The Cleaner Read Online Free PDF Page B

twenty hectares of land dedicated to showing the rest of the world how clever we are at turning seeds into plants. In these gardens are thousands of flowers and hundreds of trees, but you can’t go there at night without getting stabbed or shot, becoming fertilizer.
    I take a few paces forward, and my boredom does nothing to let up. It’s this city. Nobody can feel excited surrounded by buildings that date back a hundred years. Between the buildings is a warren of alleyways that any self-respecting drug addict can walk with their eyes closed. Christchurch patients live down these alleyways. If a businessman or businesswoman were to venture down one, they would have more of a chance of finding Jesus than getting out of there without being molested or urinated on. As for the shopping, well, shopping here is going out of style, and that’s reflected in the empty stores with signs hanging in the windows saying For Lease or For Sale. Even so, you can never find a damn parking space anywhere.
    Christchurch is voted one of the friendliest places in the world. By who, I have no idea. Certainly not anybody I’ve ever met. But despite all of this, Christchurch is my home.
    The air shimmers with heat, and in the distance it makes the roads look wet. Cars have their windows down and drivers’ arms are hanging in the breeze, cigarette ash dropping onto the sidewalk. Plenty of traffic is racing by, too much for me to run through, so I push the button for the crossing signal and wait. When it flashes and beeps for me to walk, I wait a few more seconds for the red-light runners to speed by, then cross the road. I roll my sleeves up. The air feels good on myforearms. I can feel beads of sweat running down the sides of my body.
    Two minutes later I’m at work.
    I walk directly to the fourth floor, taking the stairs since stealing cars doesn’t provide any real exercise. The stairwell smells of urine at the bottom, and more like disinfectant the higher I get. On the fourth floor I enter the conference room and place my briefcase, locked, down on the table, and move over to the photographs pinned to the wall.
    “Morning, Joe. How are you this morning?”
    I look at the man I’ve positioned myself next to. Schroder is a big guy with more muscle than brain. He has those rugged good looks of an action-movie hero, but I doubt he has any heroism left. He hates this city as much as anybody else. He has buzz-cut graying hair that would look better on a sixty-year-old drill sergeant than on him, an almost forty-year-old homicide detective. His forehead and face are covered in stress lines, which I no doubt put there. He has bags under his eyes, no doubt put there by the new baby he has at home. At the moment he’s going for the hard-worked-detective look, and with his cheap shirtsleeves rolled up and his thrift-store tie loosened, he has certainly achieved it. He has a pencil jammed up behind his ear, and another one in his hand, which he was chewing on before he spoke. He is standing with one foot forward, slightly ahead of the other, as if ready to pounce at the wall and start pounding on it.
    “Morning, Detective Schroder.” I nod slowly toward the photographs like I’m agreeing with what I just said. “Any new leads?”
    Detective Inspector Schroder is the lead detective on this case, has been since the second murder. He shakes his head like he’s disagreeing with himself, straightens his back and massages out a crick by pushing his palms against it, then gets back to looking at the photographs.
    “Nothing yet, Joe. Only new victims.”
    I let his statement hang in the air. Pretend I’m thinking about what he’s saying. Thinking and processing. Has to take me longer when I’m standing in front of a cop.
    “Oh? Did this happen last night, Detective Schroder?”
    He nods. “Sick bastard broke into her house.”
    His fists are shaking. The pencil he’s holding breaks. He tosses it onto the table, where a small graveyard of other