“A model prisoner,” Watts says. “According to the file he made every meeting with his probation officer.”
“There has to be another address.”
“Only other thing listed here is his parents,” Watts says.
“And we’ve already sent people there. He’s probably somewhere with the girl, somewhere he’s stashed her away with nobody else around.”
“That could be any one of a thousand places,” Watts says.
“That’s not real helpful,” Schroder snaps at him. “Look, there can’t be too many possibilities. It’s probably somewhere he knows, right?” He looks back down at the file. “Last time he took the kid to the North City Slaughterhouse.”
“You think he’s taken her there?”
“Only one way to find out,” Schroder says. He needs coffee and he needs a break and he needs this all to be over and for Sam to be returned safely. “It’s as good a place as any.”
He calls Landry for an update. “Johnson knows nothing,” Landry
says. “He certainly robbed the bank, but he’s not giving anything up. I think he knew Sam Hunter was going to be taken, but I don’t think he knew who by, or where she’s being held.”
Liam Marshall comes over. “We’re all ready to hit the next house.”
“Let’s go,” Schroder says. On the way he makes a call to the station and asks for a patrol car to head out urgently to the North City Slaughterhouse to take a look around.
Everything looks normal. Take away the fact that the man sitting down playing on a handheld games unit isn’t anybody I’ve seen before. Take away the fact the floor is concrete and the windows are boarded up and the walls have graffiti on them. Ignore the damp air, ignore the smell that’s etched into the walls like a stubborn stain, ignore the fact the mattress my daughter is lying on is a hundred years old, and it’s all normal, just a night in at home.
The light coming from a battery lantern is pale blue and doesn’t make the room any prettier. There’s a couple of relics in here—an old rusted filing cabinet, a laminated table that must weigh close to fifty kilos, cables and wires hanging freely from the ceiling like spiderwebs. Church lowers the game unit. It keeps making animal fighting sounds. There’s a cell phone on the table next to him and I wonder what he’s waiting for.
“Oh Jesus, please don’t kill me,” he says, and it’s taking all my
willpower not to. He’s as thin and as creepy-looking as he was in the photos in his file.
“You took my daughter.”
“I know, I know, but it was just business.”
“And so is this,” I say, and I pump the shotgun.
“Wait, wait,” he says, putting his hands up. “We can deal,” he says.
“Deal?”
“I can give you a name.”
“Yeah? What name? Austin Bracken?”
“Shit.”
“Exactly.”
“Wait, wait, there has to be something I can offer.”
I move toward Sam, keeping the gun trained on Church. When I reach the mattress I squat down but decide not to wake her. My little princess is dreaming of much happier times, her little mouth wide open.
My father walks into the room. He’s found a piece of rebar about half a meter long with a small chunk of concrete attached to the end. He looks at Church, then at me, then down at Sam, and he smiles at her, comes across, and crouches down. It’s the first time he’s ever seen her and the emotion gets to him. I’ve never seen it before—but my father starts to cry.
“So this is my granddaughter,” he says. “She’s beautiful.”
“She’s exactly like her mother,” I say.
Mummy’s a ghost.
I stroke her hair back. “He doesn’t know anything useful,” I say, nodding toward Church.
“You sure?” he asks, wiping at the tears.
“Please, guys, I can help you.”
“I’m taking Sam out to the car,” I say.
“I think that’s best, son.”
“You’ll be okay here?”
“It’s been twenty years, son. I have certain needs. Best you hurry up and get your little girl out of here. If he knows anything more, I’ll find out. I promise.”
I scoop Sam up. She tightens her arms around my neck without waking. “I’m done,” I say to Dad, keeping my voice low, not wanting to wake Sam. “Whether you learn anything or not, I’m done now. The police can do the rest. Whatever this bastard has to say, we’ll hand the information over.”
“Okay, son. I understand. Leave me the shotgun, would you?”
“Come on, let me help you out here,” Church says, “All I know is my old probation officer called me up and told me I had to help him out. He said if I didn’t he’d make life hard for me. I don’t know anything else. There’s no need to do this, any of this. It was business, I swear, just business.”
“Shut up,” Dad says, then turns toward me. “The shotgun, son.”
I think about Jodie and her parents, then I think about the cop parked outside their house and the bank manager and then I think about Gerald Painter. I hand Dad the shotgun and carry Sam outside.
The dark sky is breaking on the horizon, a purple-colored light bruising the edge of the world. I carry Sam over my shoulder and she’s chilly; I wonder if her blanket is still in Jodie’s car. I walk quietly. I keep waiting for the gunshot that will send hundreds of birds into the sky and Sam jumping out of her skin. I buckle her into the backseat, tucking the blanket in around her and under her chin. I sit in the driver’s seat and wonder what Dad is doing right now, but I don’t go and check. I look at the cell phones, killing time while my father kills time in a different way. I’ve missed a couple of calls from Schroder but I don’t phone him back. I turn them off. I don’t care about anything else now except Sam.
After a couple of minutes an engine revs loudly, then headlights appear as a car races toward us, slightly out of control, as if driven by someone who hasn’t driven a car in twenty years. It swerves past us, then it’s gone, a dust cloud following it.
I turn the key but nothing happens. I try a couple more times but
the result is the same. I pop the hood. Dad hasn’t done any damage. All he’s done is tug the leads off the spark plugs. It only takes me a minute to secure them back into place, but it’s all the head start he needs. I pop the boot. The bag of money is gone. The taillights of Dad’s new car have disappeared; he’s getting further away, with a shotgun and a bag full of cash and his desires of the last twenty years no longer suppressed.
I don’t bother chasing him because I’d never catch him, not unless I drove at speeds that would put my daughter’s life at risk. What I said to Dad earlier still stands now—I’m done with it. The police can catch the rest of the men—they surely know by now who they’re looking for. On the chance they haven’t been caught, I can’t go back home and can’t go to my in-laws’. Driving into the police station is an unknown—too many reasons for them to arrest me. By now they want to put me away, if for nothing else than for freeing my father. They’re out there searching for him too. Before I end up in jail I want to at least spend Christmas Day with my daughter.
My head is jumbled up with anger and hate and fear, and I’m so tired that, in the end, the easiest decision is to head to a motel. I find a place modern enough to have been built this year, with a sign out front saying
VACANCY
. I park outside the office and ring the bell and a couple of minutes later a sleepy man in his fifties appears and helps me out. I pay with cash.
The room is as modern as the surroundings would suggest, but I don’t really take the time to check them out. I carry Sam and put her gently into bed, taking off only her shoes, then I collapse on top of my bed and fall asleep.
They’re shooting one in four. They found Kelvin Johnson, but the other two bank robbers are in the wind, along with Oliver Church—though news of another body means Church may have been found. Dawn has come and gone and Schroder is dead on his feet. They all are. They all feel like zombies and look like zombies and it’s nights like these that keep divorce lawyers rolling in cash.
The Armed Offenders Unit is long gone now, having packed away its guns and headed for home, all of them still on standby if needed—all of them probably tempted to switch off their phones. Schroder knows that he is. They’ve busted into four houses and for all their efforts they’ve come away with one suspect.
The patrol officers sent to check the slaughterhouse have reported a body, the head of a male so badly damaged that identification was impossible. No sign of anybody else, but a couple of magazines, a small games unit, and a battery-powered lantern suggest whoever was out there had been there most of the night.
It’s a twenty-five-minute drive to the slaughterhouse from his last location. He’s too tired to drive fast, and has the window down so the air can whistle around his face to keep him awake. He makes a couple of calls to get the ball rolling, organizes the forensics techies to come out; long nights for everybody now turning into long mornings too.
The slaughterhouse is an imposing building in the early-morning light. It’s mostly made up of concrete that could probably survive an atomic bomb. There’s a police car parked outside with two officers sitting in it. The air is full of birdsong and the loudest sound is Schroder’s feet across the ground. The officers lead him inside and he keeps yawning on the way. Assuming he ever makes it home, he’s going to sleep for about twenty-four hours, he thinks; but at this stage it’s an assumption he wouldn’t bet his life on.
Oliver Church is surrounded in blood. He thinks it’s Oliver Church. The clothes certainly suggest it’s not Edward Hunter or his father, and he doesn’t see too many other possibilities at this point. Church’s head is twisted to the side with a large indentation in the side of it which has elongated the front of it, so the distance between his left eye and the left side of his mouth is far greater than the right. He looks like he’s fallen from a great height, so much so that for a moment Schroder is reminded of Suction Cup Guy. A piece of rebar with a bloody lump of cement on the end lies next to him. No way of knowing at this point if Church was tortured to give up more information, or tortured for taking Sam Hunter.
“No other cars out there?” Schroder asks.
“None.”
Probably Jack Hunter took Church’s car, which means father and son have separated. There’s an old mattress lying on the floor. Jammed between it and the wall, barely in sight, is a small teddy bear. The bear isn’t that old but seems to have had a hard life. He bets Sam Hunter cuddled that bear every night of her life, and wonders what she called it. His own daughter has a bear that she sleeps with. For a second he imagines it was her out here and not Sam, and the image is so strong it makes him want to cry. Jesus—he’s so tired.
“You think he found her?” Landry asks on the phone.
“I think so. I think Oliver Church paid the price for taking her.”
“He deserved what he got,” Landry says. “Deserved it years ago.”
“I know. But now I have to lock Edward Hunter up for it. Wasn’t his job to find Church, wasn’t his job to get his daughter back.”
“Wasn’t it?” Landry asks.
Even if it was Jack Hunter who pounded in Church’s skull, it still comes back on Edward for freeing the old man. Edward has to go to jail now, and that leaves Sam where? Maybe, if he’s lucky, he could get a suspended sentence—if he can prove he didn’t kill any of the others. Maybe.
Schroder bends down and picks up the teddy bear. Jack Hunter is on the loose and there’s already a task force looking for him—but that’s not his job, his job is to find the men who robbed the bank, and that job is almost over.
“There’s nothing more we can do tonight,” Landry is saying. “The girl was there, and she’s not there anymore. Edward Hunter got her, has to be him. He’ll have taken her somewhere safe, and he’ll keep her safe until all this is over. We’ll get the rest of the bank crew today, you know we will. Tomorrow at the latest.”
He hangs up and walks past the two officers. “Call me if anything changes,” he tells them. And with that he gets into his car and heads home, hoping for at least a couple of hours’ sleep and some time with his family before he has to start up again, right where he’s left off.
I wake up in the early afternoon with Sam cuddled up next to me. I let her carry on sleeping while I make some coffee and go about waking up some more. I switch on the TV and can’t find any news anywhere, as if this city is sick of the news now. There are holiday movies on, a fantasy on one channel, action on another, drama everywhere else, and I wonder what Hollywood would think if one day a Christchurch story showed up on its doorstep—whether it’d think the tale was too dark or too real to turn into a Christmas blockbuster. I prop Sam up in front of one of the movies and she watches it quietly, not laughing or smiling or even saying a word. She misses her mum and she misses Mr. Fluff ’n’ Stuff and she doesn’t understand why we’re spending Christmas Day in a motel room instead of our home, or with her grandparents.
I take Sam to the cemetery so she can spend some time with her mother. With all that’s happened, I figure it’ll be the last time the three of us are together for a while. I carry Sam out of the car and
sit her down by her mother’s grave and we hold hands and I tell her over and over that everything is going to be okay. There are plenty of other people out at the cemetery, all of them like me, spending time with the dead; Christmas Day is a day for celebration no matter what world you’re in. When I head back to the car with Sam, people keep watching us, and though I’m used to it, this morning it bothers me more than ever. I shield Sam from their stares and drive her back to the motel. She’s asleep again before we get there, and I lay her back on the bed and check on her every five or ten minutes, sometimes holding her hand, not sure what I should do next. I leave the TV on and flick channels but nothing of any interest comes up. Outside, Christmas afternoon is looking like a hot one; only a couple of clouds in the sky, the sun beating down on the city. Mine’s the only car in the parking lot out front. I figure everybody else has family or a better place to be than this motel.
I sit at the window watching the Christmas day, thinking about what today could have meant, about the presents we didn’t get to give, the family time we never got to have, the Christmas lunch and barbecue dinner and the excitement of Santa. I think about my dad, wondering where he is now, what or who he’s looking for. I think about the darkness he’s trying to satisfy. My own monster is quiet now, and maybe that’s the way it’ll stay.