The Murder Code by Steve Mosby

significant block, so much so that it often feels like his death occurred in the life of another man entirely. He was twenty then, a different person in countless ways, and the memory itself is hazy. He knows he was a driver, and that his work consisted of transporting goods from the city to elsewhere and from elsewhere back again. He knows he worked long hours, slept in his cab in bays, and saw too little of Jasmina and his baby daughter Emmeline, and he knows now that the money he made was too little to compensate for that lost time.
    Sometimes now he looks around at the city, at men such as Edward Enwright, and thinks that money is the only value anyone has any more. What will it earn? they ask. What is it worth? Questions of worth and value should have more than financial answers; they should not be composed entirely of currency. But as a younger man he did not understand that, so he worked those long hours, thinking that was what it took to be responsible, to be a good husband and father, to wring chance and success from the dirt-scrabble hand he’d been dealt.
    One night, he crashed his truck.
    Nobody could ever say for sure why it happened. Levchenko had never remembered the minutes leading up to the accident, but that did not, he was told, mean he had fallen asleep at the wheel. What happened to him was so dramatic that memory loss was to be expected regardless. A mental blank, in fact, might have been the minimum lasting damage anyone could have hoped for.
    Despite his inability to recall the accident, certain things were a matter of record. For some reason, close to midnight, his truck left the road on the Esther bypass, which was normally empty at such a time. The cab clattered swiftly down an embankment, cracking through trees, overturning as it went, and came to rest in a subsidiary of the Kell, three feet underwater on the driver’s side.
    Levchenko, unconscious, was pinned in place by his seat belt, submerged wholly in the ice-cold water.
    It was luck that saved him.
    Luck that someone had been driving along a short distance behind him and seen his vehicle swerve off the road in the manner it had. Luck that the man driving was a paramedic. Even before the cab had hit the water, the man had been radioing the emergency services. Then he had parked up and come down on foot, slipping and sliding down the embankment, and somehow managed to pull Levchenko from the cab and on to the riverbank.
    Levchenko was dead; his heart had stopped beating.
    The paramedic worked on him ceaselessly, refusing to give up, pressing down on his chest, thump, thump, thump, pumping the water from his lungs, breathing air into him, thump, thump, thump on his breastbone. Over and over. For seven whole minutes, Levchenko, dead, did not respond.
    And then he did.
    But he was dead for that time.
    Far more than the moments immediately before the crash, Levchenko wishes he could remember those lost seven minutes—that he could see what, if anything, might have been there. He is a religious man and always has been, and the blankness taunts him. After all these years, the question remains. Does he remember nothing from those minutes of death simply because there is nothing to recall?
    Because of what happened to Emmy, he does not want to believe that.
    There is one saving grace for his faith: the matter of how random his survival was; the fact that on a road never normally heavy with traffic, the right man happened to be the right distance behind him. His present existence—all the good and bad of it—rests entirely on that coincidence. That coincidence, in turn, rests on many others before it. And so everything he does have feels inordinately precious. Every single moment since the accident—even the worst of them—has been a gift of sorts, and he accepts each as graciously as he can.
    But there is a flip side to that:
    He is living on borrowed time.
    What happened can sometimes make him feel lucky, but a part of him wonders if there is