It’s too late to leave Houston. There will be roadblocks on every highway out of town. I risked everything to track down the kidnapper, and I failed.

  Nothing to do but wait for the FBI to find me and lock me up. There’s a certain peace in this. For the first time in days, in months, in years, I don’t have to do anything. I can just sit here, and soon I’ll be in prison. They’ll give me a bed to sleep in and three meals per day, at least until they execute me. They are supposed to give you anything you want for your last meal—I wonder if they’ll let me have one of the other inmates.

  I rub one of the scars on my leg through my jeans with my good hand, out of habit. The playing field behind the group home where I grew up looked lush and soft from a distance, but actually the grass was just tufts of weeds exploding out from between rocks and grit. While playing games, I often fell over onto the stony dirt, and one time I fell hard enough to scrape some skin off my knee. It was a minor wound and would have healed up within a week, except that I kept scratching off the scab before it hardened. Now I’ve got this scar, a daily reminder of my poor impulse control and my constant need to see what’s beneath the surface.

  Spending the rest of my days behind bars is something I can live with. But not knowing where those five people went and who took them, that’s too much to bear.

  Still, it’s not like I have a choice. I’m one guy, wanted by the law, with nothing but a stolen van and a dwindling bundle of cash.

  I consider going to Thistle’s house and waiting for her to come home. But I’d never convince her that I’m innocent—because I’m not.

  I didn’t kill Robert Shea, I’d say. Or Cameron Hall, or their families.

  Then why’d you run? she’ll ask.

  Because I ate a bunch of other people, and I was worried Luzhin was going to reveal it.

  At that point, she’d probably just shoot me.

  As I watch a bat flutter overhead, I think of another conversation with Thistle. One she might be having right now.

  I’ve sealed off all the roads out of town. It’s only a matter of time before we catch him.

  No point, Luzhin will say. He’s long gone.

  But I’m not.

  A guilty man would have fled, but I stayed to try to find the real killer. Luzhin won’t expect that.

  He hates me because he knows I’m a monster. But if I turned up on his doorstep, he might just believe me.

  I start the van and pull out of the lot.

  CHAPTER 22

  Why do you always find me in the last place you look?

  The house is big, but badly maintained. Paint eaten away by the springtime rains. The planks that make up the porch are rotting near the edges, where they weren’t oiled properly. Signs of more recent neglect, too—a bunch of cling-wrapped newspapers buried among the shrubbery.

  The first time Luzhin offered me a condemned man to eat, I drove to the field office and waited for him to leave. Then I followed him home. I crouched in the garden and watched through the window as he greeted his wife and his daughters and started frying schnitzels for their dinner. The next morning, when he left for work and his wife took their kids to school, I broke in and had a look around. The house looked nicer then.

  I don’t slow down as I cruise past in the van. If he sees me coming, he’ll assume I’m here to silence him. Sneaking up on him won’t be easy, but getting to him before he reaches his gun safe is my best chance of survival.

  I turn a corner and park the van in a side street under a big tree, so Luzhin won’t see it if he happens to be upstairs and looks out the window.

  His driveway is empty, but he has a two-car garage and the roller doors are shut. No way to tell if he’s home or not.

  His neighbour, on the other hand, is definitely not around. No lights on in the house, no car in the carport. The mailbox slot is blocked by a soggy wad of junk mail. I run through the carport, climb over the rusty gate leading to the yard, and peep over the fence at Luzhin’s house.

  No lights on there, either. Maybe Luzhin is asleep upstairs—or out looking for me. Probably worrying that someone will catch me before he does, and I’ll spill the beans about our arrangement.

  I clamber over the fence and drop into Luzhin’s yard. The weeds rustle as they cushion my fall. My chewed-up hand is burning, and the dog bite feels almost as bad. Maybe Luzhin will have some alcohol I can pour on my wounds to sterilise them.

  I tiptoe through the darkness, past a rickety shed, up a path of chipped paving stones, all the way to the back door of the house.

  Locked and deadbolted. I have nothing to pick the lock with, and kicking the door in would make too much noise. Luzhin will hear it if he’s home, and the neighbours will hear it if he’s not.

  I go back down the path to the shed. The door is sealed by a fat padlock, but the shed itself is thin aluminium, only bolted to the ground at the corners. I grab a corner of the door and bend it outwards, making a gap just big enough to crawl through.

  The shed holds a few tarpaulins, a neatly folded tent under a layer of dust, and a toolbox in which I find some screwdrivers and pliers and wrenches. These would be useful if the door was only single-locked, but since there are two keyholes, I’ll need a more precise instrument. I take a flat-head screwdriver and close the box.

  As my eyes adjust to the darkness, I see two fishing rods propped up in the corner. Where there are rods, there are hooks—I find them in a small plastic container on the ground. These should do.

  I crawl back out of the shed and head for the back door, twisting one of the hooks into a straight line. I jam the screwdriver into one of the locks and turn it, maintaining pressure, like it’s a torsion wrench. Then I start fiddling with the fish hook, trying to find the pins.

  It would normally take me about nine minutes to pick a lock like this. Tonight it takes almost fifteen, because I’m working in the dark, with a mangled hand, and I’m trying to be completely silent in case Luzhin is inside.

  The second lock clicks, and the door swings open. I find myself in a kitchen, grimy linoleum under my feet. There’s a gas stove, a knife block and a thin filmy curtain hanging over the window.

  In case I need to leave in a hurry, I pull back
the deadbolt before closing the door, so it doesn’t lock behind me. I walk slowly, wary of creaking boards underfoot.

  If Luzhin is here he’s probably upstairs, asleep. Just in case, I examine every shadow as I cross the living room. The couch is splitting at the seams. The TV is small, with an old-fashioned semi-round screen. Probably used for information rather than entertainment; I can imagine Luzhin switching on the news if he heard sirens, but not under many other circumstances.

  A door in the wall must lead to the garage. I try the handle. Locked.

  A soft scuffle from behind me.

  I whirl around to face the stairs. A door is set under the staircase, leading to a cupboard, or maybe a basement. The noise came from in there.

  Slow, silent, I move towards the door. Put my hand on the handle, and my ear to the wood.

  Breathing, fast and ragged. He’s in there.

  The gasp means he already knows I’m here. No chance of sneaking up on him. So I call out, ‘It’s me.’

  No answer.

  ‘Don’t shoot me or anything. Not until you’ve heard what I have to say.’

  The breathing continues. Dark and heavy. For a moment I wonder if he might be keeping a dog down there.

  ‘Hello?’

  Still no answer.

  I slide back the bolt, without pausing to wonder how he got in there if it’s locked from the outside. Slowly, I pull open the door. More stairs are revealed, leading down into the darkness.

  The breathing is louder now. It bounces around the blackness so that it sounds like a hundred lungs rather than just two.

  Again, I say, ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. The door swings closed behind me.

  I step down. Two steps. Three. The shadows are swallowing me up.

  Something hits me in the face, gently. I hiccup with surprise—but it’s just a bead, hanging from a string. A light switch.

  I pull the string, and a neon light clicks on.

  The basement has a concrete floor, brick walls and a low ceiling. Woodworking tools hang on metal hooks. Foam rubber mattresses are propped up against the walls. A gas can stands in the corner. It’s a typical basement—

  Except for the woman. She’s chained to the wall by her raw wrists, a black bag over her head.

  As if in a dream, I walk the rest of the way down the stairs, and the rest of the room is revealed. Four more prisoners are manacled to the other walls, all limp and pale.

  Two adults.

  Two teenage boys.

  CHAPTER 23

  Is a clock that loses a minute per day better than one that has stopped?

  My first thought is that the hooded figures are Luzhin and his family, kept prisoner by a maniac. But his wife and kids left him. I saw her—Tell him not to push for joint custody, she said.

  My second thought is that Luzhin has some kind of sex dungeon. But that doesn’t seem to fit, since everyone is fully clothed, and while I’ve never been to a sex dungeon, I’m pretty sure there would be whips and dildos.

  I pull the hood off the nearest prisoner. Annette Hall gasps through her nose. Tape is stretched over her mouth. Her eyes, twitchy with terror, lock onto mine.

  I stumble backwards. No. This can’t be right.

  Luzhin isn’t the kidnapper. He’s one of the good guys. Determined, brave…

  And willing to let me eat people if it helps close cases.

  I scrunch my eyes shut. It’s impossible. Luzhin was in an FBI van behind the Walmart while the kidnapper was picking up the ransom—

  Or he said he was. But when the kidnapper vanished after I chased him around the corner, Luzhin was already there. He could have just taken off his disguise, thrown it behind the dumpster, and pretended that he’d left the van to give chase.

  But why would he do this?

  ‘Mmmph!’ Annette Hall says.

  ‘Shhhh.’ I need to think.

  I pull the hoods off the other prisoners. Robert Shea, then a kid who looks a bit like him—the real Cameron Hall, I guess—and two people who must be Larry and Celine Shea. The parents give me pleading looks, while the two kids stare at the floor, as if eye contact might trigger a beating.

  If Luzhin is the kidnapper, that would explain how easily a lookalike for Cameron Hall was found. It would have been as simple as typing Male, 14, Caucasian, brown eyes, blond hair into the search fields of the police database. Robert would have come up, because of his sealed juvie record.

  Luzhin doesn’t own a van—but he could easily have gotten one from the police impound. In fact, he could have taken Nigel Boyd’s ambulance. An unconscious person getting loaded into an ambulance is much less suspect than one getting put into a van. He could have borrowed a human kidney from the morgue and reprinted some test results from a different case so it appeared to be a DNA match with Annette Hall’s blood. I never saw the photos he supposedly pulled from Cameron’s social media profiles, but I bet they were actually photos of Robert Shea.

  When Luzhin first gave me the case, I told him Charlie Warner was the kidnapper. He knew she wasn’t, so I guessed that he had someone in her inner circle. Then I saw her inner circle, and none of them looked like a cop. There was no undercover agent. He knew Charlie Warner wasn’t the kidnapper—because he was.

  The doctors found Rohypnol in Cameron’s bloodstream. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you, Blake?

  He knew I’d doped Robert up, because he knew he hadn’t. It all fits.

  Except for one thing. Why? Can his cocaine addiction have got so bad that this is the only way he can finance it? Why not just steal cash from the evidence locker, like the other corrupt agents do?

  Maybe it’s been him, stealing from the evidence locker all this time.

  Annette is staring at me, horror in her gaze.

  No—not at me. Behind me.

  Something whistles through the darkness and slams into the side of my skull. It’s like falling headfirst into a volcano. I plummet to the floor, my ears whining, and look up in time to see Luzhin—two of him, because my eyes won’t focus—raising a baseball bat to strike again.

  His face is the same, yet different. It’s like looking at a statue of him. He looks neither pleased nor horrified to find me down here. He may as well be a robot.

  I throw my hands up to protect my head, but not quick enough. The remaining cartilage in my nose snaps under the blow. My brain quivers like jello under the battering.

  I’m going to die down here. This is the last thought that enters my head before I black out.

  •

  I wake up reluctantly, with the sense that I’ll regret it. My shoulders are in agony, all the ligaments stretched. My face is a mess of tender flesh. My wrists, hot and swollen, are chained to the wall above my head. Now I’m just another of Luzhin’s trophies.

  When I try to breathe, an involuntary groan comes out.

  ‘Quiet.’

  My vision is still a supernova of shattered focus, but I don’t need to see to know who’s talking. His voice is flat. Colder than I’ve ever heard it. All pretence stripped away.

  ‘Why did come here, you stupid son of a bitch?’ he mutters.

  ‘I’m stupid?’ I spit out some blood and mumble through split lips. ‘This whole time I thought the kidnapper was some kind of mastermind. But you’re just making it up as you go along, aren’t you?’

  It’s probably not smart to piss him off. But how much worse could things get? He’s won.

  I can hear him fiddling with some more shackles to go around my ankles. The other prisoners weren’t wearing anything like that. I’m getting special treatment.

  ‘You didn’t think Annette would call the cops,’ I continue. ‘But you needed the money, so you couldn’t return Cameron. Instead, you abducted Robert Shea. You took his parents too, for leverage. But you didn’t know they had a cat, or a would-be girlfriend keeping tabs on him.’

  Luzhin tightens the chains, ignoring me.

  ‘Worse still,’ I say, ‘you didn’t
know Robert Shea had cancer. He’d had a kidney removed the week before. You had to pretend to steal Cameron’s kidney just so no one would realise you’d released the wrong kid. I guess your plan was to make Annette empty out her bank account, now that the case was officially closed and no one was paying attention. But when you saw that I was getting too close, you had to frame Philip Hall, kill him…’

  Annette gasps. She didn’t know Philip was dead.

  ‘…and frame me for his murder,’ I finish. ‘Then kill me too, I guess. Shoot me, and claim I resisted arrest. Now you have six prisoners you don’t know what to do with. All this trouble, just so you can feed your goddamn drug habit.’

  There’s a pause.

  ‘I’ve been sober since the night we met,’ he says.

  Out of everything I just said, that’s the part he objects to. I try to shrug, but with my arms bound above my head, it doesn’t really work.

  ‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Gambling debt, brothel bills, whatever.’

  ‘That money is saving lives.’

  ‘Whose?’

  He just looks at me.

  I remember seeing the van outside the field office, loaded up with expensive out-of-town bodyguards.

  ‘The witnesses,’ I say, finally seeing it. ‘For Charlie Warner’s trial.’

  ‘She kills people, Blake.’ Obsession lights up his eyes. ‘Dozens directly, thousands indirectly. She fed my friend to a fucking alligator. And she has people in every government department. There was no chance of convicting her. The DoJ couldn’t be trusted to protect the witnesses and the jurors. But four million dollars buys some pretty damn good private security.’ He nods to himself, satisfied. ‘Just one conviction, and half the crime in Texas will be wiped out.’

  He picks up a roll of duct tape and peels off a strip.

  ‘I get it,’ I say. ‘You’re insane, but I get it. Except for one thing.’

  He doesn’t even pause. ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Kidnapping, extortion, murder—what makes you any better than Warner?’

  ‘You’re an animal, Blake. I wouldn’t expect you to understand.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘Seven dead,’ he says, ‘to save hundreds. Thousands over the long term. That’s the difference.’ Then he slaps the piece of tape over my mouth, puts the roll back on the shelf, and clomps up the stairs.