I drive past an old miniature golf course that was brand new when my dad took me for the first and only time, when I was a kid. All the shine and color has drained from the signs over the years, the Wild West theme now just looks wild, as weeds and moss gradually pull the signs down into the earth. There are a couple of cars in front, but I can’t see anybody playing through the wire-mesh fence. I still remember vividly Dad and me walking from one hole to the next, miniature water hazards and ramps all encompassed by a miniature
ghost town, writing down our scores with miniature pencils. It was a simpler time back then, I guess. Smaller in a way.
I wonder what my dad would do if he were still free and knew he was being followed. This must have happened to him too, near the end, when the noose tightened. He probably wouldn’t even have felt the pressure.
It takes fifteen minutes to get to my in-laws.’ I pull up in the driveway and the sedan drives past. I get out and knock on the front door but nobody answers. I get my cell phone out and try calling again but still no answer. I walk around the house, through the side gate and into the backyard. I look through the windows for turned-over furniture and blood on the carpet, holding my breath as I move from one window to another, Schroder’s warning coming to life in my imagination—but there’s nothing out of place. I try the door. It’s locked. I head to the garage and put my face against the window, and when I pull back I can see the reflection of the grey sedan pulling up. It sits there with the engine running. I turn toward it. The windows are up and the sun reflects off them so I can’t see inside, not until the passenger-side window is wound down. A pale face with a sunburned nose looks at me from behind a pair of dark sunglasses.
“Eddie Hunter?” he says, and the way he asks it makes me nervous. If these were cops, they’d know who I was. They’d know where I’ve just led them. Reporters would know too.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“We know who killed your wife,” he says, and my body instantly freezes. “For the right price we can tell you.”
“What?”
“Nothing in this world is free,” he says. “I got something here to show you, it’ll prove what I’m saying,” he says.
I take another step forward, a voice in my head yelling at me that this is a mistake, that I’m being lured closer. I take a step sideways, away from the car, and the barrel of a shotgun appears in the open window and fires.
It’s a matter of priorities. If one of the bank tellers was an inside man, they’ll know soon enough. Schroder is confident a series of interviews will get them some answers before the day is out. Hell, maybe the whole thing will be over before Christmas Day even begins.
He drives back to Kingsly’s house with Landry and drops him off. The plan is for Landry to get started on the interviews while Schroder goes back out to the prison. The trip there earlier didn’t net them much. They found medication in Hunter’s cell. The warden said he was given two pills to take every day. Adding up the pills they found suggests he stopped taking his meds the day of the robbery. Instead of flushing them, he was saving them. Maybe, Schroder thinks, Hunter was planning on building a stockpile to take the whole lot at once.
When he gets back to the prison, Theodore Tate is already waiting for him. Tate used to be a cop until a few years ago, when
he turned private investigator, and after both those things he became a criminal. The visiting room is empty except for Schroder and Tate and one prison guard against the far wall, hardly paying any attention. It’s been a few months since he last saw Tate. He hasn’t changed much, except his hair is shorter and he’s lost a bit of weight.
“Thanks for doing this, Tate,” he says, sitting down opposite him.
“I was surprised you called,” Tate says. “I mean, in the beginning I was. I thought you were calling to check up on me, to see how I was doing. It was a surprise, a nice one even. Then it turns out you wanted something.”
“Look, Tate, I’ve been meaning to come and see you for some time now,” he says, and even though he means it, he knows he would never actually have done it. There’s nothing worse than seeing a fellow cop in jail—even if he isn’t a fellow cop anymore. “I just, you know, didn’t get around to it. You know how it is.”
“Actually I don’t. You could educate me. We could swap places and see how it goes.”
“I understand why you’re bitter, but it’s not my fault you’re in here.”
“I realize that. Only sometimes it’s easier if I can blame somebody else except myself. Hell, maybe it’s even therapeutic,” he says, smiling at that last bit. “So—what’s new? How’s Christchurch? Is it still broken?”
“It’s not broken,” Schroder says, and he really believes that. Really, absolutely, almost believes that.
“Yeah, well, I think it’s broken no matter what side of the bars you’re on. So what is it you want, Carl?”
“Your help. You heard about Hunter, right?”
“Everybody heard,” Tate says.
“You heard anything more than that? Like who stabbed him?”
“Nothing. Why?”
“I think he was stabbed because he got hold of some names.”
“What names?”
“I think he was putting together a list of the men who robbed the bank last week.”
“And that got him stabbed?”
“Giving those names to his son got him stabbed,” Schroder answers.
“And you think the son is going to go after these people?”
“I’m pretty sure he already has. One of the robbers was found dead this morning. The victim drove the van. Timing fits perfectly. Dad gives son a name, that guy shows up dead, the next day Dad gets stabbed. The scene this morning was pretty messy. He got killed by somebody who had no idea what they were doing. Whole thing could have been an accident, or a fluke, the way it played out.”
“You think the son is capable of it?”
“You tell me,” Schroder says. “You think it’s possible for a man to kill in revenge for his family?”
“Depends on the man,” Tate says.
“Well, this man has a father who’s a serial killer. His shrink came to see me yesterday. He thinks Jack Hunter suffers from an illness that could be passed to the son. Paranoid schizophrenia—he says it can be hereditary. Says it’s a medical thing. He told me Edward Hunter has the potential to be a real bad guy. I wasn’t so sure, not then—but now I think so.”
“So arrest him.”
“We will, once we have more evidence. Landry tried to bluff him out saying we had a witness, but he didn’t go for it. We have blood, though. That’ll tell us.”
“So where do I fit into this equation of yours?”
“Two different ways. You can find out who stabbed Hunter. That might lead us back to the bank crew. Or maybe you can get some names for us. Hunter managed it, so maybe you can manage it too.”
“Nobody’s going to talk to me.”
“There’s more of a chance they’ll talk to you than to me.”
“So why am I doing this for you? Why stick my neck out like that?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
“For you, maybe. Not for me. My best chance of survival in here
is to keep a low profile, which is damn hard to do when there are others in here I arrested back in the day.”
“There’s a girl in the equation. Edward Hunter has a daughter.”
Tate slowly nods. “And you were waiting to lay that on me, figuring it would work.”
“Did it?”
Tate stands up and Schroder follows suit. “I’ll see what I can find.”
I drop down, the shotgun exploding, and I’m back at the bank all over again, the air-conditioning replaced by real air, the houseplants replaced by bushes and trees, the six men replaced by two men in a car. A hole appears in the garage door about the same time my knees crash into the concrete.
The car door starts to open. I have nowhere to run, I have no idea what to do. But then I realize I’m not alone, I have my monster with me and he knows what to do. We’re already in action. I get up and run forward, the monster leading the way, the monster in full control and now I’m the one along for the ride. We get closer to the car. To me this seems the wrong way to be going, but I’m in no position to argue. A leg comes out of the car and touches the sidewalk: jeans and a black steel-capped boot. I drop down and ram the entire weight of my body into the door, leading with my shoulder, slamming it hard on the leg. The guy inside yells out and the shotgun drops somewhere inside
the car, buying me a couple of seconds. I don’t wait around. I run up the street, crossing behind the car, making it difficult for them to fire on me.
The car hits reverse. The transmission whines loudly as the gap closes. Words of anger spill out the window as the two men swear at each other, a miscommunication passing between them. Maybe the passenger wanted to get out and take another shot, or the driver wanted to hit me with the car in the beginning. I weave across to the opposite sidewalk. The car screeches to a halt. It fishtails so the front turns toward me. The doors fly open and the two men jump out, but the driver has forgotten he’s still wearing his seat belt and he’s pulled back in, his eyes wide in confusion.
The passenger runs around the side of the car and lines up another shot as I dive forward, getting behind a parked car and
bang
, metal is ripped out of the bodywork as I hit the ground. I get up and run, weaving between silver birch trees lining the street, waiting for the next shot, but there isn’t one, only footsteps as they pound the ground behind me.
The houses in the street are all similar, around ten years old, in great condition but a little tired, none of them—thankfully—with any front fences. I race over the front yard and down the side of a house, hitting the side gate with my shoulder, busting the latch holding it closed. I get through and the gate swings back and the top section explodes in a cloud of splinters from the next gunshot. I go left, cutting across the backyard, over the deck and past the french doors and a small sandpit that has bright yellow toy trucks in it. I reach the corner of the house and go left again, back toward the road. This time there’s a fence across, but no gate. I duck into the alcove by the back door. It’s a glass laundry door that I ram my fist through, the bandage around my hand protecting me from any cuts. The glass shatters into a thousand tiny pieces. I reach inside and unlock the door and spill into the house, my feet slipping on the glass. I go left into a hallway as the men come into the house behind me. Nobody’s home. I turn into a bedroom and shut the door behind me. I tip a chest of drawers across the doorway and a moment later it rattles as the men push against the door. The door
wobbles in its frame as it’s kicked. I try opening the windows, but they have security latches and only open far enough to fit my arm through. I grab the nearest thing, which is a clock radio, and yank it from the power socket and thrash it against the window. It cracks on the third hit, then smashes on the fourth. A shot roars from the hallway and a large hole appears in the door, then the entire thing folds in on itself with one more kick. I don’t wait around to see the rest. I take a running jump where the window was and do my best to clear the glass, but end up dragging my right thigh along a shark tooth of glass jutting out from the frame.
I get straight to my feet and run toward the road, my shoe filling with blood. I hear tinkling glass as the man behind me breaks more of the glass out of the framework with the gun to make his jump easier. The front door of the house opens as I pass, and the man without the gun comes out, running hard at me. I put my head down and pump my arms and go as hard as I can, my feet pounding into the sidewalk, my foot splashing inside the shoe, creating a suction effect that squelches blood over the edge onto the ground. The only advantage I have is that these guys are wearing big heavy shoes and I’m not, and I figure my desire to survive is stronger than their desire to gun me down—though on that last part I’m not so sure. My legs are burning, my chest even more, every breath is like swallowing smoke.
I reach their car. Both doors are still open, the keys in the ignition, the motor running. I jump in and jam my foot on the clutch and accelerator and pop it into gear at the same time as he reaches me, pulling at my shoulder. I peel rubber, and as the car lurches forward the door slams hard on his fingers. He yelps, and as the car powers ahead, he falls forward too, dragged along beside the car. The window is still up but I can hear him screaming, can hear his knees scraping along the asphalt, his feet bouncing and kicking at it. I swerve left and right to shake him loose, the bones in his fingers breaking like gunfire. I take the car up to fifty. Then sixty. Still swerving, still trying to shake him loose.
No you’re not. If you wanted him gone you’d pop the door open and watch him fall away. You’re the one in control now.
I jam my foot hard on the brake and the car swerves. My passenger slingshots forward at the speed the car was doing two seconds before I jumped on the brakes. His hand bends all the way back on itself, the tops of his fingers against the back of his hand, then—
schrip
—a wet sound as the fingers come free—only they’re not free at all, they’re still in the door. Flesh tears from the base of his fingers and runs halfway up his forearm like an apple being peeled, muscle and tendons exposed, and then he’s free, flying and then rolling past the car out on the street, his hand reduced to a piece of meat with only a pinkie and a thumb. He hits the ground hard, rolls a few times, and comes to a stop with his bloody hand cradled against his chest. He doesn’t get up, just lies there, trying to figure out how things have gone so badly and why he’s in so much pain.
The car comes to a complete stop sideways on the road. The guy with the shotgun is running toward me, getting bigger in the view from the passenger window. He’s about two hundred meters away and could probably cover the distance in about nineteen seconds if he were an Olympic athlete and wearing running shoes, but he isn’t, he’s wearing jeans and heavy boots and carrying a shotgun and he’s built big, and none of that is helping him right now. I figure I have thirty seconds until he reaches me, but he doesn’t need to cover all that distance to put me back into range.