Five minutes alone a thr.., p.10
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 10
“I’ve been thinking lately about how we met,” I tell Bridget. “You remember?” I ask, sure that she would, but not as sure as I’d like to be. What if one day this thing that is wrong with her steals all of her memories? “I was a year out of police academy. Back then the biggest part of my job was walking the streets of town with a partner, watching out for bad things, mostly dealing with shoplifters, or if our shifts were at night, being called to break up drunken fights. The job wasn’t as rewarding as I thought it was going to be. I don’t know—I guess I had always figured people would appreciate us more for what we did, but instead everybody was unhappy. It just came down to degrees. There’s something I’ve never told you about the morning we met.”
I met Bridget at a coffee shop. I kept seeing her in there. Sometimes she’d be ahead of me in line, sometimes behind me, sometimes looking serious, sometimes happy, and after a few weeks we would start to exchange smiles. Then we’d make small talk. Really small talk. Things like I promise I’m not following you, and I think I’m sixty percent coffee. Then we introduced ourselves. At the same time the cappuccino machine was making a lot of noise and I didn’t hear her name and, for some reason, I didn’t ask right away for her to repeat herself. Later that day I saw her in town. I was in my police uniform talking to Schroder, and she came up beside me and said Excuse me, officer, but do you drink anything other than coffee?
I told her I did. She smiled, wrote her number down on a slip of paper, and handed it to me. If you ever feel like getting a drink and not being alone when you’re doing it, give me a call, she said.
“The problem was,” I tell her now, “is that I never heard your name when you gave it to me, and when you gave me your number, it was just your number. You didn’t write your name down because you thought I already knew it. And from there it just became more awkward. I called you that night hoping you’d say your name when you answered the phone, but you didn’t. We went and grabbed a drink that weekend. A few nights later we saw a movie. The following weekend we went out for dinner. I still didn’t know your name, and because you were getting taxis to these places to meet me, I had no registration plate to check, and of course I didn’t know where you lived. Not then. It was after our third date I came up with a solution. Do you remember when I started texting you in the third person as a joke? I said Theo had a great time last night, and he was wondering if you would like to go out again this weekend? You responded with Bridget would love that.”
Well, Theo would love it if she woke up and everything was the way it used to be. Theo would love it if we could be okay again. Meeting Bridget was the best thing that ever happened to him.
I smile at the memory. I remember laughing when the text came in. I never wanted her to know that story. I told Schroder, and other friends, but I never wanted Bridget to know, even though I’m sure she would have laughed.
I get myself a little more comfortable, adjust my position, keep holding her hand, and stare at her while waiting for things to get better.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Schroder checks the address he’s written down against the address he’s parked outside. It’s a middle-of-the-road kind of neighborhood. Some lawns are a little long, some nice and lush and green, some too short and brown, others inundated with clover and weeds. Some fences are freshly painted, some in need of repair. Messy gardens, tidy gardens, no gardens. Nothing uniform, nothing overstyled.
He gets out of the car and heads for the house. There’s a pile of weeds next to the path leading up to the doorstep, green on top with dirt clinging below. There are fresh patches of dirt in the garden from where they’ve been pulled. There are shrubs that look like they’ve just been planted, they still have the labels hanging from them, and there are more sitting in pots ready to occupy some of the holes that have been dug. Schroder loved mowing lawns, but he sure as hell hated gardening, and back in his old life he couldn’t wait for his kids to grow enough to take care of the gardening for him.
Before he can reach the doorstep, the door opens and a young girl comes storming out. She’s dressed completely in black. Her fingernails are black, and she’s wearing big silver rings and silver bangles. She looks to be around fifteen, twice the age of Schroder’s own daughter. She’s got dark purple eye shadow on and black lipstick and he can already imagine the kind of arguments she has with her father.
Before either of them can say anything, Peter Crowley steps out of the door a few yards behind his daughter. “Damn it, Monica, I told you no,” he says.
“Whatever,” Monica says, which is a word Schroder knows all kids grow into, along with Fuck you and Can I borrow the car? She looks at Schroder, dedicates two seconds of her time to look him up and down, then dismisses him. “I’ll be back later.”
“When later?” Peter asks.
“Later,” she says, and then she’s gone, a girl and her angst walking down the road.
Peter looks at Schroder, gives a small shrug, but the guy looks embarrassed. He also looks different from the last time Schroder saw him. All those years in between age a man anyway, but age one even more who’s been through what Peter went through, losing his wife the way he did. His hair has gone gray, receding in the corners far more than the middle, and he’s lost enough weight to look like a marathon runner.
“Teenage girls,” Peter says—another pair of words that sum up the situation better than any others could. Two words, Schroder imagines, that make fathers go crazy. Schroder, even now, would tear apart the world to find his daughter or son if something ever happened to them. It’s comforting to think part of him is still human. He shrugs in a way of agreement.
“What can I help you with?” Peter asks.
“My name is Carl Schroder,” he says.
Peter nods. “One of the Coma Cops? I recognize the name.”
“Yeah. One of the Coma Cops. Listen, can I have a few moments of your time?”
“What’s this about?”
“Can we step inside?”
Peter gives him a suspicious look, as if Schroder is about to try and sell him something, maybe one of those cool comas he just came out of. Then he smiles. “Sure,” he says. “Why not? Come on through.”
Peter leads him into the house. There are photographs on the walls. Peter with a woman who isn’t Linda Crowley. Peter with the girl who was outside a moment ago, but in those photographs the girl is a little younger, the black makeup and clothing still in the future. They sit down in the lounge and Peter offers him a drink and Schroder says no. There’s a radio switched on, the volume just too low to hear what the DJs are talking about. He remembers the house from the last time he came here, though Peter Crowley doesn’t seem to remember him from back then, just from the newspapers. The house is different now. Different colors, different furniture, different everything, a new stamp being put on the place by the woman in the photographs who replaced the one who had killed herself that day he came here. He looks into the corners of the ceiling and doesn’t spot any Warrens.
“Is this about my wife?” Peter asks. “About Linda?”
“Yes.”
“It’s been almost ten years,” he says. “Can you believe that?”
“Yes,” Schroder says, and even though time heals all wounds, it doesn’t wait, it doesn’t pause, it just moves on dispassionately. In the last ten years Peter Crowley has moved on and started a new life for himself. In the last ten years Schroder has had two children and gotten shot in the head.
“Sometimes it seems like a lifetime ago, like some distant memory of a different time and a different family that wasn’t even mine, like, I don’t know, like it was a family I saw on TV. I know that doesn’t make any sense, but . . . shit . . . I don’t know, because other times it feels like it was only yesterday. I wake up expecting the woman in my bed to be Linda, only it’s not, Linda is gone and she’s been, I don’t know, replaced, I guess, for lack of a better word, but you don’t replace people, what you do is move on, and . . .” He smiles, then gives a brief, humorless laugh. “Listen to me, I’m sorry. I don’t know where that came from.”
“You’ve remarried?” Schroder asks, and he wonders what his own wife will do, whether she will replace him once she realizes he truly is lost.
Peter starts twirling his wedding ring. “Her name is Charlotte. Five years next February. We got married on Valentine’s Day, which I thought people in their right mind never did. She’s a great woman. I love her a lot. But I still . . . you know, I still miss Linda. We were . . .” he says, then lowers his voice and looks around the room in case somebody else is listening, “soul mates. We were meant to be together forever. We were going to have more children and we were going to . . . you know, we were going to live. We were going to have a great life. Now Linda is dead and our daughter does the opposite of anything I ever ask, and did you see the way she looks? If she woke up one day to find the world had run out of black clothing she’d kill herself.”
“Where is Charlotte now?”
“She’s out with her son. With my stepson.”
“The men who did this to Linda, who did this to your family, they’re out of jail now,” Schroder says, and he has to be careful here.
Peter tightens his hands into fists, his jaw tightens, and a vain starts throbbing in his forehead. He doesn’t say anything.
“Do you remember what you asked Detective Inspector Landry when your wife died?”
Peter nods. “I remember.”
“You wanted five minutes alone with those men.”
“I said I remember. And yes, I knew they were out of jail, but I promise you I haven’t tried anything. I mean, I’d love to, I’d love to go and shoot those assholes in the head, but I haven’t. So you don’t need to come around and check on me. I’ve—”
“Moved on?”
“Yes. Isn’t that what you want to hear?”
“No, Peter, it isn’t.”
Peter shifts in his seat, then leans forward a little. “Why are you here, Detective?”
“I’m no longer a policeman,” Schroder says. “I was fired.”
“And?”
“And Landry told me what you did, how you followed him home.”
“It’s his word against mine, no matter what he said,” Peter says, “and Landry was killed earlier in the year, right?”
“Yes,” Schroder says. Landry went rogue. Though, thinking about it, Landry really made the same set of decisions that Schroder is making now. Only Landry screwed up and for that he paid the ultimate price, whereas Schroder isn’t going to mess up. Not again. When he and Landry used to work together, there were no shortcuts, each of them was very by the book. By the book ended for Landry in a forest after he was hit by multiple shotgun rounds, a situation of his own making, trying to do the right thing by doing the wrong thing. By the book ended in the messiest way possible. By the book ended for Schroder when he had to shoot that old woman earlier in the year. She was the mother of a killer, a mother who had tortured and tormented her son and turned him into a monster. Schroder shot her to save a young girl’s life, and if you’re going to stop going by the book, that was the way to do it, not just dipping in your toe, but diving right in. Of course it led to him losing his job, which led to him no longer being a cop when he chased down the Carver, which led to him entering a situation without backup, which lead to him getting shot in the head. He was lucky he wasn’t arrested too.
“Landry told me you drew out your life’s savings and put it into a briefcase. You offered it to him.”
“That never happened.”
“You begged him to let you kill the men who had hurt Linda.”
“Is that what this is about?” Peter asks, his voice rising. “You want to blackmail me?”
Schroder shakes his head. “I don’t want your money. I’m trying to help somebody. Somebody like Linda. Somebody who was beaten and sliced and raped, somebody who went to Hell and came back, somebody the justice system let down, somebody who is about to be in a whole lot of trouble unless I do the right thing.”
Peter leans further forward. “I don’t understand. This right thing,” he says, “has something to do with my wife. This right thing—you need me to help you?”
“The right thing isn’t always the legal thing,” Schroder says. “And no. I don’t need you to help me. I’m not here because I need your help, Peter. When Landry told me what you did, it really upset him. He took me to a bar and we had a few drinks, and he said he wished there was a way he could help you. You know what he said? He told me he was thinking of faking some evidence, trying to find a way to prove the men who hurt your wife were innocent. He said that way they’d be let out of jail, and that way you could have your five minutes. I told him he couldn’t do that, and he said he knew, that he was just blowing off steam, that it’s a path he’d never take,” he says, and he wonders if that was the night Landry started thinking about different paths. “I can tell you I really think he was thinking about doing it. Landry never liked the way the world was, but he couldn’t do anything about it. And he felt responsible for your wife taking her own life.”
“Responsible? How?”
“Because if he had given you your five minutes, then you could have beaten the crap out of those two men. He thought if he had found a way to let you do that, to let your wife have those five minutes too, then she might have been able to move forward with her life. He thought it would have given her something to hold on to.”
“I think you should leave,” Peter says. “All you’re doing is bringing up painful memories.”
“You said you’ve moved on, but in my experience people don’t move on from something like that. I’m not here because I need your help, Peter, I’m here because you need mine. I can’t give you closure, but I can give you a step towards it. I’m here because you asked Landry if you could have five minutes with the men who attacked your wife, and I can give that to you. I can give that to you tonight and it’s not going to cost you a single dime. Or have you moved on like you say you have?”
Peter doesn’t answer. His face has tightened. It looks like it could explode. “What, exactly, are you saying?”
“I’m saying exactly what you think I’m saying.”
“It’s been a long time,” Peter says, “but the anger, you know, the anger never goes away. It burns deep. I’ve often thought of trying to find where they live, but, you know, I was always a . . . a coward. Having five minutes in a room while these guys are handcuffed to chairs is one thing, but finding where they live and going to them . . . I hated myself for a long time for never being able to protect my wife. I hated myself for not being the man who brought those bastards to justice.”
“I can change that,” Schroder says. “All you have to do is come with me.”
“Now?”
“It has to be now.”
Peter says nothing for five seconds. Then ten. Then he shakes his head. “I can’t. I’m sorry. I wish I was that man, but I’m not.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll be on my way.” He stands up. “Promise me you won’t tell anybody about this.”
“Who would I tell?”
“You could tell the police.”
“I won’t call them,” he says. “I promise.”
“You won’t need to call them. They will come here to speak to you.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m going to kill those men for you tonight, and they’re going to ask if you did it.”
Schroder walks out of the lounge.
Peter catches up with him outside, just past the weeds and near the street. “If I helped you the police would come and arrest me.”
“Would you care if they did?”
“No, I . . . I guess not.”
Schroder looks up and down the street. It’s deserted. “The police wouldn’t arrest you. The police will be looking for somebody who doesn’t exist. These two men, they will hurt other people. It’s what men like that do. It’s who they are.”
“And what kind of men are we if we hunt them down?”
Schroder doesn’t even have to think about it. “Men who do the right thing.”
Peter starts nodding. “I have a new life. When I think about what those men did . . . I want to be sick. Sometimes I am sick. Sometimes I have to rush into the bathroom to throw up in the sink, the images of what they did to her are so strong I can’t escape them. I want my five minutes. I want them for myself, and most of all I want them for Linda, but I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“What about for your daughter?”
“What do you mean?”
“Your daughter saw the whole thing, didn’t she?”
Peter doesn’t answer right away. He starts breathing harder and faster. “You don’t need to remind me of that,” he says. “Everything that happened to Linda, I often wonder if it was worse for Monica having to watch. I often wonder if the worst part for Linda was knowing our daughter was right there watching and crying and asking those men to please stop hurting her mommy. She doesn’t remember it, not really,” he says, and he looks angry, as angry as Schroder has ever seen anybody. “I had to get her counseling, of course, and for years she would wake up screaming and asking for her mother, and that was only if she slept, which she hardly did.”
Schroder says nothing. He doesn’t need to. He knows what’s coming.
“Are you sure you can give them to me? The five minutes?”
“Yes.”
“Will it change me? Will it make me a different person?”
“Yes,” Schroder says.
“What kind of person?”
“One who does the right thing.”
“Okay,” Peter says. “Okay. Let me lock up. I’m coming with you.”
