by Matt Hilton
‘The way they’re spinning the story it was just another tragic but unrelated accident to hit the Reynoldses. What’s the chance of both the husband and wife being burned to death in such a short space of time? Far as I know, the locals are buying it, though.’
‘How’d they cover Don Griffiths gettin’ himself shot?’
‘That hasn’t been mentioned, yet. A story has been put around that Don has taken Millie and his grandkids away for a while, to protect them from the terrible tragedy.’
‘They’ll have to show sooner or later. You said Don was shot in the legs, how’s he gonna explain when he turns up on sticks?’
I didn’t know, and didn’t really care. Hopefully the Carswell Hicks problem would no longer be an issue by then.
‘I’m surprised the feebies even brought him here, so close to his home town,’ Rink said.
‘Nearest trauma hospital they could find, I suppose. Don was near death when they medi-vacced him out.’
‘So where are Millie and the little ones?’
‘Don’t know,’ I admitted. I’d thought about asking, but it was better that I didn’t know. If I was captured alive, Hicks’ crew might think they could force their location out of me, and it didn’t matter how well trained, sooner or later any man will break.
Rink didn’t press the issue, he understood.
‘So tell me about Special Agent Vincent.’
I had already told Rink about the agent, how he was an undercover operative working to infiltrate Carswell Hicks’ organisation. But now I told my buddy about how Vince had been teamed up with Sonya Madden, and how he’d tried to warn Millie about the impending attack on her brother-in-law’s home, but been scuppered by the intervention of a cat. I also related how Vince had pushed Sonya to her death, and attempted to usurp power from Samuel Gant in order to delay the assault on the logging camp until his FBI friends arrived, but how that plan had also gone to pot. Finally I admitted that Vince had got the drop on me with that damn garrotte, but had spared my life when it became apparent that I was a worthy stooge.
I waited for Rink to absorb it all. He wasn’t long in offering his summation. ‘So he’s a sneaky little weasel?’
‘That about sums him up,’ I agreed. ‘But I have to admit, there’s something about the kid that I like.’
‘I’d step carefully, Hunter. He sounds like the type who’d crap on you from a great height first chance he got.’
‘Like we haven’t worked under bosses like that before?’
‘Speaking of bosses,’ Rink said. ‘Walter’s got his fingers in this pie, too?’
‘I don’t know how that came about, but you know Walter. I can’t really complain, Rink. Without Walt’s intervention I’d probably be looking at a fifteen stretch for manslaughter.’
On Rink’s chin was a livid scar, courtesy of Tubal Cain, and he rubbed at it now. He often did so when he was thinking deeply. Coming to a conclusion, he stood up, stretching his tall frame. He yawned — a natural bodily reaction to relieve stress — then grinned. ‘So when do we start?’
‘In an hour I phone Vince. Then we take it from there.’
Rink huffed. ‘Damn, I’m ready to go now.’
‘You and me both.’
Chapter 31
Carswell Hicks believed he had a God-given right to walk the streets of his home town, and no number of FBI and Homeland Security agents scouring the nation for him would put him off. As far as he was concerned, this great country had been fought for and won by good white stock just like him, so he shouldn’t have to scurry in the dark like a rodent. All these Chinese with their garish clothing and shop fronts full of tat, their garbage piled high on the kerbsides, were the ones the government needed to persecute. Lord almighty, he thought, isn’t China big enough for all them to get the hell back where they belonged?
Last time he was in Manhattan, this part of town was lorded over by the Italians, now just look at it. Now it seemed like they’d been pushed up and over Canal Street to give way to a profusion of red and yellow banners offering to buy scrap gold, paper lanterns strung everywhere and the smell of five spice pervading the air. There were little saffron-skinned men and women everywhere, so many of them that the sidewalks couldn’t contain them all and they spilled around the mounds of garbage on to Mott Street. The traffic moved noisily around them, exhausts fuming in the cold air.
Hicks walked like he had an impenetrable bubble around him. The older people moved out of his way, but now and again he got some hard-edged looks from the younger men, who stood like sentries in doorways, their slicked black hair reflecting the blue of the sky. They quickly looked away when the two hulking men at Hicks’ shoulders returned their stares.
Hicks turned off Mott and on to Pell, stepping out along the narrow sidewalk so that people had to scatter before him or be walked over. Just the way he liked it. An old lady, leaning from the front of her store to offer freshly squeezed orange juice for five bucks a pop, quickly withdrew her hand as Hicks shot her a look to curdle milk. She ranted something in her own language, but her unresponsive husband stacking rice on shelves didn’t even bother to glance at her.
Hicks found the entrance to Doyers Street. There he paused, jamming his hands on his hips like he was surveying his domain. He snorted, striding into the alley and heading for where it bent sharply to the left. When he was a college student he’d often leave Greenwich to come here to purchase cheap noodles and rice, and to play pinball in an arcade famous for having a fortune-telling chicken. But that wasn’t all that Doyers Street was famous for: back in the old gang days, the Tongs fought street battles here, using the tunnels connecting the buildings to launch surprise attacks on their enemies. Doyers would forever be called the Bloody Angle, and it had little to do with the sharp bend in the road and everything to do with the gore that once slicked this place.
Wedged between a shop offering spit-roasted ducks with their heads, necks and feet still intact, and a wholesale distributor whose mode of transportation seemed to be a rickety bicycle chained to a railing outside, was a fairly innocuous door. The door was painted in the predominant red and yellow, but was scuffed and peeling. There was no identifying sign or number, just the evidence that the door had been in use as far back as the days of the Tong wars. A single bullet hole pocked the surface near the upper left corner, and though the door had been painted in the interim, no one had bothered to fill the hole. Hicks heard that it was a historical mark of honour; apparently the bullet missed a prominent Tong leader by a hair and hit the door instead, a moment before the leader struck down his would-be assassin with a meat cleaver. Bullet Proof Tzu carried quite a rep after that poorly-skilled assassin missed his shot.
These days the Tongs held little sway over Manhattan’s Chinatown, the local criminals now being those young toughs hanging about the doorways, but Hicks didn’t care about any of that. He wasn’t here to see anyone even half Chinese. He banged on the door.
The door clicked open and Hicks stepped into a narrow hallway, shadowed by one of his minders. The second man stayed on the street, scowling at the rotating ducks in the window next door. Hicks’ minder had barely made it inside when a hidden piston closed the door tight. Locks engaged. Hicks had been here before, so already knew that the door that looked so brittle from outside was sheathed in steel and armed with sturdy locks on the inside. Like many who’d experienced war, the man who lived here was paranoid enough to live in a fortress.
The corridor smelled faintly of dog pee and something else with an acid undertone that nipped at Hicks’ nostrils. He ignored it, walking along the dimly lit hall to the flight of stairs at the far end. The door at the bottom was openly steel this time, smudged with palm prints and streaks of rubber where it had been kicked in the past. Locks disengaged and the door nudged open. Hicks pushed through it and went up the stairs sprightlier than many men approaching sixty years old. His minder puffed along behind him, twenty years younger, but also twenty pounds heavier.
A third line of def
ence stood in their way, but clicked open as they approached. Hicks couldn’t see the CCTV cameras monitoring their progress, although they were obviously there. As he stepped through the third door a waft of Tiger Balm washed over him. That was the source of the aroma he’d detected in the hall, only ten times more potent. Hicks’ grey eyes began to water.
The second floor apartment was as stark as any monk’s cell, with a cot pushed up against one wall and a metal footlocker the only furnishings at this end. A door opened into another room further along, where things were a little more ramshackle. Hicks recognised the worn office chair and desk, the computer monitor, the battered sofa in one corner, the throw rug with the beer stains. The stack of boxes teetering in a far corner was a new addition, as were the heavy drapes pulled over the window to thwart spying from the opposite building. Making up for the lack of natural light, a lamp threw a slant of yellow across the workstation and the man sitting in the chair observing the video images on the screen.
The chair swung round and the man peered up at Hicks from under a tangle of long salt and pepper curls. In the man’s lap was a small dog. Chihuahua, Hicks thought.
‘It’s been a while, Carswell. Wasn’t even sure it was you when you knocked on my door. I had to look twice.’
Hicks didn’t tell the man he’d undergone a series of cosmetic procedures in the past few months, because Jim Lloyd could already see the end result. Hicks’ predominant feature had always been his hawk-like nose, but that had been reduced, his thin lips thickened, his hairline adjusted so that he now wore a widow’s peak where he used to be bald. His hair was white, as was his newly acquired goatee beard and strap moustache. For someone allegedly dead, he looked strong and healthy.
On the other hand Lloyd looked like he had ten years before. He was still a shaggy bear of a man, stiff with arthritis and old wounds, and Hicks was certain that the combat trousers and plaid shirt were the same he always wore. A patchwork of wrinkles making a spider web pattern around his eyes counted off the years since last they’d met. At sixty-three years old, Lloyd’s face looked every second his age, but the shoulders swelling his shirt, his thick arms, looked like those of a much younger man.
‘Wasn’t sure I was going to open the door, even after a second look. You don’t look a thing like the Carswell Hicks I used to know.’
It was the first time that the two men had shared space in the last decade, but they’d been in regular communication via email and telephone. Hicks had never found it necessary to send an updated photograph. ‘I’m the same man I always was, Jim, just better looking.’
Lloyd eyed him quizzically. ‘You gotta give me the number for your surgeon, Hicks. What they say ain’t true: you can make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear!’
Hicks smiled, but wasn’t really enamoured of Lloyd’s wit; he was neither silk nor a fucking pig, never had been. He let the slight go, because that was just Lloyd’s way. Any other man would be doing a header into the Hudson, trying to find where Hicks had thrown his balls into the river.
Hicks turned to his minder. ‘Wait in the other room.’
The man didn’t raise an objection, just did what he was told. Hicks pulled the door to. Lloyd stood up from his chair and walked like a tin man across the room to where a bottle of cheap whiskey waited. He placed the chihuahua down and took up the whiskey. He held up the bottle, saw Hicks jerk his head, then chugged a shot from the neck of the bottle. He wiped his mouth with his shirtsleeve. He waggled the bottle at Hicks. ‘Where the muscle-rub fails, this always works.’
Without preamble Hicks asked, ‘You heard about your daughter?’
Lloyd’s jaw firmed a little, but that was all the sign he gave. ‘I always knew the crazy little bitch would get herself in trouble, just not on this trip. I thought that Gant would look after her better’n that.’
‘Gant isn’t responsible, Jim, it’s the prick that she hooked up with that’s to blame.’
‘Vince Everett.’ The way Lloyd breathed the name it was like a curse.
‘Right,’ Hicks said. ‘Except it turns out that isn’t his name at all.’
Lloyd took another shot of whiskey. This time he let the drips fall on his chest. ‘Undercover cop?’
‘FBI,’ Hicks corrected. ‘Special Agent Stephen Vincent was a plant assigned to find me.’
‘You kill that bastard for me, Cars?’
‘Not yet, but I will.’
‘I’d do it myself, but…’
As potent and disabling as his arthritis, agoraphobia had made a prisoner of Jim Lloyd years ago.
‘Leave it to me, Jim. I’ll make sure that Agent Vincent gets paid back everything he’s due.’
Lloyd nodded and then went back at the whiskey again. He finished it this time, but cradled the bottle in his arms like a baby, maybe thinking about what a poor father he’d turned out to be. Sonya Madden had been his only child, and Lloyd hadn’t even had the decency to marry her mother.
Lloyd moved back to his computer but he didn’t relinquish the bottle. He propped his hips against his desk, rocking back and forward, his curls swinging. ‘What about Don Griffiths?’
‘He’s momentarily out of our reach.’
‘Gant fucked that up too?’
‘You sound like you’ve got a hard-on for Gant.’
Lloyd sneered. ‘He’s an asshole. Always was, always will be. Thinks he’s some kind of tough guy; he wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in the jungle.’
Lloyd was full of stories about his days hunting the Viet Cong. In his estimation, anyone who was anything had shared the adventure with him. It was why he respected Hicks but hated his younger lieutenant, whose only experience of war was firing tank shells at pussy rag-heads a mile out in the desert. Hicks happened to know otherwise, but didn’t deem it necessary to put Lloyd straight on Gant’s military record.
Hicks studied his old comrade. Lloyd was a paradox. On the one hand he was a staunch patriot, but on the other he was as keen to disrupt his nation as Hicks was, primarily because he believed that the heroes returning from Vietnam had been fucked over by their own country. Lloyd’s argument: men just like the two of them had been reviled by the liberal fuck-wits who then abandoned them to some corner of history they’d prefer to forget. He pointed out that today’s fighting men were being held up as paragons of virtue, while their old buddies were sitting on street corners begging change for food. He had a point, Hicks agreed, but he didn’t give a damn. Hicks’ hatred of the government went much deeper than that.
‘Where is the goose-stepping little shit anyway?’ Lloyd went on. ‘I thought he’d have come with you.’
‘He’s busy,’ Hicks said.
‘I bet he is. What’s he doing, touching up those ridiculous tats he’s so fond of? Beats me why you let him hang around, Cars. You’ve gone to all this trouble to change your face and he’ll give you away in an instant.’
Hicks ignored the comment. Instead he said, ‘Don Griffiths had help. Gant’s trying to find out who it was.’
‘Probably another feebie,’ Lloyd said.
Shaking his head, Hicks said, ‘From what I hear the guy sounds more like one of our old team. Took out almost everyone Gant sent against him. He even wounded Gant.’
‘Shit, that wouldn’t take much. An eight-year-old girl would be trouble to the kind of assholes that Gant’s pulled around him.’ Lloyd went very quiet very quickly. He moved on. ‘Anyway, it’s probably best he stays out in Pennsylvania. I don’t think our contacts would appreciate him turning up at the meeting.’
‘It’s set up?’
‘Of course. All they need is paying and it’s a done deal.’
‘They’ve come through?’ Hicks couldn’t help glancing at the boxes stacked in the room.
Lloyd laughed. ‘Sure they’ve come through. But you don’t think I’m going to be as crazy as to store the goods here, do you? Are you insane, Cars? I’ve enough Agent Orange bubbling through my veins without exposing myself to any of that crap!’
<
br /> Hicks shared the laugh, again unimpressed by Lloyd’s offhand insult.
‘When and where?’
Lloyd turned to his computer, placing down the empty whiskey bottle so he could jab at keys. He brought up an email account for which he and Hicks shared administration tasks. He opened a draft document and typed in the details. He didn’t send the message. Hicks could enter it from any console and read the draft, before deleting it. That way there was no record of the message and no chance of them being traced by it. It was the same method used to communicate by many terror cells, the way in which 9/11 and the London bombings were allegedly planned.
When Lloyd turned round again, he was surprised to find that Hicks had opened the door and that the minder was standing in the doorway. In his hand was a gun, a tubular suppressor screwed on to the barrel. Lloyd, a veteran of combat, couldn’t even get his feet to move, let alone reach for a weapon. ‘Cars? What the hell is this?’
Hicks smiled coldly. ‘Thanks for setting up the meeting with the Koreans, Jim. I couldn’t have done it without you.’
Lloyd eyed the gun pointing directly at his face. ‘This is some way to show your gratitude.’
‘Oh, no,’ Hicks said. ‘This is payback. I think you set us up, Jim. You were the one who introduced Vince Everett to your daughter, knowing full well he was FBI, and you’re the one who warned Don Griffiths that we were coming. And you know something, Jim, I think you were the one who tipped off Griffiths the first time round and had me jailed for more than nine years.’
Lloyd’s groan told Hicks that everything he’d just charged his old friend with was the truth. He jerked his chin and his minder fired in response. The bullet struck Lloyd’s forehead and he dropped to the floor with a flexibility that gallons of Tiger Balm would never give him. The little dog yelped in response, cowering in a corner of the room.
Hicks pulled on a pair of leather gloves, then accepted the gun from his minder’s hand. He went and stood over his old comrade. Looked down on him. Fired twice into his chest. This time the dog stayed quiet.