I’m right next to the parking building where Jodie’s car has been for the last week. My keys are still hanging in my car, but the spare keys have been in my pocket all day. I make my way upstairs. Jodie’s car is a four-door Toyota about six years old. It starts on the first turn of the key and I let it warm up for thirty seconds. There’s a modern stereo in the center console and a GPS on top of the dashboard that both seem to be defying the law of gravity, since they haven’t fallen in some passerby’s possession. I find Jodie’s swipe card in the glove box and use it to exit the building.
I drive back the way I came and find the shotgun exactly where I’d left it. I try calling Nat and Diana again and get the same result. I drive a few minutes out of the city and pull over.
I stack up the files and go through them. The names and faces stare out at me, but none of them stand out. Twenty files, all of random people who have nothing to do with the case. After ten minutes it seems it’s all been for nothing—whatever contact Bracken had with the men who killed my wife isn’t to be found in these pages. There’s no way I can make it back into the offices to check for more. I pack the files away and get moving.
There are even fewer cars in the hospital parking lot when I get there than there were earlier tonight—mine doubles the number; the other is a van with a bunch of guys a few years younger than me leaning against it drinking. I wrap the weapon in a jacket Jodie left in the back of her car.
Visiting hours are over and have been for probably six or seven hours. I walk in looking like somebody who knows where they’re going and nobody says anything because there’s nobody around. Not a single person in this part of the ground floor—everybody is either at home for Christmas or working in the emergency room. I make my way down the corridor to the elevators, not leaving any bloody footprints behind because my shoe has dried up. I go up to the fifth floor and step past a nurses’ station that doesn’t have any nurses. Only about half the lights are on that were on this afternoon and it’s only about half the temperature. I reach the ward where my father is and there aren’t any police officers outside like there were this afternoon—which the accountant in me puts down to simple supply and demand. Tonight the city is demanding the most from its guardians, and the police are supplying every man who’s prepared to work overtime and ignore their family—which isn’t many, it seems.
Still, this isn’t going to be a walk in the park. There aren’t any officers here, but there is a security guard sitting in a chair reading a magazine, doing what he can to stay awake. I help him out there by showing him the shotgun. He’s in a similar situation to the one Gerald Painter was in last week—he’s sitting here earning a
minimum wage, armed with nothing useful. He doesn’t even make it out of his chair. He wants to—he gets about halfway up before realizing there’s no point in moving any further. He doesn’t sit back down either—just stays suspended between the two actions.
“Don’t say a word,” I say.
“I won’t.”
“Stand up.”
“Okay.”
“Is there anybody else here?”
“Like who?”
“Police. Other security guards.”
He shakes his head.
“Any nurses in there?” I ask, nodding toward the ward.
“There’s one somewhere but I haven’t seen her in about half an hour.”
“Okay. You know who I am?”
He shrugs. “Am I supposed to?”
“That’s my father in there you’re looking after.”
“Oh shit,” he says. “Please, please, don’t kill me.”
“Then pay close attention.”
I direct him into the ward. There are six men all sleeping in the room, a combination of snoring and farting coming from every corner: if somebody lit a match the air would ignite. The curtain is no longer pulled around my father’s bed. He turns his head toward us.
“The curtain,” he says, and nods toward it.
I reach up and pull the curtain around us. The security guard stands on the opposite side of the bed. My dad has his left arm free, but his right is still cuffed to the bed railing.
“I hear you’ve had a busy day, son,” he says.
“They have Sam.”
“What?” he asks, and his face looks pained.
“The men who killed Jodie. They took Sam tonight. They’re going to kill her, Dad, they’re going to kill her unless I can get her back.”
The security guard doesn’t seem sure what to do. He takes a small
step back and ends up sitting down, most likely thinking he doesn’t get paid enough for this.
“I had no idea,” Dad says.
“I need names.”
“I’ve given you a name.”
“It didn’t pan out. Dad, I wouldn’t be here if there were any other choices. You must have something else.”
“Hand me that water, son.”
There’s a glass of water on the stand next to the bed. I grab it for him. He takes a long slow sip before handing it back.
“Water tastes better here,” he says. “In prison, by the time the water makes it to us about half a dozen guards have already spat in it. Or worse.”
“Dad . . .”
“Kingsly was the driver, right?”
“Yes.”
“So, minus the man you ran over, there are five more.”
“Three more.”
“Three?”
I give him the details. “The monster got them,” I add.
“Okay, son. Well, I have another name that can help.”
“Who?”
“Not so fast.”
“What?”
“Twenty years is a long time,” he says. “The air inside, it tastes different. It tastes stale, it tastes of desperation. At night, tough men who try to kill you during the day cry. In winter it’s always so damn cold and in the summer it’s so damn hot and . . . twenty years, son, twenty years is a long time.”
“It’s still better than what the women you killed got.”
“Is it? Is it really?”
“I think if you could ask them, they’d agree.”
“I’m not so sure,” he says.
“The name?”
“I’m coming with you.”
“What?”
“You want that name, you have to take me with you.”
“They have Sam, Dad. Give me the goddamn name.”
“I know they have Sam.”
I point the shotgun at my father’s chest. He flinches. “I’m not messing around, Dad.”
“You going to shoot me?”
“If I have to.”
“How’s that going to help you?”
“It’ll make me feel better.”
“That’s my boy,” he says, and then smiles. “But you’re not going to pull that trigger.”
“Oh?”
“Too noisy. You won’t make it out of here.”
“Don’t be so sure about that.”
“And you’d be leaving without a name. You could look around, maybe try to find some drugs or tools to torture me, but the quickest and easiest option,” he says, then rattles the handcuff against the frame, “is to take me with you.”
“I can’t.”
“You can if you want to get your daughter back.”
Take him with us. Things will go a lot quicker.
“Keys?” I ask, pointing the gun at the guard.
“I, ah . . . don’t have them.”
“Yeah you do,” Dad says. “They have to in case they need to rush me back into surgery.”
The guard stands up slowly and digs into his pocket.
“There was a time when there’d be more people guarding me,” Dad says. “Back when I was younger, when I was somebody to be feared. Now, nobody knows who I am.”
“That’s funny,” I say, “because everybody knows who I am.”
The security guard leans in and unlocks the cuff, then pulls away fast, expecting my dad to try dragging a scalpel across his throat. Nothing happens. My dad lies in the same position and massages his wrist.
“I’m going to need a wheelchair,” he says.
“You can’t walk?”
“I got stabbed today, son, so no, I can’t walk. At least not that well.”
I point the shotgun at the guard again and give him a fresh set of instructions, and a few seconds later he’s lying on the floor naked with one hand wrapped through the base of the bed frame and cuffed to his ankle. I take his phone and keys and step back to the other side of the curtain. The other five men still appear to be asleep. A nurse walks past the open doorway to the corridor but doesn’t look in. She’s probably so used to never seeing a security guard sitting outside the room that she doesn’t notice him missing. I give her a few seconds’ head start, then follow her out. She goes one way and I go the other, heading toward a row of wheelchairs I spotted earlier.
I get back to my father and half of me expects him to be gone and the other half expects him to have killed the guard, but nothing has changed—he’s still lying on the bed. I slip the IV needle out of his wrist and help him into the security guard’s clothes, which are a bit big but better than the hospital gown. He winces and breathes heavily, and does more of the same when I get him into the wheelchair. He holds his hands over the area where half a day ago surgeons were busy at work, and he keeps them snug against the wound as if trying to hold parts of himself inside.
“Stay quiet,” I say to the guard. “Let us get out of here without having to shoot any nurses.”
“Okay.”
I have to put the gun in my father’s lap so I can push the wheelchair. We reach the corridor. Dad’s hands don’t ever extend beyond the wound. We reach the elevators. I hide the shotgun behind my body when the doors open on the ground floor, then put it back in my father’s lap when nobody shows up. I wheel him out of the hospital and out into the parking lot and past the same group of teenagers leaning against the van, who show interest in the shotgun by all becoming immensely quiet. I help Dad into the car and can’t figure out how to fold the wheelchair into the boot, so leave it behind. I figure this entire thing should have been more difficult. I figure getting in to see my dad should have been hard enough, let alone
getting him out. I figure a few years ago it would have been. A few years ago there were enough people left to care enough about paying one or two cops overtime or shifting some resources to have them sit beside him. If they can’t pay them enough to protect my daughter, they sure won’t pay them enough to guard an old man.
“Where to?” I ask.
“First I need some food.”
“Dad . . .”
“I haven’t had a real meal in twenty years, son.”
“We don’t have time.”
“We’ll make the time. I’m sure there’ll be a McDonald’s on the way.”
“On the way to where?”
“On the way to the next name on the list,” he says, and I pull away from the curb and follow my father’s directions.
Turns out the Serial Killer choice of food isn’t a Happy Meal, but a Big Mac. Dad complains how it falls apart in his hands but still eats it as I drive, probably faster than any Big Mac has ever been eaten.
“I don’t think your doctor would approve,” I say.
“Probably not,” he answers, following it with a Coke, “but he probably wouldn’t have approved of me being stabbed either.”
“Want to tell me about it?”
“Not much to tell,” he says, then takes another bite.
I keep driving. Dad works away at the fries. When he’s done, he balls up the wrappers and tosses everything out the window.
“Dad . . .”
“What?” he says. “People don’t throw things out the window these days?”
“Where are we heading?”
“It all looks the same,” he says. “Newer, maybe, but not much. A
couple of apartment complexes, some new homes, other than that it’s like I was here yesterday.”
“Fascinating, Dad, it really is. Now, where are we heading?”
“You’ve killed four men starting with Shane Kingsly, is that right?”
“Something like that.”
“So you’ve been listening to the monster, as you call it.”
“Something like that.”
“And now the rest of them have Sam and you’re going to do what it takes to get her back.”
“What’s your point?”
“My point is that we’re certainly alike.”
“We’re nothing alike.”
“Whatever you say, Jack.”
“Where to?”
“You know what, son, suddenly I don’t feel so good,” he says, and he grips his stomach.
I slow down. “I’ll take you back to the hospital.”
“No, no, it’s not that. My stomach’s bloated. Oh shit, I need to find a bathroom. This food, I haven’t eaten food like this in twenty years, oh shit, oh shit, this is going to be bad.”
“Just hold on,” I say.
“That’s great advice, son,” he says, doubling over and holding an arm across his stomach.
I make a left and drive to a nearby service station, pulling up around the side where there’s a bathroom door and Dad, hunched over, makes his way inside. I wait inside the car and five minutes later he comes back out, his skin even paler than when he went in.
“It’s going to take a while getting used to the outside world,” he says.
“Don’t get too used to it. Once I get Sam back I’m taking you in.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Get in the car, Dad.”
He gets in the car and we’re back on the road. His skin is clammy and he doesn’t look too good: I’m not sure whether it’s the food or the stabbing he took earlier in the day. The roads are empty except
for an occasional taxi taking the drunk home, or other killers out there looking for their daughters.
Dad gives me the address and I punch it into the GPS unit and it gives us the directions. Dad stares out the window watching the city, remembering it as best as he can. Occasionally we come across a new intersection that confuses him, but for the most part he knows his way around. I wonder if I’d be doing as good a job as him if I’d been inside for twenty years. I suspect there are plenty of other things my dad is still good at, other things that instinct and muscle memory would help him complete.
The neighborhood the GPS directs us into is another of the areas hit heavy by the virus—only this one has been hit by a rust epidemic too: the cars parked out front are all beaten up and gardens as dry as a bone. It’s all out of date, as if the GPS has brought us to 1982 instead. Dad’s still wobbly when I get him out of the car, but nowhere near as clammy as he was ten minutes ago.
“Tyler Layton,” Dad says.
“He one of the guys?”
“He’s why we’re here.”
I look at the street and the houses and the cars and I think, I’ve been here before, maybe not this exact location but certainly one just like it, certainly in a similar frame of mind to the one I’m in now, except instead of the monster in the passenger seat it’s my father—a different type of monster but a monster nonetheless. Maybe we’re all here, Dad’s darkness and my monster riding in the backseat, chatting to each other, comparing stories and wagering on the outcome of the night. Schroder was wrong when he said the city is on a precipice. He’s wrong in thinking it can still be saved. Just ask Jodie.