We used our torches to search the waste ground behind the house. He was where I’d known he would be: in the shallow pond close to the back door. There didn’t appear to have been a struggle. He’d used stones to weigh himself down.
When we pulled him out he was curled up, his arms crossed, his knees close to his chest. Like a kid in a school assembly.
Later, we drained the pond and found nothing more, apart from a mass of weeds and insect life. But I wonder about the layers of marsh and silt beneath those houses. How easy it might be to make tunnels, or to close them down.
It’s in the nature of life to adapt. If you don’t have food, or oxygen, or love, you find a way. It might not be a good way by someone else’s standards, but it’s a way.
The autopsy confirmed that Jason Welles had died by drowning in shallow, dirty water. The only external damage was some fretting or eroding of the mouth, caused by small fish or water snails.
The only other significant detail had no bearing on the cause of death, and was described by the pathologist as “demonstrating the feverish reproductive activity of aquatic life at certain times of the year”.
When they opened up the dead man’s body to remove the viscera, they found that the wall of the body cavity was lined with thousands of tiny pearl-white eggs.
JOE HILL
Thumbprint
JOE HILL IS THE AUTHOR of the New York Times bestselling novel Heart-Shaped Box, the award-winning collection 20th Century Ghosts, and a comic book, Locke & Key. He lives in New England.
“Thousands of American soldiers have served with great honour and decency in Iraq,” says the author, “but for whatever reason – some failing in myself, maybe – I don’t know how to write about heroes.
“I tend to be drawn to characters who are morally adrift, hurt, troubled people trying to struggle their way back to goodness. People with regrets, people who have made some mistakes that haunt them.
“The crime novelist James Ellroy was once confronted by an angry police officer, who wanted to know why all the cops in his stories were drug-using, bribe-taking, wife-beating bastards. Ellroy stayed cool, and told him, ‘Good cops make for bad fiction’. Sounds about right to me.”
THE FIRST THUMBPRINT came in the mail.
Mal was eight months back from Abu Ghraib, where she had done things she regretted. She had returned to Hammett, New York, just in time to bury her father. He died ten hours before her plane touched down in the States, which was maybe all for the best. After the things she had done, she was not sure she could’ve looked him in the eye. Although a part of her had wanted to talk to him about it, and to see in his face how he judged her. Without him, there was no one to hear her story, no one whose judgment mattered.
The old man had served, too, in Vietnam, as a medic. Her father had saved lives, jumped from a helicopter and dragged kids out of the paddy grass, under heavy fire. He called them kids, although he had only been twenty-five himself at the time. He had been awarded a Purple Heart and a Silver Star.
They hadn’t been offering Mal any medals when they sent her on her way. At least she had not been identifiable in any of the photographs of Abu Ghraib – just her boots in that one shot Graner took, with the men piled naked on top of each other, a pyramid of stacked ass and hanging sac. If Graner had just tilted the camera up a little, Mal would have been headed home a lot sooner, only it would have been in handcuffs.
She got back her old job at the Milky Way, keeping bar, and moved into her father’s house. It was all he had to leave her, that and the car. The old man’s ranch was set three hundred yards from Hatchet Hill Road, backed against the town woods. In the fall, Mal ran in the forest, wearing a full ruck, three miles through the evergreens.
She kept the M4A1 in the downstairs bedroom, broke it down and put it together every morning, a job she could complete by the count of twelve. When she was done, she put the components back in their case with the bayonet, cradling them neatly in their foam cut-outs – you didn’t attach the bayonet unless you were about to be overrun. Her M4 had come back to the US with a civilian contractor, who brought it with him on his company’s private jet. He had been an interrogator for hire – there had been a lot of them at Abu Ghraib in the final months before the arrests – and he said it was the least he could do, that she had earned it for services rendered, a statement which left her cold.
Come one night in November, Mal walked out of the Milky Way with John Petty, the other bartender, and they found Glen Kardon passed out in the front seat of his Saturn. The driver’s side door was open and Glen’s butt was in the air, his legs hanging out of the car, feet twisted in the gravel, as if he had just been clubbed to death from behind.
Without thinking, she told Petty to keep an eye out, and then Mal straddled Glen’s hips and dug out his wallet. She helped herself to a hundred and twenty dollars cash, dropped the wallet back on the passenger side seat. Petty hissed at her to hurry the fuck up, while Mal wiggled the wedding ring off Glen’s finger.
“His wedding ring?” Petty asked, when they were in her car together. Mal gave him half the money for being her lookout, but kept the ring for herself. “Jesus, you’re a demented bitch.”
Petty put his hand between her legs and ground his thumb hard into the crotch of her black jeans while she drove. She let him do that for a while, his other hand groping her breast. Then she elbowed him off her.
“That’s enough,” she said.
“No it isn’t.”
She reached into his jeans, ran her hand down his hard-on, then took his balls and began to apply pressure until he let out a little moan, not entirely of pleasure.
“It’s plenty,” she said. She pulled her hand out of his pants. “You want more than that, you’ll have to wake up your wife. Give her a thrill.”
Mal let him out of the car in front of his home, and peeled away, tires throwing gravel at him.
Back at her father’s house, she sat on the kitchen counter, looking at the wedding ring in the cup of her palm. A simple gold band, scuffed and scratched, all the shine dulled out of it. She wondered why she had taken it.
Mal knew Glen Kardon, Glen and his wife Helen both. The three of them were the same age, had all gone to school together. Glen had a magician at his tenth birthday party, who had escaped from handcuffs and a straight]’acket as his final trick. Years later, Mal would become well acquainted with another escape artist who managed to slip out of a pair of handcuffs, a Ba’athist. Both of his thumbs had been broken, making it possible to squeeze out of the cuffs. It was easy to do, if you could bend your thumb in any direction – all you had to do was ignore the pain.
And Helen had been Mal’s lab partner in sixth grade biology. Helen took notes in her delicate cursive, using different coloured inks to brighten up their reports, while Mal sliced things open. Mal liked the scalpel, the way the skin popped apart at the slightest touch of the blade to show what was hidden behind it. She had an instinct for it, always somehow knew just where to put the cut.
Mal shook the wedding ring in one hand for a while and finally dropped it down the sink. She didn’t know what to do with it, wasn’t sure where to fence it. Had no use for it, really.
When she went down to the mailbox the next morning, she found an oil bill, a real estate flyer, and a plain white envelope. Inside the envelope was a crisp sheet of typing paper, neatly folded, blank except for a single thumbprint in black ink. The print was a clean impression, and among the whorls and lines was a scar, like a fishhook. There was nothing on the envelope: no stamp, no addresses, no mark of any kind. The postman had not left it.
In her first glance she knew it was a threat and that whoever had put the envelope in her mailbox might still be watching. Mal felt her vulnerability in the sick clench of her insides, and had to struggle against the conditioned impulse to get low and find cover. She looked to either side but saw only the trees, their branches waving in the cold swirl of a light breeze. There was no traffic along the road and n
o sign of life anywhere.
For the long walk back to the house, she was aware of a weakness in her legs. She didn’t look at the thumbprint again but carried it inside and left it with the other mail on the kitchen counter. She let her shaky legs carry her on into her father’s bedroom; her bedroom now. The M4 was in its case in the closet but her father’s .45 automatic was even closer – she slept with it under the pillow – and it didn’t need to be assembled. Mal slid the action back to pump a bullet in the chamber. She got her field glasses from her ruck.
Mal climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor, and opened the door into her old bedroom under the eaves. She hadn’t been in there since coming home and the air had a musty, stale quality. A tatty poster of Alan Jackson was stuck up on the inverted slant of the roof. Her dolls – the blue corduroy bear, the pig with the queer silver button eyes which gave him a look of blindness – were set neatly in the shelves of a bookcase without books.
Her bed was made, but when she went close, she was surprised to find the shape of a body pressed into it, the pillow dented in the outline of someone’s head. The idea occurred that whoever had left the thumb-print had been inside the house while she was out, and took a nap up here. Mal didn’t slow down, but stepped straight up onto the mattress, unlocked the window over it, shoved it open, and climbed through.
In another minute she was sitting on the roof, holding the binoculars to her eyes with one hand, the gun in the other. The asbestos shingles had been warming all day in the sun and provided a pleasant ambient heat beneath her. From where she sat on the roof, she could see in every direction.
She remained there for most of an hour, scanning the trees, following the passage of cars along Hatchet Hill Road. Finally she knew she was looking for someone who wasn’t there anymore. She hung the binoculars from her neck and leaned back on the hot shingles and closed her eyes. It had been cold down in the driveway, but up on the roof, on the lee side of the house, out of the wind, she was comfortable, a lizard on a rock.
When Mal swung her body back into the bedroom, she sat for a while on the sill, holding the gun in both hands and considering the impression of a human body on her blankets and pillow. She picked up the pillow and pressed her face into it. Very faintly, she could smell a trace of her father, his cheap corner store cigars, the waxy tang of that shit he put in his hair, same stuff Reagan had used. The thought that he had sometimes been up here, dozing in her bed, gave her a little chill. She wished she was still the kind of person who could hug a pillow and weep over what she had lost. But in truth, maybe she had never been that kind of person.
When she was back in the kitchen, Mal looked once more at the thumbprint on the plain white sheet of paper. Against all logic or sense, it seemed somehow familiar to her. She didn’t like that.
He had been brought in with a broken tibia, the Iraqi everyone called “The Professor”, but a few hours after they put him in a cast, he was judged well enough to sit for an interrogation. In the early morning, before sunrise, Corporal Plough came to get him.
Mal was working in block 1A then and went with Carmody to collect The Professor. He was in a cell with eight other men: sinewy, unshaved Arabs, most of them dressed in fruit-of-the-loom jockey shorts and nothing else. Some others, who had been unco-operative with CI, had been given pink, flowered panties to wear. The panties fit more snugly than the jockies, which were all extra-large and baggy. The prisoners skulked in the gloom of their stone chamber, giving Mal looks so feverish and hollow-eyed, they appeared deranged. Glancing in at them, Mal didn’t know whether to laugh or flinch.
“Walk away from the bars, women,” she said in her clumsy Arabic. “Walk away.” She crooked her finger at The Professor. “You. Come to here.”
He hopped forward, one hand on the wall to steady himself. He wore a hospital Johnnie, and his left leg was in a cast from ankle to knee. Carmody had brought a pair of aluminium crutches for him. Mal and Carmody were coming to the end of a twelve-hour shift, in a week of twelve-hour shifts. Escorting the prisoner to CI with Corporal Plough would be their last job of the night. Mal was twitchy from all the Vivarin in her system, so much she could hardly stand still. When she looked at lamps, she saw rays of hard-edged, rainbow-shot light emanating from them, as if she were peering through crystal.
The night before, a patrol had surprised some men planting an IED in the red, hollowed-out carcass of a German Shepherd, on the side of the road back to Baghdad. The bombers scattered, yelling, from the spotlights on the Hummers and a contingent of men went after them.
An engineer named Leeds stayed behind to have a look at the bomb inside the dog. He was three steps from the animal when a cell phone went off inside the dog’s bowels, three bars of “Oops, I Did It Again.” The dog ruptured in a belch of flame, and with a heavy thud that people standing thirty feet away could feel in the marrow of their bones. Leeds dropped to his knees, holding his face, smoke coming out from under his gloves. The first soldier to get to him said his face peeled off like a cheap black rubber mask that had been stuck to the sinew beneath with rubber cement.
Not long after, the patrol grabbed The Professor – so named because of his horn-rimmed glasses and because he insisted he was a teacher – two blocks from the site of the explosion. He broke his leg jumping off a high berm, running away after the soldiers fired over his head and ordered him to halt.
Now The Professor lurched along on the crutches, Mal and Carmody flanking him and Plough walking behind. They made their way out of 1A and into the pre-dawn morning. The Professor paused, beyond the doors, to take a breath.That was when Plough kicked the left crutch out from under his arm.
The Professor went straight down and forward with a cry, his Johnnie flapping open to show the soft paleness of his ass. Carmody reached to help him back up. Plough said leave him.
“Sir?” Carmody asked. Carmody was just nineteen. He had been over as long as Mal, but his skin was oily and white, as if he had never been out of his chemical suit.
“Did you see him swing that crutch at me?” Plough asked Mal.
Mal did not reply, but watched to see what would happen next. She had spent the last two hours bouncing on her heels, chewing her fingernails down to the skin, too wired to stop moving. Now, though, she felt stillness spreading through her, like a drop of ink in water, calming her restless hands, her nervous legs.
Plough bent over and pulled the string at the back of the Johnnie, unknotting it so it fell off The Professor’s shoulders and down to his wrists. His ass was spotted with dark moles and relatively hairless. His sac was drawn tight to his perineum. The Professor glanced up over his shoulder, his eyes too large in his face, and spoke rapidly in Arab.
“What’s he saying?” Plough asked. “I don’t speak sand nigger.”
“He said don’t,” Mal said, translating automatically. “He says he hasn’t done anything. He was picked up by accident.”
Plough kicked away the other crutch. “Get those.”
Carmody picked up the crutches.
Plough put his boot in The Professor’s fleshy ass and shoved.
“Get going. Tell him get going.”
A pair of MPs walked past, turned their heads to look at The Professor as they went by. He was trying to cover his crotch with one hand, but Plough kicked him in the ass again and he had to start crawling. His crawl was awkward stuff, what with his left leg sticking out straight in its cast and the bare foot dragging in the dirt. One of the MPs laughed, and then they moved away into the night.
The Professor struggled to pull his Johnnie up onto his shoulders as he crawled, but Plough stepped on it and it tore away.
“Leave it. Tell him leave it and hurry up.”
Mal told him. The prisoner couldn’t look at her. He looked at Carmody instead, and began pleading with him, asking for something to wear and saying his leg hurt while Carmody stared down at him, eyes bulging, as if he were choking on something.
Mal wasn’t surprised The Professor was
addressing Carmody instead of her. Part of it was a cultural thing. The Arabs couldn’t cope with being humiliated in front of a woman. But also, Carmody had something about him that signified to others, even the enemy, that he was approachable. In spite of the 9mm strapped to his outer thigh, he gave an impression of stumbling, unthreatening cluelessness. In the barracks, he blushed when other guys were ogling centrefolds; he often could be seen praying during heavy mortar attacks.
The prisoner had stopped crawling once more. Mal poked the barrel of her M4 in The Professor’s ass to get him going again and the Iraqi jerked, gave a shrill sort of sob. Mal didn’t mean to laugh, but there was something funny about the convulsive clench of his butt-cheeks, something that sent a rush of blood to her head. Her blood was racy and strange with Vivarin, and watching the prisoner’s ass bunch up like that was the most hilarious thing she had seen in weeks.
The Professor crawled past wire fence, along the edge of the road. Plough told Mal to ask him where his friends were now, his friends who blew up the American GI. He said if The Professor would tell about his friends, he could have his crutches and his Johnnie back.
The prisoner said he didn’t know anything about the IED. He said he ran because other men were running and soldiers were shooting. He said he was a teacher of literature, that he had a little girl. He said he had taken his twelve-year-old to Disneyland Paris once.
“He’s fucking with us,” Plough said. “What’s a professor of literature doing out at 2:00 a.m. in the worst part of town? Your queer fuck Bin-Laden friends blew the face right off an American GI, a good man, a man with a pregnant wife back home. Where do your friends – Mal, make him understand he’s going to tell us where his friends are hiding. Let him know it would be better to tell us now, before we get where we’re going. Let him know this is the easy part of his day. CI wants this motherfucker good and soft before we get him there.”
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