Five minutes alone a thr.., p.44
Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller, page 44
When he doesn’t answer again, I start to turn around. If he’s going to shoot me, then he can shoot me while looking me in the eye. He can shoot me while . . .
Schroder is lying on the ground. He’s on his side and his eyes are wide open, but they’re not looking at me. They’re not looking at anything. The gun is still in his hand, but the barrel is pointing into the ground, his wrist bent inwards, the other arm tucked beneath him. His mouth is sagging open, the tip of his tongue protruding.
“Carl?”
Carl doesn’t answer. I move over towards him, grab hold of the gun, and then check for a pulse. There’s nothing. I check twice more, once in the neck, once in the wrist.
Carl Schroder is dead.
The bullet inside his head has finally traveled its course.
CHAPTER EIGHTY-TWO
And just like that, the rain stops. It’s as if a giant tap has been turned off. There’s one more giant peal of thunder, but it’s far in the distance, somewhere out to sea, and I don’t see the flash of lightning it’s chasing. Rain continues to drip from the branches.
I sit down and lean against the tree. I don’t feel remotely drunk anymore. I think about my future. When I’ve thought things through, I make my way back to the car, my feet soaking and muddy, and as I walk I think some more. My phone is in the backseat and I grab it and switch it on and sit on the hood of the car as the clouds clear and the sun comes back out. Steam starts to rise off the tarmac.
I phone Kent.
“Jesus, Tate, where the hell are you?”
“I went to see Schroder,” I tell her.
“Yeah, I know you did. We know you did. Where the hell are you now?”
“I went there to arrest him and he pulled a gun on me.”
“What?”
“This sounds crazy,” I say, which is what people say when they’re about to lie their asses off, “but he forced me to drink. He knew about my problem and, well, he forced me to drink and then I passed out.”
“He forced you?”
“Yeah. At gunpoint.”
I tell her about the car rides of which she already knows. Then I tell her about the car ride out to where I am now, and I give her directions.
“And Schroder? Where is he now?”
“He’s here,” I tell her. “He’s dead.”
I hang up then because I don’t want to talk anymore. Thirty minutes later I hear sirens. They get closer, then they’re turned off, then cars are pulling up.
“What in the hell happened here?” Stevens asks, and he looks angry, angrier than I’ve ever seen him.
I spell it out for him. I went to make an arrest. The drinking. The trip into the woods. Schroder dropping dead as I knelt over a grave.
“Whose grave?” he asks.
“I don’t know whether he dug it for me, or whether he dug it for somebody else. Also . . . he’s done it before,” I tell him.
“What?”
“Schroder. Dwight Smith wasn’t his first. He said that Quentin James was his first.”
“James? The man who ran over your daughter?”
“The very one. Carl said he took care of him for me. He said he did it because we were friends and partners and because he thinks I would have done the same for him.”
“He say where the body was?”
“He said it was out here somewhere.”
He looks at Rebecca. Other officers are getting out of their cars, but they’re waiting for me to show them the way.
“Can we have some privacy here?” Stevens asks.
Everybody else moves away, leaving just him and me.
“This doesn’t look good for you, Tate.”
“In what way?”
“You warning him. You know somebody was helping him, and we’ve got phone records that show you calling him all the time, including the night Ron McDonald was murdered. There are some who think you were the one helping him.”
“That’s bullshit,” I say. “He was going to shoot me in the head.”
“We only have your word for that.”
“What? Come on, why the hell else would we be out here? He was a changed man. When I came to arrest him, he really believed I was the only one who knew what he had done. He thought he could hide the truth by shooting me.”
“That’s your story?”
“That’s the way it happened, yes, and the medical examiner will back me up.”
“Listen, Tate, I’m going to have to suspend you, okay? If there’s any hint that—”
“That’s okay,” I tell him. “I don’t want to do this anymore. This world, it’s all about balance. I’ve done what I can for this city. Now I need to do what I can for my family. I quit,” I tell him.
He nods. He looks like he might have been expecting this. “Are you sure about this?”
“Positive.”
“You’ll still be investigated, you know that, right?”
“I know that,” I tell him.
“Show us where he is,” he tells me, and then I lead them back into the woods, back towards Schroder, back to show them exactly what karma looks like.
Acknowledgments
It’s weird . . . scary weird, that this is book number eight. Scary weird to see the years flying by and to see that I’ve finally caught up in age with Tate. He was almost ten years older than me when I came up with the idea for his first novel. Now we’re both saying goodbye to our thirties. I might make him ninety in the next book just so I can feel younger, and I might make him bald at forty-one so I can feel better about that too. It’s not much of a guess as to where I got the idea for his old-man knees.
The novel was written on different sides of the world, the first half over the summer in New Zealand, then the second half over the summer in England. Then back to New Zealand for the following summer to edit it. I’m a summer guy. I try to avoid winter when I can. I’ve avoided a bunch of them over the last six or seven years. Bits of the novel were written in hotel rooms in the US, or France, or Germany—my mind never far from what Tate and Schroder were up to.
Like the seven books before it, Five Minutes Alone has been made better by the wonderful team at Atria. My editor, Sarah Branham, is amazing, and every year I’m so thankful to know I’m in good hands, that her feedback will always send me in the right direction. To the rest of the team—Judith Curr, Mellony Torres, Janice Fryer, Lisa Keim, Emily Bestler, Isolde Sauer, and all the others—thank you so much for giving me and my books a home.
Heading across the Atlantic and I’d like to say thanks once again to Jane Gregory of Gregory and Company—without Jane I’d be lost. Also Stephanie Glencross, Jane’s in-house editor who also happens to be, in my opinion, the best editor in the UK. And Claire Morris, who gets the books into other parts of the world, sometimes into places I’ve never heard of.
Of course I’d like to thank you as well, the reader. Over the years I’ve had some truly amazing emails and messages from many of you, and getting to travel and meet people at festivals and signings is the highlight of being a writer. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again . . . you guys are the reason I like to make bad things happen.
Paul Cleave
June 2014—Christchurch
About the Author
Photograph by Martin Hunter
Paul Cleave is the author of seven award-winning, internationally bestselling thrillers, most recently, Joe Victim. He lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. Visit his website at PaulCleave.com.
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ALSO BY PAUL CLEAVE
Joe Victim
The Laughterhouse
Collecting Cooper
Blood Men
Cemetery Lake
The Killing Hour
The Cleaner
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014 by Paul Cleave
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Cleave, Paul, date.
Five minutes alone / by Paul Cleave.—First Atria paperback edition.
pages cm
1. Private investigators—New Zealand—Fiction. 2. Rape victims—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9639.4.C54F58 2014
823’.92—dc23 2014011039
ISBN 978-1-4767-7915-7
ISBN 978-1-4767-7916-4 (ebook)
Contents
* * *
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
Paul Cleave, Five Minutes Alone: A Thriller
