Donna Tuhiwai opened her eyes and lay still. She was back in the dream. This time she didn’t ask questions. She didn’t want to be forced away. She would keep her thoughts to herself. She would observe, nothing more. She would watch the dream like a television. She would be good. Then maybe the dream would let her go and she could wake up.
She studied the man on the bench in front of her. Rumpled clothes, like they had been slept in. Unshaven face, deep hooded eyes, weak chin, thick mustache, hollow cheeks, balding head with a scabbing cut over the right ear, like he’d fallen down recently. Not a nice face.
His clothes were spotty and stained, dark pants, open flannel shirt and a black tee shirt underneath. On the front of the tee shirt, sticking out and glaring at her through the open flannel, was the caricature of a one-eyed pirate and the word, Raiders.
“ That’s one of those American football teams,” she thought aloud.
“ Who said that?” She heard a man’s voice, but didn’t answer.
“ I didn’t say nothing, buddy,” the rumpled man said.
“ Then who did?” The man’s voice again.
“ Just you and me in here and I didn’t say nothing.” The rumpled man scratched under his left arm.
“ You sure?” the man’s voice said.
“ You hard of hearing? I told you, I didn’t say nothing.”
“ Okay, sorry, I must have imagined it. I’ve had a bad night and I’m having an even worse morning.”
“ I’m not exactly having a picnic here myself.”
“ What did you do?” the man’s voice asked.
“ So now you’re talking to me. All night you been sitting there staring off into space. People coming and going and you don’t say a word and now you want to talk? Well la-de-da Mr. Big Shot, maybe I don’t want to talk to you.”
“ Then don’t.”
“ I know who you are, Mr. Monday, Mr. Jim Monday. I know who you are and I know what you did.”
The rumpled man was looking right at her, but he called her Jim Monday. “Why?”
“ What?”
“ I said, I know who you are.”
“ I thought you said something else.”
“ Well I didn’t. I said, I know who you are. You’re a rich bastard. You’re in deep trouble and I’m glad.”
“ Why, what did I ever do to you?”
“ You made your money off the backs of the working class. You keep your workers down by paying low wages, so you can sit in your big house and drive hundred thousand dollar cars, while your employees can barely afford twenty-year-old Chevys.”
“ I live in a rather small house, I drive a five-year-old Ford and I don’t have any employees.”
“ You’re a millionaire big shot.”
“ I may be wealthy, but I’m no big shot.”
“ Oh, yes you are. The way people talk about you, you’d think you shit gold.”
“ Think what you want, I don’t need the conversation anyway.” Donna felt herself lean back and then it went dark.
“ Don’t turn out the lights!” She screamed the thought and instantly it was light again and she saw the rumpled man glaring at her. Then her eyes involuntarily roamed around the room. She saw benches, a toilet without a seat, a sink, bars. She was in a jail somewhere. She was dreaming that she was in jail.
“ Voices, I’m hearing voices.” She instinctively knew she was hearing the man who had been talking with the rumpled man, only now he wasn’t talking, she was hearing him in her head.
“ Me, you’re hearing me!” It was her dream. If the voice could hear her, then she could talk to it. Maybe it wouldn’t send her away this time.
Jim closed his eyes and tried to clear his head.
“ No, please don’t send me away again. Please don’t turn out the lights.”
He opened his eyes.
“ Thank you.”
“ Something wrong?” the drunk sitting across from him said.
“ You ought to try minding your own business.” Jim had had just about all he could take from the man.
“ Big man.”
Jim stood.
“ Sorry.” The drunk cowered back, pushing himself against the wall.
“ That’s your last word.” Jim stared down at him. He wasn’t usually like this. He’d spent the better part of his life learning to roll with the punches. It was like all the years since Vietnam were being washed away.
The drunk nodded, fear in his eyes.
“ Did you have to talk to him that way? It wasn’t very nice.”
Jim tried to clear his head.
“ No, I’ll be good. Please don’t send me away.”
He stopped trying to fight the voice. “Who are you?” he thought.
“ I am Donna Tuhiwai. I am asleep in the Park Side Motel, in Fungarei and this is all a bad dream.”
“ Great, I’m going crazy,” he said.
The drunk started to say something, but checked himself. Apparently he had no desire to tangle with a crazy man.
“ It’s my dream. I can hear you fine if you just think the words.”
“ This is not happening,” Jim thought. He knocked on his cast, heard and felt the knock, therefore this was happening. It was real.
“ I am Donna Tuhiwai, I am asleep in the Park Side Motel, in Fungarei and I am dreaming,” the voice repeated.
“ Where is Fungarei.”
“ Come on, it’s the biggest city in the North.”
“ Never heard of it.”
“ What pakeha doesn’t know that we pronounce “w-h” with an “f-u” sound. Whangarei then, now don’t tell me you don’t know where that is.”
“ No, I don’t.”
“ Who are you, Jim Monday?”
“ Right now I don’t know.”
“ Where are you?”
“ Jail, but you probably know that.”
“ What Jail?”
“ Long Beach City Jail.”
“ Long Beach? Where? In California? In America?
“ I am going crazy.” Jim got off the bench, started to pace the cell.
“ If you talk out loud, you just make that man curious. And even though this is only a dream, I don’t think I like him.”
“ This is no dream.” And to underscore his thought, he knocked on his cast again.
“ It can’t be real.” Donna thought.
“ It is for me.” Jim couldn’t put his finger on it, but the fact that she was in the same boat as him, sort of made the situation easier to take.
“ Then where does that leave me?” Donna thought. There was anxiety in her thought-voice. She seemed young.
“ I don’t know, where are you?”
“ New Zealand.”
“ You’re kidding?” Jim was stunned.
“ No.”
“ Let me think this through.”
“ Does that mean you’re going to send me away again?”
“ I don’t know. When I push your thoughts out of my head, is that when you go away?”
“ I think so.”
“ Where do you go?”
“ I don’t know. It’s dark. I don’t like it.”
“ Okay, I won’t force you away, but you have to let me think.” He sat back down.
“ I won’t think a word.”
Jim fought the panic threatening to rise. Somehow he was receiving a woman’s thoughts from halfway around the world. Unless, of course, it was some kind of an elaborate hoax, but that didn’t make sense. Who would do such a thing? Who could do such a thing?
He got up, started pacing again, five steps across the cell, five back. It was some kind of telepathy, he reasoned. It couldn’t be anything else. Somehow he was tuned into this woman’s mind. He remembered hearing a story, when he was a kid, about a woman who spoke Chinese under hypnosis. She was supposedly picking up the thoughts of a peasant woman in China. Everybody thought she was faking. She probably was. But this, this was real. He was hearing another person’s thoughts like they were his own. It was frightening and fascinating and it was something he had to keep to himself. One word of something like this and it was the nuthouse for Jim Monday.
And it would also be the nuthouse if he went around saying his wife’s lover was trying to kill him. He was sure of what he had seen in Kohler’s eyes, but it was possible for the doctor to hate him and not want him dead. He made a giant leap based on nothing more than his own feelings for the man. Maybe Kohler was innocent.
Even the rifle shot through the back window of the police car could be explained. Plenty of people hate the police. It could have been a drug dealer or someone high on drugs, who saw a squad car and took a shot at it for kicks, or maybe Washington or Walker had enemies, maybe somebody they once arrested. The rifle shot couldn’t have been for him. He was being paranoid.
But paranoid or not, David was dead and he was in jail, charged with assault and battery. How stupid, letting his emotions control him like that. Kohler was probably going to sue and he would have to pay, whatever the amount. The last thing he wanted to do was to go into court against Julia’s lover. No matter how much he despised the man, he still loved her. If they wanted more money because he attacked the son of a bitch, he would just pay it.
“ That’s dumb,” Donna thought.
“ It’s how I feel. If she wants money, she can have it. I can make more.”
“ I don’t know much about your situation, but from what I just picked up, it looks to me like your wife and her lover are playing you for a fool.”
“ That may be, but I just want it over. I want to get on with my life.”
“ Jim Monday.”
Jim started at the sound of his name, looked up and saw a uniformed officer and a young man in his late twenties or early thirties, dressed in an expensive suit, caring a black leather briefcase that matched his shoes.
“ I’m Monday,” Jim said.
“ I’m your attorney,” the man said as the officer was unlocking the cage. “We need to talk.” There was something about him Jim didn’t like.
“ My lawyer was killed about eight hours ago.”
“ All I know is that our firm got a call about you, then I was told to come down here and bail you out.”
“ Who hired you?”
“ I don’t know, but when old Mr. Cobb tells me to jump, I jump.”
“ What about the assault and battery business?”
“ Dr. Kohler isn’t interested in pressing charges, but there’s a small matter of getting the city to go along. You did assault a respected member of the community in front of dozens of witnesses, including, may I add, two police officers. If the city wants to go to the wall on this, we could have problems.”
“ So where do we go from here?”
“ It’ll take them about an hour to process your bail, meanwhile I’d like to talk to you, in private,” he said, indicating the man on the other bench with his eyes. “The city of Long Beach has been kind enough to furnish us a private room.”
“ Okay, let’s go.” Jim left the cell, following the uniformed officer and the young attorney out of the lock up area, through another set of doors, up a flight of stairs and down a well lit corridor.
“ You can talk in here.” The officer stopped before an oak door. He poked his head into the room, then added, “Wait a sec.” He went inside, came back with a chair, set in next to the door. “I’ll be right here if you need me.”
The young lawyer motioned with an arm extended, Sir Galahad style, for Jim to enter. He did and the attorney followed, closing the door after himself.
“ It’s not much,” the lawyer said.
Jim nodded.
The room was furnished with a folding table in the center, the kind usually found in campaign headquarters or at rummage sales. Around the table were three chairs, government chairs, bureaucratic chairs, one on the side closest to the door, facing the window and two opposite, facing the door. The lawyer laid his briefcase on the table.
“ Looks like one of those interrogation rooms you see on TV,” Jim said.
“ Not quite, but close. They use these for what we’re doing, attorney and client chats.”
“ And interrogation,” Jim said.
“ Maybe.” The lawyer held out his right hand. “My name is Jeff Turnbull. I’m going to try and get you out of this mess.”
Jim shook Turnbull’s right hand with his left, while holding up his right, letting the lawyer see the cast.
“ Police do that?” Turnbull asked.
“ I deserved it.”
“ Let me be the judge of that.” Turnbull took the chair closest to the door. Jim sat, facing the door, with his back to the window. “I have here,” Turnbull went on, opening his briefcase, “a legal pad and a pencil.” He lay a yellow legal sized tablet in front of Jim, handed him a pencil.
“ What am I supposed to do with this.
“ I’d like you to make a quick outline of what happened on Second Street this morning and the events that led to your arrest.”
“ What’s to write? A hit and run driver ran down my best friend. I went berserk and attacked the doctor that was probably trying to save his life.”
“ Probably?” Turnbull’s eyes turned to slits.
“ Was trying to save his life.” Jim flipped through the blank pages of the legal tablet, picked up the pencil, fiddled with it for a second, dropped it on the tablet.
“ Write it down.”
“ Why?” Jim met Turnbull’s slitted gaze.
“ You’d be surprised what comes to people when they put their thoughts onto paper. You might have seen something that caused you to act the way you did. Something that might have justified your actions. Something we can use to get you out of here.”
“ I saw and old, beat up gray, 1980 Buick Regal, balding tires, chrome rims, tinted windows, driver’s window down, dented front fender, strike and kill David Askew. Although the driver’s window was halfway down, I didn’t get a look at the driver. I remember the vehicle because I’ve always had a teenage-like interest in cars. I notice cars like horny men notice beautiful women. Not that I don’t notice beautiful women. I don’t think I’ll remember much more if I write it down.”
“ Humor me.”
“ No.”
“ I’m trying to help you.”
“ I’m sorry, you’re right.” Jim picked up the pencil. “Fortunately I’m left handed.”
“ Fortunately,” Turnbull echoed.
Jim bent over the paper, tried to put his thoughts in order, but before he had a chance there was a light knock on the door.
“ Can I come in?” a tall man, with a body builder’s shape trying to bust out of a yellow sport coat said. Jim couldn’t believe how ridiculous the man looked with his shoulder length, surfer-blond hair and paisley tie. The man had a nose three times too big for his face.
“ That’s the driver!” Donna thought.
“ Are you sure?” Jim thought.
“ You notice cars, I notice people.”
“ Are you sure?” Jim repeated his thought.
“ Look at him! How many people look like that? Of course I’m sure!”
The big man moved past Jim, picked up the empty chair and took it to the other side of the table, where he took a seat next to Jeff Turnbull.
“ Hi, I’m Richard Monroe, I’m going to help get you out of here,” the bodybuilder said.
“ Help kill you is more like what he really means,” Donna thought.
“ You can’t be sure,” Jim thought back, but he felt her conviction. He believed her.
“ You better do something, or the only place you’ll be going is the morgue. Yell, scream your head off!”
“ No.” Jim picked up the pencil, flipped open the legal pad as if he were going to write something.
“ What did you say your name was?” Jim asked, making conversation, hoping to distract the big man.
“ Richard Monroe.”
“ You’re an attorney also?”
“ Yes sir, work for Cobb and Cobb, just like Mr. Turnbill.”
“ Turnbull, the man’s name is Turnbull, not Turnbill,” Donna screamed the thought.
“ I know.” Jim repositioned the pencil in his left hand with the eraser against the heel of the palm and the pointed end sticking out between the two middle fingers. Then he balled his hand into a fist with the sharpened pencil sticking out like a deadly spike. He took a deep breath, held it, then jacked his arm forward, driving the pencil into the big man’s left eye and on up into his brain.
Death was instantaneous.
“ What the-” Turnbull screamed, but Jim cut it short by bringing his right forearm down on the left side of Turnbull’s head, striking the temple with the hard cast. Turnbull fell forward. Dead.
Though it had been almost forty years since he had killed, he’d killed a lot back then. Apparently he still remembered how. He stood and backed away. The two men were slumped down, heads on the table. The big one oozed blood out of his eye. The thick red liquid didn’t quite cover the orange eraser. A grotesque sight. Turnbull looked like he was peacefully asleep.
“ Are they dead?”
“ Big nose certainly is.”
“ How about the other one?”
Jim bent, touched two fingers of his left hand to Turnbull’s neck, on the carotid artery.
“ Dead,” he thought.
“ Shoot through!” Donna thought.
“ I don’t understand?”
“ Shoot through, before you get caught.”
“ I don’t understand the expression.”
“ It means, ‘Get the hell out of here. Take off!’”
“ And go where? There’s a policeman on the other side of the door.”
“ I forgot. Say, how come he didn’t come in when that weasel screamed?”
“ Good question.”
“ Better check.”
“ Yeah.” He grabbed the doorknob with a shaky left hand. His sweaty palm slid over it without opening the door. It had been a long time since he had sweat fear. He gripped the knob harder and turned it. The latch clicked and echoed throughout the room, causing the fine hair on the back of his hands and neck to tingle out a warning. He felt sweat under his arms as he swung the door open and poked his head into the hall.
The policeman was sitting back in his chair. He looked like he was asleep. Jim stepped into the hall and for a second time, in less than five minutes, he pressed the index and middle finger of his left hand against a carotid artery in a vain search for a sign of life. He found none.
“ Dead,” he thought.
“ Now what?” Donna asked.
“ Don’t know,” Jim thought back. But he knew he was going to have to do something, and quickly, so he grabbed the back of the chair with his good left hand, wrapped his bad right arm around the front of the dead police officer and dragged him into the small room.
He started back for the door, then stopped. Where could he go? Once the bodies were discovered, they would go to both his house and his condo. He put his hands into his pockets. No wallet, no money, no credit cards, they took them away when they booked him. He could hardly go to the officer on duty and ask for his property back.
He turned to the dead men.
“ You’re not going to search the bodies?”
“ Got any better ideas?”
“ No.”
In the inside jacket pocket of the dead Turnbull he found a wallet which held just under six hundred dollars, a driver’s license along with several credit cards, all in the name of Patrick Langley. He also found five business cards in the name of Jeff Turnbull, Attorney at Law.
He took the money, credit cards and driver’s license, leaving only the phony business cards. Any time the police spent trying to worry over who Turnbull really was, was time not spent trying to catch and crucify Jim Monday.
Next he opened Big Nose’s sportcoat and fished inside for a wallet. There was none. Great, he thought, one of those who keeps it in his pants. He lifted the coat off the dead man’s buttocks and smiled as he saw the telltale bulge in the left hip pocket. This man wasn’t used to wearing a suit. He slid his fingers into the pocket, pulled out the wallet.
Pay dirt, three thousand dollars in hundreds, plus another hundred in twenties. Thirty one hundred dollars. No credit cards. No driver’s license, only a business card in the name Richard Monroe, Attorney at Law. A false name for a dead man. Another problem for the police.
He gave Turnbull-Langley another look. They were about the same size. He took off his coat and laid it on the floor. Then he pulled the well dressed dead man away from the table.
“ What are you doing?”
“ I’m going to undress him.”
“ Oh my God. Why?”
“ My clothes look like they’ve been slept in and I need a shave. How far do you think I’d get walking out of here looking like this? But dressed in Turnbull’s clothes I’ve got a chance. His suit doesn’t look like it’s spent the night in jail, my clothes do.”
Without further thought, he took off the dead man’s coat. He felt a slight tingle run up his spine as he unbuttoned the vest and removed it. His hands trembled and he fought shaking fingers as he took off the tie and the white shirt.
“ Now the hard part,” he said under his breath.
He pulled the dead man out of the chair, laid him out on the floor. He untied and removed the leather shoes, leaving the socks. Then he loosened the belt, pulled off the trousers.
For a couple seconds he studied the dead man, wondering if he had children who would be crying tonight. He shrugged off the thought and undressed, leaving his clothes in a pile on the floor. He took another look at the bodies, then he put on the dead man’s suit. Everything fit, the jacket even covered his cast, but he grimaced as he put on the shoes, they were at least a size too small and they hurt. But his Nike trainers hardly went with the suit, so he stuffed his feet into the expensive leather.
“ You forgot the tie.”
“ I hate ties.”
“ You’ve gone this far, put it on,” she thought and he obeyed.
“ Time to go,” he thought and once again he started for the door.
“ Wait a minute. What about the policeman’s gun?”
“ They have metal detectors in police stations and jails, to keep guns out.”
“ Oh.” Then she added a thought, “Do they check you when you leave?”
“ I don’t know, but I’m not going to take the chance. I’m going to leave the gun.”
“ Then, let’s go,” she thought.
Jim opened the door, looked down a long corridor with several tall oak doors opposite each other, anyone of which could open and disgorge a policeman or policemen who could cut off his escape.
He stepped into the hallway and made his hurting feet move along the tiled floor. Sweat rolled down the back of his neck and still another chill crept up his spine. He tried to control his breathing by sucking air deep into his gut. He concentrated on swinging his arms in a casual, but purposeful manner. A man with a mission, but not in a hurry. A man with time, but not too much. He needn’t have bothered, because he reached the end of the hallway without incident. No police, no lawyers, no clerks, no one.
He held onto the rail as he went down the stairs, gritting his teeth against the pain the cramped shoes were causing. He had to turn right at the bottom, into another corridor, this one filled with people. He plunged ahead, passing them without acknowledging them. He might as well have been alone. The many voices and languages of the hustling police station all carried on as if he were invisible, just another attorney doing his job. The corridor opened onto a large room full of uniformed policemen, talking, drinking coffee, writing, laughing, doing their jobs. They paid him no attention as he waded among them, a fish among sharks.
A large room, many desks, two possible ways out. Which one to take? He had to decide. He couldn’t ask. Then luck attacked like lightning strikes. He saw his wife, on the far side of the room, talking to an elderly man in a cheap suit and a loud Hawaiian print tie. He stopped, saw her shake the man’s hand, turn and go through door number one.
He followed her into another hallway, moving faster in an effort to catch up. In spite of his trouble, she’d come for him. Maybe she’d finally seen Kohler for what he really was. Maybe she wanted him back. Maybe everything was going to be all right, after all.
He followed her out of the police station.
“ Julia,” he called, but the striking woman turning her head to meet his gaze wasn’t his wife. Even though she had been crying, her smile was too quick, too real. Julia hadn’t smiled like that in a long time.
“ Hello, Jimmy,” Roma, his wife’s twin, said as she smiled at him through her tears.