False Witness (21 page)

Hodge bristled. “That’s not what I said.”

The Aryan tilted his head and turned his wild eyes on Hodge. “Whatever, man. As long as he tells his boss that this was self-defense. I don’t need anymore time on my stretch.” He bounced on the floor like a boxer getting ready for a fight.

Slowly, the blanket that had been wrapped around Eddie’s brain started to peel away, and the reality of the situation began to sink in. A dead inmate on his watch, killed – at least in part – by the one Eddie was supposed to be watching. And now, another prisoner trying to control him. He felt detachment wash through him like cool water as his hand crept toward the baton on his belt.

Hodge’s mouth widened into a hideous grin as his eyes followed Eddie’s movement. “So,” he said. “You
did
pay attention. I was worried there for a minute.”

The Aryan blinked. His eyes darted rapidly between Hodge and Eddie. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

Hodge had taken off his undershirt (something Eddie now thought of as a
Trinh-beater
) and was wiping the blood from his face. When he was done, he fixed his gaze on the bald man, though he spoke to Eddie: “This inmate’s threatening you with a contraband blade, officer. You gonna stand there all day?”

The fog had lifted. Eddie was now receiving signals clearly.

The Aryan’s eyes grew owlish. “The fuck are you doing? You
told
me to kill Trinh!”

“Uh-uh. All I said was the opportunity might come up.”

“We had a
deal
, you cocksucker!” The Aryan raised the shank. “The screw here would back me up!”

“I think it’s time to contain this situation, don’t you, officer?”

Yes, it was. Eddie brought the gleaming tip of his baton down in a high arc, striking the crucifix tattoo dead center on the Aryan’s right forearm. The shank dropped to the floor with a faint
tak
. The Aryan’s screams drew no response from the three other inmates still working in the main area, their backs conveniently turned towards the Dark Corner.

The Aryan staggered back into the wall, eyes rolling in their sockets. “Oh, you fuck!” he shrieked. Eddie couldn’t tell whether he meant him or Hodge. “You dirty fuck!”

Eddie would have occasion later to wonder what would have happened if Hodge hadn’t done what he did next. Eddie raised the baton over his head, fully intending to bring it down on the top of the Aryan’s bald skull, but Hodge stepped forward, quick as a snake, and grabbed Eddie’s wrist. Eddie turned on Hodge, consumed by the moment, and almost attacked him.

“You don’t need that,” Hodge said soothingly.

Eddie breathed. His pulse had slowed to its normal rate and his belly was acid-free for the first time in days. He felt a sense of ease, of
rightness
, that had eluded him since the night he first met Jason Crowe and his goons.

Hodge gently took the baton from Eddie’s grip as the Aryan screamed more curses into the room. “Help me! Fucking
help me
, you cocksuckers!”

Eddie didn’t bother to see whether the other three had started paying attention. He let his instincts take over, dropping low over his left leg while his right spun backward on a plane level with the Aryan’s head. His thick-soled work shoe connected with the bald man’s jaw,
thock!
before completing the spin and landing back on the floor. The Aryan stumbled to his left, dazed, still holding his rapidly swelling forearm. Eddie loosed an open palm strike directly at his collarbone, snapping it with an audible crack and eliciting another scream from the Aryan.

Eddie had been in a hundred karate matches since first stepping foot in a dojo at the age of fourteen, but this was different. He didn’t need to pull his punches. There was no judge ready to flag him for excessive force. No one to tell him no. There was only Rufus Hodge and his enigmatic grin.

The molasses-like time dilation was back again as he rained blows down on the bald man. He felt a freedom he’d never experienced before in his life. The Aryan’s face seemed to transform, first into Jason Crowe’s hatefully handsome one, then into a string of queerboys from the Golden Cage. Finally, the Aryan’s face was that of Eddie’s father, his eyes red-rimmed from drink.
C’mere and take your medicine
, that voice slurred in his memory.
Take it like a man.
By the end, there was no technique to his assault, no control. Only rage.

Reality jolted back into place as Eddie felt arms encircling his own. Hodge was behind him, holding him by the elbows. He struggled, but Hodge’s grip was iron.

“That’s enough,” the ugly man whispered near his ear. “It’s over.”

Eddie’s heart was racing now, but his breaths were long and steady. He felt a bubble of snot expanding and receding in his right nostril as he inhaled and exhaled, finally popping against the bristles of his moustache. On the floor below him laid the crumpled remains of the Aryan. Blood covered the man’s face, and his legs were splayed at wrong angles. His right forearm looked like a giant blood sausage. The rise and fall of his chest was almost imperceptible. As the TV doctors liked to say, he was alive, but just barely.

Eddie looked to Hodge. “Now what?” he asked. The ugly man was calling the shots now, that much was clear.

Hodge looked at the bodies on the floor and spread his hands in an
isn’t it obvious?
gesture. “Baldy here came after me and Billy Trinh. He sliced Trinh, then he came at you with the shank. You stopped him. Saved my life.” He grinned. “My hero.”

Eddie’s breathing was finally beginning to slow as he assessed the situation. The story could work. Eddie was out of camera range long enough for it to be plausible. The other inmates had just watched – or at least heard – a guard beat a fellow con almost to death with help from the man who was now the Badlands’ most notorious badass. It was in their best interests to stay quiet.

He reached for the radio mike clipped to his collar, then stopped and turned back to Hodge. “Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

“Why did you stop me?”

Hodge folded his arms across his bare chest. In the dim light of the Dark Corner, his sweat had the effect of delineating every hair, every ripple, every scar on his body. In that light, he looked like a marble statue of some long-lost Viking raider, fresh from devastating a poor Christian village and driving its people into death or slavery. In that moment, Eddie felt something akin to awe for the ugly man.

“You’re no murderer,” Hodge said simply, breaking the spell.

Eddie finally squeezed the button on the mike at his throat. “This is Spanbauer in the laundry!” he shouted. “Two inmates down! I need men in here
now!
” Back-up would be there in less than a minute.

“I
could
have killed him,” he said, letting go of the mike.

“There’s a difference between a killer an a murderer,” Hodge said mildly. “I’m a killer. Got no problem finishing a fight if someone’s lookin to finish
me
. Even feels good sometimes.” He pointed a toe at the bodies on the floor. “But them two are murderers.”

Eddie stared at him for a moment. Hodge was right – Trinh was in for shooting two bystanders during a bank robbery, and the Aryan had just slit the throat of an incapacitated man, apparently for the thrill of it. Then something occurred to him.

“But you
are
a murderer,” he said matter-of-factly. No point in pussyfooting around the man any longer. “You shot that security guard point-blank in the back of the head. You had the cop and that Duff guy murdered.”

Hodge’s signature half-smile was back. “Not me,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what – I’d sure love to know who
did
. That’s what this was all about. I need you to talk to Crowe.”

A gang of guards arrived just as Hodge finished giving Eddie his instructions. Two tackled Hodge and cuffed him, while the others got Trinh and the Aryan onto stretchers and secured the three other inmates. A flurry of questions, commands into radios, but Eddie barely heard any of it. As the guards dragged Hodge from the room, he quickly glanced at Eddie and dropped a covert wink.

Eddie surprised himself by winking back.

Alex Dunn was quite drunk. Not staggering drunk, but certainly past the point where he could get the big brass key into the lock of his room at the Bluebird Motor Inn on the first two tries.
Third time’s the charm
, he thought with foggy good cheer as the key slid home and the knob turned. Inside, he tossed his pocket stuff on the dresser that also served as the television stand, yanked off his sandals, and fell back onto the bed. The coverlet was a scratchy nylon blend that clashed severely with the salmon-colored walls (not to mention the painting of a herd of goats mounted behind the bed), but it was comfortable enough for now.

The room’s air conditioner was working overtime, grinding out its somnolent white noise even now, after midnight. Alex sighed and grinned a big, dumb grin he wouldn’t have thought himself capable of even ten days earlier. It had been a great day. Hell, it had been a great
week
. Lost Lake had started to come alive as more and more tourists began to trickle in, taking advantage of record high temperatures to leave the rat race behind and bake their troubles away on the beach for a week or two. Kids shrieked and laughed in the water, and in the parks, and at the Kool Treet stand near the town common. Parents piled into the town’s handful of watering holes each evening, looking for a night to remember, or at least one to let them forget the worries of their everyday life outside of Lost Lake. Music seemed to be everywhere.

The book was coming along faster than it had any right to, far easier than
The Devil’s Wristwatch
. He rose at 6 a.m. each day, banging away at least ten pages in the cool of the morning before heading to Irma’s for breakfast, then more writing until early afternoon. He supposed the fact he was composing mostly from his own memory this time had a lot to do with it, but he liked to think the sheer bliss of Lost Lake was working some sort of magic on him, just as it had when he was a child.

And, of course, there was Angie.

Alex belched as he sat up on the bed, releasing several beers worth of carbon dioxide. He removed his phone from the pocket of his swim shorts – he had taken to going commando, just in case the urge to pitch himself into the lake overcame him, as it had a few times – and called up his photo archive. Angie had grabbed the phone and taken a selfie of the two of them in a local honky tonk called the Loose Moose earlier in the night, when they were still relatively sober. She was in the foreground, all dazzling teeth and full lips in the harsh glare of the flash. You could see the bikini top she wore under the men’s blue work shirt, though not the short-shorts under the table. He was behind her, smiling, but in a strained way, like he was fighting constipation. Until that moment, he hadn’t given any thought to the fact that people could post photos of Alex Wolfe online. He had dyed his hair and shaved, yes, but even with the glasses, his face still looked an awful lot like Alex Dunn’s. And with the infinitely connected network of social media, he couldn’t rule out the possibility of someone back home seeing a pic and recognizing him.

He needn’t have worried. “Here you go,” Angie cooed as she handed his phone back. “Do with it what you will. I’m not on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter, or anything else in cyberland, so I won’t ask you to send it to me.”

“Really?” he said, hoping the relief didn’t show on his face. “Me neither. I prefer to live my life face to face.” It was a lie, of course; Alex Dunn was online, very much so.
Just another Class-A fib to add to the list
, he thought with an inward wince.

“I’ve just never felt the need to see a photo of what my Grade 10 lab partner had for lunch today,” she said simply. “And I sure as hell don’t need to be constantly reminded of the fact that all the girls I went to high school with are married with children.”

It was the third time they had been out together since their first meeting in the café. First had been afternoon coffee at Irma’s on Angie’s day off, followed by dinner at a nice little place next to the marina. Alex had tried to keep the conversation focused on her – it wasn’t hard, given his years as a reporter – so that he wouldn’t have to go too deep into The Story. Lying was dangerous at the best of times; embellishing too much was like stepping into a bear trap to pick up a penny. The return on investment just wasn’t there.

It turned out Angie hadn’t been in Lost Lake very long herself. Born and raised in the B.C. interior, she’d spent the last eight years alternately pursuing an education degree and waiting tables. When she made enough doing the latter, she went back to the former. Her family consisted of a mother who had succumbed to cancer five years earlier, and a deadbeat father she hadn’t seen since her early teens. “Mom left me enough to pay for school, but not enough to eat and keep a roof over my head at the same time,” she said, with no trace of bitterness. “So I work. I’ll be a teacher someday, and I’ll be one who can honestly tell her students that you can do anything, overcome any obstacles, if you’re willing to work hard for it.”

Alex had been struck hard by Angie’s simple resolve, and how her life story contrasted sharply with his own. Journalism school had been a foregone conclusion for him; he was bright, curious, and a good writer from a young age. The only uncertainty had been whether it was going to be the University of Regina or Carleton. Even that hadn’t been a tough decision—Ottawa was farther from his parents, so Carleton it was. A monthly allowance made sure he was kept in beer and coeds, and away from the horrors of an actual working environment until his senior year internship.

Now, sitting drunk in his room at the Bluebird Motor Inn, staring at a photo on a phone, Alex wondered whether that was the moment he’d started falling in love with Angie Dawson just a little bit.

Tonight, at the Loose Moose, had been one of the best nights since his Carleton days. In spite of – or, perhaps, because of – the ridiculous circumstances he found himself in, he’d let his hair down more than he would have believed possible. Angie had matched him drink for drink (Alexander Keith’s on tap for both of them, with a couple of tequila shots for good measure) and had schooled him mercilessly on the Moose’s red felt pool table, skunking him three games in a row. He’d even thought about buying a round for the house on his oversized MasterCard, courtesy of Leslie Singer. He figured a veteran juicer like her would appreciate it, but he ultimately decided against it.