Leave Her Hanging: A Noir Thriller

Chapter Thirteen

“Look at these notes, all crisp and new,” Raj said as he counted out the four hundred I’d given him. “You rob a bank or something, bro?”

I stuck my hands in my pockets and walked with Raj past the rugby goal posts, away from a couple kissing behind the cover of the gym. It was after school, and aside from us and the snoggers, everyone had already headed home.

“You got the ID?” I asked.

Raj pocketed the money, slung his guitar over his back, and handed me a thin envelope from his other pocket. “Merry Christmas.”

I flipped open the flap of the envelope and pulled out the driver’s licence. Raj’s guy must’ve snagged an old picture of me, because my hair was short and the look on my face was more content than the one I saw in the mirror these days. Christ, I looked young. My date of birth had been lowered by a year, but all the rest of the information was correct. I bent the plastic back and forth, watching the hologram watermark glint in the sun.

“Pretty nice,” I said.

“Don’t go getting cocky with it, all right?” Raj said. “My guy does good work, and you shouldn’t get any trouble from bouncers with it. But you start waving that thing at the cops and they’ll figure it out.”

“Gotcha.” I took out my wallet and slipped the new licence in.

“Make sure you keep your old ID at home when you go out with that as well,” Raj said. “No quicker way to get busted than to walk around with two non-matching licences, you know?”

“I’m not an idiot.”

“You fight like one.” He poked my swollen cheek and sent a wave of pain shooting through my face. I slapped his hand away before he could do it again. “He got you good, didn’t he?”

“Ah, go to hell. I didn’t see you there to back me up.”

Raj grinned and shook his head. “Let me set you straight. We’re doing some business together, but I’m not your friend, bro. I just need to earn some cash to keep the bills paid and put something away for when I move out. That’s it.” He shrugged. “Then again, your friends seem to be the ones beating the shit out of you. Maybe it’s better you have as few as possible, or in a week you won’t have any teeth left.”

He wasn’t far wrong. Jeremy had been looking like he was going to take my head off all day. I’d finally managed to escape his glares when we went to Ella’s memorial assembly just before lunch.

Megan had come up to me again before it started, wanting me to take part, asking if I had anything to contribute. I didn’t. Megan had organised the whole memorial nearly single-handedly, and she’d done a good job. There were speeches from friends and people who knew her, some funny stories, even a couple of poems. A little talk about setting up a memorial scholarship in her name. And all the while in the background there was a constant loop of photos on the projector: Ella and company at school, at the beach, Ella alone, Ella as the lead in the school musical, Ella with me. Smiling, always smiling. I couldn’t take it. It was too hard to think with her looking down at me like that, too hard to keep my brain from throbbing and leaking out my ears. No one stopped me when I got up and walked out, but I drew a lot of stares. I went to the library—it was pretty much empty aside from the librarian—and forced my mind to focus on the task at hand.

I’d run through everyone who knew Ella again and again, trying to puzzle out some motive, some reason, someone to suspect. Friends, family, classmates. I tried to picture someone smart enough and ruthless enough to kill her like that and stage it as a suicide. But I got nowhere. I was in the dark.

I came out of my reverie and glanced at Raj. “Let me ask you something,” I said. “As a business acquaintance.”

“Sure.”

“You know everyone in this school. Do you think any of them are capable of killing someone?”

“Sure. You push most of these people far enough, any of them would. I mean, we see these guys at school. Like those two lovebirds.” He pointed to the kissing couple. “We talk to them sometimes, see them around the place. But what the hell do we really know about them? What if they go home and turn kittens inside out? How would we know? They’re not going to put that shit on Facebook.”

“Come to think of it, that girl does look like she’s trying to bite his face off,” I said. “One more question.”

“I’m gonna have to start charging you by the hour.”

“Hypothetically speaking, say Ella didn’t commit suicide. Say she was murdered. Who do you reckon could have done it?”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Hypothetically?”

“Hypothetically. Who’s your most likely suspect?”

“You.”

I stopped walking. “Me?”

“Of course you. I mean, look at what you’re doing right now. You’re a loaded gun, bro. Obsessive. Driven. History of violence.”

“I’m not violent.”

“Yeah, you are. You hide it well. But you’ve got a dark streak if ever I saw one. I reckon you’d be smart enough to get away with it. Not to mention previous…intimacy…with the victim. If Ella was hypothetically murdered, I’d say the hypothetical cops would be preparing a hypothetical prison cell for you as we speak.”

“But I loved her.”

He laughed. “They don’t call them crimes of passion for nothing. But luckily this is all hypothetical, right?”

“Yeah. Right.”

“That’s my mum over there.” He pointed at a white Mitsubishi van that had just pulled up across the street. “I gotta bail. Be careful with that ID, eh? If you’re caught, don’t use my name, blah blah blah. You know the drill.”

“Yeah.”

“I’d tell you not to do anything stupid, but, well, it’s you. You gotta do what you gotta do. So just try and keep your stupidity contained, eh? I’ve seen you hanging around with Megan, asking her questions. Don’t drag her down into the shit with you.”

“You’re just full of advice today, aren’t you?”

“Someone’s gotta be the moral guardian around here. Laters, bro.”

Raj stuck his thumb under his guitar strap and jumped the fence. I stood in place, watching as he got in the van and drove away.

Now that he said it, I saw how someone could put me on the other side of that noose, strangling the girl who’d left me. Sometimes I could feel the world cracking around me, and it’d only got worse in the last few months. Maybe I really was unhinged. Maybe if someone pushed me I could be driven to kill. Maybe they wouldn’t even have to push that hard.

But I hadn’t killed Ella. Nothing in all the realms of possibility could make me harm her. But someone had, and that someone was out there. Raj was right, I couldn’t drag anyone into this mess with me. I had to do this alone.

~~~

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