by Candice Fox
It was the voice of a man with only one purpose.
‘I won’t be back,’ he told the dog, and shut the door.
CHAPTER 40
Celine watched the black Lexus pull into the lot, driving diagonally across the empty parking spaces towards her at a leisurely pace. When Keeps finally pulled to a stop, the headlights of the car were pointedly directly at Celine, illuminating her like a hog with its hoof snared in a trap. He had a delicious smile on his lips as he popped open the door and rounded the bonnet, sitting on the hood of the car and folding his arms.
‘Okay, okay,’ Celine said. ‘Drink it in.’
Keeps looked at the motel nearby, cold and quiet, the red neon sign painting the sidewalk pink. The door to number three was closed. Celine had considered calling out to the man she and Kradle had met in the room after Kradle chained her to the bike rack, but sheer embarrassment had caused her to stand in front of her cuffed wrist and wave with her other hand as he too fled the scene. Calling the police was out of the question. The last thing Celine wanted to do was answer queries from authorities about how she had found herself attached by a bloody handcuff to a bike rack in the parking lot of a dingy hotel at one o’clock in the morning. She knew what an incident like that meant. It meant police reports. Interviews. Waiting rooms. A glance at her personal records. A raised eyebrow. Whispers.
Keeps lit a cigarette and blew the smoke over his shoulder, looking her up and down.
‘You arrived fast,’ Celine said.
‘I happened to be nearby.’
‘I’d ask how a man who had nothing to his name a couple of days ago is now driving a Lexus,’ Celine said. ‘But you’re the guy who can turn a twenty-dollar waffle maker into five hundred bucks, so . . .’
Keeps didn’t answer. Didn’t smile.
‘He threw the key that way.’ Celine pointed at the motel. ‘I heard it bounce.’
‘I didn’t come here to let you out.’ Keeps smirked.
‘What?’
‘I came here to see you chained up. Not every day you get to see that. Pronghorn guard locked down like an inmate, stuck in one place, watching the world tick by. This is a real hoot.’
Celine felt her mouth fall open. Every limb seemed to be growing numb, one after the other, so that she felt she wanted to slip awkwardly to the ground.
‘I was always going to scam you, Celine,’ Keeps said.
‘What?’
‘Come on.’ Keeps lifted his hands. ‘It’s what I do. I told you that’s what I do. I showed you it’s what I do!’
Celine bent in two and stared at the concrete at her feet.
‘I am going to murder you,’ she growled.
‘I don’t know why you’re so angry. This is you. This is all you.’ Keeps gestured to her with his cigarette. ‘You let me into your house. You let me into your bed. You opened your world to me. We both know you were trying to test the limits, see if your radar was working. Whether you knew good from bad. Well, you were wrong about me, Celine. I had it in for you from the very beginning. So, now you have what you wanted. You know at least some of your instincts aren’t good.’
‘You sent that payment from my account,’ Celine said.
‘Actually, no.’ Keeps shook his head. ‘No. That’s stupid. That’s the short game. I didn’t have to go to your house to access your bank account. Come on. And why the hell would I send the money to Kuala Lumpur? You ever been to Kuala Lumpur?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t. Stay home. Save yourself the trouble.’
‘You wanted me for the long game,’ Celine concluded.
‘The long game.’ Keeps nodded. ‘The big pay day. I was going to make you love me. I was going to see how long it would take for you to give me the house, the car, the jewellery, the bank account. Didn’t take you long to give me your body. I figured by the end of the month I could ha—’
He had stood and wandered within striking distance. Celine lunged, got the edge of his sleeve and nothing else.
‘Shhh, shhh,’ Keeps said. ‘You’re making a scene.’
Celine gave a hard smile that cracked into a vicious laugh.
‘What’s so funny?’
‘I’m just thinking,’ she said. ‘About the next time you wind up in Pronghorn. Having John Kradle on my row was just training. I’m going to have myself put on whatever cell block you’re assigned to and I’m going to make your life a nightmare. You will beg to be put in the hole, you slimy son of a bitch.’
‘Not this time.’ Keeps tapped his temple. ‘I told you. It’s the big pay day. And when you get one of those you move on, somewhere far, far away, where nobody knows your tricks yet.’
Celine exhaled hard. ‘Kradle.’
‘Yup. The million-dollar man,’ Keeps said. ‘You brought him to my attention.’
‘I won’t tell you where he’s going,’ Celine said. ‘Not in a lifetime.’
‘I don’t need you to,’ Keeps said, and Celine realised why he had come for her so fast after she sent the message asking for help. Because he had been nearby, just like he said, following the tracker he’d enabled on her phone, probably the first time she brought him into her house. The kind of bug he’d told her he used to scam old people, to decipher key parts of their lives he could use to convince them he was trustworthy.
‘I told you I was a bad man, Celine,’ Keeps said.
‘Yeah, well.’ Celine gave a miserable sigh. ‘I guess I should have trusted myself. At least that time, anyway.’
He reached for her, and she took advantage of the slip, grabbed his wrist and yanked him towards her. But with her other wrist chained, there wasn’t much she could do. Keeps laughed and pushed her off. He was gone into the night before she could get her phone out of her pocket.
He could see Gary Mullins. For five years, John Kradle had lay on his bunk in his cell at Pronghorn and stared at the scratches in the paintwork on the ceiling and imagined a faceless figure murdering his family. But now that figure had a shape. He had a name. Kradle gripped the steering wheel and watched the white lines passing on the road in front of him while, in his mind, Gary Mullins walked down the side of the house in Mesquite where he and his son had lived.
Kradle watched him round the corner of the yard, stepping over the bike Mason always dumped on its side at the end of the porch, sliding open the unlocked glass door to the living room. He saw Gary stop as he heard Christine and Audrey arguing in the kitchen. Audrey pouring wine and admonishing Christine for trying to make her fourth phone call to Kradle about the bubble-machine fiasco. Audrey telling her sister she would have to suck it up, stop being a spoiled brat, accept the fact that she had fucked off on her family and they hadn’t thrown a parade when she returned like she’d expected. Kradle saw Gary Mullins walking in from the living room with the rifle raised. Cutting the two women down where they stood. He saw Mullins lift his head as Mason called out from the upstairs bathroom, wanting to know what the noise was, the water still running. Mullins standing there, trying to decide if he was going to leave a witness or not.
Kradle saw his son murdered where he stood in the shower, the glass door pulled open, the blast, the shattered tiles. Kradle didn’t know if he’d uttered a single word. Sometimes, in his musings, Mason did cry out. Sometimes it was all so fast there was only the sound of the gunshot. He saw Mullins pouring gasoline in a straight line from the garage, where he found it, to the glass back doors. The fire licking the walls. Kradle saw a stronger, healthier, more fresh-faced version of himself opening the front door and stopping dead at the sight of the strip of fire working its way up the living room walls, already billowing against the ceiling in the kitchen. He saw his body snap out of shock and into action as he heard a groan from upstairs. Running past the flames, feeling their mighty heat against his cheek as he swung around the banister, finding Mason half-in, half-out of the shower. He saw himself gathering his dying son up in his arms.
The rage had been something Kradle kept tightly leashed at Pro
nghorn. Whenever he felt it burbling up his throat or pulsing behind his eyeballs he’d always talked it down, strapped it in tight, a twisting and groaning and snarling thing that was always waiting for an opportunity to burst free. Waiting for a weak moment. The right provocation. Eventually, the rage had exhausted itself and fallen asleep. As he’d walked through the desert, run through the forest, then walked the streets as an escaped man, the rage had started to stir. It had begun to break its binds in the motel room when, for the first time, he heard the name of the man who had ruined his life.
And now the rage was free.
It was wielding Kradle’s body like a precise weapon, every muscle zinging with tension, every movement sharp, silent, fast.
The phone on the seat next to him buzzed. He looked over and saw Celine’s name on the screen. Ignored it.
His intention had been to blast through any roadblock that he encountered on the way out of Vegas city proper, but all he found were abandoned wooden barriers standing like restful horses by the side of the road, flashing orange lamps making geometric shadows on the sand. It occurred to him for the first time that he hadn’t seen any roadblocks on the way from the motel back to Celine’s house. They had all fallen, disappeared into nothing.
The unexpected ease with which he headed towards his fate continued. Christine would have called it that. Fate. Destiny. He drove through empty streets off the highway, past a gas station with a big blue Bud Light bottle resting on the awning above the pumps. A police cruiser sitting behind a billboard advertising home insurance took no notice of him. It was as if he had frozen time. He turned into a sprawling estate of manicured houses. Wide lawns without fences, plastic Christmas reindeer grazing over rock gardens full of cactuses. Before sunrise, Christmas morning – a time that had been filled with joyful anticipation back in the days when Kradle had a child and the boy was small and excitable. The memories seemed too distant, and yet at the same time perfectly reachable. He could hear socks on the stairs. Whispers, giggles. Time ticking down. Kradle’s jaw was grinding as he turned onto Cloudrock Court and stopped the car outside number seventeen.
The house was unremarkable. A modern Spanish-style villa identical to two others Kradle had noticed in the street. Beyond the property, a shallow valley stretched towards a ridge of rocky hills. Kradle supposed that Gary Mullins could probably sit on the back porch at sunset with a Coors and watch coyotes emerging from their dens to hunt jackrabbits.
He crossed the driveway, past the sensible Buick with the yellow-and-black ‘Veteran’ bumper sticker, and found the side gate of the house unlocked, bags of potting mix stacked by a rack of garden tools. He was walking in Gary Mullins’s footsteps now. The killer trembling with dark anticipation, sliding open the unlocked glass door, walking into the house. His senses were alive, sucking in the smell of hand soap in a dispenser shaped like a chicken on the edge of the spotless sink. The big kitchen windows looked out over the porch, the desert beyond, framed by curtains with bright yellow lemons on them. Kradle could see the sharp outlines of a framed cross-stitch hanging on the wall of the living room. Bless this mess. He turned and walked past a portrait of Gary Mullins in uniform, turned three-quarters to the camera, a classic textured grey backdrop.
Kradle pushed open the bedroom door. One lump in the bed, turned away from him, buzz-cut grey hair on a white pillow. A full glass of water on the nightstand. On the other nightstand, an empty glass. Kradle walked to the head of the bed and lifted his pistol, nudged Gary Mullins in the back of the skull with it.
The man rolled over fast and looked up at him in the dark.
‘Get up,’ Kradle said.
CHAPTER 41
‘Settle a bet for me,’ the officer said. The handcuff key looked comically small in his huge fingers as he took Celine’s wrist in his hand. He jerked his head towards a troop of officers standing around a nearby cruiser, drinking coffee from the local Dunkies. ‘You that Pronghorn guard who was on TV?’
‘No,’ Celine said.
‘You sure look like—’
‘Can we just do this, please?’
The car smelled like every police cruiser Celine had ever been in. Of fried food and sweat. She slumped against the greasy window while the officers said long goodbyes to the others, and then watched the parking lot slide out of view, the words catching in her chest as she spoke them.
‘Please take me to your captain,’ she said.
‘Why?’ the officer riding shotgun asked.
‘Because I have to make a report,’ Celine said. ‘About a possible murder that’s about to happen. That may already have happened.’
‘How possible is the murder?’ The driver wiped his nose on the back of his hand. ‘Because we’re pretty overrun as it is, lady.’
‘Just take me there, please,’ Celine groaned.
‘I’m afraid we can’t. We got instructions to drop you off on the corner of Beatie and Ellett,’ the cop said. ‘Probably be somebody there who can take your report.’
‘Huh?’
‘The call was from on high,’ the driver said. ‘That’s all I know.’
Celine was too exhausted, too furious, to play further guessing games with the officers. She waited and, in time, the cruiser pulled up at an intersection outside a game fishing supply store. Celine walked to the silver Mercedes that was pointed out to her and opened the passenger side door.
‘Whoooooa!’ she moaned as she slid into the seat.
‘Whoa what?’ Trinity asked.
‘I thought you were dead!’ Celine’s voice was higher, more hysterical, than she intended. ‘That’s what!’
‘Oh, please.’ Trinity rolled her eyes. ‘It’ll take more than a gunshot to the neck to kill me. My people are indestructible. After the nuclear apocalypse it’ll be cockroaches and a bunch of Parkers who crawl out of the rubble.’
Celine sat staring at the other woman as she pulled the car onto the road and drove. Her entire neck and left shoulder were strapped tightly in gauze that was speckled in parts with blood. She had two black eyes, exposed stitches in her chin, and dried blood in the hair that was visible under her black cap.
‘You got shot in the neck in the forest!’ Celine screeched. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘Please adjust your volume,’ Trinity said. ‘You’re at a nine. I need you at a two. And it was shrapnel. The bullet must have hit a tree and shattered, and I got a piece of it in my neck. What’s more bothersome is the rock I must have smashed into when my head hit the ground. Raging headache. Bad, bad. So there it is! I’m disgruntled but alive. Get over it. I am.’
Celine sat back in her seat.
‘And, alas, while I’m still kicking in bodily form, my term as director of the Pronghorn breakout is officially over,’ Trinity continued. ‘As soon as someone prescribes you Vicodin, you become operationally ineffective, apparently, whether you actually take the drug or not. It’s an inconvenience we will have to overcome, and quickly, before word of my usurping spreads. At the moment I’m hoping we can still get in to see Kerry Monahan at the Mesa View Regional Hospital.’
‘Who?’
‘The girl you saved.’ Trinity glanced over. ‘The little red-haired redneck who killed your friend Brassen.’
‘I can’t get into that right now,’ Celine said. ‘I’ve got to stop Kradle.’
‘Stop him from doing what?’
‘From killing the man who killed his family,’ Celine said. ‘We know the guy’s name. Or, at least, we have a very good suspect. Kradle is on his way to—’
‘Save it.’ Trinity held up a hand.
‘No, I can’t save it,’ Celine yelled. ‘It would take you five minutes to get someone out to this guy’s address to watch for Kradle. It’s a human life we’re talking about here.’
‘Take my phone,’ Trinity said. She tapped the enclosed compartment in the centre console between them. ‘Text whatever information you have to a number saved as GS in the contacts list.’
‘Who�
�s GS?’ Celine asked.
‘Just send the text.’ Trinity waved, bored. ‘I guarantee you, the Kradle thing will be met with the swiftest possible response.’
Celine grabbed the phone and typed out a text about Gary Mullins, John Kradle and the revenge mission she believed he was on. She didn’t know where Mullins lived, how Kradle planned to get to him, or whether she was already too late to save the killer’s life. When it was done she gripped her seatbelt and watched the horizon beginning to glow with approaching dawn.
‘Why me?’ Celine asked.
‘Why you?’
‘Yeah,’ Celine said. ‘You wake up in hospital, discharge yourself, find out you’ve lost your job, decide you’re going to keep going after Schmitz anyway—’
‘You don’t decide a thing like that, Osbourne.’ Trinity smiled to herself. ‘It’s either in you or it isn’t.’
‘Your remarkable self-sacrifice and humility aside’—Celine rolled her eyes—‘the next move is to come and find me, of all people?’
‘I like you, Osbourne,’ Trinity said. ‘Is that what you want me to say? It isn’t true. But I’ll say it if it means you’ll be quiet.’
‘How did you know I was there?’
‘I happened to be trying to recruit the chief of police to help me continue my crusade to find Schmitz,’ Trinity said, ‘when I heard a very interesting report on his radio. A short-ass white woman was handcuffed to a bike rack outside a crappy hotel on the outskirts of Vegas. A bystander witnessed an African American man pull up in a Caprice, and, while the bystander thought the guy was there to rescue her, he seemed to taunt her and leave her there.’
Celine waited, feeling tired.
‘Seemed like a familiar scenario to me.’ Trinity smiled. ‘I thought – could it possibly be?’
‘You knew Keeps was bad,’ Celine said. ‘You tried to warn me.’
‘You thought you were dealing with a cute little conman,’ Trinity said. ‘But that guy’s got missing people all around him. Ladies with deep pockets who went out on yachts and never came back.’