Текст книги "Trust No One: A Thriller"

Автор книги: Paul Cleave

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Текущая страница: 23 (всего у книги 26 страниц)

“The backups were hidden. I always hid that stuff,” Jerry says.

“Under the floor maybe?”

“There was nothing under the floor.”

“Then where? Think, Jerry, come on, you’re almost there, you’re—”

“Shut up,” Jerry says.

It has to be somewhere else big enough to fit a few bottles of gin. Where? Not the bookcase. Not the desk. Nothing hidden in the wall. Nothing in the roof. Nothing under or inside the couch.

Wait . . . nothing hidden in the wall? Are you sure about that?

“I almost have it,” he says.

Hans says nothing.

“Just let me think,” he says, closing his eyes, and there he is, it’s a workday and every day was a workday back when he used to write, weekends and weekdays were all the same. He’d work on his birthday. He’d even let Henry Cutter out of the bottle for an hour or two on Christmas Day to get those thoughts down. That was the life of a writer—keep writing, keep moving forward, stay ahead of the crowd because if you don’t get that story written down then somebody else would. He’s in his office, he’s building the word count, and he’s wrapping up for the day and he needs to make a backup, needs to get those words secure, because to lose a few thousand of them, let alone an entire manuscript . . . that was one part of being a writer he could avoid. His office, his desk, he’s putting a flash drive into his computer, copy, paste, then he’s taking the flash drive back out. Then what? What does he do next?

Getting out of his chair. Past the couch and to the wardrobe. He opens the wardrobe door and—

“Jerry—”

Crouches down. There’s a box that holds half a dozen reams of paper there. He pushes it aside then—

“You have to focus, Jerry.”

Presses the bottom corner of the wall. An opposite corner juts out. It’s a false wall, no taller than his forearm but the width of the wardrobe. He pulls it away, and there’s the gin, there are the flash drives, one for each novel, there’s the gun and there’s—

“I know where the journal is,” he says, and he stands up so quickly he bangs against the table. The glass slides towards Hans, who catches it before it can fall.

“At the house?”

“In my office,” Jerry says.

“Then let’s go.”

“Let me grab my second journal,” Jerry says, and he’s already moving back towards the study. “I want to read it on the way.”

DAY ONE MILLION

Okay, so it’s not really day one million, and I’m not sure how liberal I was with exaggerations in the books. Derek (it’s actually Eric, but I’ve come to think of him as a Derek) told me this morning it’s been eight months since I checked in. Which, by my calculations, is nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand days and change short of a million. Still, it feels like I’ve been here forever.

Today is a Jerry is Jerry day.

Jerry has Alzheimer’s—check.

Jerry used to be a crime writer—check.

Jerry knows he shouldn’t trust Derek—check.

Or Eric—check.

Jerry is making a checklist—check.

I’ve been flicking through the journal and seeing I’ve been piling crazy on top of crazy, and among some of those entries is evidence that Henry has been coming out to play. I’ve been having conversations with him. Henry and me shooting the breeze. There are two points here, Future Me, that I want to make. It’s two-for Tuesday. The first is to stop trusting Eric. Let me put that in big capital letters. DON’T TRUST ERIC. I came into my room earlier and found him elbows deep in my drawer. I think he was looking for my journal. For what reason, I don’t know. I asked him what he was doing. He said he was tidying up. Henry thinks he’s lying. Henry thinks there’s an ulterior motive for Eric wanting you to write in the journal, and Henry does, after all, deal in ulterior motives (most of the characters he creates have one). In this case the motive is Eric stealing my ideas because he wants to be a writer. One thing I can remember clearly from my life of crime (writing) is the amount of people who tell me they want to write a book. It’s one of those professions everybody thinks they can do, and I always wanted to say to a lawyer I’ve been thinking about trying a case or to a surgeon I’ve been thinking about performing a heart transplant, as if their job is no more challenging than mine. And the reason, according to them, they haven’t written that book yet? Time. It’s always that they don’t have time, but they’ll make it. How hard can it be? Eric is writing a book—and at least Eric is putting in the time, he’s said he writes a few hours every night, making it a passion as well as a hobby, and that’s something I always respect, and for that I wish him all the best. However, he has once committed what I’ve always thought of as the cardinal sin, and that’s to ask Where do you get your ideas?, as if I order a box online every year and have an assistant weed out the bad ones. I’ve told him Write what you know, because there is nothing truer when it comes to the job of making stuff up, but Eric wants to write what I know. That’s why he’s looking for my journal. Sometimes on the days I remember who I am, I wonder if it’s the writing that made me this way—all those crazy people running around inside my head—some of that crazy was bound to rub off on me, wasn’t it? If Eric wants to be a writer, then let his own crazy do to him what mine did to me.

On the subject of Eric . . . I had this very strange dream a few days ago. He was taking me somewhere. I don’t know where, and dreams are like that—just random images taken from random moments of your life. Only, if I’m to be honest, and Madness Journal Version 2.0 demands nothing but honesty, it feels more like a memory than a dream, because dreams are something that disappear even while you’re fumbling around, trying to hold the pieces together. But what the hell would I know? Jerry Version 2.0 has faulty software. It was a messy upgrade that’s been slowly wiping the original operating system. Whether dream or memory, it was me in the passenger seat, my head leaning against the side window, and we were somewhere in the city and the streetlights were burning bright, hotels and office buildings lit up like Christmas trees against a black sky. I would close my eyes and when I opened them again everything would be different: different snapshots of time, traffic lights, a convenience store, a couple of drunk people staggering along the sidewalk. Then there was a house, and that house didn’t move by, it wasn’t a snapshot of a moment, it was solid, it was real, and we were parked in front of that house for a while, and there were no lights on inside, there were no lights anywhere other than streetlights. Only it wasn’t we, it was just me. Just me waiting and doing nothing, unable to move, as if the signals to all my nerves and muscles and tendons had been severed. I drifted off again then, returning a while later to a world that had moved on, the house no longer there, instead I was in a park somewhere lying on the grass.

If it was a dream, it was the most boring dream I’ve ever had.

But the thing is . . . I’ve been wandering. I see I’ve previously written in my journal I’ve been caught on the edge of the grounds, on what, in hindsight, may have been escape attempts. When I went wandering I made it into the city. It was some kids who found me on their way to school. They found me lying down on the ground in a park (like the park in the dream, I guess). One of them poked me with a stick, the way kids do a dead insect. But I was alive, and I don’t know what I said to them, but they called the police. I wandered again, trying to figure out where I was even as I was trying to determine where I wanted to go. The police found me three blocks away. I was sitting down on the pavement, leaning against a fence. I was trying to collect my thoughts, but my thoughts were a jumble. I was disoriented. I can remember there was a cat that was keeping me company, head butting my elbow over and over. That bit I remember. I remember the kids too. But the rest I don’t know. How I got there is a mystery.

Since then, I’ve learned that it’s not the first time I’ve wandered. In fact, it’s the second. And, right now as I write this, I’m staring at a pair of earrings that are on the table next to me. I found them in my pocket earlier. Either I held up a jewelry store or it’s the first indicator that I’m about to start cross-dressing. I’ll check later to see if I’ve hidden any high heels in the wardrobe.

I asked Eric whether he’d driven me anywhere. Of course I did. He laughed, and said it was my crime-writer imagination making connections that aren’t there. He said he’d have no reason to drive me anywhere, and both Henry and me agree with him. What would be the point? Eric asked if I had any memory of the other time I escaped, and I don’t. In fact, I can’t even find any mention of it in my journal.

So now for the second point of two-for Tuesday.

Hans came to see me today. I wish he hadn’t. I actually had no idea who it was when I first saw him. He had to tell me a few times, and one of the nurses told me that he actually comes to see me quite a lot, that he spends time with me out in the gardens if it’s a nice day, walking the grounds and updating me on the outside world. I never remember these talks, and I think that’s because when I’m with him I’m not Remembering Jerry, I’m the Jerry that functions in the off position.

I saw earlier that I scribbled in my journal not to trust Hans.

Now I know why.

It’s because he tells me things I don’t want to hear. He tells me why I’m here. I should respect that at least somebody is willing to level with me, but respecting him doesn’t mean I can’t hate him. It’s always easy to shoot the messenger.

Today we sat down outside. It was cold out, but the sun was shining and provided just enough warmth to make sitting outside bearable.

Why am I here? I asked. Why can’t I go back home?

How much do you remember? Hans asked, and it was Henry that answered for me, but before he answered he gave me a warning. He said Something isn’t right here, J-Man. Let me get this for you.

Henry isn’t real, I know he isn’t real and Henry would be the first to agree, yet I was willing to let him take the lead. I didn’t want to listen to Hans. I think even then, as we sat outside, I knew why I didn’t want to listen to him, and yet I did anyway.

Do you remember shooting your wife?

I didn’t remember that, no, but once the words were out there I did. I knew Sandra was dead. I knew I had killed her, but pulling the trigger—that was something I didn’t remember and never wanted to. The news was shocking, it hurt, and for a while I was inconsolable.

Why? I asked, because I had to know. Why did I shoot her?

You don’t want to know. That’s what Henry was saying. Henry, who would observe, who would study, who would connect the unconnectable dots. You really don’t want to know. Don’t listen to him, J-Man. It’s all bad news.

But I did want to know.

Hans looked away. He drew in a deep breath. Then he looked at me. Then he asked, Do you really want to know?

Yes, I said, and Henry was still telling me no.

I think that she thought you killed somebody else.

What?

There was blood, he said. Blood on your shirt.

What shirt? I asked.

And a knife.

What knife?

Let me ask you again, Jerry. Are you sure you want to know?

I told him that I did. That I wanted to know everything. And here’s what he told me.

He told me that last year, the night of Eva’s wedding, I sat in my office watching a video of myself that had been posted online (that video, that speech, that’s something I still haven’t forgotten). After watching it several times, I decided to go out. I phoned him hours later, needing a lift. He said there was blood on my shirt, and when he asked me about it, I told him I didn’t know. He said over the following days he came to believe the blood belonged to the florist at Eva’s wedding, and that I had killed her, and that Sandra had figured it out.

Hans thinks those suspicions made Sandra threaten to call the police.

He thinks I did what I had to do to make sure Sandra couldn’t make that call.

Then he reminded me that it wasn’t my fault. Killing the florist, killing my wife, he reminded me that it wasn’t me, that it was a different version of me, a darker version whose morals and ethics have been stripped away by the disease.

Of course none of that changes the fact that Sandra is dead. Or the florist.

Don’t trust Hans. I got it wrong. What I should have said was don’t believe Hans. Or, more accurately, don’t listen to him. Next time I see him, I’m going to ask him to stop coming to see me. After all, who the hell wants to be reminded of the fact they’re a bad man? I just want to become Forgetful Jerry again. Maybe it’s time to stop writing in the journal. Maybe it’s time just to let nature take its course.

Let nature take the pain and the anger and the memories away.

They’re driving back to Jerry’s house at a steady pace, Hans behind the wheel, Jerry with his eyes scanning over the final entry in the journal, the entry ending with him wanting nature to take the pain and the memories away. He can’t remember writing these words. Jerry feels dissatisfied. Instead of the journal offering closure, it has been like reading a book with no ending.

“First thing we need to do,” Hans says, snapping Jerry back into the moment, “is make sure the police aren’t going to be there.”

“Be where?”

“At your old house.”

“They weren’t there earlier,” Jerry says.

“True. But since then you showed up, you assaulted your—”

“I didn’t assault her,” Jerry says. “She just fell over.”

“You think she’s going to remember it that way?” Hans asks.

“She’ll probably tell them I tried to kill her. But that was hours ago, right? The police will have been and gone.”

“Maybe,” Hans says. “Or maybe they’re still there and keeping an eye on the place, hoping you’ll return.”

“Or maybe they think I wouldn’t be stupid enough to return.”

“But you are returning,” Hans says.

“So what do we do?”

“You ring the nursing home,” Hans says.

“What?”

“You ring them, and you tell them everything that’s happened. You tell them about Eric, that he’s dead, and that you’re at his house and you’ve found proof of everything he’s done. You tell them you’re still there and you want them to come and pick you up.”

“Why would I tell them that?”

“Because then they’ll call the police. They have to. And the police will head to Eric’s house to get you. If there is anybody waiting for you at the old house, this should draw them away. We can’t call the police ourselves because we don’t want them to triangulate the call.”

“And what if it doesn’t work?”

“You just have to hope that it does,” Hans says, and he pulls the car over at the end of the block, about a hundred yards from the house.

“I don’t even know the number,” Jerry says.

“I do,” Hans says, and quotes it from memory.

Jerry makes the call. He asks for Nurse Hamilton. He can feel his heart racing at the prospect of talking to her, of lying, and he’s thinking this is why he used to be an author and not an actor, but then he realizes it doesn’t matter because either way Nurse Hamilton is going to call the police, either way she’s going to tell them where he said he was, and she isn’t going to editorialize the call and say Well, even though he said all that, I really think he was making everything up, so you should keep an eye out on all the other places you’re keeping an eye on.

Nurse Hamilton’s voice comes on the line. She tells him that she’s worried about him, that they all are, and in return he tells her everything Hans told him to say. When he’s finished all he hears is silence. Jerry thinks this must be the first time in Nurse Hamilton’s life she’s ever been speechless. But the silence doesn’t last long.

“You must be confusing the day with one of your books again,” she tells him, and he can hear hope that what she is saying is true, that this is nothing more than one of Jerry’s Days of Confusion. He can also hear her doubt. What she knows for a fact is that the police are hunting him because they believe he’s a killer.

“There are photographs of the women Eric killed. And he was keeping locks of their hair.”

“Listen to me, Jerry, you’re not yourself right now,” she says.

“I’m very much myself right now,” he tells her.

“Eric is really dead?”

“It was an accident.”

“Are you by yourself?” she asks.

He looks at Hans. He remembers what Hans asked of him earlier. “Yes.”

“You figured all of this out on your own.”

“That’s what I’m telling you.”

“Don’t you see, Jerry? You’ve gotten confused again. You’ve—”

“This whole time everybody thought I was sick, but it was just Eric all along.”

“Eric didn’t make you sick, Jerry.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“Then what do you mean?”

“Just lately. All the bad stuff lately is because of him.”

“Jerry—”

“Come to Eric’s house and take a look at what I’ve seen,” he says, “and then tell me I’m making things up.”

“Jerry—”

“I have to go now,” he says, and then he hangs up. When all of this is over, he’ll explain everything. He switches off the phone because it seems the thing to do.

“So now what?” he asks.

“Now we give it two minutes,” Hans says.

They give it two minutes, in which there are no signs of movement, in which neither of the two men talk. Without discussing it, they give it two more minutes.

“Either they’re not moving,” Hans says, “or they were never there to begin with. But we need to get in there. We have to get that journal. We can’t exactly go up and knock on the front door, because your bloody neighbor will call the police. We can knock on the back door, and if they’re home, then—”

“They’re not going to let us in,” Jerry says. “The owner yesterday thought I was crazy, and today he thinks I’m a killer.”

“Then we break in,” Hans says. “I have my lock picks with me.”

Jerry reaches into his pocket. He shows Hans the key. “We won’t need them.”

“You remember which house is the one behind yours?”

“No,” Jerry says, and shakes his head. Then he nods. “Yes. Maybe. Why?”

Hans starts the car. He takes the next right and comes down the street running parallel with Jerry’s. He starts slowing up halfway down the block. “Well?”

“They all look the same,” Jerry says, “and I only ever saw it from the back.”

Hans gets his phone out. He uses the GPS function and gets a location on where they are. He brings the car to a stop when the blue dot on the screen is in line with Jerry’s house, only with one house between.

“That’s the one,” Jerry says.

“You sure?”

“As sure as I can be.”

Hans kills the engine. “We climb the fence. We try to figure out if anybody is home. If not, then we go in. If the lights are on, we wait until they’ve gone to bed, then sneak in. You’re sure you know where the journal is?”

“I’m positive.”

“Then let’s go.”

The house they’re parked outside is a two-story house with a concrete tile roof and a flower bed jammed full of roses that catch at Jerry’s clothes as he passes them. They move quietly across the front yard and to the gate that enters the back. It opens quietly, and a few seconds later they’re at the fence line. Hans boosts himself up and confirms it’s the right house while Jerry continues to look at the house they’ve just snuck past. He can see the glow of a TV set, the glow of lights, but nothing to suggest they’ve been heard.

“This is it,” Hans whispers, then drops to the other side. Jerry climbs over, landing in a backyard that still feels as though it’s his. Up ahead is where the pool used to be, but now it’s a paved area with a long wooden barbecue table and a pair of outdoor gas heaters. There are no lights on inside the house.

They reach the deck and the sun lounger where they had left Mrs. Smith. Jerry half expects to see her still lying there, but it also won’t surprise him if she comes storming through the gate waving her hockey stick any second. A cat sits outside the door—it stares at him, then shifts its attention to Hans before running away. Jerry reaches into his pocket for the key. A moment later he has it in the door.

“What if it has an alarm?” Jerry asks, keeping his voice low.

“Then we run,” Hans says. “Just stay quiet. I can’t tell if they’re not home or if they’re asleep.”

“I thought you could tell these things.”

“Just open the door.”

He is expecting the key not to work, expecting one more problem in a day full of them. The key won’t work and the lock picks won’t work either, but it turns effortlessly. He slowly opens the door. He knows this house. He spent most of his adult life in this house. He knows every shape, every flaw, he knows where the floorboards creak, what doors squeak, and he knows where the secrets are buried. Or, in this case, the wall they are hidden behind. His heart is already hammering, but when he steps across the threshold into the house it hammers even more, so loud that if there are people asleep upstairs it’ll be his heart that wakes them.

They close the door behind them and pause and listen, Jerry’s heart louder now, his breathing heavy. There is no beeping keypad. No alarm. His hands are sweating. He left the key in the lock, otherwise right now it’d most likely be sliding from his fingers onto the floor. In his mind he can see Eva upstairs in her bedroom doing her homework, or talking on the phone to one of her school friends. Sandra is in the lounge reading a book, or working on her next court case. Jerry can see himself behind the desk of his office, plugging away at the word count. He tries to draw in a deep breath, but it catches in his throat, and then it’s like swallowing a golf ball. Hans puts a hand on his shoulder and he almost jumps.

“Calm down, Jerry,” he says, keeping his voice low. “The sooner we get the diary, the sooner we can get out of here.”

“It’s a journal,” Jerry whispers back. His eyes have adjusted somewhat to the dark. “Step where I step,” he says, and then he starts to walk.

Hans steps where Jerry steps. The furniture makes black holes in the living room. When they reach the hall, he remembers the boards around the door can complain sometimes, so he makes a big show of stepping over them, then a big show of walking down the side of the hallway and not the middle, and the door to the office—his office—is open. They get inside and they close the door, shutting them off from the outside world, Jerry more relieved than ever to have had the room soundproofed.

“Well? Do you think there’s anybody home?” Jerry asks.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. Let’s just get this done,” Hans says, and he takes his cell phone out and uses the light to look around the room. For a few moments the office is Jerry’s again. His desk, his couch, his bookcase, his framed King Kong Escapes poster on the wall. Then he sees all the subtle differences. The books are different. The computer is different. Different knickknacks on the bookcase mixed in with some of his own, different stationary on the desk, a different monitor, the belongings of a different man, belonging to a different life. He wonders why the police didn’t tear up the floors and pull the walls down in search of evidence. But perhaps they thought the case looked pretty clear cut.

He makes his way past the desk and to the cupboard in the corner of the room. He opens it. Inside are boxes that, if Gary is anything like him, will be full of receipts and bank statements and all the other joys of being taxed in multiple countries that people don’t think about when it comes to being a writer. There’s a set of small plastic drawers full of stationary, a set of headphones hanging from a hook in the wall, a pile of magazines, some reams of paper. He starts dragging everything out, hoping he’s going to find the hidden space, hoping it’s not just something from one of his books, like that time, he suddenly remembers, when he went and bought cigarettes. His heart rate is heading back from extremely elevated into the more comfortable zone of very elevated. It only takes a second for muscle memory to kick in—once the cupboard is empty he lowers his hand and presses his finger into the corner. Out pops the opposite corner. He pulls the board away and hands it to Hans, and then . . .

And then he does nothing. He stares at the cavity, suddenly too frightened as to what may be in there. Or what may not.

You have to look, Henry says. Looking back is the only way to be able to move forward. You didn’t come all this way not to.

He looks.

The first thing he sees is a bottle of gin. He gets it out. It’s half-empty. He unscrews the lid and breaths in the aroma, the smell a brief visit to his old life.

“There’s time for that later,” Hans says, taking the bottle off him and putting it on the desk.

Jerry reaches back into the hole and the second thing he pulls out is the gun. He holds it loosely from the base of the handle, the way someone would handle it if they were surrendering to an Armed Offenders Unit. It’s a revolver. For a moment he can remember sitting on the floor next to Sandra. He’s spinning the chamber of the gun like they do when playing Russian roulette. He flicks the latch with his thumb and the cylinder opens out to the left. Each of the holes are full, but one of the bullets is only a casing, the contents of that casing having ended up inside his wife. Hans reaches over his shoulder and takes the gun off him.

Don’t trust Hans.

Probably worried Jerry is going to turn it on himself.

“Keep looking,” Hans says.

He keeps looking. This time his fingers close on the journal. He looks at the cover, at the smiley face Eva drew, the eyes glued to the cover, one of them foggy, one of them clear. Dad’s coolest ideas is written neatly above the face, The Captain Goes Burning on the spine. He opens the cover, and there are his words, words from another life filling the pages.

“It’s really here,” he says.

“Let me take a look,” Hans says, and reaches back over.

But Jerry doesn’t hand it over. Instead he clutches it to his chest. When he looks back at Hans he sees his friend looking annoyed, and for a moment, the briefest of moments, there is something in Hans’s face, something that reminds Jerry that Hans always seemed to know the dark side even better than his darkest characters. Then Hans smiles. Jerry realizes he’s being silly, and that everything is okay.

“Please, Jerry,” Hans says. “I think it’s better if I look. You’re too close to it. Too emotional. I can give you the truth in a nicer way.”

Jerry decides that Hans is right, that he won’t try to twist the journal into the best possible nonguilty narrative the way Jerry would. Hans carries the journal over to the couch and sits down, the phone going with him, not leaving a lot of light for Jerry. Jerry reaches back into the cavity and finds the flash drives. Then his hand touches something long and cold, and he adjusts his grip and puts his fingers around it. It’s a knife, no doubt the one used to kill the florist. An image flashes through his mind, of Sandra picking up his jacket and finding the blade in the pocket. It begs the question—if there is going to be a tactile link to a memory, why one that pales in significance to him being a murderer? Why does picking up the knife remind him of Sandra finding it, when picking up the gun reminds him of nothing?

There’s a reason why you’ve always conveniently forgotten those things.

Eric was drugging him to cover up the murders he committed. But what about Suzan with a z, Sandra, and the florist? The doctors would say he’s been repressing the horrible things he’s done, but is that really what’s going on here?

No. There’s more going on here, Henry says. Keep looking. You’ve found your journal, but mine is still in there.

Was Henry keeping a journal too?

He puts the knife on the edge of the desk and goes back to the hole. He closes his hand around some loose pages.

The missing pages from his journal.

You always thought Sandra was stealing them, Henry says.

But it wasn’t Sandra, it was his alter ego, the man who makes bad things happen.

That’s what they pay me for.

He sits in the office chair. He turns on the desk lamp, not caring if anybody sees the light from outside, and Hans doesn’t seem to care either because he doesn’t say anything. He seems too engrossed with the Madness Journal.

Jerry begins to read.

It may be his handwriting, but they are definitely not his words.

They are the words of Henry Cutter.