‘Fuck you to hell,’ Kurzweil quavered. ‘Go right ahead an’ shoot me if that’s what you gotta do.’
Ben gave him a long, hard look. ‘Do you have a death wish?’
‘I talk to you, Ritter and Moon will kill me anyway. I ain’t dyin’ slow and ugly for you, not for nobody.’
Ben sighed. He laid down the shotgun. He’d had no intention of using it anyway. He needed information, and headless men weren’t known for their loquacity. ‘Looks like you have me over a barrel, Kurzweil. Which makes me very unhappy. It brings out my darker side.’
The prisoner was silent. His eyes were liquid and bulging.
Without looking back at her over his shoulder, Ben said, ‘Erin, would you please mind stepping outside? Close the shutter behind you.’
‘I want to stay.’
‘No, you don’t,’ Ben said in a steady tone, not taking his eyes off the prisoner. ‘Trust me.’
Erin hesitated anxiously for a moment, then nodded to herself and walked to the steel shutter. She knelt down, grasped its lower rim and raised it three feet, letting in the rays of the dawn light. The wheels of the Plymouth parked outside were visible through the gap, the wide tyres and arches still speckled with forest dirt. Erin clambered out and used her foot to press the rim of the shutter back down to the concrete, closing Ben and the prisoner inside alone. Ben heard the car door open and shut as she got inside to wait.
There was a silence in the lock-up. Kurzweil just went on staring at Ben, moisture glistening on his forehead.
‘Everybody has a dark side,’ Ben said after a few moments. ‘But mine is so dark, it scares even me.’ He paused. Stood up and walked over to the workbench where all the tools lay. ‘It should scare you too. Because the things I’m capable of doing to you, right here, right now, on this beautiful summer’s morning, are far more inhuman than what Ritter or even Moon will do to you. You want to know where you are, my friend? You’re in my torture chamber. Whether you leave it in one piece or in several, that’s up to you.’
‘I don’t know anything!’ Kurzweil blurted out, finally talking again. ‘I was just doing what I was told!’
Ben turned and grinned at him. ‘I’ve heard that one before. You’ll change your tune. They always do, even tough guys like you. You’ll be crying like a little girl, and that’s before I even get started for real.’
He picked up a ball-peen hammer. It was a tool often used by bad guys to shatter kneecaps, break hands, tap out teeth and depress skulls. He inspected it thoughtfully, then laid it back down to pick up something else. ‘Have you any idea how easily a pair of bolt croppers will shear through human flesh and bone? Let me show you.’
Kurzweil wriggled and cried out as Ben walked around the back of the chair with the bolt croppers. He levered its jaws wide with the long handles. The prisoner had a very clear idea of what was coming, and clenched his fingers into trembling fists. ‘Oh God,’ he moaned.
Ben grabbed the little finger of the man’s left hand, winkled it out straight and fastened the jaws of the bolt croppers around it. ‘After this one comes off, we go to work on the other nine,’ he said.
Erin heard the piercing scream from outside in the car, and closed her eyes.
Chapter Fifty
Things were not going well at the McCrory residence that morning. After his late-night phone call, Finn had been so distracted that he’d managed to wake Angela by turning on the main bedroom light on his way back upstairs. Angela being Angela, that had led to a thousand questions about who he’d been talking to at one in the morning. His attempt to brush them off had only made it worse, prompting all her usual accusations of secretiveness and lying, and then a whole row that had ended up with him slinking off to spend the rest of the night alone in one of the other bedrooms. That wasn’t unusual, either.
Finn had tossed and turned until six twenty, when a splitting headache had forced him to stagger downstairs in his emerald green pyjamas. He was greeted on the landing as usual by the life-sized colour statue of the Virgin, who stood with her back to a high Irish-themed stained glass window. Angela called her a ‘gaudy monstrosity’ but Finn loved to show her off to visitors, along with his Irish Room that sported, among other items, a giant tricolour flag, a beautiful cláirseach harp and Oklahoma’s most comprehensive collection of Waterford crystal.
But Finn took no notice of the Virgin that morning as he stomped down to the kitchen to gulp down a handful of aspirin, which he was strongly tempted to wash down with a medicinal shot or two of Midleton Very Rare whiskey. Just as he’d been nursing his aching skull and thinking it couldn’t get any worse, his mobile had buzzed to prompt him that he had a voicemail message.
Ritter: ‘Call me.’
And so Finn had called him, and received news that had left him winded like a kick in the gonads. The mayor listened, sinking deeper into misery, as Ritter told him of last night’s disastrous failure and Kurzweil’s disappearance.
‘The cabin?’ Finn barely dared to ask.
‘Cabin’s not there any more. Sorry. Was your idea.’
Finn swallowed. The Midleton beckoned yet more en-ticingly. How was he ever going to tell Angela? She loved that cabin.
‘Meet me,’ Finn said. ‘One hour.’ Still reeling, he called Janet Reiss and woke her up to instruct her to cancel his appointments that morning.
‘But you have the thing with the rail union delegates that we’ve already put off twice.’
‘I don’t care. Tell’m I got run over by a train.’
‘That’s not funny, Finn.’
‘Just say I’m feeling sick, okay?’ Which was near enough the truth. By now, he could hear Angela was up early as usual, bustling about upstairs and banging doors in that way that told him he still wasn’t forgiven for last night. Great. The other news he had for her would go down a storm. What the hell was he supposed to say to her? Don’t be mad, honey. I’ll buy you another one.
Desperate to avoid her, he scurried upstairs while she was in the bathroom, pulled on his clothes in a frenzied rush and managed to get out of the house without a confrontation. Seconds later, he was racing down the long drive of his imposing residence and beating the early-morning traffic on his way to the meeting with Ritter.
Which had been when his phone had rung again.
‘How’s it going, man?’ This time, Xavier sounded as if he was calling from a raucous party or a nightclub, with wild heavy-metal music pounding in the background. It wasn’t yet seven in the morning. The rock’n’roll lifestyle of the Mexicano drug dealer scene.
‘Great! Just great,’ Finn said, his face twisting.
‘Listen, man, we need to move that shipment forward.’
Finn’s jaw sagged and he almost ploughed the Mercedes into a line of parked cars. ‘Okay,’ he said, catching his breath.
‘Yeah. They won’t wait for next week, you know?’
Finn knew that Los Locos weren’t people whose patience you wanted to try. ‘So when they want it?’
‘Two days, max. We cool for that?’ As if loading millions of dollars’ worth of illegal weaponry and munitions onto a convoy of trucks and transporting it more than six hundred miles across two states and over a heavily patrolled border without getting stopped was something to be cool about.
‘Two days! Jesus Christ, you’re killing me.’ Finn’s mind was in turmoil. Two days meant that the delivery would have to hit the road by early tomorrow, at the latest. Which inevitably meant that the job of loading the trucks would have to be done today. He’d barely have enough time, even if he rounded up every available man and got them started right away. And all of it, with Ben Hope still out there breathing down his neck and the Hayes woman running loose.
‘No, man,’ Xavier said, then added jokingly, ‘but they might, if they don’t get the goods.’
Finn knew that wasn’t really a joke.
‘I’ll see you soon,’ Xavier said, and was gone.
When Finn screeched the Mercedes to a halt outside
his private hangar, the replacement GMC was there waiting for him and he saw to his intense irritation that Ritter was there, too, along with Moon, who was chewing his damn gum and wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘100% BANDIT’. If Ritter felt bad about last night’s objective going south, he wasn’t showing it. Finn summoned them inside the Gulfstream 650, told them about the rescheduling of the arms delivery, and then launched straight in with the questions. What had gone wrong up there at the cabin? Why couldn’t they eradicate Hope? Where was the damn woman? Where were the journals?
Ritter frankly didn’t have a lot to say in response. By this time, the mayor was pacing furiously up and down the aircraft’s aisle, his face a glowing shade of puce and his hair all in disarray.
‘He’s a goddamn pussy,’ Moon insisted. ‘Can’t fight a straight fight because he’s too chicken to face us out. He’s gonna try and kill us off one at a time instead.’ He snorted. ‘Fuckin’ Kurzweil. I mean, who couldn’t kill that sorry piece of shit? My goddamn grandmother could—’
‘Get your head out your ass,’ Ritter said quietly. ‘He didn’t take Kurzweil away to kill him. He took him away to press him to rat us out. Then maybe he’ll kill him.’
‘Kurzweil knows jack.’
‘He knows enough,’ Ritter said. ‘Hope will get it out of him, for sure.’
‘Yeah?’
‘Yeah. Because I would.’
‘Okay, so what’f he does?’
‘Jesus Christ, enough yakking!’ Finn screamed at them. ‘I’m trying to think.’ He went on pacing, sweat stains beginning to show through his shirt despite the plane’s cool interior. ‘Damn it, maybe I should’ve just paid him the money.’
Ritter shook his head. ‘Forget about the money, boss. The whole thing was just a set-up. He knew you wouldn’t show. He had our moves figured out from the off. It was all about capturing one of our guys.’
‘He’s smart, all right,’ Finn seethed. ‘He’s very, very smart. But money’s money. For the right price, maybe we can make him go away.’
‘I don’t think he’s interested in your money, boss,’ Ritter said. ‘It’s you he wants. Because of what happened to the girl.’
That made Finn stop dead in his tracks and turned him cold. ‘Then you’ll just have to bury the sonofabitch, won’t you? Maybe you’ll get lucky next time. Or maybe I should just replace your asses. The fucking Mexicans could do a better job.’
‘You don’t mean that, boss,’ Moon said.
Finn looked at him sharply. ‘Don’t I?’
Ritter took off his dark glasses and gave Finn a long look. His face was placid, but there was a cold fire in his eyes that almost made Finn take a step back.
‘No more misses,’ Ritter said. ‘This time, Hope dies. That’s a promise. I’ll personally cut his heart out and bring it to you in a basket while it’s still beating.’
‘I don’t care how you do it,’ Finn said. ‘I don’t care what it takes or how much it costs. Just do it. He can’t stand in my way again.’
‘Hate to piss on your French fries, but there’s just one problem,’ said. Moon ‘We got squat on this guy. We don’t know where he’s hangin’ out, we don’t know what he’s drivin’, we have no idea where the fucker might show up next.’
‘Sure we do,’ Ritter said. ‘If he finds out what I know he’ll find out from Kurzweil, he’ll show up at Big Bear.’
‘He wouldn’t have the balls,’ Moon said.
Ritter cocked his head doubtfully. ‘I wouldn’t be too sure. You ask me, that’s where we’ll see him next. I think we should let him walk right in there. I’ll be waiting for him.’
Finn had pursed his lips and was thinking hard. ‘No, no. You’re wrong, Ritter. The woman – she’s the key. Hope knew her name, he knew about the video recording, he knew about Blaylock. He’s hooked up with her somehow. Maybe he was hooked up with her all along. Okay, so maybe we have squat on Hope. We have plenty on her.’
‘I guess we could watch the house,’ Moon suggested, ever hopeful that he’d finally get his hands on the woman in private.
‘Tried that, remember?’ Ritter answered.
‘Yeah, well, maybe if y’all had let me take care of it instead of that dickweed Spicer, she wouldn’t’ve gotten away so easily,’ Moon countered.
‘She’s bound to go back there,’ Finn insisted. ‘So that’s what the two of you are gonna do, get over there and stake the place out. She can’t stay under the radar forever. Meanwhile, I’ll have O’Rourke’s guys scour the whole of Tulsa for the bitch.’
Ritter didn’t like it one bit. Stake-out duty was for the lower orders, not for someone of his experience and seniority. There were more urgent matters to take care of. ‘These trucks ain’t gonna load themselves. I need to be there.’
But Finn was adamant. He shook his head. ‘Meagher and the boys can handle it without you. Make the calls, tell ’em to haul ass right now, this morning. Then shift yourselves to Crosbie Heights and get me that woman. We get her, we get Hope.’
Chapter Fifty-One
Erin sat waiting in the car for eight long minutes, then ten, with nothing to do but stare into her lap and try not to imagine what Ben Hope was doing to the man inside the lock-up. The scream she’d heard earlier had been cut abruptly short and she’d heard nothing since. The silence from behind the steel shutter was even worse.
Waiting made all kinds of dark thoughts pass through her mind. Who was this guy Ben? How the hell had things gotten so desperate that she’d resorted to hooking up with some crazy ex-military type tooled up with guns and ammo and dragging her into a personal revenge quest of his own? Could she trust him? Should she just take off? The key was in the ignition.
But she didn’t touch it. He isn’t like that, she kept telling herself. He’s one of the good guys.
When a whole quarter of an hour had gone by and she couldn’t stand it any longer, she was about to shove open the door when the shutter suddenly screeched up and Ben walked out and stepped towards the car. He had the .40 calibre auto taken from Kurzweil tucked into the waistband of his jeans.
She stared at him. He wasn’t spattered from head to foot with blood, or grinning maniacally clutching gory implements of mutilation. He didn’t look like someone who’d just tortured a man to death. But then, what did she know about torture?
‘Well?’ she said. She peered into the lock-up, but it was too dark to see. There was no sound from inside.
‘Well what?’
She frowned. ‘What happened in there?’
‘We talked,’ Ben said.
‘I heard a scream.’
‘And you thought what?’ Ben asked, looking at her with the faintest of smiles.
Erin suddenly felt embarrassed.
‘It’s what I wanted you to think,’ Ben told her. ‘Him too. I wanted him to believe I’d sent you away so you wouldn’t have to witness something horrible. Then when I told him I was going to cut off his fingers one at a time, he didn’t take a lot of convincing.’
‘You haven’t—?’
‘The scream was just me giving him a little pinch. Didn’t even break the skin. After that, he was ready to tell me anything.’
Erin stepped inside the lock-up. Kurzweil remained tied up in the chair. There was no blood. He still had all his fingers attached, both his ears, and appeared undamaged apart from the fact that he was stone-cold unconscious again.
‘There was enough in that syringe to knock out a rhino,’ Ben said. ‘I’ve just put the last few ccs into him. He’ll be out of action for a bit.’
‘What happens to him next?’
‘Dump him. I don’t need him any more. I know everything he knows.’
Erin looked at him quizzically, but he made no reply. That was when she spotted the torn-out notebook page lying on the workbench. Peering at it, she saw that some notes had been written on it. All she was able to make out were the words ‘BIG BEAR’ before Ben followed her eye and snatched the paper up before she could read more.
> ‘What’s big bear?’ she asked.
‘It’s not important,’ he replied, folding the paper into his pocket. He turned away and walked back outside towards the Barracuda, got in, fired up the engine and reversed the car through the open shutter and half into the lock-up.
‘Looked like something to me,’ Erin said as he got out of the car.
‘Help me get him in,’ Ben said, and Erin sensed that he was deliberately holding back from her. Together, they tipped Kurzweil over backwards and heaved him, chair and all, into the trunk. It was large enough to take a chair on its side with a large man strapped to it. Ben slammed the lid, then got back behind the wheel, put the Plymouth in drive and nudged the gas, edging forward far enough to clear the shutter. Leaving the engine idling, he climbed back out and grasped the shutter sill.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me anything?’
‘We’re leaving now.’
She stepped outside into the morning light, and watched him as he pulled the shutter all the way down on its rusty fittings and replaced the padlocks to secure it in place. He shrugged on his jacket to cover the pistol in his belt, waved for her to get into the passenger seat, then got back behind the wheel. He revved the gas and the powerful V8 propelled the car away from the lock-ups and back out into the street. He was beginning to get the hang of Tulsa’s geography.
‘That’s the real reason you sent me out,’ Erin said tightly after a few minutes’ silence as he gunned the big car through the city streets. ‘I get it now. You didn’t want me to hear what he told you. You found out where McCrory’s arsenal is, didn’t you?’ She could see from the look in his eyes that she was right. ‘Looked like a set of directions you’d written on that notepaper.’
‘Forget about it.’
‘Big Bear,’ she said. ‘Is that a town? I never heard of it before.’
‘Erin, enough of the questions. I won’t answer them.’
‘Why won’t you tell me? I’m just as involved in this as you are.’
‘Because what you don’t know can’t hurt you,’ Ben replied.
The Forgotten Holocaust Page 28