Night Work

by Steve Hamilton

  “Why am I in this thing? Just tell me.”

  “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “It’s just business.”

  “What do you mean, it’s just business? What are you talking about?”

  I heard his footsteps then.

  “Maurice!” I yelled, my ear still pressed to the hot metal. “Get me out of here!”

  “Just sit tight, Joe.” His words growing fainter as he walked away. “This will be over soon.”

  SEVENTEEN

  I scrambled over to the main door, nearly knocking over the bucket. I caught it just in time to splash water onto my pants. As I looked down at what was left, I forgot everything else in the world for a moment. I put my head into the bucket and tasted the water. It was cold. I plunged my face in and drank as much as I could until I was starting to strangle myself on the edge of the bucket. Then I lifted the bucket and poured another pint or so into my mouth. No cold beer, no fruity rum cocktail, no lemonade on a hot day ever tasted as good as that water did.

  When I was done I put the bucket down and rubbed my face with my wet hands. I took a few long breaths and then looked around the place, my eyes adjusting to the semidarkness again after the sudden burst of light. I felt along the edge of the little side door. It looked like someone had cut it with a hacksaw and then hinged it from the outside. I tried to get a good angle so I could kick it, but the door was too strong. Not that I could have fit through the opening anyway.

  I stood up and banged my head on the ceiling. It was a few inches too low for me. The least of my problems, but still it was annoying to have to bend to walk around. I went back to the main door and gave that a few kicks. It was hard to get much leverage on it. When I had thrown myself around the shed a few more times, I sat back down in the dirt.

  “Okay, now what?” I said. I went through all the possibilities again. The odds that Howie would know to go through my files and reconstruct my list, and then that he’d come out here and somehow find me even though my car was in the barn.

  Or the odds that Shea and Rhinehart would simply assume that I had felt them closing in on me and that I had run away. Just another guilty man running from the law.

  “I think you’re officially out of luck,” I said. I could feel the shed getting hotter now that the sun was up. Another long day cooking in this thing, either starving to death or running out of water and dying of thirst. Whichever came first. That’s what I had to look forward to.

  Or hell, maybe the silence would kill me first. I spent so much time playing music, the louder the better, just to keep myself out of my own head. Now I had no choice but to just sit here with my own company. My own thoughts and my own memories.

  Yeah, that’s great, I thought. Never mind all this crazy stuff scratched into the walls. A few more hours of this and I’ll really be able to show them some insanity.

  I leaned back against the door and closed my eyes.

  I drifted in and out of a feverish haze, as the sun turned the shed into a radiator. I could feel it through my back as the sweat dripped down my face. Moisture from my body that I couldn’t afford to lose.

  I drank the rest of the water. Somewhere in the back of my mind, an article I had read, long ago. When you’re stranded and you don’t have much water left, just go ahead and drink it. It’s better to store it inside you than anywhere else.

  With my thirst held at bay for a while, my hunger took over the show. That was the devil that was growing stronger in my body now. A cheeseburger, I thought. That would be perfect. With onion rings. When’s the last time I even had onion rings? Or pancakes? Or a slice of homemade apple pie?

  I started seeing things, shapes moving in the corner of my eye. Or hell, maybe it was mice. I found myself fantasizing about becoming one of them, making myself small enough to fit through a hole no bigger than my thumb. Dig right out of here and run away to freedom. Even if I had to stay a mouse for the rest of my life. I’d take it.

  The hot air kept oppressing me, suffocating me. I sat there with my hand against the bottom of the bucket, the last cool spot in the world until finally that too was glowing with heat. It felt like the life force was literally draining from my body, melting from the inside out and pouring down my face with the sweat.

  Then the side door opened again. There was another blast of intense light as Maurice poked his head inside to look at me. I looked at him without moving, without saying a word. I didn’t have the strength.

  “You still alive in here?” he said.

  I blinked slowly.

  “She sent some food out this time. I guess she doesn’t want you to starve.”

  Food. The word gave me the will to move. I pushed myself forward, crawling through the dirt.

  “I’ve got some more water, too,” he said. “You’re probably sweating a little bit in there.”

  You’re probably sweating a little bit in there, I thought. He said that. To a man sitting inside a blast furnace he actually said those words.

  “Here,” he said. He passed in a gallon jug of water. I took the top off and drank until I was almost choking on it.

  “And this.” He threw in a paper lunch bag. I reached into it and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

  “It’s peanut butter and jelly,” he said. “It’s like the only thing she knows how to make. She’s a terrible cook, I have to say.”

  I unwrapped the sandwich and took a huge bite of it. I couldn’t even remember the last time I’d eaten a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but it was suddenly my favorite food in the world. I could almost feel the protein in the peanut butter giving me strength, like Popeye and his spinach. The sweet grape jelly on top of that made the whole thing perfect.

  He stood there and watched me eat for a while. When I’d finished off the first sandwich, I reached into the bag and pulled out the second.

  “Okay,” I said. I kept eating as I talked. “Tell me what’s going on here.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Those women who were killed,” I said. “Marlene … Sandra …”

  Don’t say Laurel, I thought to myself. If you say her name out loud you will completely lose control of yourself.

  “That real estate woman,” I said. “All of them. Does this mean … Does this mean it was you?”

  Nothing from him. He was a statue.

  “Tell me,” I said. “Just tell me.”

  “You’re not gonna get any of this, Joe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not going to understand.”

  “Try me. You’d be surprised.”

  “You carry a badge. I know you’re supposed to be Mr. Understanding and all that. But you carry a badge.”

  “Well, you’re right about that,” I said. Time for a new angle. “That makes this pretty serious, you realize.”

  He smiled and shook his head.

  “They know where I am,” I said. “They’ll be coming for me.”

  “They don’t know.”

  “They do. I swear. If you let me out, I’ll help you.”

  “I know for a fact that they don’t know where you are, Joe. I was at the gym today. Those men were there.”

  “The BCI guys? Who cares about them? I’m talking about my friend Howie. You know he’s a Kingston detective. I’m surprised he’s not here already.”

  “Nice try, Joe. It’s not gonna work.”

  I crumpled up the wax paper with both hands. I wanted so much to reach through the little door and to grab him by the neck. Just get out of here first, I thought. Just get out of here and then you can worry about the rest of it.

  “Maurice,” I said. “You know this is crazy, right? You can’t keep me in here.”

  “Not forever, no.”

  “Mrs. Gayle’s son … He spent time in here, right?”

  “Brian? Yeah, he sure did. When his father put him in here, she’d send him peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, too.”

  “You know the family, I take it? I mean, the fact that y
ou’re here …”

  “I’ve been here a while, yeah. I live here.”

  “What do you mean you live here? All the times I came out here to see Brian, I never once saw you.”

  “There’s a little house out back. That’s where I stay. I’m the caretaker.”

  “That tattoo on your arm …”

  “Is Agnes, yes. My angel. I owe her everything. She’s the one who saved me.”

  “Saved you from what?”

  “From what I would have become if she hadn’t taken me in. I know you know all about kids in trouble, Joe. That’s your job. Although I doubt you ever had somebody like me.”

  “And now …” And now you kill women in your spare time. I couldn’t say it.

  “And now I know how to take care of business.”

  “This ‘business’ you take care of,” I said. “If it’s about me … I mean, if Mrs. Gayle is mad at me because of what happened to her son … These women…”

  Do not say it, Joe. Do not say it.

  “If it’s about me, then why don’t you just come after me and get it over with? These women that I don’t even know …”

  Do not say her name. Do not think of her. Do not picture her face in your mind or you will fly into a thousand pieces.

  “The last one,” I said. “The real estate woman, who I talked to for three minutes, whose name I cannot for the life of me even remember right now …”

  Easy, Joe. God damn it, get a grip on yourself.

  “I told you,” he said. “You don’t get it.”

  “So explain it to me.”

  “Maybe Agnes will.”

  “Fine. Let me talk to her.”

  “You’re not going to talk her out of this, if that’s what you’re thinking. I can guarantee you that.”

  “I just want to talk to her, okay? Can you get her for me?”

  “I think she’s occupied at the moment,” he said. “But don’t worry. You’ll be seeing her soon enough.”

  “Maurice …”

  “I’ll tell her you said thank you for the food.” He grabbed the door and was about to close it.

  “Maurice, did you kill Laurel?”

  He stopped himself. He looked in at me, looked me straight in the eye. It was the same look he gave me when we were sparring that one time, when I surprised him and he came right back at me with that overhand right. It was the one and only time he had let down his guard, I realized now, the one and only time he had shown me his true self.

  “Did you kill her?” I said. “Tell me.”

  He slammed the little door shut and locked it. Then he was gone.

  I bounced around the inside of the shed for the next hour or two. If there had been a stick of furniture in the place, I would have turned it into sawdust. When I finally ran out of gas, I sat back down in my usual spot with my back against the door. I finished the rest of the water. The light grew dimmer, but the heat of the day remained.

  I tried hard not to think. It was an impossible task.

  Another hour passed. Or so it felt like. Then another.

  Then I felt a jolt run right up my spine.

  “I’m opening the door,” I heard Maurice say from the other side. “I have a gun, and I’ll shoot you if you don’t move to the back right now.”

  I got up, feeling the blood rush from my head.

  “I’m not kidding, Joe. You’ve got three seconds.”

  “I’m going,” I said, although I doubted he could hear me. I stood against the back wall and listened to the clacking of the padlock against the metal door. Then it opened. A wave of fresh air washed over me. It felt thirty degrees cooler. The sun had gone down, but I could see the grass just outside the door. After the hours I had spent in this place, just looking outside … I would have made my break right there if I hadn’t seen the hunting rifle in Maurice’s hands.

  It was Mrs. Gayle who opened the door. She was wearing a red housedress with white polka dots. Her hair was down. She stood with bare feet in the grass, looking in at me. She was squinting like she couldn’t quite see me in the dark recess of the shed.

  I stayed against the back wall, my head slightly bowed under the short ceiling. I waited for something to happen.

  “One move,” Maurice said. His voice had a new edge to it. “One move and I shoot you dead. Do you understand?”

  I nodded.

  “Say it out loud,” he said.

  “I understand.”

  “Do you know why you’re here?”

  Because one or both of you are batshit crazy. “I can only imagine,” I said. “I suppose it has something to do with Brian.”

  “Don’t say his name.” She turned to Maurice. “Make him stop that.”

  “He won’t say it again,” Maurice said.

  “Tell him you’ll shoot him if he does.”

  “I’m sure he gets that.”

  “I want it to be clear,” she said. “Not another warning.”

  “He won’t say it. Am I right, Joe?”

  “You asked me why I thought I was here,” I said. “You didn’t tell me what words I couldn’t say.”

  “Well, now you know.”

  “You told me you’d stay in control of this,” she said to him. “I’m getting very uncomfortable.”

  “Everything’s fine, Agnes. Please relax.”

  “How can I relax? He’s standing right here in front of me. I told you this was a bad idea.”

  “It was your idea, Agnes. Go ahead.”

  “How did this even happen?” she said. “How did he end up back here?”

  “It was just bad luck, okay?”

  “He’s not supposed to be here, Maurice. He’s not supposed to be anywhere.”

  “I told you,” he said. “He’s one of them, don’t you understand? He’s part of the whole system. They’re not going to turn on him so easy.”

  “You said you were going to lay it right in their laps. That they’d have enough to arrest the president. Those were your exact words.”

  I was getting sick to my stomach trying to follow what they were saying. I could barely process it.

  “You asked me to give you this chance to speak to him,” Maurice said. “I’ve done that. So please say what you need to say so we can be done with it.”

  She turned away from him and rubbed her forehead for a while. Then she reached into a front pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper. She unfolded it once, then twice. She held it up and looked at it, then moved it a few more inches away from her face.

  “I forgot my glasses,” she said. “Will you go get them?”

  “I can’t leave you here with him alone,” he said. “Just tell him.”

  “I spent all this time getting it right. I want to make sure he understands why this is happening.”

  “I think he knows the general idea,” he said. “He knows what he did to you.”

  She kept rubbing her forehead. She wouldn’t look at me. Finally, she went to Maurice and put her hand on his shoulder. As he put his arm around her, he had to hold the rifle with one hand for a moment. I was thinking that might be my one chance to surprise him, if I could somehow get to the gun …

  But no. No way. It was too much ground to cover. He moved to the other side of her so he could hold her with his left arm and keep the rifle on his right hip.

  “Mrs. Gayle,” I said. “What happened to your son …” I was careful not to say his name.

  “Do you know what the worst part was?” she said. Her voice was steady and clear now as she stepped away from Maurice. “Never mind having him taken away from me. Maybe you know how that feels now. I don’t know, you tell me. But the worst part of having him go away to that place was that it meant I was breaking my promise to him. Because I promised him, Mr. Trumbull … I promised him that he would never again have to live in a cage. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  “Yes,” I said, “but—”

  “When that promise was broken, he lost all hope. It didn’t matter at that point w
hether he’d be in that prison for another month or another year or for the rest of his life. He didn’t want to be alive anymore. That’s what it came down to.”

  She took a step toward me.

  “I don’t imagine you’ve been kept in a cage like an animal before,” she said. “Perhaps you have some small idea now of exactly how that feels.”

  “Yes,” I said. Let her have her say, I thought. Don’t try to argue with her.

  “Brian’s father …” She looked up to the sky, obviously trying to find the right words. “Brian’s father didn’t deal with things in the best way. I think that’s safe to say. I tried to make things better between them, but there was only so much I could do. Maurice can tell you that.”

  He nodded his head slowly.

  “When you were assigned to him by the court, I had such high hopes that you’d be able to help him. I trusted you like you were a member of this family. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” I said, thinking, no, not at all. I’m not supposed to be a member of your family. I’m not supposed to take the place of the kid’s father.

  “He spoke very highly of you, did you know that? He once told me that he was thinking of being a probation officer and working with kids, just like you.”

  If it wasn’t surreal enough, that one really threw me. The kid never said a word to me. I had no idea if he was even listening. Either I was getting through to him without knowing it, or else he was feeding some line of bullshit to his mother. Or hell, maybe it never happened at all. Not in the real world.

  “He really looked up to you, Mr. Trumbull. But when he had the worst day of his life, where were you?”

  “I came,” I said. “By the time I got here …” The moment came back to me, coming up the driveway and seeing the fire trucks and police cars. The officer Brian had tried to shoot was sitting in the back of an ambulance. Brian himself was already gone, on his way to the Woodstock station.

  Come to think of it, I thought, the rifle Brian had that day … that could be the very same rifle Maurice is holding right now.

  “It was your job to support and protect him,” she said. “But instead of doing that you turned against him.”

  “No.”

  “You told the judge to send him away to prison.”