Читать книгу Whatever it takes - Paul Cleave - Страница 5

One

“You’re going to kill him,” Drew says.

I rest my forehead against the wall and stare at the floor. I try to get my breathing under control. There’s a half-flattened cockroach down there, along with a cigarette butt tossed at the garbage bin that’s missed. There’s something in my mind that hurts. I pinch the bridge of my nose and squeeze my eyes shut and will the pain away, but it holds on tight. It’s like a splinter buried deep that’s gotten infected, and the only way to dull the pain is by punching the guy tied up in the chair. Which is what I do. I hit him so hard I hear something crack and I don’t know if it’s one of my fingers or his cheek. I’ve hit him so many times already my fingers hurt bad, but his face has to hurt more. His left eye is swollen and purple, his nose is broke and his bottom lip split and there’s plenty of blood and torn skin. But despite all that the son of a bitch still looks up at me with a grin, the kind of grin anybody would want to wipe off his face, only so far nothing has worked. The only thing I can wipe are my knuckles on my shirt, which is already plenty messy.

Drew puts a hand on my shoulder and I shrug it off.

“Don’t,” I tell him.

He puts his hand back on my shoulder and looks me right in the eye. Drew and me, we’ve been best friends since we were kids. Growing up, we chased girls across playgrounds and climbed trees and went fishing. When we were older we joined the police together and played the role of best man at the other’s wedding. If he doesn’t remove his hand in the next two seconds, I’m going to break it.

“This isn’t you, Noah. This isn’t the way we do things.”

He’s right. This isn’t me. Yet here we are. He takes his hand off my shoulder.

“Goddamn it, Noah, I can’t let you beat him to death.”

Drew has a look on his face that’s a mixture of confusion and panic, mixed in with an overwhelming look of wanting to pretend this isn’t happening. I feel the same way.

“You should leave.”

“I . . .”

I take another swing at the guy in the chair before Drew can say whatever it is he thought he could say that would stop me. Blood and sweat mist the dry air and the punch echoes in the room. I can smell wood and blood and sweat. The guy spits a glob of blood on the floor and shakes his head. His smile comes back and I feel something in my stomach roll.

“My dad is going to put you in a box,” he says. His name is Conrad, and the same way me and Drew grew up together, so did me and Conrad, only everything was opposite. We never hung out. Conrad isn’t a hanging out kind of guy. He’s a selfish son of a bitch. He’s a bully without an ounce of decency in him. The kind of guy women warn their friends about and cross the road to avoid.

He’s also the sheriff’s son.

“You should be spending time thinking about your future, not mine,” I tell him.

He spits again. “I told you already,” he says. “I don’t know where she is.”

I pace the office. The windows are closed and the air isn’t just hot, but sticky hot. My clothes are damp. They cling to my skin and stretch when I move. The wooden floors are worn smooth by the years of anxious foremen pacing them the same way I’m pacing them now, and they creak a little under my weight. Conrad is the current foreman. The furniture in here is so old everything could be a prototype. The first desk ever built, the first filing cabinet assembled — hell, even the computer is so big it looks like its first job was cracking the Enigma code. There’s a TV bolted on the wall with a screen as round as a fishbowl. The ceiling is pitted with fly crap and the in-out trays on the desk have paperwork spilling out of them. My headache is starting to rage and the thing turning in my stomach turns some more. I don’t like where this is going. I wish there were a way to take it all back.

There isn’t.

I have to carry on.

For the girl. Alyssa.

I stop pacing in front of him. “Where is she?”

“I want my lawyer,” he says.

Drew steps between us. He puts his hand on my chest and the other is on the butt of his gun that’s still holstered and I wonder whether he’d use it, whether he even knows if he would. I shouldn’t have gotten him mixed up in this. “Let’s have a word outside,” he says.

I stare at him, unblinking. Then I relent. We head into the factory. I put my hands on the iron railing. A few lights are on, but they’re not doing a great job, the vastness of the factory is sucking the enthusiasm out of them. I can only see twenty yards in front of me. There are rows of lumber stretching out into the dark, long beams running as straight as train tracks. The night is pressing hard up against the dusty windows. I lean against the railing so I can face Drew as he closes the door. I can see Conrad through the window, looking out at us.

Drew keeps his voice low when he says, “Even if he does have her, he’s not going to talk.”

I undo the top button of my shirt. There are streaks of blood on it. The air in here is thick. The factory’s powered down for the night, which means no air conditioning.

“He will,” I say, for Alyssa’s sake, and for mine too. There’s no going back from this. “He has to.”

Drew shakes his head. “We can’t keep beating on him. Especially when we don’t know for a fact he has her.”

“He has her,” I say. “I know he has her.”

“You don’t. Not for a fact. You think he does, and you want to believe he does, because if you’re wrong, then we’ve messed up here big time.” He exhales loudly and looks up at the roof as if answers or escape are up there. “Ah, hell, Noah,” he says. “Even if we’re right we’re still in a world of trouble. Even if he confesses right now he’s going to walk away from this. You gotta know no attorney in the world would prosecute him after what we’ve done.”

“We’ll deal with that later. Right now we have to find Alyssa. We’ve come this far. We can’t have done all this for nothing.”

“I wish I could say I let you talk me into this, but that would be naïve.”

“I can make him talk.”

He shakes his head. “We’re done. We have to take him in. We have to do this properly. Best we can hope for is we don’t end up in jail alongside of him.”

“If we take him in he’ll never talk. It’s like you said, nobody would prosecute him. We wouldn’t even be able to charge him. The only way we find her is if we keep doing what we’re doing. There’s no other way now.”

“We can’t keep doing this,” Drew says.

I nod. Then I shake my head. I exhale slowly and loudly as if my body is deflating. The headache stays. It pounds against the walls of my head. I pinch the top of my nose and close my eyes. “Jesus, Drew, I’ve messed up. I’ve really messed up.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder. “Maybe there’s a way we can fix it, but we need to call the sheriff. He ain’t gonna be happy, but . . .”

I slap one handcuff on his wrist and the other one onto the railing.

“What the hell, Noah?”

I take my gun out and point it at him. There’s no need for both of us to throw away our careers. We can’t keep doing this. But I can. “I’ll say it was my fault. I’ll say you tried to stop me.”

“Noah . . .”

“I’m going to need your gun and your keys.”

“Don’t do this, buddy.”

“Hand them over.”

“And if I don’t?”

I don’t answer him. I won’t shoot him, he knows that. He sighs. It’s hard seeing the disappointment in my best friend’s eyes. He takes his gun out and lowers it carefully, kicks it over, then tosses me his keys. I kick the gun over the edge of the landing and it hits the floor below but doesn’t go off. Guns don’t do that. I send the keys after it. I ask for his phone and he tosses it to me. I put it into my pocket.

“It can only go badly for you,” he says.

“I know.”

I head back into the office. I close the door. Conrad smiles at me. “Tick tock,” he says.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

He spits on the floor where his blood is forming all sorts of patterns of the type a psychiatrist might find interesting. “It means there’s only so long you can keep this up before my dad gets here. You know what he’s going to do to you. I’d bet the farm he’s going to put you in the ground.”

“Tell me where she is.”

“You’re a broken record, man.”

“We found her headband.”

“What headband?”

“The one that fell off her when she was abducted. It has your fingerprints on it. That’s what put me on to you, Conrad.”

He doesn’t say anything.

“I took a look in your car out in the parking lot before we came up here. Her school bag is in the trunk.”

“You’re lying, and if you’re not lying it’s because you put it there.”

I stretch out my fingers. They need patching up. They need ice. They need splints.

“You going to hit me again?” he asks. “You always were a pussy, Noah. Why don’t—”

“I know the kind of guy you are, Conrad. And you know that I know.”

His laughter makes me cringe. “Finally, the truth as to why we’re really here. That missing kid has nothing to do with any of this,” he says. “We’re here because you’re still holding a grudge, even after all these years. You’re pathetic.”

I take my gun out and shove it into his stomach. His grin disappears. “Listen to me, Conrad. I know you took her. She’s seven years old. Just an innocent kid. Tell me where she is, and this all ends.” I push the gun in tighter. “You don’t tell me, this still ends, only in a much messier way. My partner out there, he wants me to stop, but he’s cuffed to the railing and can’t do anything to help you. There’s nobody else coming. Your whole tick-tock thing, that’s really about me shooting you if you don’t tell me where she is. Could be in the arm. Could be in the leg. Maybe I’ll shoot you in the dick. You really want a life where you only have a tube to piss out of and legs that don’t work?”

“You don’t have the balls,” he says.

I grab a pair of invoices from the in-out tray and ball them into his mouth. Even when I shoot him in the leg it takes his mind a second to catch up. He thrashes around and spits out the invoices and they’re bloody and wet and stick to the floor. Drew is yelling at me to stop, and on this side of the door Conrad is screaming and my ears are ringing from the shot and the thing in my stomach is turning and turning and the thing in my head is banging and banging. Blood is pouring out of Conrad’s leg to join all the other blood on the floor. I can see a butterfly. I can see a pair of women’s shoes. I can see a missing girl, and I can see death.

“Where is she?” I yell.

“Go to hell.”

I think of Alyssa, scared and alone and tied up somewhere. I know Alyssa. She’s had a rough few years, first losing her dad, then earlier this year losing her mom. She’s a tough kid fighting a mean world. She’s gone through so much I refuse to let her go through anything else. The ringing in my ears starts to subside. I can hear blood dripping on the floor. I can hear my own heartbeat.

I jam the gun into the wound. I feel sick. I can’t do this for much longer. I need him to tell me. I need this to stop. He screams. “I’m not kidding, Conrad, I swear to God, I’m not kidding.”

“Please, Noah, please, don’t, please don’t.”

“Where is she?”

“Wait,” he says, and he’s caught between hyperventilating and crying. “Just a second, just . . . just wait.”

I wait, giving him the chance to compose what needs composing. It won’t be an insult. It won’t be a denial.

“What if . . . what if I didn’t take her, but I know who did?”

Relief floods my body. I can work with that. “And how would you know that?”

“What if — I mean, Jesus, my leg . . . it hurts, man, it really hurts. I need an ambulance.”

“Where is she?”

“You’re crazy, you know that? You’re a psychopath.”

“Where is she?”

“What if . . .” His eyes roll and he looks pale. I shake him. He looks right at me. “I don’t feel so good.”

“Tell me where she is and I call an ambulance.”

“An ambulance,” he says, and he starts to pass out again.

I slap him.

“What?”

“Alyssa.”

“Yeah, Alyssa, Alyssa . . . I overheard a couple of guys, right? They were talking at the bar last night. What if I told you what they said?”

“If what they said finds her, then I don’t have to shoot you no more.”

“They were search and rescue guys,” he says, “from out of town, here looking for that hiker who got lost recently. I’ve never seen them before, I swear.”

Search and rescue guys. The town of Acacia Pines is surrounded by an endless sea of forests and lakes that out-of-towners get lost in. Locals refer to that vast wilderness as The Pines. Search and rescue refer to it as the Green Hole — black holes absorb light, but the Green Hole absorbs hikers and campers. We’ll send out search parties, and sometimes search parties will come in from other cities to help, and most of the time we’ll find the missing campers, but sometimes we don’t. “You didn’t think of picking up the phone and calling your dad? You figured you’d do nothing and let a seven-year-old girl you knew was missing stay missing?”

His head droops. I put my finger into the bullet wound and he screams and I take my finger back out and wipe it on my shirt.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?”

He grits his teeth. “I didn’t want to get involved.”

I should shoot him anyway. Instead, I say, “Tell me what they said.”

He sniffs up another gob of blood and lets it fly into the puddle. “They said they were looking at selling her, that she was . . .” he says, and he grimaces as a wave of pain rips through him. “They said she was cute and ticked all the boxes. They were going to move her offshore in the next few days.”

“Doesn’t explain how her bag got into your car.”

“If you didn’t put it in there, then I don’t know how it got there.”

“And your fingerprints on her headband?”

His voice takes on a whiny quality and he says, “There’s a million ways that could have happened. Maybe I picked it up thinking it was something else. Maybe it’s been somewhere else other than on her. I don’t know. Maybe your tests are wrong. It’s your job to figure that shit out.”

“What about the ski mask I found in your glove compartment?”

He doesn’t say anything.

“You want to explain it to me?”

“It’s . . . it’s not what you think,” he says.

“Yeah? And what do I think?”

“It’s just a ski mask,” he says. “I wear it when I’m out hunting when it’s cold. That’s why shops sell them and why people buy them. Come on, Noah, I’m bleeding to death here.”

“Where is she, Conrad? You overheard them — where’d they say they had her?”

“I don’t know,” he says, and he’s crying now. “I swear I don’t know.”

I push my finger back into the wound. I fight the urge to gag. His body strains against the rope as he leans forward. His veins stick out and his face is as red as a face can get before something hemorrhages, usually in the eyes.

“Wait,” he says. I take my finger back out and I wait. “They mentioned the old Kelly place,” he says, and he’s blubbering tears and snot and it’s mixing with the blood and making a disgusting mess over his shirt.

“The Kelly place,” I say.

“The Kelly place,” he repeats.

I holster my gun and walk out of the office.

He yells out at me through the open door. “You’re dead, Noah. You hear me? You’re dead.”

“What the hell did you do to him?” Drew asks me.

I don’t answer him. I can’t. I hand Drew back his phone, head down the stairs and I don’t look back.