Paul Cleave - The Laughterhouse

It’s a nice neighborhood. Dr. Stanton’s car doesn’t stand out here. Nice homes, nice gardens, probably nice people who would give you the time of day if you asked. It means he has to be more careful. There are still other cars occasionally going by, people coming home from work. Nice people tend to phone the police if they see strange men hanging around their nice neighbors’ nice homes. He looks at every window in view to make sure nobody is watching him, and when there are no other cars in sight, he runs onto the front yard of a two-storey house with large windows with curtains pulled across each of them. There are lights on inside, but there are lights on in all the homes and he has no choice but to try.

He reaches over the side gate and is able to unlatch it. It opens quietly. He listens for any signs or life, especially a dog, but there is nothing. The backyard has some light on it near the windows, but nothing near the fence line, and that’s where he heads, sticking near the bushes and making his way to the tree in the corner. He steps behind it. Something a few feet away moves through the leaves and he pauses, and even though it’s only a hedgehog or a cat, there is a moment, a brief moment, when he thinks a flashlight is going to light him up before a police baton knocks him down.

The hedgehog scurries off. Caleb scales the fence. He can see down the side of the neighbor’s yard and out into the street and the judge’s house is one house down on the opposite side of the road. Not a bad guess. He stays on the fence and waits. It’s dark outside and the temperature has dropped. He balances himself so he can rub his hands. Two minutes later a car slows down outside. It comes to a stop. Caleb stops rubbing and fixes his attention on the driver as the interior light comes on. The driver spends five seconds checking something, probably the address, before getting out. He carries the pizzas and only makes it halfway to the door before two people jump out of a nearby car, and at the same time somebody races out from the front door of the house. They close in on the pizza delivery boy, who drops the pizzas.

Caleb doesn’t hang around to watch anymore. The judge isn’t there, and even if he was, there would be no way to get to him. Whitby’s mother will be the same.

He walks back to the car, slowly shaking his head. He switches on the radio and listens to the news as he drives. The police have been to the slaughterhouse. They’ve found Melanie Stanton alive and well.

He punches the steering wheel. Octavia wakes up. He can hear her moaning through the duct tape. Caleb drives with no idea where to go next.

My headache has gone and there are flecks of vomit on my shirt that I’ve tried to wipe off with my hands. It’s five-thirty before I see the first of the patrol cars that Schroder sent out to the neighborhood, which means I’ve been leaning against my car for thirty minutes. I flag it down. The guy behind the wheel looks pissed off and ready to arrest me until I show him and his partner my ID, at which point he then just looks pissed off. I’m pissed off too and ask what the hell took them so long, and he explains it in two words-boy-racers.

We drive around the neighborhood with him doing all the driving and me doing all the bleeding and his partner stretching his head in every direction as he points a spotlight out the window lighting up the shadows. None of us are talking. Emotions are running high. There is no sign of Cole. During that time five other vehicles help in the search. The streets are quiet. Cole has moved on. I had it within my power to stop him. I was close, so close to getting Stanton and his other two daughters back.

In the end I’m in enough pain and there’s enough blood in the backseat that we head for the hospital. Dog bites are not something I want to mess around with. It’s almost six o’clock when we hit the edge of town, and another half an hour to drive the final few miles thanks to the boy-racers and their cars and their desire to be accepted as part of what soon must be called a gang, or a cult, but for the moment is simply known to the rest of Christchurch as a fucking huge headache. I’m angry at missing the appointment with Forster and Bridget. We pull up outside the emergency room entrance and neither of the cops walks me inside. The good thing about the bite is it’s keeping me awake. The bad thing is my shoe is full of blood. The waiting room is full of people who have messed up at some point during the day, they’ve hit themselves with hammers and tripped on power cords, school kids with broken arms from soccer, housewives who have walked into doors when dinner wasn’t ready on time. I show my badge. That and the holes in my leg give me priority to the annoyance of everybody in the room. I’m taken through the doors into a cubicle and told to take my pants off. A few minutes later a doctor comes in. He prods the wound with his finger and not a lot of sympathy.

“Looks bad,” the doctor says, and he looks bad too, with his comb-over and bloodshot eyes, his breath smelling of coffee. “You’ll have to stay off it for a few days, and you’re going to need some shots. I’ll get a nurse to come along and clean it up, then I’ll come back and stitch it. My advice is to stay away from dogs.”

The nurse is a heavyset woman with kind eyes and an even kinder smile. She tells me that I look like I’ve been through the wars. She tells me the wound is going to be okay, that the last dog bite victim she had to help had his nose, cheek, and ear removed. She tells me how sad that was, and still she keeps smiling as if she’s telling me how sweet her grandchildren are. She gives me two shots in my arm and both of them hurt. She finishes cleaning me up and I’m alone for ten minutes with a throbbing arm and throbbing leg before the doctor returns, other doctors and nurses passing in the hall, some looking fresh, others like they’ve been on their feet all day. He takes a look at the wound and nods. He injects it and waits a minute before poking a needle at it.

“You feel that?”

“No.”

“Good.”

Some of the holes are deeper than the others, some wider, all of them look about as mean as each other.

“I’ve been getting headaches,” I tell him.

He doesn’t look up from his work, just keeps on stitching. “What kind?”

“Bad ones,” I say, and I tell him about the attack that started them with the glass jar, and about what happened today.

“You need to see somebody,” he tells me.

“I’m seeing you.”

He shakes his head. “You know what I mean. Why haven’t you been to see anybody already?”

“I just figured they’d disappear.”

Finally he looks up in mid-stitch. “And how’s that been working out for you?”

“Not well,” I admit.

“You taking painkillers?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I have an addictive personality. I didn’t want to risk it.”

“Okay. So your plan was to never do anything about it, just a wait-and-see attitude, and now you mention it just because you happen to be here. Is that the same logic you put into your job, Detective?”

“No,” I say, breaking eye contact with him. I wish I’d never bought it up.

“No. Exactly. Just headaches?” he asks, putting down the thread and the hook-shaped needle. He reaches into his top pocket and pulls out a flashlight.

“Sometimes I get dizzy too. And earlier I couldn’t talk.”

“You were punched, right?”

“Yes.”

He shines the light into my eyes. “Both pupils are dilating normally,” he says. “What else?”

“Nothing.”

“Loss of time? Have you collapsed? Are you forgetting things? Loss of motor skills?”

“My arm wouldn’t work earlier after the attack, but only for a minute.”