Authors: David Jackson
‘Yeah. My mom’s blood. She’s dead. I killed my mom.’
10.36
PM
‘What? What did you say?’
‘I want you to kill someone, Erin.’
She’d heard him correctly the first time, but saying it again doesn’t make it any more believable.
‘What are you talking about? That’s crazy.’
The voice remains calm.
‘I don’t think it’s crazy. I think it’s a good deal. If you want to see your baby alive again, then that’s what you need to do.’
She shakes her head. This has got to be a joke. A test. He’s pushing me. Trying to find out just how far I’d be prepared to go. He’s not really expecting me to agree to this.
She pushes out a mirthless laugh. Lets him know she appreciates the morbid humor.
‘All right, can we get serious now, please? I want my
Georgia back.’
‘Yes, I know you do. And that’s why I’m giving you this opportunity. I’m perfectly serious about it.’
No. No. This is insane. He can’t mean this. Nobody in their right mind would suggest something like this.
‘You want me to kill someone? You’re seriously suggesting that I kill another human being?’
‘Only if you want Georgia as much as you say you do. If you love her, then prove it. Her life for somebody else’s. Is that such a hard bargain for an adoring mother to agree to?’
‘Yes. Yes it is. It would be hard for anyone to agree to. It would be hard if you had stolen ten children of mine. You’re asking me to take someone else’s life. Do you understand how repellent that idea is to me? Do you have any concept of how alien it is to me?’
‘Really? You surprise me. That’s not the impression I have of you.’
This stops her. Impression? What impression? All he’s got is a few minutes of listening to me over a microphone.
‘That’s because you don’t know me. You know nothing about me.’
‘Actually, I know a lot more about you than you think. I didn’t just pick you out of a hat,
Erin. You were chosen. Carefully selected.’
A chill races through her body. The situation she’s in is devastating enough without the added suggestion that it could possibly go much deeper.
‘What do you mean, selected? I don’t understand. How was I selected?’
‘I can’t go into all the details. Suffice to say that you were chosen on the basis of your potential.’
Wait. What? He’s talking as though I’m the subject of some kind of experiment here. Like I’ve been under a microscope all my life and didn’t even know it.
‘Chosen by whom? By you? Why? And how? You mean you’ve been watching me?’
So many questions. Her mind is a whirlwind of questions. Nothing makes sense. Nothing is believable. This just doesn’t happen to people.
‘Like I say,
Erin, I can’t go into details. But you’re definitely right for this. I know you have it in you.’
‘No. You’ve got me all wrong. I don’t know what you’ve heard about me. I don’t know what research you’ve done on me. But you picked the wrong person. Doesn’t matter what threats you make, to me or my baby. I can’t do what you ask. I’m sorry.’
She hears a low laugh through her earpiece.
‘Oh,
Erin. You’re priceless. You’re perfect for this. It’s precisely because you think you can’t do it that makes you so suitable. This will be good for you, believe me. It will bring out an inner strength in you that you don’t even know you possess. You will discover so many new things about yourself.’
He’s insane. Has to be. He sounds calm and rational, but he’s got to be out of his skull. This is too twisted for words. Why is he doing this? What possible motive could he have if he’s not crazy?
‘I don’t want to discover new things. I’m happy as I am. I just want to get on with my life. Just me and my baby. Please, if you really have Georgia, you should give her back to me. I won’t say anything about this to anyone. Just hand her back, and we’ll forget all about it. Okay?’
‘Erin, Erin,
Erin.’
The voice is so patronizing now. Making her feel like she’s a naughty child who needs to learn her lesson.
‘Stop all this. You can’t make it go away. It is what it is. Whining and pleading won’t change things. Besides, it’s beneath you. Start showing some of that fortitude I talked about.’
A wave of fury suddenly engulfs
Erin. ‘NO!’ she yells. She leaps to her feet. Grabs her lapel and brings the brooch right up to her mouth. ‘NOOOO! You give me my baby now, you fucking piece of shit! You hear me, you son of a bitch? Give me back my baby, or so help me God I will track you down and I will kill you. Do you hear what I’m saying, you cocksucker?’
She stands there panting after her tirade, burning tears of anger running down her face.
‘My, my. What a potty mouth you have when you get riled. But you know what? I believe what you said. I believe you could kill me right now, if it meant getting your baby back. You see? You can do it. You can kill for your baby. You’ve already taken that first vital step.’
‘Fuck you,’ she says. ‘I’ve had enough of listening to your crap. I’m calling the cops. You can watch if you like. If you get so aroused by watching what I do, then observe this, you prick.’
She walks over to the phone. Picks it up from its cradle. Holds it in front of the brooch.
‘You see this? Watch what I do.’
‘Erin, put the phone down.’
The voice has a hardened edge to it. A hard, sharp edge that threatens harm.
‘Watch. See? I’m pressing nine. See how I press the nine key?’
‘You’re being silly, Erin. Don’t be so childish.’
‘Now a one. Are you getting all this? Can you see what I’m doing here? Your game is over, mister. Give up now, or you are in so much trouble.’
‘Erin. I am not going to warn you again. This is your last chance.’
‘Oh, yeah? Last chance for what? What are you going to do about it? Scared now, aren’t you? Shoe’s on the other foot now. Are you watching? One more digit. Ready for this, you cowardly bastard?’
‘Erin, if you make that call, you will regret it for the rest of your life.’
Erin
stabs at the key. Does it with great emphasis to let him know she’s not afraid of him. She’s in control now.
‘Now all I have to do is press this call button. See? This one here?’
She hovers her index finger over the button – the one with the little icon of a green phone above it.
And then the man says something that makes her think again.
He says,
‘Do you want me to hurt your baby? Is that really what you want?’
‘What?’
‘Because I will hurt her. If you complete that call, I will damage your baby.’
She stares at the phone. Her finger is still aimed at the call button, but now it’s quivering. And over the camera, the man will see that he has put doubt in her mind.
‘You’re bluffing. You wouldn’t hurt a baby. Nobody would hurt a little baby.’
‘Ah, see, that’s where you’re wrong. This child might mean everything to you, but it means nothing to me. It’s a means to an end, that’s all. I don’t care if it lives happily or suffers a very painful death.’
Erin wavers. What do I do? If I stop this call now, he’s won. He will know how weak I am. I can’t let him believe he’s stronger than me.
‘You know what? I think you’re lying. I’m not even sure you’ve got my baby. She could be dead already, for all I know. And even if you do have her, you won’t hurt her. You know why? Because if you harm just a hair on her head, this conversation is over. I will take out the earpiece and I will smash the brooch and your little game will be over. The only reason I’m still talking to you now is because I’m giving you a chance to put things right. You’ve got three seconds. After that I’m calling the cops. What’s it going to be?’
She hears a brief burst of what sounds like handclapping.
‘Bravo. Nice try. You’ve got guts, Erin. It’s why I chose you.’
‘Three,’ she says.
‘Won’t work, though. Not against me. There’s no point in trying to fight this.’
‘Two.’
‘But maybe it’s for the best. We need to get off on the right foot. Establish the ground rules. Maybe this is a lesson you need to learn the hard way, just so we work together better in the future.’
‘One.’
‘Okay, Erin. If that’s what you want. I’ll let you choose. What’s it to be? Georgia’s fingers? Her tiny button toes? Maybe those shiny blue eyes of hers? What do you think? Which bits of her are you going to sacrifice?’
Tears are streaming down her face now. Her finger is shaking uncontrollably over the phone. I can’t do this, she thinks. I can’t endanger
Georgia. But I have to do it. It’s the only way to save her. I have to do it. Please, please, please, let this be the right decision.
She presses the call button. Brings the phone to her ear.
‘Oh, Erin.’
His voice in one ear, speaking with quiet finality. The ringtone in the other. Please answer. Answer the damn phone.
And then she hears it.
The scream.
The high pitched shriek of her child.
She’s heard
Georgia cry a thousand times, and she knows it’s her – knows that without doubt. But this cry pierces her. It shoots through her ear and into her brain and on down through her heart and her gut, ripping her insides to pieces as it fires through her body. And all she can think is, No, no, no, what have I done? And she drops the phone and yells something. Calls for him to stop as she fumbles for the phone. Pleads with him not to hurt her baby. Look, I’m ending the call, see? Can you see? Please tell me you can see this. Please stop hurting Georgia. She’s just a baby. Please stop. Please. Please.
And then she’s on the floor and she’s screaming and crying and wishing the world beneath her would open up and swallow her and end her life because of what she has done to her poor sweet baby.
11.05 PM
Detective Second Grade Callum Doyle would go home now if he could. But he can’t. He has almost two hours of his shift left. He started work at four this afternoon, and isn’t due to finish until one in the morning.
The unsociable hours are one of the downsides of being a
New York City detective. Doyle thinks it’s a pity that the criminals in this fair city haven’t yet adopted the more reasonable nine-to-five working day to which anyone with common sense adheres. Maybe they should form a union. Take strike action. The criminal fraternity is certainly being short-changed in this regard.
That said, tonight it would seem that the felons have finally seen sense. Either that or they’ve all taken themselves off to a conference somewhere. It has been a deathly quiet shift in a deathly quiet day. The Christmas and New Year festivities are well and truly over. Not so much drunken carousing. Not so many suicides. The two ends of the happiness spectrum have been replaced by a middle ground of people returning to the mundanity of everyday life. This is a lull, though. The brief respite provided by the holidays will soon be forgotten, and people will resume where they left off. They will return to their feuds, their hatreds, their greed, their pettiness. Conflict will be re-ignited. All will be as it was. As though the message of Christmas was written in disappearing ink.
Doyle can’t wait.
Which is not to say that Doyle has less love for his fellow humans than the rest of us. In an ideal world he would be the first to vote for scrapping the police force. He would be the first to sign up to no more murders, rapes, robberies, assaults and other forms of nastiness. But it’s not an ideal world, is it? These things happen, and if they’re going to happen then they may as well happen on Doyle’s shift, because right now he is bored stiff. He is bored of paperwork, and he is bored of taking phone calls from mentally disturbed people who want to report aliens under their beds, and he is bored of trying to keep himself interested in things that don’t interest him.
He is not alone in this. When he looks around the squadroom, he sees his colleagues yawning, stretching and scratching. It’s not as if they can even do much in the way of chasing up leads on active cases. When it gets this late, people don’t like to receive calls from cops, asking them what they saw or heard or did. They want to go to bed. Requests for interviews at this time of the night just make people irritable and uncooperative.
Rachel, his wife, might also be a tad annoyed if he called her again. He spoke to her less than an hour ago. And an hour before that. And an hour before that too. She saw right through it. Said, ‘You don’t build up credit, you know. Making all these calls tonight when you’ve got nothing else to do doesn’t mean you don’t have to call on other nights. You’re not allowed to average things out like that. It’s in the rulebook.’
He smiled at that, but although he didn’t protest, he actually did have reasons for calling other than boredom. That’s the thing with working these late shifts. He misses out on precious family time. The evening meal together. Putting Amy to bed. Earlier, his daughter told him on the phone about a flower she had made with the new craft set she received for Christmas. To anyone else it would be insignificant news, but to Doyle it was fascinating. He listened intently to her squeaky little voice and told her how clever she was and about how he was dying to see it, and then she told him she would leave it by his bed for him to see, and he wished he could be there right then, sitting with her on her bed and looking at this beautiful flower his child had created.
And sometimes, when he gets all melancholy like that, he thinks about how he has let his family down. He thinks about all the terrible things he has done. Things that include killing and maiming. Things he cannot tell anyone about. Things he finds difficult to admit even to himself. He knows he has been changed by these things, and sometimes it worries him that he will lose himself and he will lose his family. And then he gets scared.
Shit!
Too much time to think, that’s the problem. Snap out of it, man.
He clears his throat. Gets up from his desk. Rotates his shoulders and shakes the tension out of his arms. He’s spent the last hour typing up DD5 reports – a task which he hates – and his posture feels all out of whack. He reckons he’s not built for desk duties. He’s built for being active. For doing stuff. In his younger days he boxed. He was good, but not brilliant. Not top-notch enough to make it his career. But he’s never stopped doing the exercises. He still jogs, he still does the sit-ups and the press-ups, and he still pounds the punch-bag. And he doesn’t do all that just so he is better prepared for the demands of typing.
Doyle picks up the mug from his desk. Given to him by Rachel, it has a picture of Popeye on it. ‘Popeye,’ she explained at the time. ‘Because you’re Doyle. Popeye Doyle? The French Connection?’ To which he replied. ‘Thank you, Olive. Where’s me spinach?’
He strolls over to where Tommy LeBlanc is pouring himself a thick, strong dose of coffee. Sets down his mug next to LeBlanc’s.
‘Fill her up,’ he says.
LeBlanc smiles. ‘Regular or premium?’
‘Gimme the highest octane you got.’
LeBlanc brings the jug across and pauses. ‘You really need this? With all the excitement we got going on here?’
Doyle shrugs. ‘What can I say? I like living on the edge.’
Not so long ago, most of Doyle’s conversations with LeBlanc were not as amicable and relaxed as this. LeBlanc is the youngest and least experienced member of the Eighth Precinct detective squad. That in itself does not make him a bad or ineffectual cop, and in fact Doyle now thinks of him as having the makings of an excellent detective. A few months ago, though, his view of LeBlanc was as a snot-nosed fashion-obsessed newbie who probably didn’t know shit. Which, Doyle now accepts, was completely unreasonable of him. What prompted that way of thinking was that LeBlanc’s usual partner on the squad was, and still is, a man called Schneider, who hates Doyle’s guts. It was guilt by association – a specious syllogism that went something like: Schneider hates Doyle; Schneider’s partner is LeBlanc; therefore LeBlanc hates Doyle too. And without any evidence that this had some basis in fact, Doyle went on the defensive and mentally slotted LeBlanc into the category of ‘opposition’.
Things came to a head last October, when Doyle and LeBlanc were paired up for the first time on a case. From the get-go it was not a harmonious partnership. Doyle did his best not to involve LeBlanc. He didn’t even let him into his thought processes. It didn’t help matters that this particular case, involving the torture and murder of a teenage girl, really fucked up Doyle’s mind, and that the man he believed to be the killer was adept at fucking
up Doyle’s life. A partner he could have trusted and relied upon would, he now acknowledges, have been a tremendous asset.
Doyle knows all this. He got it wrong. He made a mistake. He acted like an asshole.
But good things can arise from bad situations. And arising from this one was what he learned about LeBlanc, which is that underneath the trendy suit and the skinny tie and the snazzy glasses and the waxed blond hair there is a stand-up guy who has balls. A guy with a moral compass that points in the right direction despite the spiteful magnetic pull emanating from people like Schneider.
In short, Doyle has taken a shine to LeBlanc. He would welcome the opportunity to partner up with him again, and this time on much more conducive terms.
Says Doyle, ‘You get any good toys for Christmas?’
LeBlanc’s smile shows that he doesn’t mind the jibe. His youthful, fresh-faced appearance belies the fact that he is actually only a few years younger than Doyle.
‘Yeah. I got a nice train set. You want, I’ll let you come over and use it some time. It’s got little action figures and everything.’
‘Cool. Is it as nice as our subway? Does it come with a pickpocket and a homeless guy and a drunk and a flasher?’
‘Sure does. Even has this one little guy, throws himself onto the track at random intervals. It’s very realistic.’
Doyle issues an exaggerated sigh. ‘Ah, don’t you just love the romance of those traditional toys? Much nicer than the modern crap.’
He takes a sip of his coffee. Tries to peer through the grime-caked windows of the station house.
‘What’s wrong with people tonight? Don’t they know there are things worth stealing out there? People worth assaulting? This rate, we’ll be out of a job.’
LeBlanc starts back to his desk. ‘It won’t last. Make the most of it. Something big goes down now, you’ll be here all night. Just type up your fives and punch out. Tomorrow you’ll be praying the shift could be as peaceful as this.’
Doyle nods. Wise words from such a young head. Make hay while the sun shines. Except that the sun isn’t shining because it’s a miserable, depressing January night, and making hay is the last pursuit he’s likely to undertake in a squadroom full of tired, bored cops.
He sighs again, this time for real, and drags himself back to his desk. He sets the coffee mug down on a Guinness coaster, then flicks the head of the bobble-headed leprechaun that was bought for him by the squad as a welcoming present. Something to do with him being Irish, ho, ho.
He sometimes wonders what would have happened to him if he’d stayed Irish. If he hadn’t been whisked across to
New York when he was only eight years old. Would he still have become a cop? A member of the
gardai
? Was he always destined to become an enforcer of law?
And sometimes he wonders whether that’s still what he is. Whether the line between right and wrong is still as clear as it seemed to him when he was a hopeful young man in the
Police Academy. That line seems so much fuzzier now. Some of the things he’s done…
His phone rings. He snatches at the receiver and stabs the flashing call button before some other bastard can steal his action.
‘Cal? It’s Marcus, downstairs.’
Marcus Wilson. The desk sergeant. Doyle likes
Wilson. He likes LeBlanc too. Hell, it seems to Doyle as though he likes everyone at the moment except the criminals, who are just not living up to expectations tonight.
‘Hey, Marcus. How’s it going?’
‘Oh, the usual. You know how it is. Busy, busy, busy. Right?’
Doyle frowns. How is it that Marcus has so much to do, while we’re sitting here with our thumbs up our asses? Where’s the fairness in that?
‘Yeah,’ he says. ‘Up to our eyes here. Whaddya got?’
‘A live one. You interested?’
Am I interested? All the activity we got going on, not a moment to ourselves, and he asks if I’m interested?
‘Shoot,’ says Doyle.