The House of Broken Backs: A Joanna Mason Novel

by Amy Cross

  He stares at me, and I can tell that he's seething with barely-repressed anger.

  "You know what?" I continue, turning toward the door. "We're partners, right? So why don't I use my intuition to come up with the guy's name?"

  "No fucking way," he replies, putting a hand on my arm. "You're a bullshit merchant, Mason, and that guy's name is gonna be revealed by good, solid, methodical police work."

  "So you don't want my help?" I ask, turning back to him and carefully hiding the fact that he's walking right into my trap. Carver has a flaming ego, and it feels good to use it against him.

  "Hell, no," he replies. "I'm going back in there, and if it takes me all night and all of tomorrow, I'll get his real name." He pauses. "In fact, I'm gonna call Schumacher tonight and make damn sure that he knows not to let you in with the prisoner. You'll only fuck things up, anyway. Hell, if you spend five minutes with that guy, he'll clam up and never give us what we need!"

  "You know," I continue, "if you turn my help down now, there's no going back. I won't come and save your ass later. Everyone'll know that I found the guy, and that you fucked up the interrogation."

  "You'll see," he says firmly. "You might have your so-called intuition, Mason, but I have certain skills that are gonna make you realize that we're not even in the same fucking league." He heads to the door, before turning back to me. "And you can wipe that fucking smirk off your face!"

  Once he's gone back into the interrogation room, I watch through the one-way mirror for a few more minutes before heading out into the corridor and making my way toward the elevators. I know Jordan Carver doesn't have a hope in hell of getting the guy's real name, but it amuses me to think of him trying. By tomorrow morning, he'll have damn near lost his mind, and by that point he'll have told Schumacher to keep me away from the prisoner. Sure, it'll piss me off if we never learn the guy's real name, but then again, I can take solace in the fact that Carver's reputation is gonna take a nosedive.

  No-one can really win in life, but you can pick up little victories along the way.

  John

  "I've got all the time in the world," he says, sitting calmly on the other side of the desk. "I can sit here all day and all night, and then I can come back again tomorrow, and the next day, and the day after that. Makes no difference to me. For you, though, I think it'd be a hell of a lot easier if you just accepted the inevitable and gave me a name."

  "I've given you plenty of names," I tell him.

  "You know what I mean."

  I can't help but smile. This guy has been attempting to break through to me for hours now, and I think he's actually managed to delude himself into believing that he's getting somewhere. He probably thinks I'll snap and give him what he wants, and I suppose that kind of approach would probably work with most people, but not with me. It's not entirely his fault; I doubt he's ever met anyone like me, but he'll learn soon enough. There's no way in hell I'm ever going to give him my real name.

  I got rid of my old, 'real' life a long time ago.

  We sit in silence for a moment.

  "You think you're all that, don't you?" he continues eventually. "You think you've got everything covered."

  I lean forward and take a look at his name-tag. "Detective Carver," I say after a moment, leaning back in my chair, "I think you misunderstand the situation. Granted, I intended to drive off into the sunset and start a new life, and I must admit, I'm a little annoyed that you caught me at the last minute. Still, I can see a positive to the current situation. I'm sure you've been through the files in my office, or at least you've started to organize them. Surely you can see by now that I built up quite an impressive empire over the years. That's really what I am, you know. I'm an entrepreneur. I saw a gap in the market, and I -"

  "Tell me your name," he says firmly.

  I smile.

  "What's wrong?" he continues. "Are you ashamed of something? If I find out your name, am I gonna be able to trace it back and learn the truth about you?" He fixes me with a determined stare. "Maybe I could even learn what makes you tick. I'm thinking something pretty bad must have happened to you as a child to make you turn out like this. What's wrong? Did Mom or Dad hurt you? Did they neglect you? Did someone put their hand somewhere they shouldn't?"

  "Wouldn't you like to know?" I reply. "The problem with the modern world, Detective Carver, is that there's nowhere left to run. Throughout human history, there has always been a chance for men to abandon their old lives and strike out into the unknown. Sure, most of them probably died pretty quickly, but at least they had the opportunity to start a new life. In the twenty-first century, that basic human right is denied to us. Credit reports, criminal records, social networking... We have no choice but to drag our pasts with us everywhere we go, with no possibility of ever getting free. That's a pretty significant psychological burden, don't you think?" I wait for him to reply, but it appears that I've finally made him think. "I offered a way out for people who wanted to start again," I add. "It's a shame that I had to do it by raising and killing those people, but I think that in this case the end justifies the means."

  "Tell me your real name," he replies.

  "You don't get it, do you?"

  "Tell me your name!"

  I can't help but laugh.

  "You think this is funny?" he asks.

  "Kind of," I reply. "If only you could get past your need to feel morally superior to me, Detective Carver, you'd realize that I'm right. You're focusing on my name, but that's completely immaterial; in fact, if I gave you the information you're after, I'd be undermining my own beliefs." I pause for a moment, amused by the look of irritation on his face. "Please try to understand," I continue, "that if -"

  "Tell me your name," he says again, this time getting to his feet as if he thinks it might help to tower above me.

  "No," I reply calmly.

  "Like I said," he continues, "I've got all the time in the world to stay here until you realize that you need to cooperate."

  I shake my head.

  "Tell me your name!" he says yet again, this time raising his voice almost to the level of a shout.

  "You can try all the techniques in your little book," I reply calmly, "but none of them will work. I'm taking a moral stance here, Detective Carver. You wear your name proudly on a little tag, and I keep mine hidden away deep in the darkest recesses of my mind. We're opposites, really, aren't we? In a way. I mean, can't you see things from my point of view? Don't you even have, for example, an embarrassing middle name? Something you'd rather keep back from the world?"

  "Go to hell," he replies, "you smug little bastard."

  "You look tired," I tell him. "Maybe we should pick this up tomorrow."

  Sitting down, he leans back in his chair, folds his arms and stares at me.

  "You think this is going to work?" I ask, raising an amused eyebrow.

  No reply.

  "Fine," I continue with a sigh, "if you want to waste your time and mine, we can have a staring contest." I wait for him to say something, but he clearly thinks the silent treatment will work. Sighing again, I simply meet his gaze and await his next move. It's a little tiring to be constantly badgered like this, and I believe it might take quite some time for him to finally give up; still, I guess time is the one thing I have in abundance now that I've been caught. These idiots might have managed to track me down, but they'll never, ever learn my real name.

  It'll be amusing to watch Detective Carver try, though.

  "Tell me your name," he says again, getting to his feet. I swear to God, he can't decide what to do next; he keeps switching from one strategy to another. "Just tell me," he adds. "Get it over with."

  I smile.

  "Tell me your name!" he shouts, slamming his fist against the table. "Tell me your goddamn fucking name!"

  Joanna Mason

  "Hang on!" I call out as I get out of bed. Making my way across the darkened room, with sunlight peeking through the closed drapes, I somehow contrive to trip over
my own shoes and land with a thud on the floor. Sighing, I get to my feet, slip into my old clothes from yesterday and make my way to the front door.

  Peering through the peephole, I see that Dawson is standing out in the corridor.

  "I was wondering when you'd be in touch," I say, forcing a smile as I open the door. "Long time, no see, stranger."

  "So how did you do it?" he asks.

  "How did I do what?" I reply, still feeling as if I'm not quite awake. "I've done so many brilliant things lately, it's hard to -"

  "How did you find that place out in the middle of nowhere?"

  I shrug. "Intuition."

  "No," he replies. "That's what you told Jordan Carver and Schumacher and all the other guys, but I'm not buying it. I know how your famous intuition works, Jo. You take in a load of information, you process it somewhere in your subconscious mind, and then suddenly you spew out the answer, but that's not what happened this time. You didn't have any information to process. All you had was hundreds of square miles of land, and the vague hunch that there might be something hidden out there."

  I open my mouth to reply to him, but I'm not quite sure what to say.

  "So how did you do it?" he asks again, this time with a faint smile.

  "Come in," I mutter, turning and making my way through to the front room, where all my papers and files from the past couple of days are strewn across every surface. "Sorry about the mess," I add, rubbing my eyes, "but you've been here before. You know how things get sometimes."

  "Thanks for getting me home the other night," he says as he comes through to join me, picking his way through the piles of folders on the floor. "I'm sorry you had to see me like that."

  "You were pretty wasted," I point out.

  "Yeah, well..." He pauses. "Whatever. But come on, Jo. Help me out. This whole thing is driving me crazy, and I know you didn't use intuition alone to find that facility."

  I stare at him for a moment. "You remember the other night when you were drunk?" I say eventually. "You remember how I found you in that rundown little bar, even though you'd deliberately gone somewhere out-of-the-way because you wanted to be left alone?"

  "Don't think that wasn't intensely annoying," he replies.

  "I went to hundreds of bars before I found you," I continue. "It was the only way. Fuck, my feet were aching by the end of it, and I almost gave up several times, but somehow I pushed on and eventually I spotted you slumped in a booth." I wait for him to say something, but he doesn't seem to be getting the link. Smiling, I indicate the papers on my desk. "You were right," I add. "Sometimes good old-fashioned leg-work is the best approach."

  He walks over to the desk and picks up some of the print-outs.

  "Official planning records for every structure out there in the wilderness," I tell him. "If anyone built so much as a chicken shed, it's in those files."

  "But the place where that guy was holding the people... That wasn't in the records."

  "Exactly," I continue, opening the lid of my laptop to show him the mapping app I've been using. "If intuition played a part in this, it was only that it made me realize that this guy had tried to hide his business away from prying eyes. So I used one of those online aerial photo sites to check for anything that wasn't listed in the planning documents."

  He stares at the screen for a moment. "No," he says eventually, turning to me. "No way, Jo. The area you would have had to cover... You'd have had to sit and look at page after page for -"

  "Three days, twenty hours and nineteen minutes," I reply, interrupting him. "With no sleep, barely any food, and just a few pee breaks. Plus a few trips out, but I printed off maps and took them with me. No rest for the wicked, huh?"

  He pauses. "You're telling me that you checked the entire area manually?"

  "There was some luck involved," I add. "I was barely a third of the way through when I spotted a little smudge in the middle of nowhere. I zoomed in, and there it was. A fairly large building that didn't appear on any official documentation."

  "That's insane," he replies. "I mean, any normal person would've lost their mind."

  Nodding, I can't help but feel a little proud of myself. "In case you haven't noticed," I add with a yawn, "it's kinda taken it out of me. I think I have a lot of sleeping to do. Jordan Carver can handle the processing of that jerk."

  "Jordan Carver's not doing too well," Dawson replies. "He's been interrogating him for days now, and he still can't get his real name."

  "He never will," I reply.

  "Schumacher's tried to pull him out, but Carver..." He pauses. "I think he's going a little strange. Sometimes you can even hear him down there, shouting and screaming at the guy, but he's not getting anywhere. I think Schumacher's thinking of putting him on forced leave for a week or two, just so his sanity doesn't crumble."

  "I offered to help," I point out with a shameless grin, "but I think Detective Carver was very keen to perform the interrogation without my help. Anyway, he's on a hiding to nothing. The guy won't give his name up, and even if he did, what's the point? It's not what matters. What matters is..." I pause for a moment as I try to work out what, in this whole mess, really does matter. "Those men and women are going to need a lot of help," I say eventually. "They probably won't ever recover fully from the way they were brought up."

  "At least they're alive," Dawson points out. "While they're alive, there's hope, right? If not for all of them, then at least for some. It'll take a while, but they might be able to lead normal lives."

  "It's false hope, though," I point out. "You've seen what they're like. That asshole kept them chained up like animals. There's no coming back from that."

  He smiles, but it's a sad smile, worn down over the years. "There's always hope, Jo," he says after a moment. "It's a lot harder to live when you don't even have hope."

  "Did you come here for anything specific?" I ask, hoping to change the subject. "I mean, now that I've given away my trade secrets, I kinda need to get back to sleep. I was having a lovely dream about unicorns and ponies and all that shit before you came banging on my door."

  "I guess I'll see you around, then," he replies.

  I nod, before following him back out to the hallway.

  "So how are things going?" I ask. "How's Elaine?"

  "She's good," he replies.

  "And..." I pause, waiting for him to tell me about the baby, but instead a kind of uncomfortable silence descends; I have no idea whether or not he knows that Elaine told me. "I mean," I continue after a moment, "is everything going okay? You know, with the..." I take a deep breath, hoping that he might get the hint. "Last time, you told me she was pregnant, so -"

  "Right," he replies, looking distinctly awkward. "Yeah. Everything's... You know, ticking along. There's no rush."

  "You thought about names?" I ask, suddenly feeling as if I'm about to cry.

  "Not really," he mutters. "Names aren't that important, not at this stage. We've just got to keep on pushing forward and..." He pauses. "We're just hoping for the best, overall," he adds finally.

  With that, he turns and heads toward the elevators, leaving me to push the door shut and stand alone in my apartment. Dawson has now had two opportunities to tell me that Elaine lost the baby, and instead he's kept the news to himself. I guess the bitch was right: Dawson thinks I'd make jokes about it, so he'd rather not talk to me about anything that involves real emotions. I can kind of understand why he's reached that conclusion, although I can't help but wonder if there's some way that I can make him see that I've changed. Then again, I don't know if I really have changed.

  Trying to ignore the dull ache in my chest, I turn and head back toward the bedroom. Tomorrow morning, I've got my first meeting with the doctor who's running the experimental treatment program, so I guess I need to get some rest. After all, maybe there's still a chance that I'll have a miraculous recovery. Like Dawson said, everyone needs hope, although sometimes I think I was better off when I was absolutely certain that I was going to die. />
  Sometimes, hope is just cruel.

  Epilogue

  Thirty-five years ago

  "Hey! Get the fuck back here!"

  Stopping at the intersection, I glance over my shoulder and see that he's still chasing after me. I turn and run, almost getting hit by a car before reaching the other side of the road. It's late, and people are starting to flood out of a nearby movie theater; the crowd slows me for a moment and I have to push past them, all the while glancing over my shoulder to make sure that my father hasn't caught up with me. In this sea of people, it's impossible to really pick anyone out, but I'm convinced that he must be somewhere nearby.

  I've come this far.

  I can't let him catch me now.

  Ducking beneath the crowd, I get onto my hands and knees and crawl past all the legs of oblivious theater patrons. I'm really starting to panic now, and I'm convinced that at any moment I'll feel a hand grab the back of my shirt and haul me back to reality. Still, I know I have to take this chance, because I can't risk being forced to go home. Now that he knows I want to get away, my father's going to be a thousand times harsher with me, and I knew when I left the house tonight that I was crossing a line. I just have to -

  Suddenly I feel a foot slamming into my side, and I drop down onto my chest. The crowd parts and I'm grabbed from behind, hauled up onto my feet before being turned around so that I come face to face with him.

  "Where are you going?" my father asks, his voice filled with restrained, white-hot fury. "Didn't you hear me calling you, John?"

  I stare at him, unable to summon any words. I'd hoped that I'd never, ever have to see him again, and now he's got me in his grasp. It took so long to summon up the courage to get away from him, and I don't think I can do it again. This is it. I tried to escape, and I failed. For the rest of my life, I'm going to have to live in his shadow.

  "Come on," he continues, holding me by the arm and pulling me through the crowd. "We need to talk about this."