Five minutes alone a thr.., p.4
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 4
Then came the conversation.
But a week before the conversation there was the referendum—or, more accurately, the result of such a referendum. The citizens of New Zealand were asked a month ago whether to keep the prime minister they had, or vote on a new one. They were given that opportunity every three years. Personally, he never thought there was much difference between politicians. Could they be trusted? No. Did people know that? Yes. So who was the fool when a politician let you down? He would vote Labour, he would vote National, he would choose on the day. Who was the better of two evils? That was the box he would tick. This time there was a second question being asked, a question many were demanding to be asked. Should the death penalty be brought back? The current prime minister won by a landslide. But the death penalty was closer. Half of the country voted yes. Half voted no. It was split down the middle. A dead heat. So the votes needed to be counted. And recounted. And recounted again. Which took two weeks. The votes weren’t split down the middle at all. They were separated by one hundred and seventy-seven votes. They say every single vote counts. In this case it was one hundred and seventy-six votes away from being true.
The death penalty was coming back.
He didn’t care.
It was what it was. It didn’t affect him. It wasn’t a big deal.
It was. Just. Life.
Then the conversation. It was three days ago. It wasn’t just his wife that came by. There were others. People he’d worked with. People he knew. They felt bad about what had happened to him. Of course they did. He didn’t. It was. Just. Life. He was okay with it. Didn’t like it. Didn’t hate it. He’d accepted it. People from his past were showing up. They showed up without being invited. Sometimes with food. Sometimes with beer. He just sat and listened and didn’t much feel like contributing to the conversation—which, in hindsight, meant he felt something, didn’t it?
The conversation that changed everything was seemingly inconsequential. There was the weather. It could rain or snow or the sun could scorch the earth, and what would change? He’d sit in his room and okay, maybe he’d put on a heater or open a window, but life would go on. Other people. Names from his past were thrown at him, this guy was doing that, that guy was doing this. World events. Oil was going up in price, somewhere was getting invaded, human rights were in jeopardy as they always were in some far corner, people being hacked to pieces a way of life the way ice creams on beaches in summer was a way of life in New Zealand. The referendum. The death penalty was on its way back and did he think it would change the level of violence in the country?
The Christchurch Carver—given name Joe Middleton—was a sick, twisted son of a bitch who for years had worked as a janitor at the police department during the day, but during the night was out there breaking into the houses of women who were alone, tying them up, and turning them into homicide statistics. The police arrested him late in the game, and a year later, on the day his trial was set to begin—the trial that would possibly send him to death row—Joe escaped. Even now he’s roaming about freely, but nobody knows where.
And that did it. At the mention of the Carver he felt something stir inside him. It was like an old car that hadn’t run in years was being started. Only the fuel was bad, the engine was half-seized, there was enough juice for the engine to try and turn over, but that was all, a hint of life and then nothing. So the New Him did care about something. It cared about the Carver, because back in the old life he had been on the task force that had failed for so long to catch him. He still felt the anger of the man’s escape, but what could he do about it? Track the Carver down? No—because nobody has been able to. He cared . . . but then he didn’t care. The anger just drained away. The Old Him—the Old Him would have fired up, would have topped the rev counter, would have exploded.
More of the conversation. The prime minister. Did he like the guy? He was fine. Fishing. They should go fishing sometime, like they used to. Did he remember that time the fishhook went through his ankle? The rugby season was over and had he seen any of the cricket? He should get out more, should try to get away, should try to do this and try to do that—and he nodded some of the time and some of the time he didn’t, he just stared ahead, waiting to be alone. Travel. Gardening. New restaurants opening and old restaurants closing. A new mall was being built. Extensions to the prisons were almost complete. Dwight Smith was released two weeks ago.
Another jump start. Something inside sparked.
Did he remember Dwight Smith? Yes, he did, and wasn’t it early for Dwight Smith to be released? Why yes, it was, six years too early. Why was that, he’d asked? Why was anything, he’d been told.
So something had sparked and it had caught. And why? Looking back, he thinks because Dwight Smith was somebody he could do something about. The Christchurch Carver—nobody knew where the hell he was, what he was doing, whether he was dead or alive or even still in the city. But Dwight Smith? Well now, Dwight was an entirely different kettle of spiders.
The conversation ended and he was alone again and on the couch he didn’t like or dislike, and the motor was running. There were hiccups and moments where it almost stalled, but it was running.
Dwight Smith was free.
Dwight Smith was a dog who had tasted blood.
The Old Him had been about men like Dwight Smith. The Old Him had been about getting up every morning at seven a.m. and getting to work by eight, about fighting a never-ending fight, about dedicating himself to the cause. It had been about sitting at his desk with a coffee and catching up on paperwork, about taking orders, about giving orders, about often being somewhere in the middle of the chain of command. It had been about knocking on doors, interviewing shop owners and bank tellers and people whose homes had been broken into. It had been about interviewing family members and victims and suspects. It had been about seeing the good in people and the bad in people, but mostly about the bad. He would spend his days putting bad people away, and they would do their time and they would come back out and he would spend more days putting them away again. It was simply how the world worked. From eight o’clock to five o’clock, five days a week—that was his life, often with overtime. A never-ending cycle. Of course old age and karma caught up to some of those bad people so he never had to see them again, and occasionally they either gave up the life of crime or got so good at it they dropped off the radar, but there were always more being produced in the white-trash factories of the city, a production line of meth manufacturers and sociopaths and rapists and shoplifters and arsonists and people who just didn’t give a shit. And of course the Old Him stopped being the Old Him because of people like Dwight Smith and the Christchurch Carver, and why should—
Why should.
There they were Two small words. Why should, and a future opened in front of him, just like that, a doorway to a world of possibilities. That was the moment he realized he was a man searching for something. That’s what man did. If man didn’t search, the world would not evolve. The world would not be explored. People would still be living in caves and killing lizards with rocks.
Why should a guy like Dwight Smith get a second chance at hurting people?
Why should Dwight Smith get to be happy? Should get to carry on? Should get to be free?
He didn’t care. And at the same time he did care.
He didn’t understand it.
What he did understand was Dwight Smith wasn’t going to spend his life indoors staring at a goddamn spider in the corner of the room. Dwight Smith was a ticking time bomb who was going to cause a lot of pain.
Why should.
He was evolving. Why should Dwight Smith get to live a better life than him? Or that of the woman he had attacked?
Why should?
The answer was simple—he shouldn’t.
CHAPTER FIVE
Our trip out to the railway line is reversed. Everything we saw on our way out we see on our way back, only from the other side of the road and heading the other way. There are some differences. The flow of traffic has increased a little, but not a lot. The sun has climbed a little, but not a lot. The temperature has raised another degree. There are more guys out in the fields raising sheep and cattle and turning seeds into vegetables. I couldn’t do it. I figure I could work on a farm for five days at the most before catching the same train Smith caught.
Neither of us talk. We’re both thinking our own things. Kent is motionless, staring straight ahead, her hands barely doing any work as we cruise at seventy miles an hour in a straight line.
Are we on the same page here?
Hutton’s words keep coming back to me. Yes, I’m a cop again, yes I’m back on the force, yes I’m one of the team. But for the last three years, after killing the man who took my daughter away from me, I’ve been off the team. In that time I’ve developed some habits as a private investigator that don’t mesh well with being on the same page. That’s what Hutton is questioning. He’s asking if my loyalty is to the job, or to doing the right thing. Or at least what I think the right thing is.
The service station Dwight Smith worked at is on the corner of a busy intersection with two separate entrances and two separate exits, one of each on a separate road, the intersection on this side of town, right where the farms end and the houses begin. There are a dozen pumps and half a dozen staff and a building in the middle of the forecourt that’s like a small air-traffic tower overlooking it all, the building and signage painted the same yellows and blues Dwight Smith was wearing, only the yellows and blues here aren’t splashed with red and streaked with black. We park next to the building and lock the car because recently two police cars have been stolen, which caused a memo to go around at work reminding us to use some of that common sense we were all raised with.
The forecourt feels a few degrees hotter than the rest of the city. There are bags of charcoal for barbecues stacked up against one of the walls of the traffic tower, twenty-four packs of soft drink stacked next to them, and next to those are blackboards with special prices written on them, offering drink and chocolate bars for what I imagine is twice the price of a supermarket. We go inside. The guy behind the counter is between customers and is wiping up a coffee cup that’s been knocked over. His hands are full of paper towels. We ask him for the manager. He picks up the phone and a minute later the manager comes out and we all shake hands. His name badge tells the world his name is Andrew Andrews, which suggests his parents were lazy. Andrew Andrews is clean-shaven but has missed a patch beneath his chin, and has busy eyebrows that would look more appropriate on a Muppet.
“Let me guess,” he says. “You’re here about Dwight Smith. That’s why he’s not at work, right? He’s in custody for something, right?”
“You don’t seem surprised,” I tell him.
“Hey,” he says, sounding cheerful, “every year we take on a couple of parolees, and every year they stop showing up for work, and every year somebody like you will come here and tell me why. But somebody has to hire these guys, right?” he says, still sounding cheerful, like hiring these guys can save the world. “What else you gonna do, just throw them into the streets and hope for the best?”
“Does Smith have a locker here?” I ask.
“Yeah. It’s this way.”
He leads us through a door and into a corridor with more of the company colors. On the walls are large photographs of the service station from over the years, starting with black-and-white images from fifty years ago, old cars and men in old-fashioned overalls, everybody smoking around the service bay, a guy sitting on a wooden crate drinking soda while squinting at the sun, a small boy playing beneath a jacked-up car. People weren’t as much into health and safety back then, but the weather sure as hell was better. The air-traffic control building in the center of the forecourt only appears in the more recent pictures. I remember coming here with my dad, occasionally sipping a cola while somebody would wash the windshield and pump the gas, which was what, a quarter of the price back then?
“Dwight Smith worked here for two weeks,” I tell him. “You must have gotten some impression of the man. What can you tell us about him?”
Andrew Andrews, the man who hires these men out of the goodness of his heart—and no doubt some tax breaks that come along with it—shrugs. “I don’t know. He came in to work on time. He pumped gas. He kept himself to himself. Didn’t make any waves. Didn’t steal anything that I know of. What is it you’re trying to get at? If you just tell me I might be able to help you a little more.”
“He make any friends?” Kent asks.
Another shrug. “I don’t think so. He seemed to fit in okay. He chatted to people if they chatted to him, but he hasn’t been here long enough to build any friendships. Like I said, he kept himself to himself. So you going to tell me what he did?”
“He’s dead,” Kent says.
Andrew slowly nods. “So guess there’s no need to fire him,” he says, and he’s still using the cheery voice, and I can’t tell if he’s being serious or if it’s a bad joke.
We reach the lockers. There are a dozen of them, all with a range of padlocks, including Dwight Smith’s, who has locker number ten. Smith’s padlock is smaller than most of the others, as if he has less to hide.
“You were going to fire him for not showing up?” I ask.
“Listen,” he says, turning his back to the lockers so he can face us. “We try to help these guys out, okay? But if they’re not going to show up, what would you have me do? There are a hundred other guys coming out of jail who’d love to have his job.”
“Do you know what he did?” Kent asks.
“What? You mean that got him arrested?”
She nods.
He shakes his head. “No. I mean, they send us people who don’t have thieving on their rap sheet, but other than that we can’t know. They don’t tell us, and if they did, then we couldn’t work with them. You know what I’m saying? If we all learned our new workmate was into hurting kids . . . Well, people don’t get second chances in life if they’re sharing their baggage with you.”
“You think being in jail for rape or murder is baggage?” Kent asks.
Andrews shakes his head. “You know what I mean,” he says, “and that’s not it. It’s just the way it has to be. What’s the alternative? Let these guys live on the street? Then what? At least if they’re working, they’re not out there doing other stuff. So what happened? Somebody kill him? Or he kill himself?”
“Why? Do you think he’d kill himself?” Kent asks.
“I’m not thinking anything,” Andrews says. “Just being curious. So you going to tell me?”
“We’re not at liberty to say,” I tell him. “You got a key for this?” I ask, pointing at the padlock.
“Yeah. All employees have to leave spares with us. Wait here a minute.”
He leaves us alone. The lockers are part of a room that is attached to a couple of showers and bathrooms, none of which are currently in use. There’s a bench running the length of the room in front of the lockers. It reminds me of the gym back when I was at school. There’s a couple of car magazines sitting on the bench and somebody has left out a bag of sandwiches. Andrews makes it back. He hands us a key with a tag on it that says Dwight Smith, #10.
“Did he say or do anything out of character yesterday?” I ask. “Or did anybody come to see him?”
“Yesterday was my day off,” Andrews says, “but I can find out for you.”
“Okay, you do that,” I say.
Andrews seems like he wants to stay to see what we find in the locker, but manages to last only a few seconds of me and Kent staring at him until he wanders off. We open the locker. There’s a jacket hanging in there, it’s brown and made from leather and looks beaten up and old—could be he bought it secondhand, could be it belongs to his brother, could be it’s his from before he went to jail. Was last night warm? Not real warm. I wouldn’t have gone out without a jacket. There’s a cell phone that looks out of date. It’s still on, the battery sitting at fifteen percent. There’s no passcode required to switch it on. I check his call logs, his text messages, his address book. There’s work, his brother, his parents, the Preacher from the halfway house.
Smith’s wallet is here. There’s a driver’s license and two twenty-dollar notes and a photograph of a naked woman that, when I pull it out, shows it was torn from a magazine. There are no bank cards. There are no receipts. There’s nothing else in the locker. I go through the jacket pockets. Empty.
“It’s like he just decided to up and leave,” Kent says. “Except for his keys.”
“His keys he kept on him,” I tell her. “This spare locker key looks identical to the one hanging out of the ignition of his car. He needed them to gain access to this stuff.”
“Then why didn’t he use it last night to gain access?” Kent asks. “Where would he go without needing his jacket, his wallet, or his phone?”
“You don’t need any of that stuff if you’re catching the front end of a train,” I tell her, which is one of two logical explanations. The other one being he saw something that made him leave in a hurry. We put everything into evidence bags. We close up the locker and put the lock back into place.
My cell phone rings. It’s Hutton. “How are you getting on there?” he asks.
I tell him about the cell phone, the jacket, and the wallet.
“So either something spooked him,” Hutton says, “or the urge to kill himself came on so strongly he had to leave.”
“There’s a third possibility,” I tell him because, after all, we’re all on the same page here. “He might have seen somebody who fit whatever fantasy he was conjuring up next.”
