Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

one arm. Penny turned her face away, resisting the urge to touch her Mariah Carey wig. She pulled her radio out of her backpack—from a distance it looked like one of those new cellular phones. She started a pretend conversation, affecting a thick Boston accent. ‘I’m at thirty-one, but no one’s answering. What?’ She started walking away. ‘You said thirty-one! Yeah, you did. Shoot. Okay, I’ll be right down.’

By the time she looked back, the neighbour had disappeared back into her apartment.

And Swaize’s shower had started.

After that, it felt like Penny didn’t have a choice. She was sure there had been a chance to turn back at some point along the way, but not right now, when she was standing outside a paedophile’s door with a snap gun and an alibi. It wasn’t a game anymore.

Penny slid the blade of the gun into the lock and pulled the trigger five times. There were five sharp clicks, and the door swung open.

She needn’t have worried about renovation. Swaize’s apartment was even more of a wreck than when she’d last seen it. People’s lives after prison were rarely better than they’d been before it. Empty TV dinners were piled on the floor next to the sofa. The sagging, tattered curtains were closed, but still let in a lot of light through the tears. A cockroach crawled out of a chipped coffee mug, which was on top of a porn magazine, which rested on a cardboard box with a picture of a microwave on the side. A cheap painting of some trees hung crooked on the wall.

As she crept towards the bathroom, the hissing of the shower got louder and louder. She could hear muttering, and a strange slapping sound—like Swaize was patting his belly in there. The oddness of this created a wave of revulsion. Later, Penny reflected that if he hadn’t been slapping himself, she wouldn’t have been so strangely sickened and she might not have gone through with it. His death was his own fault, in so many ways.

She slowly twisted the handle, so only the little slide bolt held the door closed. She couldn’t kick it while holding the handle down. Instead, she took a deep breath, and shoulder-barged the door.

The slide bolt didn’t break. The door stayed closed, but there was a loud thud.

Inside the bathroom, Swaize said, ‘What the hell?’

Panicked now, Penny barged the door again. This time it burst open. The slide bolt went flying and jingled its way across the tiles into the corner of the room. Swaize was opening the shower curtain. He was white, with skinny limbs but an inflated gut, and hairy nipples on an otherwise bare chest. When he saw her, he instinctively covered his crotch, as though that was what she was after.

Filled with terror instead of righteous rage, Penny charged at him. They were barely a yard apart. Not much of a run-up. It didn’t matter. She tackled him, one hand on his shoulder, the other on his face. The hot water got in her eyes, so she didn’t see his head hit the wall, but she felt the impact in her palm, and heard the crack. His legs buckled, but didn’t go limp the way she had expected. Penny scrambled up and backed away as Swaize crawled around the floor of the tub as slowly as a starfish for a minute that felt like an eternity. He eventually slumped sideways and looked up at her, uncomprehending. Water droplets splashed his eyeballs. When he didn’t blink, Penny realised he was dead.

There was a sense of unreality, like this might all be a dream, as Penny went back into the living room, wiping her palms on her spandex pants. She picked up the remote and turned on the TV. She needed something to explain the yelling. There was a documentary on, something about the giant Pacific octopus. A stern-voiced narrator was describing how the octopuses squirt their eggs into the ocean and never meet their young. The narrator got louder and louder, shouting at Penny as she turned the volume up to maximum.

Penny realised she’d just put her fingerprints on the remote. She went to clean them off with a wet wipe from her bag but stopped herself just in time. A remote with no prints on it would be even more suspicious. She’d have to say in her report that she turned it off when she arrived.

She walked back into the bathroom.

Swaize had moved. Or had he? She didn’t remember him lying in that position. Perhaps he wasn’t dead.

She put a finger to his neck. Couldn’t feel a pulse.

She grabbed the cake of soap—it was tiny, like he’d taken it from a hotel—and rubbed it on the soles of his feet. No movement. If he was alive, he wasn’t ticklish.

Penny had arrested some killers who shot their victims twenty times, and others who kept hitting them with a baseball bat long after they were dead. She used to think of it as bloodlust. But now she understood. There was an urge, having reached the point of no return, to make sure.

She rubbed some soap on the floor, too, making it extra slippery, but avoided the puddle of blood growing under his head. That needed to stay undisturbed. Even a half-decent crime scene investigator would become suspicious if the puddle looked smudged.

Penny didn’t have a sense of how long she’d spent in the apartment. It was as though time had stopped along with Swaize’s heart.

But then there was a knock at the front door. ‘Lionel? You okay?’

The hairs on the back of Penny’s neck stood up. Had she locked the front door behind her? She didn’t think so. Hadn’t thought of it. Planning the perfect crime had been easy in the abstract. Now she was actually here, and it was messy.

Another knock. Probably the neighbour she’d seen