The Spill: The Beach Never Looked So Deadly (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 1)

by Aaron Leyshon

  “Pleased to meet you,” I said. A polite lie. She was a mess and the faint mist of crazy that swirled around her head made me uneasy.

  “Shall we find a table?”

  We looked around. There were a few tables nearby, most of them empty. She chose one closer in, away from the edge, as if the vastness of the Algeciras Bay made her nervous.

  “Your email intrigued me, Mr. Hammer. What do you know about my divorce? What could I have gotten in the settlement that I didn’t get?”

  I clicked my fingers for a waiter. He came over. I ordered a whiskey sour and indicated for Ms. Lancaster to say what she was having. She said nothing, just waved the waiter away with a flourish.

  “They never leave you alone if you don’t set your boundaries early,” she said, her voice a mix of posh upmarket education and an icy unbalanced edge.

  “My divorce?” she reminded me.

  Might as well spit it out, see if she stayed to talk anyway. “I have to level with you, Rebecca. I’m not with the court.”

  “I figured as much. Your email would’ve come on their letterhead or signed by their Principal, not just some investigator. Still, what do you know?”

  “I’m an investigative journalist. I’m looking into your former husband. I’d like to ask you a few questions.”

  Rebecca stood up, shoved her chair in toward the table. The legs grated on the floor with an unnerving screech. “No, no! I won’t hear of it! How dare you lure me in here?”

  A few diners around us raised their heads. It seemed I couldn’t have a meal anywhere on this tiny rock without causing a scene. I raised my hands, placating, lowered them to my side. “Please, sit. It’s okay.”

  “No. You come in here dredging up the past. I . . . I . . .” A small sob escaped the corner of her mouth.

  “Please, Ms. Lancaster, please take a seat. I won’t take up much of your time.” I clicked my finger, maybe a bit more rudely than the establishment was used to from their upscale clientele. But whatever. The waiter came over with my drink. I asked him for another. I set the first one before Rebecca.

  She looked at it forlornly, and then slowly raised it to her lips. “What makes you dredge up such horrible things??”

  “What horrible things, Rebecca?”

  “The past! Everything that happened! Did you not read the divorce files?”

  “I’m a lazy man. I read only a little,” I acknowledged.

  “So, you know what he was like.”

  “I met him.”

  “And what did you think?” she said.

  “He was quite caught up with himself and the prospect of making money on his money. He wasn’t particularly well-mannered, either.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” she said. “Michael Connelly is the most self-absorbed, self-righteous dick that I have ever met in my life. I would say I had the displeasure of living with him for . . . for too many years.”

  She wasn’t the kind of woman who struck me as being someone who Michael would go for, someone a billionaire could afford to hang out with. She wasn’t pretty, not in the conventional sense. Her eyebrows were arched and plucked, but she was dour, and round. “Where did you meet Michael?” I asked.

  She ignored me, still mired in remembered misery. “The things he did . . . the things he said to me . . . you have no idea. My life was completely ruined, all because of him.” She paused, then spat out, “Asshole!”

  I assumed she was referring to her ex, rather than to me. “Did you meet in school?”

  She peered at me suspiciously, then looked away, chewing away the last vestiges of too-orange lipstick from her lower lip. “What does it matter to you?”

  “It matters because I’m investigating your husband.”

  “You said that. What are you investigating about him?”

  “I’m looking into his shipping companies, the oil leaks.”

  “Huh. There’s been no oil leaks, not on his ships. He wouldn’t allow it. Anyone who let it leak off would be . . .” She stopped.

  “Would be what, Rebecca?”

  “Yes, yes, we met in high school. Of course.”

  I allowed the change in subject. At least I’d got her talking. “What was he like then? Did he have many friends?”

  She thought for a moment, a hand resting carefully on her chin as if just hanging there by a thread, and then she sighed dreamily. “He was different then; nice, polite, well-mannered, the kind of boy you’d want to take home to your parents, and I made the stupid mistake of doing that.”

  I nodded. Silence was sometimes the best weapon.

  “He never had many friends, just a few. They work for him now.”

  “In the casino?” I asked.

  “Pavel does,” she said. ”But I haven’t seen him for years, not since the divorce.”

  “When was that?”

  She looked at me sharply. “You really didn’t read the paperwork?”

  “No.”

  Her crazy eyes rolled. “You think I want to help you take my husband down because I think he’s an asshole, because of what he did to me, because of the bruises that he left on my soul?”

  I stayed perfectly still; didn’t nod, didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I don’t. I don’t know why you’re looking into him, I don’t know what you hope to find, but you won’t get it from me.” She swirled the last vestige of liquid in her glass, slammed it on the table and strode off. I caught up with her near the kiosk, where the two grifters were, swindling another tourist out of a few extra quid.

  “Rebecca, do you know any friends other than Pavel, people I might talk to?”

  “I told you I’m not helping you. It doesn’t matter what you say. I won’t help you.”

  “What if I told you I was trying to help your ex-husband?”

  “Then I’d tell you to go to hell.”

  She raised an arm, whistled. A taxi pulled up. She hopped in. “Don’t follow me.”

  I jumped into the front. She jumped back out. I hopped out after her and followed her down the street, to the sound of the irate cabbie’s curses. “Just one name, Rebecca. That’s all. One friend. One person who might know what Michael’s been up to. Somebody who might be able to help. I think he’s mixed up in something that he shouldn’t be, something bigger than just the shipping and the oil. I think he’s mixed up in the abduction of a young girl.”

  That stopped her dead. “A young girl?”

  “You have kids, right?” I remembered that much from the documents I’d skimmed over.

  “Three,” she said. She’d stopped trying to get away from me. Women were always easy to play when you dangled their motherhood over their heads.

  “And they live with Michael?”

  She didn’t answer, but the tears that began running down her face did. “It’s not what you think. He . . . he . . . he . . . got custody because they wanted to live with him because of his money, because he . . . because he could pay for it, because he could afford a better lawyer. Oh, my kids!”

  “Well, this kid’s about to die. Her little toe was discovered a couple days ago. She might already be dead, and I feel like Michael has something to do with it. Please, please give me something, anything.”

  She stopped and turned, faced me square. “You’ll have to talk to his brother.”

  “I didn’t know he had a brother.”

  “He has two. Only one of them lives here.”

  “And what’s his name?”

  “He changed it,” she said, looking me dead in the eye. “He goes by Dan Branson now.”

  Chapter 12

  Out to Sea

  It took me a few hours to find out where Dan Branson lived. It wasn’t on the ship where I’d met him, not out to sea, but in one of the houses just below the Rock, looking out over the bay. I crouched deeper into the bushes. I’d come straight here, got out of the taxi down the road, walked up the street, stayed out of sight. I knew I was being followed, but that was okay by me. It meant that if anything
bad happened, maybe the police would be on my side. Then again, after the treatment in the station, they probably wouldn’t be.

  I waited another 40 minutes before I felt it was safe and that no one was home. I came out of the bushes bit by bit, walked up the drive, stepped onto the doorstep and looked in through the side window beside the door. Nothing moved inside. I slipped around the side of the house. It was a big house, so plenty of windows. I checked in each. A large drawing room in the first: empty. Then, a kitchen, a bedroom, a room I couldn’t see into because the curtains were drawn. Still, no people, no voices, no sounds, no movement from inside. The house creaked—as all houses do—but it didn’t seem to be anything unnatural or anything human.

  By the time I’d made a full lap of the house, I had a rough layout of the ground floor in my head. I decided the glass back door was the safest place to break in, out of sight from the street, away from the neighbors, and relatively easy to get at the latch. I tried the handle, my hand wrapped up in my shirt to keep from leaving any more damning evidence behind. Locked.

  I’d just picked up a brick when I heard the scream from upstairs. It wasn’t bloodcurdling or anything like that, just the sound of utter surprise, and then terror, and then a gurgling, and footsteps slammed on the stairs inside. I could hear them from the back door. The front door slammed. I saw the back of a person, fleeing. No time to tell if it was a man or woman, or to pick up on any details that would be of help. A car screeched out front and drove away. I made my way slowly back around the front. The door was open, swaying in the wind, and I crept inside.

  I scanned each of the rooms downstairs and then made my way upstairs, second by second, bit by bit, dreading what I would find there. It only took a few moments to reach the top. I could see the blood from where I was standing. It trickled out of the bathroom just to the right of the hallway. I inched my way down, trying to avoid stepping in the sticky red mess, which was hard while I was limping. It was hard to be quiet, too, but the house seemed to creak and nobody spoke. There was just the gurgle of running water.

  The sight that confronted me was terrible. Her throat was slit so wide it was like a second smile beneath her chin. She lay face up on the floor in a pink satin nightgown, her hair bound up in a towel over her head, graying, badly dyed strands peeping out. I wouldn’t be getting any more information out of Rebecca Lancaster.

  Chapter 13

  Patsy

  Hathaway had said the police would be tracking me. That meant they knew I was in here. That meant I was a patsy for something: this murder? Duffy’s murder? I didn’t like where this was going. I had to get out of there before they came in, but how? They’d already be here. They would have seen or heard the scream and come running up the street. They’d be here in a second.

  Sure enough, there were knocks on the door, a shouted hello. Police barged in, guns drawn. I kept going upstairs. I stepped over the blood and scurried further down the hall, away from the body, away from the police. I could hear them downstairs searching, looking in each room, finding nothing, shouting “Clear!”

  And then they were on the stairs, the footsteps, one at a time, thump, thump, thump. They weren’t rushing. They knew I was in here.

  I looked around for a place to hide, anywhere—a laundry basket, a cupboard. There were plenty of cupboards but that was never the safest hiding spot. I’d played hide-and-seek as a child; I knew what that was like. I had to get somewhere safe or somewhere outside, somewhere they couldn’t find me.

  I went into the main bedroom, a huge sweeping space with classic art on the walls, 1,000-thread-count cotton sheets on the bed, a silk coverlet on top. There was a tumbler on the walnut nightstand beside the bed—nothing else—and a phone on the other side. I poked my head into the huge walk-in closet, saw rows and rows of clothes on one side, suits tailored perfectly—Hugo Boss, Brioni, Valentino, all the major brands—and on the other side were the environmentalist-type clothes, the clothes Dan Branson chose to masquerade in when he was on the boat, which he no doubt wore for all of those photo ops, the type of shots that hung on his walls, in his cabin, around the ship.

  At the end of the walk-in closet there was a bathroom. I hurried in as fast as my gimp leg could take me, heard the steps behind me. They were close. They’d checked the first few rooms. I’d heard “Clear!” at least three times. That gave me, what, 30 seconds? I stepped into the bathroom, stubbed my toe.

  “Fuck!” I shouted.

  They heard that. That knocked it down to ten seconds. The pain jolted up through my ankle. I slammed the door shut, locked it. That might buy me another one or two seconds—or a body riddled with bullets.

  I heard the crash as the bedroom door was flung open. I launched my body into a deep, luxurious, stainless steel, ceramic-lined Jacuzzi, the kind a man buys not for himself but to entertain several hookers at a time. Deep enough to provide a bit of cover, as long as they didn’t batter-ram their way in and stand over me. It would have to do. I flattened myself like a cockroach.

  “We know you’re in here!” shouted one of the men. He sounded like the Glock from McDonald’s—one of them, anyway. They both looked the same, toted the same gun. What could I say to that? They didn’t know I was in here. I knew I was in here, and I knew it looked like I definitely wasn’t going to get out of here anytime soon. Not alive anyway, and that was my whole aim—to stay alive.

  They scanned the bedroom. “Clear!” someone shouted.

  “Down here!” said the other one. He was right outside the door of my sanctuary, his voice just feet away from where I huddled. “Come out with your hands in the air!”

  I wasn’t going to do any such thing. It was one of those locks you find on toilets, the kind you can open from the outside with a few twists of a screwdriver or an old key, but they didn’t bother. I heard their weapons clicking, put my hands over my ears and pressed against the tub lining as close as I could. Bullets ricocheted off the toilet and walls, pinging against the tub. The sound of the gunshots rang out in the room. I held my breath, didn’t move, didn’t flinch, didn’t so much as shake even though I needed a drink worse than anything. I only prayed Branson had spent his money wisely on the most durable tub he could find.

  The door splintered some more. There was laughter outside. “You think we got him?” said one of the Glocks.

  “I’m not sure,” said the other. “Points for a head shot.”

  More bullets strafed the room. Light was coming in from the outside now, in long straight beams, like light sabers slicing through the dimness. I closed my eyes, kept my head down. The bullets stopped ringing. Maybe shooting at a sorry mass of splinters had lost its entertainment value for the Glock Twins.

  There was a loud crunch as the door flew off its hinges. One of the men came into the room. He grabbed me by the collar, held me, pulled me up. I wasn’t hit, not at all. Hell, I was more alive than I’d ever been. I could feel the adrenaline pumping through my body, pumping through my veins.

  “Who taught you to shoot?” I taunted. Alcohol withdrawal had made me daring—or stupid.

  They both stared at me, unsure of who would answer, and then they realized they didn’t have to. These weren’t the guys I’d met before in McDonald’s. These weren’t cops. One of them I recognized: John-Boy, he of the mean left hook and the penchant for half-drowning strangers.

  He lifted his gun in his big hand and thumped it down on the back of my head. I saw stars, saw the face of Sarah Jones, Gemma Jones, the girl on the boat, my ex-wife in the last moments before she died.

  The next thing I saw hurt my head. A bright-red phone perched on the nightstand. It was ringing, and the annoying old-school chime sliced into the pain in my head, to the throbbing, the thumping, the shakes, the shivers, the fears, the visions. I closed my eyes, tried to block it out, tried to go back down into the dark depths, but they wouldn’t take me, and the phone wouldn’t stop ringing.

  I tried to roll around again, pulled the sheets up over my ears to block the
phone out. It didn’t work, but the sheets felt really good on my skin. They were soft, silky. I pulled them down, opened my eyes, reached over, felt the pain searing in the back of my neck just below where I’d been struck. I pulled the receiver off the hook. “Hello. Who’s this?” I asked.

  The voice on the other end of the line was deep and familiar. It belonged to a weasel-faced punk I’d met on a boat. Its name was Dan Branson. But his real name was Dan Connelly. “What the fuck are you doing in my house, Hammer?”

  I didn’t have a good answer for that, just put the receiver back down on the hook and rolled myself out of the bed. I didn’t want to, let me tell you. I wanted to close my eyes again. This place had to have a liquor cabinet. I searched around, stepped over the body that the guys who’d bludgeoned me hadn’t even attempted to clean up. Some people had no damn class. I didn’t look at it this time, Rebecca with the two gaping mouths. I walked straight down the stairs. I stepped into the living room, around into the kitchen, had a look in the pantry. Nothing there. Was his house as dry as his boat? Smarmy little prick.

  Back into the living room. I searched in all the sideboards and closets and finally opened a door that revealed a variety of fine liquor. I pocketed a few bottles, the small type, the ones you find in hotel minibars—better hotels than the one I was staying in, anyway.

  I took a sip from one of the small bottles. It went down, burning all the way.

  I took another bottle, slightly bigger than the last, stuffed it into my pocket and limped out the back door. There were voices around the front and the telltale crackle of a police radio. I noticed the blue flash reflected on the fence behind me. I froze, listened for a moment. Hathaway was talking to one of the other officers. “They found an ear this morning.”

  Oh, God, I thought. Sarah.

  “What? Who did?” said the other officer.

  “I dunno. Dino’s crew, I think.”

  “They have an ID on who it came from?”