“So you won’t call him?” she asks.
“There’s just no point. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” she says. “Then show me how to put the rifle together.”
“It’s simple,” he says, and he picks it up piece by piece and attaches it, metal locking into metal, each piece making a satisfying click, him telling her along the way what each piece is called. It takes him less than a minute.
“Again, but slower,” she says. “Pretend I’ve never used a gun before,” she says, but of course she’s used a gun before, and she’ll be using one again soon too. Real soon. As soon as he’s finished showing her how.
He takes it apart. Puts it back together. This time it takes three minutes. He shows her how to load it. Then he takes it apart and puts it back into the case and shuts the lid and latches it closed.
“Anything else?”
“Ammunition,” she says.
He unzips the front of the rucksack with the C-four buried inside. Reaches in and pulls out one box of ammunition. “There’s two more just like it in the bag,” he says. “Point two two three Remington,” he says. “All armor-piercing rounds.”
“Thank you,” she says.
She shoots him twice in the chest through the newspaper, the silencer allowing the neighbors to keep on being neighborly without fighting the need to call the police. She knows shooting the guy who gave you the guns is somewhat of a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason. She figures that arms dealers, just like taxi drivers and helicopter pilots, always know they’ll never make it to retirement. He drops where he stands. The look on his face is one she’s seen before, a look of disbelief mixed with anger and fear. She puts the pistol back into the briefcase along with the newspaper. She goes over to the manhole and reaches in and finds another bag. It’s most of the original money she gave him. Which means he probably used some of it to buy the gun and explosives. This is his profit.
“I believe you,” she says, looking down at him, and he would thank her for agreeing with him, but all he can do is slowly open and close his mouth, a spit bubble of blood growing and shrinking. “If I can’t find somebody to shoot Joe for money, maybe I can find them to shoot him for another reason. Thanks for everything,” she says, “and I’m going to keep the bag too,” she says, holding it up. “I like the color.”
She guesses he has another minute to live, two at the most. She takes one of his chocolate bars out of her pocket and starts working away at it. She enjoys the sugar rush about the same amount as she enjoys watching Derek die. Which is a lot. She starts the stereo back up while he’s doing it and the world for Derek, just like The Stones warned him earlier, becomes as black as night.
Chapter Two
“You passed the test,” he says, and it’s just more bullshit that I’ve heard for the last twelve months, and to be honest I’ve stopped listening to it. It seems people have made up their minds. Somehow this topsy-turvy world has taken upon itself to convict me without even getting to know me.
I look up from the table I was staring at to the guy doing all the talking. He’s got more hair on his face than on his head, and I start wondering how flammable it is, starting with the comb-over. He seems to be waiting for an answer, but I’m not sure what he’s going on about. My short-term memory since being in jail has packed its bags and left—but my long-term goals are still the same.
“What test?” I ask, and I ask not because it interests me, but because at the very least it relieves the boredom. If only for a moment. “Joe isn’t not remembering test,” I add, just for fun, and the words sound a little over the top, even to me, and I regret them.
The man’s name, Benson Barlow, sounds pretentious, and in case you weren’t quite sure he even has leather elbow patches on his jacket to drive home the point. His thin smile looks obnoxious. In other times, better times, I’d cut that smile off his face and show him how it looked hanging all bloody in his fingers. Unfortunately these aren’t the best of times. They’re the worst.
“The test,” he repeats. He looks smug. He has that annoying look people get when there’s something they know that you don’t, and they’re dying to tell you and trying to stretch it out for as long as they can because they like being the only one to know. I hate people like that almost as much as I hate people who say Open mouth, insert foot. But, to be fair, I hate other people too. I’m an equal-rights kind of guy. “The test you took. Half an hour ago.”
“Joe took a test?” I ask, but of course I remember the test. It’s like he said—it was only half an hour ago. My short-term memory may not be that great these days when every day is the same as the last, but I’m not an idiot.
The psychiatrist leans forward an interlocks his fingers. He must have seen other psychiatrists doing that on TV or maybe they taught it in psych 101 just before they taught him how to sew on the leather patches. Wherever he learned it, he doesn’t look as good doing it as he must think. This whole thing is a big deal for him. It’s a big deal for everybody. He’s interviewing the Christchurch Carver for the people who want to lock me away, and he’s trying to find out just how insane the Carver really is, and he’s learning that I’m a big bowl of retard.
“You took a test,” he says. “It was thirty minutes ago. In this very room.”
This very room is an interview room that is an awful room by anybody’s standards, particularly by Benson Barlow’s, I imagine, yet is nicer than the cell I currently live in. It has cinder block walls and a concrete floor and a concrete ceiling. It’s like a bomb shelter, only one that would collapse in on you if a bomb actually hit it, which, to be honest, would actually be a relief. It has a table and three chairs and nothing else, and right now one of those chairs is empty. My chair is bolted to the floor and I have one hand cuffed to it. I don’t know why. They think I’m a threat, but I’m not. I’m a nice guy. I keep telling everybody. Nobody believes me.
“Here?” I ask, looking around at the different concrete views. “I don’t remember.”
His smile widens, he’s trying to give me the look that suggests he knew what my response would be, and I get the idea that maybe he did. “See, Joe, the problem is this. You want the world to think you’re mentally challenged, but you’re not. You’re a sick, twisted man, nobody will ever question that, but this test?” he says, holding up a five-sheet questionnaire that I filled out earlier, “this test proves you’re not insane.”
I don’t answer him. I get the bad feeling he’s leading somewhere with this. And the smirk on his face tells me it’s not somewhere I want to go.
“This question here,” he says, and his voice rises and makes it sound like a question. He points to one that was pretty easy for me to answer. Some of the questions were multi-choice, some of them I had to fill in. He reads it out. “It says What color is this dog? And what did you tick? You ticked yellow. The dog is red, Joe, yet you ticked yellow.”
“It’s yellowish,” I tell him.
“This one here? If Bob is taller than Greg, and Greg is taller than Alice, who is the tallest? You wrote Steve, and then you said that Steve is a fag,” he says, and the way he says it is enough to make me laugh, but the prospect of where he’s going is enough to keep me worried, so everything balances out and I stare impassively at him.
“Steve is tallish,” I tell him.
“There is no Steve,” he says.
“What have you got against Steve?” I ask.
“This test has sixty questions in it. You got every single one of them wrong. Now that takes some real effort, Joe. Forty of them are multiple choice. Statistically you should have gotten a quarter of those right. At the least, a couple. But you got none. Only way you could get none right would be if you knew the right answers and chose the wrong ones.”