Never Coming Back

by Tim Weaver

It felt like everything was moving in slow motion.

  I felt dizzy.

  ‘I’m sorry, David. But they had to go.’

  My vision blurred.

  ‘You must understand that.’

  I moved quickly.

  He held up a hand. ‘Wait, David, it’s–’

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, jamming the end of the shotgun into his face, forcing it into his mouth. He started gagging on it. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ I could hear the tremor in my voice but didn’t care, didn’t care about anything any more. ‘You’re going to pay for this.’

  He tried to speak, his voice muffled.

  I jammed the stock in against my shoulder, gripped the fore-end and pumped it once. His eyes widened, his noise getting worse, an animal going crazy. Images flashed in my head: running through the woods as a boy, Dad setting up targets for me to shoot; a farm up in Scotland, an east London forest, the moment I thought I’d breathed my last, all the cases that would never leave me. And then Derryn, behind me, as I looked out through a hotel bedroom window across a vast desert, at two graves.

  It’s okay. They’re fine.

  They’re in a better place now.

  Annabel.

  Olivia.

  ‘No,’ I heard myself saying, like someone else was speaking the words. ‘No, I’m not the same as you.’ I slid the shotgun out of his mouth, hearing him take a deep breath, like he’d been underwater, drowning. ‘No, whatever else, I’ll never be the same as you.’

  I flipped the gun in my hands.

  Levelled the stock at him.

  And then smashed the butt of the gun into his face.

  He went out cold.

  Getting to my feet, unsteady, emotional, I went to the door of the room, spun the wheel and stepped back. Raised the gun, ready for Soto. The door popped gently away.

  A pause.

  A couple of seconds later, fingers fed in around the edge, gripping it. Then, very slowly, the door started to arc back, revealing the room full of photos.

  Then Carlos Soto.

  ‘What do you want?’ I screamed at him, looking down the sights. I brushed an eye with my shoulder, trying to clear my vision while keeping both hands on the gun.

  But everything just blurred again.

  ‘It’s okay.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘It’s okay,’ he repeated. He reached down, carefully placed his gun on the floor, then straightened. His eyes moved from me, to Graham, to the hole in the floor. He could smell it too. He could see the flies that had come up the shoot from the sand-covered pit, escaping into the room we were in. ‘Everything’s okay, David,’ he said. ‘I’m on your side.’

  71

  Twenty-four hours later, I sat at the same table overlooking the same part of the pool as the day before. The morning was completely still. No breeze, just desert sun arrowing out of a clear sky. I ordered a beer and a Cobb salad, and realized how alien this place felt after five months in a tiny Devonshire fishing village. Not just the huge fake facades and the sweeping excess of it, but other, smaller things, like the weather. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d ever felt a day like this, when there wasn’t even a faint stirring in the air.

  All the loungers were taken, men and women baking in the heat, and the pool was full. Old men swam lengths. Glamorous couples dipped their toes in. Kids screamed with laughter. I watched a brother and sister, no more than six, chasing each other around its edge, the girl laughing riotously as her brother failed to catch her. Eventually the boy started to cry, and his dad pulled him in for a hug, asking him why his sister was so cruel, before winking over the boy’s shoulder at the girl. She laughed and returned to the pool.

  After my lunch arrived, I picked at it while rereading the Las Vegas Sun, flicking all the way through to sport I’d never really understood, even when I’d lived here, then back to the front page. Carter Graham looked out at me. It was the photograph he used on his company’s website. EMPYREAN CEO: BODY FOUND AT VEGAS HIDEAWAY. Beneath that was a sub-headline: MULTIMILLIONAIRE CARTER GRAHAM ACCUSED OF KILLING MISSING PROSTITUTE. SOURCES SAY MORE BODIES TO COME. They didn’t realize yet that it got worse still, echoing across decades and spanning continents.

  I folded up the paper and pushed it aside.

  The previous day, I’d spent four hours in a police interview room telling them what I knew. It helped having Soto there. He vouched for me, and that seemed to carry a lot of weight. He’d run Robbery-Homicide for seven years before making the switch to casino security, and the assistant sheriff still seemed to rate him highly, even more the people who’d once called him captain. I told them everything I could, only holding back on details that might lead me into trouble. Back home, I’d broken the law, I’d used hackers and informants, and I didn’t want that reverberating from the other side of the world. But I painted them enough of a picture: of Graham, of what he was protecting, of the son he let loose on the streets of a city the cops here cared about deeply. I didn’t worry that the men and women interviewing me might have been on Graham’s payroll; if they were, they were sweating it out waiting to be found, and unlikely to do anything to make themselves known. And, anyway, I sensed that Soto wanted that to be his job.

  That, once I left, he’d find them and have some kind of revenge.

  As the sun started to drop out of the sky, I headed back up to my room, showered, and then watched it fall the rest of the way, melting into the ridges of the Spring Mountains.

  The lead on the Graham murders, a cop called Cowen, had told me to remain in the States until they’d given me the all-clear to go home. I didn’t anticipate leaving any time soon. It would be difficult enough pulling together every loose end from what had happened on their own doorstep, let alone coordinating tasks and tethering leads with a police force five thousand miles away. Cowen told me he was due to speak to McInnes over video link, and after he told me, I wondered what McInnes would make of all this. I’d only met him once, stumbling around in Rocastle’s shadow, but now he was going to be investigating Carter Graham, and would eventually find his old boss at the end of the trail.

  At about eight o’clock I started to fall asleep, my body finally giving in after days of irregular rest. But then my phone began buzzing across the bedside table. I reached over and looked at the display. It was a text message from Healy. Graham is all over the news here. THANKS, Raker. I had £100 worth of shares in Empyrean, you arsehole.

  I smiled to myself.

  This was his way of re-establishing contact after our last conversation had ended so abruptly; hidden deep down, as hard as it was to believe, it was probably even an apology too. It was Healy all over: not willing to concede all the ground, but cognizant enough to know that, when it came down to it, I was the only person he had left. His wife was gone, his sons barely wanted to know him. Whatever else I was to him – however much he tried to fight me, tried to plough a lone furrow – in the end, he knew that much.

  You’re welcome, I replied. I’ll give you a call when I get back.

  And then an image of Emily came into my head.

  I’d called her the day before, briefly, to tell her what I’d found, and it had been the most difficult call I’d ever had to make in my life. Inside three days her whole family – everyone she’d ever cared about – had been committed to the ground. She may have prepared for this moment, tried to harden her resolve and accept the reality of what was coming, but a small part of her would have clung on to the idea that they were alive.

  I dialled her number and waited for it to connect.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘Emily, it’s David.’

  ‘David,’ she said quietly.

  I could hear she’d been crying. ‘How has today been?’

  ‘Hard.’ She paused. ‘Really, really hard.’

  I sat up in bed, then moved across the room, back to the windows, neon blinking in the glass. Five years ago, what felt like a lifetime ago, I’d promised Derryn I’d bring her to the ci
ty. She’d always wanted to see Las Vegas – but I’d never had the chance.

  She was gone before I could make it happen.

  Back then I’d been a different man – yet to be marked by the death of my wife – a man who knew nothing of the missing, of the world of the lost, of the way life tethered you to people and to moments, over and over in different ways. The Lings, Annabel, they all could have lived if I’d recognized Cornell for what he was the first time I saw him. I could have cut him off at source. I could have saved them all. But I never would have known about my daughter. I never would have met Emily and found out the truth. Because if I’d been a different man, I wouldn’t have been with Derryn, and she wouldn’t have persuaded me to start finding missing people, and her death wouldn’t have helped me find my place in the world. And all that followed – the case that almost killed me, the move to Devon – would never have taken place.

  Nothing was random.

  Everything was connected.

  ‘I’m sorry, Emily,’ I said to her finally.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘For this.’

  I could hear her voice start to turn again, tears twisting her words: ‘You don’t have to apologize to me. I asked you to find them. You found them. You brought me …’

  Closure.

  Except, for her, it wouldn’t feel like that.

  And, as I looked out at the millions of lights, I knew – for a long time – it wouldn’t feel like that for me either.

  72

  I pulled the Challenger into Texico Mexas – a fast food restaurant on Pecos, east of the airport – just after nine. At night, this far from the Strip, Las Vegas was like any other West Coast city: low-rise buildings; small, two-colour billboards; orange sodium lights running off into the darkness. After I’d got off the phone to Emily, Soto had phoned through to my room and asked me to join him. He said his girlfriend, Ellie, worked here on week nights, and she’d get us a thirty per cent discount on our food. I never considered myself much of a food snob, but Tex-Mex wasn’t really my thing. I’m not sure it would have been Soto’s either if it wasn’t for Ellie. Yet it wouldn’t have been the right thing to have turned him down. He’d led me to the bodies of the girls, so at least I could try to process it, and he’d watched my back at the station when I’d needed it. I owed him this.

  Inside, I spotted him in a booth at the back.

  A waitress asked if she could seat me, but I told her I was fine, and weaved across the restaurant. ‘How you doing?’ he said, getting up from his seat and shaking my hand.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  But, even though he didn’t know me, he could see that wasn’t the case. One of the ways I’d been so successful in my work was through suppressing my emotions, knowing when to keep them concealed and when it was fine to let them drift. Even if I paid lip service to it, I couldn’t bring myself to pretend everything was fine.

  I couldn’t describe how I felt.

  Words had once been my gift. But not now.

  We sat down and talked for a while about where the police investigation was, and Soto said he’d spent most of the day on the phone to his friends in the department. ‘It’s just like you said,’ he told me, fingers around a beer bottle. ‘It stretches far and wide.’

  I nodded. ‘Graham was a powerful man.’

  A woman came over a couple of minutes later, and when I saw her name badge, I realized this was Soto’s girlfriend, Ellie. She was in her late thirties, small and slim, auburn hair tied back from a porcelain face. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d taken a shine to her. She seemed quiet, almost shy, but she had the kind of smile that lit an entire room.

  ‘Are you in town for long?’ she asked me.

  I glanced at Soto. He obviously hadn’t got to the stage where he talked about his work with her. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said, smiling. ‘Probably a couple of weeks. We’ll see.’

  She asked what we wanted, and we both ordered chilli.

  ‘How long have you two been dating?’

  They looked at each other, and I could see the answer immediately: not long. They had the kind of glow you only really saw in couples right at the beginning of their journey. Things started to develop after that, not for the worse, just in a different way.

  ‘It’s been four and a half months,’ Soto said.

  ‘That’s great.’

  ‘What about you, David?’ Ellie asked.

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Have you got someone to go back to?’

  I paused. ‘Not at the moment, no.’

  Ellie disappeared back out into the restaurant, and Soto and I started talking about the case again, then moved on to baseball, which I knew nothing about, and the recession, which I knew more of. I remembered, in 2007, I’d arrived in Vegas before everything had gone south. As I ordered a third beer, the edges slowly started to fall away. I rated alcohol alongside Tex-Mex – I could take it or leave it – but, tonight, it was going down well.

  ‘So, I wanted to tell you something,’ Soto said after a while, faintly, something moving in his eyes. Then it was there in his face, plain, like it was written in neon. ‘It’s about the girls. I don’t know whether this will help or not, but you deserve to know.’

  I slumped back in the seat. ‘What?’

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t tell you before, I just–’

  ‘What is it?’

  He hesitated. ‘You remember I said Cornell had a man down at Henderson Airport? That was how he was able to transport everything in and out of the US?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t totally honest with you.’ There was no hope in his face, just a starless dark. ‘I told you I’d followed him to the airport that one time, during the two weeks I tailed him. Well, that wasn’t true. I tailed him for a lot longer than two weeks and I followed him to the airport maybe seven or eight times.’

  ‘Just get to the point,’ I said, hearing a hopelessness in myself now.

  ‘One time, he chartered a plane out of the country and he didn’t come back for a week. He’d gone out to organize the kidnap of that family you talked about.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So he came back one day ahead of them.’

  I didn’t say anything.

  He looked at me. ‘I watched him return the next day, waiting for those girls to come off the plane. I’d checked in with Henderson, managed to get them to tell me which planes were due in, and when I heard there was one coming in from the UK, I knew it had to be something to do with him.’ He swallowed, pushed his beer to one side.

  ‘Carlos …’

  ‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘In the airport, he had to act normal. He had to be a regular passenger; a guy waiting for his two daughters to get off the plane, or whatever. It didn’t matter if he knew a man who could get them through immigration. It didn’t matter if this guy knew who he really was. Everywhere else in the terminal, he had to be normal. He couldn’t make a scene. So, as soon as he saw them coming, he did things like give them a kiss and take Olivia’s Mickey Mouse doll from her and play with it, because he thought that was the type of thing a father might do for his child.’

  He stared at me, uncertain.

  ‘He could act normal,’ Soto went on, ‘he could put on an act. But the girls … they couldn’t. They were shit-scared. I could see it in their eyes. Whoever had sent them out from the UK had obviously threatened them, told them not to say a word, but the little one, she was in tears, and the older one just kept telling her everything was going to be okay.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear the rest,’ I said to him.

  ‘You do.’

  ‘I don’t.’

  ‘Believe me, you do.’

  I just stared at him.

  ‘Next minute, everything went to hell.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  He looked off, beyond my shoulder.

  I followed his line of sight and saw he was looking at Ellie, taking a tray of food to a table just down from us. She smiled at
him, he smiled back – a small, tight smile; maybe not a smile at all – and then he turned back to me and it fell from his face.

  ‘Suddenly, security swarmed on him – like, seven or eight guys – and he ended up getting separated from the girls. Just got dragged off around the next corner.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I found out later, someone had called in an anonymous tip. Someone from the UK. They’d told the airport Cornell had drugs on him.’

  Rocastle.

  I remembered his words to me: I told Annabel I’d make it right.

  ‘I didn’t need to know those girls to know they were in danger.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘I guess it was just instinct,’ he said, ignoring me. ‘He didn’t have any drugs on him, so he was in and out of wherever the security team took him pretty fast afterwards.’

  Next to me, Ellie arrived at the table, carrying our food.

  ‘But by then it was too late for him. They were gone.’

  She put down our plates of chilli.

  ‘I just did it, automatically, but then, after a couple of weeks, I started to realize I couldn’t trust anyone. I didn’t know who was working for Cornell, even in Metro, didn’t know who he had on his payroll and when I was being watched by his people.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘So it’s been my secret for ten months.’

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I realized it wasn’t just Ellie that had come to the table. There were others, just behind her, who had followed her across the restaurant.

  I turned in the booth.

  And, suddenly, they were standing there next to me, sisters holding each other’s hands, the eldest one with a smile on her face that was like looking in the mirror.

  I felt my heart swell up.

  Felt tears blur in my eyes.

  And then Soto said, ‘David, I want you to meet Annabel and Olivia.’

  Author’s Note

  In the interests of full disclosure, and if you hadn’t noticed already, I should probably admit to altering the history and geography of Devon’s Start Bay area ever so slightly. I hope I’ve managed to do it without causing offence, while also remaining true to a very special part of the world. For those who may be interested, the village in which Raker grew up is based closely on Torcross, while the tragic events of Miln Cross were inspired by the real-life story of Hallsands. Five thousand miles west, Las Vegas has remained (largely) untouched, with only some very minor adjustments made for pace and clarity. But, here, I must give a special mention to Peter Earley’s Super Casino: Inside the ‘New’ Las Vegas (2000), which is a brilliant account of modern-day Las Vegas. I was fortunate enough to visit the city in the early stages of my research; on my return, Super Casino answered almost every question I forgot to ask. It comes highly recommended.