Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

him with my left arm. Do you know how hard it is to do everything one-handed? Every day my shoulder blades were a little further apart, my neck a little creakier. I used to limp around like a pterodactyl.’

It wasn’t a sudden bathtub-Eureka moment—more like a rising tide. A thought that became a notion that became an idea that became a plan that became an obsession, all in the space of one sleepless night.

She could kill someone.

She wouldn’t, of course. But she could. Penny had been a police officer for nine years, and a damned good one. She hoped to go back to it, once she worked out what to do with the kid during the day. Mostly the criminals were dumb as rocks. It was almost offensive, how little credit they gave the police. They barely bothered to cover their tracks.

Two years ago she had busted a car thief. Not knowing how to hotwire a car, he’d stolen the driver’s keys instead. Then he’d just driven the car around Houston like it was his. He didn’t take it to a chop shop. He didn’t change the plates. He just rolled down the window and smugly insisted that it wasn’t stolen, even when Penny pointed out that the real owner’s name and address were on a tag dangling from the keys.

Penny would do much better. If she committed a crime—hypothetically—there would be no evidence at all.

There was no sense risking her career on a petty crime. ‘Go big or go home,’ her husband always told her. He’d said it when ordering at the steakhouse, back when they could still afford to go to restaurants. He’d said it when they decided to have a baby. Then he’d left her alone with a two-month-old. He went big, then went home.

What would her method be? If she did this. Which she wouldn’t, of course. Thinking about it was just a way to pass the time.

At seven years old, Penny had started stealing tattered mystery novels out of the cabinet in her mother’s study. She had been convinced that her mother would be horrified to learn she was reading them, although when she became an actual police detective she realised how tame the books had been.

Her favourites were the locked-room mysteries. In Blood and Water, a man stabbed himself with a knife made of ice, hoping to frame his neighbour for his murder. The ice melted before the police arrived. In The Squeaking Pulley, the killer was a child, small enough to escape through the dumb waiter. In The Black Noose, the victim appeared to have vanished into thin air, but was later discovered jammed in the chimney—the killer had tried to pull him up using a rope around his neck and he had gotten stuck halfway.

Penny couldn’t read, these days. Reading required concentration. Concentration required sleep. The baby had taken even that from her. But she still had fond memories of those locked-room mysteries.

That had to be her method. A dead man in a sealed room, so the police would be forced to conclude accidental death.

It was hard to choose a victim. She knew so many lowlifes who had escaped justice in the corrupt Texas court system. But Penny didn’t want to cause any unnecessary suffering. She would pick someone with no dependents, no friends. Someone nobody would miss.

Pretty soon, she had narrowed it down to three men. One had punched his wife and received a reduced sentence after signing up for a twelve-step program and convincing a judge that his wife had attacked him first. Another owned a small building in which hundreds of tenants lived and ate for ‘free’—provided they worked with hazardous chemicals for twelve hours a day. The third candidate was a paedophile named Lionel Swaize.

In the end, Penny picked the paedophile, because she hadn’t been the lead investigator on that case. She had only met Swaize once, when raiding his apartment with a bunch of other officers. She did a mental walkthrough of the place. Where was the front door? Where was the bedroom? Had there been a lock on the bathroom door?

There had. She was sure of it. But none of this is real, she reminded herself. These thoughts were just harmless diversions, while she waited for Frederick to sleep.

Her baby screamed and screamed.

Eight months later, Penny was outside Swaize’s second-storey apartment, waiting for his shower to start. His front door had been repainted. Hopefully the interior layout was the same, and the lock on the bathroom hadn’t been replaced.

She didn’t think anything would have changed. She had been digging into Swaize’s bank records. He was living month to month. He didn’t have the money for substantial renovations.

She was wearing her workout gear. She’d signed up with the gym across the street, with the not-untrue excuse that the police gym was full of sexist, handsy a-holes. Today, she’d used her key to get into the gym and then slipped out the fire exit at the back. As far as the security camera out front was concerned, she was still in there.

This project had remained a game when she researched Swaize. It had remained a game when she drove past his building, checking for security cameras. It was a game when she requisitioned the snap gun for Friday’s raid on the brothel, even though today was only Wednesday. It was a game when she dropped off Frederick at her mother’s place this morning, not even really seeing him as he waved goodbye, already thinking about the murder. It was still a game when she watched Swaize pull into the parking lot, his hands still dirty from his job at the Texaco. Even now, while she waited outside his door, it could still be a game. She hadn’t done anything illegal yet.

A woman was looking at her. A neighbour, unlocking her door with a bag of groceries under