Five Minutes Alone by Paul Cleave Page A

had taken place in. The Crowleys had sold that place.
    He takes the SIM card out of the phone and snaps it in half, then replaces it with another. He hears a car pull up outside. Heputs the pad away and moves to the door. This is interesting, he thinks, and for a moment wonders if this is about the phone call he just made, because he impersonated this very man, but no, of course not—how could it be?
    He opens the door. Theodore Tate walks up the path towards him.

CHAPTER ELEVEN
    Schroder has had a rough year. He split up with his wife a few months ago, and is currently on disability because he can’t work. It’s been a few weeks since I’ve seen him, and these days he isn’t exactly what I’d call a talkative guy. He nods and, on occasion, he’ll answer if you ask him a question directly, but he’ll never take the conversation and run with it. Earlier this year he was forced to shoot a nasty old lady in cold blood to save an innocent girl. Taking a life was when Schroder stopped being Schroder. He lost his job, and I became a resident of Coma Land that same night. A few weeks later he started working for TV. He was the on-set consultant for a few crime shows, and he narrated and was in a reality show about a New Zealand psychic who looked for answers in unsolved crimes. Then the Christchurch Carver escaped and Melissa X, the Carver’s girlfriend, shot Carl in the head, and then he joined me in Coma Land for a spell. When he came back to the world of the living the dark version of Carl became something else. I’m not sure what, exactly. Something empty. Something hollow. Something that made his wife leave him.
    “Hey, Carl,” I say, as I walk up the sidewalk to the front door. It’s open and he’s leaning against it.
    “Hello, Theo,” he says, and he hardly ever calls me Theo. It’s always Tate. Or used to be. “Why are you here?”
    “I need your help,” I tell him, skipping over the pleasantries. Carl doesn’t do pleasantries—not anymore.
    He looks down at the file I’m carrying. Dwight Smith’s file. “You may as well come in.”
    I follow him inside. The house is thirty or forty years old and doesn’t have a lot of personality or a lot of furniture. There are nophotos on the walls, no paintings. In the lounge there’s a sofa and two matching chairs and a TV and nothing else, except dust on the floor and cobwebs in the corners. He doesn’t offer me a drink. He sits on the sofa and I sit in one of the chairs facing him. He’s bald these days, his head shaved when the doctors saved his life, hair unable to grow back on the scar tissue left from the gunshot, so now he keeps it shaved. The scar is awful, it’s a shiny dime to the side of his head, small lines extending out from it like cracks in a mirror. It’s an inch above his right eye and halfway between that and his ear. Then there are the scars from where the doctors went to work, thin white lines from cutting, holes where drills were used, those scars will fade, but not the bullet wound itself.
    “How you been?” I ask him.
    “The same,” he says. “You?”
    “Doing okay,” I tell him. “How are the kids?”
    “Why are you here, Theo?”
    “You remember Wayne Beachwood?” I ask.
    “Wayne Beachwood,” he says, then he says nothing else for a few seconds, it’s as if he’s trying to access the memory, opening and closing drawers looking for the right file. “Yes, I remember him. The train guy. He’s the guy who threw . . . what was his name . . . Russell Lighter onto the train tracks.”
    “Richard Lighter.”
    “Richard Lighter. Beachwood had been drinking and he ran Lighter over in his car. He picked him up and threw him on the train tracks, hoping to hide any evidence, but there was a witness,” he says, all very monotone as if he’s reading from the file he found. “You’re here because of Beachwood?”
    “Not quite.” I hand the file out to him, but he doesn’t take it. After a few seconds I lean further