Gone Cold

by Douglas Corleone

  Aubrey lifts her brows. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that. Tasha used to tell me that her dad’s favorite saying was, ‘Charity begins at home.’”

  I can’t help but smirk. “It doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. When the phrase was first coined, the word charity didn’t mean aiding the poor or helpless. Charity was more a state of mind, a mentality of warmness and kindheartedness. Like just about everything in this world, the phrase was eventually corrupted. Some attribute the quote to the English churchman Thomas Fuller, but all he did was add to the phrase. And what he added is now gleefully omitted by those who’ve shanghaied the words.”

  “What did this Thomas Fuller say?”

  “He said, ‘Charity begins at home, but should not end there.’”

  “Jeez,” Aubrey says, shaking her head, “the way it’s used today, it sounds like it came straight from Ayn Rand.”

  “More’s the pity, isn’t it?” Terry says as he sets his gin and tonic on the table and takes a seat between us. He motions to Aubrey’s coffee. “Sure I can’t get you anything a bit stronger, love? I make a hell of a bone-dry martini, don’t I, Simon?”

  “He does,” I say, though I’m fairly certain I’ve never had one. I detest the taste of gin.

  Aubrey, never one to bow to peer pressure, switches topics by asking, “How did the two of you meet?”

  “He used to work for me,” Terry says, extracting a pack of cigarettes and a lighter from his suit jacket. “Here at the pub.”

  “I remember Simon working here all four years of college,” she says. “But I also remember thinking it was odd he went to work at a bar since he didn’t seem to like them very much. When we were at school, Tasha and I literally had to drag him out for a few drinks on Thursday and Friday nights or he’d have spent those evenings in the gym or alone in his room reading crime fiction.”

  Terry purses his lips. “I met him on your campus actually.”

  “At American?”

  “Right, love. If I recall, I was putting up flyers for me Grand Opening. I stopped him to ask for directions to some building or another. And eventually talked him into escorting me personally. I caught his accent, of course, and once he confessed to being born in London, I told him he had to come work for me. He argued he wasn’t much of a bartender. I said, ‘Bullocks. You can start as me barback and work your way up from there. It took some convincing. And a substantial hourly wage. But I eventually got him to come round. Next thing you know we’re best mates.” He winks at Aubrey. “Or at least that’s what I told the young lasses who came into the pub just to get an eyeful of him.”

  “Important thing is, we remained friends,” I tell Aubrey. “So I had someone to spend time with once you started stealing Tasha away more and more frequently.”

  Aubrey smiles. To say it’s the saddest smile I’ve ever seen is an understatement. I realize now that I love Aubrey like a sister. Love her like I’d love Tuesday if she were still in my life. If our father hadn’t broken our family into pieces and spread us out on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Terry lights his cigarette. “You won’t believe what I read in the rags his morning. Those geezers in the mick parliament are proposing to ban smoking in pubs. In pubs.” He takes a pull and blows a stream of smoke up toward the ceiling. “And the daft journo that wrote the story says the Yanks are likely to follow suit sometime in the next few years. Can you believe it? Ban smoking in pubs. Might as well ban drinking in pubs while they’re at it.” He takes another drag. “Arseholes they are, every last one of them. Couldn’t organize a piss-up in a brewery. Never mind what banning fags will do for business. Imagine the aggro, will you? There may come a bloody day when I can’t light up in me own boozer.”

  I throw back a sizeable portion of my pint. I love Terry too. Love him like a father. Like the father I’ve always wished I had.

  Tears well and threaten to fall. So I lift the rest of my pint and carry it across the room. All the while wishing the rain would end without really having a sound reason why.

  Why the hell should I care?

  What concern is it of mine?

  Let the skies open. Shouldn’t matter to me. Might as well rain forever now for all the good the sun will do me.

  Chapter 56

  Ostermann ran his hand down the far wall, feeling for a seam. He looked back at the kid waiter, who motioned for him to look lower.

  “Brilliant,” Ostermann said as he kneeled before the hardwood paneling. “Here it is.”

  He reached into his jacket and pulled out a switchblade. “Eleven-inch Italian stiletto,” he said as he flicked it open. “An anniversary present from Magda.”

  Sliding the knife between two innocuous-looking wooden panels, he used the blade like a crowbar and slowly pried open a heavy, hidden door, which stood only three and a half feet in height.

  And opened onto complete darkness.

  Still on his knees, Ostermann removed his phone from his pocket. He tapped an app titled Flashlight and a beam as strong as a miniature Maglite appeared. Directing it into the hole, the beam illuminated a steep set of concrete stairs.

  “Simon,” he said softly as he rose to his feet, “I think it’s best you remain up here while I go down.”

  Wordlessly, I stepped past him, ducked my head, and cautiously started down the stairs.

  The air was stale. Like an attic you haven’t entered for years. It was cold at the top, and the temperature dropped relentlessly the closer I came to the bottom. By the time I reached the last step, my breath was forming a fog so dense I could barely see past it.

  With Ostermann right behind me shining the light from his phone, I stopped directly in front of a sealed metal door.

  I felt my fingers curl into fists. Since Liverpool my left had been regaining strength and range of motion. Now it, like the rest of my body, was operating of its own accord.

  I consciously opened my right hand and pressed my palm against the cold steel.

  My breathing quickened.

  My pulse raced.

  Despite the temperature, beads of sweat began to form at my hairline.

  “There,” Ostermann said, aiming his light at a small panel door to my right.

  Opening it revealed a digital keypad.

  My anticipation instantly sunk.

  “Type in Shauna Adair’s birthday,” Ostermann said. “Day, month, last two digits of the year.”

  In the darkness, I looked a question back at him.

  Matter-of-factly, he said, “The waiter has spent some time with her down here. He asked that we not let his boss find out.”

  I pressed the keys slowly, deliberately, my frozen fingers slightly sticking to each one.

  As soon as I entered the last number I heard the click of an electronic lock. Like the one on Ostermann’s hotel room door only louder, heavier. This lock was far more secure.

  It had been made not only to keep intruders out but to keep captives in.

  I felt the sound in my stomach like the percussion of a bass drum.

  I searched for a door handle.

  “Push inward,” Ostermann said.

  I did; I pushed hard on the heavy metal door and slowly it came open.

  And I froze.

  Behind the door was a room that looked like a poorly finished basement. Cheap furniture, including a couch with cat-clawed upholstery, a pair of wooden chairs with uneven legs, a double bed consisting of only a mattress and box spring dressed in yellowing sheets. A single set of plastic see-through drawers against the left wall. The walls masked with hideous wallpaper, no doubt in order to conceal soundproofing materials and whatever other horrors lurked behind them.

  And in the far corner, a pale form. Small, emaciated, curled up like a ball.

  Next to her, on the floor, a syringe. A burnt spoon. Several black and gray Bic lighters. A pair of opened translucent vials, one empty, one half-filled with brown powder.

  Alternative rock played quietly from hidden speakers.

>   I swallowed hard as I tried to process the scene revealing itself before me.

  “Hailey?” I breathed.

  Her name dissipated in a pathetic puff the moment it left my lips. Likely because it was much warmer inside the room than out.

  Finally, I steeled myself and went to her. Each step like trudging through three feet of snow, my legs as heavy and leaden as they’d ever been. All that I’d faced in the past twelve years—as an investigator and the father of a missing girl—suddenly seemed trifling. Like waking from a vaguely negative dream set in the distant past.

  Once I was within just a few feet of her I nearly lost my balance, my knees threatening to collapse beneath my weight as they had in our kitchen the day Hailey first went missing.

  I lowered myself to my haunches and held my hands out to her, though I felt strangely certain that she wasn’t remotely aware of my presence. Of any presence.

  “Hailey.”

  I went to war with the dread building in the back of my throat and finally touched her head. Like being struck with a jolt of electricity an intense tingling shot up my arm, into my shoulder blades. I shuddered then set my jaw and boldly used both hands to take hold of her, to pull her toward me.

  The term “skin and bones” could barely describe how she felt in my quivering hands. I was reminded of a feral cat I’d once fed as a child, of lifting him in my own matchstick arms just a few days before I discovered his feline corpse hidden deep within my father’s azaleas.

  I breathed in the scent of her, her short dyed hair so thick with smoke I nearly gagged.

  A soft moan escaped her lips and I immediately lifted her into my arms and rose to my feet. Set her gently back down on the bed.

  She weighed no more than ninety or a hundred pounds.

  Sitting beside her, I took her face into my hands and searched it for some sign of life other than the feeble breaths emanating from her nostrils. As I held her, the lids of her eyes slowly began to lift like the curtains on a show. And in those moments I saw myself. I saw my wife, Tasha. I saw my daughter.

  Looking at her now I didn’t know how I ever could have doubted her identity. The grainy image caught on closed-circuit television outside the Stalemate should have been more than enough to convince me.

  I whispered her name as though to say it aloud would cause her to vanish again. As it had once in my dreams.

  Her lids fluttered and finally closed. But I’d already seen enough in those eyes to know.

  This was the infant girl I’d gently taken from Dr. Bruce Chen’s arms eighteen years ago at Georgetown University Hospital while a wholly depleted Tasha looked on from her spot on the operating room table with tears of joy in her eyes.

  This was the one-year-old who first rose to her feet in a portable playpen on a freezing Thanksgiving night in the living room of her grandparents’ colossal house in Richmond, Virginia, while everyone else watched the Ravens kick hell out of the Cowboys.

  This was the shy and awkward toddler I’d sat and watched from my miniature plastic chair as she reluctantly joined a half-dozen other unwieldy children for circle time on her first morning of preschool.

  This was the little girl who drew suns on every piece of construction paper she ever set crayon to, even scenes set indoors, simply because she treasured days when the sky was sky-blue and the sun was unobstructed by clouds.

  This was the little girl Tasha and I watched dance through the sprinklers in our yard as we sipped sweet tea on our lounge chairs on the back porch.

  This was the little girl I took sailing on Chesapeake Bay.

  This was the little girl who, instead of shells, insisted on collecting the white sand from Maryland’s Downtown North Beach.

  This was my little girl.

  The little girl who, for the past twelve years, had peered out at me from the photograph on my refrigerator. The little girl with whom I’d last known true happiness as we stood together with her mother in front of Cinderella Castle at the Magic Kingdom.

  The little girl whom I’d last held in my arms the morning I left for Bucharest to track down a United States fugitive.

  I placed my lips on her pallid face. Ran a hand through her matted black hair. Kissed her and gently set her head back down on her sickly motel pillow.

  Only once I rose to my feet did I remember Kurt Ostermann was still in the small basement room with us.

  “Simon, look,” he said, pointing to a spot just under the bed.

  Money, I saw. Loads of it.

  Immediately I thought: The reason she went up north.

  Her father had gotten himself into some kind of trouble. With his competition, Lennox Sterling had suggested. Maybe even with his mates.

  She’d been in a rush, Quigg had told me. She’d moved with a definite urgency. She had to do something of grave consequence for her father.

  For Terrance Davies.

  Also known as Nigel Cummings.

  I went to one knee and sifted through the bills. Tens of thousands of pounds if not a couple hundred thousand.

  And secreted within those notes was a small, unsealed off-white envelope.

  I opened it, withdrew its contents: a single page of typewritten instructions.

  Silently, I read them.

  To Ostermann, I said, “This money is a ransom.”

  A ransom, I thought. But also a ticket to see my daughter’s abductor. Live and up close. In all likelihood, my one and only opportunity to make Terrance Davies answer for all he’d done.

  Chapter 57

  Ostermann remained behind at Knight’s End to keep watch over Hailey, while I headed off to the East London district of Wapping, where Shauna Adair had been instructed to take the ransom to free Terrance Davies from an East End gangster known as John “Gentleman Jack” Noonan.

  Lizzy, the bartender back at Knight’s End, had provided what little information she could on Terry’s captor.

  “Dapper fellow,” she said. “Looks a lot like the film star Michael Caine, he does. And a real charmer, from what I’ve heard. At least to the fairer sex. But to blokes? Goss is that he once ripped his own solicitor’s throat out with his teeth like a rabid bulldog.”

  Unlike Terry, Jack Noonan had his hands in much more than drug trafficking. Based out of South London, Jack’s firm was known to be active in gambling, extortion, money laundering, arms dealing, protection rackets, sex trafficking, and contract killing.

  “What’s his beef with your boss?” I asked.

  “They had a row over territories, far as I know. Nigel—”

  “His real name’s Terry,” I said. “Terrance Davies.”

  “All right, then. Terry started muscling in on Jack’s action.”

  Unfortunately for Terry, Jack’s action included much of London and its surrounding areas, including Essex and Kent. Over the past decade, working closely with the Colombian cartels as well as local Yardies, Jack’s syndicate had largely consolidated the organized crime industry. With politicians, Metropolitan Police officials, even some higher-ups in the newly formed NCA, Jack had become all but untouchable. As a result, most small-timers had been bought out or scared off. But not Terry. Terry remained intent on keeping his humble slice of London’s East End.

  “So after several warnings, Jack finally moved on one of Terry’s mates—took the poor bastard’s toes, all ten of them.”

  A rotten shame, she said, but it did bring Terry to the table. After a few days of talks, they came to an agreement wherein Terry would give Jack a percentage of his earnings from the disputed territory.

  “Only Nigel being Nigel—or Terry being Terry, I suppose—he eventually welched. When Jack’s boys came round to collect, Terry disappeared. Only Terry ain’t no magician, right? He’d apparently only gone so far as Leeds in the North Country, when Gentleman Jack tracked him down.”

  Using his firm’s Afro-Caribbean muscle, Jack got ahold of Terry and brought him back to London. In bad shape, Lizzy had heard—though his poor physical condition, she admi
tted, was nothing more than a rumor.

  “According to the note, Jack’s holding Terry in a warehouse in Wapping,” I said.

  “That’s in the Borough of Tower Hamlets,” she said. “Not far, right? Somewhere between the north bank of the River Thames and the Highway.”

  I asked her how Shauna became involved.

  “Terry’s got no one else he can trust, see. He knew someone sold him out in Leeds. Someone close to him. Had to be. Because hardly any of Terry’s mates knew where he was going. So Terry told Gentleman Jack, ‘If you want your dosh, ring my daughter. She’s the only one can get it for you.’”

  “And that’s why she went to Dublin?”

  “Actually, she would have made a few stops. Terry owns public houses all over the UK and Ireland. Only a few act as his true bases of operations, however. Shauna would have gone to the Doubled Pawn in Manchester, Bishop’s in Glasgow, and the Stalemate in Dublin in order to collect the kind of money Jack Noonan was asking for.”

  “According to the instructions, the drop is supposed to happen tonight.”

  “Is the girl in any shape to make it?”

  I shook my head. “I’m going to make the drop,” I said.

  “You? Why would you do that for Terry?”

  “Let’s just say I owe him. And tonight I’m going to even the score.”

  * * *

  Lizzy lent me Terry’s brand-new black Mercedes for the drive to the river. I parked near a former landmark known as Execution Dock, which was utilized by the Brits for hundreds of years to hang pirates who’d been convicted and sentenced to death in the Admiralty court.

  I stepped out of the Mercedes and into the fierce wind blowing in from the Thames. Wapping somehow maintained its historic character as a maritime district even though most of the warehouses that remained standing had been converted into luxury flats.

  Not the one I was looking for, however. The warehouse I was looking for was now owned by a Kuwaiti investment company. It wasn’t in regular use, though it did from time to time host large events like major film premiere after parties.