Hideout by Jack Heath (iphone ebook reader txt) 📕

‘Hello?’ she called out again. She walked to the open bathroom door.

The body was gone.

Penny choked on her own spit. She moved a little further into the room. There it was, thank God. The body had just slumped down a little further into the tub. Softening—rigor mortis wouldn’t start for hours yet. The blood had all but washed away.

Penny knocked on the open door and called out, ‘Mr Swaize?’ She made eye contact with the dead body as she did it. Like she could wake him up. Part of her wanted to undo this. No, that wasn’t quite right—part of her wanted to want to undo this. To be the kind of person who couldn’t kill a stranger in cold blood. Or tepid blood, at least, she thought, recalling the surge of panic leading up to his death.

If wishes were horses, her ex would have said.

Penny shoulder-barged the door so the neighbour would hear the thump. Then she pulled out her radio. ‘Dispatch? I got a dead body here. Looks accidental, but send forensics. You never know.’

Albert, the guy from the gym, did call her in the end. The baby ruined their date by crying pretty much constantly. Penny couldn’t even drink her coffee, because the caffeine would get into her breast milk and keep the baby awake. Albert was talking about his job, and Penny got a sense that all his anecdotes were witty, but because she was distracted by the baby she only really learned that he was a paralegal. Convenient, she thought. I might need an attorney. All the forensics seemed to think Swaize’s death was an accident, but the official ruling hadn’t come down yet.

Despite the awful date, Albert still said he wanted to see her again. Penny suggested her place, where she would be better able to keep the baby distracted. There were toys, and a crib.

When he came over, he didn’t help feed the baby, change the diaper or put him to bed, but he was patient while Penny did. Far from being annoying, his lack of interest in the baby delighted Penny. When her old friends did call, they would never ask how Penny was—only the baby. Her mother was the same. Her doctor asked how she was doing, but then always added pompously, ‘The mother’s wellbeing affects the child’s, you know.’ But Albert was interested in her.

Once the baby was asleep, she and Albert had sex. She pushed the clothes, toys and packets of wet wipes aside and rode him, right there on the sofa. She gripped his hair and he squeezed her ass. She thought it might be her last chance to have sex before she went to prison.

She wasn’t sure when she had become convinced that she was going to get caught, but a sense of inevitability loomed: the feeling that her days with her baby were numbered. She had driven past the razor wire and hurricane fences of the Gatesville Unit several times, already wondering where in the facility she would be housed.

She waited for someone to notice that she had played a minor role in Swaize’s original arrest. No one did. She waited for the neighbour to say that she looked like the woman who had been hanging around Swaize’s apartment before his death. The neighbour didn’t. She waited for someone to contact the gym and confirm her alibi. Nobody did.

Albert never called again. She left a voicemail for him, and he didn’t get back to her. Maybe he was looking for a woman with less baggage. Or maybe the baggage was why he had wanted that second date—he might have thought a single mom would be keen for a commitment-free fuck. He’d gotten what he wanted, and left. Like they all do.

She told herself it didn’t matter. She’d gotten what she wanted from him, too. And as it turned out, she didn’t even need his alibi. Penny’s boss called. The death had been ruled an accident.

She was free.

CHAPTER 34

I fill your body as you listen to music in church. What am I?

‘How did you know Swaize would lock his bathroom door while he was showering?’ I ask.

‘Ex-cons always do,’ Penny says.

‘But what if he didn’t?’

She smirks. ‘I guess I would have had to put a spring inside the slide-bolt mechanism, and hold it in the open position with a credit card.’

‘So … how did you get caught?’ I ask.

‘I didn’t,’ she says.

I scan her face. I can usually tell when someone’s lying to me, but I don’t think she is. Her chin is up, the edges of her lips curled, eyes slightly narrowed, eyebrows raised. Pride, and anticipation.

‘You turned yourself in,’ I say.

‘My, you are a good guesser,’ she replies. ‘I see why my son picked you.’

‘Why would you commit the perfect crime and then confess?’

She looks out the little window. ‘Guilt,’ she says simply. ‘That man’s life weighed on me more and more heavily. I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t concentrate. I had to make it right.’

‘But—’ I stop myself. This grinds against everything I know about criminal psychology. People don’t turn themselves in out of guilt. They do it out of fear. The fear of getting found out gets bigger and bigger, swallowing up their whole lives like the blob from a horror movie, until eventually they confess just so they won’t have to worry about it anymore.

But Penny committed, in her mind, the perfect crime. There was no chance of getting caught. And she doesn’t seem to have an anxious disposition—she wasn’t going to imagine new evidence that the police might find.

‘The Gatesville Unit wasn’t so bad,’ she muses. ‘The library was better stocked than my public library. Two hours outside per day—I never got that at work, or even in