A Killer Harvest

by Paul Cleave

  He can smell grease and can hear insects buzzing in the grass. There are beer cans and drink bottles tossed in every direction. He figures the only thing that isn’t here but should be is a kid prodding a dead cat with a stick and a hobo drinking wine wrapped in a paper bag. The first autumn leaves are starting to pile up against the base of the fences. He wonders who litters more, people or nature.

  “It wasn’t like anything,” he says. “I mean, it’s how I always was. I didn’t miss my vision, because I never had it, but yeah, I knew I was missing out. There were times when it was really hard, but most of the time I didn’t think about it. Like, you know how you don’t think about breathing, you just do it? Kind of like that. I didn’t think about being blind, or dwell on it, it was who I was.”

  “And now?”

  “And now everything is different.”

  “But not just because you can see, right? Because of everything else in your life?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Do you still see your friends from before the operation? Or do they see you differently now? And when I say see, I don’t actually mean see.”

  “That’s . . .” he says, but doesn’t finish.

  “That’s what?”

  “That’s really insightful,” he says. “And no, I don’t. They don’t want to hang out with me anymore.”

  “Must be tough,” she says. “Not just losing your dad, but feeling guilty that you can see after what happened to him, and feeling bad your other friends can’t see too.”

  He wants to hug her, but doesn’t. They keep walking. Occasionally one of them will lose balance and fall into the other one, knocking the other off the rail too, causing them both to laugh.

  “Am I the first friend you’ve made since getting your sight?”

  Her question makes him smile. It makes him feel good inside. It brings back the thought of hugging her. “Yes.”

  “You’ll make others,” she says. “I’ll introduce you to some people tomorrow. They’ll like you, I promise.”

  “Thanks,” he says. “That sounds . . . cool.”

  “You won’t have to be alone anymore, and you’ll like them.”

  He’s excited about making friends. He also thinks that having lots of friends is the best defense you can have against guys like Scott.

  Soon Joshua and Olillia are batting away mosquitos and squashing the occasional sandfly against their arms. Joshua can’t see any grasshoppers, but he can hear them chirping from all directions. He feels sweat dripping down his side, where his schoolbag is resting, but the sweating and the itching are the only downsides to this outing. He likes the heat from the sun, likes walking on the rails, and the sleepers, likes the sounds of insects coming from the grass. It’s firing off his imagination the same way his audiobooks used to, and he wonders if that could lead anywhere, that perhaps of all the things available to him, being a writer is now one of them. Of course, he could have been a writer even if he had remained blind—but describing a world you’ve seen in the light is easier than describing one that’s only ever been in your head.

  “You always walk?” he asks. “Or you sometimes bike?”

  “I walk,” she says. “I could actually drive, if I had a car.”

  “Really? You can drive?”

  “I got my learner’s license two months ago, so I always have to drive with somebody older who’s been driving a few years. It’s fun. I guess you’ve never driven, huh?”

  “Never,” he says, “but I want to.”

  “My brother could teach you. He taught me.”

  She tells him about her brother. He’s studying at teachers’ college because he wants to be a physical education teacher. He loves sports, plays a bunch of them, not well enough to play professionally, but well enough to be able to teach others. The students they were walking behind leave the tracks at the intersection up ahead. A police car, perhaps the same one as before, shoots up the bank and races down the other side, part of it hitting the ground and creating sparks, its sirens blaring. Seeing it brings them both to a stop.

  “Must be something pretty bad,” he says.

  “I hope nobody’s been hurt,” she says. “You think they’re heading to an accident? Or a crime scene?”

  “Could be either of those, or could be they’re looking for somebody.”

  They reach the intersection. The houses up and down the street look similar to the houses on his street. They’re mostly single-story homes with the occasional two-story scattered among them. Autumn is stripping the gardens and the hot sun is burning the lawns and some yards are in better condition than others.

  “This is where we part ways,” she says.

  “Oh, yeah, of course.”

  They stand by the tracks staring at each other.

  “Umm . . . do you want my number?” she asks. “In case you have any questions about school or homework? Or if you want to maybe walk to school together?”

  He smiles. “Sure,” he says. He takes his bag off and unzips the compartment along the side. His hands are shaking a little. He’s nervous and isn’t sure why. He takes his phone out. The screen is sticky from the soda poured on it earlier. He tries to switch it on, but it doesn’t work.

  “Give me your hand,” she says, and he does. She writes her phone number on his palm and doesn’t mention the fact his hand is shaking even though surely she must notice it. “It was nice walking with you, Boy Who Used to Be Blind,” she says.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, Talking Girl.”

  He watches her walk down the bank and then down the road. She’s fifty yards away when she turns and waves. He feels like he’s been caught out, but he’s not sure of what. He waves back, then crosses the road and continues down the tracks.

  This next section is the same as the previous, only there’s lots more litter, more dried grass, more graffiti, and, as he begins sweating even more, more insects too. Every few seconds he has to slap at something trying to take a bite out of him. There’s another student way up ahead. He focuses on him, trying to match his pace. After a hundred yards he realizes the phone number on his hand won’t survive the walk home—his sweat has already smudged the first two digits. He takes his bag off, pulls out a notebook, and scribbles it down. When he puts his bag back on, he looks down the train line behind him. Somebody is running towards him. He can’t tell who, but somebody from his school is making the most of the same shortcut. When he looks back a few moments later he sees that it’s Scott.

  This can’t be good.

  He runs.

  “Wait up, freak!” Scott yells.

  He’s never run before in his life. He’s walked quickly, and he’s jogged a little bit over the last few weeks, but he’s never run anywhere, not like this, not full on like his life depended on it. This means he’s short not only on experience, but also on stamina. Already he’s breathing hard. The student he was following is now in the next section of train tracks, too far away to help even if he wanted to. His feet pound heavily on the sleepers, and he keeps his eyes on them, knowing one false step will send him into stones. He can hear Scott catching up. Can hear his feet stomping on the sleepers. The road comes into view. He just has to make it there. Just has to keep running.

  Scott ankle-taps him. He loses balance and flies into the air. He twists and manages to use his bag to take some of the impact, but not all of it. He rolls down the stony embankment and into the grass below.

  THIRTY-TWO

  This is what it’s like to be a stalker, Vincent thinks. An elevated heart rate, sweaty palms, and a constant case of the nerves. A stalker who is an idiot. Who has a lot to learn. A newbie.

  Going to the hospital—that was stupid.

  Injecting Erin Murphy—that was stupid.

  He succeeded only in drawing attention to the fact that her accident wasn’t an accident at all. He’s let the police, the hospital, everyone, know that someone is trying to kill her, which would be at least somewhat bearable if he had, indeed, successfully ki
lled her. Instead he’s back where he started—living with the knowledge that she could wake at any moment and remember every detail.

  There is an upside—the precautions he took at the hospital worked. The police didn’t come for him. The woman not dying—that was bad luck. But not getting caught—that’s good planning.

  It will all go better with the boy.

  He’s been following Joshua Logan and other people close to Detective Benjamin Kirk over the last two weeks. It took him a while to determine the order in which they would all go down. It was a complicated process, but he has finally pinpointed his second target—the son of Ben’s former partner, the boy who got his father’s eyes.

  Vincent looks like any other parent as he taps his fingers against the steering wheel while staring into the sea of students. It’s easy to fit in. What isn’t easy is knowing what Joshua will do. Is he getting picked up? Walking? Getting the bus? Well, that’s why Vincent is there—to learn. The other thing that isn’t easy is spotting the kid. There are so many of them all dressed the same.

  But then there he is, walking out of the gates, and Vincent has to keep waiting because if he follows he’ll spook the kid. He also can’t keep catching up and pulling over. He knows the route the boy will take—he just needed to find out his mode of transportation. Walking is perfect.

  He gives it five minutes, then pulls out. He passes Joshua near a convenience store where schoolkids are fattening themselves on meat pies and cans of soda. Joshua doesn’t go in. Nor is Joshua alone. He’s walking with a girl from school.

  Vincent takes the next right and drives up and over a railway crossing a hundred yards down the road. He drives another twenty-five yards and pulls over. The girl could be a problem if the kid is always going to walk with her. Other students bike past his parked car. Some walk. He keeps looking busy by checking his watch and playing with his phone. A kid with dark spiky hair and a mean look on his face races past him on the footpath side of the car, and when Vincent glances at him the kid yells, “Loser!” and flips him the bird.

  He considers following that kid home instead.

  Joshua reaches the top of the railway tracks, and instead of coming down this side, he and the girl change direction and walk along them.

  “Interesting,” Vincent says, and pulls into traffic.

  There is a light up ahead that’s green, but nobody is going through it, and soon he sees why—there are police cars racing through the intersection. They turn and come his way, and for a moment he’s nervous that for some reason they’re coming for him, but they don’t slow down. They’re heading in the direction of the school, hitting the railway fast. Maybe one of the kids has stabbed a teacher, or one of them has stabbed a fellow student. Usually the biggest assholes were assholes as kids too, but the kind of shit that happens at schools these days is far beyond what the biggest bully would have tried back when Vincent was a student. He still remembers his first day at high school. He was thirteen. It was a couple of years before he met Simon. All his friends had gone to a public school, but his parents sent him to a private school, which meant he knew nobody there. On day one in the playground one kid pulled Vincent’s pants down around his ankles, then knelt behind him, while a second pushed him in the chest, sending him toppling over the first and onto his back with his legs in the air. There wasn’t a single student who didn’t laugh. He pulled his pants up and knew there was a decision to be made—become the butt of everyone’s joke, or get himself some respect.

  The boy who knelt behind him was still on his knees laughing. Vincent kicked him hard in the face. He broke the boy’s nose, split his lip, and knocked out two of his teeth. He dived on the other kid, and they were still swapping punches that mostly missed when the teachers pulled them apart. He knows his parents’ money was the only reason he wasn’t expelled that day, but nobody laid a finger on him again. Ever.

  Traffic starts to move, and though he misses this green light, and misses it on the next cycle too, he gets it on the third. He drives north and gets held up at the next intersection, this time for another police car, and once again misses two green lights because of backed-up traffic. The kid who called him a loser earlier passes him again, and now that he’s seen him a second time, he reminds him of that kid back in school whose teeth he kicked out. The traffic clears and he turns down the road, and up ahead the girl who was walking with Joshua is now walking towards him, and Joshua isn’t here. He’s probably carried on down the tracks. Vincent turns the car around and this time he times the light, then gets stuck at a red, but only for a minute before making the next left down a road that runs parallel to where he saw the girl.

  Joshua will be all alone on those tracks, Vincent figures. Vincent’s goal for the day had been to follow the kid and learn his movements, the same way he’s been following the others, but really, you can follow people for only so long before they start to notice you. The point here isn’t to follow, the point here is to act.

  With the kid all alone on the railway tracks, the time to act is now.

  He parks near the railway crossing and gets out of the car. He carries the knife wrapped in a rag. He had put it in the car earlier just in case, and, hell, this is a classic just-in-case moment. He climbs the incline, and when he gets to the top of the tracks he looks first to his right, and sees nobody in that direction. To his left, nothing makes sense. The boy is only about twenty yards away, lying in the grass. Another kid is moving towards him. With traffic and delays, the boy has covered more ground than Vincent expected. Maybe he’s been running too.

  He should just turn away and go back to his car. He can always pick this up again tomorrow, or next week. There’s no hurry.

  The second kid reaches down over Joshua, ready to punch him.

  None of this is your problem, he tells himself, and none of this was the plan.

  He’s tempted to go down there, but leaving is the right thing to do. Keeping the knife wrapped in the rag, he takes a few steps back towards his car, then changes his mind. He’ll wait and watch a little, and see where this goes.

  THIRTY-THREE

  Ben tries Joshua’s cell phone again. The kid must not have switched it on since leaving school. Michelle, on the other hand, has been easy to get hold of, and he’s managed to put the fear of God into her.

  Officers have been sent to Joshua’s house, as well as to the school, with others cruising the streets. They know the make and color and license plate number of the car Vincent Archer owns. A manhunt is under way, and they will find him—the question is, will Archer find Joshua first?

  Ben and Vega are on their way to Vincent Archer’s parents’ house, hoping they can learn more about Vincent and, in doing so, perhaps learn where he might be—or where he would take Joshua. While Vega drives, Ben phones the others on the list Vincent made, warning them that they may be in danger. He’s also placing calls to Joshua’s friends, after Michelle told him how despondent Joshua has been feeling about the way they’ve ignored him. It’s possible he’s gone to see them.

  Robert and Helen Archer live in a neighborhood full of big houses and tall fences, expansive yards and expensive cars. It’s the kind of neighborhood that makes him feel like he’s wasted his life by not winning the lottery. There can’t be a house on this street with fewer than six bedrooms and three baths, and some with more, Ben expects, and some with tennis courts and pools out back. These aren’t mansions, because Christchurch doesn’t do mansions, but they are about as big as you can get in this city. He’s never known anybody to live on a street like this, but he has visited these kinds of houses before, because rich people kill too. Robert and Helen Archer. For some reason the names sound familiar, but he can’t figure out why.

  The house is hidden behind a hedge that must be ten feet high. There’s an opening in the middle of it, but that opening is filled in with a wooden gate. They pull up in front of it and Ben winds down the window and presses his finger onto the button of a video intercom.

  A woman
answers. “Can I help you?”

  “It’s Detective Inspector Vega and Detective Inspector Kirk,” Ben says, and they hold their badges up to the camera. “From the Christchurch Police Department.”

  “What can I help you with?” the woman asks.

  “We’d like to talk to you about Vincent,” Ben says.

  “Vincent? Why? What’s happened?”

  “We’ll explain when you let us through.”

  “Yes, yes, of course,” she says, and there’s a buzzing sound and the gate rolls open.

  It’s a short drive to the house. There’s a good half-acre of front yard, with the driveway curving around an oak tree that’s taller than the two-story house. A tire swing that looks fifty years old and ready to break hangs from a branch as wide as a horse. Parked next to the tree is a perfectly rustic garden seat that looks ready to throw out of alignment the spine of anybody who might try sitting there. There are lines of manicured roses and knee-high hedges of clipped lavender being dive-bombed by bees. Large square patio tiles eat up the last ten yards of lawn towards the contemporary house where there’s an outdoor table and a barbecue and a bar and a fireplace. A birdbath at the edge of the lawn is holding the attention of a black-and-white cat. The house, only a few years old at most, is made up of slate tile walls the color of sand. There are floor-to-ceiling windows, which provide a voyeur’s-eye view of expensive furniture and high ceilings. It looks like a movie star could live here.

  The entrance is two side-by-side doors with a column on each side. One of those doors opens, and a woman wearing a purple blouse and black pants comes out. She must be incredibly strong, Ben thinks, to be able to support the weight of the massive pearl necklace hanging around her neck. She has dark blond hair and designer glasses and a botoxed forehead and a smile that’s had the same treatment. She reminds Ben of every real estate agent over fifty he’s ever met. She introduces herself as Helen Archer and doesn’t ask them to come inside, but instead leads them to a pair of outdoor sofas. Again he wonders how he knows her name, and he can’t make the connection. He certainly knows he’s never been here before, and she doesn’t look familiar. She takes a couch and Ben and Vega take the other. Between them sits a low concrete coffee table with candles arranged perfectly in its center.