The Sudden Dark

Ten

I did a few easy cruises of the Sumner house, making it to the end of the quiet street, hanging a turn, going back. It looked the same from every angle of observation: a paint-chipped, sun-beaten, untended bungalow with a pitted steel roof, laid on the edge of an outer suburban rim. There was no car parked outside or anywhere close down the street. There was no light inside, and no movement at the windows.

I parked up the street and went carefully down the footpath towards the house. There was police tape stretched across the front door and, to my surprise, a real estate sign already staked in the front yard. I stalked down the empty driveway flattened into the grass running alongside the house.

I peered around the rear, and found the back door hanging open, the police tape cut.

I didn't know whether I should make a sound or not—there might've been someone inside who shouldn't have been, just like myself. The answerer of the phone, maybe. Or it might've been a police detective doing a last comb of the scene.

I didn't knock. I didn't call out. I went through the door, my boots squeaking hard on the wood floor, and with every expectation that I'd be running in a flash at the split moment of danger or discovery.

I haunted through the house with silent caution, not knowing what I was looking for other than anything.

As I came down the hallway and creaked into the door to the living room, I was stopped at the sudden feel of something coming from behind and pressing into my back. Something hard.

'Alright, buddy. Let's just go easy on now. Don't be an idiot.'

I didn't respond. I raised my hands slowly into the air and let the man lead me with the blunt end of his gun in my spine deeper into the room.

I made myself stone still. He spread my feet apart and patted me down: pockets, arms, chest, legs, ankles. I had nothing for him to confiscate. He stepped back, and I saw a motion in the corner of my eye that told me to sit on the couch.

He sat on the armchair across the slim coffee table from me, keeping his gun on his knee and his spine arched forward. He was big, and broad, and tall. He had red hair that had been shaved down sharp to the scalp of his round head, rough skin, broad features, wisps of peachy facial hair at his heavy jaw. He was wearing solid black and heavy work boots.

I passed my eyes carefully around the room without taking them from the man with the gun. The house was a scattered mess, probably in the process of a ransack.

'You're a cop,' the man said.

I shook my head, not lying.

'No? A P.I., then.'

Shook my head again.

'Can't be some bloody concerned citizen. You knew Frank, huh?'

'I met him once,' I said. 'Briefly.'

'That so? But I reckon you didn't become fast friends or nothin'. So, tell me—who the fuck do you know?'

'No one,' I said. 'I don't know anyone. I met Frank the day before yesterday.'

'The day he choked it,' the man added.

I nodded. 'I also met Clive Reed on that day. Also quick, before we could be friends. But you're friends with him, aren't you? You thought he was calling.'

The man smiled a little with his big lips, colouring them darker than the deep tan of the rest of his skin. 'Don't go thinking you're Dick Tracy or anything.' 

He stood and backed away from the chair, across the room, with the eye of the gun still looming hard in my direction. With his other hand he reached into the clutter of a desk drawer and removed a polaroid from inside. He threw it across to me.

The picture was of Frank Sumner and Clive Reed standing with their arms over each other, in front of the narrow doorway to the Shooting Star and draped in glaring neon. They both looked younger than what I'd seen of them two days before, and the picture had a fade of time as well.

'Buddy-buddy, huh?' I said, as the man came back to the armchair. 'If I kept looking, would I find a picture of you with them as well?'

'You can keep looking, but there ain't nothing else here. I checked.'

'What were you checking for? The kid?'

The man's clay-molded face hardened. 'You know where the kid is? Tell me.'

'I have no idea,' I said. 'I came here to see if I could find out. I'm guessing you did as well.'

He relaxed back into the chair, but kept his thick finger primed by the trigger guard of the gun. 'He's with the little slut, isn't he?'

'I reckoned so,' I said without giving him much reaction, 'but I can't find her either. She's Clive's daughter?'

The man laughed, low and guttural, like thick rain shattering down a rusty pipe. 'That's what he told you? That filthy bugger.'

'Why're you looking for Markwell, then? Is it about the girl? The money he stole?'

The man shook his head slowly. 'Nuh-uh. You don't know where he is, so you're no bloody use to me. You're lucky that I don't know you're not a cop, at least, so it's gonna go like this: I walk out the door, and you count a solid thirty seconds before you leave too. You come out before that thirty seconds is up—spy a peek at me, follow where I'm going, anything like that—I shoot you down in the street no second thoughts. Understand?'

I didn't nod. Didn't shake my head. Didn't move.

The man stood slowly and backed out of the room and down the hallway. The gun was facing toward me until it disappeared through the kitchen and out the back door.

I obeyed him. I counted a long, long thirty seconds.

...twenty-eight...twenty-nine...thirty.

I went through the back door and onto the street. There was nobody around, no car that was missing. I walked back up the footpath and drove home.