by Lee Stone
‘Snooping’s your job,’ Lockhart said. ‘What’s the point of putting yourself in that situation if you don’t do your job when you’re there?’
Glinka stopped chewing.
‘You don’t remember anything at all?’ Lockhart asked, frustrated at Glinka’s lack of recall.
Glinka shrugged and carried on eating.
‘What does it matter to you, anyway?’
Lockhart waited, but there was nothing else.
‘Go back to Marie, Glinka.’
Lockhart spent another hour in the café waiting for Jimmy Penh to show. He thought about Matilda Braganza out in the storm with a gun in her hand. He was beginning to understand the risk she had taken, and the deception, and the urgency. He remembered the images of the Kun Krak, the stomach-churning shriveled baby from Audrey Dufour’s blog. The Smoke Child. No wonder Matilda was desperate. Lockhart imagined her out in the howling wind, stalking her target and waiting for the moment. Waiting to take back her baby and take her revenge. He thought about Trista. Did she hate the Ukrainians the way Matilda must hate Jimmy Penh? Did she ache for him to return the way Matilda ached for her child? She had schemed and plotted and risked everything; her life, her sister… What if Trista was plotting? Taking risks? Planning revenge? That would be a catastrophic idea, but there was nothing to do to stop her. Nothing he could do to protect her. She was beyond him now. She was as alone in the world as him.
‘You look like you’re a million miles away,’ the barista said as she passed by. She came back a moment later with a slice of chocolate layer cake.
‘Whatever it is,’ she said, ‘I guarantee this won’t make it any worse.’
Lockhart smiled and thanked her. Lightning hit the ground somewhere close and pulled him back into the moment, back to the café and the storm. It had been an hour since Glinka left, and nobody had come. He decided to call it a day, and was halfway out of the door when he saw the garbage truck rumbling quickly along the center of the street, water blooming in an arch either side of its heavy fuselage. Lockhart watched it speeding towards the café. The city departments were on lockdown. It had to be them.
‘You changed your mind?’ the barista asked as Lockhart ducked back inside.
‘Empty the cash register,’ Lockhart said, heading back to the seat at the back of the room. ‘Tell them you cashed up an hour ago. And I need you to do something for me. It’s a big favor.’
Lockhart told her what he needed. By the time the garbage truck hissed to a halt outside the café’s rain-streaked windows, she had taken a roll of notes from the register and stashed them under the counter.
From his seat at the back, Lockhart watched the blurred silhouettes of two men approach from the truck. The shorter of the two, thin and wiry, pushed through the door and into the room. He scanned the place and, seeing Lockhart, headed towards his table. The taller man was young and stood sentry behind his boss.
‘Jake Leisler,’ the front man said easily as he approached. ‘Jimmy Penh sent me. I hope that’s okay?’
He sat down without waiting to be asked, and lit a cigarette. He waited for Lockhart to introduce himself, but Lockhart said nothing. Experience had chiseled Leisler’s features, and his face was hard and unforgiving.
‘Jimmy says you’re interested in a little business?’ Leisler prompted.
Slowly, Lockhart unzipped the hold-all on the table so that Leisler could see the bundled notes inside. Lockhart watched him carefully, studying the way his eyes had sparked into life when he saw the cash. Greedy, calculating eyes.
‘Now you got my attention,’ Leisler said. ‘I think we can work with that.’
‘That’s just the start of it,’ Lockhart said, zipping up the bag and standing up. ‘Trouble is, you’re not Jimmy Penh.’
Leisler looked up from the bag.
‘Jimmy doesn’t do business outside the office.’
Lockhart scuffed his chair back under the table, slung the bag over his shoulder, and turned to walk away.
‘No deal then,’ he said, and he headed for the door. It was a calculated risk, and with every step he took, he could feel Matilda slipping away from him. He was almost at the door when Leisler called him back.
‘I’ll take you to Jimmy,’ Leisler said. ‘But he won’t like it.’
Lockhart shrugged.
‘I don’t like it either,’ he said. ‘Jimmy can come to me. Here. Tomorrow. Early. I’m not dealing with anyone else.’
It took a few seconds, but Leisler had been suckered in as soon as he saw the cash, and eventually he crumbled, holding his hands up in agreement.
‘Ten o’clock,’ Lockhart called after the two men as they left. Leisler didn’t break his stride. The guy with him stopped and rattled around in the cash register, but came out with nothing but change. He took a fistful of shrapnel, shoved it into his pockets and left. When they were gone, the barista came out from behind the counter, a sly look on her face.
‘Kept today’s takings,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’
Lockhart smiled and said, ‘What about the favor?
She shot him a quizzical look.
‘The phone? I tossed it in the garbage truck, just like you said. Although why you wanted me to do that is beyond me.’
She had promised to throw her cellphone into the back of the garbage truck while Lockhart was talking to Leisler, and in return he’d given her two hundred dollars from the hold-all to buy a new one.
‘I’ll show you why,’ Lockhart said. ‘But I need to borrow your computer.’
There was a laptop behind the counter, ancient and ingrained with coffee dust. Lockhart called up iCloud and clicked on Find my Phone. A map popped onto the screen, with a green dot blinking as it slowly moved from one side of the screen to the other.
‘Let’s see where they’re going,’ Lockhart said, tracing his finger across the screen.
The barista smiled.
‘Clever boy,’ she said, turning the sign on the door from Open to Closed.
‘Let me get you a refill,’ she said as she shuffled past him, the roll of banknotes she had hidden under the counter still in her hand. ‘This one’s on the house.’
46
Tyrone couldn’t smile wide enough. The sound of the Lamborghini’s engine roared around him. Through him. Each twitch of his right foot caused the throaty roar to change pitch and the Aventador to surge forward like a racehorse let off the rein. He had the roads to himself and was tanking the V12 through New York City, drifting through rain-drenched turns and flooring the throttle along the straights. He’d three-sixtied the car twice, but Leisler hadn’t batted an eyelid. They were flying along Broadway, heading for Amsterdam and the Elbow. He slammed a hard right onto 110th Street, lost traction, and drifted into an unforgiving curb.
The shock wave slammed through the chassis and thumped Leisler and Tyrone hard into the backs of their bucket seats. The package Leisler had been holding flew from his hand and slammed against the windshield.
‘Fuck, sorry.’
Leisler looked at Tyrone.
‘No problem,’ he said, and he leaned forward to pick up what he had dropped. Tyrone looked down into the footwell and saw reams of black cotton, which had begun to unravel.
‘What is that?’
Leisler’s eyes flicked up at him, dark and hooded. Calculating.
‘It’s an opportunity,’ he said.
Tyrone stared at the twist of black cotton and glimpses of what it was shrouding. Something golden. Or at least, golden in part. In other places it looked fatty and fleshy, like the roast ducks he had seen hanging in the steamed windows in Chinatown. As Leisler pulled at the cloth, he saw it. The outline of a shape, tiny and yet unmistakable. A finger. A tiny, human finger.
‘What the fuck…?’
Leisler sighed. He liked Tyrone. And yet he was the kid who had always seen too much.
‘I’ll show you what is,’ he said. ‘I owe you that much.’
He pulled back the cotton until sl
owly the Kun Krak came into view. It had been harvested from its mother’s womb early and did not look much like a baby. It looked reptilian. Alien. It was embryonic; its back still curved and prominent. Its head was too big for its body, and the heat had shrunk its skin until it clung unnaturally to its bones. A shrink-wrapped skeleton.
‘What is it?’ Tyrone asked.
There was something haunting about the roasted child. Tyrone thought he could see pain etched on its face.
‘Curiosity is not always a good thing,’ Leisler said.
Tyrone looked at his boss, the Lambo humming under his foot. There was something ugly in the water. A hardening in Leisler that he didn’t trust.
‘Sure.’
Leisler sighed, pulling the shroud completely from the Kun Krak and then slowly beginning to wind it back. It was a hideous thing: pulled from its mother’s womb at maybe twenty weeks; it was too young to be considered human, and yet to well formed to be anything else. Hours of roasting had bled the fat from the carcass, and the remaining Smoke Child was lean and frightening. Fingers and toes were well formed and the expression of fear and pain etched on its features was something an unborn child should ever experience.
‘Listen,’ Leisler said. ‘You’re ambitious, right?’
‘I guess,’ Tyrone smiled. ‘Sure.’
‘Well, me too,’ Leisler told him. ‘And if you see a gap in life, you’ve got to go for it. That’s why you’re working for me, and that’s why I’m holding on to this.’
Tyrone edged the Aventador back out onto 110th Street before hanging left into Amsterdam. This time he kept the car below forty and stole glances at Leisler as he went.
‘It belongs to Jimmy,’ Leisler continued. ‘Well, it belongs to his uncle, actually. It’s called a smoke child. You can see what it is. It’s a cooked up baby girl.’
Tyrone did not like Leisler’s unguarded honesty. He kept driving. Kept his eyes front. Kept alert.
‘What’s it for?’ he asked eventually.
Leisler smiled.
‘They think it’s powerful,’ he said. ‘You know why? Because they’re backwards fucking Cambodian fucks, that’s why. We do all the hard work in this city. We clean the streets; we do the hustling and the shaking down. We get splashed with blood and guts. But you ask Jimmy and apparently this little fucker is responsible for all of our success. It’s bullshit.’
He wrapped the black cotton shroud around the Smoke Child’s head covering the last of the golden flesh from sight.
‘Magic?’ Tyrone asked.
‘Ah, it’s some voodoo shit,’ Leisler said. ‘Now Jimmy’s uncle wants it back. And so here’s my opportunity. See, I’m ambitious too Tyrone. Just like you. And this evil bag of skin and bones is my opportunity.’
Tyrone took his time, weaving the Lamborghini between the standing water on Amsterdam’s patchwork tarmac.
‘So you figure that if you take this thing, you’ll take their power away?’
Leisler snorted.
‘Fuck no,’ he said. ‘What power? It’s a dead baby, that’s all. It’s sick, but it’s not magic. It’s just Cambodian hocus pocus. No, I figured we take the Smoke Child, drive a wedge between Jimmy and his uncle, and move into the gap that’s left behind. Simple.’
Tyrone said nothing, processing the new information, working out which way the wind was blowing.
‘Stop off at the yard,’ Leisler said. ‘I need to check the truck.’
Five minutes later, Tyrone pulled up in the builders’ yard where the garbage truck was parked up for the night.
‘I have a problem,’ Leisler told him. ‘Jimmy’s ripping the place apart looking for this voodoo child.’
He nudged the black cotton bundle with his foot.
‘Which is fine, because nobody knows that I’ve got it.’
He paused.
‘Except you.’
Tyrone’s shrewd eyes narrowed.
‘You know something,’ Leisler told him evenly. ‘You saw something. I know it was an accident, but you’ve put me in a very difficult position.’
Tyrone’s street instinct told him that staying in a tight space with Leisler was suddenly a terrible idea. He pulled the handbrake and shouldered his way out of the car. Leisler did the same on the opposite side. In the open, Tyrone could feel the full force of the storm. The wind almost lifted him off his feet.
‘The way I see it,’ Tyrone said, his mind grasping for safety like a drowning man, ‘is that you want me to be your number two. You said that already, remember? You’re teaching me. There will always be a point when you have to let me know stuff, right? Well, maybe that point is right now. So maybe that’s a good thing, right?’
Leister moved around the car, bent slightly against the rain.
‘You’re a loose end, Tyrone,’ he said above the wind. ‘Dress it up how you like, but that’s what you are. If it makes any difference to you, I’m sorry. I had high hopes for us. Seriously. You could have been a contender.’
Tyrone scowled. Suddenly he didn’t give a fuck about Jake Leisler’s reputation. They were just two men out in the rain. And the gloves were off. He reached into his pocket for his knife. Just in case.
‘You’re telling me that because I glimpsed a bit of skin between some cotton…’
He never finished the sentence. Leisler shot him twice in the head. The second round was a force of habit. Tyrone was already falling towards the sodden earth before Leisler got the shot off. Still, the second bullet hit in exactly the same spot as the first, making certain that Tyrone would hit the floor and never get up. It was too bad. The kid had shown potential. Leisler looked at him, open-mouthed and face down in the rain-soaked earth, coughing his last breaths into the pooled water. He had a knife clutched in his right hand. Leisler pursed his lips, impressed. Tyrone had moved quickly. Just not quickly enough.
Leisler pulled the limp body through the mud and heaved it into the back of the garbage truck. A loose end was a loose end, and he has seen too many good men go down early because they hadn’t paid attention to the small stuff. When it was done, he walked calmly back to the waiting Aventador, the engine still humming and the driver’s seat still warm from where Tyrone had been sitting.
‘Change is coming,’ Leisler muttered to himself, and the car growled as he turned it back out onto Amsterdam and North toward the Elbow.
47
Lockhart was watching the raindrops cast shadows on the dashboard of the barista’s Kia Spectra. She had thrown him her keys as soon as he had explained his plan, when the bleeping dot on iCloud had come to a halt on the map. Lockhart had driven uptown to the place where the garbage truck had stopped. It was a building yard, clay and earth waiting for construction to begin. An oil barrel smoldered against the outer wall; the only sign of recent activity. Leisler’s truck was parked up a few yards away. A few cars littered the far end of the yard, and Lockhart had eased the Kia amongst them. There was no sign of Leisler and so Lockhart turned on the radio and waited. He flicked through the pre-sets. The talk stations were wall-to-wall weather.
‘I can see the storm already,’ he said, flicking from channel to channel. ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
He thought about the ever-changing skies over the farm where his father had taught him to read the clouds and predict the storms. Deep in the English countryside, and the weather had rolled in through the valleys and out across the fields.
‘If you can read the weather, you can read people,’ his father had told him. ‘Storms gather and brood long before the lightning begins. People are the same.’
The rain clung to the windshield like tar, and the tiny Kia felt small and cramped. He longed to be out walking in the storm. Longed to be striding through the fields back home, watching the clouds. He longed to be back in England.
At last he found a jazz station. He wondered whether the depth of it would send him over the edge or pull him back from the brink. In the end it did neither. It did what good music does best, and pulle
d him away to another life. The moment Lockhart punched the pre-set, he smiled. He recognized the first few bars of ‘Stormy Weather,’ and the strains of Ella Fitzgerald. He smiled at the conceit of it. A cliché, but a good one all the same.
Stormy weather,
Since my man and I ain’t together,
Keeps raining all the time.
The usual claustrophobic sense of longing washed over Lockhart, but it was hard to be maudlin when Ella was singing. She did maudlin so much better than he could ever manage. He let the music soak into him for a while. There was nothing to do but wait, and every reporter worth his salt knows how to do that. Soldiers describe war as days of waiting, followed by moments of terror and adrenalin. Reporting is the same. Except Lockhart was not on his own. Not when he had Ella. She soared and fluttered, filling the Spectra with beautiful noise. The music was almost loud enough that Lockhart didn’t hear the throaty roar of the Aventador sloping back into the yard. Almost.
Wherever Leisler and his friend had been, they were back. Lockhart got rid of the jazz and watched as they pulled up next to the garbage truck. They were leaning close, looking at something. After a minute, the driver got out, followed by Leisler seconds later. They raised their voices in the storm, but Lockhart couldn’t hear them. Then, without warning, Leisler shot the young guy. He fell like a stone and crumpled in a heap at Leisler’s feet. Lockhart felt his pulse quicken as adrenalin seeped into his veins. He slipped down in his seat, breathing fast, hoping the rain would be enough to stop Leisler from spotting him. He needn’t have worried because Leisler too busy dragging Tyrone’s dead weight through the sodden ground and heaving it into the garbage truck. He hit the button on the side of the truck with ice-cold nonchalance and made his way back to the Aventador. He revved it hard so it spat and growled, and then he spun it around in the mud and headed out of the yard. Lockhart gave it a few seconds and then rolled the Kia out after him.
Amsterdam was long and straight, and Lockhart could just make out the glaring taillights of Leisler’s Lamborghini ahead through the spray. He pushed the Spectra as hard as it would go to keep them in view. They slowed eventually and Leisler pulled up on the curb outside the Elbow. Lockhart sailed straight past a few seconds later, hung a right, and killed the engine. The rain beat time on the thin metal roof, and Lockhart took a moment to steady himself. This was it. Matilda had told him she used to dance, and this was exactly the kind of place she would have done it. It smelled just right.