Road of the Dead

by Kevin Brooks

  She looked at Vince again, then nodded. Cole put down the phone and crossed back over to the window.

  “Sit down,” he told Abbie.

  She sat down next to Vince and gently wiped some blood from his face. He closed his eyes and groaned. Abbie put her hand on his knee and turned to Cole.

  “You didn’t have to hit him so hard,” she said quietly.

  “He’s lucky I only hit him.”

  “It wasn’t his fault…”

  “What wasn’t?”

  “Anything…everything…” She blinked slowly, then lowered her eyes. “Rachel…it wasn’t Vince’s fault. He didn’t know what they were going to do. He was just—”

  “Shut up,” Vince muttered, trying to sit up. “Don’t say nothing—”

  “He knows,” Abbie told him. “He already knows—”

  “Gypsy shit…dunno shit…”

  “Don’t, Vince…please…you’ll only make it worse.”

  “She’s right,” said Cole, stepping forward with the pistol in his hand.

  Vince looked up at him, smiling crookedly. “What you gonna do—shoot me?”

  Cole nodded. “In the knees, first. Then the elbows. Then I’ll string some rope around your neck and tie it to the back of your car and drag you all over the moor.” He stopped in front of Vince and pressed the pistol into his knee, then slowly leaned forward and looked him in the eye. “What do you think? You think I’m joking?”

  Vince said nothing, but he wasn’t laughing.

  Cole stared at him for a long time. Eventually he said, “I’m not sure how much longer I can put up with you, so let’s just get this done—all right? No more shit. You sit there, you don’t move, you don’t say anything. If I ask you a question, you either nod or shake your head. Anything else and you’ll never walk again. Got it?”

  Vince nodded.

  “Good.” Cole turned to Abbie. “Now, I’m going to tell you what I think happened, and you’re going to listen. When I’ve finished I’m going to ask you some questions and you’re going to answer them. If I’m satisfied with your answers, you’ll never see me again. If I’m not satisfied, you’ll be seeing me in your nightmares for the rest of your life. Do you understand?”

  Abbie nodded.

  Cole went back over to the window, lit a cigarette, and started talking. “Henry Quentin has been trying to buy up this place for a long time,” he said. “He needs it for the hotel people, whoever they are, and he’s been getting impatient because you won’t sell.” He looked at Abbie. “Am I right?”

  She nodded.

  He said, “But you need the money.”

  “We can manage.”

  “That’s not what Vince thinks, though, is it?”

  Abbie said nothing. Vince just stared at the floor.

  “Vince hasn’t worked for a long time,” Cole went on, “and you both know that the money you got from selling your land won’t last forever, so when Henry comes along and offers you a good deal—probably more than a good deal—Vince can’t understand why you won’t take it. It’s good money, you can buy another house, a nice new house. Maybe a new car, too. Why not take the offer?”

  “It’s my house,” Abbie mumbled. “It’s my mother’s house.”

  “Right,” said Cole. “But Vince is getting all kinds of shit from Quentin. He’s putting the pressure on—offering more money, getting more impatient, starting to get nasty. And that starts getting to Vince, and he starts getting nasty with you. But whatever he says, and whatever he does, you still won’t change your mind. So when Quentin suggests trying something else, like maybe giving you a bit of a fright, Vince can’t see what else he can do but agree.”

  “They would have done it anyway,” Abbie muttered softly. “With or without Vince, they still would have done it.”

  “Yeah, but they didn’t do it without him, did they? Vince told them when would be the best time to do it. He told them you were going to visit his mother after Rachel had left, and he told them you’d be expecting a lift home from him, and he told them he’d pretend the car wasn’t working so you’d have to walk home on your own.” Cole held up his hand to Vince, showing him the oil on his fingertips. “I checked your carburetor—it hasn’t been changed in years. You lied, didn’t you?”

  Vince started to open his mouth, then changed his mind and just lowered his head.

  “You piece of shit,” Cole said to him. “You set up your own wife, for Christ’s sake. You let her walk home in the middle of the night, knowing full well that Quentin was going to set one of his freaks on her—”

  “Nothing was supposed to happen,” Abbie said. “No one was meant to get hurt. I was just supposed to get frightened…”

  “And that makes it OK, does it?” Cole shook his head. “Shit…he’s your husband. He’s supposed to look after you.”

  She shook her head. “Vince didn’t know they’d get Selden to do it. He wouldn’t have gone along with that. Selden’s a head case.”

  “You lent Rachel your raincoat, didn’t you?”

  Abbie nodded, starting to cry.

  Cole just stared at her. “Selden thought Rachel was you. Vince told Quentin what you were wearing and what time you’d be walking back. Quentin told Selden, and when Selden saw Rachel wearing your raincoat and walking the road back to your house, he thought she was you. But instead of just frightening her, he raped her and killed her and left her on the moor.” Cole paused, staring the truth into Abbie’s lost eyes, and in that moment I could feel the pain of Rachel’s death sucking the air from the room.

  I couldn’t breathe. I’d never felt so cold and numb in all my life. It was as if I’d only just realized that Rachel was dead.

  She was dead.

  My sister was dead.

  Never coming back.

  She was dead forever, forever pained and cold and wronged and dead dead dead dead dead dead dead…

  I was crying silently now.

  Cole was with me, crying deep down inside himself, but no one else knew it—not even him. He was still staring at Abbie and Vince, speaking softly in the silence of the night.

  “What happened, Abbie? How did Quentin find out what Selden had done? Did Vince tell him? He must have been surprised when you came back that night and nothing was wrong.”

  “He was drunk,” Abbie said emptily. “I don’t know what happened. I just left him on the sofa and went to bed.”

  Cole looked at Vince. “Did you call Quentin?”

  Vince shook his head—No.

  “So how did he find out?”

  Vince shrugged—Don’t know.

  Cole looked at him for a while, then said, “Do you know where Selden’s body is?”

  No.

  “Do you know who killed him?”

  No.

  “Was it Red?”

  Don’t know.

  “Quentin?”

  Don’t know.

  “But Quentin ordered it?”

  Maybe…

  “Yes or no?”

  Yes.

  “When—that night?”

  Don’t know.

  “Is Bowerman involved? Does he know where Selden’s body is?”

  Don’t know.

  “Yes or no?”

  Don’t know.

  The room was full of nothing now—no sound, no air, no light, no dark. No feelings. There was too much of a void to feel anything. Cole was nowhere; his black eyes soulless, his dead heart still. Vince and Abbie were just lumps of meat. And I was Ruben Ford. I was sitting in the back of a wrecked Mercedes in a breaker’s yard in East London. I was watching the rain in the crystal-white lights over the gates, watching my jewels in the darkness. My mountains. My watchtowers. I was alone with Rachel, walking a storm-ravaged lane in the middle of the night, and we were cold and wet and tired and scared and we didn’t know why…

  What are you doing here, Rach? I thought you were coming home tonight?

  I was Ruben Ford. I wasn’t dead. I could see things: a burning sk
y, a field of bones, a nightmare face carved out of rock. I could see a red maniac with a vision of me in his eyes…

  “What are you going to do now?” a distant voice said.

  I opened my eyes to the echoed silence. Abbie was looking at Cole, her unanswered words still trembling on her lips. Cole was staring at me. I could see the flicker of my unknown thoughts in his eyes—the lights, the jewels, the skies, the faces—and I knew he could see them, too. He could feel them in me. He was with me. For the very first time in his life, he’d sensed something from me in the same way that I’d always sensed feelings from him. And it scared the hell out of him.

  “It’s all right,” I told him. “It’s just you and me.”

  He stared at me for a little while longer, his feelings still burdened with mine, and then he simply blinked his eyes and it was gone—all of it. The images, the feelings, the thoughts, the fears…he just made them all disappear, and the only thing left was now.

  “Get your stuff, Rube,” he said, pocketing the pistol. “We’re going.”

  On the way out of the house, Abbie stopped Cole in the doorway and asked him where he was going. Her face was streaked with tears, and her eyes were haunted. But not by Rachel’s ghost. The only specters plaguing Abbie were her own.

  Cole didn’t even look at her.

  “Where are you going?” she asked him again, pleading with him, putting her hand on his arm. “What are you going to do? About us, I mean. It wasn’t Vince’s fault, and I didn’t know…” She stopped, realizing that Cole wasn’t listening, he was just staring at her hand on his arm. “Sorry,” she said, letting go. “I didn’t mean—”

  “You don’t mean anything,” Cole told her, pushing his way past to the door. “You never did and you never will.”

  Thirteen

  The air was crisp and crystal-black as we drove up the lane away from the farmhouse. White moths fluttered in the beam of the headlights, dancing in the air like ghosted snowflakes in the night, and away in the distance I could see faint threads of crimson coloring the raven sky. The inside of the Astra was sour with the stale scent of fear. There was a bloodstain on the passenger seat and a fresh smear of pink on a starburst crack in the driver’s window. Cole was as dark and silent as the surrounding moor.

  “Stop the car,” I said to him.

  “What?”

  “Just stop a minute…please.”

  We’d just pulled out onto the village road, and when Cole slowed the car and we rolled to a halt I realized we were back at the forest again. Not that I could see it. I couldn’t see anything. But I knew it was all there—the gateway, the forest, the Road of the Dead. I could feel it watching us.

  Cole cut the engine and lit a cigarette. He wound down the window to let the smoke out.

  “Are you OK?” he asked me.

  “Not really. How about you?”

  He shrugged. “I’m all right.” He breathed out smoke and turned to look at me. “It’s nearly over now. We’ll be home soon.”

  We both knew it was a lie, but neither of us cared.

  “Did you get all that stuff about Rachel from Nate?” I asked him.

  “Not all of it. He told me as much as he knew, but he didn’t know everything. I had to guess the rest. I wasn’t sure I was right until I’d checked Vince’s car.”

  “Is that why you hit him?”

  “Who?”

  “Vince.”

  Cole shrugged. “I needed him out of the way, that’s all. If I hadn’t whacked him they never would have told us anything.”

  I glanced idly at the bloodstained crack in the window. “Where’s Nate?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered, “wherever I left him, probably.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “Where he belongs—crawling around in the shit.”

  “He’s still alive, then?”

  Cole looked at me. “Don’t start judging me, Ruben.”

  “I’m not—I’m just asking if he’s still alive.”

  “I already told you. He’s crawling around in the dark somewhere, alive as he ever was—OK?”

  I nodded, satisfied that Cole was telling the truth. “What about Skinny?” I asked him. “What was that all about?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “Christ, Cole—what the hell were you doing? Giving him the shotgun…shit, he could have killed you.”

  “Yeah?” Cole smiled. “I thought you said he didn’t have the guts for it. You could see it in his eyes, you told me. Remember? According to you, he couldn’t kill anyone to save his own life.”

  “His gun wasn’t loaded then.”

  Cole reached into his pocket and pulled something out. When he held out his hand to me and opened his fingers, I saw the two shotgun cartridges nestling in his palm.

  “You think I’m stupid?” he said.

  I looked at him, shaking my head, not knowing what to think. I’d seen him showing Skinny the loaded shotgun…I’d seen the cartridges glinting in the chambers. He couldn’t have taken them out then. He could have taken them out some time later, when I wasn’t with him, but I knew he wasn’t lying. He wasn’t stupid—he hadn’t given Skinny a loaded gun.

  “Do you know what magic really is?” he said to me.

  “Magic?”

  “Yeah, magic—illusions, conjuring tricks, pulling rabbits out of hats…all that kind of stuff. Look.”

  He closed his fingers on the shotgun cartridges, held them tight, then opened his hand again. The cartridges were gone. I stared at the empty space for a moment, not quite believing my eyes, then I looked up at Cole.

  “It’s not magic,” he said. “It’s just fast hands.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was stunned. The trick in itself was amazing enough, but what really astonished me was simply the fact that Cole could do it. That’s what I couldn’t believe. He was my brother. I knew him inside and out. I knew him as well as I knew myself. And I knew—without any doubt—that he didn’t do magic tricks. Not in a thousand years. Magic tricks were the last thing in the world he’d do. They were frivolous, pointless, boastful, vain…they were childish, for God’s sake. My brother didn’t do childish. He hadn’t even done childish when he was a child.

  “It’s only a trick,” he said to me.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a trick. You don’t have to think about it.”

  I looked at him. It was strange, suddenly realizing there was a side to him I’d never known anything about. I don’t think it changed anything between us, but it shifted things ever so slightly. Whatever it was that made us us—the bond, the dynamics, the history—whatever it was, it was now fractionally out of sync. Out of tune. Our purity had been compromised by a barely audible hiss of white noise.

  It didn’t mean anything.

  I didn’t like it, but it still didn’t mean anything. All we needed was a bit of fine-tuning.

  “Are you ready?” Cole said to me, starting the engine.

  “Why did you pick Skinny and Nate?” I asked him.

  “What?”

  “When we were waiting outside the hotel—what made you go after Skinny and Nate? Why not one of the others? Why not Red? I mean, he probably knows more than Skinny and Nate put together.”

  “He’s smarter than them, too,” Cole explained. “That’s why he didn’t hang around when they split up. He was into his car and away before I had a chance to move.”

  “All right,” I said, “but what about Quentin? He was on foot, on his own…we even knew where he was going. We could have picked him off easy.”

  Cole dropped his cigarette out the window. “Skinny and Nate are weak,” he told me. “That’s why they do what they’re told.” He rolled up the window. “There’s no point trying to crack coconuts when you can get what you want by cracking eggs.”

  I smiled at him. “You’re full of surprises tonight, aren’t you? Magic tricks, self-styled proverbs…what else have you got up your s
leeve?”

  He held out his hand and gave it a flick—and the two shotgun cartridges dropped into my lap. I looked down at them, then lifted my eyes back to Cole. The half-smile on his face only lasted a moment, but it was more than enough for me. The white noise had gone from my head.

  “OK?” he said.

  I smiled and nodded. “Let’s go.”

  It wasn’t far to Henry Quentin’s house—along the moorland road, down the winding lane, and then we were heading into the village and the big stone house was looming up on our left. As Cole slowed the car and turned off the headlights, I rolled down the window and peered through the darkness at the rear of the house. The vast garden that I’d glimpsed before was completely closed off behind a high brick wall topped with razor wire and broken glass.

  “Any cameras?” Cole asked me.

  “Not that I can see.”

  We kept going, rolling slowly alongside the wall, both of us looking up at the ancient stone house. It was dark, the windows unlit. Weirdly shaped chimney stacks jutted from the roof like an army of soot-black sentries.

  “What do you think?” Cole asked me.

  I shook my head. “We’d have to go over the wall. They’re bound to be watching it. And we don’t know what’s on the other side, anyway. There could be dogs, cameras…anything.”

  Cole thought about it for a moment, then nodded. He turned the headlights back on and accelerated away down the road.

  We drove into the village and turned around and parked by the telephone box, facing Quentin’s house. Cole turned off the engine and we sat there in the still of the night, quietly watching the house. The driveway was still cluttered with vehicles, including the gas tanker, and there were more cars and motorbikes parked on the road outside.

  “Looks like he’s got a few visitors,” I said.

  Cole nodded.

  I looked over my shoulder and gazed down the High Street. There was no one around. The street was dead—the hotel closed, the houses sleeping. Beyond the village, the distant moorland blurred like a dream into the gray-black horizon of the night.

  “Do you think Quentin knows we’re coming?” I asked Cole.

  He nodded again. “Vince probably called him as soon as we left. He’ll be waiting for us.” He looked at me. “You don’t have to come in with me, you know.”