‘No.’

‘What’s wrong? You queer?’ yelled Suarez.

Chuck winced and flushed. ‘No!’ He shifted uncomfortably and wished Suarez would shut the hell up.

‘So why’d you beat her brains out through her nose, then?’

Chuck bit his lip. He knew why he’d beaten Annette Lim’s brains out. In his own head he could grasp the logic of it – could sympathize with the way he’d been backed into a corner and then squeezed there, first by the Lucky Eight, then by Human Resources, then by the man with the gun and then, most humiliatingly, by Jeff. He’d been squeezed until he’d just … popped.

The thought of how his life had spiralled away from him made Chuck feel dizzy and, with a wave of nausea, he realized he’d lashed out at the one person who least deserved his fury. If he’d killed Jeff or the man with bad skin who’d made him piss his pants in terror, he could have pleaded his own case with a somewhat clear conscience. But killing Annette Lim was an act of pointless knee-jerk petulance that Chuck could not justify, even to himself.

That was when he started to cry.

Detective Ronaldo Suarez smiled. He loved this bit. The bit where they broke down and confessed. It was the only part of his job that was ever remotely like NYPD Blue. He was never likely to chase down a suspect, but sitting in a chair watching one cry suited him just fine; he knew his limitations.

But Chuck Zhong knew his limitations too. He knew that Suarez would eventually get what he wanted out of him. But he was also smart, and not so wrapped up in the nightmare that he didn’t know that that gave him a certain amount of leverage. Sure, he’d killed Annette Lim – there was no getting away from that now – but the reason he’d finally snapped was a lot more interesting than the age-old one of pretty girl rejecting dumb boy.

Chuck’s thoughts were a little formless, but somewhere through the mist in his mind he caught tantalizing glimpses of Jeff being raped in the showers while he awaited trial for sexual assault, and of the man with the gun pissing his own pants, as vaguely drawn cops worked him over.

In his current ice-cold position, these images warmed him a little. More than that, with his world, his life and his self-respect stripped from him, his dreams were all he had left to call his own.

So he stopped answering Suarez’s increasingly loud questions and rang his bell until a nurse came and hustled the fat detective out, like a bee bothering a bear away from honey.

Then Chuck spoke to his court-appointed public defender – a cherubic-looking man of sixty – and asked about a deal.

27

TEXAS WAS HOT. Tom had thought the Karoo was hot, but he’d been wrong. Texas was like a griddle underfoot, with cartoonish waves of shimmering air rising above the ground. His All Stars actually stuck to the sidewalk, making an embarrassing schwick-schwick-schwick as he walked up to the glass doors of the City of Irving Police Department.

Inside, the air-con hit him like a bucket of iced water and within seconds he was shivering.

‘Detective Suarez?’

The desk sergeant raised his eyebrows without looking up from his paperwork. ‘He’s busy.’

‘Yeah, I know. I may have some information on his case.’

The desk sergeant peered at him now, blatantly sizing Tom up, from his sweat-dampened hair to his melting sneakers, then finally resting wearily on the NTSB badge in Tom’s hand. ‘You steal that?’

Tom was too sapped to retaliate. ‘No.’

The desk sergeant sighed and jerked his head at a row of plastic chairs. ‘Take a seat.’

The desk sergeant did nothing to prepare Tom for Ronaldo Suarez. And Tom thought he was a man who really needed some kind of advance warning: maybe a lackey running ahead of him with a red flag.

Suarez weighed 317 pounds. He wasn’t tall and he wasn’t muscled, just obscenely fat. His big round face was topped with a dark crew-cut, and contained black eyes that glittered in slits between his low brows and his high, fat-filled cheeks, making him look as much Chinese as Latino. His nose and mouth were corralled between those cheeks and several chins that bounced on a blue shirt the size of a Texas sky.

Despite his size, Suarez bustled through the double doors at speed, glanced at the desk sergeant for directions and stuck out a giant hand for Tom’s to get lost in. ‘Detective Suarez,’ he said, looking Tom square in the eyes, and every first impression Tom had been gathering was blown away by the sharp intelligence in them. ‘How can I help you, Mr Patrick?’

‘Maybe I can help you.’

‘Well, that would be a nice change.’ Suarez grinned at him, showing what looked like milk teeth in his broad head. ‘Come with me.’

Tom followed him at speed back through the double doors and past dozens of cramped cubicles separated from each other by the flimsiest of frosted-plastic partitions.

Suarez’s cubicle made no concession to his bulk. It was the same size as the others, with the same-sized chair, which he lowered himself into with a sharp hydraulic exhalation. ‘Pull up a seat.’ He gestured at an empty cubicle across the aisle and Tom grabbed the back of a chair and rolled it opposite the detective. When he sat down, their knees were almost touching.

‘So, what do you know, Mr Patrick?’

‘This Annette Lim? Who’s the guy you’ve got in custody?’

‘Kid named Chuck Zhong. Security guard at WAE.’

‘Do you know why he killed her?’

‘Not yet.’

‘What’s he said?’

‘Not much. He’s only just gone down to Hutchins from the hospital. On suicide watch. Tried to hang himself after he did it. Another guard found him and CPR’d the shit out of the guy. That’s why he’s not downstairs right now. I’ve been allowed limited access so far and he’s not talking, but I was going over again later to have another crack. So, Mr Patrick, when do we get to the bit where you help me?’

Tom grinned. He liked the direct approach and had a gut feeling that he could trust Suarez. He stood up and rolled his chair back across the aisle. ‘You want to grab a bite?’

‘You buying?’

‘If I must.’

*

For a fat man, Suarez ate very little. Tom wolfed an eighteen-inch pizza while the other man poked at a chicken salad.

‘Diet,’ he explained needlessly.

‘They don’t work,’ said Tom. ‘When you start restricting food intake, the body goes into a protective mode that slows the metabolism to preserve every calorie.’

Suarez looked at him warily. ‘Are you shitting me?’

‘I saw it on the Learning Channel.’

‘Fuck this, then,’ said Suarez, and flapped his hand at a waiter. ‘Bring me a goddamn bowl of chilli. And fries.’

As they ate, Tom told him about the Pride of Maine, about South Africa, about the fan disc and the flange bolts, about the paperwork pointing back to WAE. ‘And now this,’ he finished, dropping sugar into his black coffee.

‘You think it’s connected?’

Tom shrugged.

‘Seems like a long shot,’ said Suarez. ‘She was a pretty girl – it may just have been a sex thing.’