Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

Jerry is sitting in a taxi handing money over to the driver when his phone rings.

“You okay, buddy?”

The driver looks concerned. He’s a big guy whose chest is hanging on his stomach, and whose arms are as thick as Jerry’s legs. He has skin tags tagging his neck and sunspots spotting his scalp. To Jerry he looks like a human baked potato.

“I’m . . . I’m okay.”

“You sure you’re okay?”

Jerry looks out the window. He’s outside his house. The phone is still ringing.

“This is where I live,” he says.

“Then good job I brought you here,” the taxi driver says. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m okay.” The driver hands him his change. Jerry looks at his wrist, but he’s not wearing a watch. “What’s the time?”

“Just after six.”

He climbs out of the car. The day is darkening. It’s cool too. He looks down at the phone, but doesn’t recognize it. Where has he been? Shopping? Visiting friends? The taxi stays where it is while the driver fiddles with something on the dashboard.

Jerry answers the phone. “Hello?”

“I’m on my way.”

“Hans?”

“I’ve got him,” Hans says. “I can’t believe I’m doing this, but I got him.”

“Got who?”

A pause from Hans, and then, “Are you . . . are you okay?”

Jerry looks at his house. Yes, he’s okay. He must have wandered, but where he went he doesn’t know. What he does know is that lately he hasn’t been well. He’s been forgetting things. He pats down his pockets, but can’t find his keys. Sometimes he climbs out windows and goes where he shouldn’t, and if that’s what he’s just done, then perhaps he can climb back in. He moves up the pathway and around to his office.

“I’m fine,” he tells Hans.

“You’re still at the park, right?”

“What park?”

“The park where I told you to wait for me.”

“I don’t remember any park. I’m back home.”

“The nursing home?”

“What nursing home?” Jerry asks, though something about that feels familiar, but he can’t figure out why. He reaches his office. The window is shut and locked. He can see through the window and though everything looks the way it always looks, there is something a little different. The computer looks newer than he remembers, and things are in slightly different places, but for the most part it’s how it should be . . . except off a little. “No, I’m back at my house. What park are you talking about?”

“You’re back home? At your house?”

“Pretty much.”

“What does that mean?”

He makes his way to the front door. Maybe Sandra will be home from work. She’s going to give him a hard time, but if he’s lucky by the end of the day he will have forgotten. And if she isn’t home, there’s a spare key hidden in the backyard. Funny how he can remember where the key is, the day they wrapped it in a small plastic bag and hid it in the garden just under the edge of the deck, but he can’t remember the last thirty minutes.

Perhaps funny is the wrong word.

“Jerry?”

“It means I’m right outside, about to head inside.”

“You’ve remembered where the journal is?”

“You know about that?”

“Listen, Jerry, you need to listen to me very carefully. I want you to stop walking. I want you to stay on the sidewalk. I’m going to come and pick you up.”

He’s almost at the front door. He searches his pockets again in case the keys are hidden in there somewhere—how many times has he looked for his wallet or keys or phone in a pocket only to have found them there on the second or third time hunting through? He doesn’t see what the big deal is with Hans. He also doesn’t find the keys. He does find a pair of Sandra’s earrings, which seems a little odd.

“Jerry?”

“Yeah, yeah, I heard you, but you’re not making any sense.”

“Concentrate, Jerry. What do you remember about today?”

He thinks back over the day. He actually can’t remember anything. That happens sometimes. His family is worried he’s going to mess up the wedding because of it. He knows they’re thinking of putting him into care.

“Jerry?”

“I don’t remember much,” he admits.

“You don’t live in that house anymore, Jerry.”

“Yeah, right,” he says, and then laughs, and then he starts knocking. Nothing funnier than playing a joke on somebody who is losing their mind.

“Are you knocking?” Hans asks.

“I don’t have my key.”

“Seriously, Jerry, you don’t live there anymore. You need to wait for me on the street.”

“But—”

“Are the police around? Do you see them?”

“What? Why would there be police here?”

“You live in a nursing home. You’ve wandered off. You rang me earlier and I came and picked you up from a shopping mall. You don’t remember any of this?”

“None of it,” Jerry says, annoyed at Hans for still pushing this silly joke.

“You have to—”

“I don’t get it,” Jerry says. “I’m missing the joke.”

“I’m not joking.”

“I can see all my stuff through the office window.”

“That’s not your stuff.”

“Ring me back later when you’re making sense,” he says, then hangs up.

He knocks again, but there’s no answer. Either Sandra isn’t home or she’s in the shower. The phone starts ringing again, but he ignores it. He makes his way to the side gate, noticing that the shrubs they planted last spring have all been torn up and replaced by different ones, a layer of bark put down, a family of garden gnomes guardians to it all. He reaches through and unlatches the side gate, and when it swings open he’s staring at a yard that feels slightly out of whack. It takes him a few moments to figure it out, and that’s when he notices the pool has gone. When the hell did that happen? He’s used to losing things by the pool, but never has he actually lost the pool. The garden is different too, but the deck is the same, as are the pavers surrounding it, and he digs his fingers under one and lifts it. The key is still there. He steps up on the deck and opens the bag and at the same time looks through the windows of the French doors into the house. The world tilts further. He doesn’t recognize any of the furniture, and there’s a large painting on the lounge wall of horses running along a beach that he doesn’t remember ever seeing.

Sandra has finally done it, she’s kicked him out and the baker has moved in, all the furniture has been replaced, and she didn’t even have the decency to let him know. Maybe this is what Hans meant when he said he doesn’t live here anymore. He gets the key out of the bag.

“What are you doing here?”

He turns towards the voice. Mrs. Smith has always reminded him of a generic grandmother he’d throw into one of the books for some bad guy to toss down a flight of stairs. “Look, I appreciate your concern,” he says, “but I’m fine. And as you can see we’ve taken care of the gardens. Thanks for stopping by.”

That’s when he notices there’s one thing about her that he’s overlooked. She’s holding a hockey stick. She has both hands tightly wrapped around the handle, with the heel pointing in his direction. Is this a mugging?

“I’ve called the police,” she says, so this isn’t a mugging, and the words trigger a memory, the same woman saying the same thing, and he was sitting in a car when she said it, he was in the passenger seat and they were parked right there on the road, and who was he sitting next to?

“They’re going to lock you away for what you’ve done, for ripping out my roses and setting fire to my car.” She adjusts her grip on the hockey stick. “And for spraying that word on my house.”

“What are you talking . . .” he says, then the images all come rushing, so many of them at one time it makes him dizzy, so many he can’t make any sense of them. He sits down on the doorstep with Mrs. Smith watching him, looking as though she wants to wind up her arms and let loose with that hockey stick.

“Nobody is buying the Alzheimer’s bullshit, Mr. Grey, so stop playing that card. You’re a no-good, rotten son of a bitch who murders women for fun, and if you—”

“What?”

“If you think that you can sneak back into your old house and—”

“What?”

“And kill the new owners, well, you take one more step and I’ll put this through the side of your head.” She changes the angle of the hockey stick to make it look more threatening to prove her point. “I made the national side back in my day, so don’t think I don’t know how to use it.”

The national side? At what? Hockey-stick fencing? “What are you talking about?”

“You’re rotten inside, Mr. Grey. Mean to the core.”

“There is something wrong with you,” he tells her. “What kind of person makes up this shit?” Then he realizes he’s the kind of person who makes up this shit. He does it for a living. He’s a professional liar. A makeup artist.

“You just stay where you are,” she says, and prods the hockey stick at him. “Your wife is dead because of you.”

“What?”

“You killed her.”

Hearing her say that . . . well now, she shouldn’t have said it. Shouldn’t. Have. Said it. He grabs the heal of the hockey stick in both hands and then it’s a tug-of-war between them as he gets to his feet and pushes forward. He’s heavier and stronger and younger and madder and he pushes her easily back down the pathway. Her foot goes into the garden off to the side, she stumbles, holding onto the hockey stick to try and keep her balance, and suddenly he realizes what’s about to happen. As annoying as she is, the last thing he wants is her falling over and cracking her head open. He tries to keep his grip on the hockey stick to stop her from falling, but she’s too heavy, and the stick comes out of his hands. She loses her balance then and topples over, her ass hitting the ground a second before her back, her head hitting a second later, and as he stands there staring at her, he realizes what she said is true—Sandra is dead.

Your name is Jerry Grey, Henry tells him, and he’d forgotten all about Henry, camping out in the back of his brain, there to offer commentary along the way. You’re a crime writer who doesn’t live here anymore, your Alzheimer’s tips the world upside down and shakes the hell out of it. The police are coming for you, they’re coming for you. Oh, also, you shot Sandra.

But it’s Hans that is coming for him, not the police, Hans coming around the side of the house, Hans coming to a stop where Mrs. Smith is making friends with the lawn. She isn’t moving.

“What the hell, Jerry?”

“It . . . it was an accident.”

“Is she . . . ?”

“I don’t know, I don’t know.”

Hans leans down and checks for a pulse. He has to move his fingers around for a few seconds and tuck them into a wrinkle that makes his fingers disappear to the first knuckle, but then he nods and he looks relieved. “She’s still alive. Help me get her up onto the deck.”

They get her upright, each holding one of her arms over their shoulders as they lift her onto the deck. The sun loungers there haven’t been cleaned after the winter, they’re covered in dead leaves and cobwebs and bird crap, but between them they get her laid down on one. “We can’t just leave her like this,” Jerry says. “It’s too cold.”

“Why did you come here?” Hans asks. “You’ve remembered where the journal is?”

“No,” Jerry says. “I don’t even know why I came here.”

“Do you know where it is?”

Jerry nods. “The guy in there has it. The new owner of the house. Gary Somebody. It’s in there somewhere. That must be why I came back.”

“Then we need to go in and get it,” Hans says.

“She called the police,” Jerry says, looking down at Mrs. Smith.

“She said that?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, then we don’t need to worry about her getting cold because they’ll be on their way.” He pulls Jerry back in the direction of the street. “If we have to, we can come back later.”

They reach the car. It’s not the same car Hans was driving earlier. It isn’t until Jerry is sitting down and putting on his seat belt that he realizes they’re not alone. Eric the orderly is slumped across the backseat, eyes closed and softly snoring.

I DON’T KNOW I. DON’T KNOW.

You don’t know what’s going on, but Sandra is dead and Sandra is dead and Sandra. Is. Dead.

You must have fallen asleep and when you woke there was a gun in your hand and why is Sandra dead? What happened? You must have shot her because there’s a hole in her chest and her body is cool and it must have been a while ago and—

You don’t know.

You don’t know.

The Madness Journal, now more important than ever to get your thoughts down. Important to write and remember. But write what? You don’t.

Know.

What happened.

Jerry doesn’t know. Henry doesn’t know. Jerry and Henry are similar sounding names and you don’t know if you’ve ever noticed that before but. You must have, really, and Sandra is dead in your office and. She’s lying on the floor and. There’s blood all around her, it’s leaked. From holes. In her chest and her eyes are open. Open, she’s staring at me as you write and you.

Don’t know what to do. Since the police aren’t here it means she was shot in your office and nobody heard anything, which makes sense because that’s where she is, that’s where the blood is, and.

Think. Think, Jerry.

Think and remember.

What do you remember?

Nothing, but a quick look back into the Madness Journal tells a sorry story of a man taping trash bags to the walls and sitting in the chair and the safety stopping the gun from going off and then Sandra arriving, but you me us we don’t remember what you spoke about but it’s there in the journal and you’ve read it and you called Hans, you called him six hours ago, and the cat died years ago, but you still tried to buy cat food for it, which was way before the baker fucked Sandra and you fucked the wedding and you need to call Hans again to see if he did come around and if he did you need to ask what you spoke about and you need to know what made you angry enough to.

Shoot.

Sandra.

With the gun you were supposed to shoot yourself with, the gun that is on your desk within easy reach right now.

Jerry fucked up. Jerry got confused. Jerry . . .

Shut up, Henry, for the love of God, please. Just. Shut. Up.

Your brain feels like it’s bleeding. Like it’s swelling. Like it’s going to explode. You need to call Hans. He will know what to do. Somebody writes bitch-whore on your letter box? Then call Jerry. But a dead body you need to make disappear? Well now, Hans is your guy.

But you don’t want to dispose of a dead body. What you want is for this not to have happened. Since it has happened, all that’s left is to go back to Plan A—to shoot yourself in the head sans pillowcase.

Have you done this? Have you done this awful thing?

You don’t know. Surely you would know if you had. Wouldn’t you?

Jerry messed up. Jerry is a coward.

Shut up, Henry.

You need to call the police. You need to.

You don’t know. What to.

Do.

You don’t.

Know.

You want to wake up and find none of this has happened.

Bad news—Sandra is dead.

Bad news—Sandra is dead.

“What the hell?” Jerry says.

“I’ll explain on the way.”

“On the way to where?”

Hans starts the car. They leave Mrs. Smith and her neighborhood—Jerry’s old neighborhood—behind, the houses flicking by, houses he used to see every day but can no longer remember.

“What do you remember?” Hans asks.

“Five minutes ago none of it, but now I remember most of it, starting with waking up today in that woman’s house. I remember finding the park you told me to go to, and waiting for you. I . . . ah, hell, I think I must have fallen asleep. Then next thing I knew I was at my old house.”

“I spoke to you a few times,” Hans says. “I thought the police might be tailing me, and I figured it was too risky to come and pick you up right away. I went online. The nursing home has a website because everything has a website, and aside from telling the world what they do, the site also tells the world who is doing it. They have a whole section with the staff there, including brief biographies. There was only one Eric there. I called you back and you were even more determined to question the guy. The way you were explaining it . . . it was making sense. Made sense to at least talk to the guy, right? But it made even more sense to go through his house when he wasn’t there, and see what I could find.”

“So why is he in the back of the car?”

“Because it didn’t work out as planned,” Hans says, and does it ever? Certainly not in any of Jerry’s books, Jerry thinks. “After getting his name online, a phone book gave me his address. Then I gave a buddy of mine a call. I drove to the mall, and I go in and meet him in the bathroom and give him my car keys, and he gives me his, and two minutes later he’s pulling the fire alarm. Everybody ends up moving outside, and in the sea of people I get rid of anybody following me. I head out into the parking lot and then I drive to Eric’s in my buddy’s car. This, by the way, is Eric’s car.”

Hans says it all so matter-of-factly, as if this is the norm, and Jerry guesses for Hans maybe it is. He glances back over at Eric. There is duct tape holding his hands behind him, and more duct tape covering his eyes.

“It’s not as bad as it looks,” Hans says, and Jerry isn’t so sure. He’s also feeling less sure about the whole idea Eric could be guilty. “I gave him a shot, probably similar to the stuff he’s been giving you,” Hans says.

“So how did you go from wanting to search his house to having him sedated in the back of his own car? What happened?”

“What happened is I knocked on his door and I figured, you know, if he answers I can ask him some of those questions.”

“And he answered?”

“No. Which made me figure he wasn’t home.”

“You broke in?”

“Of course I did. I go inside, thinking that if he’s a writer, he probably has an office, and an office is a good place to start looking. Only he’s in there on his computer with a set of headphones on. He hadn’t heard me. He sees me, and he recognizes me right away because I’ve been to see you at the nursing home a number of times, and—”

“You came to see me?”

“Of course I did, buddy. Back to the point, Eric sees me because his desk is facing the door, and he jumps to his feet, and because he knows who I am he does the addition very quickly and figures out why I’m there. Or at least he thinks he knows. He doesn’t even say anything, but he throws a coffee cup at me, then comes charging at me. He doesn’t even get a shot in,” Hans says, smiling at Jerry. “Before I knock him onto his ass. He looks up at me, and he looks angry, and worried, and I tell him I’m there because he killed those girls. He tells me he has no idea what I’m talking about. I tell him I know he was framing you, but he shakes his head and tells me I’m making a mistake. He tells me you’re a psychopath, so then I kick him in the head. He’s out cold and I’m getting ready to tie him up when I notice his wedding ring.”

“He’s married?”

“Yeah. There are photographs on the walls of his house to prove it. So I figure the best thing to do is get the hell out of there. I tidy up the mess so the wife won’t think bad thoughts the moment she gets home, then I drag him through to his car and throw him in the back. I don’t want him to wake up, so I head to my car because I have a couple of shots in there—”

“Shots?”

“Shots to make sure he stays asleep.”

“Your buddy had them in his car?”

“No. I took them with me. They’re there for option number three, remember? One shot puts you to sleep, and that’s all I gave Eric. But enough shots . . . well, you go to sleep and you stay asleep. I give Eric one, and I’m on the way to pick you up from the park when I phone you. That’s everything. Now we have to go somewhere and question him.”

Jerry isn’t sure what to say. It all seemed like a good plan back when Hans and Henry were bouncing around ideas the same way Henry would bounce around ideas with his editor. It all seemed possible at the time, but seeing Eric unconscious in the backseat changes the game in a similar way it would if Jerry walked into his publisher’s office dragging in a dead prostitute and a serial killer and pitched the plot for his next book. There is a world of difference, Jerry thinks, between making shit up and making shit happen.

“Jerry? Earth to Jerry?”

“Yeah, I’m still here,” Jerry says.

“You zoned out.”

“I’m okay.”

“He’s guilty, right?” Hans asks.

“Is he?”

“He’s the one who told the police you confessed to him. And somebody drugged you, right? It’s either that—or you really did sneak out of the home and walk twenty miles to single out a woman you had never met. Plus he knew. The moment he looked at me, he knew he’d been found out.”

“What if he wakes up?”

“He won’t,” Hans says. “Not yet.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“I just know.”

“So where are we going?”

“I know a place,” Hans says, and of course he does.

The day is getting darker. Even though he doesn’t like Mrs. Smith, he hopes somebody has found her already. At the end of the month daylight saving time will kick in and the days will get longer, but right now there isn’t much light past six thirty. Hans has to turn on the headlights. Traffic isn’t too bad because rush hour was over an hour ago. The quality of the neighborhoods degrades the further they go, until they enter one in which every fence is tagged and the sidewalks have cracks with more weeds pushing through than there is grass on front lawns. They park out front of a two-story house that has no front garden, just a huge slab of concrete taking up the entire yard, patches of oil scattered across it, a hopscotch layout created by duct tape in the center. There’s a For Sale sign nailed to the fence that must be fresh since there’s no graffiti on it, or maybe there’s an amnesty on For Sale signs. The amnesty doesn’t stretch to the rag doll that has been nailed beneath the sign, a roofing nail going through the middle of the doll’s face, giving her a metal nose the size of a quarter.

“Wait here,” Hans says, and he turns off the headlights before getting out of the car. Then he leans back in. “I mean it, Jerry. I’m only going to be gone a minute, but don’t wander off, okay?”

“Is that meant to be a joke?”

“It was meant to be, but halfway through it stopped being funny.”

Hans walks up to the front door reaching into his pocket along the way, then he’s in the dark and Jerry can’t see what he’s doing, but he knows his friend is most likely picking the lock, something he’s always thought is a cool trick for his characters, but something he’d never be able to do in real life.

You can do it, Henry says, and Jerry decides it’s neither here nor there.

A minute later Hans is heading back. He’s wearing a pair of thin leather gloves. He glances at the doll on the fence, and Jerry wonders if he’s conjuring up the same kind of images that Horror Book Henry would have thought back in the days when fiction and nonfiction were two completely different things. In another universe, that doll could pull the nail out of its own face and carry on doing what it was doing before somebody assaulted it.

It’s awkward getting Eric out of the back of the car. He’s heavier than Mrs. Smith, and Jerry is sure he’ll have a sore back tomorrow from all this lifting. But they get Eric upright, and then they get him up the driveway and past the wide open door and into a hallway. Before lifting him, Jerry took Eric’s glasses off and put them into his pocket for safekeeping. It’s dark inside and Hans manages to point his cell phone light ahead as they walk, giving Jerry a brief rundown along the way.

“Used to be a drug house,” he says. “It was just small-time stuff, mostly just a couple of guys selling weed to partying teenagers, but the guys were informants for the police, so the police let them do their thing as long as their thing didn’t go beyond that, but of course it went beyond that because they got into some beef with another couple of guys a few blocks away, and next thing you know the average life expectancy in the neighborhood drops substantially. Nobody wants to buy in this neighborhood, and nobody wants to buy a house where a couple of dealers got themselves nailed to a wall, and the cops never did find their dicks.” Jerry looks concerned, and Hans laughs. “Don’t worry, I’m kidding. They did find them. Anyway, that shit was months ago, and nobody ever comes by here, and the police have no reason to. Not while it’s empty. Come on, let’s get this guy upstairs.”

There is no furniture in the house, nothing to try and avoid, no rug to trip on. They get to the stairs and it’s a tight squeeze and Jerry’s not sure what the difference is going to be upstairs compared to downstairs when it comes to questioning somebody, but there must be something significant to be going through all of this. He thought by now they’d have Eric strapped into a chair with a knife to his throat, but there are no chairs and no knives.

Upstairs smells like cat piss and the air is stale. Every wall he looks at he can imagine two men nailed to it. They dump Eric on the landing because they’re both too exhausted to drag him further. Jerry starts to wonder if this is one of those moments when he’s actually in the off position, Functioning Jerry who can’t seem to store any memories, Functioning Henry who is calling the shots.

“You okay, buddy?” Hans asks, puffing a little.

“No,” Jerry says. “None of this is okay. Now what?”

“Now we get him to talk.”

“And just how are we going to mange that?”

“We hang him out the window.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“It’s the easiest way.”

“You’ve done it before?”

“I’ve seen it done,” Hans says.

“In real life?”

“In movies,” Hans says. “It always works.”

“But won’t he just tell us what we want to hear if we do that? It won’t count, right? I’d confess to anything if it’d stop me from getting dropped on my head.”

“Then we make him tell us something only the killer would know.”

“And what if he isn’t the killer? What if I really am?”

“Then if you’re a killer, you shouldn’t be feeling too bad about this, right?”

Jerry hates how that statement makes perfect sense.

“Look at where we are, Jerry. Look at the situation we’re in. You’re lucky the taxi driver earlier didn’t figure out who you were. You’re a wanted man who is running out of time, and if you’re to be believed, an innocent man. If you don’t want to do this, then fine, we take Eric back home and drop you off with the police and you won’t get to look for your journal and you’ll plead guilty and Eva will continue to never want to speak to you, and the police will blame you for every unsolved crime over the last thirty years. Or we trust your gut, and we question him.”

Jerry doesn’t know what to say.

“The clock is ticking,” Hans says. “Are we doing this or not?”

Jerry nods. The decision made.

They drag Eric into the nearest bedroom. Houses always look sad when they’re empty, Jerry thinks, and this house looks so sad he feels like they ought to put it out of its misery by torching it when they leave. There is wallpaper hanging from the walls and large stains in the carpets and funny-shaped circles of mold on the ceiling. He can’t imagine what a real estate agent would say as a selling point—unless they listed it as an ideal home for the budding pyromaniac. The bedroom is facing south, over the backyard, where there is very little in the way of light, but just enough to see the backyard has been paved in concrete too. Jerry guesses the previous owner hated gardening. Hans unlocks the window, then has to shoulder it upwards because it’s swollen in the damp air. Eric is still unconscious, and he’s still wearing his orderly clothes from the home. Seeing him here is so out of context but not enough to jar Jerry back into the world of rational thought, because surely he can’t be there now.

“We wake him up, and then we hang him outside,” Hans says, and he takes the tape off Eric’s eyes, but leaves the one over his mouth. “We let him get a good look around, and then we drag him back in. I’ll slap him around a little, and we don’t ask questions, what we do is we give him statements. We don’t say Did you kill those girls? What we say is We know you killed those girls. Got it?”

“I got it,” Jerry says, his stomach turning at the thought, but not turning as much as Eric’s will be.

“Don’t drop him,” Hans says.

“I won’t.”

“And I want you to keep thinking about where you hid your journal, okay?”

“I’m trying.”

“Then try harder.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Jerry says.

“You ready?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Hans wraps duct tape around Eric’s ankles, pinning his feet together. Then from his pocket he pulls out a small vial. “Smelling salts,” he says. “Trust me, Jerry, everything is going to be okay,” he says, and he opens the top and waves the vial under Eric’s nose.