Five Minutes Alone (18 page)

CHAPTER THIRTY

Schroder hears the crash and the door to the bedroom banging into the wall. There are footsteps pounding. Then they’re at the window. “What the . . .” but the guy doesn’t finish his words. Schroder looks over the edge of the roof and can see a flashlight pointing down at the ground. It spotlights the dead dog, then a moment spotlights the body with the opened-up face, and from the clothes that guy is wearing he knows it’s Taylor Collard. Then the light goes back to the dog.

“Buzzkill,” somebody says. “The bastard killed my dog!”

“I can barely walk,” the other guy says, and neither voice belongs to Bevin.

“Toughen up,” the first guy says, and Schroder thinks of him as Dogman. Then Dogman adds, “He killed my dog!”

The light goes back to the body. Taylor Collard has had a bad night as far as head injuries go, but it looks like he’s not going to have any more nights, good or bad. The center of his face has pressed in, the nose flattened to one side, a piece of scalp hanging over his forehead, the whole thing covered in blood. No need to check for a pulse this time.

“He’s gotta be down there somewhere,” the other guy says, and there is pain behind his words, and this guy Schroder thinks of as Achilles. Dogman is the one with the flashlight.

“We need to get the hell out of here. I need to get to a hospital before I lose my leg or bleed to death,” Achilles says.

“We need to get Buzzkill to a vet,” Dogman says.

A second light points at the ground now, stopping at the dog. “Your dog is dead, bro,” Achilles says.

“Don’t say that. Don’t you say that.”

“What is that, some kind of brick?” Achilles asks, changing the subject, most likely for his own safety.

“Where?”

“Where I’m pointing the flashlight.”

The flashlight changes position. “No, it looks like . . . Shit,” Dogman says, and an instant later the flashlight points upwards and hits Schroder in the face. He pulls away from the edge of the roof and hears a bullet catch the edge of the guttering where he was half a second earlier. For a moment his night vision is ruined and he has to blink away the bright spots of the flashlight floating in front of him.

He makes his way along to the chimney. Santa would have a pretty good escape plan from here. His heart is pounding and he needs to sit down and take a breath, perhaps lie down for a few minutes. He can’t do any of that. He needs to get out of here before these guys call for more Buzzkills and more assholes to come and help, or before they decide to set fire to the place.

He moves around the chimney and positions himself so he can see out over the front of the grounds. He can see his car and their car and, as he watches, Bevin Collard walks up to his car and crouches beside the front wheel, stands up, and then moves down to the rear wheel. He can’t hear it happen, but he knows he’s just had both tires cut. Even if he could get the keys back and race to his car, there’s no way he’s leaving anywhere in a hurry.

He makes his way quietly towards the far end of the building. Ten yards short, just as the roof slopes back down, he braces himself and gets his fingers beneath a roof tile and pulls. This one comes away easier than the one he threw into Taylor Collard, the piece of wire supposed to be holding these things more securely isn’t there. That’s often the case with buildings of this age, where the tiles are held in place by the tiles around it, the builders missing the occasional piece of wire or just being too lazy. The next one also
has no wire, the third one does, and so does the fourth, but not the next two. Within a minute he’s made a hole in the roof. This next bit is going to be noisy, but he stomps on the wooden slats, they’re thin and long and break easily, but they snap like kindling, the sound telling everybody where he is. He climbs into the roof. The air is thick and hot, and every movement he makes swirls up dust from the decaying insulation. He uses his cell phone for light and walks from beam to beam, there’s enough head space so he can almost stand upright. There is no way of finding the manhole, but he doesn’t need a manhole. All he has to do is step between the beams and he’ll fall through the ceiling panels and into one of the bedrooms or, if he’s really unlucky, onto the staircase, or, if he’s really, really unlucky, he’ll plummet straight down to the ground floor at the base of the stairs.

Construction hasn’t changed much over the years or, more accurately, tradesman practices haven’t changed much. There are scraps of wood, newspapers, empty insulation bags, and broken tiles that have been dumped up here. He sweeps his cell phone past it, looking for something he can use as a weapon.

“He’s in the ceiling!”

The words come from somewhere beneath him, and he stops moving and turns the phone into his chest so no light can escape—not that they could see it anyway.

“I’m telling you, we should just burn the place down,” Achilles says.

“He killed my dog,” Dogman says. “I want to make him pay.”

“Burning him alive will make him pay, and I have to get to a hospital.”

“Burning him alive lets him off easy.”

A moment later there’s a gunshot. He hears a bullet come through. It cracks one of the roof tiles.

“What the hell? Don’t do that,” Dogman says.

Another gunshot.

“I said don’t do that. What if you hit him?”

“I’m hoping to hit him. I gotta get this leg taken care of before I bleed to death.”

“I just told you I want to make him pay. What if you get him in the head? No, shoot him if you see him, but only in the legs. Aim for his knees. Come on, let’s find a way up there.”

“He’s probably listening to us,” Achilles says.

“Then fine, let him listen. There’s nowhere he can go.”

Schroder moves along carefully, feeling a little safer that they’re not planning on shooting him. What it means, though, is they’re going to try and find a way into the ceiling. He finds a piece of rebar that’s three feet long, but when he goes to pick it up it won’t move. The damn thing is buried into a beam of wood, even though it doesn’t seem to be doing anything. He tries to wiggle it, but it’s no use. He picks up a broken roof tile. It’s a diagonal, jagged piece of concrete shaped like a shark tooth that runs the length of his palm. There’s an identical piece next to it.

He goes back the way he came. As soon as they start to come up here, he’ll drop through the ceiling into the hallway or one of the bedrooms. Hopefully he can get back outside through the open front door. He makes it a few more yards when there’s a sound coming from where he just was. Something is being dragged across the floor. One of the beds, probably. Which means they’ve found the manhole cover. He throws the roof tile, pitching it underhand into the distance where it crashes into the roof and then into the ceiling.

“He’s getting further away,” somebody says.

He moves carefully in the direction of the dragging sound, picks up the other half of the roof tile, crouches, and waits.

The dragging comes to a stop. There’s the sound of the bed protesting against the weight, then only two feet away from him a crack of light appears as the manhole cover is lifted. The light gets bigger as the gap widens.

He stays still.

The cover opens a few more inches. Then a few more. Then it’s tossed all the way up so it hinges over itself and lands on its back.
A hand appears, and then another hand with a flashlight, then the top of a head. A neck and shoulders facing away from him.

Schroder steps forward with the broken roof tile, but before he can swing it down he misplaces his foot, steps off the beam and directly onto the ceiling board, and a second later he’s falling right through it, crashing to the ground below.

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

We sit in the car outside Peter Crowley’s house and we make a call to the station to get them to trace Peter’s number. We don’t need a warrant. When somebody’s life is on the line, we can call the service provider and get a telecommunications intercept. I give the number to the officer and he tells me it’ll be a ten-minute call to the phone company, and from there hopefully they’ll have a location within twenty minutes and he’ll call me right back.

I can tell that Rebecca is grumpy with me, and to be fair I’m grumpy with me too. She wants to go home and I want to go home and instead the night keeps creeping closer to morning, and soon we’ll be eating breakfast and sitting in a task-force room and Sunday will last forever.

Of course none of that has to happen. If we can find Peter Crowley, then maybe we can find the bald man too. Maybe all of this can end right now.

I tell this to Kent, who shakes her head.

“Bevin and Taylor were taken, what,” she says, then looks at her watch, “almost five hours ago. You think they’re still alive?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “It’s possible.”

“Okay,” she says. “But here’s the deal. We find Peter’s location. If it turns out he’s having an affair, or he’s off gambling, then we go home, right? We go home and we just wait for the Collards to show up, either dead or alive.”

“Deal,” I tell her.

“And here’s another deal. If we’re going to kill thirty minutes, how about we go and grab some coffee?”

We head into town, back towards the alleyway the Collard brothers disappeared from, towards the drunks and the police sta
tion, and we turn off a few blocks before all that and head to a line of cafés, the average age here twenty years on top of the average age of Popular Consensus and the bars around it. We choose a café and sit at an outside table beneath a gas heater. We order coffees from a waitress in a tight, black T-shirt with piercings in her ears, nose, and tongue. We sit with a view out over the Avon River, a river that winds around the heart of the city, its water dark and shallow, home to ducks and beer cans. There are a dozen people at the café doing the same thing as us. It’s almost four a.m. and I guess some of them have been out at clubs or bars and are now winding down, while those half our age wind down stuffing their faces with burgers at fast-food joints.

“So why did you join?” Kent asks me.

Our coffees have arrived and I’m still blowing on mine, trying to get it to cool down. There’s a stereo pumping music into the courtyard, something easy listening that I don’t recognize and could fall asleep to.

“Sorry?”

“The police force. Did you join to fight the good fight?”

“Something like that,” I tell her.

“Does something like that come with any other details?”

I shrug. “I guess so. I don’t know. I mean, this city is my home, right? I love it here. I know I bitch about it, but I’m allowed to because it’s my city, and I’ve just always wanted to make it a better place. It deserves to be better than it is. I always thought I could make a difference. That’s really all it was. What about you? Why’d you join?”

She smiles as if hitting on a happy memory, then blows on her coffee. “Well, it was either that or be a baker.”

“A biker?”

She laughs. “A
baker.
Can you imagine me as a
biker
?”

“Somehow it’s easier to picture you as a biker than a baker.”

She laughs again. “I joined the force because of my dad—you know the cliché, girl becomes cop because dad is one. I kind of got pushed into it, really, but I always have this dream of one day open
ing up my own shop. I make the best muffins. I know that sounds silly, but I really do.”

“You bake muffins?” I ask.

“Don’t laugh,” she says, but she’s still laughing.

“I’m not laughing,” I say, but I am. “When I try to imagine it, all I come up with is you wearing a chef’s outfit along with a chef’s hat covered in flour as you try putting out oven fires.”

“I’ll prove it to you,” she says. “I’ll make a bunch of muffins for you and Bridget and I’ll bring them around on Monday and leave them on your doorstep for when you get back from the hospital.”

At the mention of Bridget’s name I stop laughing. I think about her trip to the mall, our excursion into the woods, about Monday’s appointment.

“I’m sure it’s going to be okay,” Kent says, because she can tell where my mind has gone.

I manage to start drinking my coffee. “Do the guys at the station know about the baking?”

“No,” she says, “and don’t you dare tell them.”

“Well, keep me in muffins and I promise to keep it a secret.”

My phone rings. It’s the station. They have a location on Peter’s cell phone. It’s west of the city, back in the direction of the train tracks where all of this started for us. But further. Three cell phone towers have been used to triangulate the signal. The location given is a farm, which, for all intents and purposes, is the middle of nowhere. We’re told the cell phone is within a half-mile radius of that. We’re told they’ll update us if that signal moves.

“So whatever Peter Crowley is doing,” Kent says, “he’s still out there doing it.”

“Seems that way.”

“Okay. Good call on tracking the cell phone. Come on,” she says, and quickly finishes her coffee, “let’s go and arrest one of the good guys.”

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

Schroder’s fall is broken by Achilles, who for some reason has taken off his shirt. He lands on Achilles’s head and shoulders, folding him into the ground. The broken roof tile is still clutched tightly in his grip.

The flashlight pointing into the roof now points down at him. Dogman is sitting on the edge of the crawl space. He starts to lower himself, then seems to think better of it and lowers his gun instead. At the same time Schroder swings the roof tile. He uses all of its weight and connects it as hard as he can into Dogman’s knee. It tears into Dogman with a popping sound and though he can’t be sure, it feels like he’s levered most of the kneecap out to the side. He pulls the tile back out.

Dogman screams, then he’s dropping onto the bed, rolling onto his back, and hitting the floor. Achilles reaches up, Schroder sees the movement, and turns towards it just in time to push the guy’s hand away as he fires the gun. He uses the tile against the side of Achilles’s face, clubbing him as hard as he can. It doesn’t go in like it did to Dogman’s leg, but it doesn’t need to. Achilles is laid out flat. Schroder grabs the gun out of his hand just as Dogman is leaning up with his own gun. Schroder takes the shot before Dogman can, hitting him in the throat. For his part, Dogman is left with a very confused look on his face. All the pain and emotion and fear disappear from his features, and he slumps down and ends up sitting with his legs out ahead of him. He stares at Schroder, and now there is a crack of emotion, not much, but enough to see fear and confusion. Schroder keeps the gun pointed at him, and at the same time he watches Dogman struggle with the depths of
what death is going to be like, then, with no real choice, he gives in to it.

He fires a shot into Dogman’s head to make sure the same thing that happened with Taylor Collard earlier in the evening isn’t going to happen again. Then he turns the gun towards Achilles and shoots him in the head too. He’s seen too many horror movies to bother about thinking twice. He sits down hard on the floor and leans against the wall. He can feel his heart hammering inside his chest. All he can hear is the ringing sound of gunfire. It hurts. His throat is getting sore from breathing so heavily. Dusty insulation is falling like soft snow through the open hole in the ceiling. He wants to close his eyes and sit back and relax, to get some energy back, but there’s still Bevin Collard to deal with. He looks at Achilles. The reason he’s shirtless is because he’s taken it off and tied it around the wound in his leg with his belt.

He looks at his hands. They’re shaking. They’re covered in scratches and insulation dust and dirt. The holes in his arm from Buzzkill look nasty, like a row of bloody eyes looking at him. He needs to get out of here. Needs to get Peter to safety. And the story? What will he tell the police? He doesn’t know. For now they just need to get away from Grover Hills.

“What’s going on up there?”

The voice comes from the ground floor, loud enough to be heard over his ringing ears. He’s heard gunshots in close quarters before, and knows his ears will still be in pain for a few more minutes.

“Help,” Schroder says, and he coughs as he says it and lowers his voice.

“Matt?”

“Help,” he says again.

Footsteps on the stairs. Cautious. Schroder switches off the flashlight and stays in the doorway of the bedroom, wishing all of tonight could have been as easy as this moment is about to be. A moment later there’s a beam of light, it plays across the walls and the floor and comes to a stop on the bodies.

“Oh sh—” is all Bevin Collard gets to say before Schroder pulls the trigger, aiming center mass. He’s not sure where the bullet gets him, but Bevin is already taking a step backwards and the momentum takes him through the rail of the stairs. A second after that he crashes into the floor below. Schroder drags himself to his feet and steps into the hallway and points the flashlight down at the last victim. What was good enough for the others is good enough for Bevin, and the man’s head twitches heavily to the side as Schroder fires a shot into it.

What a mess. A goddamn mess.

He gets Dogman’s gun, then makes his way downstairs and picks up the gun Bevin Collard was using, giving him three guns. Outside he finds a fourth still clutched in Taylor Collard’s very dead hand, but with life being a learning curve and on a curve where he learns from his mistakes, he fires a shot into Taylor’s head too.

He goes down into the basement. Peter Crowley has rolled onto his side. His eyes are open and they watch Schroder as he crouches over him.

“What . . .” is all Peter can say, then he smacks his lips together a few times, then says, “water.”

“I’m going to get you out of here,” Schroder says.

It’s not the best position for an injured man, but using a fireman’s lift to pick Peter Crowley up is the only way to get him out of the basement. His arm hurts like a bitch as he carries him up the stairs, and it’s hard work but not impossible, and a minute later he has Crowley outside and lays him on the lawn. He retrieves the keys for his car, then confirms two of his tires have been slashed.

“We’re going to have to take Dogman’s car,” he says to Peter, crouching down beside him.

“The men . . .” Peter says, but nothing else. There is blood running out of his ear, and Schroder’s hands have blood on them from picking him up.

Schroder puts his hand on Peter’s shoulder and keeps it there. “They’re dead. All of them. I got them for you. I know it wasn’t
supposed to be this way, but the men who hurt your wife are now rotting in Hell.”

Peter smiles, reaches up, and puts his hand on top of Schroder’s. “It’s okay,” he says.

“It’s not okay,” Schroder says.

“You killed them.”

“Yes. I killed them.”

“And I like ice cream,” Peter says.

“What?”

“Chocolate is my favorite. Do you have any?”

“No,” Schroder says.

“Chocolate is Linda’s,” he says, but then says nothing else, just stares ahead and releases his grip on Schroder’s hand and lets his own hand hit the ground.

“I’m sorry,” Schroder says, and he grips the dead man’s shoulder and looks him in his open, unseeing eyes. “It wasn’t supposed to be this way, but Linda would be proud of what you tried to do. I’m just sorry this is the way it went down.”

It didn’t have to be this way, not really. Things didn’t work out because Schroder got caught up in the momentum of bad mistakes. That’s what it came down to. He closes Peter’s eyes, holds his fingers on them for ten seconds in the hope they won’t pop open, and they don’t. Then he wonders if he is going to cry, if the emotion of it will get to him, but no. Of course not. There are no tears for the New New Him.

There is still plenty of work to do.

He drags Taylor Collard to the stairs and lays him horizontal to them, then goes inside and drags the brother out and lays him on the first step, also horizontal. They help turn the stairs into a ramp, not a great ramp, more of a pyramid, but one good enough for Dogman’s car to climb up without any real trouble, and Schroder does that now, parking as close as he can to the door. He moves to the back and pops the trunk. There are two metal containers, somewhere around fifty gallons of fuel in total, and two twelve packs of beer.

He takes out the spare wheel. In the cavity beneath the wheel is a plastic bag. He opens it and finds four silencers. He takes one out and confirms it fits his gun, then drops the gun and silencer into separate pockets. He rolls the spare wheel over to his car hoping it’ll have the same stud pattern, and it does. It takes ten minutes to change it with one of his own, which is a few minutes longer than normal, which he puts down to the sore arm and fatigue. Then he switches the other damaged tire with his own spare wheel. He tosses both damaged wheels into the trunk of his car.

He empties the fifty gallons of fuel across the ground floor of the building, some around the car, a lot of it on the stairs. He can’t imagine too many people will be upset with Grover Hills being burned down. If anything, most people will wonder why it wasn’t torched months ago.

He can’t find the flares Dogman was told to bring, but he finds a box of matches in the dead man’s pocket. Since he’s at it, he takes out the wallets of all the dead men and nets himself over seven hundred dollars in cash, most of it from Bevin Collard, and most of that he assumes is drug money. No need to see that burn. He looks at the driver’s licenses. Matthew Roddick and Robin Walsh. Two unmemorable names. He wonders what kind of record they have.

He wipes down three of the guns, even though the flames will take care of any prints, then places them in the hands of three of the dead men—Roddick, Walsh, and Bevin Collard. The fourth he hangs on to. The shower curtain lining the trunk of his car he tosses onto the veranda.

The match lights on the very first try. He drops it into the puddle of fuel, it lights up blue and orange and races along the floor. It’s only a matter of seconds before flames are leaping into the air. They reach for the stairs, the walls, they go into the shadows where the ghosts of Grover Hills are hiding. He picks up the roof tile he killed Taylor Collard with and tosses it into the fire, then drags Peter away from the flames. He doesn’t want a good man to burn.

Schroder stands by his car and watches the flames, enjoying the
warmth on his face, until after a few minutes it becomes too hot. All that wood—it’s not going to take long until the entire thing collapses in on itself, all the DNA and fingerprints and the story of what happened here tonight burned away. He doesn’t hang around to watch that happen.