Chris Mooney - The Dead Room

There, a faint pulse.

'N-N-N-Names!'

Jamie shook him. He stared up at her, his head bobbing from side to side.

She slapped him across the face.

He groaned. His lips quivered.

'TELL… AH… TELL ME.'

Ben didn't answer but his lips kept moving. Blood trickled out of his ears. He was bleeding out. Dying. The answers she needed were caged somewhere inside his skull and she wouldn't know them unless Ben woke up. He had to wake up.

She pressed her mouth against his, the slick, bloody mess sliding against her lips, and screamed air into his lungs until she was dizzy. She pulled her mouth away, gagging, then pumped his chest with her fists the way she'd been taught – three sharp pumps. Ben didn't move or make a sound. She screamed air down into his lungs again. Ben lay still. Jamie pounded his chest with her fists and he didn't move and she kept hitting him and screaming for him to wake up even though she knew it was too late.

Jamie scrubbed the blood from her face and her scraped and swollen hands using napkins and a half-full bottle of water she'd found in a McDonald's bag tossed on the back floor of the Honda.

She checked her face in the side mirror. The left side was swollen but clean. She couldn't do anything about the blood on her clothes and sneakers until she got home.

You better pray to God you don't get pulled over.

She tossed the bloody napkins inside the boot. Ben stared up at her with a puzzled expression. Why so sad, hon? Did you really think I was going to tell you what you needed to know? You were going to kill me anyway, so what was in it for me?

Ben could have told her everything and she still would have killed him. She had known that the second she decided to follow him from the drugstore.

Jamie reached inside the boot, pinched his eye and came away with a bright blue contact lens. Ben's real eyes were brown, just as she remembered.

She searched his zippered pockets and found a Tiffany key ring and wallet. She wondered if one of the keys opened the house in Charlestown. Maybe the fat guy in the Hawaiian shirt lived there. Maybe he was the man who had killed her husband.

She stuffed Ben's things in her pockets. Slammed the boot lid shut, placed her hands on the bumper and started to push. The damp ground was muddy but sloped forward and after a moment the car started to pick up speed.

I'll let you in on a secret, Ben had told her. I'm a cop.

Bullshit. An undercover cop or Fed wouldn't have forced his way inside a house and shot two children in cold blood. A cop wouldn't have allowed two men to shove someone's hand inside a running waste-disposal unit and wrap a noose around their neck. A cop wouldn't have broken into a house and slit a woman's throat. Ben had made it up, a last-ditch attempt to spare his life.

The front tyres dripped over the edge. Jamie gave a final push and let go. She stood hunched forward with her hands on her knees, sweating and sucking in the muggy night air as the car disappeared from her view.

For a moment the only sounds she heard were the crickets chirping from the woods. Then a loud splash that sounded far away, as though it was happening in another place, at another time. Standing at the cliff's edge, she watched the car being swallowed inside a cyclone of silver moonlit bubbles. Growing up in Belham, she remembered the time some drunk had fallen over in the water. For days divers searched for the man's body. It was never found.

Her muscles tensed and her skin grew cold. What if the car didn't sink? What if the water was too shallow? In the evening's chaos she hadn't thought through that possibility.

All her worrying, it turned out, was for nothing. The car sank below the black water shivering with moonlight. The surface grew calm again.

She headed towards the path, hot and uncomfortable underneath the bloody windbreaker. She wished she could take it off but it covered the shoulder holster and Ben's Glock, which was wedged in the back of her jeans. The extended magazine kept digging into her lower back.

She had a long walk ahead of her. She had parked on Kale, a busy neighbourhood off Blakely full of other suburban homes with minivans much like her own. She knew she couldn't watch him from the neighbourhood – too risky, too exposed; plus Ben or his partner had started drawing the front shades of the house. Fortunately, she knew Belham and knew where to park.

Jamie hoped the teenager was okay.

She hadn't known he was inside, not at first. Standing in the hot, dark woods behind the house, she had debated about moving to the back fence for a closer view, then ruled it out. The homes were too close together. Someone might be watching from a window, see her and call the police. Safer to watch from inside the woods.

In addition to the Magnum, she'd brought the small pair of binoculars she kept in the back of the minivan. (Michael liked to use them; Dan had bought them for sporting events and those rare times he went hunting. She kept them in the glovebox.) From her vantage point she could see only part of the kitchen. She had an excellent view of the sliding glass door leading into the living room and for a long time watched Ben search every inch of the room, even going so far as to cut the chair and sofa cushions. Not once did she see the teenager tied down to the chair.

That changed later, when she heard a car pull into the driveway, and the mechanical chug as the motor hauled up the garage door.

Jamie remembered trying to find a new vantage point. The tree limbs kept obstructing her view. Walking through woods in the dark, in a hurry and without the aid of a flashlight, wasn't desirable. She kept tripping and bumping into things. It was slow, tedious work.

By the time she'd found a new spot, the blonde-haired woman in the blue T-shirt was taped down to a chair seated across from her son, their eyes covered with duct tape. The boy's mouth was taped shut but not the woman's; Jamie could see her screaming as the man with the suit started breaking her fingers. Ben stood behind him holding a barber's straight-edged razor.

Jamie reached for her phone, then remembered she'd left it in the minivan. It didn't matter. Even if she had brought it, by the time she stammered through the 911 call the woman and boy would be dead. Ben had just cut off one of the woman's fingers.

Jamie's first thought – and it shamed her to admit this – was evidence. As a former cop, her fingerprints were stored on a database. She couldn't leave her prints or any other evidence for the police to find; she had to protect her children. She fumbled at her zippered pocket for the latex gloves.

What happened next came back to her in a series of flashes: running down the incline, slipping and falling. Getting up and tripping again. Finally finding the gate. Unzipping her jacket, grabbing the Magnum and sprinting across the lawn. Moving quietly up the back steps, not wanting to alert Ben and his partner, then discovering that the sliding glass door was locked. The woman screaming. Two shots and the glass shattering. Climbing inside. From the living room, firing two shots at the suited man, hitting him in the stomach. Swinging the Magnum to Ben and seeing the woman's cut throat. A shot to the thigh and Ben falling backwards, on top of the boy, tipping over the chair. Kicking Ben in the stomach and then grabbing the handcuffs from the suited man lying on the floor, bleeding out of his chest. Wrestling Ben on the floor and cuffing him. Then picking up the spent brass.

A quick search of the woman's pockets revealed the set of keys for the Honda. With Ben cuffed and taped inside the boot, Jamie came back, picked up the straight-edged razor and cut through the boy's bindings. She left the strips of tape covering his eyes, placed the cordless phone she'd found on the floor in his hand and ran fast to the waiting car.