Hangman Read online

  ‘Can’t say that they do.’

  The wind sweeps across the perfect grass and ruffles his grey hair.

  ‘Well, thanks for your help,’ Thistle says.

  ‘Anything for my hard-working colleagues at the Federal Bureau of Investigation.’ The guard opens the gate for us, smiling faintly. Thistle rolls up the window and drives through. I can feel the guard watching us as we turn onto the street.

  ‘I’ll track down the other guards,’ she says. ‘See if they’re more useful. You really think our kidnapper might be one of the other residents?’

  ‘No,’ I say, and point west. ‘Head that way. I want to meet Cameron’s music teacher.’

  •

  At the group home I grew up in, meatloaf was served every Friday night. Steaming ground shoulder roast, with Vidalia onions and apple cider vinegar sauce. Fat and juicy. Most weeks, that meatloaf was all I could think about.

  Meals were served in the garage, which was the only place big enough to fit all the kids. We ate at two trestle tables, which meant some kids sat back to back under the fluorescent lights. The floor was sealed concrete. After dinner we would sweep it, and Mrs Radfield would hose it down.

  One Friday night a skinny black girl named Arty sat next to me. I didn’t know her well—she hadn’t been at the home as long as I had. She was always humming, with perfect pitch but no rhythm, like wind chimes. She also had a knack for finding the best clothes in the donation bin. She was often wearing a floral dress, or some cool jeans.

  Arty wolfed down her meatloaf in seconds, not taking the time to suck out the juices and appreciate the flavour like I did. Then she grabbed my bread roll and threw it onto the floor.

  ‘Hey!’ I picked it up, and when I turned back to put it on my plate, my meatloaf was gone. I was confused at first. Arty couldn’t possibly have snatched it up and eaten it so quickly. Then I realised she’d switched our plates around. She was gulping down my meatloaf, and I was left with a lump of potato and a dirty roll.

  A smarter kid would have solved this problem verbally. Talked her into giving me back the rest, threatened her, gone to get Mrs Radfield, whatever. But I was watching my favourite dish disappear, bite by bite, and I wanted a solution that would get it back before it was all gone.

  My solution was to hit her.

  I belted her in the cheek, and she collapsed sideways off the bench. I slid over, grabbed the meatloaf, and stuffed it into my mouth. But I didn’t have time to swallow before she reared up behind me, crushing my throat with her forearm. I choked, precious gobs of meat splattering the table, and then grabbed a fistful of her hair and yanked at it. She screamed and let go of me.

  Meanwhile, someone else had done the smart thing and gone for help. All us kids wore soft slipper-like shoes, but I could hear a pair of hard rubber soles striking the path outside the garage, getting closer. Tock, tock, tock. We were all wired to listen out for that noise.

  Arty and I let go of one another. I neatened my hair, smoothed my shirt, wiped the food and drool off my lips, trying to look responsible and innocent. But when I glanced at Arty, she was doing the exact opposite. She’d scruffed up her hair, poked herself in the eye to bring out some tears, and kicked off one of her shoes, exposing a yellowed sock.

  Mrs Radfield saw us, Arty looking helpless and me looking sensible. Then Arty got a pat on the head and a third helping of meatloaf while I was sent to the Prayer Room.

  Later I learned that she’d gone hungry at lunch because someone had pulled the same trick on her. That’s what gave her the idea. So I forgave her for stealing my food—but not for the hour I spent in the Prayer Room. I was supposed to spend it thinking about what I’d done, but instead I spent it telling myself that nobody was ever going to outsmart me again.

  ‘Sorry, sir,’ the lady in the drive-thru says. ‘We don’t have meatloaf.’

  ‘In that case,’ I say, ‘I’ll have a double-shot latte with three sugars, a sachet of salt and a straw.’

  ‘Pardon me?’

  I repeat the order.

  ‘You’re not gonna eat?’ Thistle says. ‘Uncle Sam’s paying. Director’s orders.’

  He’s a notorious miser, but he makes sure I’m well-fed. ‘I packed a lunch,’ I say.

  Thistle orders a black coffee and a blueberry muffin. Then we drive to the pay window. I unwrap my lunch—a thick slice of defrosted meat. Nothing else.

  ‘What is that, ham?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You know, traditionally, a ham sandwich would have bread.’

  ‘I’m on the paleo diet,’ I say, my mouth already full.

  ‘Uh-huh. You know a latte has milk in it, right?’ Thistle digs through her purse for some change and gives it to the guy in the pay window. ‘Mr Burns is pretty stingy,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen him pay for a consultant’s meals before.’

  ‘Part of my fee.’

  She hands some coins to the guy in the booth. He thanks her, and she drives on.

  ‘You don’t get a fee,’ she says.

  ‘Where’d you hear that?’

  ‘I used to work in payroll. We don’t have the budget to pay civilian consultants. You work for free.’

  She looks both admiring and suspicious.

  ‘How much is the ransom?’ I ask, changing the subject.

  ‘Twenty K.’ Thistle takes the paper bag with her food in it, hands it to me, and drives back out onto the highway. ‘Hall’s already withdrawn it from the bank. She’s supposed to drop it in a dumpster behind the Walmart on the Northwest Freeway. Unmarked bills, two hundred twenties, a hundred and twenty fifties, and one hundred hundreds. Is that more salt?’

  I tear open a second sachet and pour it into my latte. ‘I like it how I like it. Does twenty grand seem low to you?’

  ‘Probably means they need the money for something specific.’

  ‘So they’re amateurs.’

  ‘Yep,’ Thistle says. ‘Especially since they gave her the drop location this far in advance, and they took Cameron’s printed photos even though we can easily get digital copies.’

  If they’re not professional kidnappers, they’ll be easier to catch. But it means Cameron is less likely to survive.

  I pass the muffin to Thistle and take another bite out of the meat. It’s salty, warm from the car and does little to put out the hungry flames in my gut.

  ‘Did they make the usual threats about what they’d do if she won’t pay?’ I ask.

  ‘Worse than usual. Said they’d nail him to the basement wall by his eyelids, nostrils and lips. Then they’d leave him to starve.’

  Imaginative. Makes my extracurriculars look tame.

  ‘Probably exaggeration,’ Thistle says. ‘If Hall doesn’t cough up the cash, they’ll get mad and ask again. Maybe for more this time. Then, if they don’t get that, they’ll just shoot him and dump him in Galveston Bay. No need for sadistic bullshit.’

  ‘So we’re looking for someone with a violent imagination, but no follow-through.’

  Thistle takes a bite out her muffin and swallows. ‘Maybe we should arrest Quentin Tarantino.’

  ‘Those aren’t real blueberries,’ I say. ‘Just blobs of glucose, dyed blue, set in dough made out of woodpulp.’

  ‘It’s not a fucking celery stick,’ she says. ‘I’m not eating it for my health. Mind your own business, Mr Ham-and-nothing-else-for-lunch.’

  She takes another bite of the muffin as she drives out onto the street. I suck my latte through the straw in short pulses. Sip-sip. Sip-sip.

  ‘Of course, they might have shot him already,’ Thistle says. ‘Proof of life is eighteen hours old. You know the stats.’

  I do. A kid goes missing every forty seconds in the USA. Most kidnappings are committed by family members of the victims, but four thousand six hundred people every year are abducted by strangers or loose acquaintances. And three out of four kidnap deaths occur within three hours of the abduction.

  Cops don’t say ‘deaths’ when they ci
te these statistics. They say ‘tragic outcomes’.

  I tell myself I’m worried for Cameron’s safety. But that’s not the whole truth. If the kid dies, I don’t get my reward. And without it, who knows what I might do?

  Thistle’s phone chimes. She glances at the screen. ‘Mr Burns says the housekeeper’s alibi checks out. The other agents all got nothing so far. It’s like the kid just vanished.’

  ‘Maybe we should see if he’s at Area 51,’ I say.

  ‘Area 51 is an urban legend,’ Thistle says, apparently not aware that I was kidding. ‘Like Slenderman, or the guy who eats death row inmates.’

  I choke on my coffee.

  ‘You okay?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, but my heart is racing. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Area 51. It exists, but it’s just a normal air force base. They test new planes there.’

  ‘Not that part. The death row thing.’

  Thistle flashes a wicked smile. ‘Oh, you haven’t heard that one? The government struck a bargain with a cannibal, and they use him to dispose of bodies after executions.’

  ‘Who told you that story?’ I ask, trying to sound casual.

  ‘The supermax prisoners use it to scare each other up in Huntsville. Better watch your step or a man from the government will come and eat you.’ She shrugs. ‘It doesn’t make much sense, but conspiracy theories never do.’

  ‘Right. It’s probably bullshit.’

  Thistle laughs. ‘Probably?’

  ‘Definitely bullshit,’ I clarify. Then I take another bite out of Nigel Boyd’s thigh.

  CHAPTER 5

  What has many keys, but cannot open any door?

  I was eleven when an older boy decided to beat me up because he didn’t like the way I was looking at him. It was the same way I looked at everybody—sideways and hungry—and probably lots of kids didn’t like it, but he decided to do something about it.

  He used to play basketball barefoot, his shoes side by side like spectators on the edge of the court. I rarely saw anyone playing with him. He would be alone, hurling the ball directly at the ground to see how high he could get it to bounce. One time it swished through the hoop on the way back down, and he beamed as if he’d put a grand on a winning greyhound. Until he saw me staring.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  I looked away quickly.

  He was walking over. ‘What the fuck you looking at?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  He knocked me down on the asphalt and started kicking me. Aimed for my face when I covered my chest and my gut when I covered my head. Since I was the weird boy from the refuge system, draped in piss-smelling donation-bin clothes, it was a while before anyone intervened. People were too scared to grab him, and too hygiene-conscious to grab me.

  When a teacher finally pulled the kid off, she sentenced us both to half an hour in ‘the sorting-out room’. He and I sat in silence on opposite sides of an empty classroom for twenty-two minutes while a different teacher read a magazine. I was dizzy, my nose bleeding like a gut-shot fox. Then we were released back into the playground, where he pushed me down again and emptied a trash can on my face. He yelled something at me too, but I don’t know what it was. I was completely deaf until three weeks after the beating.

  My hearing’s fine now, but my nose is still crooked, and my arm sometimes aches where he broke it. But my tongue has stopped searching for the missing tooth behind my right canine, which couldn’t be replanted because the root dried out. I still can’t afford a fake.

  At the time, I hated that teacher for not suspending or expelling the other boy. But now I realise that as an adult, kids look harmless—skinny arms and big eyes and innocent grins. How could they hurt anyone? They’re so cute. A few playground scrapes are nothing to worry about. Boys will be boys.

  I look out the office window at the students chasing one another around the football field. Maybe they’re beating on each other when I’m not looking, and the skin under their shirts is black and blue. Or maybe this is a better school than the one I went to.

  ‘Cameron isn’t in trouble, is he?’ the principal asks Thistle and, to a lesser extent, me.

  Not the kind of trouble she’s thinking, I’ll bet.

  ‘We’d just like to ask him a couple of questions,’ Thistle says. Her tone implies that Cameron was witness to something rather than the perpetrator or the victim. That’s important—she can’t lie, but nor can she reveal that he’s missing. There’s a list of people who are cleared to know about the kidnapping, and the principal isn’t on it. The truth might create a panic that would get Cameron killed.

  The principal is a small white woman with hair like grey cotton candy and a blouse buttoned so high the collar might just choke her. I could snap her narrow, flimsy bones with my bare hands.

  I close my eyes, forcing the image away. It’s the drone of the air conditioning, sapping my focus.

  Outside in the corridor there are framed photographs of every principal who ever served here, all sitting on the same wooden throne. According to her plaque, she’s had the job for fifteen years. She didn’t have a wedding ring in the picture, but she does now.

  The principal’s office is not so different from Luzhin’s. Computer, filing cabinet, family photos. Maybe the more authority you have, the less important it is where you have it. Your office starts to look the same as that of every other bank manager and town mayor and light colonel in the country.

  Cautiously, the principal says, ‘This a drug thing?’

  ‘Not that we know about.’

  Her shoulders sag with relief. Some things haven’t changed since my school days—the staff don’t care how many fights break out, but if a kid gets busted with weed or shrooms, all hell breaks loose. Suspensions, firings, reporters hanging around the campus.

  ‘Is he a good student?’ Thistle asks.

  The principal nods. ‘Yeah, he’s really sharp. Hard worker, too.’

  The compliment sounds automatic. She probably barely knows him.

  ‘His music teacher is Mr Crudup, right?’

  ‘Uh…’ The principal turns to her computer. She types fast, but clumsy. Every third tap is the backspace key, because her nails are too long for accuracy.

  ‘Yes, Harold Crudup,’ she says. ‘You want to have a word with him?’

  ‘That’d be great. Where is he?’

  ‘He should be in the staffroom. He’s tall, African American, bald.’

  ‘Harry Crudup?’ I ask. ‘From the Smooth Candies?’

  ‘That’s the one,’ the principal says. ‘But you might not want to bring that up.’

  ‘A band?’ Thistle guesses.

  ‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Had a couple of hits fifteen years ago.’

  ‘And Mr Crudup doesn’t like talking about it?’

  ‘The opposite,’ the principal says. ‘Get him started on his glory days, and you won’t be able to stop him.’

  On the field, two boys are getting up after a tackle. One of them throws the ball at the other’s face, point blank. The other ducks and shouts as it bounces off his helmet. The coach blows the whistle, and everyone retreats to their sides.

  •

  Harry Crudup smiles like a grocery bagger: tired and distracted. His fingers tap out a rhythm on the arm of his chair. His keys are on his desk and have a miniature piano attached. Strange—I thought he was a guitarist. There’s no music in the air, but his head is bobbing as though there is.

  I’m focused on a different beat. A pronounced vein pulses on his temple. I can almost hear the thumping of his heart.

  ‘Harold Crudup?’ Thistle asks.

  The bobbing of his head turns into a nod.

  Thistle holds up her badge. ‘I’m Special Agent Reese Thistle, this is Timothy Blake. We want to ask a couple of questions about one of your students.’

  ‘Sure.’ Crudup gestures to a few empty chairs. We’re the only ones in the music staffroom.

  It’s a weird thrill, being this close to a s
emi-celebrity. When I was fifteen I found a Discman in a trash can near a shelter. The CD was still in it—a self-titled album by the Smooth Candies. I spent the afternoon walking around Houston with the headphones in my ears, pretending I was a rich kid dressing down rather than an orphan dressing up. All the while Harry Crudup’s voice crooned in my head: He can’t do the things I can, but baby, I ain’t your man.

  Now, that same voice is saying, ‘Nice to meet you.’ He talks deeper than he sings.

  ‘You know Cameron Hall?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘Yeah. Is he okay?’

  This is a hard question to dodge, but she manages it. ‘You got any reason to believe he wouldn’t be?’

  ‘His mom called yesterday,’ Crudup says. ‘Asked if I’d seen him. I said sure, he finished class an hour ago and went home, far as I know. Then some FBI guy calls me, asks the same thing. I tell him what I told her. Now you’re here.’

  ‘Ms Hall called you direct?’

  ‘She called the school switchboard. They put her through. I was just about to leave for a lesson at home.’

  ‘You do private lessons? What instrument?’

  ‘Any instrument.’ He smiles, revealing the gap between his front teeth. ‘Want to learn?’

  ‘You teach Cameron privately?’

  ‘No. What’s this about?’

  ‘Nothing you need to worry about,’ Thistle says. ‘But we do need to speak with Cameron.’

  I speak up for the first time. ‘Is he any good? On the trumpet, I mean.’

  Thistle shoots me a sideways look. She doesn’t know how that’s relevant. Nor do I, but it doesn’t hurt to ask.

  ‘Yeah,’ Crudup says. ‘He’s better than most.’

  ‘Who does he hang out with?’ Thistle asks.

  ‘He’s by himself mostly. He’s a quiet kid.’

  ‘Secretive?’

  ‘Quiet,’ Crudup says.

  ‘The kids choose their own seats? In the band?’

  ‘They’re grouped by instrument. Other than that, sure.’

  ‘So who does he sit with?’

  Crudup stares up at the ceiling, thinking, index finger extended. ‘The kid on his right would be Chrissie Porter,’ he says. ‘Sax player. To the left he’d have Jim Epps, on the trumpet. He’d be more friendly with Jim—the instrument sections tend to stick together.’