Black Violet

by Alex Hyland

  The noise started again. Definitely from the living room. I signaled to Freddy – he nodded that he was ready. I gritted my teeth and charged through the door. I span around the room, wielding the heavy steel, searching the corners. But no movement anywhere – the room was empty. As Freddy quickly checked the rest of the apartment, I heard the knocking sound again. The balcony window was knocking against its frame in the breeze. I let the extinguisher swing lifelessly to my side.

  Freddy reappeared in the living room. ‘Motherfuckers,’ he said.

  I stared at the sofa. The rear upholstery was torn away. I ran over to it and peered inside – the money was gone. I stared at Freddy and tried to make some sense of it.

  ‘How much did they take?’ he said.

  ‘A hundred and fifty.’

  But I didn’t give a shit about the money, nor the apartment. My mind started to race. Jon and I both burgled in less than a week? This was no fucking coincidence.

  I capped the anger in me and tried to think. I took a careful look around the apartment. Absolutely everything lay in pieces. TVs and table lamps, cabinets and chairs. They’d even dismantled the tiny LED clock on the kitchen table – they’d thought there was cash in it?

  ‘They took the money,’ I said. ‘But they came looking for something else.’

  ‘Like what?’ said Freddy.

  ‘I don’t know.’ I thought carefully to myself for a moment. ‘Something that they couldn’t find at Jon’s.’

  My heart faded as I thought about his message.

  ‘He was probably trying to warn me,’ I said.

  Fuck. This was something to do with his work, I was sure of it. I’d told the police that he’d called a few hours before he’d died – that he’d said it was important. They’d dismissed it. Jon’s computers had gone, some cash, a couple of watches – it was a burglary that had gone wrong, simple as that. Bullshit.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ said Freddy. ‘Go to the police?’

  I shook my head. I didn’t want them looking into me at all.

  ‘Whatever these fuckers came looking for, I know I didn’t have it,’ I said. ‘Maybe Jon still does.’

  Freddy and I reached Jon’s apartment in Chinatown twenty minutes later. It was on the third floor of an old Victorian walk-up, all dusty staircases and mahogany shadows.

  Police tape sealed the edges of Jon’s door. I took out the key. Before Jon and I had fallen out, he’d given me a copy. It had always served me with a glimmer of hope that he’d never asked for it back. Unless, of course, he’d changed the lock. I glanced around the corridor, then peeled away the police tape.

  I slid the key into the lock. The door clicked open.

  It looked like someone had driven a combine harvester through his apartment. The whole place had been shredded just like mine. Glass cabinets, smashed and torn from the walls. The hi-fi in pieces – plugs dismantled. Rotting food on the kitchen floor – every jar from every cupboard had been emptied. No way had this just been a burglary. They’d been looking for something specific. I didn’t know what – documents maybe, photographs. Whatever it was, I knew that Jon kept copies of everything he was working on, on a flash drive. The drive looked like a cheap plastic cigarette lighter – it even produced a flame. Someone might take it by accident, but no one was going to steal it deliberately. We needed to find it.

  ‘You take the bedroom,’ I said. ‘I’ll start here.’

  Jon’s desk lay on its side in the far corner of the room. It was as good a place to begin as anywhere. I picked a path through the debris toward the desk. As I did, I caught sight of the bathroom. I wasn’t ready for it. A near-black, dried pool of blood on the floor tiles. A mist of black droplets on the walls. I closed my eyes.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. I kept breathing as the tears welled up in me. ‘Oh, Jesus-fuck.’

  Freddy stepped over to the bathroom door and quietly swung it shut.

  ‘Let’s just find this thing and get out of here,’ he said. ‘It’s no good you being here.’

  I wiped my eyes dry, then nodded. I took a deep breath and stepped toward Jon’s desk.

  I tried to keep myself focused, but the remnants of Jon’s life lay discarded all around me. Letters, photographs and keepsakes – things I hadn’t seen in years. The antique fountain pen that my mother had given him. The poem that he’d written for my dad’s fortieth birthday. Beneath the broken shelves in the living room, I found the lion that he’d carved out of a piece of driftwood when we were kids. I picked it up and gazed at it.

  I remembered that day. Dad had taken us all to Bodega Bay for the weekend. As Jon and I played in the sand, we came across this strange-looking piece of twisted wood in the surf. We picked it out of the water and tried to imagine how far it had traveled – what distant oceans it might have crossed. As I got ready to throw it back into the sea, Jon stopped me – he wanted to keep it. I remember telling him that it was just junk, but he took it home. A few weeks later he showed me the lion. He’d turned that lost piece of driftwood into something good. He’d given it new life.

  I gazed at the lion, then carefully placed it on his desk.

  Freddy and I went through everything. Bags, suitcases and clothes. Freddy even went through the bathroom, but we couldn’t find the drive anywhere. It was early evening by the time we gave up.

  I sat on the living room floor and stared miserably around the apartment.

  ‘It’s got to be here,’ I said. ‘Jon never took it out of the apartment.’

  Freddy shrugged. ‘Maybe they found it.’

  ‘Then why come to my place?’

  ‘Maybe he gave it to someone. I mean, if it was that important.’

  I sighed – maybe.

  Freddy leaned down and picked up a handful of photographs lying on the floor. They were pictures of my mom and dad standing outside the little bookstore they’d owned. My dad’s green eyes shining away. My mom holding his hand, her cherubic little face bright red from the sun.

  Freddy sat down beside me. ‘Is that your parents?’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘You look like your dad,’ he said.

  I said nothing.

  Freddy straightened out a fold in the photograph, then glanced at another – the four of us at a music festival. Mom and dad wearing the African print caftans that they’d bought at one of the festival stands.

  Freddy smiled. ‘They look like real hippies here.’

  ‘They were,’ I said. I gazed emptily at the picture for a moment. ‘They used to smoke grass in the house.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  I shook my head.

  Freddy eyed the photo more carefully – in the background was an open-air stage full of brightly dressed musicians.

  ‘Were you at a rock concert?’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘England. Glastonbury.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘I don’t know, ten, eleven maybe. They took us every year.’

  ‘To England?’

  ‘Uh-huh. My dad was into the whole medieval thing, he loved it out there. He’d show us these ancient sites...tell us stories about what happened.’

  And for a moment I remembered how much those stories had meant to me. As a kid, magic had been a passion of mine, and the time of King Arthur, Avalon – for me it was the time when magic felt its closest to being real. They may have been myths, but there’d been hope in them. Not like today when there’s nothing. No magic. No mystery. No wonder in anything.

  ‘We’d go to these old cathedrals,’ I said. ‘I’d take brass rubbings from the floor. Knights with swords. Then I’d draw in these backgrounds. Armies fighting under dark skies. Maidens and dragons.’

  Freddy raised his eyebrows at me. ‘Maidens and dragons?’

  I shot him a smile. A nerd I may have been once upon a time – but no more. I was a player now. Burning the candle at both ends, in the middle, and a couple of other places that only Charlie Sheen knows about. I’d run down that nerd years
ago, and he wasn’t getting up again.

  I gazed at myself in the photograph – that stupid kid with his romantic dreams.

  Freddy nodded to himself, then slid the photographs onto Jon’s desk. ‘They sound like cool people,’ he said. ‘I can’t even imagine my parents smoking grass. They freaked out enough when they found my cigarettes.’

  I eyed him for a second, then went still.

  He stared curiously at me. ‘What?’

  ‘They found them?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

  I kept my eyes on him and tried to think.

  When we’d lived with Uncle Harry, Jon and I used to smoke a little grass ourselves. After Harry would go to bed, we’d open the bedroom window, roll a joint and talk into the early hours. Harry always suspected that we were smoking, but could never find it. He went through our bedrooms a couple of times, but Jon used to hide it in a small tin – tacked to the underside of the fridge with modeling clay.

  I got up and headed into Jon’s kitchen. Freddy followed me. The fridge was pulled away from the wall – they’d definitely looked behind it. I kneeled down and ran my fingers under the front edge of the base. Nothing. I tried the left side edge. Again nothing. I pulled the fridge further away from the wall, bent down and tried the right side edge. My fingertips ran across a familiar rubbery texture.

  I smiled at Freddy. ‘I found it,’ I said.

  I prized it away from the base. A wad of modeling clay about the size of a flattened golf ball. I turned it over – and felt confused for a moment. There was no cigarette lighter, no flash drive.

  Pressed into the clay was a necklace. Tiny. Delicate.

  I carefully peeled it out of the clay. It had a small pendant – a thin gold disc, about an inch in diameter. One side depicted the sun – a tiny diamond, no more than half a carat in size, sat in the middle of embossed gold rays that emanated out to the edge. The back was thumb smooth apart from an inscription: ‘For Miranda’. It hung from a slender gold chain. It may not have been worthless, but it wasn’t far off – it couldn’t have been worth more than a couple of grand. I watched the pendant twist as it dangled between my fingers.

  ‘You think this is what they were looking for?’ asked Freddy. He stared curiously at it. ‘It doesn’t look like anything worth dying for.’

  ‘Yeah. But Jon hid it.’

  Freddy studied the inscription on the pendant. ‘Who’s Miranda?’

  I shrugged – I had no idea. Maybe Jon’s boss would know.

  I tucked the necklace into my jacket pocket. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here.’

  We exited the main entrance of Jon’s building and headed for my car parked at the end of the street. I reached for my phone – Jon’s boss was hosting the wake, Harry would have his number. As I dialed Harry, Freddy grabbed my arm and slowed me down. He nodded toward a silver Mercedes S600 parked in front of my car. Inside sat two men. Through the glare on the windshield I couldn’t see whether they were looking at us or not. The driver raised a phone to his ear. Freddy and I slowed even further – the guys reacted. The car doors opened and both of them stepped out. Well-built. Gray hooded shirts. In the shadow of the street lights I couldn’t make out their faces.

  Freddy glared at them. ‘What the fuck are you looking at?’ he said.

  I grabbed Freddy – I already knew these guys were bad news. One of them reached inside his shirt.

  ‘Run!’ I yelled.

  The guy produced a silenced pistol. Freddy and I sprinted for the backstreet next to Jon’s building – a bullet zipped past us and splintered into the brickwork. I ducked and sped for the corner just ahead. Another silenced gunshot, then a stumble. I glanced back – Freddy was lying on the sidewalk, his head split wide open. I slowed as I gazed at him, his blood pouring in thick surges across the paving stones. I couldn’t breathe. Screams from people across the street. I tore around the corner, trying to shake myself awake as I hurtled down the backstreet. I could hear the guys approaching the corner behind me. The other end of the backstreet was a hundred feet away – another Mercedes pulled up beside it, tires screaming. Two more guys in hooded shirts leaped from the car and ran for me. The guys behind me swung round the corner. I scanned the buildings beside me – steel shutters and fire escapes. A guy in a white baseball cap was smoking a cigarette beside an open fire door – he darted back inside.

  ‘Call the police!’ I yelled at him.

  I ran for the fire door as it swung closed. I caught it with the ends of my fingers and pulled it back open – bullets ringing into it as I slammed the door shut behind me. I tumbled down a tight staircase, dance music blazing in the darkness ahead – gunfire shattering the door lock behind me. I reached the bottom of the stairs and ran into the murky catacombs of a nightclub. I heard the two guys behind me yell for the others to cover the main entrance. I ran deeper into the club – a small dance floor with a labyrinth of ghostly lit corridors and rooms leading off it. It was still early – no crowds that I could lose myself in – just a couple of dozen people. My blood raced as I tore down the maze of corridors looking for another exit. There was nothing – just black walls decorated in chaotic patterns of shattered glass. A sign at the end of the corridor read: ‘The Apocalypse. The end of time. Where we come to dance.’ I ducked through a doorway and into a small dimly lit room. A couple of stoned-looking girls were slumped on a red sofa. A second corridor ran past a tiny brick archway just beyond them. This second corridor must have led up to the club’s main entrance – I could hear voices, commotion, footsteps running down stairs.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked one of the girls beside me.

  I hushed her – listening as the footsteps reached the bottom of the stairs by the archway. I edged back out of the room and hid in the first corridor. The pounding music in the club then stopped. Raised voices from the dance floor, then a scream. I kept my eyes on the corridor that led up to the entrance. I ducked back as a guy in a hooded shirt appeared in the archway.

  ‘You cover the main door,’ he said to another.

  He had an accent – European – French maybe. He pulled the slide on his pistol, then started walking. I pressed myself against the corridor wall and prayed that he wouldn’t head through the room where the girls were sitting. I listened carefully – as he headed deeper into the club. One of them covering the main door, the other three inside – I stared up the corridor at the corners and doorways, the panic buzzing though my head. I could hear people crying, then more footsteps approaching – I couldn’t tell whether they were coming from the corridor or the room. I glanced around – nowhere to hide. I unscrewed the light in the ceiling just above me – my end of the corridor went black. I froze as a silhouette appeared in the orange glow at the far end of the corridor. He stared toward me, gun in hand. I kept absolutely still. He looked around then spoke to someone behind him.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. The same voice – the French guy.

  He produced a phone, then dialed a number. He held the phone away from himself and listened.

  My phone rang. Fuck! I switched it off. The bastard turned toward me and fired. I dived back through the room where the girls were sitting – could hear the guy covering the main entrance racing for the archway. I saw his shadow stretching down the corridor wall. He was two seconds away, steadying himself with his right hand – the gun would be in his left. I leaped onto the sofa and launched myself toward the left-side pillar of the archway. The guy appeared, raised his gun, but I was airborne – I grabbed his left arm as I crashed into him, the weight of my body smashing his arm against the pillar’s edge. I felt his arm snap – the guy yelling as we crumpled to the floor. I could hear the French guy just around the corner behind me, the other two pounding through the club. I scrambled to my feet and pulled myself around the archway, bullets from French tearing into the wall behind me. I clambered up the stairs, sprinted out of the main entrance and immediately found myself faced with two gun-wielding cops.

  ‘On the ground
now!’ one of them shouted at me.

  I dropped to my knees and raised my hands. The street was empty – crowds of people cordoned off way up at the junction. I heard someone in the distance yell at the cops, ‘That’s him, that was the guy!’

  ‘They’re in the club!’ I said.

  The hooded guys ran out onto the street behind me.

  ‘Don’t fucking move!’ the other cop yelled at them.

  The cops took aim. The hoods ground to a halt.

  ‘Drop the fucking guns!’ said the cop.

  Three police cars tore around the corner and headed for us. The cops in front of me then collapsed as the hoods opened fire. I dived for cover between the police cars screeching to a halt. Their doors swung open, but with two dead officers on the street, no one was asking any questions – the cops started shooting. I leaped to my feet, bullets zipping past me as I crashed through the main door of a bar on the other side of the street. I glanced back – four cops were chasing the guys from the club down the backstreet, another two coming after me. I pushed my way through the bar crowds toward the rear exit – blurred glimpses of panicked eyes gazing at me. A barman grabbed me and tried to stop me. We struggled a moment – I lifted his keys, pushed him out of the way, then slammed though a heavy rear door out into a staff parking lot. Five cars – I hit the beeper. A black Chevrolet Malibu lit up. I jumped inside and started it up. As I reversed hard out of the lot, the cops burst out of the rear door – bullets thudding into the bodywork of the Malibu. The passenger window exploded across me as I swung the car around. I ducked, slammed down the pedal and swerved around the first corner I could find.

  I had to get out of town, had to hide. I didn’t know who the hell those guys in the club were, but they were professionals – well-armed and coordinated. They had my fucking phone number? As I swerved around another corner, I took the phone from my pocket. They could probably locate it, but I needed to make one call before I threw it. I switched it on and dialed Harry’s number. I got his voicemail.