“Beats me. Vincent fucking van Gogh. Who do you think?”
“I dunno,” said the other officer.
Hathaway was getting exasperated now. “What do you mean you don’t fuckin’ know? Whose little toe turned up the other day?”
“Oh, that’s right, that girl who was taken at the zoo.”
“Yeah, that’s the one.”
As interesting as their conversation was, I didn’t intend to be found anywhere near this place when Rebecca Lancaster’s body was discovered. I figured they hadn’t spotted me and they hadn’t surrounded the place, so there was only one way out: over the fence. I climbed up and over the laughably clichéd white picket fence and into the neighboring yard, landing softly but wetly in a long plunge pool. I’m not exactly a small man, so I made a big splash. I stayed below the surface, waited, waited, waited, listened as carefully as I could through the top of the water. No one came to investigate. I crawled out, drenched, bedraggled. Checked my pockets for my whiskey. I’d lost a bottle. I dove back in and found it, picked it up. I was going to need all the courage I could get hold of.
I walked around the side of this house and then through a garden gate into the next yard. This yard was empty. No one there. Nothing of note. Just grass. I kept going, over to the next fence opposite. This one didn’t have a gate, wasn’t so neighborly. I climbed over, carefully, making sure I stayed low, kept my profile off the sky, made sure they didn’t see me, and dropped down into the next yard. My ankle howled at me.
There were lights on in the house, people talking. A woman was cooking. I could see her through the window. Upstairs, a man sang in the bathroom. Neither of them noticed me. I snuck across the yard, tiptoeing as best as I could with my awkward limp. And then, I felt my shoes slip in something dark, brown and sticky. I almost swore then and there, but instead I limped quietly, as silently as I could, trying to wipe the heel and get the dog shit off it. The last thing I needed right now was for whatever godforsaken creature had deposited that huge turd to come after me.
I took another few teetering, tiptoeing steps until I was at the fence. I propped myself against it, used my bad leg to wedge into the crack. It hurt, but no more than the last two fences, no more than the fall into the pool, no more than the last few days had. Maybe it wasn’t broken; just sprained. Still fucking hurt.
A loud bark started up from behind me and something slammed into the fence. The whole structure shook. I was almost on the top of the fence now, but not quite. I started to fall, felt something scraping, digging into my leg—sharp—tearing up my pants, trying to pull me back down. There was another bark, another scrabble at the fence. The fence started to move, to sway. The woman in the house was looking at me now, my eyes fixed on her as the whole fence gave way.
The dog was on top of me. I could hardly figure out its breed, amidst the blur of gnashing teeth, the dark brown jaws flecked with foam, hackles up. It ripped at me, coming for my throat. I threw out a fist, copped it on the ear. It fell back and then it came again, barking, latched onto my other arm, the dog pulled, I pulled back. I slammed my foot into it this time, sending it careening. I jumped up and ran as best I could, hobbling to the other fence. I was going to get over this. I was determined to… without falling down.
The dog jumped up, grabbed me by the ass, wrenched me down. I thumped it again and again and again. Eventually, it let go and whined its way back over to its owners, who were running out of the house. The woman was screaming. “What the fuck are you doing?” She called her husband. “Get out! Get out of the shower! Come down here!”
But I was already over the next fence and the one after that, and then I was out on the street at the back, a different street from the one Dan Branson’s house sat on.
Chapter 14
Overdue
I was still soaking wet, stumbling towards my motel room door, when I threw away my last bottle and fished around in my pocket for my key. It wasn’t there. I checked the other pockets one by one and then again, once more for good measure. I let out a sigh, turned back around and went down to the lobby, down to the cashier’s desk. The girl behind the counter was young but she had a hardness about her. She looked up at me, didn’t say anything, then looked back down at whatever she was doing behind the counter.
“I seem to have lost my key,” I said. “Room 10.”
She looked up again, and then down at her screen. “Name?”
“Ray Hammer.”
She was silent for a moment. Then, “It looks like you haven’t paid your last few nights’ bills, Mr. Hammer.”
“The company’s settling it,” I said, in what I hoped was a convincing voice.
“The company hasn’t settled anything,” she said. “You’ll need to pay.”
I fished around again in my pocket and pulled out my wallet. I knew there was nothing in there, just an old sodden twenty. I pulled it out, put it on the counter. “This is for you. The rest is in my room. I’ll bring it down as soon as I get in. How much do I owe?”
“Three hundred pounds, Mr. Hammer. And by the way,” she said as she was handing the duplicate key over the counter to me, “there’s a man here waiting to see you.”
Chapter 15
Al Ronson
The last person I expected to see in that divey motel bar was my editor. I stepped over and nodded at him. With a sweep of his arm, he indicated for me to sit down. Acting the host, even though it was my home, temporary as it might be. How just like him. I considered pointing that out, but after stepping over a fresh corpse and having a dog hanging off my ass, I wasn’t in the mood. So I sat.
“Hey, Ed,” I said in greeting.
He glared at me. “You still doing that? I have a name, you know.”
“I know. Maybe I’ll use it someday.” If looks could kill. . . . “This is the last place I’d expect someone like you to be in,” I told him.
He sniffed, looking around at the general crappiness of the motel he’d secured for me and nodded in silent agreement. “Yes, you’re about right on that. I just flew in for Andy’s funeral. Thought I’d drop in and see how you’re going with the story.”
I wasn’t going anywhere with the story. He knew that damn well. I hadn’t sent anything in for days, and what I’d sent made no sense; not to me, not to him, not to anyone. But I was working on that.
“We’re pulling the story,” he announced, as casually as if he was informing the office staff that they were switching coffee brands in the break room. As if I hadn’t been busting my ass, been arrested, been half-drowned just for a few column inches in his shitty paper. Bastard.
I decided I wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of seeing my shock, so I just nodded and ordered a drink. “You having one?”
Ed shrugged, and addressed the waiter. “Yeah. Same as him, thanks.” Then, to me, “You sure you should be? You look a bit pissed.”
I took the drink from the waiter, lifting my glass to him in sardonic salute. “This is the first of many.” Actually, it was nowhere near the first, but fuck that.
He looked at me with a skewed smile, like he was assessing a curious-looking insect, deciding whether it was worthy of his bug collection. “You’re a hard bastard, aren’t you, Ray?”
“I’m a drunk bastard.”
He knew better than to go down that rabbit hole. “There’s not enough interest in the story. Our audience is leaning right these days. Nobody seems to care about the environment or what’s going on with it. The Strait could drown in oil, as long as they have enough gas to keep NASCAR races going on the weekend. So, the story’s dead. You can come back whenever you like. We’ll put you on the first flight.”
“You could pay my hotel bill first.”
He smashed a sun-aged fist into the table, laughed and took a sip of his drink. “Yes, the girl in reception did say something about you being good for nothing. I thought she just meant your character.”
“I’m not coming back,” I said.
“We don’t need you here. We
need you somewhere else. We’ve got other stories to cover. You’ve got a job to do, Ray. You can’t just go rogue whenever you feel like it.”
I shook my head. “Do you remember Afghanistan?”
“I’ve never been,” he said.
Of course he hadn’t, with daddy’s money keeping him nice and safe at his creampuff college, going straight into an executive position at the paper right after. The only sand he’d ever seen was chafing his ass crack after a day at the beach. “I have, and they had good stories there. You remember what you said to me before I got some of them?”
“I told you to come home. I told you stop, to leave it, that there was nothing there.”
“Yeah, and were you right or was I right?”
“Let’s split the difference,” he said, because that’s what assholes say when they know they’ve lost an argument. “The story was good, but we had other good stories you could have followed, other good leads.”
“Well, the same’s happening here. There’s something huge. I want to get onto it. You heard the story about the girl that went missing?”
“Girl?” he asked blankly.
“The one whose body parts keep turning up.”
“Oh yeah, that girl.” The look on his face said, what of it?
“Someone hired me to look into her father, and she was abducted before my very eyes.”
“Who hired you?”
“I can’t say. Client privilege.” I wouldn’t have told him anyway.
Ed made a disgusted noise of dismissal. “Shit; they ain’t got no privilege. You’re no private investigator. You’re just a journalist doing a job that you’re not supposed to be doing. I want you back on Monday.”
“The funeral’s tomorrow. That gives me what, two days?”
“That’s how long we’ll pay your hotel bill. After that, you’re on your own. You might not even have a job to come back to.” Big man, threatening me. A tin soldier wielding petty power.
“If the story’s anything like I think it’s gonna be,” I said, “I’ll have a job to come back to, maybe even a promotion.”
Ed took another slow sip of his drink, like a fine Southern lady savoring a mint julep. I gurgled mine down. “Besides,” I said, “everyone around here seems to wanna hire me.” The rest of them want to kill me, I thought.
Ed looked like this was the least likely occurrence he could conjure up in his dim little mind. “I’ll pick you up in the morning,” he said, “take you to the funeral. Think about it overnight.”
I asked for another drink. We both got one put down in front of us. He decided to be prissy. “Look, I don’t need this, Ray. I’m heading home, back to my hotel.”
I felt a wave of aloneness. With Duffy dead, there was nobody else on the Rock to pass the time of day with—even a dickhead like Ed was better than an empty table or my dismal room. “Why don’t you stay? Let me tell you a story. I’ll tell you about what’s been happening here, about a whole lot of bodies, about some pirates, some ships. There’s even a beautiful girl in it for you if you hang out for a while.”
The chair scraped as he stood. “You’ve had enough, Ray. You’ve had enough.” Patronizing asshole.
Just then the bartender came over.
“Is there a problem?” I asked. If there was, I hoped I could finish my drink before we got to it. “If it’s the bill, the company’s paying for it,” I said, indicating my editor, who looked as if that was news to him.
“No, sir,” said the waiter. “There’s a phone call for you.”
I stood up, pushed my chair and started to follow him.
Realizing I was following him, he said: “No, not you, sir. The other gentleman.”
Ed stood up, followed the man, and headed back to the bar, took the phone. I sat back down, took another sip of my drink, another big sip, and another one after that. I watched as my editor chatted. He was animated at first, and then that animation became something else. His face fell. He turned ashen. He came back to the table to sit down, and I noticed tears were streaming from his eyes. He was not in a good way.
I put a hand on his shoulder, compassion overriding my innate aversion to him. “Bad news?” I asked, although that much was obvious.
He nodded. “The police wanna talk to me.”
“The police here?”
“Yeah, a Senior Sergeant Hathaway or something.”
“Why? Has something happened?” That asshole Hathaway was someone I didn’t want to spend any more time near. He was no doubt still looking for an excuse to nail me.
“Yes,” said my editor, and the tears rolled down his face anew.
I awkwardly patted him on the shoulder, cradling my drink in the other hand. I wondered if it was appropriate to take a swig so close to a man who was in so much obvious pain, decided it was, and drained the glass. I reached for Ed’s glass.
“It’s okay. I’m . . . I’m . . . it’s okay,” he said.
He clearly wasn’t okay.
“My . . . my wife,” he began, and I felt my own face turn ashen. I’d been seeing her for a little while now, just off and on, on the side, nothing serious, but I quite liked the time I spent with her and I didn’t want him to find out or anything bad to happen to her. I didn’t know what I’d do if she died.
I braced myself. “What about her?”
“She . . . she . . .” he blubbered, “She received a package. Arrived by international courier an hour ago.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” I said. What kind of package could make a grown man blubber?
“There was a severed hand in it. A child’s hand.”
I felt my world swimming. Sarah Jones was being dismembered bit by bit and I was supposed to be protecting her, looking for her, finding her for her mother. And where was her mother? When would this stop, and why were they doing this? Was it because of me? Had to be, I figured. There was a clear connection between Ed and me, and me and the kid. Why else would anyone take the trouble to ship a child’s body part across an ocean?
I dropped Ed down at the police station in his rental car, and swung it around the streets for a few spins. He didn’t even ask me about how much I’d had to drink when I was driving him there, which showed how preoccupied he was. I didn’t blame him.
Chapter 16
Driving Under the Influence
I do my best thinking when I’m driving. When I’m crunching through the gears, curving out in a beautiful arc around the corners. I was a sight to behold, or at least I told myself that I would be. With me behind the wheel, the car probably looked more like a bird with a broken wing.
Mentally, I ran over the things that had happened since I arrived: Andy Duffy falling through the skylight shortly after I’d spoken to Michael Connelly in the casino; finding myself hostage on a boat; being asked by a beautiful woman to trail her husband in a custody dispute because there were no private eyes in Gibraltar; becoming a private eye and then finding that she had vanished, her daughter vanished, her husband vanished; the girl being dismembered bit by bit. The loony environmentalist on the ship who’d kidnapped me turned out to be Michael Connelly’s brother, and he’d given me a photo of Gemma Jones with her daughter and Michael Connelly on a luxury yacht. The police had taken the photo off me, of course, but I tried to recall the details. There’d been something about the yacht that was a little bit off, a bright color on the bow, maybe the sight of some paint, the name—perhaps the last letter, ‘A’ written in pink or a bright orange, something like that. I decided to take a look at the boats in the bay.
When I pulled into the La Roca marina, I hopped out of the car and walked along the pier. The same fisherman from earlier was still throwing bait out into the water and then throwing his net in, pulling it up full of fish. I nodded to him. He nodded back. I walked around the restaurant and out along one long pier. None of the boats had anything bright on them.
I walked back and down and around, pier after pier, boat after boat, very few of them luxury yachts. But then, I ca
me to a section that was gated. On the other side, I could see the vast hulks of luxury boats, long, tall sleek things with several berths for as many people as you wanted to take out, as many bottles of champagne as you could hold. The biggest of these had a big Day-Glo pink name scrawled down the side—La Madre Teresa.
I rattled the gate, but it didn’t budge. I hadn’t brought my lock picks. I’d been too distracted, too drunk. I rattled it some more, looked up at the top, considered climbing over, but the pikes on the end and my sore ankle made it seem impossible. No, that wasn’t the way in. I’d have to come back another day, in the morning perhaps. I walked back down along the pier, past the fisherman.
“Hey!” he shouted after I’d gone about ten or so steps past him.
I turned and looked back at him. What now?
“I saw you here earlier,” he said, and turned back to his net, pulling it up onto the deck, dumping the fish out, picking them up by the tail one by one and dropping them into a large bucket. He threw the small fry back into the ocean. Good guy.
“That was a lifetime ago,” I said.
He nodded his agreement, and I realized that pulling in nets of fish all day hand over fist must pass very slowly. “That woman you were with . . . “
“Rebecca Lancaster?” I asked.
“Her,” he said. “She’s bad news.”
Like I didn’t already know that. “Thanks,” I said, but not one to speak ill of the dead, I decided to leave it at that.
“She comes down here all the time,” he said. “Every time a different man. They say she’s had five husbands and only two of them are still alive.”
I closed the gap between us and grabbed him by the collar. He flinched, but since I had eight inches on him he didn’t ry to fight me off. “Do you know Michael Connelly?” I demanded. “Her last husband?”
He nodded, sheepish. “Yeah, of course I do. Everyone around here does.”
The Spill: The Beach Never Looked So Deadly (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 1) Page 7