[David Raker 01] Chasing the Dead by Tim Weaver

Author:Tim Weaver [Tim Weaver]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241957400
Amazon: 0241957400
Publisher: Michael Joseph
Published: 2011-10-24T23:00:00+00:00

Zack had the car keys in his pocket. I took them out and headed back down to the road. The sky was starting to lighten a little, turning from black into grey, and grey into green. By the time I found my way back to their car, the green had finally become blue.

As I got in, I realized it was a week since Mary had first entered my office.

I was still barefoot. I looked in the mirror and saw I had a thin, deep gash right on the hairline where Zack had clocked me with the gun at the house. My face was bruised and battered, streaked purple and blue, and one of my eyes had started to close. My shoulder wasn’t broken, nor was my arm, but they both hurt right down to the bone. And I could see a knuckle imprint, close to one of my ears, where the man in charge – the man with the saccharine breath – had punched me in the side of the face.

I sat still for a moment and composed myself. Studied my reflection.

Who are you?

I wasn’t the same man who had worked that first missing persons case. I wasn’t even the same man who had woken up the day before. I’d killed twice. I knew that changed me; a part of me knew it changed everything. Suddenly, I was capable of ending a life; of looking into another man’s eyes and, for a split second, losing enough control to pull the trigger. Somewhere buried beneath the surface I’d discovered a man I knew nothing of.

A man who knew nothing of order.

I wondered, for a moment, what Derryn would have made of what I’d done. Would she still have trusted me? Would she still have wanted to lie next to me in our bed? Would she have been able to feel a change in me, a sudden barrier between us, as if there were two men now – the one she had always known, and the one she didn’t recognize.

I started up the car and turned on the heaters.

As air pumped into my face, I realized the thing she’d probably have been most scared of was that I felt so little for what I’d done. I’d killed, but I wasn’t a killer. I’d done what I’d needed to do in order to come out of those woods alive. I didn’t want to have to do it again, but I knew, in some part of me, if I had to, I would. They’d come for me, and when they did, I’d pull the trigger again. Maybe that made me less than the man Derryn would have wanted me to be. But this wasn’t about missing people any more.

This was about survival.

I looked at the clock. 7.49. They all thought I was dead now, so I had to use that. We must have been gone a couple of hours, and burying a body would take another couple on top of that. That gave me two, three hours tops before they realized Zack and Jason weren’t coming back.

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