The volume was low, in hopes of not disturbing her father.
He came anyway.
It was odd, but he would often take a bath—since they didn’t have a shower—and then roam the house in just a towel, his black hair slicked back over his head, his funny little furry chest and white freckled skin on show. Both arms tattooed, old sailor style. He stood in the doorway, water streaking down his skin, his thick eyebrows slung over cold eyes. A cigarette hung limp from his lips and his nostrils flared just a little as if there was a foul smell in the room, something he could detect even above the cloud of smoke around his face. Perhaps he didn’t like Rey’s smell.
He waited there, saying nothing.
In these spaces between the ticking of a clock, he could explode and destroy a room or simply walk away. The trick was to watch him carefully. His eyes, his lips, his stance. Today, it seemed, he would not strike. At least, not again.
“She’s gone,” Rey said, without emotion. There was none to convey. Her mother was gone, she would be safe.
Her father stared at Rey for a moment or two then simply sniffed once and said, “She’ll be back. Bad pennies always turn up.”
Rey didn’t know what a bad penny was. A phrase she hadn’t heard before. In the end, it didn’t matter. He had been right. Her mom was gone, but a few hours later, the front door creaked open. She was back. Rey had failed.
Oslo, Norway, 2016
“Mum?” Rey said, or at least she thought she did. Perhaps it wasn’t out loud. “Mum?” The memory of her mother faded, and Rey was left alone in the dark. A dull ache pulsated its way through Rey’s hip. A pain that became a sharp stab when she shifted on whatever it was she lay. Prostrate, incapacitated.
Drugged maybe?
She moved again. The hurt streaked like lightning into her spine. Though it never seemed to be enough to jolt her awake, to release her from the fog—the numb darkness in which she floated. Why couldn’t she open her eyes?
Rey sank deeper into the void in the hopes of utilizing her other senses. Sounds, smells. She heard shuffling, stiff cloth rubbing against something. Clothes that weren’t fitted. Not for fashion. Utilitarian. A uniform? And the smell, clean. Fresh. Not odorless, but close. Sterilized.
A hospital? Yes. She was in a hospital. It was unmistakable and all too familiar.
“Georgina? Georgina, can you hear me?” The voice was female, far away, speaking English bathed in a Norwegian accent.
Knuckles pressed on her sternum, then rubbed back and forth.
“Georgina?”
Rey lifted a finger, just slightly. Her cracked lips parted and cold air slipped into her mouth, stealing what little moisture was left. An unintelligible gurgle sounded from somewhere deep in her throat.
“She’s awake,” the woman said, continuing to speak in English. “I’ll get the attending doctor.”
More shuffling, and then the room fell silent.
Doctor. She was going to get the doctor. This really was a hospital. She called me Georgina. That means they have the passport. That also meant she was either very badly injured or sedated, or both. Either way, this entire situation screwed with her timeline. Shit.
Rey gathered her strength, concentrating on forming words with her mouth and passing air over her vocal cords. Only one word came. “W-water,” she croaked.
No one answered.
“W-water,” she managed again, louder this time.
“Okay, it’s okay,” came the woman’s voice.
Soothing liquid slipped over Rey’s chapped lips and slid down her sore throat. Just a trickle, not enough. Rey swallowed greedily. “More,” she pleaded.
“Not too much. Can you open your eyes, Georgina?” the woman replied in hushed tones.
Nurse tones. Everywhere in the world, they sounded the same. Rey hated the way nurses spoke.
“Can you open your eyes?” the woman asked.
Rey had to concentrate, focus on the thin flaps of skin protecting her eyes from the harsh overhead fluorescence. She forced her eyelids open, fluttering them spasmodically while her pupils dilated and shrank in unison.
The images above were blurry at first. Blobs pretending to be human. Slowly, Rey’s eyes adjusted and her carers came into focus. A blonde, attractive woman, possibly in her thirties. A little dumpy, but all smiles. As if Disney had drawn her and brought her to life. Beside her was a much less friendly face—a wiry man with wiry spectacles and a goatee.
“This is Doctor Jensen,” the nurse said.
“He royalty ... or something? Needs an intro ... duction?” Rey coughed and rubbed her stubbled head. The light was like hot pokers pushing through her retinas and into her brain.
The nurse chuckled and said something in Norwegian.
The doctor didn’t laugh.
Rey’s eyes rolled in her head, but her consciousness was returning.
“You were in a car accident,” the doctor said. His accent was sing-songy. Comical. His face was not. “You were very lucky.”
Rey remembered an old car. An old Ford curbed the damn pavement. “Fucking asshole ... ran me down.”
“That asshole brought you to the hospital,” the doctor said.
Rey didn’t reply. Instead, she gazed around for a possible way to leave, but the curtains were drawn around her cot.
“Am I still ... in Oslo?” She needed to be in Oslo. Timing was everything. She was so close. Couldn’t mess it up now.
“Oh, yes, for sure.”
Rey breathed a sigh of relief. “I need to leave,” she said, trying to shift from the bed. The pain she’d forgotten about made itself known again. She yelped.
“You can’t go anywhere,” the nurse said, easing Rey back onto the gurney. “It’s not broken, but you hit your hip—or the car did—quite badly.”
The doctor pawed at her face, shining a small light into her eyes.
“Hey, Jesus,” Rey complained, swatting his hands away.
“Pupil reaction is normal,” the doctor said. “Nothing broken on x-ray. What cycle are you on?”
“Cycle?” Rey asked, rubbing at her face.
“Chemo. We found it in your coat.”
“Oh,” Rey said. “I don’t remember, to be honest. Been a while, that’s for sure. Feels like forever.”
“I can understand that,” the nurse offered.
“And it’s for?” the doctor pressed.
“Breast cancer. Stag—”
“Jensen?” a man’s voice called.
The curtain slid back with a quick shink, the sound of metal rings sliding across the cubicle frame. A short gray-haired man with a grayer beard and dull eyes peered in expectantly. His face was a mix of worry and relief as his gaze met Rey’s. A powerful stench of cigarettes, like the John Player Specials Joe used to smoke, seeped into the room. The foul smell clung to the newcomer as if trying to hide his soaked-in beer stink. Bile rose in Rey’s throat.
“You can’t be in here, Detective,” the doctor said in English.
“Oh, give it a rest,” the detective replied, pushing his way into the room. “And what were you doing wandering into the road?”
“Me?” Rey spat, incredulously. “I think you’ll find you curbed the car. Drunk at the wheel there, Officer?”
The nurse gave the detective a sideways glance.
“Detective Arne Huakaas.” He straightened his back and his expression. “I think you’ll find you had your face buried in your damn phone, probably obsessing over Instagram or Facebook or some such.”
Rey didn’t have time for this. Better to take the blame, sign anything she needed to, and get the hell out of there. “Sure, look. I’m on my last couple of days here. I have a flight home that I need to make. So, if I’m not dying, can I get out of here?” She swallowed again. “And get some more water, please.”
The doctor nodded, and the nurse handed Rey the plastic beaker.
Rey measured their expressions as she took a sip of water. She needed to be more compliant, more likab
le. Sarcasm and irritation weren’t going to get her anywhere.
“I mean I have the capecitabine to take orally, but need to get back for my IV doxy. Can’t take that on my own.”
“We’d like to keep you for a while. Just for a night or two maybe,” Jensen said. “A CAT scan might be best, to clear you of any head injuries.”
Rey looked at the clock on the wall. “How long have I been out?”
“Just a couple of hours,” the nurse said.
Rey calculated the timing. She could probably afford to lose the rest of the day. Maybe until tomorrow morning. Best not to arouse suspicion at this point.
Agree to the tests, she thought. They’ll go away if you do.
Rey was right about the hospital staff leaving. Once she agreed, they did a few more basic checks, took some blood, and then left her to it. The cop was another story. He hung around, and no amount of badgering by the administration seemed to be able to make him leave. Insistent that he stayed to make sure Rey—Georgina as he knew her—didn’t slip into a coma.
The guilt trip must be killing him, Rey thought.
The detective didn’t say much. He simply sat on the small IKEA-looking chair next to her bed, stinking of cigarettes. For the unholy stench to be that bad, Rey figured he had to be getting through two packs a day. Her stomach turned. Every time she inhaled, the life-giving air was tainted with tar and nicotine. As irrational as Rey knew it to be, his dirty habit instantly dropped him into the bad bucket in her mind. Was there another act so selfish as polluting other peoples’ lungs? Irrational or not, Rey’s instinct hadn’t failed her yet. Smokers always turned out to be dicks in the end—it was just a matter of when they’d reveal their true selves.
Rey watched the detective with renewed intensity, willing his personal brand of dickishness to emerge—besides hitting her with a car. For a long time, the old man didn’t do much at all other than disappear into his mobile phone for an extended period and glance up every time Rey groaned when shifting her weight from one buttock to the next. When he realized she wasn’t dying, he went back to his handheld screen.
Rey grunted, her hip sore more from lying with all her weight on it than the accident.
Huakaas looked up.
“For Christ’s sake,” Rey said. Noting his raised eyebrows, she changed tact. “Have you seen my phone?”
“Need to make a call?” Huakaas asked.
“No, no. I’m bored. It has my music. I need my music.”
“Oh,” he said, seemingly confused. “Uh, let me go look. Actually, I had it, and your passport. I left them at the nurses’ station.” He made a noise that Rey had only ever associated with dads getting out of chairs before he walked out into the ward.
Why was the cop hanging around? Surely, he had better things to do than stink up the ward. Did he know something? Was he waiting for her to slip up? Was he even on that case? Probably not. Oslo had a bunch of detectives. No way was he was assigned to her case.
Still, can’t be too careful.
Huakaas bowled back into the room, all smiles, clutching her phone and earbuds in his hairy hands. “Here,” he said, handing them over.
Rey nodded and took the items. “Thanks.”
She swiped in her code. The screen unlocked. Twenty-one percent battery. Rey scrunched up her nose in annoyance. That wouldn’t be enough. She needed her music.
“Problem?” Huakaas asked.
“Out of juice,” she replied.
“Oh,” he said. “I’ll go and ask if they have a charger.”
“That’s more exercise than I bet your tar-ridden lungs have done in a decade. Feeling guilty there, Detective?”
Arne’s face hardened. “You want the damn charger or not?”
She wanted it, so simply nodded.
“A Samsung, right?”
She bobbed her head again.
The detective slipped out.
Rey watched him leave. A funny little man. Late fifties by his looks. A cop all his life, probably. His gaze seemed to roam everywhere, but not in a perverted way. He was observing, gathering information. Noting and filing away little details most people wouldn’t even deem important. He might seem like a bit of a bumbling idiot, and he might smell like an ashtray and had one too many beers before he climbed behind the wheel, but underestimating him would be a mistake. There was something underlying something in him. Anger. Resentment. Rey closed her eyes and conjured up the image of his hairy hands.
No wedding band. Not anymore. A fading tan line, though. He’d been married.
The detective came back in clutching a cable. “You’re in luck,” he said, then began an awkward search of the area for an electric outlet. He found one next to the ECG, plugged in the cable, and handed the loose end to Rey. She took the offered cable, noted her recollection of his ringless-finger was correct, and connected her phone.
“Not the first time finding a socket for a girl in a hospital bed, huh?” Rey said.
The question seemed to hit him hard in the chest, doubling him over so that he folded in two and crashed heavily into the flimsy seat at the side of her cot. He took too many seconds to respond, before saying, “I’m a cop. Seen my share of accidents, and worse.”
He was lying. That question hit home. A daughter perhaps? A wife? Disease maybe. Cancer? No, he looked guilty. Shamed. His usual observant gaze was now pointed anywhere but on Rey.
“I can imagine,” she said, finally. Rey didn’t like liars. This guy had graduated from a smelly drunk driver to lying about why he was familiar with a woman in a hospital bed. Rey studied his features, looking for those telltale signs. She knew she shouldn’t, not now, not when she was so close, but fire once again began to bubble up inside her. So, she pressed a little harder. “Though, it seems, it’s a little more like personal experience.”
The detective stared into her eyes, now fully alert, considering her just as she considered him. “You a psychologist now?”
“Call it a woman’s intuition,” she said.
The wrinkle in his nose, the twitch in his eyebrow. The slightly tighter grasp of his own hands. That phrase annoyed him.
“That’s just something women say to make it seem more important when they guess something’s right,” he replied dryly. “Don’t confuse correlation with causation.”
“How about experience in reading others?” Rey offered. “As a cop, you must be good at that.”
The detective eyed her carefully. “Of course,” he said, his tone laced with, and I’m observing you.
“You didn’t answer the question,” Rey pressed.
His lips tightened again. “No, I didn’t,” he said. “It seems you’re fine, though. I need to get home. Tomorrow is another day. Gotta catch bad men.”
“Just bad men?” Rey said.
The detective’s expression hardened like marble, his eyes now cold and unmoving. “I’ll call the hospital in the morning, see that you’re okay.”
“Appreciated, Detective ... sorry, I forget.”
“Huakaas,” he said, then left.
Rey sat on her cot, mind piecing the conversation together. The whole picture was so cliché. A detective, married to the job, divorced. Likely to have a kid. He probably didn’t see his child anymore. Bitter. Angry. Old school. Catching bad men. Not women. He’d been in a hospital, at a woman’s bedside. And he felt guilty about it. She unlocked her phone and punched in his name, as well as the terms Oslo and Norway, into Google. Time to find out what type of dick this smoker was.
An assortment of articles came up—his name tied to various investigations and crime scenes. Statements made to the press. His involvement with that nut job who had murdered a bunch of campers a few years back. And ... the King Kubb Killer. Rey scrunched up her nose. Just her fucking luck to be mowed down by the cop looking for her. Luckily, his biases and fixed views seemed to blind him to the true identity of the killer he chased. The true motive. He was a baby boomer. Trapped in a warped time, where marriage was forever, men rul
ed the home, and children were seen and not heard. This all worked in her favor, but she still needed to be careful, and she most definitely needed to leave.
Yet, as Rey contemplated the rest of her plan, the final finishing touches, it was impossible to shake the curiosity growing like a vine inside her. The detective, Huakaas. Upholder of the law. He’d curbed the car and hit her but somehow had not been arrested. Not to mention, she was damn sure he was hiding something from his past. Something he’d done to his wife.
She hooked up the earphones and skipped five songs until she found one that felt right. At this moment, “Downfall” by Del Amitri appealed the most. All the tracks on the album Hat Full of Rain were about the betrayal of a loved one, a woman. “Tell Her” was all about asking her not to leave, while “Driving with the Brakes On” described the original couple’s attempt at reconciliation. “Downfall” was a song for the other woman. Somehow, it just seemed fitting for the situation.
Rey kept scrolling the search results, clicking onto the next page, and then the next, where most people would have given up after the first page. Something caught her eye—a newspaper article. The copy was in Norwegian, but there was a photo of Huakaas, easily a decade younger—though still looking tired and drawn—and on the same page a photo of a woman and girl. They had to be his wife and daughter. Rey copied the URL and dropped it into Google translate. The resultant text was not fluent, but passable English.
There had been a lengthy court case, and Huakaas’s position as a detective had meant it made the news. Rey scanned the text and filled in the odd sentences with the words or phrases she felt were trying to be conveyed. Aslaug, his wife, had wanted a divorce. He’d refused, and she’d gone to the newspaper. He was a drunk.
No surprise there, Rey thought, the hum of pain in her hip returning as if to drive the point home. She continued reading.
A Time For Monsters Page 6
