by S. B. Caves
A sound distracted her. Snuffling, hitched breath, moaning. May spun around and saw a girl wandering toward her somnolently, holding her blouse together with her hand. One side of her pretty face was swollen and red. Immediately, May knew what had happened. Some cowardly piece of shit had put their paws on her. When May was fifteen her first boyfriend, and subsequently the first boy she ever slept with, had slapped her once for embarrassing him in front of his friends. At the time, she told herself she had deserved it. All he had done was squeeze her boobs in front of them, and she was embarrassed so she told him to fuck off. That only made his friends laugh, saying that she wore the trousers, he was under the thumb, all that schoolboy shit. But that single moment had set a precedent, one that would follow her through to adulthood.
‘Are you all right?’ May said, the timbre of her voice wavering madly.
‘I’m… my boyfriend…’
‘It’s OK. What’s your name?’
‘T-Tara.’
‘All right Tara, what’s wrong?’ May walked toward the girl. ‘Has someone hurt you?’
‘No, nobody h-hurt m-me,’ she said. ‘They… they…’ The sobs racked her and she shook her head, crying like a child in denial. ‘My boyfriend, he… they took him!’
Boyfriend? May looked at this young girl. How old was she? Fourteen? Fifteen? She could see the girl’s pimples beneath her powdery foundation, the clots of mascara in the corners of her eyes. This was a little girl trying to look older, probably had tissues stuffed down her bra to pad it out.
‘We need to call the police,’ Tara said. ‘Can I use your phone? I… I left mine in his flat.’
‘Wait, hold on a second,’ May said, suddenly conscious of the fact she was carrying two of the weapons involved in the crime this girl wanted to report. ‘Why don’t we get out of this cold and sit in my car, how about that?’
‘The p… police…’
‘We’ll call them,’ May said, ‘but we don’t have to catch pneumonia while we do it.’ She smiled at the girl, but the girl was not ready to smile back. ‘Come on.’
May walked to the back of her car and put her bag in the boot. Then she opened the door for the girl and they both got inside.
‘Did you see what happened?’ Tara asked.
‘No, I was just…’ She tried to think of an alibi, and when none came she said, ‘I didn’t see anything. What happened?’
‘They beat up Jerome and took him! They beat him and… they took him. I went back inside to try and get help and…’ Her face crumpled, her bottom lip sticking out childishly. ‘Nobody would help me!’
May was relieved: she hadn’t been seen picking up the hammer and the gun.
‘Don’t worry,’ May said, giving her a reassuring pat on the leg. ‘You just calm down. We’ll figure this out.’
Chapter Nineteen
Relief washed over Emily when she finally found the warehouse. Not because they had completed the first part of their objective, but rather because they had made the journey without getting into a fatal collision. Emily could not get the hang of driving the automatic and kept slamming them to a screeching halt every time she so much as touched the brake pedal. There were hardly any cars on the road that time of night, which was lucky considering she’d had to go on the motorway.
She turned the ignition off and got out, feeling weightless. Boneless. The sky was brightening; lavender clouds scudded across a sliver of sunlight. It would have been a beautiful morning were it not for the carnage waiting in the back of the van. She looked around; nobody was there at this early hour, so she opened the back door of the van. Jack got out, handed her a set of keys and said, ‘Unlock the grille with this one, then open the door with that one. When you go inside the alarm will beep. The code is two-seven-zero-eight. Got it?’
‘Yeah, I got it.’
‘What’s the code?’
‘Two-seven… um…’
He bent his head down so that he was face-to-face with her. ‘Emily,’ he began in a soft voice. ‘We’ve done it. You can calm down. Just relax. The code is two-seven-zero-eight.’ He smiled. It didn’t touch his eyes.
‘Got it,’ she said. She unlocked the grille and the door, went inside, and keyed the code into the alarm system with trembling fingers. The beeping stopped. Jack got into the driving seat, turned the van around, and reversed so that the back doors were facing the entrance of the warehouse.
He stepped inside the warehouse and flicked the light switch on. Cold white light washed over a kingdom of boxes and crates. The musty smell of damp cardboard hung in the chilly air. He walked over to a large, square pallet trolley that they used to unload and move boxes, and set it by the door.
‘Come on. I need your help for this part,’ he said, and climbed into the back of the van. Emily followed him in. Morley’s hands were tied in front of him with duct tape and he had a bandage turbaned around his head. Blood was seeping through the bandage, and the sight of it reminded her of the dream with Kate and the scarf. She closed her eyes against the sight of it and pushed the thought away.
They awkwardly push-pulled Morley out of the van and placed him on the trolley. His face was streaked with dried blood and his complexion was ashen beneath the warehouse lights.
‘What’re we going to do with him?’ Emily asked.
‘Oiling room is down there,’ Jack said, pointing with his chin. ‘That’s where we’re taking him.’
‘Aren’t we going to’ – she swallowed, sucked in air – ‘bury him?’
‘He isn’t dead,’ Jack said grimly. ‘He started to stir again when I was tying his hands up, so I had to give him another dig. He’s as strong as an ox, that’s why we need to get him in his room before he starts to regain consciousness.’
Emily moaned. She was relieved, but couldn’t understand why. This is what she wanted, wasn’t it? She wanted justice for Kate. No, not justice, revenge. So why did she still feel so queasy about the whole thing, so… guilty?
Jack grabbed the handle on the trolley and began to wheel Morley down one of the aisles. She followed him through the labyrinth of shelving units and up to the entrance of the oiling room. It was about the size of her bedroom at home, yet the confines had been made smaller by the boxes lining the walls. At the far end of the room was a large thick pipe that ran into the floor. Jack dragged Morley off the trolley and pulled him into the room, stopping halfway to regain his breath.
‘He weighs a tonne,’ Jack said, palming sweat from his face before dragging Morley the last three or four feet to the pipe. He sat Morley against the pipe, spat on the floor, and then walked out of the room.
‘Keep an eye on him for a sec. Shout if he starts to wake up.’
‘Where are you going?’ she asked, the urgency causing her voice to echo off the corrugated roof.
‘To get the rope from the van,’ he said over his shoulder.
She stayed by the door, ready to slam it closed if Morley suddenly woke up. The man was somehow even more intimidating when he was unconscious than he had been when he was awake. For all she knew, Morley could be playing possum, waiting to snap alive and make his exit when she least expected. She looked at the pipe and wondered whether it would hold him. She wasn’t sure. The pipe was sturdy enough, but Morley was a bear of a man, and if he was determined then maybe he might just be able to break free. She remembered coming home from a club on the night bus when she was eighteen or nineteen and seeing half a dozen police officers trying to subdue a man in the road. The man wasn’t as big as Morley but he still managed to give the police hell, thrashing like a shark out of water, bucking the police off him as though they were children. They must’ve sprayed a gallon of CS gas in his face and still he had a defiant and ungodly strength that made them call for backup.
Jack returned with the rope. ‘Did you put the hammer in the van?’
‘The hammer?’
‘When you hit him. Did you put it in the van? I couldn’t find it.’
She had no idea what she’d
done with the hammer.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Was I supposed to?’ His eyes bore through her. She cringed away from his gaze. ‘Everything happened so fast. I didn’t know what to do.’
His face softened. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the crook of his arm and nodded. ‘Yeah, I know. It wasn’t exactly a smooth transition, I admit. Don’t worry about the hammer.’
He walked over to Morley, looped a length of the rope around his neck, and then tied the remaining rope around his feet. To Emily, the rope didn’t look thick enough, and she suddenly had a vision of Morley waking up and snapping free of the bonds. Her thoughts shifted back to the hammer.
‘Should I be worried about the hammer?’ she asked.
‘Nothing we can do about it now, is there?’ he said, standing. He appraised his work, tested a couple of the knots to make sure they were tight. He picked up Morley’s hands, which were cocooned in duct tape, and seemed satisfied. ‘We can’t go back for it.’
She bit her lip. ‘You think they could link it back to us?’
He looked at her hands. ‘You’re wearing gloves.’
‘Yes, but you’re not.’
‘I’ve never been arrested. My prints aren’t on any databases. Anyway, you seem to forget he had a gun. I’m sure that would be of a lot more interest than the hammer.’ He gave Morley one last glance and then began to walk out of the oiling room, closing and locking the door behind him. ‘Let’s go and get a cup of tea.’
‘Wait. Do you think we should put something over his eyes?’
‘What for?’
‘So that the next time you open the door he doesn’t see you.’
‘Doesn’t matter if he sees me or not. He’s not going to live long enough to give anyone a description.’
Emily’s stomach rolled over. So this is real then, she thought, and became aware of a heaviness in her bladder that hadn’t been there a few minutes ago.
He led her up the stairs into a large open space, at the end of which was a kitchenette area with a sink, a kettle and a fridge. He began to make the tea. A couple of packets of biscuits were on the counter, along with bottles of water and a loaf of bread.
‘Sorry, Em, how do you take your tea again?’
‘I don’t want any,’ she said, plopping down on a moulded plastic chair. What she wanted to do was use the toilet, but even more than that she wanted to get away from this place.
‘You sure? It’s freezing in here.’
‘Jack,’ Emily said, holding her head in her hands, trying to still the cyclonic shift of her thoughts. The last few hours had been so surreal that she no longer felt like herself. It was as if some inner part of her had separated and she was a remote viewer of her own life. ‘What happens now?’
Jack leaned on the counter and folded his arms. ‘Now I’m going to have a cup of tea, and then I’ll go down to see our mutual friend and give his head a proper dressing in a couple of hours. I don’t think I fractured his skull when I hit him. What about you?’
‘How on earth would I know? I’m not a doctor.’
‘Are you first-aid trained?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I am,’ he said. ‘Have to take health and safety courses every few years, working with machinery and that. But I’m not a doctor either, so at best I can clean his wounds, maybe superglue his cuts back up, do enough to keep him alive for as long as we need him. But if he has a fractured skull or something worse, then I guess that’s it.’
She rested her elbows on her knees and bowed her head. She had never been this exhausted in her entire life, not even when she was maid of honour at Kate’s wedding and they were up from five getting ready, rushing around, dressing up the venue. Nor had she been this drained on the day that they buried Kate, even after she’d been weeping pretty much non-stop in the week preceding the funeral. Now, she wanted nothing more than to climb into a bed by herself, pull the cover up over her head, and fall asleep forever.
‘Why don’t you go home,’ he said. ‘I can do the first shift with him.’
‘First shift?’
‘Yeah. We can’t afford to leave him here alone, not while he’s still alive. Someone always has to be with him, just in case. And at the same time, neither one of us should just disappear from our normal lives in case it arouses suspicion.’ He sipped his tea loudly. ‘Well, nobody’s going to miss me for a week or so, but you’ve got Roger.’
‘What about May?’
He rubbed his eye with his index finger and said, ‘She’s angry with me so I’ve probably got a few days before she cools down. But I’ll probably have to pop by the other warehouse, just to make sure the place hasn’t collapsed, and to keep everything away from here.’
When he tilted his head back to scratch his beard, she saw the bluish-red bruises from where Morley had throttled him. She yawned and blinked, black orbs floating in her vision.
‘Fine, I’ll head home then, if you think it’s a good idea.’
‘Of course it is,’ he said. ‘Get some sleep. Can you come back here tonight?’
Tonight? she thought sluggishly, and then remembered they had started a whole new day.
‘Yeah,’ she nodded. ‘What’re you going to do?’
‘I’ll get some rest. I brought a sleeping bag and some cushions so I’ll be perfectly comfortable.’
She nodded. She was so tired she could have fallen asleep on a washing line. ‘What if he wakes up?’
‘I’ll talk to him,’ he said, smiling.
She got up to leave, reeling dizzily. He walked her to the door. Just before she left, she said, ‘I don’t want to torture him.’
A shadow passed over Jack’s face. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean, I want to know why he killed Kate. And I think he’ll tell us, in time, or maybe right away, who knows. But I don’t want to torture him.’
‘What difference does it make?’ Jack asked defensively. ‘He deserves a slow death.’
‘I don’t want to be involved in anything sadistic. I said I would help you… kill him. I didn’t say I was going to torture him like an animal.’
‘That’s what he is. An animal.’
‘Whatever he is, I don’t want to do it like that. OK?’
‘Sure,’ Jack said without emotion.
She opened the door and stepped out into the frigid morning air, her hair whipping into her face. ‘What time shall I come back?’
‘Let’s say nine.’
She nodded and left without another word.
Jack closed the door and then walked to the oiling room. He did not feel excitement or any sense of contentment, not yet anyway. He felt nothing at all; not so much as a flicker of satisfaction in the void. Maybe when he looked into those green eyes for the last time, he would feel peace.
He opened the door. Jack could hear the man’s ragged breathing now, more like snoring. He walked over to the box by the fire exit, and then retrieved his sleeping bag cushions. He rolled the sleeping bag out on the floor, untied his boots and kicked them off, and then got inside, securing a cushion beneath his back.
He turned on his side and watched Morley. Less than ten minutes later, he was asleep.
He did not dream.
Chapter Twenty
Dillon had been fast asleep when Leila rushed into the room, yelling his name. Usually he was a very light sleeper, his ears attuned to the slightest disturbance. On some primal level he supposed it was because he always wanted to be alert and in control of his environment, even when he was unconscious. This subliminal instinct had kept him in good stead all through his adolescence in St Joseph’s and beyond: he had caught two potential burglars trying to break into his hostel a few years back, and on another occasion had managed to hotfoot his way to safety when the police came to raid the flat he was renting.
He snapped awake so violently at the sound of Leila’s voice that his fists were already in a fighting stance, ready to swing. There was no grogginess. He was immediately and acu
tely aware of everything in the room, but she was talking to him as though they were already involved in some deep-rooted conversation. He only heard ‘Craig’ and ‘Frazier Avenue’ and stood up, his erection jaunting against the fabric of his boxers. When she finished with ‘…on the TV,’ and paused for breath, Dillon said, ‘Stop,’ and raised his hands. ‘What the fuck are you going on about?’
Leila rolled her eyes in that impatient bitchy way that always made him want to launch her across the room. She inhaled and said, ‘They’ve just raided Craig’s flat on Frazier Avenue. It’s all over the TV.’
He looked at her for a second, trying to gauge whether it was a wind-up or not, and said, ‘You’re not having me on, are you?’
‘No,’ she said, mouthing the word exaggeratedly. ‘I’ve just paused it on the TV. Come, I’ll show you.’
He followed her into the front room. Cora was sitting in the high chair with clumps of porridge hardening around her mouth, slapping her tray with her chubby hands. Dillon saw the TV paused on the reporter’s face while he was in mid-sentence, the wind sweeping his hair.
‘Rewind it,’ he said to Leila, who went straight for the remote and did as she was bid.
When she pressed play, the TV showed the Frazier Avenue car park cordoned off with blue-and-white police tape.
‘Thanks, Ian,’ the reporter began, looking over his shoulder at the armada of police vehicles. ‘Well, the scene you see behind me is the aftermath of a suspected kidnapping that has led to a truly bizarre turn of events. Late last night, an eyewitness reported the assault and kidnapping of her boyfriend, Craig Morley. However, her description of the incident prompted a raid on Mr Morley’s residence by the Metropolitan Police. After a thorough interview with the witness, who has to remain anonymous for legal reasons, it is believed that Mr Morley had live firearms in his flat. Now the police have confirmed that they did not find any guns or ammunition, but they did locate over eight kilograms of pure heroin…’
Dillon’s knees gave out and he fell back onto the sofa. His body ran cold. He covered his eyes with his hands and groaned. Leila was talking over the TV, asking him what was wrong. Cora was slapping her tray and singing merrily, and the reporter was still talking about an ‘extensive search’ to find Craig.