Philip wasn’t nervous, just irritated. He wanted the heroin. He also wanted to conclude the deal to have Mother killed. He knew he wouldn’t be able to do it himself. He loved her too much for that. He’d made it clear to Slaven that a job might need to be done, although he hadn’t named names – not that he felt it was necessary to do so, since he’d dropped enough hints to make the object of his animus fairly clear. He also had a good idea of the going rate. Ten grand would cover it. He could probably get it done for less – even for free, if he waited long enough and gave Slaven and his people enough business – but it would be difficult for him to establish himself while Mother was still alive. She’d find out. She had her ways. It would be better if she were no longer around.
‘I need to take a leak,’ he said. He also wanted to stretch his legs, and give himself time to think away from Lastrade. He got out of the car and walked to the corner of the lot, which was surrounded by a wall with a spiked fence running along the top. Near the corner was the recessed entrance to a garage, accessed via a pair of locked steel doors. It gave him a little privacy, so he unzipped himself there, pissed, and lit a cigarette. He tried Slaven again. This time the phone was answered on the second ring, and Philip recognized Slaven’s voice.
‘Where are you?’ Philip asked.
‘Right behind you,’ said the voice in his ear, just after the same voice spoke to him from behind.
Philip turned to see Slaven holding a phone in one hand, and a gun in the other. With him was a second man, also armed, with a face like an assemblage of blades. Philip heard the Sebring start up at the same time as the garage doors were opened.
‘Inside,’ said Slaven.
The Sebring appeared behind them, but Lastrade was no longer alone in it. There was a stranger at the wheel, and another in the backseat holding a gun. Lastrade looked frightened as the car drove into the garage.
‘What is this?’ asked Philip.
‘That,’ said Slaven, ‘is what we are about to find out.’
90
The call came as Parker reached the outskirts of Greensburg. He recognized the number. Few others knew it.
‘Hello?’ he said.
The voice of the lawyer Eldritch came over the Bluetooth connection. His breathing was labored.
‘Mr. Parker, I want you to listen to me. In Kentucky is the home of a man named Donn Routh …’
VII
To the house wherein the dwellers are bereft of light,
Where dust is their fare and clay their food,
Where they see no light, residing in darkness,
Where they are clothed like birds, with wings for garments,
And where over door and bolt is spread dust.
‘Ištar’s Descent to the Underworld,’
trans. E. A. Speiser,
Ancient Near Eastern Texts (1950)
91
The Collector moved through Donn Routh’s near-empty house, with its spoiled food in the kitchen, its unused rooms, its life half-lived. It smelled bad, and only the continuing cold spell prevented it from smelling much worse. It was not just the pot of old stew on the stove, or the vegetables that had begun to soften to mush. Routh’s home stank of neglect and foul habits. It reeked of moral decay.
The Collector wondered if Routh had killed the Chinese girl here. He thought so, but he did not believe Routh had killed many other women in the same way. He had sensed an emptiness to Routh, a joylessness. He might have murdered the girl simply to see what it felt like to take her life, and the Collector could almost pick up the lingering aftertaste of his disappointment, even after all this time. The music collection was interesting, though. It suggested some form of aesthetic sensibility, and a desire, if not an actual ability, to take pleasure in the sublime.
His phone vibrated in his pocket, but he ignored it. Somewhere in this house there had to be a clue to the identities of the surviving Brethren. He needed to concentrate.
The Collector first went through all the vinyl records, emptying them from their sleeves and tossing them to the floor, barely noticing if they broke or not. They had clearly been precious to Routh, and therefore it was possible he might have hidden other items of value among them. In the end, all the Collector found for his troubles were some letters to Routh from a dealer in rare vinyl, stored away in a copy of Verdi’s Requiem featuring the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Carlo Maria Giulini, with the voices of Christa Ludwig, Nicolai Gedda, and Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. The Collector was about to discard this record, too, when some instinct caused him instead to set it aside intact. His father always claimed that Schwarzkopf was the greatest interpreter of lieder he had ever heard, although he admitted to being troubled by what appeared to be her enthusiastic membership of the Nazi Party. The Collector thought that this particular example of her work might bring Eldritch some pleasure.
He continued his search of the house, moving from room to room, finding little of interest, until finally all that was left was the basement. He stood at the top of the steps, looking down. An earlier brief glance had revealed boxes and assorted junk. Now he had little choice but to tackle it. First, though, he wanted a drink of water. His mouth felt dry and dusty.
He stepped into the kitchen. A woman was standing before him, a man hovering at her right shoulder. The woman held a kitchen knife in her hand. The Collector raised his left hand and opened his mouth to speak, even as he tensed his right wrist to release the blade concealed along his forearm. The woman advanced a step, and the Collector felt a sharp pain in his chest that, like a flame igniting and feeding on oxygen, grew in intensity until it was all that he knew. He dropped his left hand to the handle of the knife, even as the blade on his wrist snicked from its scabbard and landed uselessly on the floor. The kitchen door stood open, and beyond it he could see the last of the day’s sunlight fading into evening. He began walking, and the woman and man stepped out of his way. The blade in his chest cut at his insides with each step he took, but he did not stop. He wanted to die in the light. He made it to the door just as his legs gave out, then dropped to his knees as the sun grew dark and the world bled red around him. Shadows converged. He tried to keep them at bay, but he no longer had the strength. The shadows took on a terrible solidity as he moved from his world into theirs, and he found himself surrounded by the Hollow Men.
The falcons have no love for the hunter, he thought. He is simply a provider.
They fell upon him, and he was devoured.
92
Sally and Kirk looked down at the body before them. The stranger lay on his side, his eyes barely open in death, his lips forming an oval of shock. He was still holding the handle of the knife, as though it were he, and not Sally, who had delivered the fatal blow. As they stared at him, marks began to appear on the exposed skin of his face and hands: puncture wounds, as of the insertion of needles.
Or sharp teeth.
A kind of gray mist seemed to swirl around the dead man, and in it Sally thought she could discern faces materializing and vanishing.
None of this was visible to Kirk. All he saw was a dead man who appeared to be conspiring in his own rapid decay, his face mottling where he lay. He didn’t look like a cop. That was all Kirk knew for sure, which was good.
‘What’s happening to his skin?’ Kirk asked, but Sally barely heard him. Eleanor had appeared. She was standing by the old barn, and shaking so violently that she was little more than a blur. She radiated fear, and Sally felt it break upon her in turn.
And then Eleanor vanished from view.
‘We have to get away from here,’ said Sally. ‘Like, right now.’
For once, it was Kirk who was the calm one. He retrieved the cash and documents from the basement, gathered some food for the road, and took the keys to the Camry from a hook in the hall. By the time he was done, Sally was over at the barn, keeping as much distance as she could between herself and the man she had killed. Kirk joined her, and removed a board from the barn floor, revealing Routh’s gun s
afe. He unlocked it, and took out a pair of pistols and some ammunition before replacing the board. Finally, he opened wide the barn doors, drove the Camry out, and parked their Focus in its place. He had to help Sally into the passenger seat, all thoughts of abandoning her forgotten for now. She was retreating into herself, and he struggled to get any sense out of her.
‘Eleanor’s gone,’ she said. She started to cry. ‘She’s gone, and she won’t be coming back.’
Good, Kirk wanted to say, but he kept this opinion to himself.
‘Where should we go?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Sally. ‘It’s all coming to an end.’
‘It matters to me.’
He wasn’t about to give up. They had money and new identities. They just needed some time, and a place to hide. A hotel was out of the question while they were together, and they couldn’t turn to any of the family because they were all in danger now.
He was halfway to the highway when he figured it out.
He turned the car at the first opportunity, and headed northeast.
Many hours later, Parker pulled up behind the home of Donn Routh, and the beams of his headlights caught the body on the ground. Parker stepped from the car, a flashlight in one hand, his gun in the other, and took a moment to stand over the remains. He then checked the house, established that it was unoccupied, and returned to the body.
It seemed impossible that the Collector should be dead, and Parker was surprised at the sadness he felt. In death, the ogre was diminished, but also humanized. Whatever he was, or whatever he might have believed himself to be, he had died alone and in pain.
Across the yard, the double doors to a barn stood fractionally ajar. Parker slowly advanced on it, and used the door on the right to shield himself as he made the gap wider. He identified himself as an armed investigator, but received no reply. He risked a glance, and saw a red Ford Focus parked inside. He stayed low and touched a hand to the hood. It was warm, but he sensed the emptiness of the barn. He found the registration in the glove compartment of the car, identifying it as the property of one Kirk Buckner, with an address in Turning Leaf, West Virginia.
He called the police, and waited for them by the body of the Collector.
93
In the house by the sea, the lawyer Eldritch woke from a dream of tides. The nurse sat in a chair beside the bed, flicking through a magazine. Eldritch stretched out a hand and touched her leg. She looked up. The old man’s eyes stared clearly and brightly at her, and when he spoke, it was without a tremor.
‘My son is gone,’ he said.
94
Philip knelt on the filthy garage floor. His hands were secured behind his back with plastic ties, and the left side of his face was covered with Lastrade’s blood and brain matter. Like Philip, Lastrade’s hands had been bound, but he’d barely lived long enough to resent the cinch.
Philip had closed his eyes and waited for the shot that would end his own life, but it did not come. That was hours earlier. No one had spoken to him since then, and a cotton sack had been placed over his head. The warehouse was freezing. Philip couldn’t stop shaking. His knees hurt, and his back ached, but he was alive.
There was hope.
Philip drifted. He thought of Mother. When he fell asleep and started to topple, he received a blow to the head for his trouble, and was returned to an upright position. It was torture.
But there was hope.
Footsteps approached, and the bag was removed from his head. The light was dim in the garage, and it did not take his eyes long to adjust. Lastrade still lay on the floor beside him, facing the ceiling with a hole where his nose used to be.
But now Slaven was standing over Philip, the two bags of money at his feet. Slaven reached into one, withdrew a wad of bills, and held it up like a dead fish. He even sniffed at the paper, his nose wrinkling in distaste, before removing a Zippo from his pocket, igniting it, and holding the flame to the corner of the bills. He waited for them to start burning, watching Philip throughout.
‘Hey,’ said Philip softly. ‘Hey.’
The bills caught, a faint blue tinge to the flame.
‘Worthless,’ said Slaven. ‘Fake. Just like you.’
‘I didn’t know,’ said Philip.
More footsteps, this time from behind: the tap-tap of heels. He smelled her before he saw her. He knew her scent, had known it all his life. He tried to look over his shoulder, but a gun touched his cheek, forcing him to continue staring straight ahead.
‘Mother,’ he said, when at last she appeared before him. ‘Please tell him. Tell him that I didn’t know. Honest, I didn’t.’
Mother looked down at her child, and Philip started to weep.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said.
‘They set you up,’ she said, speaking softly as one would to a little boy who does not understand why the bigger boys were being mean to him. ‘They fed you to the authorities so that you would lead them to Slaven and his people, and then Slaven would lead them to the drugs, and the drugs would lead them to the terrorists, or so they believed. You’ve caused everyone a great deal of trouble.’
‘I was going to make us all rich,’ said Philip.
‘“Us”?’ said Mother.
He heard it in her tone. She knew what he had planned to do. Slaven had told her. That was low, spilling another man’s secrets to Mother.
Philip stopped crying, the tears instantly cut off as though a faucet had been turned.
‘Why couldn’t you just have trusted me?’
‘Because I knew it would have ended like this: in guns, and blood, and dying.’
She reached for him, and used her thumb to blot the last of his tears, smearing some blood with them, even as the first of her own tears began to fall.
‘I won’t do it again,’ said Philip.
‘I know.’
She drew his head to her, and held him to her womb.
‘I just want to go home,’ said Philip.
‘No,’ said Mother. ‘You can’t do that. I can’t keep you with me anymore. You must go away for a long time. Arrangements have been made.’
She stroked his hair, and kissed the top of his head. She recalled the scent of him as an infant, the feel of his hair against her skin, the sound of his breathing as he slept. She was too soft. All women were when it came to their sons.
She released her hold on him and stepped back.
‘Goodbye, Philip,’ she said.
‘Mother—’
She turned and walked away. She had taken only three steps when the shot rang out. She did not look back. She did not want them to see her face. It was a mother’s frailty.
Had she been stronger, she’d have killed him herself.
95
With the assistance of David Ferrier, the police now possessed a list of the owners of the vehicles present at the house of Kirk and Sally Buckner for the family conclave, and a series of arrests commenced.
The widows of Richard Franklin and Sumner Chase were held in separate interview rooms, advised by a pair of lawyers who instructed them to stay silent for the present, although Sophia and Jesse didn’t need to be told that. They understood their best hope was to keep quiet, and beyond confirming that a gathering had taken place at the Buckner residence in Turning Leaf, and professing ignorance of what might have brought their respective husbands to the home of Tobey Thayer, they were prepared to admit nothing at all.
Also in custody were Art, Jeanette, and Briony Montague, all of whom were doing passable impressions of innocence. Their stories were similar to those of Sophia Franklin and Jesse Chase: they had all been brought together by bereavement, the passing of a distant relative. They even had a name to give: Elyse Barlow, who had died recently in upstate New York surrounded by semi-feral cats, and whose body continued to lie unclaimed in a mortuary.
Madlyn and Sally had warned them that a day like this might come, and they were well prepared. The attempted murder of Tobey Thayer was probl
ematic for Sophia and Jesse, but there was nothing to link the others to it. Therefore it might have been possible – barely, but sometimes barely is enough – for some, or all, of those being questioned to distance themselves from the accumulating mess of bodies had it not been for Steven Lee.
Steven Lee had been laid up with a peptic ulcer. The ulcer wasn’t responding to medication, not helped by his ongoing intake of caffeine, alcohol, and tobacco, and he was now resigned to surgery. But due to his indisposition, somewhere on his lot the remains of Jaycob Eklund lay rotting in the trunk of a 1982 Oldsmobile Firenza, generally regarded as being among the worst cars manufactured in the 1980s, and not likely to be improved by the addition of a corpse. Elsewhere, packed into various cubes of twisted metal stacked by the eastern boundary, were the bones of some of the unfortunates who had passed through Steven Lee’s hands in recent times, including Richard Franklin’s late, lamented squeeze, Lucie Mossman. Steven Lee should probably have found a means to get rid of them, but in a curious way he liked having them around. They constituted both a memorial wall and a trophy cabinet.
As soon as he saw the cops arrive, Steven Lee panicked and tried to run.
With a peptic ulcer.
When he collapsed, he started shooting. Only one person died in the ensuing exchange of fire, and that person was Steven Lee, his body jammed between two cars. One was a Kia Concord.
The other was a 1982 Oldsmobile Firenza.
More police. More calls to Moxie Castin and to SAC Ross in New York. Parker was questioned about how he came to be at the farmhouse of one Donn Routh. He told the police about the call from Eldritch, which was when he realized that nobody had informed the old man of his son’s passing. He tried to do it himself, when he was given a minute, but the phone just rang out.
But perhaps, he thought, Eldritch already knows.
A Game of Ghosts Page 35