Acts of Violence (3 page)

When I rounded the
corner, I was surprised. There was no guy in a boat. But there was an
ambulance. And cop cars. And cops. And the cops were going into my apartment
building.

They couldn’t be
there for me. If they hadn’t been called to my place last night with the noise
the barmaid was making, they wouldn’t have been called this morning. The old
lady down the hall had probably twitched her last curtain. Shame. Meant she
probably left me her cat.

I stuck casually to
the wall as I neared. Didn’t want to be seen by the cops. If they saw me,
they’d stop me. Question me. I wanted my coffee. They’d be knocking on doors
later anyway if there was any call for questions.

When I reached the
door, I heard a voice. It was the old man who lived on the bottom floor. I was
about the only one in the building who wasn’t old. He was calling to a cop
standing at the foot of the stairs. The cop walked over to him and I took the
opportunity to slip past and up to my floor. The guy asked what was going on,
but I just kept going. I didn’t hear the reply. I’d have turned back around and
left if I had. I shouldn’t have been so sure of myself.

At the top of the
stairs, I looked left, towards the old lady’s door. There was only one person
in the hall that side. And she was holding an angry looking ginger cat.

My brain didn’t
have time to find disharmony between the old woman staring at me with wide eyes
and the assumption I’d made a minute ago. I heard sounds coming from the other
direction. My door was open. The sounds weren’t the kind I liked to hear from
my apartment. Voices, footsteps, clicks, a short laugh.

I decided pulling
my gun on the cops wasn’t a good idea, even if they had let themselves into my
home. I considered leaving, but I’d already been seen. So I stepped through the
door.

‘Stay where you
are!’ The first cop to see me wrenched his pistol out so wildly I thought he’d
shoot his own foot. Two other uniforms trained their pistols on me.

Two detectives
stood just inside. They’d turned to face me, but didn’t bother with their own
weapons. One of them was familiar.

‘Jack Mason.’ He
spoke as though seeing an old acquaintance again after a long time. One he
didn’t like.

‘Detective… No,
sorry, it’s slipped my mind.’ It hadn’t. It never would.

‘Detective Lawrence.’ He introduced his partner, but I forgot his name right away.

‘Right. The guy
with the first name for a last name. Do you have a last name for a first name?
What was it again?’

‘Detective. And
what I have is you. For real this time.’

‘The hell are you
talking about?’ That was a long time ago. And yesterday. Both at once.

Lawrence stepped
aside. I nearly threw up.

The girl wasn’t
making coffee. She’d been about to. The cupboard over the sink was open. Two
mugs were sitting on the side. But then something had happened. Something that ended
with…this.

I took a couple of
steps further in. The partner motioned to stop me, but Lawrence backed him off.
I guessed later that he wanted to see how my acting had improved.

Police technicians
swarmed the place. I ignored them. Something drew my eye to the ceiling. There
was blood even there. It was everywhere. On the floor, on the bed, in the
kitchen. And all over the girl.

The whole room was
turned over. Someone had searched hard for something. It wasn’t the girl
getting thrown around. The blood wasn’t spread about enough, although there was
a lot of it. There was a hole in the wall, smeared with blood. Her face did
that. A smashed lamp on the floor, also bloody. Everything was bloody. Two
smashed plates on the kitchen floor. Bloody footprints, deliberately smeared.

The girl wasn’t on
the bed where I’d left her. Well, most of her wasn’t. She was lying on the back
of my overturned armchair. She’d put her underwear back on, but nothing else. The
bra had been ripped mostly off. It stayed on only by one strap around her
elbow. An elbow that was bent the wrong way. Most of her skin was red, orange
or black. The same dark brown eyes that had stared into mine while she groaned
and writhed on top of me stared at me again now. Accusing. But unseeing. There
was no shine to them now. The whites were red.

And then I couldn’t
put it off any longer. My eyes moved to her breasts. Or rather, breast. One of
them only raised about two inches into the air, elongated. Gravity. The fawn
was mostly disguised by dark red now. The other breast was gone. Where it
should have been was a rough, lumpy, dark red circle.

My eyes moved to
the bed. On the pillow sat the missing breast. A browning stain spread around
it.

*

Lawrence sat back in his chair. It
creaked.

The timer read twenty-seven
minutes and thirteen seconds. Just over twenty-seven minutes closer to my
death. The lawful murder of an innocent man. I hadn’t done it. That’s what I’d
told Lawrence. He’d never believe it.

‘So you
conveniently wandered out for food at just the right time? Went off looking for
breakfast just long enough for somebody to let themselves into your building.
Let themselves into your apartment. And kill the girl.’

‘Just the right
time?’ The scanner would note the increased heat and heart rate. The flared
nostrils. ‘Hardly seems convenient to me that I was out while a girl was
getting cut to pieces in my apartment! Yeah, real convenient, you ridiculous
prick.’

‘Where’s the food,
Jack?’

‘I told you, the
store had just been robbed. I didn’t get any.’

He pointed at the
scalpel. Opened his mouth to speak.

‘My prints aren’t
on it, are they?’ I said. More of a statement. I knew it wasn’t mine and I
doubted anyone would have planted my prints on it. Easier to take my gun and
shoot her with it. Except they’d have had to take it from me first.

‘Do you suppose
that means something? Have you heard of gloves, Jack? Finger salves?’ You could
rub that stuff onto your hands and it would solidify, covering your prints. It
lasted a few hours. Cheap too.

I stayed quiet. I
wanted to shout at him. Call him as many names as I could think of. There were
two problems with that. Firstly, he hadn’t actually done anything wrong. Of all
the cops in Harem, he was probably the cleanest. From what I’d heard anyway.
All he was doing was investigating. And he had damn good reason to suspect me. Second,
the table would give me a shock to remind me of my place. That would just make
me angrier. It would shock me again. It would continue until one of us gave up.
I doubted it would be the little computer chip inside the table.

There was a single
rap on the door and it opened. Lawrence’s eyes flicked up. I saw the flash of
excitement. I’d have bet good money it was his partner, back from investigating
something. Probably the club. Things were about to look worse for me.

He tapped something
on the table display. The timer froze at twenty-nine minutes and forty seconds.
It felt as though my death sentence had been put on hold for a little while.

A very little
while. Lawrence didn’t even leave the room. Whoever it was whispered into his
ear for less than a minute. Then the door closed and Lawrence sat back down. Resumed
the timer. He looked almost happy.

‘Where’d you meet
the girl, Jack?’

He definitely knew
about the club.

‘The Web.’

‘She was a few
years above most of their patrons.’ I didn’t say anything. He knew damn well
she worked there. ‘Witnesses say that you assaulted Webster junior and then
practically abducted the girl while hiding behind a Harem PD badge.’

I said nothing. It
was surprising how fuzzy even recent memories can get the moment a little heat
is on you. Like the car windshield on a cold morning. I was trying to remember
everything about last night. Exactly how and when it happened.

‘Let’s start with
the assault. I think that’s what set you off on the girl. Webster was out cold
when you left. You didn’t get enough of a kick out of smashing up his face, so
you moved on to the girl. Worked out the rest of the adrenaline.’

‘No.’

‘Broken cheek bone.
Fractured skull. Cracked teeth, some missing. Broken collarbone. Dislocated
shoulders. Both of them. Broken elbow. Broken fingers. Half-crushed larynx. I
won’t even start on the internal organs. And then of course, your crowning
achievement. The thing that really wins you the sick fuck award. You sliced off
her breast.’

‘No.’

‘There’s evidence
of sexual assault too, as if all that weren’t bad enough.’ She’d been wild.
Rough. That made things better last night. Worse today.

‘No!’

My feet pushed off
the floor. The restraints kept me pinned down, pulling painfully at my wrists. I
was back in the ice cold shower. My funny bone had been set upon by a hammer
again. Felt like nearly a minute before my legs finally relaxed and I collapsed
back into the chair.

I closed my eyes.
Tried to ignore the stinging pulses and calm down. I couldn’t argue my case
through gritted teeth. Or through a million volts. Or whatever it was. Felt
like ten million.

‘Calm down, Jack.’ The
calm voice flared my anger again for a second. ‘There’s no need to bring pain
into your last moments of relative freedom. Was it the rape? Were you hoping
you got away with that? You did a lot of bad things last night.’

‘I fucked the girl
four times and finished her smokes. That’s it. She consented to both. I’m not
sure she was as happy about making the coffee.’ I straightened my thoughts out
a little and took a risk. ‘I can prove it wasn’t me.’

‘Oh? Okay, you tell
me what you have and I’ll tell you what I have.’

‘At the club,
there’ll be witnesses to verify that the girl hit Little Dick Webster. He hit
her back. That’s why I hit him. That’s why I took her out with me. You know
that wouldn’t have ended well for her. Then,’ I continued quickly before he
could whip out some smart remark, ‘there’s the cab driver.’

‘Cab driver?’

‘Yeah. You remember
when you weren’t asking the right questions? That’s when I’d have mentioned it.
We got a cab a few blocks from the club, back to my apartment. The driver saw
us together. Saw she wasn’t under…what’s that big word…duress. In fact, he
probably heard her asking me to invite her to my place.’

‘The victim
asked
to be taken to your apartment?’ I didn’t know if the tone was doubt or
surprise. Didn’t matter. On its own, it didn’t prove anything.

‘At home we had
sex. Maybe she is a little bruised, but that’s because
she
was rough. You didn’t find any traces inside her, did you? Why would I have
bothered with protection if it was assault?’

Lawrence tried to
cut in, but I was on a roll. If I let him stop me now, I might lose it.

‘Then in the
morning, I left the apartment to get food. The old lady down the hall will be
able to tell you. She notices everything else that happens within six blocks.
She’d have heard the girl call to me as I walked out. Told me she wanted eggs.’

Lawrence smirked. I
didn’t like that. I continued anyway.

 ‘Whatever you
think of me, you know I’m not a complete moron. I wouldn’t have left the knife
lying there. I’d have got rid of it. In fact that’s the
only
reason I’d have left the apartment if I’d done it.’

He just shrugged at
that one.

‘The storekeeper
can tell you what time I got there. He should know what time it was; he’d just
been robbed, after all. And if not, just check what time he called it in. Inside,
in a steady temperature, those techs will have pinpointed the time she died.
Check it and you’ll know I couldn’t have been there.’

I scanned through
the night again. I couldn’t think of anything else. It had seemed a lot more in
my head. But there should be enough there to show I wasn’t guilty.

‘She hasn’t been
sleeping so good lately.’

That kinda threw
me. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

‘The old woman,’ he
clarified. ‘She took some pills and slept like a corpse… Oops. Maybe that’s a
poor choice of words. She didn’t hear you come in, didn’t hear you go out. Didn’t
hear you redecorating your apartment in brain matter grey. Slept right up until
our sirens woke her.’

I hesitated. The
old lady had been my best bet at getting off. She noticed the slightest things.
Had hearing like a bat with a directional microphone. I shouldn’t have been so
sure of myself. But I got the pills for the old lady myself. She liked me. I
thought she’d have helped me out. Left out the part about sleeping and just
told them she heard nothing. Maybe I’d been a little overconfident when I said
‘prove’.

‘And the store
clerk?’ he continued. ‘He must’ve been really shaken up, because he don’t
remember you at all. And it isn’t far to the store. You could have run it easy
enough.’

He looked pleased
with himself. The clerk didn’t remember me. The robber had shaken him up so bad
I could have been a naked supermodel and he wouldn’t have noticed. Couldn’t
prove I was there. Couldn’t prove I wasn’t.

‘Now shall I tell
you what I’ve got?’ Lawrence sat forward. This was going to be good. For him.
Bad for me. ‘I’ve got you assaulting Richard Webster. I’ve got you assaulting a
member of Webster’s security personnel. I’ve got you impersonating a police
officer. I’ve got you hauling the victim out of the club by her arm. I’ve got
bruises on her arm to back that up. I’ve got traces of your blood in her mouth
and a bite mark on your lip that I know will match her teeth. I’ve got your
skin under her nails. I’ve got her torn clothing, blood and mutilated corpse in
your
apartment. I’ve got a statement from the cab
driver that you scared her into thinking she’d be in danger if she went home.
This time, Jack, I’ve got
you
!’ He slammed his fist
down on the table as he said it.