My Dearest Jonah (15 page)

As we arranged ourselves into our established formation, Pete strolled to the side of the house, slicing two wires with a hunting knife causing the porch light to buzz loudly once, and then fall
dark. We entered the cellar door, which opened so easily our elaborate tools seemed ostentatious, as though we’d arrived at a child’s party in tuxedos. The basement was a basic games
room – table tennis, billiards table, a broken old television holding a coat hanger aerial in the crown of its head, and a bar, which on further inspection, Michael declared ‘drier than
a nun’s cunt’.

We walked in uniform up the stairs towards the ground floor of the house. The rooms were cavernous and utilitarian even in the dark. From the hallway we dispersed, each taking a different room.
I found a locked door, which I would later find out in court was Mr Mayhill’s study, and the source of all that we sought. Herman continued in the living room, tapping floorboards and
checking for submerged handles behind the iconography that hung on each wall. Across the hallway Pete took each key from the rack in the kitchen on the off chance they may be of use. Michael stood
in an open doorway silently. I saw him enter the room without warning. Curious as to his unlikely restraint I followed him through the door, which had closed silently behind him.

“Found me some treasure of my own,” he said, staring at a small cot in which a girl of no more than ten lay, pristine and oblivious. He made his way towards the edge of the bed and
was stopped by my hand, which gripped his shoulder so tight I thought I felt it crack beneath the pressure.

“Oh come on Jonah,” he hissed. “Can’t a guy have a little fun around here? Call it a reward... candy for the boys.”

I gripped his shoulder tighter still and he grimaced in pain, his body jerking for release.

“Alright,” he said eventually. “But we already given away our reservations with St Peter. Don’t see what difference it makes.”

I was careful to shut the door behind me as we exited the room.

The cavalry had regrouped in the living room whispering plans when we heard the first shot. Mr Mayhill must have been silent as an assassin as he descended the stairs. The
bullet streaked past Pete, taking his ear clean off, and jammed itself into the wall behind my head. Pete fell to the floor. Michael yelped and fumbled for his gun. Mr Mayhill remained stoic in the
doorway, his shotgun glinting in the stolen light of the living room. There were more gunshots. The doorway where his daughter slept opened and then shut again. Michael rushed towards him and tried
to wrestle the gun from his arm as Herman bent down to check on Pete’s injuries and relieve him of his surplus weapons.

“Woah, Tiger that’s some kit you got there!” yelled Michael, holding the neck of the shotgun as Mr Mayhill struggled in the doorway.

Another bullet flew past me and caused a draft of cold air to blow over the proceedings as a window pane shattered to the ground. Herman stood up and then fell again at the sound of the third
bullet, slumping over Peter like a winter blanket.

I ducked behind the couch and pulled my pistol from my pocket, firing blindly into the air. Shrapnel and glass showered me as ornaments erupted into fragments that snagged on the skin of my
face. The white innards of the sofa began protruding like boils as something else hit the floor, and then silence.

I stood up slowly, my gun still poised. In the doorway Michael lay groaning on the floor, his face halved and weeping blood. Mr Mayhill pointed the gun at me. In the seconds that followed I
noticed that from my stomach a trail of blood ran steadily to the floor as though I were a burst pipe. Then, without words, one final shot rang out.

Mr Mayhill hit the ground still clutching his shotgun, as peaceful as he’d ever be.

I felt myself fall to the floor, grasping desperately at my exposed entrails with one hand as though trying to retain each diminishing ounce of myself. My hands soaked and my head became
light.

My final conscious act was the one that still haunts me to this day, and one that save the only other survivor of that doomed night you alone are privy to. God help me Verity, I crawled over to
where Pete and Herman lay and with some difficulty swapped my gun with Herman’s, doing my best to wipe the streaks of blood and fingerprints from both handles.

I woke two days later, handcuffed to a hospital bed.

So this is how I know Michael. And now, as well as yourself, he remains the only person who knows the true extent of my cowardice, and the sheer scope of my own wickedness.

Of course I was not without blame, even within the manipulated evidence I had created. And if, when barely out of your teens you are shot, you are forever held as a boy, though if at the same
age it is you found holding the pistol you are deemed a man and tried as such. So for the sake of a few days I, a grown man, was tried in what became one of the most prominent crimes of the
decade.

Luckily I was able to rise from the ashes of my own misdemeanours. The crime itself became further reaching than even I could have contemplated. Jack’s family circle was disbanded and the
extent of their wrongdoings examined forensically, until just about every member of his family was held behind bars. The newspapers ran pieces on the dark heart of America, of the world us boys
inhabited. And then the magazines latched on. We became symptoms, metaphors, the dark heart of the American Dream. Press coverage grew like tumours until more ink and paper was spent on us than any
movie star in the world. The highest lawyers were flown in, fuelled by prestige and publicity which - we were told repeatedly - was worth tenfold their waived salaries. Suddenly both Michael and I
found ourselves at the centre of an ugly drama in which the death of two broken boys and one innocent man took a backseat to a national debate on the nature of guilt. It seemed that the whole world
became a philosopher during the months of that trial; every moron with access to a pencil had their own idea as to who was to blame, and bar the odd exception it was seldom those with hands of red.
We were the media; we were our parents, our upbringings, our incomes, our area codes, our blood types, our diets... just about every single contributing factor was aimed squarely at us like
shields, until we became shrouded and immune to the glint of the limelight; surplus to our own carnage.

It was odd, I can tell you, reading back over my life as I awaited my fate. Odd when they’d got things just wrong - my age, say, when my mother was killed, or the year I finally left
school for good. Odder still when they got things right that only I could have known.

As someone who’d never even seen his own birth certificate, let alone a payslip or a bank statement, it was as if for the first time in my life I had proof of myself; like I had been
written into existence by excitable strangers. I can’t say that a part of me didn’t enjoy the attention. Either way I felt like suddenly I had been invented by the whole country that
seemed to have a better idea of me than I did. The inevitable upshot being that by the time our stories had been stretched and woven on the media’s loom our sentences were lowered to just
twenty years apiece.

Herman was nineteen when he died. Pete twenty-two. Mr Mayhill a grown man of forty-five; nothing if not halfway what he deserved. I can’t say I’m proud of what I
did, but then again I can’t say I don’t feel as though I’ve more than paid my dues.

On Friday morning, unable to sleep, I took coffee alone in the cafe amidst the nightshift workers who chewed the fat before returning, soiled and exhausted, to their daylight
beds. Halfway through my second cup Mary was readying herself for the start of her shift as the lights inside became nullified by the rising sun. A man in overalls went to pay his bill and left a
five-dollar note on the counter.

“I’ll double it for your phone number, precious,” he said, the ‘s’ of precious catching on his chipped front teeth.

“You could triple it and add six zeroes and you’d still be no closer to my specifics. Now if that’s all I can do for you... ” she scowled, placing the money into a
communal tip jar as her paramour left, face red and ego bruised.

Mary’s indignation towards the male gaze was now silently respected by almost all who frequented the diner. The lonely truckers who politely requested a private dining
experience were met with a steely dismissal, and one morning not long after I’d moved here I was served coffee in a cup dotted with blackened fingerprints. I stared at Mary quizzically - like
recognising like, though she was not to realise this - and she shrugged as if to say ‘it was all I could do’
.
Eventually when we were alone she began talking. Turned out a
gentleman on her bus ride home had allowed his hands to wander suggestively against the nylon of her overalls. After her polite request for him to desist went unnoticed, she had taken a fork from
her handbag with which she ate the same lunch every day (cottage cheese and pineapple, with a single wheat cracker) and tore four skid-marks of skin from his forehead to his chin. Thankfully the
gentleman turned out to be a prolific and still-at-large sexual predator, and so the charges of attempted murder were dropped. But, as Mary told me proudly:

“My Daddy was a hunter and his Daddy before him. I could pick a bird clean off a power line with nothing but a fork and my steady aim. If I’d attempted to kill him he’d be
dead.”

“You sure got a fine line in letting a guy down,” I said as she poured herself a small cup of coffee, which she took black and gulped hungrily.

“You could drop most of these log-heads from a high-rise and they’d still climb up and try again, dumb sonsofbitches. Say, you’re an early riser today, honey,” she said,
topping up my cup. “Though we don’t see all that much of you these days. Got yourself a little lady?”

“No ma’am, grafting like an honest man. Got myself not one but two sources of income.”

“Well you don’t do things by half, huh? We miss you around here. Don’t give us no hassle. Not like some.”

“I’ll try to make the effort,” I said, before remembering my promise to Harlow.

“Levi?” she said, surprised that I had asked, “Oh he’s a card alright. Hasn’t been in as much these days. I guess it’s getting too much for him, what with his
age and all. Last week he forgot his little notebook. I made sure it was returned. Boy, I tell you, it was something to stop myself from reading it. I think more than anything I just didn’t
want to ruin the surprise.”

“So he’s harmless enough?”

“As the next man who needs a stick make it to the restroom. Though you’d be wrong in thinking he’s as dumb as he acts. The man’s a copper bottom genius, has the money to
prove it too. They say he has over three million dollars in paintings alone. ‘The bard of small town America’ that lady from the magazine called him when she came round sniffing. Funny
that a place where nothing happens can get people so damn excited. Suppose there’s a lot to be said for recognising your own. He writes the little people so well you see, that way everyone
understands.”

“I heard he was a writer.”

“You heard? You mean you haven’t read it?”

“Read what?”

“Oh you must! He wrote us all so beautifully. We’re all in there. The coffee shop, Main Street, the town fair. Of course he changed it all just so, you know, I daresay he
wasn’t so keen on the town taking him to court... or running him out with pitchforks for that matter. Some of the stories he made up... ” she laughed. “Phewey, he’s got him
an imagination. Had the sheriff shoot a man and bury the body. Have you ever!”

“Can’t say I’ve come across his work.”

“Oh he doesn’t write as himself. Uses a... what’s the word?”

“Pseudonym?”

“Penname. That’s it. Here, I’ll write it down, you can check him out next time you make it to the library. That is if you still do, now you’re a corporate big shot and
all.” She scribbled a name on a napkin and handed it to me. “You really should read the books. He wrote us all so beautifully. Especially you.”

“He wrote me?”

“Well, here and there. There’s always a stranger, always handsome, always full up with secrets... always gets the girl in the end too, even when he don’t deserve her, which he
usually doesn’t.”

“Doesn’t sound like my sort of thing.”

“Oh but it would be. How can you not? Don’t you at least want to know how it ends?”

“I’ve survived this long without his clairvoyance. Can’t say I’ve suffered as a result.”

“You know you are like him. The character I mean. Boy has he got you good.”

“What’s he like though, character wise?”

“You?”

“Levi.”

“Oh, an old fool. Hasn’t spent a penny he doesn’t need to. Wouldn’t tell by looking at him the man was worth more than the rest of this town put together. Has an eye for
the ladies too... I say ladies, some of them are barely much more than girls. And don’t they just eat up his promises! Sweet really. Why do you ask darling?”

“No reason,” I said, and paid my bill.

I arrived half an hour early to meet Michael, partly through nerves, and partly due to an eagerness to claim the shadiest booth available in the entire bar. As is turned out
the latter was overkill, the bar was empty save for the serving staff, yet still I felt the need to locate the darkest table in the room.

One hour and three beers later Michael entered, his shadowy associate trailing behind.

“Well aint this quaint,” he said, taking a seat.

I nodded.

“So Jonah, now that the shock’s worn off, how’s life?”

“Quiet. I keep myself to myself.”

“Not much changed there then. This boy... ” he said to Ed, “... this boy quieter than a praying monk. You never seen cash handed over as quick. Never so much as raised his gun.
Silent but deadly, huh pal?”

A waitress in tight blue jeans passed the table and Michael extended his arm to block her path.

“Two more beers when you’re ready, darling.”

“Sure thing,” she said, making her way back to the bar.

“So Jonah, what’s your line of work?”

I told Michael first about the sideline with Caleb, and then moved onto the details of my main source of income, carefully omitting the names of any allegiances I had managed to make over the
previous months.