Five Minutes Alone (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

A beam of light comes into the office. Somebody yells “Get ’em,” and the dog, a rottweiler, sprints towards him. It covers the ground faster than any dog should, then leaps up, taller than any dog should be, its paws batting at and between the bars, thumping the window harder than any dog should. Suddenly it turns and runs to its left and picks something up. It’s the possum from before—or a different one. The dog shakes its head from side to side, then uses its paw to hold the possum on the ground while tearing it apart.

“You’re next,” somebody yells.

Schroder runs for the basement door, then stops. It’s a dead end, and he can’t help Peter from in there. Even if he could somehow manage to lock them both inside the cell, then what? Sit there and be steam roasted as the building burns down around them? He shuts the door leading down the stairs so at least the dog won’t run straight down there for Peter. There’s banging at the front door. The padlock and chain are keeping them out. The guys who just showed up look like the sort to travel with a crowbar in the car.

Higher ground is the way to go, if for no other reason than it delays his death and the pain leading up to it. He trips on the damn warped step on the stairs to the upstairs landing and puts his hands out to break his fall, and his cell phone slips from his grip and sails down to the floor, hits hard and the light goes out. Ambient light is still coming in from the car outside. He can hear voices at the door, somebody is yelling at the dog to shut up. The phone is his lifeline. He gets back down the stairs, scoops it up, and drops it into his pocket, heads halfway up the stairs, then stops at the warped floorboard.

The floorboard is better than nothing.

He gets his fingers into the gap beneath it, tightens his muscles, and when he pulls it comes up easier than he would have thought, so easily he almost falls down the stairs. He gets his phone out and holds his finger on the power button hoping it’s not damaged, that maybe the fall just disconnected the battery for a brief second internally, or some other weird random event that happens when you drop your phone, and he’s relieved to see the welcome screen boot up. He looks at the floorboard. It’s ten inches wide, two feet long, and has finger-length nails sticking out the end.

He runs to the end of the corridor. He uses the piece of wood to smash the window, then he grips the bars and tests for any movement, of which there is none, as good a job done upstairs as downstairs to secure them. However, this place has been abandoned for ten years, and in that time no maintenance has been done, and he imagines little was done before then too, so it’s possible one set of bars could be only one good kick away from coming free, the bolts strong and unforgiving, but the wood they’re bolted into tired and soft. He should head to the south side, where the shade helps grow mold, where hopefully some of the boards have absorbed enough water over the years to have started rotting.

He goes to a south-side bedroom. He smashes the glass. There is ivy twisted around the bars. When he tries pushing the bars off the house, he has no more luck than before. He smashes the glass in the next bedroom. Only this time when he puts his hands on the bar there’s a gunshot and he feels something whizz past his face, and that same something smacks into the ceiling above him.

There is splintering from downstairs, then there’s a gunshot from down there too, and then he can hear the doors being thrown open. He loads Tate’s number up on the display of his phone. The dog downstairs is barking, he can hear it racing across the floor, its claws digging into the wood as it makes its way to the stairs. He wonders if it will go for his throat or for his balls, and isn’t sure which is worse.

He presses send.

Tate will hear him being ripped apart. He just needs to hang on
long enough to tell him by who and if he has time, he’ll ask Tate to do him one last favor—to take care of these guys for him. To do to them what he did to Quentin James. He honestly doesn’t know if Tate will agree to it. The Old Tate, the one from earlier in the year would have. But this New Tate is like the wood he’s hoping to find the bars bolted to—tired and soft.

Only the phone doesn’t dial. Where there’s supposed to be signal bars there’s a red
X.
The phone has gotten damaged in the fall. He can hear the dog coming up the stairs. He pockets the phone and tightens his grip on the floorboard. At the very least he should close the bedroom door and buy himself a few more seconds. If he’s lucky, the four men will shoot him rather than set Buzzkill on him. He swings the door, but before it can latch, Buzzkill’s snout and front paws appear in the gap. The dog is strong, too damn strong.

Schroder kicks the door, hoping to at least hurt the animal, which he must do, but the damn dog doesn’t let it show, its pride and anger making it more savage as it barks and bangs at the door. Schroder knows he’s losing a battle. He jumps back and tightens his grip on the floorboard. His eyes have adjusted slightly to the dark.

The door bangs open. Buzzkill pauses for one second, enough time to bark and snarl and figure out the best angle of attack, which it then decides is from the front, which it then puts into practice. It runs forward and leaps into the air, a mouth full of teeth, deciding the throat is the way to go.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

It’s almost three a.m. when we get to Peter Crowley’s house. With this kind of news I don’t think he’ll mind being woken at this time of night—if he is home. We’re still getting out of the car when Hutton calls us. Two cell phones have been found in one of the dumpsters from the alleyway.

“Phones were wiped down,” Hutton says, “so no prints. But we do have a bunch of contacts. There are text messages too, which we think may be code, as there are lots of texts about books and shirts and DVDs, there are some locations that don’t make sense—at least not to us, and at least not yet. I’m not sure if we’re going to find anything on here that can lead to other drug busts, but hopefully it will,” he says, and then we hang up.

There’s a light on in the lounge of the Crowley house. I press my finger on the bell and can hear it ringing inside. We take a step back, wait half a minute, then ring it again.

“I’m coming,” a woman says, and we see a hall light switch on, and through the frosted glass panels of the door we can make out the shape of somebody approaching. “I’ve told you not to leave your damn keys when you go to—” the woman says as she starts opening the door, and then she stops. She sees Kent and she sees me and we don’t even need to tell her we’re police, and already she’s thinking a dozen things, all of them bad.

“Oh my God,” she says, and she lifts her hands to her face, and they’re shaking, and she takes a step back, then another, then her legs give way and she stumbles and falls.

“It’s okay,” Kent tells her, and takes a step forward.

“Is she . . . is she dead?” she asks.

She?

Both Kent and myself are shaking our heads. “No,” Kent says. “We’re here because we need to talk to Peter.”

“So . . . So . . . Monica is okay? When she didn’t come home I just thought . . .”

Monica. The daughter. A door opens into the hallway and a teenage girl spills out of it. She’s wearing a black T-shirt with a picture of a skull on it. The skull looks weird, and it takes me a moment to realize why—it has bone ears sticking out from the sides. The ears have earrings. “What’s going on?” the girl asks. She sees who I’m guessing is her stepmother and helps her to her feet.

“You’re home,” the woman says. “I thought . . . Wait. . . . I fell asleep on the couch. . . . Where’s Peter?” she asks. “Why wouldn’t he wake me when he got home?”

“Is he home?” I ask.

“Of course he’s home. Monica, go and get your father,” she says, and Monica disappears. “Why do you need to talk to him?”

“We’re hoping he can help us with a case we’re—”

“He’s not in bed,” Monica says, calling from the bedroom.

The woman looks concerned. “He should have been back by now.”

“Back from where?” Kent asks.

The woman straightens her pajamas. “He went out this afternoon. He left a note saying he had an emergency at work. He got called in. So . . . so you’re not here to tell us something bad happened to him?”

“No,” Kent says.

I take a step towards the door. “Let’s go inside so we can sit down and we can explain why we’re here.”

“I think that’s a good idea,” the woman says.

The woman walks ahead of us, and the girl, Monica, closes the door and follows us into the lounge. The woman introduces herself as Charlotte, Peter’s wife. The girl is Peter’s daughter. There is a boy here too, we’re told, but the commotion hasn’t woken him.

We explain we’re following an active lead in a homicide investigation, one that Peter may unknowingly have information for. Charlotte shakes her head as if she can’t believe that’s possible.

“What time did he leave for work?” I ask.

“I don’t know. The note didn’t say, and nobody was here.”

“He was here when I left today,” Monica says, “which was around two o’clock I guess, or maybe three. I was out the rest of the day and I snuck back inside about an hour ago.”

“You were drinking, weren’t you,” Charlotte says. “We asked you not to—”

“I wasn’t drinking!”

“No? Then what? Just hanging out? And smoking?”

“It was nothing like that.”

“So where is Peter now?” I ask. “Where does he work?”

Monica shrugs, folds her arms, and stares at her stepmother. “You always think the worst,” she says.

Charlotte ignores her. “He’s on call. He’s a plumber, but his van is still here so one of the other guys must have picked him up. He said there was a broken water main in an office complex in town, and not to wait up.”

“I saw the guy who came to pick him up,” Monica says, still keeping her arms folded.

“Who?” Charlotte asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t know everybody dad works with. Some bald guy.”

Some bald guy. Just like it was some bald guy in the alleyway tonight.

“Sounds like Drew,” Charlotte says.

“Can I have Peter’s number?” I ask.

She reads it out to me and I tap the numbers into my cell phone. I press call and the line connects. It rings and after eight rings it goes through to voicemail.

“Is there a problem?” she asks.

I hang up. “He’s not answering.”

“Let me try.” She disappears out of the room, leaving us alone with Monica.

“Why do you need to talk to my dad? Did he do something?”

“No,” Kent says, “we’re just hoping he can help us.”

“Is this about mom?”

Kent looks at me and I look at Kent and we’re not sure how to answer, but our lack of answer is an answer in itself.

“It is, isn’t it. I don’t remember any of it,” she says. “I mean, I know what happened, and a few years ago I read about it, but I don’t remember it. I don’t know whether I even tried to help. All I know is that I sat there and watched it happen.”

“I’m sorry about what happened,” I hear myself saying, and I am, but the words don’t change anything, they just sound hollow and empty, like saying
I’m sorry for your loss
to somebody you barely know.

“The men who hurt mom, will they ever get out of jail?”

Before I can answer, Charlotte comes back. She’s holding a cell phone. “He’s not answering me either.”

“Okay. Can you give me Drew’s number?”

“Something is wrong, isn’t it,” she says, and she sounds anxious now. “That’s why you’re here. Has Peter done something?”

“We just need to talk to him, that’s all.”

“At two in the morning? What aren’t you telling us?”

“Please,” I tell her. “Drew’s number?”

“It’s about mom,” Monica says.

Charlotte looks at her and a small frown appears. “What? What could this possibly be to do with her?” Then she looks towards us. “Is this to do with the men that hurt her? Have they hurt him?”

“They’re in jail,” Monica says.

“Not anymore,” Charlotte says.

Monica looks confused.

“They served their time,” Charlotte says.

“No, that can’t be, Dad would have told me.”

“We didn’t want you to know.”

“Do you . . . Do you think they’ve hurt my dad?” Monica asks.

“Nothing like that,” Kent says.

“Do you think . . . Do you think my dad is going to hurt them? I hope that’s it,” she says. “I hope he kills them.”

“Monica, don’t say such a thing,” Charlotte snaps.

“Well I hope he does. If they’d never hurt my mother then I wouldn’t have to listen to you,” she says.

“Monica!”

Monica stands up. “This is bullshit,” she says, looking towards me and Kent. “These guys kill my mom, and now you’re here to treat my dad like he’s the bad guy?”

“Monica!” Charlotte says.

“Whatever,” Monica says, and storms off.

Charlotte sits back down on the couch. Her face has gone red. “I’m sorry about that, but she hates me because I can never be her real mother,” she says, and she doesn’t sound upset, if anything she just sounds used to it. “I can’t imagine it’s going to get any better. Here, let me find Drew’s number for you.”

She scrolls through her phone then reads it out. I dial it.

“Excuse me a minute,” I say, and I step out of the lounge into the hallway, then decide to step outside instead. I have a feeling about what I’m going to hear.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Drew says, as a way of greeting.

“Is that Drew Fulton?”

“Yeah, it’s Drew Fulton,” he says, “and it’s still the middle of the night.”

“This is Detective Inspector Theodore Tate,” I tell him.

There’s movement, and I can tell he’s pulling himself into a sitting position.

“The police?” he says. “Has something happened?”

“I wake you?” I ask, and I watch a guy get out of his car over the road, drop his keys, pick them up, fall over, and pick them up again.

“Yes.”

“So you’re not working,” I say.

“What’s this about?”

“Have you seen Peter Crowley tonight?” I ask, and the guy over the road is now staggering up to his front door the same way I play golf, with lots of lefts and rights and hitting the trees on the way. He drops his keys and belches loudly enough for me to hear him.

“Peter? What?” he asks, and he sounds concerned. “No, no, why?”

“He didn’t help you with a broken water main in town?”

“What broken water main?”

“We’re looking for Peter,” I tell him, “and he left a note with his wife saying he had to work in town.”

“If there’s a broken water main I would have heard about it,” he says.

“Thanks for your time, Mr. Fulton.”

“Wait, has—”

But I don’t wait. I thank him and hang up.

Peter lied to his wife.

Was the bald man that came to speak to him the same bald man Danny and Harry saw? I think it is. I think the bald man has pulled Peter into a whole world of trouble. Trouble that started nine years ago and took on new life in an alleyway in town, the kind of alleyway where bad things tend to happen. The question is—did Peter know the bald man before today? And if he did, did Kelly know him too?