Running from the Dead

by Mike Knowles

  “If that ain’t walking away, I don’t know what is.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  “You want to know why I don’t walk away? It’s because wherever I go, I’ll still be me. I’m no good.”

  “That’s—”

  “Don’t, okay! I didn’t call you to talk about this. This was supposed to be fun, but it’s not. It was nice to have someone to talk to, but I don’t need to talk about this. I know what I am and it’s shit. I’m not a good person. I have ruined every relationship I have ever had. Me, not someone else. It’s been my fault every time. I don’t know how to be good, I sure as hell don’t know how to be happy, and I am so tired of feeling bad.” Lauren sighed. “You know what? I gotta go.”

  “Lauren wait.” Jones’ voice ricocheted off the cramped walls of the bathroom.

  She didn’t hang up. “What?”

  “What if I told you that there is a way out?”

  “I just told you there is.”

  “Another way,” Jones said.

  “Is this where you tell me you’re going to save me again? Let me stop you right there. After I screwed up, Tony changed, or maybe he just stopped pretending. He’s not with me anymore. I’m with him and he will never let me go. I’ve seen what he does to people who try to leave. You have no idea what he’s like. I do, and that’s how I know there is only one way out for me.”

  “What about through?” Jones said.

  Lauren said, “What?” as though she thought she had misheard him.

  “A way through instead of out.”

  “Through to what?”

  “Home. Norah said you could go home to her.”

  He had expected the offer to stun her. He had expected tears and agreement. He got laughter.

  “I bet Terry would love that.”

  The name threw him. “Who’s Terry?”

  “Norah’s brother. He liked to take me out on dates. Norah thought it was all cute and innocent until I told her it wasn’t. Terry said I was lying. He told Norah that I had been in the system my whole life and I thought every guy was looking to abuse me. Norah was the first real mother I ever had, and she didn’t believe me. She turned out to be just like everyone else. So, no, I’m not going back to her.” She snorted. “At least now I get paid when a man touches me.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “I told you. There is nothing better out there for me.”

  “Lauren, you wrote on that door. You called my number. You aren’t ready to go out. You’re holding on for something. I was wrong about Norah, but not about this. Some part of you knows that there is something better out there.”

  Lauren went quiet and Jones thought that he might have gotten through to her. The growl of frustration that came out of her mouth next told him he was wrong.

  “This was a mistake. Talking to you was supposed to be fun, not like this. I don’t want to talk anymore.”

  Jones said, “Lauren,” but she was already gone.

  Jones opened the bathroom door and felt cooler air touch his skin. The relief was short lived. If the argument next door had been a thunderstorm before, it was a hurricane now. He could hear an angry exchange peppered with every word his mother had once told him not to say. Jones walked to the bed and sat down with his eyes on the wall. Lauren was supposed to be the one he could save—the one who would go home and have a life. Someone on the other side of the wall slammed a door hard enough to buck the picture frames and Jones was blessed with a moment of quiet. He lay back on the bed and felt his back complain.

  He had spent years looking for Adam, and in the back of his mind, in a place he had never told Ruth about, he had harboured wild dreams of being able to find him, and reality stabbed through his fantasy when he did. Jones never had a chance—he had failed before he started; then, he saw Lauren’s message. Part of him, the part that had thought he could have found Adam, wanted to believe that it might have been about Lauren all along—that maybe Adam was meant to lead him to Lauren. It was a ridiculous thought, but that didn’t mean it hadn’t taken root deep inside his head. But when Jones hung up the phone, that silly fantasy met the same fate as the one he had about finding Adam. He had no other moves to make and no one left to save, not even himself.

  Through the thin wall, Jones heard the bathroom door in the other room open and bounce off the spring doorstop that matched the one on the baseboard in the bathroom in Jones’ room. He could make out the voice he heard as male and it intensified in sync with the other guest’s thunderous footsteps. Jones heard a woman yell and then a loud thump shook the wall. The drywall shook again as it attempted to redistribute the energy of whatever she threw against it. Jones pinched the bridge of his nose as the argument began again in earnest on the other side of the wall.

  “Liar!”

  Thump.

  “Asshole!”

  “Whore!”

  Thump.

  “I hate you.”

  “I hate you more.”

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Thump.

  Jones sat up and stared at the wall. A few feet away in a room that matched the one Jones was sitting in, two people were at each other’s throats. Two people hell-bent on hurting each other. Why didn’t one of them just leave? Why couldn’t one of them just walk away from the words and whatever was flying around in that tiny room.

  Jones stood up.

  Thump.

  “Fuck you!”

  “Fuck you!”

  Thump.

  The sound was coming from the other side of the wall. Jones took two fast steps and punched the wall. He didn’t hear the sound his fist made going through the cheap layers of low-end drywall because he was screaming. He hit the wall again and again. As he lost steam, it was harder to say the words and Jones realized what he was screaming. “Why won’t you just leave?”

  Panting, Jones braced himself using his elbow and pulled his arm out of the wall. He left his blood on the powdered edges of broken gypsum. Through the hole, Jones could see them. Two people suddenly quiet, but standing together. Jones looked at the woman and said, “Go.”

  She stepped toward Jones and yelled through the hole in the wall, “Fuck you, you psycho!”

  Jones turned and threw the nightstand at the wall. The small piece of furniture made a great deal of noise as it exploded. Jones whirled toward the other wall and splintered the dresser with his boot. Two more kicks reduced the motel prop to kindling.

  The cops found Jones sitting on the floor with his back against what was left of the wall. The motel room dimensions were the only thing left intact.

  28

  If Jones had any questions about the kind of cop Scopes was, the detective’s response time answered them. Jones had been arrested, booked, and put into a holding cell with five other men who had likely been picked up for offences linked to their varying degrees of intoxication. Two of the men had passed out and a third was on his way to joining them. The fourth man was in a business suit that looked like it had weathered a busy day at work and an even busier night out. Jones watched the man nervously look around the cell and figured it was his first time; it was Jones’ first time too, but he couldn’t manage to work up any feelings about it.

  He opened and closed his hand and judged his success to be a sign that nothing was broken—nothing physical anyway. He wondered if the same was true for his head. Sitting in the cell with nothing to do but think, Jones could not remember how far he had taken it; he had even less of a recollection of the arrest and drive to the station. He had seen soldiers break. The battlefield would damage the reinforced mental structures created by the army’s relentless drilling and the soldier would collapse in on himself. Jones had always thought that he had left the army with all his scars on the outside, but now, sitting inside a cell, he wasn’t so sure.

  Jones was given tw
o hours to cool off in the cell and then he was brought to an interview room upstairs. Jones was led to a chair that gave him a view of the door and told to sit down. Twenty minutes later, Scopes walked into the room, holding two cups of coffee. He put one of the cups in front of Jones and then took his seat opposite him.

  “I don’t know how you take it, so I just said regular. Hope that’s okay.”

  Jones nodded. “Back to playing good cop?”

  Scopes flashed a smile and Jones saw his crooked white teeth. “Good cop left town when you blew off our meeting. You’re fucked now, big boy. Totally fucked. I checked on that accident you told me about and you know what I found?”

  Jones tested the coffee and found it lukewarm and bitter. He took half of it down before he answered. “What?”

  “Nothing, that’s what. Your story was bullshit. And right then and there, good cop walked away because good cop hates nothing more than getting shit on his shoes.” Scopes drank some of the coffee and then opened the file that had been under his arm when he opened the door. He scanned a few pages before sliding a paper clip off a small stack of pictures. He turned the pictures around and slid them one by one toward Jones, until they were in a line that ran like a film strip.

  “Know what these are?”

  Jones looked at the pictures, knew that he did, and said, “No.”

  “They are part of a case that I’m working on. Seems someone killed a man in his basement. Interesting thing about this murder isn’t the man. The interesting thing is the basement.”

  “Got a nice pool table?”

  “Funny.” Scopes stared at him with no humour in his expression. “No, there isn’t a pool table. The interesting thing about this basement is that there was a second body—a kid. One that I have been told was murdered decades ago. We’ve had our people go over the scene. People with degrees and computer skills that go beyond surfing for porn, and do you know what they came up with?”

  Jones waited.

  “Nothing. We don’t know who the body belongs to. What we do know is how it was found.” Scopes stared at Jones as he drank some more coffee. He put the empty cup down hard and said, “The second body had been hidden inside a wall for those decades I spoke of. Best we can tell, our other victim was forced to open up the wall with his bare hands before he was shot while he was on his knees. There were powder burns on his palms. Do you know what that means?” Scopes didn’t care if Jones had something to say. It wasn’t a conversation; it was more of a soliloquy. “It means he had them up when he died. He was begging for his life.”

  Jones waited.

  “Want to know what I think?” He leaned in close and whispered his hypothesis to Jones. “I think our victim was a murderer himself. I think he killed that kid, and he sealed him up in the wall like in that story by the Nevermore guy.”

  “The Cask of Amontillado,” Jones said. “Edgar Allan Poe.”

  Scopes slapped the table and the empty cup jumped a few centimetres.

  “That’s the one. The name has been on the tip of my tongue for days.” Scopes breathed a sigh of relief. “How did you think of it so quick?”

  Jones shrugged. “I like to read.”

  Scopes smiled. “Maybe you had more time to think about it. Anyway, our vic was a killer and someone knew about it. Now, pay attention, because this is where it gets interesting.”

  Jones waited.

  Scopes flipped a few pages in the file before extracting a thin stapled stack of sheets. Scopes took his time turning the papers around with his index finger. “This is all we have on our murder victim slash killer. This is it. He’s lived in the same place for twenty-five years. He’s had the same job for almost thirty. He is not currently married and he doesn’t own a dog. He pays his taxes and doesn’t have so much as an unpaid parking ticket on his record. All the neighbours said he was a great guy. He kept his lawn clean and in the winter, he cleared off other people’s driveways.”

  Jones could feel Scopes was getting closer to the point, and he knew the cop wanted to make it sharp, so it would hurt when he jabbed it at him.

  “On paper, this guy is no one. He is boring and he is clean. That’s what the paper says, but the basement.” Scope shook a finger at Jones. “That basement says something different. This man has a body wrapped up in a tarp hidden inside a wall in his basement. The body has been there for years. I don’t know how many yet, but the techs will know soon enough. They have all kinds of tests they can do with their fancy equipment, and one of them will give me a number.” Scopes leaned in closer and whispered across the table. “But to tell you the truth, I’m not interested in what the techs have to say about the kid in the wall. Do you know what I’m interested in?”

  Jones shook his head.

  The cop lifted a single finger. “That first body. Kevin McGregor. A sixty-two-year-old man who, on paper, appears to be the most law-abiding son of a bitch who ever abided. That is what I am interested in. Those crime-scene techs are all about the body in the wall. They’re running all kinds of tests through all kinds of fancy machines, thinking that they are going to come up with something that breaks the case. CSI has gone to their heads. They think computers have all the answers.” Scopes smiled and shook his head. “Those eggheads don’t realize they’re all looking in the wrong place. That first body has more to say about what happened than the kid in the wall. Someone broke into that man’s house, walked him down to his basement, and then made him knock down a brick wall without tools.” Scopes paused to observe how Jones felt about this part. When he saw nothing on Jones’ face he went on. “Someone hated that man, and it looks like they were right to, and they made it ugly. After our killer broke McGregor’s body, he put him on his knees and shot him while he pleaded for his life. My question is, how did our killer, well our second killer, technically, know what had been hiding behind that wall?” Scopes paused for an answer, and when Jones didn’t bite, he said, “I don’t need a computer to tell me about the kid. I just need to find the man who killed Kevin McGregor. That guy knows the whole story.”

  The cop stared at Jones and his eyes betrayed a sadist’s amusement. He had gotten to the point and he was ready to shiv Jones with it.

  “Now, I’m not going to lie to you, Sam. When I saw the scene, I thought this thing was a dud.” He ticked off his fingers as he spoke. “No evidence left by the killer, a second unidentified body that had been there for years, and no clear evidence of a motive. Cases like that usually end up in a box in the basement, unless we get a lucky break.” Scopes smiled. “Guess what happened?”

  Jones said nothing.

  “Not gonna guess? Okay, I’ll tell you. We got a break. A witness came forward and told us about an odd conversation with a man who, and you’ll find this interesting, only had one—”

  “Lawyer,” Jones said.

  “Eureka.”

  “That’s not his name.”

  Scopes closed the file and folded his hands on top of the paper. He was smiling wide enough for Jones to see his sharp discoloured canines. “People cry lawyer the same way they cry uncle when someone has them in a headlock. They say the word like they think it will make everything stop.” He leaned back in his chair and slid the folder back and forth a few times with the fingers on his right hand. “I get it and I don’t take offence. I really don’t. I blame TV. Every cop show has it play out the same way. Some crook, no offence, says lawyer, and a few seconds later his attorney walks through the door and says something stupid like, ‘No more questions, Detective.’ Cut to the next scene and the bad guy, again no offence, is walking out the front door of the station. You know that’s just TV, right? You’ve been around long enough, and seen enough, to know that isn’t how this is going to play out.”

  Jones lifted a hand. “You’re going to get up and take me to a phone so I can call my lawyer.”

  “No,” Scopes said. “What’s going to happ
en is—”

  Jones lifted his hand again. “Lawyer.” He looked at the camera mounted in the corner of the room and said, “Lawyer.”

  Scopes sighed. “Listen, I know I came down hard on you, but you have to know that I’m on your side. That animal killed a kid. You did the world a favour and there isn’t a cop in the world who would say different. Talk to me. Let me help you.”

  Jones watched Scopes watching him. The cop was looking for a reaction that he could use like a compass to get inside Jones’ head. Jones gave him nothing. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Detective. The only thing I know is that you have concocted some elaborate story in your head that somehow includes me, and I want no part in it. I want to call my lawyer.”

  Scopes stared at Jones with his jaw set. When he finally spoke, it was through clenched teeth. “If that’s the way you want it. But you’re making a mistake. Forensics moves slower than investigators. I thought I would do you a favour and give you a shot at saving yourself because of the circumstances. But if you want to roll the dice on science, that’s fine. Just know that the lab is the hardest bitch I’ve ever met, and I have two ex-wives. It might take some time, but she will find something, something microscopic you didn’t even know you missed, and seal your fate in one typed page. It won’t matter that you killed a monster because science doesn’t see monsters. Science just sees ones and zeros. Guess which one you’ll be.”

  Scopes stood and put the folder under his arm and then made a grand gesture of checking his watch. “Four a.m. Let’s go wake your lawyer up.” He smiled at Jones. “At least that will be fun.”

  Scopes brought Jones to a desk that had pictures of three little girls positioned in the far corners. He handed Jones the receiver and hit a button to get him an outside line. “You know the number, or do you need to look it up?”

  “I know it.”

  Scopes waited, so did Jones. Finally, Jones said, “Could I get a bit of privacy while I speak with my lawyer?”

  “You need privacy to leave a message?”