Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘Twitter?’ I guess.

‘Wrong. Twitter gets the credit, but the real reason was the price of grain got too high. And that’s just bread. People don’t even need bread.’

‘Right. They can just eat cake.’

He ignores me again. ‘Imagine what it will be like when it’s water. Something you die without. Every population rises up. Every government tries to suppress it. The death toll rises and rises.’

He says all this with increasing fervour, like he’s looking forward to the water wars. The veins bulge in his neck and his hands.

I’ve been thinking about the bullet wound in Samson’s skull. If the killer really wanted to make it look like a suicide, they would have forced Samson to hold the gun, then twisted his arm and made him shoot himself. That would minimise the risk of the shot missing, and would also put powder residue on the victim’s fingers.

I don’t know for sure that the killer did that. But I do know that Donnie is the only person in the house strong enough.

‘So how come you’re not a plumber anymore?’ I ask.

‘What’s the point?’ Donnie finds another camera and starts unscrewing it. ‘If everyone’s plumbing is gonna get turned off anyhow? So after Fred made the offer—oh, wait. You wanted to do this one.’

He hands me the screwdriver. There are flecks of old blood on the blade. I remember Fred’s voice: You don’t need all this stuff to hurt someone. You can just use an electric kettle, or a screwdriver, or a hockey stick.

I squeeze the grip. Now I’m armed and Donnie’s not. I could kill him and hide his body. The others would assume the hiker had done it.

But having the Guards search the woods again won’t help me sneak Thistle out of here. The opposite, in fact.

I unscrew the casing for the camera, exposing the battery. ‘What offer?’

‘I’m just like you.’ He claps me on the shoulder. ‘I saw a wrong and I tried to right it. The police got all in my face about it, so I came here to lie low.’

Donnie tells me that he saw a busted pipe out the front of someone’s house flooding the street. He knocked on their door, but they didn’t answer. He tapped on the windows. No answer. He knocked on the doors of some neighbours. One guy—a Black guy, Donnie specifies—opened up, but he didn’t know the occupants of the house and certainly didn’t have a spare key.

‘He just shrugged.’ Donnie gives me the new battery. ‘Like, “What can you do?” All this water spilling into the street, while half of California is on fire and rivers everywhere are drying up. And this son of a bitch just shrugs and closes the door on me.’

I slide the battery into place and seal the casing. ‘So what did you do?’

‘I went back to the house with the leaking pipe,’ Donnie says, ‘and I broke in.’

As he describes his method, it’s clear that this wasn’t Donnie’s first attempt at breaking and entering. He casually describes the steps, which include things only an experienced burglar would think of. He moved his pick-up so it wasn’t parked too close to the house, broke some branches in the tree out front so they obscured the line of sight between the street and the side gate, then rattled the gate in case a dog came running. He even pulled some condoms on over his shoes so he didn’t leave identifiable tracks. ‘You’d be amazed how far those things stretch,’ he says.

I wonder how many of the homes he visited as a plumber got robbed later.

There was a crawl space under the house, accessible from the backyard. Donnie slid back the bolt and wriggled in. Half of the space was flooded, and the other half was thick with spiderwebs. ‘You ever seen spiders trying to escape from a flood?’ he asks. ‘It’s like they go web-crazy. They turn everything above the waterline into cotton candy. I could hardly breathe in there.’

Donnie dragged himself through the mud and cobwebs until he reached the water main, and switched it off. The water stopped. When the occupant returned, they would notice that their faucets didn’t work and their toilet didn’t flush, and they would call a plumber, who would turn on the main and immediately spot the leak. Problem solved. Maybe Donnie would even get the job.

Then a gun went off above his head.

‘Turns out there was someone home,’ he says. ‘Can you believe that? She was too scared to open the door when I knocked. Social anxiety or some bullshit like that. So she saw me out the window climbing over the gate, and when she heard me crawling around under the house, her solution was to go get a gun and start shooting into the fucking floor. I nearly shat my pants, and crawled out of there as fast as I could. But after the second shot, she stops firing and starts screaming. Get this: she literally shot herself in the foot. I mean, not directly, it was a ricochet—but can you imagine?’

Donnie doubles over, laughing too hard to continue the story.

‘What happened after that?’ I ask.

Donnie wipes some tears from his eyes. ‘So the Black guy next door, he hears the gunshots and calls the police. Now he cares, right? I was already gone by the time they got there, but he took down my licence plate number, because he thought I was the one shooting. So the cops pick me up later. I tell them the truth, but they decide to press charges for breaking and entering—even though I was only trying to help. I get pulled up in front of a lady judge. I already had a suspended sentence for aggravated assault, so the judge puts me away for eighteen months.’