Chasing China White

by Allan Leverone

  He shook his head and felt as though he might start crying again at any moment. “I didn’t mean to shoot anybody. I’ve never even held a gun in my life until today. I barely know how to use the damned thing.”

  “Well, you didn’t have much trouble tonight.”

  “I owe a lot of money to a guy,” he said, “and I was given the chance to get…what did he call it?” He squinted in concentration, still standing directly in front of the girl he’d strapped to a chair.

  Then he remembered. “Debt relief,” he said. “He offered me debt relief if I would do this little job for him.”

  “Little job? You consider killing my parents a little job?”

  “No, it’s not like that,” he said.

  “Then what is it like? Because when I look across the room all I can see is my mom and dad’s blood and them lying on the floor and…and…” Her lips quivered and one fat tear splashed over the bottom lid of each eye and rolled slowly down her face and her voice broke just before she stopped speaking.

  “Nobody was supposed to get hurt,” Derek said bleakly. “And I didn’t have a choice. If I didn’t do this, I would have been thrown into a lobster boat, and then taken out into the Atlantic and dumped.”

  “So you killed two innocent people instead. Good trade-off.”

  “They weren’t…” Derek’s voice trailed away as he realized he’d—once again—fucked up. As far as he knew, the wife was innocent. As far as he knew she had no idea the extent of her husband’s gambling problem. And even if she was aware he had a problem, Derek knew there was virtually no way she would have known how much money her husband owed a slug like Crowder.

  And although you could argue Jeff McHugh was guilty—if he hadn’t gotten himself in so deep with Crowder this situation would never have happened—he certainly didn’t deserve to die for his transgressions.

  More to the point, how could Derek make the argument to the girl he’d just orphaned that her now-dead father was the reason a man with a gun had stormed into their home? To the girl McHugh wasn’t an out-of-control gambling addict, he was her dad, and no matter how badly Derek felt the compulsion to wash some of the blood off his hands by way of explanation, he couldn’t bring himself to add to her misery by soiling her memory of her father.

  “They weren’t what?” she said. She was watching him intently, and while he could still see fear in her eyes, a much greater percentage of her expression was given over to curiosity and more than a little defensiveness. She was prepared to fight for the honor of Mom and Dad.

  “Never mind,” he said, shaking his head in tight little motions.

  “No, tell me. You started to say they weren’t something. What weren’t they?”

  “Forget it. I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for everything that happened here. I didn’t come here to kill anyone and I’m so sorry.”

  “Sorry doesn’t mean much with two people lying dead on the floor. Tell me what you started to say.”

  It was hopeless, and Derek realized he should have known it would be. He’d just killed a young girl’s parents virtually right in front of her. What was she supposed to do, accept his lame-ass explanation with a smile and a shrug? Say, “Oh well, accidents happen,” and stroll back to her room whistling a happy tune?

  Trying to explain himself had been a stupid idea, and while deep down he’d known she wouldn’t want to hear anything he had to say, he had at least thought the act of speaking the words of apology would make him feel…something. He wasn’t sure what.

  Better probably would have been too much to hope for.

  But this was the polar opposite. Talking to the girl for just a few moments had made him feel much, much worse. He had taken not just the lives of the two adults, but the life of a child as well. She was still conscious and breathing, but her world had been shattered and she would never be the same.

  And it was his fault.

  His stomach lurched and he slapped a hand over his mouth and swallowed the acid that tried to explode out of him. It burned his throat on the way back down.

  He felt sore and sick. His elbows and ribs throbbed with every beat of his heart, as did his nose and the side of his face. He felt the relentless stare of the girl in the chair, who had stopped speaking but who seemed unwilling or unable to tear her accusatory gaze from him, not even for a second.

  I have to get out of here.

  He had no plan, other than a vague notion that if he made his way back to Crowder, the man in charge would figure out a way to make things okay. Derek was a lowlife fuckup, but Crowder was an accomplished lawbreaker, a man in charge of a vast criminal enterprise who had undoubtedly seen plenty of occurrences exactly like this one.

  He had seen them and fixed them.

  Crowder would know what to do.

  Derek had to get out of here.

  But what about the girl? It wasn’t like he could just slap the tape back over her mouth and leave her here, duct-taped to a chair. Who knew how long it would be before she was discovered?

  Jeff McHugh had been some sort of business bigshot, so he probably would be expected at work tomorrow. Derek didn’t know much about the business world, but he assumed the biggest of bigshots had the ability to set their own hours. If McHugh was that kind of bigshot, it was possible no one would think anything of it if he didn’t show up for work tomorrow, or maybe even the next day.

  The wife was a complete mystery, but Derek suspected she might be one of those stay-at-home moms who wouldn’t be missed for days, maybe not even for weeks.

  And what about the girl? Presumably she would be expected at school tomorrow, but if she didn’t show, what would happen? Would the school call the house? Probably, but if there was no answer it didn’t seem likely they would call the cops or send someone to investigate, at least not until she’d been missing for more than one day.

  He realized that if he handled this the wrong way, he could very well end up killing the girl as well as her parents.

  He tried to slow his racing brain and think logically for a minute. Come up with a plan that would allow him time to make his escape but not sentence the girl to a horrible, painful death.

  He wished he could call Crowder, but he’d lost his cell phone years ago and the boss certainly hadn’t offered him one.

  Maybe the McHugh’s home phone? Derek had a vague suspicion that calling anyone from their landline would be a bad idea. And it didn’t much matter, anyway, because Crowder hadn’t given him a contact number.

  So Derek was truly on his own, and that prospect did little to inspire anything in him other than dread.

  He could only come up with one plan. It didn’t seem like a very good one, but it didn’t have any competition, either, and standing around here waiting to be caught held no appeal.

  Derek approached the girl and tried to loom over her threateningly. Said, “I’m going to leave now.”

  “About time,” the girl snarled.

  “Shut up. I’m not going to put the tape back over your mouth, but if you scream or yell or even yawn before thirty minutes goes by, I’ll come back and kill you, do you understand me?”

  She didn’t argue, but she didn’t answer in the affirmative, either. She didn’t say anything at all. She just glared at Derek until he dropped his eyes. Again.

  He decided there was nothing to be gained by waiting any longer, so he turned on his heel and backtracked out the front door. He was proud that he remembered to make sure the door was locked before pulling it closed behind him.

  7

  Crowder had lent Derek a little Hyundai to use on the job, since Boxford was so goddamned far out in the country. He’d insisted Derek park it a good distance from McHugh’s home, though. “We don’t need some sharp-eyed passerby spotting the car and remembering the tags. Leave it in an inconspicuous area at least a half-mile from the house.”

  At the time, Derek remembered having been insulted that Crowder would think he was
so stupid, as if without the proper instruction he would have parked right in McHugh’s driveway before invading the man’s home and robbing him blind. Of course he would have taken care to protect his—and Crowder’s—anonymity. He wasn’t an idiot.

  Now, though, hiking through a thicket of woods behind the now-dead Jeff McHugh’s home and then along the side of a narrow country road, slinking into the woods at the first sign of every passing car, Derek wished he hadn’t been quite so conscientious.

  He was jonesing hard, craving the sweet agony of needle piercing skin, to be followed immediately by the soothing rush of the heroin as it entered his bloodstream. He was alternating between sweating his ass off and freezing his balls off.

  He was filled with guilt and self-recrimination for what he’d done and what he had allowed himself to become, and his imagination tortured him relentlessly with the certainty that McHugh’s daughter had by now screamed loudly enough to alert a passerby to her predicament, Derek’s warning to her notwithstanding. He was certain that any second now a dozen police cruisers would come screeching to a halt, light bars flashing, and cops would leap out with guns drawn and they would begin shooting and not stop until Derek was bleeding on the side of the road out of a hundred separate bullet holes.

  God, he needed a fix.

  The hike back to the Hyundai seemed to be taking twice as long as the trip the other direction had. Three times as long. Four. He was a mess and a failure, and the only thing keeping him going was that Crowder would know what to do. Crowder had been running his organization forever and had undoubtedly seen it all. He would tell Derek what to do and then he would—

  A car’s headlights shone off in the distance and Derek was by now on a sidewalk, close enough to civilization—or at least what passed for civilization in McHugh’s little pissant hometown—that slipping into the woods and out of sight was not an option. He stood up a little straighter and tried to trade his shuffling loser’s gait for a normal pace, project the image of a regular guy out for a nighttime stroll, maybe his car had broken down or he was just another hipster who didn’t believe in polluting Mother Earth with carbon monoxide so he walked everywhere he went, and as he did so he prayed with all his heart that the oncoming vehicle was not a police cruiser.

  He held his breath as the car approached, shaking so much from nerves and a craving for drugs that he imagined his misery must be obvious. The car passed by, moving slowly. But it wasn’t a cruiser and it didn’t stop, and by the time its taillights disappeared in the distance behind Derek the shopping center in which he’d parked had become visible, its sodium arc lamps glittering up ahead like a poor man’s Vegas.

  Derek picked up his pace and forced himself to ignore the rest of the passing cars, focusing only on making it to the Hyundai. A group of teenagers crowded the sidewalk, moving in the opposite direction, and he ignored them. When one of the kids rammed a shoulder into him on the way by, accidentally on purpose, Derek pretended not to notice even though it rocked him back on his heels so badly he thought he might fall on his ass.

  The kids snickered and Derek kept right on going. He refused to give them the satisfaction of an angry glance or a swear-laden comment. Nothing. They didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting to that little fucking car, locking the doors and leaving this goddamned town and its horror-filled memories in the rear view mirror. Derek had fucked up so badly he didn’t have a clue what he was going to do beyond the next few minutes, but one thing he did know was that he was never coming back to Boxford if he lived to be a thousand years old.

  For a long time the lights of the shopping center seemed to stay the same distance away, like a mirage in the desert. Derek felt like he walked and walked for miles and the goddamned thing refused to come any closer.

  Then he was there. The parking lot loomed in front of him with the lights of the store off in the distance. It had been open for business when he parked here earlier in the evening and at that time his car was invisible, lost and anonymous in a sea of minivans, pickup trucks, SUVs and sedans.

  Now, though, almost all the other cars had disappeared. Even though the store was still open, it was late enough on a Tuesday evening that most shoppers had long-since gone home to eat dinner and watch TV and get a good night’s sleep in preparation for school or work tomorrow. Crowder’s Hyundai sat off by itself. As anonymous as it had been in this location at 5:45 p.m., it was that conspicuous at 9:45.

  Derek didn’t even care anymore. He tossed his empty backpack onto the passenger seat and slumped behind the wheel.

  Slammed the door and hit the locks.

  Closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the headrest and turned the key.

  Began to cry softly as he tried to imagine how the hell his life had spun so horribly, irrevocably out of control.

  He wasn’t sure how long he sat in the car, blubbering like a little kid when he should have been putting as much distance between himself and the McHugh home as possible. It was probably only a couple of minutes but time seemed to have become elastic.

  Between the extreme stress of knowing he’d ended two lives and the steadily increasing sensation of illness as his body reacted to the lack of heroin, he felt insubstantial and weak. He felt like a cartoon character who’d just stepped off a cliff and was now pumping his feet madly in a futile attempt to delay the inevitable. It was only a matter of time, and likely not very much of it, before Derek plunged straight down to his death. He’d seen it happen a million times to Wile E. Coyote while watching Saturday morning TV as a kid, and although the fall never stopped Wile E. for long, Derek knew it would leave him busted and broken and unbreathing.

  Which was, of course, exactly the fate he deserved.

  He wiped his eyes and jammed the car into Drive and rolled out of the parking lot. Getting back to Crowder’s office would be easy because of the time of night and the fact the man had made damned sure Derek knew the way. He expected to be twenty-five thousand bucks richer tonight, and he certainly didn’t want the deliveryman to get lost with the goods.

  Thirty minutes later Derek eased the car to a stop outside Crowder’s building. A new kind of fear had started to crawl through him beginning about halfway between Boxford and Boston, a fear that had less to do with a pair of murders and much more to do with the fact he knew Crowder was going to be pissed.

  Instead of getting the cash and/or liquid assets he was expecting, the man who’d forced Derek into doing him this “favor” was going to have to deal with a failure of the highest magnitude.

  There would be no cash dumped onto his desk.

  There would be no jewelry. No bearer bonds or ATM cards or credit cards or bank account numbers.

  There would only be a terrified dude with a murder weapon in his pocket and a story Crowder was most definitely not going to want to hear. Derek was so concerned about setting Crowder off that he had given serious thought to hitting the highway, pointing the Hyundai south on I-95 and driving as far as the gas in the tank would take him.

  Get away from the cops.

  Get away from Crowder.

  Just fucking get away, period.

  But as seriously as he’d considered leaving everything behind, he hadn’t done so for one reason: the goddamned tank was only a quarter full, and even in a car that got great gas mileage, there was no way he could drive far enough to escape Crowder’s reach.

  Or of the cops, for that matter. The police wouldn’t let a little thing like distance stop them from hunting down the man who’d murdered a bigshot banker (or realtor, or stock trader, or whatever McHugh had been) and his wife.

  Then there was what might be the most important factor: he still needed a fix. He needed it badly, and the situation was worsening with each passing hour. And since Derek had no money and no way of finding a dealer quickly in Hartford or Newark or wherever the Hyundai finally ran out of gas, he decided to suck it up. Face Crowder, deal with the repercussions, whatever they mig
ht be, and move on.

  At least Crowder would know what to do, what the next steps should be for a guy with the blood of two people on his hands.

  You’re doing the right thing. You’re making the right decision. You have no choice.

  Derek repeated as many variations on the same encouraging mantra as he could conjure while sitting in the car and trying to force himself to go inside and face the music. In theory the positive reinforcement should be making him feel better.

  But he didn’t feel better.

  He doubted he would ever feel better.

  He sat in the car and chanted his feel-good bullshit to himself and eventually realized no amount of optimistic, hippy-dippy crap was going to make a goddamned bit of difference. In the end, he was still a homeless junkie multiple murderer, and things didn’t turn out right for guys like him. Ever.

  There would be no happy ending.

  No clap on the back and thanks from Crowder for a good try.

  Things were dark and getting darker for Derek, and he could sit in the front seat of the cheap little foreign car until the cows came home and that wasn’t going to change.

  He almost started crying again. Felt the tears try to squeeze their way out from under his eyelids. Swallowed heavily and forced them back.

  Then he inhaled deeply and pushed out a breath. Opened his door and trudged inside to face the music.

  8

  The backpack was dangling by a strap from Derek’s right hand as he entered the office, and Crowder glanced from Derek’s face to the pack and then back again. The expression on his face was one of a man who’d eaten one too many spicy Buffalo chicken wings.

  “Bag looks a little light,” he said sourly.

  Derek shook his head, staring resolutely at the floor. “There was a…problem.”

  “I can see that. Explain.”

  “McHugh’s wife was there.”