He keeps grinning at me. His teeth look like they haven’t seen fluoride in years.
‘Sure is a nice place you got here,’ I say — and hell, maybe the day isn’t long enough after all, because here comes that personality clash. ‘You in the middle of renovating?’
‘Yeah. It’s a real fucking palace,’ he answers, but his laughter doesn’t have an ounce of humour in it. It’s as though he’s heard other people do it, maybe on TV or on the radio, and he’s trying to imitate it. ‘Somebody died, right? Isn’t that why they fired you?’
‘Where’s your son?’
SNobody knows. The police have been here all afternoon,
right? They’ve gone through this place and asked me the same damn things over and over, and my answer didn’t change for them and it ain’t changing for you.’
‘Your boy is guilty of something. Things will go easier for him if he starts helping himself here. Tell me where he is and I can start to help him.’
‘You’re a fucking joke,’ he says, sneering for a few seconds and then grinning like the madman he’s turning out to be. I feel sick knowing this is the man who covered my little girl’s coffin with dirt. Sick he was anywhere near her.
‘You can’t hide him for ever.’
‘You finished?’
I think about Bruce Alderman and how he was behaving while we dug up the coffin, and I think about him driving away in the stolen truck with the coffin sliding off the back and hitting the ground. I think about how he has perhaps behaved his entire life. This man was his role model. Maybe the world should be thankful there were only four corpses found in the lake and not a hundred.
‘You know, I am going to find him,’ I say, ‘only now it’s going to be the hard way’
“I don’t fucking care about making your life easy’
“I’m not talking about hard for me. You should have given him up, Alderman.’
Instead of getting angry Alderman starts to laugh again. ‘You’re just a fucking cliche,’ he says. ‘And on top of that, you have no authority here.’ He composes himself immediately, as if the laugh was as fake as the concern he’s displayed over the years filling in and digging out holes. ‘They never found him, did they?’
‘What?’
“You know what I’m talking about.’
I slip my business card back into my pocket. I’m glad he didn’t take it. I don’t want this guy touching my card; I don’t like the idea that my name could be in print anywhere inside this house of the damned — worse, I don’t like the idea of his fingers brushing against mine.
“I’ll find your son,’ I promise.
‘Ya think so?’
“I know so.’
He shrugs, as if it doesn’t bother him either way. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe he really doesn’t care, and that’s always been the problem for his son. Already I can see Bruce Alderman being found not guilty on a plea of insanity. With this man as his father, there isn’t a jury in the world who would be unsympathetic.
It’s been a pleasure,’ I say, and I back away from the door, keeping my eyes on him. He stares at me as if he is trying to unlock some great mystery. The only mystery here is how somebody so antisocial can have worked these grounds for so many years. He Closes the door.
“I’m ashamed at myself, angry with him. I came here to
intterview the bastard yet the only thing I achieved was to let him crawl under my skin. And I can’t take it out on either of us.
I reach the footpath, unlock the car and swing the door open.
And that’s when it happens. I sense it immediately. It’s a sprinkling of goose bumps that covers my arms and the back of my neck, and at first I think it’s just a residual feeling that anybody leaving that house would get; but then something touches my back. I know it’s a gun even though I’ve never felt one pushed there before.
‘S-s-slowly,’ he says, ‘just move s-sl-low-ly’
‘Where?’
‘Driver’s s-seat. Climb in.’
I do as Bruce Alderman says, trying to stay as calm as possible as he climbs into the seat behind me.
chapter eleven
Too much training and not enough experience. That’s my problem. Plus the training never detailed anything like this. It was more a general thing, like a commonsense warning. If a gun is pointed at you in close proximity, stay calm. Try to talk your way out of it. It’s advice I would’ve figured out even if I’d never learned it.
‘D-d-don’t try anything,’ Bruce says, so I don’t. I don’t fight for the gun. I don’t open the door and try to run. Don’t do any of this because it’d be pointless, unless the point was to get shot.
Instead I slowly adjust my body so I can turn my head and face him. The gun looks huge, but only because of the viewing angle and I’m not the one holding it. There are two hands on the handle. Both are shaking. A finger is wrapped around the trigger.