Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  ‘How much did she owe?’ Tyrone asked quietly.

  ‘Four grand,’ Leisler said. ‘Give or take.’

  Tyrone scratched the back of his head.

  ‘Doesn’t seem like much.’

  Jake Leisler nodded.

  ‘It’s the principle of the thing,’ he said. ‘A flood starts with a single raindrop. You turn a blind eye, and it sends out a message. The wrong message. People have to know that if you borrow from Jimmy Penh, you’d better pay him back.’

  Tyrone shuddered as he watched the girl’s head disappearing into another garbage bag.

  ‘I don’t think I want to borrow a dime off Jimmy Penh,’ he said.

  For the first time, Leisler smiled.

  ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘But if you did, you’d pay him back, right?’

  ‘Damn right,’ Tyrone said. ‘Every cent.’

  Frank finished wrapping. He picked up the bagged torso and headed towards the door. Leisler took the smaller bag with the legs inside and hoisted it onto his shoulder.

  ‘Always double bag,’ he said, turning back from the door. ‘Do you see how it all works now?’

  Tyrone nodded.

  ‘Good,’ Leisler said. He glanced at the door to the bedroom and handed Tyrone the gun he had used to kill the girl. ‘In that case, you can deal with the kid.’

  16

  Lockhart spent the night behind the bar just in case the cops returned to the beach hut. He settled on a makeshift mattress underneath the porch and was still awake when the first of the monsoon rains arrived. Soon, huge plump droplets were hammering on the grass roof and soaking the thirsty ground. Angry lightning ripped the night apart, and for a while Lockhart gave up on sleep altogether. Instead, he sat up with his back to the rough wooden wall and listened to the rolling thunder. He felt it rumble right through him. He watched the distant cargo ship clinging to the horizon, thrown into stark silhouette with every violent flash.

  The monsoon rains finished as quickly as they had begun, like someone had turned off a tap. They left behind a wary calm as the world took stock of what had happened. The air was cooler and quieter; the humming insects had taken refuge. He woke with the light and headed up the dirt road into Kep. He picked up his bike in town and drove out towards the lawyer’s address. It was early, and he passed nobody along the way. The air had fallen still again, and the fields on either side of the red dirt road looked vibrant after the downpour.

  The lawyer’s house was a white concrete building, with roof tiles that perfectly matched the red earth Lockhart had spent the morning driving across. A professional-looking sign on the white concrete gatepost read:

  Leonard M. Fischer, Lawyer.

  The gatepost was covered on the top with green algae and on the bottom with orange spray from passing traffic on the clay road. The whole place had an air of neglect. In the courtyard, grass and weeds were nibbling at the edges of the turn-space. Patches of gray concrete were emerging through the building’s white paint. Underneath a plastic doorbell, yellowing Sellotape held a small piece of card from the top of a packet of Ara cigarettes. Fischer was scrawled on it in biro.

  Some lawyer, Lockhart thought.

  He pushed the bell. It didn’t work, so he knocked on the screen door, which rattled on its hinges. Nothing moved inside the house.

  He knocked louder.

  From somewhere inside, Lockhart heard breaking glass. Then silence. Nobody came. He pulled at the screen door and headed inside.

  ‘Hello?’

  The place was like a library. Or a morgue. The dead sister, Matilda, came into Lockhart’s mind. He wondered where the police had taken her body. Then he remembered Kate, locked in Kampot prison. Focus on the living he reminded himself and pushed on into the gloom of the house.

  An American flag was nailed to the wall. A few badly framed photographs jostled for position underneath. Someone had nailed a crucifix to the left-hand wall between two doors, both of which were open.

  ‘Anyone home?’ Lockhart called.

  Nothing. He found an office behind the first door, stacked full of books and legal papers. A standard green glass lamp sat on a long wooden table. An answerphone looked like it hadn’t worked in a decade. No lawyer.

  The second room was a musty smelling bedroom with an unmade, empty bed. The drapes were still drawn and there were clothes strewn about. Piles of jeans, mostly. A single hung dark suit, protected by a thin plastic dry cleaners cover, was hanging neatly from the curtain rail.

  Lockhart doubled back and found the lawyer in the kitchen. He was slumped over a table facing a television set on the counter. Every inch of the table was covered with empty beer bottles. An overflowing ashtray sat on a chair he had pulled close. It was hard to tell if he was breathing.

  ‘Hello?’

  Nothing. Lockhart reached forward and shook him by the shoulder.

  All hell broke loose.

  He stretched his elbows, which had been cradling his head on the table. The result was that he knocked all the beer bottles onto the floor. Half of them bounced, half of them smashed. Startled by the noise, his head lurched up from the table and his eyes sprang open. They were shot to hell, but they registered his shock at seeing a stranger in the room. He lurched backwards, topping the other chair and kicking the brimming ashtray onto the floor. He coughed loudly, a bronchial early morning smoker’s cough, and tried to find some composure.

  ‘Yes?’ he said, his voice gravelly. ‘Can I help?’

  Lockhart looked at him. He was old. Well into his sixties, but still had a powerful frame. He had a biker’s beard, which was mostly gray, although the couple of inches below his chin hung white. The rest of his hair still had a little brown in it and hung in unkempt dreadlocks around his shoulders. He wore a lightweight camouflage hunting jacket, with regulation black tee and jeans that looked like they hadn’t seen the wash for a while.

  ‘Leonard Fischer?’

  The lawyer nodded warily and began patting down his clothes.

  ‘Can I help?’ he said again.

  Lockhart looked around the chaotic room.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  Fischer seemed not to hear, more concerned with rooting about in his pockets.

  ‘There’s one behind your ear,’ Lockhart said after a minute, and the lawyer stopped rummaging. He stared at the stranger in his kitchen like he was seeing him properly for the first time. Slowly his hand reached up and pawed clumsily at the side of his head. His fingers found the cigarette and automatically pulled it to his lips. He was drawing on it before his other hand had lit it, so great was his apparent need.

  ‘I’m looking for legal advice,’ Lockhart said, watching him breathe out the smoke. The lawyer stood up and stumbled over to the fridge and began rooting around inside it.

  ‘You in trouble?’ he asked over his shoulder.

  ‘A friend of mine got arrested yesterday,’ Lockhart said. ‘Ended up in Kampot jail.’

  Fischer turned back from the fridge with a bottle in each hand.

  ‘Beer?’ he asked, holding them up.

  ‘No thanks,’ Lockhart said, as the lawyer thumped the two beers onto the table and sat back down heavily in his chair.

  ‘Breakfast of champions,’ the lawyer muttered, searching among the detritus for the opener. ‘So what’s the charge?’

  Lockhart watched him carefully.

  ‘Witchcraft.’

  The lawyer stopped searching and looked up at Lockhart. For the first time, a shrewd intelligence sparked behind his bloodshot eyes.

  ‘What’s his defense?’

  ‘What kind of defense do you need against witchcraft?’ Lockhart asked. ‘And he’s a she, by the way.’

  ‘Don’t get all Western about it,’ the lawyer said. ‘Witchcraft is a real charge out here. Which means you need a real defense.’

  He stood up slowly and took the beers back off the table. He put them back into the fridge, filled a metal kettle and put it on the stove. Lockhart watched his
hands shaking with the effort.

  ‘She’s not a witch,’ he said. ‘That’s the starting point.’

  The lawyer sat down again, with a little more control this time.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  Lockhart nodded.

  ‘Someone killed her twin sister two nights ago. They’re identical. The police arrested her yesterday thinking she was the sister, come back to life.’

  ‘So what can you prove?’ the lawyer asked as the kettle began to sing.

  It was Lockhart who stood up and took it off the boil.

  ‘Thanks, kid.’

  Lockhart smiled. It was a long time since anyone had called him that.

  ‘Where do you keep your coffee, Mr. Fischer?’

  Considering the state Lockhart had found him in, the lawyer recovered remarkably quickly. One cup of coffee, and he was back in the game.

  ‘There’s one thing I can prove,’ Lockhart said as he watched Fischer drink. ‘The police must have taken away Matilda’s body from the hotel, right? With one body in jail and another in the morgue, they’ve already got the proof that Kate and her sister are two different people.’

  Fischer rested his cup on the table.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘So they know your friend’s no witch. What do they really want?’

  ‘No idea,’ Lockhart said. ‘To be honest, I hardly know her.’

  The lawyer watched Lockhart add a pinch of salt to his coffee.

  ‘If you hardly know her,’ he asked, ‘why are you getting involved?’

  Lockhart thought about it. Thought about home. Thought about Trista, alone and vulnerable. Thought about the distance between them. And then he stopped thinking about her and thought about Kate Braganza instead.

  ‘I met her on a flight to Phnom Penh last week,’ Lockhart said. ‘She hasn’t had time to do anything wrong, so far as I can make out. Someone’s just murdered her sister. And I don’t know who else will get her out of Kampot jail if we don’t.’

  ‘You’re a regular knight in shining armor, eh?’ Fischer said. ‘Not many of them around these days.’

  Lockhart couldn’t tell whether the lawyer was being sarcastic. He looked at the smashed bottles and the spilled ashtray and wondered whether Fischer was really Kate Braganza’s best chance.

  ‘They’re not holding her for fun,’ Fischer continued, ‘which mean’s your friend’s got a secret.’

  ‘Either that, or her sister did,’ Lockhart said.

  ‘Fair point. What happened to her?’

  Lockhart told Fischer about the room at The Happy, and the clientele, and the man in the hallway. He described the room. Described the smashed mirror and the fresh bruises still blooming when he had found Matilda strangled on the bed.

  ‘But the sister had flown in on the afternoon she died which didn’t give her much time to upset anyone either. She was spending a few months backpacking through Asia, apparently. Took a detour to meet up with Kate. That’s all I know.’

  Fischer opened his mouth to ask another question when Lockhart stopped him.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘There was something else.’

  He walked out of the kitchen and across the hallway. The morning sun was streaming through the front door and lighting up the star-spangled banner on the back wall. He found paper and a pencil on the wooden desk in the disorganized office and took them back through to the kitchen.

  ‘What is this?’ he asked, and he drew the strange crucifix he had seen at The Happy. ‘I saw it scratched into the wall at the hotel where the sister died. It was freshly carved.’

  The lawyer cursed.

  ‘That’s a whole lot of bad news,’ he said.

  17

  Tyrone Olmsted’s gloved hands were shaking with the adrenalin rushing through his veins. He had stuffed the young boy’s bleeding body into the heavy duty black bags before wrapping them in duct tape and hoisting the bundle onto his shoulders, just like Leisler had done. He forced himself not to run. He made his way slowly out of the apartment. If there is a nice way to do what he had just done, Tyrone told himself, then that is the way he had done it. A clean job. Close range. From behind. The kid never knew what had happened. The body was small, and there had been no need to use Frank’s electric carver. As he walked along the leafy balcony, Tyrone pulled the sanitation mask back over his face. It hid the fear, and it hid the guilt.

  As he reached the stairwell, he turned straight into two wiry looking neighborhood kids. They were walking shoulder to shoulder up the concrete stairs. Their concrete stairs. Their apartment block. Their neighborhood. Tyrone understood the rules. He had enforced them often enough, on the other side of town. They did not yield, but Tyrone wasted no time muscling past them. He was bigger and broader than they were. He was coming down, and gravity was on his side. He had the added weight of the dead boy on his shoulders too. The kids split as he arrowed through them, but one of them turned back and shouted after him.

  ‘Fuck you, Garbage boy.’

  Behind the sanitation mask, Tyrone Olmsted smiled. He smiled because he was beginning to understand. Real gangsters don’t act like gangsters. They don’t dress like gangsters. They don’t fuck about like MTV gangsters or neighborhood kids. Real gangsters are smart, like Jake Leisler. Real gangsters do terrible things and then hide in plain sight. He felt the weight of Leisler’s gun in his coat pocket. He glanced back over his shoulder, eyeing the boys. They were fifteen or sixteen years old. Old enough to make a play, and old enough to get slapped back down Tyrone thought. You have no idea who you’re looking at. I could shoot you now and wrap you up in plastic and duct tape. I could do whatever I want. I work for Jake Leisler. I work for Jimmy fucking Penh. But he did not act on any of these thoughts. He kept his mask and his gloves on. He didn’t run. He threw nothing. He did exactly what Leisler had told him.

  When he reached the other men they had already thrown their bags into the jaws of the garbage truck. Leisler told him to do the same, and he tossed the boy in after his mother. Frank hit a green button on the side of the truck and the truck’s engine revved. Its mouth yawned open and the powerful pneumatic blade crashed down on the bags, scraping them back into its filthy belly with the sound of bruising flesh and grinding bone.

  ‘Gone,’ Leisler when the blade completed its cycle.

  They walked back to the front of the truck and climbed into the cab. Leisler stretched out on the back seat while Tyrone and Frank wedged back into the front. They drove back at the same steady speed as before. They had almost reached 110th Street when they heard the scream of sirens.

  ‘This is the best bit,’ Leisler said from the back. ‘Trust me Tyrone, you will love this.’

  Tyrone did not love it. He didn’t like cops. Suddenly he could feel the sweat on the back of his shirt, and all he could think about were the shot and butchered bodies in the belly of the truck. All he could hear were the sirens, all around. Getting closer. The four men in the cab watched as two cop cars sped towards them, blue and reds flashing and rubber tires screeching. They came closer still until they were right on top of the truck. And then as quickly as they had arrived, they were gone, heading into Washington Heights and the streets that Leisler’s gang had left behind.

  ‘Welcome on board the best getaway vehicle in the world,’ Leisler told Tyrone. ‘It’s virtually invisible. Nobody notices us when we’re parked up. Nobody notices us carrying out the bodies, and nobody ever stops us.’

  ‘The perfect disguise?’ Tyrone asked.

  ‘Pretty much,’ Leisler said. ‘Did you ever see the cops stop a garbage truck? I mean, ever?’

  They drove back the same way, back over the Williamsburg Bridge and into Brooklyn. When they reached the incinerator, the driver paid the security guard a tip, and he waved them through.

  ‘The tip gets us straight to the front of the queue,’ Leisler said. ‘But never pay too much or he’ll get suspicious.’

  The driver reversed the truck right up to the foot of a huge pit full of garbage. Fra
nk opened the door and jumped out. Putrid air rushed into the cab and Tyrone pulled the mask back over his face. It did little to disguise the stench of rot. He watched a giant claw was operating overhead, plunging into the waste and lifting metal claws full of it high into the air. It dropped the waste over a steel wall and into the white hot heart of the furnace. In the mirrors he saw Frank hit a button on the side of the truck and the entire back end lifted high into the air on its pneumatic arms. The metal blade inside the truck corkscrewed forwards and spewed out its contents. Tyrone watched as the three heavy sacks tumbled out into the rest of the detritus and were grabbed by the claw. Michelle Ma Belle, Tyrone thought as they dropped into the blistering heat for the fire.

  18

  Lim did not like the busy streets of Cambodia’s capital city. He had walked these streets on year zero, when Pol Pot had demanded the purging of the capital city. Almost forty years ago. He had been a young man. They all had been. Ta Penh had led them through the streets, forcing the residents out into the fields. Killing Buddhists. And Muslims. And Christians. Intellectuals. Foreigners. They killed many people. That had been the job. Lim had been good at it. Ta Penh had been better. Now their ruthless work had been undone by imported Western capitalism.

  Still, just like it had been in year zero, Lim had a job to do. He found a mobile phone shop on the corner of Street 63, near the Central Market. It was not one that he had used before. The pavement outside was littered with scooters and parasols; young people sat outside drinking tea and talking about whatever it was fashionable to talk about these days. Lim did his best to disguise his disdain while he purchased a disposable SIM. He paid in cash and said nothing of interest to the cashier.

  Outside, he pulled the battery out of his phone as he walked and slipped the new SIM into the empty slot. He was so focused on what he was doing that his hip caught the handlebar of the nearest scooter to the door as he left, and the whole thing tumbled to the ground. A young man sitting under one of the parasols stood up. A punk. He was nineteen. Twenty at a push. Naïve. Not a concern for a man like Lim, even in his advancing years. But the last thing Lim wanted was to cause a scene. It was his job to stay invisible. Ta Penh’s safety depended on Lim remaining invisible. If the CIA’s propaganda was true, it was a messenger who had led them to kill Osama bin Laden. Lim would not let the same thing happen to Ta Penh. He was always stealthy. Always careful. Always thorough. And today would be no different.