Soul Meaning (Seventeen)

by AD Starrling

  Reid nodded at old acquaintances while we waited for our orders. ‘So?’ he said finally.

  I dragged my gaze from the busy street beyond the glass window and studied my partner. Despite having lived through a divorce in the time that I had known him, Reid had not aged much in the last ten years. There were a few more wrinkles around his eyes and a slight deepening of the cynical twist that hovered almost constantly near his lips; otherwise, he had retained the sturdy build that had made him such a good Marine and cop.

  ‘I think we should tail him first, find out whether there are others with him,’ I said with a shrug. ‘Hunters normally work as a pack.’

  Reid frowned. ‘And how do you intend to kill him?’

  I avoided his eyes. We had had this conversation enough times for me to know exactly how the next few exchanges would go.

  ‘You need to get a gun,’ said my partner.

  ‘I don’t like guns.’

  His frown deepened. ‘You’re a first class shot.’

  I sighed. ‘That doesn’t mean I have to carry a gun.’

  There was a calculated pause. ‘What about a sword? You’re good with swords.’

  I looked at him steadily. ‘Where do you propose I keep it? Besides, I’ve told you before. I don’t like violence.’

  ‘Unfortunately, violence likes you,’ said Reid doggedly. ‘How many people nursing a bottle of whisky on the end of a pier and grieving the death of their best friend get accidentally shot in the head by a random gunman?’ Another sigh left my lips: my partner was being unusually vocal. ‘And what about that drug dealer in New York, the one who stabbed you in the back?’ His eyes narrowed. ‘Oh, and let’s not forget Rudy.’

  I grimaced. Rudy Lomax was a fifty-year-old bald and middle-aged accountant who used to work for a large international merchant bank in Boston’s financial district. Despite owning a penthouse in Back Bay with views over the Charles River and wearing thousand dollar suits, Rudy had defaulted on his alimony on more than one occasion. When the collection agency retained by his ex-wife hired us to tail him, the accountant became enraged at the breach of his privacy and ran me over with his Lexus.

  ‘To be fair, he only broke my leg,’ I muttered into my coffee. ‘And I was fine by the end of the week.’

  ‘Really?’ said Reid shrewdly. ‘What about Louisiana?’

  I looked away from his piercing gaze and shifted uneasily in my seat.

  Even I had to admit that Louisiana had been an ugly affair. We had gone looking for a missing fourteen-year-old girl called Carly Jennings, a bright-eyed and vivacious child who was the apple of her parents’ eyes. Jennings had met a man through an internet chat room a few months before her disappearance. The trail led us to New York, DC, and finally to the southern state of Louisiana, where we uncovered a child prostitution ring with connections to South America and the Far East.

  Things started to go wrong when the Feds got involved. By the time the gun smoke cleared, two agents had died and I had been shot twice. Jennings was found at the bottom of a ship’s cargo hold bound for the east coast.

  ‘Louisiana was a fluke.’ I looked at the pancakes that had just landed before me, thanked the waitress and reached for a fork.

  Reid grunted. ‘Lots of things in your life are flukes.’ The conversation was thankfully cut short by the arrival of a serving of artery-clogging fried food. He ignored my disapproving tut-tut and dug into his eggs.

  We left the cafe a quarter of an hour later and drove across town to the Parker Hotel. On our left, the Hancock Tower gleamed against a clear sky. Reid pulled up behind a hot dog vendor and went inside the building. He returned within minutes and settled in the driver’s seat.

  ‘Haus is still inside,’ he said briskly. ‘Doorman said he arrived two days ago. Alone.’

  I frowned at his words. This was unusual behaviour for a Hunter: from the various attempts on my life over the centuries, and inside knowledge provided by a couple of very close friends, I knew that the minimum number of assassins assigned for an execution-style mission was normally two. Both the Crovir and the Bastian Orders had strict rules on these matters: any member going beyond their remit was severely punished, usually by a death. Was Haus acting by himself?

  I had wondered briefly that morning which side he belonged to. Then again, it hardly mattered. I was only surprised that the immortals were after me following almost a century of silence; it was becoming apparent that at least one faction still wanted me dead.

  At four o’clock, Haus had still not left the hotel. The hot dogs had proven to be sickeningly greasy and three cups of coffee were burning a hole in my stomach. Reid was on his fifth cigarette. At this rate I was going to die from second hand smoking.

  The sudden purr of the engine finally jolted me from my semi-comatose state. ‘Is that him?’ said Reid. I looked across the street. A pale, skinny man with ash blond hair and a black overcoat had walked out of the hotel and was hailing a cab.

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured. ‘That’s the man who murdered me.’

  Reid manoeuvred the Chevrolet into peak time traffic. Twenty minutes later, we had barely moved two blocks. The cab eventually crawled onto Interstate 93 and headed towards the Zakim Bridge and the Charles River. Shortly after, it pulled off the highway and turned into a side road. Reid slowed down and followed.

  We drove through a series of increasingly rundown neighbourhoods. Snatches of hip hop music drifted sporadically through the Chevy’s half-open windows from the streets outside. Homeless people scoured the alleys behind shops and stores, some pushing their worldly belongings in shopping carts. We stopped at a set of traffic lights and earned a battery of hostile stares from a gang of teens standing next to the intersection. Less than a mile away, sunlight glinted on the steel work of the Tobin Bridge. We were not far from the water.

  The roads became deserted. Stretches of disused land appeared on our right, graveyards for the corpses of burnt out cars and broken white goods. By the time we entered the maze of derelict buildings that bordered the Mystic River, Reid had put the Chevy into a crawl.

  Red tail lights flashed up ahead. The cab pulled to a stop next to an abandoned warehouse. Haus stepped out and stood watching as the car drew away. He turned briskly and disappeared into an alley at the side of the building.

  The Chevy rolled to a standstill. Reid turned the engine off. We glanced at each other and slowly exited the car.

  Sandy loam crunched softly beneath our boots as we made our way towards the alley. The blares of car horns carried on the wind from the distant toll bridge. In the blue skies above, a seagull screeched and whirled smoothly on invisible currents, unheeding of the daily chaos of human life hundreds of feet beneath its wings.

  I heard the crack of the bullet before it hit the ground next to us. Reid swore as I pulled him sharply into the lee of a building.

  ‘I thought you said he had a sword.’ He frowned and took the Glock out of his holster.

  ‘Hunters are trained in the use of a range of weapons,’ I said quietly.

  Another bullet whizzed out of the alley. It was followed by a wild cackle.

  Reid looked at me with a puzzled frown. ‘Why is he laughing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I asked him the same question last night. All he did was laugh louder and call me a half-breed.’ I paused. ‘It doesn’t sound like healthy laughter to me.’

  ‘I know what you mean,’ said Reid. ‘It kinda reminds me of that Jack Nicholson movie.’

  ‘“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest?”’

  ‘No, “The Shining”,’ said Reid. Another cackle followed. ‘Now what?’

  Before I could muster a reply, Haus’s words drifted on the breeze towards us. ‘Come out, come out, wherever you are!’ he shouted from the alley.

  Reid’s frown deepened. ‘He does a bad Nicholson impression. Just for that, he deserves a bullet.’

  I touched his shoulder and silently indicated the roof of the adjacent building. He nodded. We turned and he
aded for the broken side door we had walked past earlier. There was a tortuous creak of metal against metal as we squeezed through the narrow gap between the frame and the doorjamb.

  The inside of the warehouse was unusually warm. The air was fetid and smelled of death. We strolled past the rotting carcass of a racoon and headed for the rickety stairs at the south-west corner of the building. Broken bottles, crushed cans, and dirty syringes littered the corridors on the upper floor. Beyond a roomful of damaged mannequins and rust-covered sewing machines, a door opened out onto a fire escape. It was a short climb to the roof.

  The wind had picked up. It brought with it a range of smells. The organic stench of the river. The rank odour of oil from a nearby refinery. The chemical stink of the tannery half a mile away. The acrid reek of gunpowder.

  I pushed Reid behind an air vent just as the bullet ricocheted off the hot asphalt yards from where we stood.

  ‘He’s a smart bastard,’ grunted my partner.

  ‘Ah-huh.’

  ‘North-east corner of the roof?’

  ‘Yes,’ I murmured.

  ‘I can smell you, half-breed! You stink higher than a skunk!’ shouted Haus from the neighbouring rooftop.

  Reid looked at me pointedly. ‘I showered this morning,’ I said sedately.

  He rose on one knee and fired two rounds at the opposite building. An answering volley scorched a series of cracks in the rooftop five feet from where we hunkered down.

  ‘He’s either a crap shot, or he’s playing with us,’ he said, frowning.

  ‘I’m pretty sure it’s the latter.’ Neither Order forbade their Hunters from playing with their prey. In fact, the Crovirs were famed for it.

  Reid cocked his head questioningly. I nodded. He let off another five rounds. Before the last bullet left the barrel of his gun, we were up and running towards the next vent. ‘Why isn’t he shooting—’ he started to say as we reached the metal tower.

  Without warning, a section of the roof collapsed beneath us. In hindsight, it had been a pretty obvious trap.

  We landed in the room with the mannequins with a thunderous crash. Above the noise of falling debris, I heard a harsh grunt from Reid. I dug my way out of a pile of inanimate figures, wincing at the sharp stabs of pain radiating from several cuts and bruises, and turned towards him.

  Reid was lying stiffly next to the bank of industrial sewing machines. A forty-inch steel rod rose through his left thigh and pinned him to the floor.

  ‘That’s not good,’ I said bleakly, meeting his eyes. He gritted his teeth in response.

  A dull thud drew our gazes to the ceiling: Haus had cleared the gap between the two warehouses. Rapid footsteps sounded above our heads and a shadow appeared against the patch of blue sky visible through the jagged hole in the roof.

  ‘Found you, you dirty half-breed,’ hissed the immortal.

  My eyes widened as I looked past the barrel of an M9 Beretta pistol into the face of a madman.

  ‘Go!’ shouted Reid.

  The deafening noise of the semi-automatic filled the confined space. I darted across the room, deadly shards erupting around me. A jagged piece of metal tore a gash across the back of my left hand. I reached the far wall, hit the fire door with my shoulder and emerged into bright sunlight. Haus’s wild cackle reached my ears as I sailed over the railing of the fire escape and dove into the river.

  Bullets riddled the water behind me. I swam further into the murky depths and twisted around until I floated in the eddies. Shells scored the surface of the river once more: by the look of things, Haus had loaded another magazine into the Beretta.

  I debated my options. The Hunter would not kill Reid. This I was certain of. Instead he would use my partner as bait to lure me out. That’s what I would do if I were in his shoes. I turned with the faintest misgiving and let the current carry me north.

  It was two hours before I got back to the apartment. Night had long since fallen across the city. The driver of the cab that I eventually managed to hail sniffed at me suspiciously before reluctantly allowing me onto the backseat of his car. His disposition did not improve when I handed him a wad of soggy dollar bills at the end of the journey.

  After checking the rooms for signs of forced entry, I showered, redressed my wound and changed into fresh clothes. I then did something that would have surprised Reid had he been able to see me: I headed for the painting of Monet’s 1906 “Water Lilies” that hung above the mantel piece in the living room.

  Pausing beneath the canvas, I gazed at the mesmerising shades of blue for silent seconds. Of all of Monet’s works, this was the one I found the most soothing. It had taken several years and a considerable amount of money to convince the artist to make another copy for me.

  I took down the painting and carefully laid it on the couch before turning to face the wall again. I touched an ordinary looking section of the cool white stone. A small electronic pad emerged soundlessly beneath my fingers. I keyed in a code and watched a ten-inch wide partition slide open next to the pad. I pressed my right hand against the fingerprint recognition screen and stared into the retinal scanner above it. Seconds later, the entire wall retracted by a foot with a ponderous noise and a metal panel descended from a hidden recess in the ceiling.

  No one knew that I owned the apartment complex. Ten years ago, following the death of my best friend at the hands of the Hunters, I set up a company made up of twenty fictitious shareholders and named it Baldr Inc., which I then used to buy the building and the freehold for the land it stood upon. Over the years—at times using independent contractors, but mostly doing the work myself—I modified the tower block for my own personal use. I performed detailed background checks on all prospective tenants and only selected the ones that would cause me no trouble. As it was, the apartments on the ninth and eleventh floors were never leased, and mine was the only apartment in use on the tenth floor.

  I considered the display of weapons that now occupied what had once been the east wall of my living room with a frown. Although I abhorred violence and opted not to carry a gun, my life as an immortal had taught me that it was a necessary evil. I hesitated briefly before selecting a Glock 17 and a Smith & Wesson .45 ACP. I tucked them into the holsters on my thighs and loaded a handful of magazines in the belt at my waist. My gaze was finally drawn to the center of the panel.

  In the first half of the seventeenth century, during the early Edo period, I spent several formative years in Japan: I had been travelling through Asia at the time and had come across a few interesting rumours concerning a man called Miyamoto Musashi. Miyamoto was a samurai who hailed from the then Harima Province of Japan and was reputed to have won all the duels he had ever participated in, beginning with his first one at the age of thirteen. To this day, he is still considered one of the most famous sword masters in Japanese history.

  It took me an entire year to convince Miyamoto to take me on as an apprentice; during that time, I became proficient in the country’s language and its various dialects, and immersed myself into its strange new culture. Once under Miyamoto’s tutelage, I learned the art of Niten Ichi-ryu, a two-sword fighting style that he had perfected using a long blade, the katana, and a shorter blade, the wakizashi: in combination, the two blades were known as the daisho. Miyamoto was a hard task master and it was almost a decade before he came to be satisfied with my technique, and this only after I defeated him in a duel. When I left Japan, he had a daisho made for me as a leaving present. Carved into the blade of the katana was an identical copy of the intertwined alpha and omega birthmark branded into the skin over my heart.

  I lifted the ancient swords from their stands in the middle of the metal panel, grabbed a long coat from the closet in the hallway and headed out of the apartment. At the end of the corridor, a keypad operated door opened onto a private lift that took me eleven floors down to the basement below the building. I stepped out into a dark void, turned and flicked a series of switches on the wall to my left. Light flooded the large subterr
anean space before me.

  The basement was off limits to the other tenants. Bar the lift access and the virtually invisible security doors that opened out onto a side alley, there was no other way in or out of the lower floor of the apartment complex.

  As I crossed the concrete floor briskly, my steps echoing off the distant walls, my thoughts turned to the events of the last twenty-four hours. One question overrode all others in my mind: why were the Hunters on my trail again? I wondered briefly whether I had crossed their territory in some way and involuntarily brought myself to their attention once more. The idea was so ridiculous I discarded it straight away. If the Hunters had wanted to find me, they could have done so with maddening ease in the last hundred years.

  The more I pondered the matter, the more I felt the urgency to know the answer: I was not usually one for premonitions, but I could sense storm clouds gathering on the horizon.

  I finally stopped in front of a sleek machine that looked like it had been built for speed. The GSX1300R, known simply as the Hayabusa, was launched by Suzuki in nineteen ninety-nine. The original model had a 1299 cc, four-cylinder, 16-valve engine, and could do zero to sixty mph in two point sixty-seven seconds. It was, and still is, the best hyper sport motorbike ever made by Suzuki. I was one of a lucky few who had managed to get their hands on a limited edition midnight black version.

  Moments later, the Hayabusa roared through the dark streets of the city. It was raining again. I ignored the wet spray rising from the asphalt and headed swiftly across town. The roof of the Cramer building soon appeared between the maze of dark office blocks that crowded the stormy skyline: as the scene of our last battle, I had no doubt that Haus would be waiting there for me. I grimaced slightly. He probably thought it was poetic justice or something.