by Candice Fox
“There’s nothing in the house,” he said. “I didn’t think you kept it online. Too traceable that way. But maybe I’m wrong.”
He became distracted, clicking through the inner workings of my computer. I braved a covert, awkward shuffle into the corner of the kitchen. I pushed myself up, took a moment to look at my attacker. I was steadily growing hotter. My entire body boiling beneath my clothes. Recognition. I knew this man. I knew his thin, angular face and big, dark blue eyes.
“What are you doing?”
“What do you think I’m doing?” He clicked around the computer, glanced at me. Looking at my face brought him out of his frenzied search of the laptop. I shifted backward, but there was nowhere to go. “I’m looking for pictures. Videos. Documents.”
He was looking for child porn. Whoever this man was, wherever I had seen him before, he was associated with my case. This wasn’t a robbery, although I’d known that from the anger. This was personal. I felt blood running down my jaw, tasted it between my teeth. His shirt was torn. I hadn’t made much of an impact.
“If you leave, I won’t call the police,” I said.
“Do the police respond when you call them?” He snorted. Bitter. “I wonder how far they’d have to come. Whether they’d make it in time.”
“Look, I don’t know who you are—”
“You don’t?” The man’s brow dipped just once. Genuine shock. “Really?”
He grabbed the baseball bat from the floor and came toward me. My stomach plummeted.
“Please don’t.”
“You really don’t know who I am?”
“Please.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. He grabbed my jaw and shoved my head against the cupboards until I opened them.
“Look at me,” he snarled. “Look at my face.”
I could hardly breathe. If I didn’t get the picture soon he was going to kill me. I could see him losing control again. Twitching in the muscles of his tight, red neck. His heart was hammering—jugular ticking fast in his neck. I searched his face and cringed as it came to me.
“Oh, god. You’re Claire’s father.”
The baseball bat was in his fist. I cowered into the corner, expecting another blow as he rose to his feet.
“That’s right, shithead.”
I’d hardly looked at my victim’s parents during my trial. Not my victim. Claire. I had to stop thinking about her that way. The way the rest of the country was looking at her. Because I didn’t deserve this. There were angry tears on my face as a brief swell of defiance prickled in my chest.
“What took you so long?” I asked. “I expected you to be out there with the mob when they televised where I lived six months ago.”
“Yeah?” He sat down again. “Sorry. I wanted a more personal visit.”
“What are you gonna do?” I asked. It wasn’t a challenge. I was serious. Because whatever he’d told himself about coming here and finding child porn and having me sent back to jail wasn’t going to pan out, and he was starting to realize that. He could do whatever he wanted to me out here, and no one would hear me scream. I wasn’t sure a beating would satisfy him. If he was going to kill me, all I wanted was to be sure he wouldn’t touch my fucking geese. I started working my way mentally toward an argument for them. Toward getting him to make me a promise. But it was hard to maintain complete consciousness. He’d really smacked me around, maybe even after I’d passed out. The lights above me weren’t completely clear. I had the feeling I’d been kicked in the chest a few times. Things were crunching and rattling as I breathed.
He was back in the chair, ignoring me. Head in his hands, fingers gripping his hair, thinking, as I was thinking.
“I kept a picture of you,” he said. He drew a long breath, let it out slow. “Since Claire picked you out of the photo lineup. I asked the cops to show me the lineup, show me who she’d identified. You. I asked if I could take the picture. I kept it in my wallet. I would look at it sometimes to remind myself that you were just a man. That you weren’t some … thing. A ghost.”
A car drove by on the road outside. I thought about screaming.
“I figured if I let myself get overwhelmed by the idea that you were more than you really were, then I’d start to see you everywhere,” he said. He rubbed his hands together. Examined his skinned knuckles. “Rose, my wife, she was seeing you everywhere even after you were arrested. Big men hanging around little girls. Fathers with their daughters, you know? No. I’d take out the picture and look at your face and I’d think to myself, He’s a man, and he’s in prison, and he can’t hurt her anymore.”
His lip twitched. I saw a flash of teeth.
“But then they let you out of prison,” he said. “And I didn’t know where you were. And you kept hurting her. Even though you were nowhere near her. She hurts. Every day. Just … Just being alive.”
I was shivering from head to foot. The new calm that had overtaken him was sending my terror into overdrive. This man had the capacity to kill me. Not as he had been before, blinded by fury. But like this. Calm, and methodical. No one would investigate my death very deeply. Any number of people all across the country wanted me dead. They’d have to leave my grave unmarked, so that the vigilantes didn’t come to piss on it.
“Listen to me,” I told him. “I didn’t hurt your daughter.”
“I thought about this for so long. It was the only way I could go to sleep at night. I’d think about buying a plane ticket, coming here, finding you.” He opened his hands, gestured to my kitchen. The shattered glass and plates at my feet. The broken chair by the door. “I thought about all sorts of things. About cutting you. Hanging you, for a while. Shotgunning you in the face. I had all these fantasies. They were so real, I could feel them.”
He was suddenly crying. Manic. He pulled his hair, scratched his scalp hard with both hands. Rubbed his face with his palms like he was trying to wake from a dream.
“And now I come here and I find you’re just a fucking man,” he said. “Just like I told myself. You’re just a man.”
I didn’t know what he was talking about. All I could think of was my own survival. I’d heard men talk like this before, about their fantasies falling in a heap, their plans coming undone. In my job as a cop I’d listened to them on the radio, standing in the street looking up at them on ledges, standing just beyond reach of the negotiator. He was going to kill me. It was all he could do. My lips were so dry I could hardly form words.
“Please. Please listen. There’s a yellow envelope among my papers,” I stammered. “In the second bedroom. I’ve been … I was working with a partner. She found some things on the man who really did hurt Claire. Some leads. I haven’t done—I didn’t—”
He stood and I tried to scramble away, got nowhere, curled into a ball, thinking he was coming for me again. But he just turned down the hall and left the house.
There was a shoe by my face, but it wasn’t a black boot this time. It was a dirty pink Converse sneaker with wet grass sticking to the shoelaces. A thin ankle covered with tattoos of yellow tigers and wet jungle leaves straining as she stood over me. I felt Amanda nudge me in the side with her other shoe. I made a sound of life.
“Ted! You are alive!” she said, but her jubilation plummeted quickly into grief. “Damn it. I just lost a bet with myself.”
She leaned on me, and I felt her slip a knife or scissor blade into the cable tie at my wrists. My hands flopped onto the floor, numb and useless.
“Birds,” I said.
“What?”
“The birds.”
“Oh,” she said. “Good point.”
She walked away, through the porch door, letting it slam behind her. I lay on the floor and dreamed. I’d taken a few beatings in my time, in prison and out, and I knew the worst thing I could do right now was try to get up too fast.
Amanda Pharrell was my investigative partner, a strange tattooed pixie who could be brilliant in the throes of a case, but annoying as a poke in the eye in equ
al measure. I’d been working with her since I moved to Crimson Lake, my old life on the drug squad with the New South Wales police long forgotten. I guess you could say she “hired” me; I was technically employed by her private investigations firm, the only other person on the payroll. But our partnership had been more of a beautiful accident, the hand of fate pushing us together. When I fled Sydney, I’d stopped and decided to settle in Crimson Lake by chance. And by chance, there was someone in town who everyone hated just as much as me. It was my lawyer who had put us together, and somehow—I still struggle to understand how—it had worked.
Like me, Amanda was never going to be welcomed back into the loving circle of civil society. She’d stabbed a seventeen-year-old schoolmate to death after the two sat in a car in the rainforest together, about to walk up to a party. It wasn’t her fault, but like my crime hers was a one-way ticket out of the “normal” world.
It was Amanda who had brought me a yellow envelope one day shortly after our first case together, a package containing papers detailing exactly what she’d managed to find out about the man who really did abduct and rape Claire. I’d been too scared to look very closely at them. She hadn’t pushed me on the issue. It was my decision what I did with the investigation of my own case, and in the weeks that had followed, all the envelope brought me was worry and terror at the possibilities. Maybe if I went looking for Claire’s attacker, I’d never find him. Maybe I would find him, and he’d get away. Maybe I’d try to find him, and only further implicate myself somehow, or be unable to prove it was he who’d attacked Claire Bingley. Maybe I’d ignore the envelope altogether, and he’d do it again, and this time he’d kill someone, and that would be my fault. I didn’t think any good could come of what was contained in the envelope, no matter what happened.
I heard Amanda thump back up onto the porch.
“How many geese did you have before?”
“Seven,” I groaned, pulling my legs toward me slowly, easing my way up onto my elbows. “Six gray, one white.”
“Yeah, they’re all there.” She sniffed, kicked the porch door closed behind her like she owned the place. “They’re just puffed up. Cranky.”
“I’m pretty cranky myself.” I staggered to my feet. She slipped under my arm and tried to help me to the bathroom, but being so small, she wasn’t very useful. I smeared blood on the doorframe, made footprints on the divorce paperwork my wife had sent me, still unsigned. In the bathroom mirror, my face was awash with blood, one-half swelled so that the eye was a slit between two purple lumps, patterned with a cross from lying on the kitchen tiles.
“What are you doing here?” I asked her.
“I figured something was up,” Amanda said, helping me to sit on the edge of the bathtub. “You don’t go to bed till ten. Weren’t answering your phone.”
“How do you know I don’t go to bed till ten?”
“I’m a supersleuth. An investigative genius. A deductive savant.”
“I might have been out. Had visitors.”
She laughed as she wet a washcloth in the sink. She was right, of course. I went to bed at exactly ten. In prison, lights out had been exactly eight. So I’d extended my sleep time to normal adult hours when I was freed, but I kept to the exact timings because too much free will was still uncomfortable for me. I got up at six. Had breakfast at six thirty. Lunch at midday. I went to my room to go to sleep at exactly 9:45 p.m. and played with my phone until lights out. Nothing else felt right.
“This will need stitches,” she said, touching my face. Amanda had a dozen or more strict rules about working with her, and one of them was that I never touched her. But the longer I’d worked with her, the more she touched me. She seemed to be holding part of my cheek up. “You want me to call that quack?”
I craned my neck and looked in the mirror again. There was a curved five-centimeter gash under my eye, hanging open, revealing raw red flesh. “That quack” was a coroner I’d befriended who saw to all my medical needs. I couldn’t see regular doctors, attend regular hospitals. Even to buy groceries I had to go two towns over, wear sunglasses and a cap pulled down low, and make sure I didn’t talk to anybody. In and out, breathing deeply and sweating, like a man on a bank heist. Once, I’d been the only face on the cover of every newspaper nationwide. When people recognized me, there were a range of reactions. Men sometimes tried to punch me. Women tended to go all cold, walk away, ignore me until I left. Old ladies shouted and pointed at me. I was terrified of having to see a dentist.
I took the washcloth and pressed it into the wound.
“It’s fine. I’ve got to go. I’m going to catch him before he leaves.”
“Who?”
“The guy.” I looked at my partner. “It was Claire Bingley’s father.”
“No way!” She slapped me in the chest. I winced.
“Way.”
“What are you going to do? You going to bash him? I’ll come.” She punched her palm, her jaw jutted. “I like a bit of argy-bargy.”
“I’m not going to bash him, I’m going to talk to him.”
“Talk to him?” Amanda balked. “About what, exactly? The dude just KO’ed you on the kitchen floor. Seems like he might have got his point across. Or are you confused by his message? I can spell it out for you, Ted—he wants you dead. He wants to shred your oversized head. Grind your bones to make his bread.”
“I got it,” I said. “But I think I have a right of reply.”
She looked me over, took in my injuries, seemed to assess my chances in another tangle with Mr. Bingley.
“You’re not in a good way.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Your employee health insurance doesn’t cover suicide missions.”
“Amanda.”
“Can you even walk? Did he get you in the nuts?” Amanda cringed in expectation of my answer.
“I don’t know. Everything hurts.” I stood.
“If I finally got hold of the guy who’d raped my daughter, I’d have gone right for the nuts,” she mused. “I’m not sure I’d have used a baseball bat, either. Pair of scissors, maybe. Icepick.”
“This isn’t making me feel better.”
“I don’t know why you’d want to go anywhere near that guy again.” She shook her head. “You got something to say, send an email.”
“I’m going. Help me get cleaned up and get me to my car, would you?”
“You’re stranger than pie, Ted Conkaffey. If you want to go get yourself murdered, fine, but you’re not going anywhere with half your face falling off.” Amanda took me by the shoulders and pushed me back onto the toilet. “I’ll fix it. Have you got any fishing line?”
“Forget about it. I’m not letting you anywhere near my face, with or without fishing line.”
“What, you think I’m gonna mess it up? You’re not a pretty man, Ted Conkaffey.”
“Yes I am.”
“You don’t need to be a doctor to stitch a guy’s face,” she said, lifting my chin, examining the wound. “I’ll do it. It’ll be great. It’ll be very erotic. Like when Val Kilmer cuts his face in The Saint and Elisabeth Shue stitches it for him. Urgh, Val Kilmer. Val Killlmerrr. I’m sorry. I need a moment.” She sighed and hung her head back, her eyes closed, remembering. Gave a warm, wide smile.
* * *
It turns out that a lot of women have stitched men’s faces in movies. Amanda told me all about them, straddling my lap in the bathtub, where the light was best, her breath on my face as she fed the fishing line through my skin with a sewing needle and ignoring my whining. Aside from Elisabeth Shue and Val Kilmer’s soulful interaction in The Saint, Rooney Mara stitched up Daniel Craig’s brow in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead put some stitches in John Goodman in 10 Cloverfield Lane.
It wasn’t all that odd to have Amanda sitting on me, crotch to crotch, jabbering excitedly about erotic moments in movies, neither of us feeling anything remotely sexual. There was nothing erotic about us. In fact, Amanda
seemed to have little concept of regular emotions. She was exactly as bright and cheerful about me not being dead as I imagined she’d have been about finding my corpse. She used weird expressions like “stranger than pie” as if everyone should know what they meant. Her social-emotional barometer had certainly been bashed around by her murder conviction, by her decade in prison. But I wasn’t exactly sure it had been firing on all pistons before that.
She helped me out to the car and I got on the road, my hands locked on the wheel, everything pulsing with pain in protest to the movement. I should really have been in the hospital. But then, I hadn’t been where I was meant to be or doing what I was meant to do in a very long time.
I was working on a hunch that Claire Bingley’s father had flown into Cairns to confront me, and that it wasn’t the kind of mission that would be extended out so that he could go sightseeing, maybe catch a jumping crocodile cruise. I figured he’d have left my house and gone right back to the airport to catch a plane home. The whole mission seemed badly planned, spur-of-the-moment. He might have seen a reflective feature story mentioning me and snapped. Might have just been thrown out by his wife. Maybe something had happened with Claire. He’d acted out of rage, and now that the deed was done and the dream was broken he’d be running, wondering if I’d called the police, if they’d answer, if they’d be waiting for him at the terminal.
I drove to Cairns airport, speeding all the way, now and then scratching at my bruised nose as blood dried inside my nostrils. I didn’t know if I’d find him. It was a terribly long shot. But I’d been too terrified to say what I needed to say at my house, and the man had been too angry to hear it.
I parked in the short-term parking lot and walked across the front of the long, squat buildings, looking in the windows at the empty check-in counters, receiving worried looks from the red-jacketed receptionists as I passed. The front of my shirt was splattered with blood, and I limped heavily on my left side, one arm hugged close to my body to brace what were probably cracked ribs against the jolting of my steps.
