[Jack Harvey Novels 03] Blood Hunt

by Ian Rankin

  He was wearing a roomy pair of sneakers he’d bought duty- free at Heathrow. He’d divvied the birdy up into halves, folded each into a torn section of paper towel, and secreted one in either trainer, tucked into the cushioned instep. He’d also bought a clean polo shirt and sports jacket—again on the credit card. He wanted to look like a tourist for the authorities at JFK, but since he didn’t want to look like a tourist on the streets of New York, he’d kept his old clothes so he could change back into them.

  His hotel was on East 34th, between Macy’s and the Empire State Building, as the man in the booth had informed him. He tried not to think about how much it was costing. It was only for one night after all, two at most, and he reckoned he deserved some comfort after what he’d been through. Christ alone knew what lay ahead. The bus dropped him off outside Penn Station, and he walked from there.

  It was morning, though his body clock told him it was mid-afternoon. The receptionist said he shouldn’t really check in until noon, but saw how red his eyes were and checked her com- puter, then phoned maid service. It turned out she could give him a room after all, freshly cleaned—she’d just have to tweak a reservation. He thanked her and headed upstairs. He lay down on his bed and closed his eyes. The room spun around him in his darkness. It was like the bed was on a turntable set to 17 rpm. Jim’s first record player had been a Dansette with a setting for 17 rpm. They’d played Pinky & Perky records on it. The pigs had sounded like ordinary people. It was just a matter of slowing them down.

  Reeve got up and ran a bath. The water pressure was low. He imagined a dozen maids all rinsing baths at the same time, preparing rooms for new guests, guests who came and went and left nothing behind.

  He remembered a quote he’d read in one of his books: something about life being a river, the water never the same for any two people who walked through it. He’d remembered it, so it must have meant something to him at the time. Now he wasn’t so sure. He studied his face in the bathroom mirror. It was getting ugly, all tensed and scowling. It had looked that way in Special Forces: a face you prepared for when you met the enemy, a permanently pissed-off look. He’d lost it over time as he’d let his muscles relax, but he was getting it again now. He noticed that he was tensing his stomach muscles, too, as though readying to repel a punch in the guts. And his whole body tingled—not just from jet lag; senses were kicking in. You might call them a sixth sense, except that there was more than one of them. One told you if someone was watching you, one told you someone you couldn’t see was near. There was one that told you whether to run left or right to dodge gunfire.

  Some of his colleagues in Special Forces hadn’t believed in the senses. They’d put it down to sheer luck if you beat the clock. For Reeve it was instinct, it was about picking open part of your brain normally kept locked. He thought maybe Nietzsche had meant something similar with his “Superman.” You had to unlock yourself, find the hidden potential. Above all, you had to live dangerously.

  “How am I doing, old man?” Reeve said out loud, slipping into the bath.

  In Queens, the fashion accessory of choice was the stare.

  Reeve, though dressed in his needing-a-wash nontourist clothes, still got plenty of stares. His map of downtown Manhattan wouldn’t help him here. This was a place they told strangers to avoid. His cab driver had taken some persuading; the yellow cab had been idling outside the hotel, looking for a fare up to Central Park or over to JFK if he was on a roll, but when Reeve had asked for Queens, the man had turned to examine him like he’d just asked to be taken to Detroit.

  “Queens?” the man had said. He looked Puerto Rican, a ribbon of black curly hair falling from his oily baseball cap. “Queens?”

  “Queens.”

  The driver had shaken his head slowly. “Can’t do it.”

  “Sure you can, we just need to discuss the fare.”

  So they’d discussed the fare.

  Reeve had spent a lot of time with the Yellow Pages, and when he couldn’t find what he wanted in Manhattan, he’d switched to the outer limits: the Bronx and Queens. The third store he tried had sounded about right, so he’d asked for directions and written them down on a sheet of hotel notepaper.

  So he sat with them in the back of the cab, listening to the wild, angry dialogue of the two-way radio. Whoever was manning the mike back at HQ was exploding. He was still exploding as the cab crossed the Queensboro Bridge.

  The cab driver turned around again. “Last chance, man.” His accent, whatever it was, was so thick Reeve could hardly make out the words.

  “No,” he said, “keep going.” He repeated the words in Spanish, which didn’t impress the driver. He was calling in, the mike close to his mouth.

  The street they were looking for, the one Reeve directed the driver to, wasn’t too deep into Queens. They stuck close to the East River, as though the cabbie didn’t want to lose sight of the Manhattan skyline. When the cab stopped at lights, there were usually a few men hanging around, leaning down to peer into the back like they were at an aquarium. Or looking into a butcher’s cabinet, thought Reeve. He preferred the idea of the aquarium.

  “This is the street,” Reeve said. The driver pulled over immediately. He wasn’t going to cruise looking for the shop, he just wanted to dump Reeve and get out of there.

  “Will you wait?” Reeve asked.

  “If I stop longer than a red light, the tires’ll be gone. Shit, I’ll be gone.”

  Reeve looked around. The street was run-down, but it didn’t look particularly dangerous. It was no Murder Mile. “What about giving me your card,” he said, “so I can call for another cab?”

  The man looked at him levelly. Reeve had already paid and tipped him. It was a decent tip. He sighed. “Look, I’ll drive around. No promises, but if you’re right here at this spot in twenty minutes, maybe I’ll be back here to pick you up. No promises, you hear? If I catch another fare, that’s it.”

  “Deal,” Reeve said.

  Twenty minutes might cover it.

  He found the store on the other side of the street. Its window made it look like a junk shop—which in part it was—but it specialized in militaria and survivalist goodies. The hulk behind the padlocked counter didn’t look like he was going to be mugged. Brown muscled shoulders bulged from a tight black T-shirt with some Nazi-style emblems and writing on the front. There were tattoos on the man’s arms, variously colored. The thick veins ran through them like roads on a map. The man had a bulbous shaven head but a full black beard and mustache, plus a large looped earring in one ear. Reeve immediately pictured him as a pirate, cutlass between his teeth in some old black-and-white movie. He nodded a greeting and looked around the shop. What stock there was the mostly boxed, but the display cabinet behind which the owner—Reeve presumed he was the owner—sat was full of just what he’d come here for: knives.

  “You the one that phoned?”

  Reeve recognized the man’s voice and nodded. He walked towards the display case. The knives were highly polished combat weapons, some with extremely mean-looking serrated edges. There were machetes, too, and butterfly knives—even a foreshortened samurai sword. There were older knives among the flashing steel; war souvenirs, collectibles with dubious histories.

  The man’s voice wasn’t as deep as his frame would suggest. “Thought you must be; we don’t get too many customers midweek. Lot of our stuff goes out mail order. You want I should put you on the computer?”

  “What computer?”

  “The mailing list.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You see anything you like?”

  Reeve saw plenty. He’d considered buying a gun, but wouldn’t have known how to go about it. Besides, a knife was just about as good, so long as you got close. He was hoping to get very close…

  “Nothing exactly like what I’m looking for.”

  “Well, this is just a selection.” The man came from behind the counter. He was wearing gray sweatpants, baggy all the way down to his an
kles, and open-toed sandals showing one toe missing. He went over to the door and locked it, turning the sign to CLOSED.

  “Was it a bullet or shrapnel?” Reeve asked.

  The man knew what he meant. “Bullet. I was rolling, trying to get to cover, bullet went into the toe of my damned boot.”

  “Through the steel toe cap?”

  “I wasn’t wearing steel toe caps,” the man said, smiling. “This didn’t happen to me in the army.” He was leading Reeve through the shop. The store was narrow but went back a long way. They came to a section of clothing: disruptive patterns, plain olive greens, stuff from all over the world. There were boots, too, and a lot of equipment for wilderness survival: compasses and stoves and pup tents, binoculars, reels of filament for making trip wires, rifle sights, crossbows, balaclavas…

  This, Reeve realized, was going to take more than the twenty minutes his cabbie had allotted him. “No guns?” he asked.

  “I’m not licensed for them.”

  “Can you get them?”

  “Maybe if I knew you better. Where you from anyway?”

  “Scotland.”

  “Scotland? You guys invented golf!”

  “Yes,” Reeve admitted, not sure why the hulk was suddenly so excited.

  “Ever played St. Andrews?”

  “I don’t play golf.” The hulk looked bemused by this. “Do you?”

  “Hell, yes, got me a five handicap. I love golf. Man, I’d like to play some of those courses over there.”

  “Well, I’d be happy to help you.”

  “But you don’t play.”

  “I know people who do.”

  “Well, man, I would surely love to do that someday…” He unlocked a door at the back of the store. It had three locks, one of them a padlock attached to a central bolt.

  “Not the rest rooms?” Reeve said.

  “Yeah, the head’s back here, but then so is a lot of other stuff.”

  They entered a small storeroom with barely enough space for the two of them. There were three narrow doors with piles of boxes in front of two of them. A box sat on the small table in the middle of the room.

  “I already looked these out; thought they might be more your thing.” He lifted the lid from an innocuous brown cardboard box, the size of a shoe box. There were layers of oiled cloth inside, and between the layers lay the knives.

  “Nice balance,” Reeve said, handling one. “Bit too short, though.” After handling each knife, he handed it to the hulk for repolishing. Reeve peeled off another strip of cloth near the bottom of the box and saw what he’d been looking for: an eight-inch blade with five-inch handle. He tried it for weight and balance. It felt almost identical to his German knife, his Lucky 13.

  “I like this one,” he said, putting it to one side. He checked the remaining knives out, but none came close. “No,” he said, “it has to be this one.”

  “That’s a good knife,” the hulk agreed, “a serious knife.”

  “I’m a serious person.”

  “You want a scabbard for it?”

  Reeve considered. “Yes, a scabbard would be useful. And I want to check out some of your other lines, too…”

  He spent another hour in the front of the shop, adding to his purchases. The hulk had introduced himself as Wayne and said that he used to be a professional wrestler, on TV even. Then he asked if Reeve was still interested in a gun.

  Reeve wasn’t sure. It turned out all Wayne had to offer was a revolver, a pump-action and an assault rifle, so Reeve shook his head, glad the decision had been taken for him.

  Wayne handed him some leg straps so he could fasten the scabbard onto his leg if he wanted. “On the house,” he said.

  Then he added up the total, and Reeve took out some cash.

  “Running around Queens with a bankroll,” Wayne said, shaking his head, “no wonder you need a knife.”

  “Could you call me a cab?” Reeve asked.

  “Sure. And hey, write down your address, just in case I ever do make that trip.” He pushed a pad of papers towards Reeve.

  Reeve had already given a false name. Giving a false address was easy.

  The rest of the day was quiet. Reeve stayed in his room, slept for as long as he could, and exercised when he couldn’t. About midnight, feeling fine, he walked the streets around the hotel and up as far as Times Square. The city felt more dangerous at night, but still not very dangerous. Reeve liked what he saw. He liked the way necessity had reduced some of the people to something edgier, more primeval than you found in most British cities. They all looked like they’d stared into the abyss. More than that, they looked like they’d bad-mouthed it as well. Reeve was not offered drugs—he didn’t look the type—but he was offered sex and other sideshows. He stood on the fringes watching a man play the three-card trick. He couldn’t believe people were making bets, but they were. Either they had money they didn’t need, or they needed money very badly indeed. Which just about summed up the people hesaw.

  There were tourists about, looking like tourists. They were getting a lot of attention. Reeve liked to think that after a day in the city, he was fitting in, picking up less attention, fewer stares. Here he was, behind enemy lines. He wondered if the enemy knew it yet…

  Next morning, he took a bus south 235 miles to Washington, DC. This was where Alliance Investigative had its headquarters, according to Spikehead. The private eye might have been lying, but Reeve didn’t think so.

  Reeve’s own hotel in New York had a sister hotel in Washington, but that would have made him too easy to trace. Instead, he called a couple of other chains until he found one with a room in its Washington hotel.

  He took a cab to the hotel itself, and asked at reception for a street map. In his room he got out the phone directory and looked up Alliance Investigative, jotting down the address and telephone number. Spikehead hadn’t been lying. He found the address on his map but didn’t mark it, committing it to memory instead. He looked up Dulwater next, but didn’t find an entry. The man who had been Spikehead’s contact at Alliance was ex-directory. Knowing what he was going to do, he heaved the Yellow Pages onto the bed and looked at the list of private investigation agents and agencies. There were plenty to choose from. Alliance had a small, understated ad which only said that they specialized in “corporate management.” He went for one of the small ads, and steered clear of anything that boasted having been “long established.” For all he knew, PIs were every bit as clubby as lawyers or accountants. He didn’t want to contact a PI only to have that PI telephone Alliance with the news.

  As it turned out, he chose remarkably well.

  “You’ve come to the right person, Mr. Wagner.”

  Reeve was calling himself Richard Wagner. He was sitting in the rented office of a Mr. Edward (“please, call me Eddie”) Duhart. Duhart was interested to speak to a European. He said he’d been researching his name and was positive it was originally DuHart and that he was somehow related to a big Bordeaux distillery.

  “I think you mean vineyard,” Reeve had said.

  Eddie Duhart was in his late twenties, nicely enough dressed but not wearing the clothes with ease. He kept moving in his chair, like he couldn’t get comfortable. Reeve wondered if the guy was a cokehead. Duhart had cropped blond hair, shiny white teeth, and baby-blue eyes. You could see the child in him peering out from a college-football body. “Well, yeah, vineyard. Sure I mean vineyard. See, I think these Duharts came over here to further their, you know, trade. I think they settled here, and”—he opened his arms wide—“I’m the result.”

  “Congratulations,” said Reeve. The office was small and looked impermanent. There was a desk and a filing cabinet, a fax ma-chine, and a coatrack on which hung something looking suspiciously like a fedora. There was no secretary, probably no need for one. Duhart had already informed him that he was “fairly fresh” to the business. He’d been a cop three years but got bored, liked to be his own operator. Reeve said he knew the feeling. Duhart said he’d alway
s loved private-eye stories and movies. Had Reeve ever read Jim Crumley or Lawrence Block? Reeve admitted the gap in his education. “But you’ve seen the movies, right? Bogart, Mitchum, Paul Newman…?”

  “I’ve seen some movies.”

  Duhart accepted this as a truism. “So I decided to become a PI, see how I made out. I’m making out pretty good.” Duhart leaned back in his creaking chair, folding his hands over a gut that did not yet exist. “That’s why, like I say, you’ve come to the right person.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.” Reeve had admitted that he wanted to know a little about Alliance Investigative.

  “Because I’m not stupid. When I decided to set out in this game, I did some reading, some research. Foreknowing is forearmed, right?”

  Reeve didn’t bother to correct the quotation. He shrugged and smiled instead.

  “So I asked myself, who’s the best in the business? By which I mean the richest, the best known.” Duhart winked. “Had to be Alliance. So I studied them. I thought I could learn from them.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “Oh, I don’t mean I spied on them or asked them questions or anything. I just wanted to know how they’d gotten so big. I read everything I could find in the libraries, how old man Allerdyce started from nothing, how he cultivated friends in high and low places. Know his motto? ”You never know when you’ll need a friend.“ That is so true.” If he leaned back any farther in his chair he was going to tip it. “So, like I say, if you want to know about Alliance, you’ve come to the right guy. Only thing I’m wondering is, why do you want to know about them? They done you wrong, Mr. Wagner?”

  “Do you believe in client confidentiality, Mr… Eddie?”

  “Sure, Rule One.”

  “Well, then I can tell you that, yes, I think they may have done me wrong. If I can prove that… well, that might put both of us in an interesting position.”

  Duhart played with a cheap pen, handling it like it was rolled-gold Cartier. “You mean,” he said, “that we could both use information about Alliance to our separate advantages?”