‘That’s what they’re going to do. It won’t matter how many times I say please, they’re going to nail it to the wall anyway.’
He watched her grow small and covered up in front of him. She kept moving her mouth, and still no words would come. He let go of her hair. When she breathed again she shuddered. He hadn’t realized how close she was to crying.
Good. Let her cry.
‘I don’t know what you want me to do about it. It’s not my fault—’
‘Really? If you hadn’t got bored with Kevin, hadn’t gone looking for somebody with a bigger johnson, then maybe he wouldn’t have hanged himself in the garage’—he spat the word at her, making her flinch, knowing the memory of her husband swinging from the rafters still gave her nightmares—‘and then your father would’ve lent us the cash. The company wouldn’t have gone down the drain. Then I’d be able to pay them and they wouldn’t nail—’
‘Stop saying that. I’m sick of you saying it. And it wasn’t my fault. You—’
His eyes bulged as if they were trying to escape from their sockets. For a moment he was the one couldn’t find adequate words. He laughed the way lunatics must laugh when their medication is late.
‘I what? You’re not suggesting I seduced you, are you? Jesus Christ. You took off your panties in the ladies’ bathroom and sat on my lap at the Christmas party—’
‘I did not—’
‘Just shut up will you, for once in your life. It doesn’t make any difference to you anyway. You’ve got Kevin’s money, you’re okay, thank you very much. Do you know what they do if you still don’t pay them after they nail your hand to the wall? Do you?’
She bit her tongue, her jaw moving tightly. It took more self-control than she thought she had to stop herself from saying she’d like to be there when they did it, lend a hand. She breathed deeply through her nose, held it right down inside her, let it out slowly.
‘What do you expect me to do?’
He looked at her as if it was the stupidest question he’d ever heard. It was.
‘Give me the money, what do you think?’
‘I’ve told you. I don’t have it. I can’t sell the house just like that—’
‘What about the life insurance?’
She shook her head, dropped her eyes quickly.
‘It was suicide. I don’t know if they’re going to pay.’
She said it a little too fast, like it was an answer she’d practiced in the mirror.
He gave it an irritated head shake, his mouth twisted, twitching in the corner. He’d caught the look before she deliberately dropped her eyes, seen something pass behind them. He’d seen it before—every time her husband’s suicide came up. He knew what it was too. Confused suspicion, like she’d just heard a joke she didn’t get. Except this wasn’t funny at all.
She was having doubts—doubts about whether it was suicide at all. She wasn’t all the way there yet, but she was steadily inching her way towards the idea that he had something to do with Kevin Stanton’s death.
She knew he’d caught her.
‘I suppose you’re going to say it’s all Kevin’s fault now,’ she said, ‘because he was so inconsiderate as to kill himself.’
‘Your fault,’ he muttered under his breath.
‘What did you say?’
‘Nothing. What about Daddy? Frank, I’ve got so much money I don’t know what to do with it, Hanna.’
She looked at him like he was making up words.
‘He hates you, Hugh. He wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire.’
‘That makes two of us.’
Three of us, she thought to herself, wishing she had the balls to say it to his sneering face.
‘At least I’ve got a good reason to hate him.’
Self-pity now. What did she ever see in him?
‘Now it’s his fault you owe all this money, is it? Typical man. It’s everybody’s fault except—’
He realized he was still holding the broken wine glass stem. He needed to do something with it before he poked her in the eye with it. He threw it against the wall and kicked the dustpan over, sending the broken glass flying.
‘Feel better now?’ she said.
‘Much.’
He was sick of arguing with her. He had to get out before he did something he’d regret later. Something that might jeopardize any chance of getting the money out of her or her father. He turned away from her, his blood settling to a temperature just under a rolling boil.
‘Where are you going?’ she said as he gave the dustpan one last kick and headed for the door.
‘Out, what’s it look like.’
‘Where?’
He stopped and turned to face her again. He crossed his arms, stuck his thumbs in his armpits. He knew what she wanted him to do. This was where he was meant to go to her, put his arms around her, hold her tight. Aw. Say he was sorry. Tell her he loved her.
Yeah, right.
‘What the hell do you care?’
She shook her head.
‘I’m scared what you might do when you’re like this.’
She had good cause to be.
She knew exactly what he was going to do. He was obsessed with her father, with her father’s money. And trying to find a way to get his sweaty hands on some of it. For days he’d been threatening to have it out with the old man. She hated to think how that meeting would turn out. Two stubborn, pig-headed men going up against each other. One with a lifetime’s experience of getting his own way, the other so desperate he’d stop at nothing to save himself from the animals after his blood.
‘Don’t you dare go around there.’
Too late.
She’d been lucky in a way. Lord knows how he might have reacted to the word dare, if he hadn’t already been gone, the angry slamming of the door like the slap on the face she was going to give him the next time she saw him.
Chapter 2
IT WASN’T VERY OFTEN Frank Hanna wished he drove a small white Hyundai sedan or something equally nondescript, instead of his ostentatious Bentley Mulsanne. Today was one of those times.
Somebody was following him, he was sure of it. And the Bentley was making it very easy for them.
He’d spotted them as soon as he left the house. The car had pulled away from the curb when he rolled down the driveway and turned onto the street. It was still behind him now, a couple miles later, hanging back the exact same distance whatever speed he drove.
He had to lose whoever it was before he got to Buckley’s office.
He goosed the gas, the big engine responding with a massive surge of power. The three-ton car accelerated hard until he was alongside a semi-trailer truck lumbering along in the inside lane. He glanced in his mirror. The car following was steadily making up the ground it just lost.
He still couldn’t see who was inside, couldn’t even tell if it was one or more people. He had a good idea though—that loser McIntyre. Or the people he owed money to.
There was a turning on his right just up ahead. The timing had to be perfect. He waited to the last second and wrenched the wheel into a hard right, swinging the big car in front of the semi-trailer and into a narrow side street, missing the truck's bumper by inches. There was a loud blast on the horn and the angry squeal of rubber as the truck slammed on its brakes. On the far side of it, the car following him shot past. Hanna glanced in his mirror, saw the side of the semi-trailer completely blocking the entrance to the street, the truck at a standstill.
He was in the clear.
He stomped the gas and shot forward between the cars parked on either side of the narrow street towards safety at the far end—so long as they didn’t loop around the block and cut him off from that end. He stole another quick glance in the mirror. Still okay behind. His eyes snapped front again and almost bulged out of their sockets. He stomped the brakes and the car nose-dived to a halt, the front end sliding sideways on the greasy pavement.
He couldn't believe his eyes.
In the split second it took to look in his mirror, a delivery truck had reversed into the street and was coming towards him. He twisted in his seat. Behind him the semi-trailer was on the move again. He hit the horn but the truck kept on coming. He leaned right into it and the truck stopped with a jerk, rocking on its suspension. It had nothing to do with him. The driver jumped down from the cab and made his way round to the back. Hanna hit the horn again and the driver held up his hand, fingers splayed—five minutes.
He turned in his seat again, saw the back end of the semi-trailer clear the end of the street and disappear from view. Behind it, the street was clear—for the moment. Any second the car would appear again after making a U-turn or backing up. It would pull into the side street. He’d be boxed in if the idiot in front of him didn’t get out the way.
The delivery driver had opened up the back of the truck and was climbing out again, a stack of boxes in his arms. He smiled apologetically at Hanna, then stopped again, the boxes balanced between his body and the back of the truck, supporting them on his raised thigh. He fished in his pocket, pulled out his cell phone.
Hanna couldn’t believe it. The guy was taking a call on his phone instead of getting out of his way. He hit the horn, realized his stupid mistake too late. The driver looked at him with a scowl as Hanna changed in the blink of an eye from an important businessman in a big hurry to an arrogant rich bastard who thought he owned the whole damned road.
Hanna could almost see the guy’s bodily functions slowing down in front of his eyes—his pulse, his breathing, the movement of his limbs grinding to gradual halt like a kid’s toy as the batteries ran down. The slow smile that crawled across his face confirmed it—he was deliberately antagonizing him.
Then the guy looked past him. He froze for a split second, his face incredulous.
Hanna’s head snapped around, his heart in his mouth. A cold triangle of sweat stuck the back of his shirt to the leather of the Bentley’s seats. The street was empty. There was nothing there.
What the hell was he looking at?
Then the driver laughed, said something into the phone and laughed again. He hadn’t been looking at anything behind Hanna. It was something the person on the other end of the line said made him stop and stare into space.
Hanna couldn’t believe the car still hadn’t turned into the street. They might have given up. Maybe the driver was looking in his mirror as Hanna threw his car in front of the semi-trailer truck. He’d lost them.
Or they’d looped around the block already to cut him off.
He opened his door and stuck his head out, trying to see past the truck. The driver got the wrong end of the stick, thought he was going to shout at him as well as lean into the horn.
‘Okay, okay. I told you five minutes. Jesus Christ. What are you, in a hurry to get to the office? Didn’t you fire enough people yesterday? Got a bunch more you need to do today?’
Hanna ignored him, ignored the sound of him laughing at his own joke. He leaned further out. He still couldn’t see around the truck. He got all the way out of the car and stepped to the right. The driver got the wrong idea again, stepped forward to meet him, blocking his view. The boxes were still balanced precariously on his arm as he tried to do too many things at once.
‘What’s your problem? You think because you’ve got a car like—’
Hanna looked up at the sky in frustration, then suddenly snapped, a red mist descending on him, the like of which he hadn’t felt for thirty years. He put his hands under the edge of the bottom box and brought them up sharply, pushing up and away. The boxes flew into the air, over the driver’s head and rained down onto the ground behind him.
‘Hey! What the—’
He didn’t get to finish. Hanna put both hands on his chest and shoved. The guy yelled and went sprawling backwards. He landed on his butt on top of the untidy heap on the ground, half of them bursting open with his weight.
Hanna stepped over him, muttering idiot through his teeth. The street beyond the truck was clear, nothing blocking the end. He walked back to his car, gave one of the boxes a good kick as he went past. The driver yelled a mouthful of abuse at his back.
He didn’t care if anyone was following him now. He felt wired, in the mood for anything. Or anyone. There wasn’t much anyone could do to him now anyway. He got in the car and backed all the way down the street, the parked cars either side a blur in his peripheral vision, and shot out into the main street without looking or caring. He floored it, burned rubber all the way to Buckley’s office.
He sat in his car in the parking lot outside Buckley’s office with his arms on the steering wheel, his head resting on them. He felt tired, that hazy crashed feeling you get when the adrenaline stops flowing.
He couldn’t put it off any longer.
He got out and went to put right what had been eating at him for fifty years.
Chapter 3
EVAN WAS GOING TO punch Frank Hanna soon if he didn’t stop saying that.
I don’t blame you for the death of my son-in-law
He’d said it at least three times already. It wasn’t clear which of them he was trying to convince. Evan had a hard time keeping the lid on his guilt as it was. After all, it was the photographs he’d taken of Lisa Stanton and Hugh McIntyre in flagrante delicto that had pushed Kevin Stanton over the edge, made him take his own life. And now Stanton’s father-in-law was telling him not to blame himself. If he kept it up much longer, Evan would be the one swinging on the end of a rope in his garage.
‘I’d like to hire you to look into it.’
‘What do you mean? It was suicide.’
Hanna waved that away.
‘No, not that, something else. I was talking to the detectives looking into Kevin’s death. One of them said something about you. It wasn’t exactly a recommendation, but it stuck in my mind.’
Evan nodded, wondered what Guillory had been saying about him. Something nice, he hoped.
‘They said Buckley’s got the monopoly on stubborn and stupid. Made me think, that’s the man for me.’
Evan sat up straight as if someone had put a cattle prod up through the seat of his chair.
‘Kate Guillory said that?’
‘No, it was the other one, the fat one.’
‘Ryder.’
Hanna nodded.
‘You should’ve asked Kate.’
‘I did. She said much the same thing, just different words. You don’t give up—even when everybody else thinks you should. That will be very important on this case.’
Evan leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head wondering where this was going.
‘Want to hear what else she says?’
‘No thanks.’
‘Nothing you haven’t heard before, eh?’ Hanna said with a knowing smile.
‘And you still want to hire me?’
‘Definitely. This is a very delicate, personal matter. If I’m honest, I don’t expect it to end well.’
He paused, waited, as if to give Evan a chance to show him the door if that was the way he wanted to play it. Evan stayed put. He was intrigued. Not many clients told you they expected you to fail before you even got started.
‘Good. I also need somebody who’s going to tell me how it is, whatever it is. I don’t want sugar-coated, don’t want somebody pussy-footing around because they don’t want to hurt my feelings. The detectives said that wouldn’t be a problem for you.’
Mr Feelings Trampled-on nodded his head and told him to continue.
‘I’m not long for this earth. I have pancreatic cancer. I’m seventy-one and if the more pessimistic estimates are right, I won’t make it to seventy-two.’
He said it as if he was describing how long the auto mechanic said his car transmission would last.
‘I haven’t told anyone yet. In a minute you’ll understand why.’
Evan cocked his head like a curious dog might.
‘Not even your daughter?’
‘She’s the las
t person I’d tell.’
‘Kevin?’
Hanna shook his head, a helpless gesture. He fingered the wedding band he still wore, turning it in half revolutions around his finger.
‘I would have told him. I didn’t find out until after he died.’
Evan went to speak but Hanna held up a hand to stop him. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the edge of Evan’s desk, palms pressed together. Close up, he looked a lot worse than his detached, almost dismissive, account of his condition suggested.
‘Even before I found out I’ll be meeting my maker sooner than I thought, I planned to leave all my business assets to Kevin. Kevin, not Lisa. She would have benefitted from them as well of course—for as long as she stayed with him. I was grooming Kevin to take over the business when I stepped down. None of that’s going to happen now.’
‘And now that Kevin’s gone, you don’t want to leave it to Lisa.’
The yellow tinge to Hanna’s skin seemed more pronounced at the suggestion. He rubbed his face with the heels of his hands.
‘It would be as good as giving it to McIntyre.’
Evan got a glimpse of the hard-nosed businessman as Hanna talked, even though he was talking about his own flesh and blood. As far as he was concerned, you make your bed and you lie in it—literally in his daughter’s case. If she made a bad call, it was no skin off his nose. Blood was exactly the same thickness as water.
‘I’m not going to leave my daughter penniless. My house is worth millions and I have another one in the Bahamas. I’ve got a private jet and a ton of cash and investments. She gets all of that. She won’t starve. What she chooses to do with it is up to her. Or McIntyre. They can sell the lot and drink themselves into an early grave. It’ll be their loss, and theirs only.’
And good riddance seemed to hang in the air between them.
He paused and took a deep breath, his nostrils flaring. A vein throbbed in his tightly clenched jaw. It struck Evan that here was a man who had always gotten what he wanted in life. Now he was up against something he couldn’t control. His own mortality—and it wasn’t sitting well with him.
The Evan Buckley Thrillers: Books 1 - 4 (Evan Buckley Thrillers Boxsets) Page 56