Altered States (3 page)

My altered state was more meditative; pondering the questions surrounding Pearle’s short life, for what seemed like the millionth time.

I remember standing at the entrance to the hospital ward, people scuffing past me clutching bunches of flowers and bowls of fruit and selections of magazines. I hadn’t brought anything. What do you bring a woman you abandoned almost a decade before? I’m not sure a bunch of grapes and a copy of Cosmo really makes up for much.

Most people associate hospitals with some bad experience in their past: a childhood injury, an elderly relative passing away. I was no exception.

The time that passed as I dallied at the doorway was time I could ill afford. I knew I could not spend too long there. So I put procrastination to one side and set out on the journey to her bed, back to her side. Reality would insist that the ward was full of people, but to me there was no one else. There was just me and her, and the distance between us, which was less now than it had been for a long, long time. Every footstep echoed with meaning, as clearly as if I were tap-dancing in a vacant cathedral.

Then the dancing stopped.

There she was. I could picture my face at that moment, an ambiguous mix of emotions. Despite the circumstances I couldn’t suppress a brief moment of undiluted excitement at seeing her again. Excitement which soon faded.

‘Aaron?’ she said in the faintest of whispers. The lump in my throat was so thick all I could do was nod as I took her hand. And then she delivered those words that had hounded me ever since.

‘She had your eyes, Aaron,’ she whispered as her own eyes gently closed. The last words shared with a grieving mother ... with the only person who ever really understood me.

She was talking about Pearle, her daughter, who had died from a rare viral infection three days before. It was such an unusual condition that it had made the newspapers. Only in a minor bottom-of-page-fifteen kind of way, but that was enough to trigger the alert that brought me here.

The infection that took Pearle was claiming her mother’s life force too as I stood beside her, running those words over in my mind, s
he had your eyes
. Pearle was not my daughter, so what kind of sense did it make?

Most people would not have paid such heed to these words. She was slipping in and out of consciousness at the time, prone to what doctors call confabulation: the filling of gaps in one’s memory with fabrications believed to be fact. I know all about this. But, hell, if there was one thing I knew more about, it was
her
, the woman lying before me.

I had been out of her life for a long time, but that day, she saw me, and I mean she
saw
me, she
recognised
me. And those words were no idle ramblings of an ill mind. They weren’t entirely lucid, but with every fibre of her body she felt that they represented the single most important fact I needed to know.

I didn’t know why, and in the months that followed I tried to come to terms with the fact that I never would know why; that I never would make amends for letting her down so badly.

From that moment on I carried an unwavering belief that Pearle was the answer to a lot of things as far as my life was concerned – maybe everything. I had little evidence to support this hypothesis, but then I didn’t really know what the questions were.

Pearle was my very own forty-two.

On occasion I worried that it was just my need for something to cling to, something to obsess about. I couldn’t deny that I needed such a thing, since I had left behind all the substance of my life.

I don’t get to interact with the world much these days, not on a personal level. I’m what you might call a low-key kind of guy. By low-key I mean that my parents don’t even know I exist anymore. Funny how life goes full circle in some ways. As a kid I was pretty darn good at hide-and-seek. Today hide-and-seek was my day job. Mainly hide.

The reason for me hiding was nothing clichéd like there being people wanting to kill me. This may also be true but it was just a footnote in my story. The main reason was that I am, well, kind of special; I have certain abilities. And there were some people – powerful people – to whom I would be very useful. There was a time when I thought helping these people was the right thing to do, but then I changed my mind. That’s when I had to bail out; to run away. That was a long time ago now.

At first you feel guilt at severing yourself from everyone you know, at absolving your responsibilities. Then after a while you actually start to believe you don’t exist anymore. You walk the streets like an invisible man, with an unparalleled sense of liberation. It’s quite exhilarating for a while.

But the exhilaration soon transitions to isolation; an isolation beyond which can never be imagined. Most people suffer loneliness at some point in their life. Anyone unlucky enough to be devoid of family or friends for a time. But to also have no enemies, no neighbours, no colleagues, no postman; to have no consistent figures in your life at all; is a terrifying experience. The meaning begins to ebb away from your world. People become nothing but automaton to you. That is a very dangerous place to be. When people become objects ... the world turns bad.

I didn’t want the world to turn bad. Not if I could help it. So, in many ways, I felt I was clinging to the last shreds of sanity via the girl in that photo, because when looking at her I actually felt something inside – which was a rare experience for me these days. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe I just needed a stable figure in my life; and one thing you couldn’t deny about Pearle was that she was very stable. She was six years old when the picture was taken – and she always will be now.

I shook myself from my reverie; I had a job to do. I needed to see a man in a prison. The man arrested in connection with Pearle’s death. This was not as straightforward as it should be. Nothing ever is for me.

I’m something of an expert at laying low. I could write a book about it – though promotion may prove problematic. Specifically, I can impart that one particularly bad way of laying low is to walk into a city jail and visit a murderer; what with all the policemen, cameras, form-filling and so forth. So there was really only one alternative, and it was potentially a rather expensive one.

I pulled on some clothes, and grabbed the briefcase full of cash I always had handy for just such occasions.

I headed into town and then slipped off the main Strip. One block makes a big difference in New Meadows. Sneak behind its glitzy façade and you find the true depth and hue of its foundation. Ugly storage units, grimy offices, low-grade accommodation for the underpaid workers. It was virtually a different world. This was the real New Meadows. The rest was just a front. A crocodile smile.

As unwelcoming as it was, this was just the ambience I was seeking. I was heading for a bail-bondsman and I needed a distinctly back-street kind of outfit. A place that wouldn’t ask too many questions. I also needed to be face-to-face. Calling 1800-GET-ME-OUT would not suffice.

The door tinkled as I walked in.

‘Can I help you?’ The question originated from a pale-looking man sitting behind a dishevelled desk. He seemed somewhat surprised at receiving any custom in person. The décor seemed quite surprised too. In fact, it seemed to have popped out for lunch. The ceiling was short of its full complement of polystyrene tiles, and most of those that remained bore the familiar brown stain of a leaky air-con unit. Loose cables trailed across the floor beneath furniture that was mostly fashioned from bare chipboard. A real classy joint.

‘I’d like to post bail,’ I stated succinctly.

There was a name plate on the man’s desk. It wasn’t a shiny brass affair. More of a grubby plastic fridge-magnet, propped up against a pot of pencils. As such it served the double purpose of clearly stating the name of its owner – one Kent Bradshaw – and of equally clearly stating that he was a loser. He was not a bad man, I could tell that; with a less than savoury employer most likely. In this respect I felt a twang of sympathy for him, and at some level felt bad about what I was about to do. But sometimes we have to do things that make us feel bad. Sometimes there is a greater need.

‘Do take a seat,’ Kent urged.

I didn’t take a seat. I just gave him the particulars of my desired inmate, a man named Jackson Burch. The clerk tapped the details into the terminal in front of him, peering intently at the screen, flashing the occasional look of apparent confusion. Clerks in such mundane roles often strive to convey the impression that there is something extremely complex and unusual about entering the same half-dozen pieces of information they enter a hundred times a day. You can experience this phenomenon when checking-in for a flight. Despite the fact that the airline already has all of your details and has been expecting your arrival for the three weeks since you booked the ticket, the check-in clerk still appears utterly confused at your arrival and indeed your very existence in this world. It’s a power thing – that is, trying to pretend they have some. Fortunately, at the end of Kent’s taxing ordeal he still found the energy to speak.

Kent looked at me quizzically. ‘You have half-a-million dollars in cash? ... In a briefcase? ... And you wish to use a bail bondsman?’ he over-punctuated.

‘Yes. I have five-hundred thousand dollars ... In a briefcase ... In one-hundred dollar bills ... And I’d like to use a bail bondsman,’ I said with subtle mimicry. ‘Is that a problem?’

‘N-No,’ the clerk stuttered. ‘But you do know you can just go right up to the court with this money, yeah?’

The guy tilted his head. I tilted mine.

‘And
you
know that some people place a very high price on anonymity. Right?’ I leaned in a little. ‘I trust you can respect that?’

By this point Kent would be thinking I was a mafia gangster wanting to knock off a witness, or someone with a similarly socially-unacceptable hobby. I figured he’d at least be smart enough to know that compliance was a good life-preserving tactic when dealing with such people.

‘But assuming there is no problem, the bail will be wired straight from our account; and he should be out within three or four hours.’

‘Excellent. I’ll wait.’ Finally, I took a seat. The guy was getting steadily more nervous. I can have this effect on people. When I want to.

When it came to explaining to his boss why he’d mistaken a case of one-dollar bills for half-a-million bucks he’d be left with very few answers.

What can I say? I’m a very persuasive guy.

Once Beaten

Conner was at his desk early. He always was. Detective work was the kind of work that followed you home; the kind of work that woke you up early in the morning to a mild state of anxiety. It was an occupational hazard and Conner accepted that.

He’d been attempting to tease meaning from the reports in front of him since 6.30am, but they were proving resistant to his best teasing tactics. So, when Mila arrived she was a welcome distraction, especially as she was escorting fresh bagels and coffee.

‘Bagels?’ Conner enquired. ‘On a Thursday?’ Friday, of course, was traditional bagel day.

‘I thought that having breakfast
twice
this week might be good for you.’

‘Hey, I have breakfast.’

‘Yeah, not quite as many calories in a cigarette as you might think.’ She plucked the bready contents from a brown paper bag. ‘Cinnamon-and-Raisin or –’ she peered at the second ‘– Shit-Loads-of-Seeds?’

Conner jabbed a key on his keyboard. ‘Given that I’m already suffering a poppy-seed related F-key malfunction, I shall opt for the former, if that’s okay. Thanks.’

‘I think so.’ He thumbed through a couple of leaves of pre-amble to the last page of the report and handed it to Mila. ‘According to this, the same gun that killed our dealer friend was used in another gang murder last week.’

‘So?’

‘So, that victim was on the
other
side.’