Coffin Dodgers

by Gary Marshall

  "Okay," Amy says. "Now we look for links."

  "What are we looking for?"

  "You'll know it when you see it. The victims must have something in common," she says. "All we need to do is to work out what it is."

  We take our stacks and start looking for needles.

  "Have you ever considered a life of celibacy?" Amy asks. It's just after ten, so of course Dave's cut his date short.

  "That's pretty much what I've got now."

  "I know. But if you did it officially it'd save you a fortune. So, what happened this time?"

  "She drank."

  "Isn't that the idea?"

  "No, I mean she drank. She'd downed most of a bottle of wine before we'd even finished the starters."

  "Ah," Amy says. "That's not good."

  "No. By the time the main course came --"

  "Cannelloni?" I interrupt.

  "Yeah. By the time that came, she was utterly wasted. Slurring her words, talking too loudly, that sort of thing. People were looking."

  "Oh god," Amy shudders. "How embarrassing."

  "Yeah. She was ranting about her ex and getting really worked up about it. It's amazing the effect shouting 'tiny cock' has in a quiet restaurant."

  "She didn't."

  "She did."

  "Bloody hell."

  "That wasn't the worst bit, though."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The other diners clearly thought she was talking about me. So the next time I go to Tosca's, everybody's going to be thinking 'oh, there's that guy with the tiny cock'."

  "That's terrible," Amy says, desperately trying not to giggle. I'm trying to catch her eye so I can make her laugh, but she knows me well enough to avoid making eye contact.

  "So what did you do then?"

  "I got out of there as fast as I could."

  "What, you left her in Tosca's?" I ask.

  "Come on, what kind of guy do you think I am? She came with me. I was going to walk her home, but after about ten feet she said she was tired, so she sat down. In a puddle. In the middle of the road."

  "Classy."

  "Yeah."

  "So what did you do?"

  "Picked her up and chucked her into a hedge."

  "No!" Amy is open-mouthed.

  "Not really," Dave says. "Called a cab, put her in it, paid the driver and gave him a big tip so he wouldn't chuck her into a hedge."

  "Ah, you're a good man, Dave," I say. "In fact, you're such a good man, I'm going to buy you some socks."

  "Socks?"

  "Yeah. Socks."

  Dave looks baffled.

  "You can stuff 'em down your trousers the next time you go to Tosca's."

  Dave tells me to get stuffed. Amy gets three beers from the fridge and we go back to work.

  More often than not the accidents are sad but not linked. A pensioner with Kynaston's Disease -- it's like Alzheimer's, but unfortunately you can't cure it with a pill -- starts cooking, forgets about it and starts a fire; on the other side of town a nineteen-year-old militant reads one political website too many, tries to make a bomb, and blows his own face off. Sad? Sure, at least in the first case. Linked? Probably not.

  As the night progresses, though, we start to see the patterns Amy predicted we would see. Heating systems explode or fill apartments with invisible, deadly fumes. Cars go off the road and hit trees. Supposedly safe drugs turn out to be fatal. One man drowns in the river, while another dies from carbon monoxide poisoning. One crashes a motorbike while another overdoses on prescription medicine.

  One crashes his car into a wall and dies. Another crashes into a field, lives, and starts looking for reasons why.

  By the end of the night we have nine possible pairs, ten if you include Scott Marsden and me. Fourteen of the victims were white, two Hispanic, two Asian and two black, and our list includes sixteen men and four women. Other than Marsden and I only two names are familiar: James Colvin and Michael Hurley.

  The pairs aren't mixed, either by race or by gender: if one victim is black, so is the other; if one is female, the other victim is too. From the clothes in the photos and the street names in the news reports we can be reasonably certain that some of them were rich, some of them were poor and some of them were in between. Some of them had good jobs, others bad jobs, others no apparent source of income; some lived in the richest parts of town, others the roughest. Some left grieving families; others were barely missed.

  "Amy, if there's a link I'm not seeing it," I say. "They don't have anything in common. One pair's black, another one's white, two male victims here, two female victims there. It seems pretty random to me."

  "There must be something. We just haven't found it."

  "Matt's right," Dave says. "Different backgrounds, different schools, different jobs, different accidents."

  Amy is adamant. "It's there," she says. "There's something there. There's something that links all the names here. I know it."

  "Amy, the closest we've come to a link is age."

  "What do you mean?"

  "They're all between twenty and thirty," I say. "It's hardly a smoking gun."

  "Maybe that's it," she says. "Maybe that's the link. How old was the youngest?"

  I flick through the printouts. "Twenty-two."

  "The oldest?"

  I flick again. "Twenty-nine."

  "That's got to be it," she says. "The simplest explanation is usually the right one, and all that. They've been picked because of their age."

  "Picked for what?" Dave asks.

  "I don't know. But I think we need to take this to Burke."

  "I was scared you were going to say that," I say. "He isn't exactly keen on seeing me again."

  "Matt's right," Dave says. "Burke said he'd make his life a misery if he wasted his time again."

  "This is different," Amy says. "This --" she waves the stack of printouts -- "This is evidence."

  "This isn't evidence," Burke says. "This --" he waves the stack of printouts -- "This is a list."

  The meeting with Burke is going pretty much the way I thought it would. Amy's done most of the talking so far, with me sitting there like a nodding dog and Burke getting increasingly irritated.

  "With respect, I think it's more than that," Amy says, trying to keep the exasperation out of her voice.

  Burke drinks from his mug. "World's Best Dad" is printed on the side in bright red type.

  "No, it isn't," he says. "It's a bunch of printouts about a bunch of dead people who don't have anything in common. What did you expect me to do with it?"

  "But the conversation Matt overheard --"

  "The conversation Matt says he overheard," Burke interrupts. "A conversation between three people, two of whom he can't identify, one of whom very conveniently happens to be his boss. The only crime I know of here is the one Matt and his friend were committing at the golf course."

  Burke looks at me. "Nobody reported it, so as far as I'm concerned it didn't happen. I've told you before, I don't need extra paperwork." I nod. "But that doesn't mean I won't come down on you like a ton of bricks if you do anything like it again."

  Amy takes a breath, ready to speak, but Burke beats her to it. "Let's say you're right, though. Let's say there is a big conspiracy, that all these --" he hefts the stack of printouts again -- "people are victims, and that your boss is somehow involved. What then? Should I go to the casino and cuff Bob Hannah? On what charge?"

  Amy straightens in her chair but Burke doesn't give her the chance to speak. "Police work is all about MMO," he says. "Means. Motive. Opportunity. Before you can find that, you need to have some suspects." He looks at each of us in turn. "And before you have suspects, you need to have a crime. Not a bunch of names. A crime."

  "Detective Burke, I know what I heard," I tell him. "They talked about my crash. I didn't make that up. They talked about how important it was to make everything look like an accident, and how important it was to get two people each time. This isn't just a list of accidents. We'
ve found a pattern here."

  "It is just a list of accidents," Burke says. "I know some of these names. I was SIO on some of them." He sees the puzzled look on our faces. "Senior Investigating Officer." He flicks through the pile. "This one. Steven Green. Died of carbon monoxide poisoning. I was at that scene. His heating system was faulty, it filled his house with fumes, he died. I saw the system. It was older than I am, and in roughly the same condition."

  "But --" I started.

  "But what? A couple of heavies burst into his house whenever he thought about getting his heating serviced, pointed guns at him and made sure he didn't do it? 'Mister Green! At some point in the future you might die, or you might not! Who knows?' It's hardly a Mafia hit, is it?"

  Neither Amy nor I have an answer to that.

  "People die every day," Burke says. "And most of them die in accidents. If something looks suspicious, if somebody dies and they weren't terminally ill in a hospice somewhere, we investigate it. If they die at home, we check out their home. If they die in a car crash, we check out the crash site, pull the black boxes, work out who was at fault or whether their car went wrong. If they blow their own head off with a gun, we dust and analyse and measure to see if the gun was in their hand when it went off. We work all the hours God sends to do that, and then we work some more. Most of the time -- make that nearly all the time -- the suspicious ones turn out to be accidents. I told you, I know some of the names on this list, we investigated them, and they were accidents. If I pull the records on the names I don't know, on the scenes where other officers did the investigation, I'll find the same thing. None of these cases are open -- and that means there's nothing to investigate. No foul play, no mysterious bullet holes, no bloodied knife in the dustbin, no masked stranger running away from the scene. You honestly think you found something in a few hours of reading newspaper reports that an entire police force missed?"

  He takes another drink, but we don't speak. It's clear Burke isn't finished yet. "You found a pattern? Patterns are everywhere. Get two people to lie back and look at clouds, sooner or later one of them will see an animal and the other will see Jesus. But they're just looking at clouds."

  Burke looks at me, but it's not the hard glare I've become used to seeing or the evil eye I just know Amy's giving him. "You've had a bad accident and it's shaken you up. You say it wasn't your fault, you didn't do anything wrong, and maybe you're right. But that doesn't mean there's a big conspiracy, or that somebody's out to get you. Shit happens, and it's happened to you. Take some time off, get drunk, do something to clear your head and get it out of your system. Chasing imaginary bad guys isn't what you need right now."

  Burke gets up and escorts us to the front door.

  Amy slams the car door so hard I half-expect the Dentmobile to collapse into dust, but it defies the laws of physics and stays in one piece. Not for the first time, I think that if there's ever a nuclear war, the Dentmobile will survive along with the cockroaches. Maybe they'll drive it around. They'd probably be safer than Amy.

  The Dentmobile is moving before I've even buckled up, Amy pulling out in a screech of tyres while headlights flash and horns blare behind us. I know better than to try and start a conversation.

  We drive in silence, Amy even more reckless than usual, my foot doing that imaginary braking thing so often that I think I've probably worn a groove in the passenger footwell. I don't criticise her driving, though. That'd be more dangerous than anything Amy's currently doing with the steering wheel.

  After more near misses than I care to count, we pull up in the Dentmobile outside my apartment. I gesture towards the coffee shop across the street. "Want to get a coffee? My treat."

  "Sure."

  Amy gets a table while I order the drinks. We're both caffeine fiends so I order a pair of giant coffees with extra shots of coffee. I buy some cake too. It's hard to be angry when you have cake.

  I take the tray over. Amy smiles when she sees the cake. "Think I need cheering up?"

  "Not at all. Just thought you might like some cake." I grin, and Amy grins back.

  Never underestimate the power of cake.

  Amy takes a drink of her coffee, absent-mindedly tapping her fingers on the table.

  "I thought he'd listen to us at least," she says.

  "I know. But --"

  "You're going to say that you can see it from his point of view, and you're going to say that he's got a point," she says.

  "Well..."

  Amy is swirling the wooden stirrer around her coffee cup.

  "We can't just give up, Matt."

  "I know," I say.

  I watch her stirring her coffee and realise that she's been biting her nails. She keeps stirring, staring out of the window at the street.

  Sometimes Amy's like a radio signal. One minute you're receiving her loud and clear, the next minute you've got nothing but static.

  As Amy studies the passing cars and passers-by, I study her. As ever she's wearing her off-duty uniform of black top, black skirt, black tights, black army boots, but close-up a few things aren't right. Her nail polish is chipped, her eyeliner smudged, and from this distance I can see dark circles under her eyes that aren't anything to do with make-up. She looks exhausted, and all I want to do right now is give her a hug.

  I don't, of course. I wait for her to come back to Earth. Eventually, she does.

  "Okay," Amy says. "It's safe to say Burke isn't going to do anything, and if he won't help us then we've no chance of the police helping us. So we're on our own. But there's still stuff we can do."

  "We've still got the bug coming," I tell her.

  "Any sign of it?"

  "Site said this week. If it doesn't turn up by tomorrow I'll chase it."

  "Okay. So we've got that, and we know that someone called Sansom is involved, somehow."

  "Dave was looking into that," I say.

  "Anything?"

  "I don't think so. He'd have said."

  "Maybe he's looking in the wrong place," Amy says. "I'll see if I can think of other ways to track him down. Oh, and Matt?"

  "Yes?"

  "Thanks for the cake." Amy grins and devours it in a single bite.

  I wave goodbye and wait until Amy's out of sight before trudging up the stairs to my apartment. I open the door and find a "sorry, you were out" card on the door mat. I grab it, turn around and walk to the sorting office. After the usual rigmarole -- pressing the buzzer and waiting while the staff play cards, smash frogs with hammers, summon minor demons from the outer circle of Hell or whatever it is they do when you're waiting; showing my ID and then waiting another eternity for a bored clerk to locate the package and slam it down on the counter with enough force to turn a house brick into confetti -- I'm walking home with a box under my arm. Assuming it hasn't been destroyed by the sorting office staff, we have our bug.

  Back in my apartment I open the box. Miraculously the contents seem to have survived. I skim the instructions, but they might as well be in Greek for all the sense they make to me. Not to worry. Dave will suss it out.

  "Want to know how it works?" Dave asks.

  "Not really."

  "I'm going to tell you anyway."

  "Do you have to?"

  The bug is in two parts, one big and one small. This much I understand. Dave waves the smaller of the two at me. "This is the actual bug," he says. "It's voice activated, so it'll only broadcast when there's something happening."

  He puts it down and grabs the larger part. "This is the receiver," he says. "It picks up the broadcast from the mic and records it. But the really cool thing is that it connects to the net. As long as it's near a wireless network, you can access it from anywhere that you can get online. So we'll hook it up to the casino network."

  "Doesn't that have security stuff on it? Passwords, stuff like that?"

  "No, not the internal network -- that's like Fort Knox. I mean the public one, the one that the guests get to use."

  "Doesn't that have passwords too?" />
  "It does. If only we knew someone who worked in security."

  "I swear to God, Dave, there are times when I could happily hit you with a shovel, bury you in a ditch and do a happy dance."

  "Yeah, but you'd regret it the following morning," he says.

  "You're right. I'd probably pull a muscle from dancing so much."

  Dave blows me a kiss. "I'll put this in tomorrow."

  "Think it'll work?"

  "I think the bug will work," he says. "Whether we'll get anything from it?" Dave shrugs. "Who knows? But it's worth a try."

  Suddenly Dave goes rigid. "Did you hear that?"

  "Hear what?"

  "That noise."

  "What noise?"

  "It sounded like a voice."

  "Really?"

  "I've heard it before."

  "What is it?"

  "It's the beer in your fridge! It's trapped! It wants me to save it!"

  I give him the finger.

  "Want one?" he says.

  "Of course I do. And when I've finished it, I'm going to use the bottle to beat you to death."

  "Good plan," Dave says. "Amy coming over?"

  "Not tonight. Late shift."

  Dave grimaces. Of all the shifts we work, the late shift is the worst. It doesn't finish until two a.m., by which point the customers are drunk. Or angry. Or both. It's bad enough for me on the bar, but it's even worse for the waitresses.

  "Seeing her tomorrow?"

  "Yeah."

  Dave gives me a serious look. "You really need to do something, you know."

  "About what?"

  Dave isn't fooled. "You know what. If you won't do it for yourself, do it for me."

  "I don't follow you."

  "Matt, you're a pain in the arse with all of this. When she's not around you spend your whole time moping. And you're getting worse."

  "This just isn't the right time."

  "How long have you been saying that? Three years? Four?"

  "Maybe." It's probably longer. A lot longer.