Hidden River (Five Star Paperback)

by Adrian McKinty

  “No time,” he said, helping me on with my rucksack.

  Downstairs. A knock. Her mother led her out. She’d been crying all night. She looked terrible. Where the blood had been, her hands and arms scrubbed raw.

  “Areea, listen to me, I need you to understand that it wasn’t your fault. There was nothing you could have done, you understand that, don’t you?” I said.

  Areea didn’t say anything. She stared at me. She opened her mouth but then closed it; her expression spoke volumes. She, for one, did not believe Pat’s story about a burglar. In the night she had absolved herself of blame. She had placed it where it belonged. On my shoulders. Areea’s cold intelligence had seen through everything, cut to the quick of things. She looked at me for a hard minute. Her eyes burned. I let her go. Backed away. Closed the door. So there I was, indicted. Given a responsibility I wasn’t sure I would be able to fulfill.

  In any case, I had to leave.

  The bus station. A scout around for cops. None.

  The bus.

  Denver slipping behind me, with all the farce and horror and catastrophe; desiccated sunflowers on the plain, drying prairie, the South Platte River. I slept.

  “Fort Morgan, Colorado,” the driver said.

  I got out.

  The I-76, the river, a sugar factory, and unemployment were the salient features of Fort Morgan. Too far to commute to Denver, too close to the city for a thriving motel strip or highway spill-off trade. It had nothing much going for it. No mountains, no scenic beauty. Drugstores, diners, a couple of bars, depressed-looking, prematurely aged farmer types.

  Pat’s apartment was in an old redbrick building next to a large graveyard that ran beside the highway and the river beyond. One room. A dirty window, a working phone, a sink, a hotplate, a mattress on the floor, and everywhere a whole shitload of gear Pat had stolen from the Denver Fire Department. The guy had lifted everything: a uniform, a first-aid kit, two fire extinguishers, six pairs of fire-retardant gloves, a respirator, smoke bombs, burn cream, boots, and the pièce de résistance: a Kevlar vest that the firefighters wore when putting out fires in riot areas. Some handy stuff there for the motivated individual.

  I stewed in the cramped Fort Morgan apartment for a week. One hundred degrees every day and a dry mistral from off the endless plain, dust from Mexico when the wind blew from the south and from Canada when it switched to the north.

  I bought chili and dumped it in a pot. I didn’t know what I was doing there. I was waiting. I was letting time slip by. I knew I wasn’t going back to Ireland now. I mean, it could have been easy. I could have disappeared and never have had to deal with him or her again. I didn’t know why they wanted me dead, I had no proof of anything, I wasn’t going to the police with that thin tissue of suspicion and innuendo that would have gotten me laughed out of any precinct house. What was going on in his head? Did Charles think I knew more than I did? But if so, he must have known I wouldn’t have fucked around, I would have gone straight to the peelers. I had nothing. Why bother to kill me? It made no sense. But then it’s hard to know what goes on in the brain of a psychopath. Regardless, I could have vanished, I’m sure he thought that I was dead, he had stabbed me in the fucking heart. No report in the paper, but that didn’t mean anything. Jesus, I could be lying there still. Anyway, I was dead. And I could have stayed dead and they would never have thought of me again.

  Pat had three books in his apartment: The Man in the High Castle, Respiratory Injury: Smoke Inhalation and Burns, and the I Ching. I read the former two and rolled the latter and the forty-second hexagram had nine in the last place. Misfortune: Do Not Act.

  But it nagged at me.

  What had I said to Amber that had finally blown the gaff? What had I done? And what about the lack of proof? If I knew anything, what game did they think I was playing? Did they think I wanted to blackmail them? Was that why I’d said nothing, I was biding my time, positioning myself to be the new Alan Houghton?

  I used the phone. I had Pat now as a confidant. Pat took more interest in the case than John ever had. He was sharper, too. Pat had heard of the Mulhollands. He was fascinated by the whole business, especially the murder of Margaret Prestwick.

  He reckoned that Charles had just panicked. Amber tells him I know about Victoria, I’m not who I say I am. He realizes I’m after them, panics. Whether I have enough evidence to go to the police is irrelevant. The congressman’s resignation announcement coming up. The water cannot be muddied. I must be stopped….

  Gothic, but probably true.

  Whatever the reason, Charles had read me completely wrong. That’s not how I would have done things. I would have kept my mouth shut. I would have built my case slowly and steadily and then when I really had something, some actual, honest-to-God proof, I would have given it to the peels, gratis, let them handle it. He had read me wrong and Pat was probably right. Charles had freaked. Decided he had to finish it that night. Exhausted, nervous, resolved.

  Colfax. That goddamn broken lobby door. Five flights. John with a knife in the heart. Charles, you fool, if only you could have taken a day’s rest. Slept on it. You would have seen sense. No reason to kill me. John didn’t have to die in my place. I had nothing. If I had, you’d have been in goddamn handcuffs. You and the wicked queen, too.

  A week. A long week. I was running out of ketch. You couldn’t get smack in this cow town. And at the end of it, I had thought enough. I was resolved.

  I told Pat what I was going to do.

  And once again, he was the voice of reason. And as I plotted and as I planned every day, he told me to forget it and to let it go.

  But I couldn’t, not now. It all had led to this. I had to see him in person, that was the only way. I had to. Why? What would I do when we met? Kill him? I didn’t know. But I had to bring things to a head. I had to see the fucker. Had to. A compulsion. A madness.

  Pat raged, fumed.

  He told me to take the weekend to think it over before I did something so dumb. And Pat was a wise person and I would be a fool to ignore his advice and I did think it over, but I knew I was going to do it.

  I told him.

  Again Pat begged me to reconsider, but he knew it was too late and once he’d heard my plan, he resigned himself and decided that he should help, so at the very least I wouldn’t get topped as easily as John.

  “Sit tight,” Pat said, “I’ll be on the next bus up.”

  I met Pat off the bus. The ride had been rough on him, he was pale, sick. I cooked him Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. He ate some of it. Opened his overnight bag. Removed a bottle of gin and a .45 automatic Colt pistol.

  “This is for you,” he said, giving me the gun. “It was my dad’s. Army issue. He was a lieutenant in World War Two. I’ve checked it, I shot it at the range. Works good. Anything closer than fifty feet. Blow their fucking head off.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I felt better about it, I had a gun and a Kevlar jacket. I’d be safe. We went onto Pat’s narrow fire escape, looked at the graveyard and the river, and talked.

  “What makes you think he’ll come alone?” Pat asked, pouring gin into a coffee mug.

  “Oh, he has to. This whole thing has been about blackmail. He can’t involve anyone else. He’ll come alone, it wouldn’t make sense for him to bring in other people now,” I said with confidence.

  “Take the gun, and wear that Kevlar vest, he’ll try to kill you,” Pat said.

  “I know,” I said.

  A bright hot plains–Colorado afternoon. Blue sky. We walked together to the pay phone outside Walgreen’s. Pat accompanying me at a snail’s pace, but insisting on going in a last ditch effort to dissuade me. I dialed the number. I got through to the Mulhollands’ answer phone. Read from my piece of paper:

  “I want to meet. This is a one-time-only offer. You didn’t kill me. I am not dead. You fucked up. You know who this is. I want to meet on my turf. Alone. Tomorrow night, midnight, the cemetery in Fort Morgan, Colorado, the shelter in the
center of the graveyard. Alone.”

  I hung up the phone.

  * * *

  The next day. A thunderstorm came in about ten o’clock. Thunder and sheet lightning that shook the whole building. It began to hail, golf-ball size.

  “Nasty,” I said, looking out the window, just for something to say.

  “Yup,” Pat said. “On the radio they said it would be freezing rain and hail. Whoever heard of such a thing in July? It’s El Niño, that’s what it is. Won’t do any good, though, we need six months of sweet Jesus rain, need it bad.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But look at that. Can’t see for shit out that window. I won’t be able to check the cemetery. Dumb-ass plan. I knew it. I bloody told you. You’ll be on your own,” Pat said grimly.

  “I’ll be ok.”

  Pat muttered and made some coffee. We watched the clock. Midnight crept around.

  “Well, I better go,” I said.

  “Can I just say one thing?” Pat asked.

  “Aye.”

  “This won’t solve anything,” Pat said, his melancholy eyes teary, sad.

  “Pat, I’m going to get this fucker, he killed my best friend, I have to do this, I have to bring things to a head.”

  “You don’t have to do anything, Alex,” Pat pleaded.

  “I do,” I said.

  “Why not just go home,” Pat said.

  “No.”

  “What do you possibly think you can get from this?”

  I thought for a moment. What did I want? I wanted to confront him, I wanted to yell at him, I wanted him to confess, I wanted him to go to the police, to turn himself in, I wanted to see his face, I wanted closure, I wanted him dead. I wanted a million things.

  I put on a sweater, a coat, the Kevlar vest, and a wool hat to keep out the rain.

  “Are you sure he’ll be alone?” Pat asked.

  “He has to come alone. This is all about blackmail. They can’t involve anyone else. You’ll see,” I reassured him.

  “Be careful,” Pat said.

  “I will.”

  I left the apartment, walked downstairs. I crossed the street to the main graveyard entrance. Went in. My plan was to skirt the tree-lined stone cemetery wall on the river side. It rose to a dense woody embankment overlooking the graves and from there I could see everything, yet because of the trees I couldn’t be seen. Charles wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t know Fort Morgan. He’d show up, go to the shelter in the center of the graveyard, wait for me, but I’d already be there watching him.

  I inched along the wall. The hail had become freezing rain. Pitch black. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I stopped in the trees fifty feet behind the shelter.

  Midnight. A few minutes after.

  A figure in a white coat. Too small to be Charles. Who? Amber? He sent you to do the dirty work? He sent you to clean up his mess?

  I watched her. I waited. She came closer.

  Amber. Is that really you? I kept behind the trees. Had to be her. I smiled. I moved nearer, still hidden by the undergrowth. I slithered down the embankment until I was only twenty feet away, cloaked by the trees and the night.

  “Amber,” I said.

  She didn’t hear. She leaned on a hooped pillar, provided for people to tie up their horses.

  I said it louder: “Amber.”

  She spun around, looking at the graves, and then she peered into the thickets of dense wood, staring right at me, not seeing me. The hood on her coat up, but definitely Amber. No one else had that poise. That deep embodiment of sex. One of the main weapons in her arsenal. And as I stood there looking at her, thinking of that, gazing at her, it came to me and I knew what the mistake had been. What a naive boy I was. From Ireland. From the sticks.

  “Amber.”

  “Alex?” she said. It was her.

  “Amber, I know now what I did wrong,” I said.

  “Come out, come down here and talk to me like a civilized person,” she said with self-assurance.

  “It was that remark, that joke. Wasn’t it?”

  No reply.

  “That Kama Sutra twenty-one joke. Goddamnit. You froze up after that. And you told Charles. And he came to kill me.”

  “Come out of there and talk to me face-to-face,” she said. Cool, icy. I liked that.

  “Kama Sutra twenty-one. Victoria said that to me once. Victoria Patawasti. She said that as a joke to make me laugh. To relax me. A joke against herself. You know, because she’s Indian. But she said it to you, too, didn’t she? You slept with her, didn’t you? You fucked her to get her to tell you her password. Or if not to tell you, to give you information to work it out? I’m right, tell me I’m right, Amber.”

  “Come over here and I’ll talk to you, I can barely hear you,” she said, quiet and calm. Of course she wasn’t going to confirm or deny anything in case I had a tape recorder. I knew that.

  “‘Carrickfergus,’ you kept saying. Was that it? Does that ring a bell? Was that her password? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares. It doesn’t matter. You got it somehow. Seduced her, got her to trust you. You were Charles’s whore. And it was more than just the password, he wanted to know if she could be bought.”

  “You must be drunk or something, Alexander, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I want to help you, I think you might be mentally unbalanced, you’re talking nonsense, come down here, come out of there, I can help you,” she said.

  I barely contained my anger.

  “No, you stand there and fucking listen to me,” I said.

  “But I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m really sorry, Alexander, you’re out of your mind,” she said softly, patronizingly, like a social worker or a nuthouse nurse.

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. Alan Houghton, the first obstacle. Victoria Patawasti, the second. And you seduced her and she wasn’t sure, but you’re so goddamn beautiful. You fucked her. Probably with that strap-on dildo you used to have.”

  “That’s disgusting, you must be drunk or on drugs or something. Please, Alex, believe me, I have no idea what you’re saying,” she said.

  “Liar. You fucked her. Charles told you to do it. Maybe it was her first time with a woman, she was nervous, so she made that joke. That same fucking joke. Her on top, you below. ‘That’s position twenty-one of the Kama Sutra,’ she said. And stupid me. You remembered it when I said it.”

  “Oh, my God. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re quite delusional,” she said, calm and lovely and irritating.

  “When I did that Kama Sutra joke, you knew I’d slept with her too, that I knew Victoria Patawasti, that I’d slept with her and that I’d come to avenge her, to seek you out.”

  She didn’t speak, she didn’t budge, she stared at me, silent, unmoving. Infuriating.

  “Tell me I’m wrong, you bitch, you bloody bitch,” I screamed at her.

  But she said nothing. Shook her head sadly. Smiled. It was the final straw.

  I climbed out of the thicket. I walked down the embankment toward her. I took out the .45, chambered a round. She dropped something, a signal. Hit the deck, put her hands over her head, a glint of her white teeth grinning in the dark and rain.

  The shooting started and I was hit immediately in the chest and shoulder.

  I tumbled to the bottom of the embankment. Gasping. Blood over my hands. Bullets flew out of the dark, thumping into a tree a half meter to my left. Others flew by from a different angle, big and churning like machine-gun rounds. The rain poured down. It hurt to the touch. My hat gone. Amber gone. Dazed. I looked for a way out but the air was as thick as coal.

  I stood again. Easy target. Petrified. I dived for cover. I got behind a gravestone. Caught my breath. A scream of objects came whistling by out of the trees. An arc of fire. A shotgun. Jesus. So that’s shooter number three: a guy above me blocking off the exit.

  They had planned it out. Trumped me, checkmated me. They had anticipated that I would come early, that I wo
uld be in the trees above the shelter and along the wall. They had seen all this and had placed two assassins in the shelter next to Amber and one in the trees behind me so I could not escape. The men below had me from different angles and the man up at the wall could shoot down on me from a flanking and elevated position.

  I had lost all the advantages that I had come here with: surprise, tactical superiority, the high ground.

  Automatic weapons. M16s. Coils of tracer in the black sky. A hungry pack of bullets seeking me out. The cemetery far from streetlights, and Fort Morgan cloaked in low clouds. Thunder. Rain. No stars. No cars. No help.

  They found me. An object smashed into me and I went down again. My eyes saw white. I bit through my tongue. I rolled to the side. I’d taken another hit. Above my left knee this time. I reached down and my hand came back with blood. Shotgun pellet. I couldn’t tell if my patella was smashed. A lot of blood. I yelled and burst into tears. Scrambled away. Pathetic. I had failed. For Victoria, for me. For everyone. I, who was so goddamn smart. Jesus. My eyes closed. She was cleverer than me. I could see that now. I had been bested. Arrogance. Hubris. I blinked. Crawled behind a big tomb bedecked by angels. The men were moving too. Getting a better position. I had to move. I slithered toward the embankment, under monuments, gravestones and Celtic crosses. A sign told me that I was in section K, block 1, wherever that was.

  My head was light. I couldn’t breathe. A tunnel collapsed my vision into a single fatal exit and the downpour took on a dreadful cadence. Funereal and mocking.

  I should have listened to Pat.

  No, it went further than that. I had fucked this up from the start. From the very day I landed in America. And now I was going to die.

  At least it would be my just desserts. The punishment for such incompetence should be death. I took another breath.

  “Lost him,” one man yelled.

  “No, over there somewhere,” another replied.

  “I’ll go around,” said the first.

  Trapped, but I would try for it. The least I could do. I got up, I staggered on. Impossible. Shambling. Ahead of me somewhere in the pitch black were steps that led to the back entrance to the cemetery, the closed gate, the wire fence. Twenty or thirty wide-spaced cuts into the side of the hill, filled with pounded stone, leveled. I could have run them in thirty seconds on a good day. Now, at night, in the middle of a storm, with a shoulder wound, a leg wound, and with at least three gunmen less than the length of a basketball court away and zeroing in on me, it would be a bloody epic. Three men, one armed with a shotgun and the others using bloody automatic rifles.