Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘Kyle seems to look up to you,’ I say cautiously.

Fred laughs. ‘Cute, huh? He never knew his father, and I think for him I’ve kind of stepped into that role. Ridiculous, right? He’s practically our age.’

Actually, I think Fred’s about thirteen years older, and I’d be older still. ‘But he makes himself useful?’

‘Hundred per cent. He cleans and repairs the sets, and he does all the supply trips for us, picking up stuff that keeps us running. He delivers the flash drives to the post office for our mailout subscribers, as well. I don’t want anybody else doing that.’

‘Why not?’

‘Everybody else knows too much. I don’t want their faces on camera.’

I get it now. Kyle is expendable.

‘The kid knows what we all look like.’ I’m trying to keep the conversation going. ‘And our names.’

‘He won’t talk. He loves me and hates cops. I’ve also made a few transactions in his name, and the police are bound to find something at his old home.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like whatever. No one’s innocent.’ Fred says this like a mantra. ‘It probably won’t be enough to make the police think they’ve caught the ringleader, but enough that they can pretend they have. They get to arrest someone, we get to walk away, and Kyle gets to sacrifice himself for me. Everyone’s happy.’

If he’s telling me this, he and Lux must have been even closer than I thought. I need to tread very carefully. ‘Do the others know about this plan?’

‘No. But they’ll go along with it, when the time comes.’

We continue searching for a few more hours. Nothing but dirt and trees. No sign of the hiker.

‘I think we’ve lost him,’ Fred says finally. ‘You think he’ll tell anyone?’

‘I don’t know.’ This is true in every sense. I have no idea what the hiker was doing so far from the trail, how he knew my name or what he might do next.

‘It’ll be a shame if we have to move on.’ Fred turns, cutting back across our winding path towards the house. ‘But we’ve been living in a sandcastle. The tide was always going to come in eventually.’

‘Yeah.’

‘You’re with me? For whatever comes next?’

‘Of course.’ I think of last night, when Fred was about to push that button on his phone. Compared to the other Guards he seemed so calm, even as he was about to … do whatever the button does. Even now, talking about abandoning a business he spent years building, and he still exudes only an air of mild regret. ‘I don’t know if I’ve ever met anyone more in control of their emotions.’

‘Than me?’ Fred looks surprised.

‘Yeah.’

He smiles. ‘Well, my group leader always said you can’t choose what happens to you, but you can choose how to feel about it.’

I think of the moment I realised Thistle was gone forever. What I experienced in that moment didn’t seem like an emotion. It was a physical thing, like a flu, making my throat close up, my eyes burn, my stomach twist. No way could I have turned that off.

Fred thinks he’s more enlightened than me. I think he’s never experienced real pain.

‘I’m not sure it’s that simple.’ I watch a distant crow wrench the innards from a squirrel’s carcass.

‘Okay,’ Fred says, like he knows I’m wrong and will graciously allow me to stay that way.

‘How long has it been since you last went to group?’ I try to frame the question so if he’s still doing the therapy—and if Lux is supposed to know that—he’ll think I mean how many days.

‘Getting close to three years now,’ he says, giving me no clue as to what kind of group it was. Drugs? Anxiety? Grief? ‘Before I went, I had a lot of misplaced anger. I thought I was pissed at my wife, but they taught me that those feelings were mostly about my mom. By the time I left, I wasn’t mad at anyone.’ He glances sideways at me. ‘You thinking about joining?’

I wasn’t. ‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘You think I should?’

‘I think everyone should,’ Fred says. ‘Life’s too short to be unhappy.’

I wonder what kind of man Fred was before group therapy. Sadder, by the sounds of it. Maybe he felt guilty about running a dark web torture site. Now he can choose not to feel bad.

This makes me think I shouldn’t go to therapy. Feeling bad about the things I’ve done is my one redeeming quality.

When we get back to the house, Zara meets us at the door. She’s shaking, and there are tears in her eyes.

‘Samson is dead,’ she says.

CHAPTER 15

Someone hires me to discreetly take your things, even though they don’t want the things I take. Who am I?

I once worked as a cleaner at a motel in Baytown. I’d push a little cart filled with sheets, bleach and rolls of toilet paper from one room to the next, scrubbing and tidying the things inside. There were only two of us, and a lot of rooms to clean between the hours of ten and two. We didn’t have enough time to be thorough, which meant the carpets never got vacuumed and the semen stains on the dressers never got anything more than a cursory wipe.

I did find the time to examine any jewellery guests left in their rooms during the day. Anything simple, like plain gold wedding bands, I could swap for cheaper substitutes later. Diamonds became cubic zirconia. Pearls became plastic.

The other cleaner, Helena, preferred to clean the smoking rooms so she could work with a cigarette pinched in the corner of her mouth. She didn’t talk much—each morning she would give me a wary nod and scan me with her hard little eyes—but on my first day, she did warn me that I