Five Minutes Alone (12 page)

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The alleyway is near the center of the city, a few blocks away from Christchurch Cathedral, a church where Schroder once arrested a naked guy who had painted his genitals black, put a white collar around the base of his penis, and stood outside the main doors during lunch hour asking people to praise the Lord. When they got him back to the station, he tried to hang himself in his holding cell. They rushed him off to hospital where he was under care for two days, then put on suicide watch for a week, then on the way back to the station a guy in another vehicle was simultaneously having a heart attack and running a red light, and those events saw that guy plowing his car into the transport van and killing the suspect. Schroder always thought it was the equivalent of saving an injured seal and returning it to the ocean only to see it swallowed by a whale.

The city has gotten dark. It happened in degrees as they came up with different plans. Seven o’clock and the sky glowed red on the horizon, it reflected off the shop windows, it looked like lava. The eight o’clock shadows gave way to nine o’clock shadows. They were longer. The lava on the windows had cooled. Soon the shadows were gone, the sky a dirty blue, each passing minute turning it black. And still they waited.

By ten o’clock the only light is coming from the streetlights and from the bars around the corner. There are a few lights on inside the bank, and in some of the stores too, there for passersby to notice if somebody is breaking in. A few people walk past Schroder and Crowley, not many, though foot traffic at the end of the block is heavy because at the end of the block and around the corner are the bars the alleyway services.

The brothers are either still down there or they’ve gone through the back entrance to one of the bars. Nobody else has shown up. Nobody else has come out. Peter is always in a state of motion, his body one moment tight with anticipation, the next almost loose enough to slide under the door. Schroder should have done this alone, and he could have, but he wouldn’t be much of a Five Minute Superhero if he didn’t give people their five minutes.

“It’s time,” Schroder says.

“Finally.”

“Two minutes,” Schroder says. “Don’t be late.”

“I won’t be.”

Schroder gets out of his car. Before leaving Peter’s house, he had filled one of the small, empty plant pots with some wet dirt. He now smears that dirt across both license plates, tosses the container back into the car, wipes his hands on his jeans, then crosses the road.

He can hear music coming from around the corner, the
beat-beat-beat
playing right alongside laughter and girls screaming in delight, a blast of foul language, the hubbub of life, guys yelling
hey bro
and
hey mate
over all of it. He walks to the alleyway, his hands deep in his pockets. When he gets there he’s a guy now staggering a little. He’s just a guy who’s had too much to drink, a guy outside trying to clear his head, maybe looking for a dumpster he can take a piss behind.

On the left is the wall to a sporting store; the music store where, almost twenty-five years ago, his dad brought him to buy his guitar; and a bookstore. To the right are the back walls of the bars. There are stacks of flattened cardboard boxes everywhere. Bags of trash, most of them sealed, some of them torn apart by cats and mice, a large cardboard box lying on the ground with it’s
this way up
arrows pointing the direction that Schroder is walking, making them
Head this way for trouble
arrows. It smells down here too, a combination of rotten food and wet dog, a gagging kind of smell, the kind of smell that requires a few showers to remove. He walks in and stops halfway, twenty-five yards of real estate behind him,
twenty-five yards of it ahead, before the alleyway terminates. Either the brothers are further up, or they’ve gone through one of the doors, but he thinks they’re further up. He has a pretty good idea why these men are down here. There are different types of music from the different bars, each competing to drown out the other, different beats, different tempos, some of the doors are ratting in their frames.

He moves forward. He counts off the seconds in his head. The back doors to the shops come and go. There’s some light, but not much, and less the further the alleyway goes. Beneath the lights that aren’t going are jagged bits of glass as rocks and bottles have been thrown at them. He stops ten yards later and turns back towards the street. He’s in no-man’s-land now. No wonder lots of bad shit happens in these kinds of places.

He is ten yards from the end of the alleyway when he first becomes aware somebody is following him. He stops. He turns. A bottle starts rolling across the ground from behind one of the dumpsters. He’s walked right past somebody and not seen them hidden in the shadows.

He turns from the bottle. Up ahead a figure is standing at the end of the alleyway. There’s a single, dim lightbulb overhead providing barely enough light to see him. A glance behind him shows the man he walked past is now picking up the bottle. Schroder turns towards the first figure he saw. The man is around six feet. Wearing black and with dark hair and a trail of tattoos from his hands leading under the sleeves of his jacket. Bevin Collard. He can hear the guy behind him getting closer too. The brother.

“What you looking for, buddy?” Bevin asks, and his voice is deep and gravelly and Schroder doesn’t like it, not one bit. He’s dealt with plenty of assholes in his day who all had similar voices.

“What are you selling?”

“Nothing. How about you just be on your way?”

Schroder shakes his head. “How about you give me what I’m asking for?”

“Only thing you’re asking for is trouble,” Bevin says.

There’s a bag on the ground by Bevin’s feet. Schroder points at it. “What will two hundred dollars get me?”

“Mugged, if you don’t fuck off,” Bevin says.

“Come on, guys, my money is good.”

“Yeah, for getting mugged. You’ve seen too many movies, buddy, if you think we’re drug dealers. How about you just be on your way and go back to your wife and kids and mortgage and your white picket fence, huh?”

He knows they’re selling drugs. There’s no other reason for them to be down here. He also knows that’s why they’re not going to hurt him. They can’t. Because if they hurt him, then the police get involved, then they can’t come back to their favorite spot for selling drugs to the people who frequent these clubs. He’s still counting off the seconds. He’s at ninety now.

“My wife left me,” he says, “and I don’t have a picket fence. I want what I came here for.”

“Listen, mate, to me it seems like you’ve come here because you’re looking for a bad place in town to be punished in, but this isn’t it.”

Schroder nods. “You’re almost right,” he says.

“Almost?”

“Yeah. Almost. Maybe a guy like me might come to a place like this because he wants to punish somebody else. You think of that?”

Nobody answers him. He can sense the guy behind him tensing up. So is the guy up front.

“Ah, geez, buddy, why’d you have to go and say something like that,” Bevin says. Schroder doesn’t answer. The two minutes are up. “See, that sounds like a threat. Sounds like you think you can take both of us on. Does that sound about right?” he asks, taking a step forward.

“Sounds about right, Bevin,” Schroder says.

The question comes. It was always going to come. “How do you know my name?”

“I know it because I’m a concerned citizen. Lots of things concern me, or at least they used to. I used to care about global warm
ing, about terrorism, about the economy. I should care that the bullet inside my skull is going to cross the finish line. But I don’t. But what I do care about is getting Linda Crowley’s wedding ring back.”

“Who the hell are you?” Bevin asks.

Then, from behind Taylor, comes a set of headlights. The bright beams pointing at them, and all three are lifting hands to shield their eyes as the lights make their shadows stretch and dance across the walls. The car stops five yards short of Taylor. Then the driver, who leaves the lights on and the engine running, opens the door. He climbs out a little awkwardly because of the cricket bat he’s keeping out of view.

“Hope I’m not interrupting anything, guys, but where the hell can I score some decent pussy around here?”

“You’re in the wrong place, mister,” Taylor says.

The driver stares at him, then turns slightly to his left and right. “You sure?”

“Positive,” Taylor says.

“I don’t know. This seems like the place,” the man says, stepping forward. “I mean, I see a couple of pussies right here.” He produces the cricket bat. He produces it in the same step that he takes towards Taylor, he raises it on his next step, and on his third he brings it around and smashes it into the side of Taylor’s head. It’s a one-swing deal. Taylor has gotten his arm up to stop it, but it’s a useless effort, the bat most likely breaking it on the way through to a good, solid home run. A game-ending home run.

Taylor drops without understanding why, either dead before hitting the ground or one or two seconds after. Probably not a bad way to go out, Schroder thinks, compared to what is going to happen to his brother who, according to their interview statements, did ninety percent of the raping while Taylor did ninety percent of the watching.

When he turns back around Bevin is no longer facing him. He’s looking for a way out. He’s five yards from the end of the alley. Two. One. Then he’s hard up against the wall. He tries the nearest door,
but it’s locked. He turns back towards Schroder, then reaches into his pocket and pulls out a knife.

“Put it down, Bevin,” Schroder says. “Put it down and climb into the car and it’ll go much easier. We just want to talk.”

“Fuck you, man.”

“We’re going to get you into that car, Bevin, and we can do it the easy way or the hard way.”

“Then it’s going to be—”

The glass bottle whistles as it flies through the air, end over end, and it hits Bevin right in the middle of the forehead. He drops just as quickly as his brother. Schroder thinks that makes for pretty good symmetry.

“Nice shot,” Schroder says.

“All those years playing cricket just paid off,” Peter says. Then he looks down at the body by his feet. “I messed up. I didn’t mean to hit the other guy so hard. I think he’s dead already. I wanted my five minutes with him too.”

“How about you take ten minutes with this one then?”

Peter nods. “I guess that works.”

“Let’s get them loaded into the car before somebody comes out of one of these doors. Oh, and make sure you grab the bottle. That’s the only thing you touched, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Good,” Schroder says. “Come on, let’s get this done.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

Peter drives and Schroder gives directions. The brothers are stuffed into the trunk. A check by Peter for a pulse on Taylor confirmed Bevin is now an only child. As for Bevin, he’s back there with his legs and arms tied up. Beneath them, keeping blood off the car, is a shower curtain.

“Are you sure you know the way?” Peter asks.

They’ve been driving for twenty minutes, most of that on the same road, then the turnoff, then the complicated maze of neglected roads without signposts, they go from tarmac to gravel and back and forth, never settling on one for too long. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we’re nearly there.”

“I want to get started,” Peter says.

“We’ve already started,” Schroder says, and a moment later they’re pulling into an entrance half-hidden and half-guarded by a pair of large oaks. The road goes from tarmac to gravel. Slimmer trees line the driveway to an abandoned building up ahead. It’s an old mental institution by the name of Grover Hills, built almost a hundred years ago, abandoned for the last ten of those after the government took funding away from mental health institutions, penny-pinching to fund other schemes while simultaneously flooding the streets with a whole lot of crazies. The only thing climbing the walls these days are vines of ivy, they cling to the weatherboards, they wrap around the downpipes and thread themselves around the guttering. It looks like nature itself is doing its best to pull the building and the memories made here into the ground.

He brings the car up to the front entrance. This place was out of sight and out of mind for ten years until several months ago when one of the crazies came back. An ex-patient, homesick for the in
stitution, started living here, along with a collection of people he began abducting. Schroder was still a cop then. Was still a family man and a by-the-book man. This isn’t where he was going to bring Dwight Smith last night. It’s similar—Grover Hills is one of three abandoned institutions out in these middle-of-nowhere parts, but this is the one he chose tonight because downstairs is a room perfect for their needs.

They get out of the car and it bounces and shifts on its springs and settles. Schroder stretches out his back and Peter does the same, some clicks and some pops and then they walk up to the front door. It has been padlocked closed, a chain running through the handles, but Schroder would never have been a very good cop if he didn’t know how to pick a padlock. It takes him a couple of minutes, and then the chain is on the front step and the door hinges protest a little as he opens them, but then they’re inside, the halls dark and unwelcoming, six patient rooms downstairs, a kitchen, a communal area for eating and TV, toilets, showers, offices, and upstairs another two dozen rooms all for patients. He can still remember the layout. Abandoned furniture, nothing worth more than what it would take to come out here and retrieve them, can be found in most of these rooms. And ghosts. If there are such things as ghosts, then this is where they would be. “It feels like people died out here, and that they suffered,” Peter says, which reminds Schroder of Jonas Jones, the psychic he briefly worked with earlier in the year.

“They did,” Schroder says, and not just earlier in the year with the crazy guy who thought he was returning home, but over the years this place operated. “Patients were tortured here. We found some of them buried out in the grounds.”

“Jesus,” Peter says.

“They say Jesus saves,” Schroder says. “But He didn’t save these people. Come on, it’s this way.” Schroder turns on a flashlight, the beam picking out the dust floating through the air, stirred up from the door opening. He leads them to a closed door. “This is it,” he says, and swings it open to more protesting hinges. Behind the door
are concrete stairs leading down into darkness. Schroder leads the way, the sound of his footsteps not echoing, but being swallowed up by the room. He moves the flashlight around, spotlighting an old couch, an old coffee table, an old bookcase. There’s a wall forming a partition running left to right, in the middle of it a heavy iron door.

“This is where they died?” Peter asks.

“Patients used to call it the scream room,” Schroder says.

Peter looks sick. “I can’t believe there are things like this in this world.”

“Really? After what was done to your wife, you don’t think places like this exist?”

Peter doesn’t answer.

They head outside. The cloud cover has broken up. Without any light pollution, they can see a thousand times as many stars. Tiny pinpricks, some flickering against the night sky, an endless amount of worlds.
It’s beautiful
, he thinks, and for a moment, a brief moment, he thinks what it would be like to lie on the ground with his wife and stare up at them. It is, he realizes, the first time he’s missed her.

The moment doesn’t last. He pops open the trunk. Bevin has woken up, but the gag is keeping him quiet and the plastic ties are stopping any attempt of escape. Even so he’s squashed so tightly in the trunk against his dead brother he couldn’t have moved anyway. They pull him out and let him bounce off the bumper onto the ground, a grunt making it through the gag, then they pick him up and between them carry him to the scream room with the big iron door. They dump him on an old cot shoved against the wall. Collard straightens himself until he’s sitting up with his feet on the ground. His hands are still bound behind him. There’s blood dripping down them from where he’s been struggling.

Schroder hands the flashlight towards Peter. It’s solid and holds six batteries and is used by security guards to make shadows disappear and crack skulls.

“Now what?” Peter asks.

“Now you get your five minutes.”

Peter reaches out and takes the flashlight. “It isn’t how I thought it’d be.”

“It never is.”

“I mean—he looks so pathetic.”

There is something different between last night and tonight. Last night Kelly Summers was chomping at the bit to have her five minutes. Last night Summers was angry because Smith had broken into her house. He was going to rape and kill her. She was running on fear and adrenaline and the need to see justice. Most of Peter’s anger is still in the past, and any vengeance he wanted perhaps he got in the alleyway. He has to bring that anger forward.

“You’re not angry enough,” Schroder says.

“I’m angry,” Peter says.

“No,” Schroder says. “Nine years ago you were wild. Nine years ago if I’d brought you out here, you’d have made me pull over on the way just to break some of his bones and take a piss on him. I want you to do something for me.”

“What?”

“I want you to close your eyes for a moment.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s important. Please, just for a moment.”

Peter looks at him, then takes a few steps back from the room with Collard and closes his eyes.

“I want you to visualize what happened to your wife,” Schroder says. “I want you to imagine her naked beneath this guy, with his sweaty hands all over her, with him fucking her, with your daughter close by watching and crying and asking them to stop. I want you to think about his brother egging him on, about your wife crying, her broken arms and shaved head, about—”

“Enough,” Peter says. “What the hell is wrong with you?”

“He violated your wife, he laughed and grunted and—”

“Enough.”

“Your wife prayed you would come home and save her and—”

“Enough!” Peter shouts, and this time he steps forward and
shoves Schroder in the chest, and he lets it happen, taking two steps back to absorb the impact. “Go and get me the cricket bat then leave me the hell alone.”

Schroder leaves the flashlight with Peter. He takes the stairs out onto the veranda and takes another look up at the stars. The night has gotten chillier as it’s gotten closer to midnight. They still have plenty of time, but he would like to get this done soon. The sooner the bodies are found, the sooner Tate will see a pattern forming that doesn’t involve Kelly Summers. But for the pattern to stick, he’ll need a third. One is unique, two is a coincidence, but three is a pattern. The sooner he is done with this, the sooner he can figure out who he’ll choose for tomorrow night, then Kelly Summers and Peter Crowley won’t look like suspects. He heads over to the car and grabs the bat and returns to the scream room where Peter is pacing in small circles, his hands clenching and unclenching. Schroder can feel the anger radiating off him. He hands him the bat and is ready to jump back in case Peter decides blood from one man isn’t enough.

“Nobody can hear us, right?” Peter asks.

“That was one of the purposes of the room,” he says. “Close that door and nobody is going to hear a thing, not that anybody would—there’s nobody around for miles.” Peter rests the flashlight on the coffee table so it lights up Bevin Collard. Urine is dripping off the edge of the mattress onto the floor, and he’s crying. Peter takes the gag from his mouth.

“Please don’t do this,” Bevin says.

“You killed my wife.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Taylor. I tried to stop him, we just wanted to frighten her, that’s all, but your wife hit Taylor and got him mad and things. . . . Please, I’m sorry, you have to believe me I’m so sorry. . . . Things just got out of control. Shit, I’m sorry, okay?”

“Sorry doesn’t help.”

“You’re going to die here,” Schroder tells him, a little worried Collard’s act might change Peter’s mind. He needs to get this back on track. “There’s no escaping that fact. So ask yourself, do
you want to die begging for your life, or do you want to die like a man?”

“Fuck you,” Bevin says, looking at Schroder. Then he looks at Peter. “Please, man, please, think about this.”

“You hurt her in front of our daughter,” Peter says, and there are tears on his face, but there’s rage there too. Mostly rage. “You raped my wife and you broke our daughter.”

“Please—”

“You’re a monster,” Peter says.

“Please—”

Peter shakes his head. “You brought this on yourself,” he says. “You’re just lucky I didn’t kill you ten years ago.”

Bevin’s screams follow Schroder up the stairs and out of the room, and they follow him onto the veranda where he sits and waits and stares out at the shapes in the darkness, and then they end when the iron door is closed. He sits down on the step and looks up at the stars. Then he looks out at the fields and the driveway and then the car. All that darkness is broken up by a single light coming from the trunk of his car. They left it open after pulling Bevin out. The light is annoying him, and the last thing they need is for the battery to die. He gets up and moves over to the car to take care of that problem, only just like last night, things aren’t going to plan.

Taylor Collard has gone.