‘Former business associate, he’s been missing for years.’
‘And this has anything to do with you, why?’
I was leaning on the back of Noel’s chair and I could smell something alcoholic in the room. Ale, beer, could have been whisky. He didn’t seem drunk. It must have been coming out in his sweat. I took a step back and surveyed Ronnie.
He said, ‘I have to do this for Eli, guys.’
‘Why?’
‘Because, honestly, he’s the best person I can think of to come back and help out right now. You know we can’t keep bleeding money into Mark Chester and her fucking boyfriend.’
‘Ex-boyfriend,’ Noel corrected, without any prompting from me.
‘What?’
‘Ex.’
‘Oh, right, whatever.’ Ronnie shook his head. ‘But the point is, I owe him. Seriously, I’ll get him to Skype you guys soon, you’ll see. He’s trustworthy.’
No ‘sorry’. Nothing.
I leant down again. ‘Do you know a guy called Sean? He was here looking for you.’
‘He doesn’t need to worry about that,’ Noel cut in, way too quickly. ‘I’m handling it.’
‘Sean?’
‘Ron!’ I couldn’t see Noel’s expression, and I looked down to check the thumbnail of his face on the screen too late to gauge whatever telepathic exchange had just happened. ‘It’s fine.’
I threw up my hands and went to sit on the other side of the desk, not bothering to hide my disgust from Noel, who was ignoring me. Turning in the swivel chair, I lowered the back until I was almost lying down to listen to the rest of their conversation, hanging my head over the edge towards the floor.
‘What’s the deal with this hotel then?’ Noel asked.
‘It’s not haunted… well, that’s bullshit. But it’s fucked up. There’s been lots of suicides there, women jumping out of windows and killing the people they landed on. There was a girl dead in the water tank for two weeks before anyone thought the water tasted funny.’
‘Jesus.’
‘It’s a magnet for freaks from all over.’
I stopped spinning. It had hurt when Ronnie skimmed over my relationship status. But what seemed like an atomic bomb going off in the centre of your life didn’t often register on anyone else’s radar.
‘Fuck this shit,’ I muttered, pulling myself up.
Noel barely glanced over his laptop as I left the office.
On a more sinister note, I wondered, did the fact that I was no longer with Nic mean I had no leverage? It was Nic who had got me this job in the first place. Without a renowned contract killer at my back, what power did I have? It could have been the paranoia, the drugs or whatever, but I was looking into the future and seeing a massive fucking elbow edging me out. And then what? Back to the squats and minimum wage and skipping for food? Fuck that. It was me holding everything together. Me.
I’d stopped in the hall.
This place was as much mine as it was theirs. I wasn’t leaving.
My fingernails dug into my palms.
I wasn’t leaving.
Just let them try and make me.
I went downstairs and a couple of the girls were rehearsing dance routines onstage in hoodies. Retrieving my mobile and some cigarettes from the bar, I went outside and thought it over for a few minutes before calling Edie.
It was hardly a betrayal. I wasn’t Seven. But it paid to keep my options open.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Ronnie
I fell asleep fully clothed in one of the bedrooms upstairs without even kicking my shoes off, and when I woke up nine hours later it was four in the morning and the house was empty.
I excavated grime from the corners of my eyes and wandered from room to room. The one I’d been sleeping in was clearly occupied by a girl, but it was sparse.
The other kid’s room – a boy, by the looks of it – had the appearance of being slept in, but when I looked out of the window our car was gone.
I went downstairs and found a note on the kitchen counter.
Going to talk to some people.
Luiz with me.
E.
I felt inside my crumpled jacket for my phone. All the fuss about bringing him with us and then suddenly they were inseparable.
The note didn’t explain where Cathal was though.
I ran a glass of water from the tap and downed it.
The house was silent. He definitely wasn’t sleeping.
I looked out of the living room window, but could only see the lit-up driveway and not much of the neighbouring houses.
‘Cathal!’ I called, just in case.
Nothing.
I tried the back door and it was unlocked.
Did I really want to see what Cathal was doing in his back garden at four in the morning?
I did, I decided. If we were living with a serial killer it would be best to know.
Taking off my jacket, I rifled through one of the drawers for a slim little filleting knife, and went outside. The garden was unlit. I couldn’t see any borders but I could feel a stone path beneath my feet so I followed it into the darkness.
I could be Skyping with my kids or with Rachel, I thought. The longer I went without doing it, the more monumental a task it became.
Most of the sky was blacked out by trees as I continued to feel my way along the flagstones.
There was a light. As I squinted, it became three lights, emanating from the windows of a workshed, a wooden box, a man-cave. He could be doing anything; making a table, or welding. I just couldn’t help but imagine it was more likely he had some poor soul chained up and ready for a ritual sacrifice, a kidnapped woman being held as a sex-slave maybe—
I stopped because it was none of my business.
But we were staying in this guy’s house. I had to know.
I held the knife down by my side, out of sight, and edged towards the shed.
I put my ear to the door, but couldn’t hear much. In a slight crouch, I skirted around and peered in one of the windows. Dew soaked into my socks from the long grass.
There was a worktop, a microwave, glass implements and smoke coming from somewhere. I craned my neck to get a better look and Cathal’s face appeared through the glass.
‘Fuck!’ I started, falling away from the pane.
The door opened behind me and I hurriedly put the knife in my back pocket.
‘Wanna come in?’ Cathal asked, hanging out of the doorway.
‘I, uh… couldn’t find anyone in the house.’
‘And you thought I might be hiding something?’
He presented the inside of the shed with a sweep of his arm, and it became apparent that no human being was chained up in this space. It was mostly desks and weird instruments, like a lab.
‘Searching for a cure for cancer?’ I said, looking for a place to lean and settling for one of the worktops.
The fish knife dug into my arse and I straightened up again, as Cathal did something with a beaker of water over a bunsen burner.
‘You’re not far wrong,’ he replied, looking over his shoulder.
‘Really?’
‘You ever heard of Ormus?’ He picked up a tiny plastic pot full of white powder and held it out.
I studied it for a moment, but it was just white powder.
‘No.’ I handed it back. ‘What is it, a drug?’
‘It’s a combination of precious metals in an unusual atomic form, where the atoms don’t form any bonds with each other. Gold, silver, cobalt, nickel, copper, couple of others. You won’t find it on the periodic table though.’
‘Why?’ I tried to sit down again but couldn’t.
‘It’s not scientifically recognized.’
‘Why?’
Cathal locked onto me with this intense stare. ‘Because it can cure pretty much everything.’
I frowned, not sure how he wanted me to react.
With awe, I guessed, going by the expectant way he was looking at me.
&
nbsp; ‘Um… really?’
‘Yes.’ He opened a drawer beneath one of his worktops and took out a bag of capsules. ‘I started taking them nine years ago, when I was diagnosed with eye cancer.’
He reached up to his left eye, hid it for a moment, and when his hand came away again it was gone.
I jumped at the sight of the pink empty socket. ‘Shit!’
‘It’s a glass one.’ He opened his palm and there was his eye, dark grey, staring up at me. ‘It was spreading though. Eye cancer is a bugger, it can reach your brain like that’ – clicking his fingers, ‘turn into tumours and stuff.’
‘Um… so…’
He put his glass eye back in, blinking it into place as if it was a contact lens. ‘I got on the Internet and ordered these as a last resort. I stopped chemo, it was making me sicker. Within a year, the cancer was gone. My oncologist didn’t know what the fuck was going on like.’
‘And you weren’t doing any other treatment?’
‘Nope.’ His eye lit up. ‘And what’s more, my hearing got better, the sight in my right eye became perfect, my blood oxygen levels are like I’m a teenager. It literally reversed the aging process. I water my plants with the stuff. Here, take some.’
‘So why aren’t you a multimillionaire then?’ I took the bag of capsules and eyed them with suspicion.
‘It’s actually illegal to claim you can cure cancer if you’re not one of the big-boy pharmaceuticals in America.’ He sat down on one of his wooden chairs and shook his head. ‘Most of the research is going on in Canada. But I make a tidy amount selling Ormus on the Internet to people like me.’
‘But that makes no sense.’
‘It makes perfect sense, Ronnie, eh. No one makes money out of healthy people. All these drugs we’re being peddled, they cover symptoms but don’t tackle the illness, keeping you hooked on medication for ever. If Ormus was out there for everyone… Fuck, the pharmaceutical industry would be dead fish.’
I suppose that did make sense. I took a handful of the capsules and glanced up at Cathal, who nodded.
‘Take a load, seriously. I’d rather you believe me than pay anything. If you’re up for it, Ormus oil is a trippy drug too, kinda like acid.’
‘OK, thanks. I might hold off on the tripping balls but… OK, I’ll take these.’ I put the bag in my pocket. ‘So what are you doing in here at stupid o’clock? Making it?’
‘You extract Ormus rather than make it. But no, I’m doing something a bit more experimental.’
I couldn’t work out whether he was a nutter or not. He seemed to make good points, but then a lot of conspiracy theorists did. The one thing that gave Cathal some credibility was his money. He clearly had a lot of money and you couldn’t afford to buy a house like this without peddling a decent product.
‘Like what?’ I asked.
When Cathal turned away again I took the knife out of my pocket and hid it behind a pile of books. Then I sat down. When he turned back he was holding tiny fragments of something in his outstretched hand.
‘Making gold,’ he said.
I almost lapsed into a smirk. ‘What, extracting gold? From Ormus?’
‘Kinda. It’s more like using Ormus to transmute other metals into gold.’
I laughed a little, hoping he’d take it in good spirits. ‘Fuck, man, here I was expecting you to have sex slaves tied up in here or be part of a cult or something, but you’re actually doing something more mental than that. Alchemy, really? Can you show me?’
‘My method isn’t perfected yet. I almost went and gave myself mercury poisoning last year. But give me a piece of silver before you go and next time I see you it’ll be part gold.’
‘How would you do that?’
‘Can’t tell you. I’d have to kill you, eh?’ He winked at me with his real eye.
I glanced back towards the house. ‘You mind if I make myself a coffee? Then I’ll see about giving you bits of silver.’
‘Help yourself, man. Make one for me while you’re at it. The boys should be back soon.’
I couldn’t find a window in which to pick the knife up discreetly so I left it there.
It was lighter outside as I walked back towards the house.
In the kitchen I took out the bag of capsules. They didn’t look like they had magical properties, but then what did I expect them to do? Glow? Dance about?
I opened a few cupboards and then laid eyes upon a glass jar of coffee by the kettle and a cafetière.
‘Fucking a,’ I muttered.
There was a key in the front door, Luiz and Eli’s excited tones, shoes being scraped against the mat…
‘Hey!’ I called.
‘Trent lived at the Cecil!’ Eli blurted out, bounding into the kitchen. ‘He lived there!’
‘Fuck yeeeeah, boy!’ Luiz screeched.
‘How’d you know?’
‘We asked around people, spoke to some homeless guys and the security guards.’ Eli looked wired, as if he had taken some coke.
‘And they said?’
‘They said… well, they said to come back in the morning. But they recognized Trent from the photo, said he’d lived there for five or six months last year. Lived there.’
‘Where’s Cathal, he asleep?’ Luiz pointed at the ceiling.
‘Na, he’s in the garden making gold.’
‘Huh?’
‘In the garden,’ I said again. ‘In his shed out there.’
‘Wicked, man.’
Luiz let himself out of the back door and I put the Ormus capsules in my pocket.
Eli was staring into space, flicking his fingers against each other. After a while he said, ‘In one of Trent’s postcards to me, he said he was in the clutches of something… evil. He said he wasn’t himself, that he had only come to long enough to write that postcard and send it.’
‘What?’
‘I didn’t tell you because I thought you’d find it too bizarre. I should have told you though.’
‘Have you still got the postcard?’
‘No, not that one. My w— It got thrown away. Luckily it wasn’t forgettable but it didn’t give me the chance to check where it had come from or glean anything useful.’
‘So you don’t want to… kill Trent?’
‘No. Yes… I don’t know. As I said, I don’t blame him as much as I do the others. If they all ganged up on him he would have gone along with anything they wanted. Especially if Mel convinced him, he always loved her most.’ Flicking his fingers, not looking at me, picking at his lips. ‘He wasn’t a malicious guy. I once caught him standing in a storm outside the tube on my way to our offices, and he’d brought a stack of umbrellas to hand out to people who had forgotten theirs. Like, this was a guy who went vegan before it was cool because he actually gave a shit about animals. He was so fucking… bland.’
‘But he asked you for help. You personally. That’s why we’re here?’
He nodded.
‘Why the fuck didn’t you say anything before?’
‘I didn’t think you’d be as interested by a mission to go help a guy out.’
‘As opposed to killing him?’
He shrugged, as if it was fucking obvious and I just lacked the self-awareness to see it. ‘Thought it would seem insipid.’
‘Really?’
‘Weak, innit.’
‘Maybe you don’t know me that well.’ I folded my arms.
He chewed at his nail and said, insincerely, ‘Maybe.’
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The Cecil Hotel was a tall cement block by LA’s Skid Row. It wasn’t the sort of decay that existed so visibly in London. The sheer number of homeless was breathtaking. On the short walk from our taxi to the front of the hotel I was sure I could see about two drug deals happening in plain view of the security guards.
They didn’t seem to care. They only cared that none of these people got inside.
The Cecil was gold-topped and bordered by a fire escape, with a grand sign and three American flags abo
ve its double doors. Frustrated grandeur, like the rest of LA. Inside, everything was still gold, but tired and bordering on beige.
This was where Trent Byrne had lived for five months.
I wondered what he could have been doing, wandering these halls for so long.
Above me there was what looked like a stained glass window in the ceiling. Even though it had seen better days, I wouldn’t have had the Cecil pinned as a murder hotel.
Eli had taken Trent’s photo up to the reception desk. I could hear him talking to a receptionist, asking how long the lady had worked there and who was in charge.
I walked down the lobby and out of earshot. There were faux marble statues next to towering pot-plants and stone plinths, as if they had tried to recreate a scene from Ancient Greece. Everything about this place repelled me. Whether it was genuine foreboding, or whether I’d become biased due to Cathal’s scrapbook of atrocities, I didn’t know.
‘Ron!’ Eli waved me back over. ‘We can check out Trent’s old room.’
The receptionist gave me a nod.
He had probably slipped her a fifty-dollar note or more.
I eyed up the two security guards either side of the lifts. Eli waved his key at them but they didn’t take much notice. I guessed they were there to enforce a strict ‘No guests’ policy.
We went inside, and the doors of the lift slid shut.
Eli pulled a face and said, ‘This place is creepy.’
‘Wouldn’t even stay here a night, let alone five months.’
‘Enough to drive anyone insane after that long. It’s like The fucking Overlook.’
I wasn’t sure what that meant.
When we stepped into the eighth-floor hallway, I realized that the reason for my sense of unease was the lighting. I found myself having to squint.
It was quiet.
The floor was like polished bathroom tiles.
‘We can talk to the manager once we’ve had a look,’ Eli said, turning the key over in his hand.
They’d given us a proper key for the room, I realized; not a key card. This place really must be old.
The hallway was dotted with circular mirrors.
‘How long was that girl’s body in the water tank before people noticed?’ I asked.
Road Kill Page 12