“Got them,” I said. “And I think there’s only two of them.”
“Where?”
“Two floors down, room on the far side. Best guess, that’ll be where they’re keeping Sophie.”
“If they’re keeping her at all. If she’s alive,” Kris said.
I almost hit him. The urge was there, the sudden flush of rage and sheer bloody-minded unwillingness to consider the possibility that he was right. Which he was.
“Doesn’t matter,” he continued, oblivious. “Either way, we go in and get them. If there are only two of them, they can’t be watching the back of the building. They must be expecting a car.”
“Maybe. Maybe there’s no back way in.”
“Maybe. Only one way to find out.”
I conceded him that. “So we try to sneak round there without the guy upstairs seeing us, and then…”
“Then I suggest we split. I’ll go upstairs, maybe over the factory roof, and nail the watchman before he knows we’re there. You go for the downstairs and take out the other guy. That way we don’t have one of them free to do whatever to your friend as soon as they know we’re in the building.”
“It’ll be tricky without knowing the layout of the place. Timing could be a problem.” I shrugged. “But then we’ve got no way of communicating and the whole thing’s guesswork anyway. Hell with it.”
Kris nodded. “It’s as good as we’ll get. Wait until night?”
“Blundering around an unfamiliar factory in the dark? When they could have night vision equipment, and we definitely don’t? No, I don’t like that idea. Let’s just give them an hour or so to get comfortable and dozy, get round the back, and go for it.”
The downpour didn’t let up at all. I was soaked in the time it took to scuttle across the southern side of the canning plant lot, keeping its bulk between us and the watching eyes in the Trent offices.
The chain-link that marked the southern border of these derelict units was peppered with climbing weeds and windblown trash. Maybe two feet of solid vertical cover, and better than nothing above that. I hunkered down and moved as quickly as I could in a half-crouch along the periphery, checking through the weeds every now and then to see where we were in relation to the offices. Once we were within sight of the back of the building, I examined its crumbling face for any sign that they were also watching the rear.
Nothing. No one.
Only the top two floors of offices were visible above the factory roof, and they were almost windowless on this side. Maybe the view wasn’t great with all the refining pipework in place. There was a huge sliding door on the ground floor that was open maybe a few feet. Inside it was dark, but I could make out the front of what looked like a pickup truck. No movement there.
“Looks clear,” I said to Kris.
“There’s a ladder leading to the roof on the rear wall past the gas tank. Keep to what’s left of the piping and head for it. We can get upstairs that way.”
“How do we know the roof’s in any condition to support our weight?”
“We don’t. There’s a gantry up there. Otherwise, stick close to the walls. It’ll be strongest there.”
I swung up and over the fence, feeling the blood pounding through my system. I was expecting a mistake. That there’d be someone watching us after all. A shout of alarm. A rifle bullet through the spine. Sophie dead upstairs.
What I got was a shoe full of muddy water on the other side and a twenty yard dash to the nearest cover. We followed a low concrete enclosure as far as we could, then broke across another ten yard stretch to some rusting pipes. I kept scanning the factory, but nothing had changed. No sign that they knew we were coming.
From the pipes to a pile of brick rubble, and from there to the back wall of the factory and the ladder up. Kris tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Hope you have a head for heights.”
I didn’t answer, just climbed. The rungs were greasy with the rain and the drab olive paint on them was cracked and crumbling, revealing the rust underneath, but the ladder seemed sound. I made it to the top, a little out of breath, and glanced down at the lot below.
I guessed it was around seventy feet, but I wasn't sure. All I knew was that it was far enough to kill me if I fell. The wind up here tugged at my hair and pressed my freezing cold, wet jeans against my legs.
The maintenance gantry running across the roof was in a worse state than the ladder, but it held. I dashed along as fast as I dared, then down to where the top couple of floors of offices jutted from the corner of the building. Popped my head up to the nearest window long enough to see a bare room beyond the empty frame, then back down again.
I pointed at Kris, then gestured upwards and nodded. Remember: you go after the guy upstairs.
He nodded and gave me the thumbs up.
We hauled ourselves in through the window. I drew my Colt and flicked the safety off. I wished I had a silencer like Kris. Waited by the door, listening for movement inside, then opened it and checked the view.
A short corridor dividing two open office spaces, other rooms like ours dotted along the back wall, and there, the stairwell. The place smelled of mildew and the only sounds were the wind howling through a dozen shattered holes in the structure and the rain pelting it outside.
We split at the stairs. Kris crept up to the top floor, and I edged my way down a level, watching the turns. The door below was missing, giving me a clear view across to the room the little guy had vanished into earlier.
Still no sounds and no sign of movement.
With the wind outside whipping itself into a frenzy, I crept to the door, gun out in front of me.
Still nothing.
I held my breath, counted to three, calm and steady, then threw open the door and swung into the room. Swept the corners, finger taut on the trigger, ready to drop the smaller guy before he could even blink.
Sophie was handcuffed to a radiator at the back of the room and had a strip of duct tape over her mouth. She looked roughed around, but not badly hurt.
The little guy wasn’t there.
From upstairs came the sudden roar of a shotgun blast and a moment later Kris started screaming.
52.
I ran across the room, trying to keep one eye on the door behind me. Tugged the tape from Sophie’s mouth — to her credit she didn’t cry out — as a second blast from the shotgun split the air. I bunched the chain on the cuffs up as high as possible, away from her hands, and shot through it, aiming out the window so I didn’t end up killing us both with a stray ricochet even if the shrapnel from the chain didn’t blind us both.
“Where’s the other one?” I said.
“Don’t know,” she gasped, and flung her arms around my neck, crying.
I dragged her out of the room. It looked like one guy had been bedded down here to keep an eye on her while the other was on lookout duty. A couple of sleeping bags, a camping stove, food and water.
The corridor was empty. I kept Sophie cradled in one arm as she clung to me, and covered the stairwell with my gun. Still no sign of the little guy.
Hit the top floor and broke out into a T-shaped corridor. At the far end was the room being used as a watch post. I saw the top of someone’s head sticking out of the doorway, heard whimpering.
I tried to watch the doors to the other rooms I passed as I made my way there, but it was impossible. Too many angles, only one gun.
The lookout post was a mess. The big guy was the one lying in the doorway. He had a pair of bullet wounds to his chest and most of his face had been blown away. By his hand was a bloodied hunting knife. Kris was slumped against one wall, covered in blood and gripping a semi-automatic shotgun in one hand. He must have fought it away from the guy. His pistol was lying on the floor some way away. He had a gaping hole in his gut, probably from the shotgun, and a half dozen slash wounds to his arms and face. One eye was gone, just a wad of blood and ichor, vanished beneath a vertical cut running from his scalp down to the top of his cheek. He was
alive, conscious enough to be in pain, but he was a mess.
Sophie screamed at the sight of him, then stopped, started hyperventilating.
“Kris, Kris, can you hear me?” I said.
I wanted to lay a hand on his shoulder, show him I was there, that there was someone with him through the pain. But I didn’t have a free hand, so I had to watch him suffer alone.
He whimpered, breathing in stop-starts, the agony from his chest fighting it out with his need for air.
“Kris,” I said again.
I could barely make out the words, but it sounded like he was saying, “It hurts… it hurts… God… God… hurts…” Tears began rolling down his face from his one good eye and he stopped talking.
I heard the stairwell door open and leaned out far enough to see the smaller guy staring in utter horror at the corpse of his friend, face white. He saw me, his mouth opened like he was going to say something, and then he dived back inside. I lurched forward to follow but Sophie tightened her grip and cried, “Don’t leave, Alex! Don’t leave me alone!”
Behind us, Kris had gone silent.
Caught in a moment of indecision. The urge to hunt down the small guy with the scarred face, to find out who he was and make him pay for what he’d done. The petrified look on Sophie’s face, red eyes pleading with me not to go.
Hell.
“I won’t, Sophie, I won’t,” I said. I pocketed my gun and held her, comforting her as best I could.
Downstairs, I heard the roar of the pickup’s engine revving. It rocketed away from the factory like the Devil was following after.
Sophie began to calm down after ten minutes or so, once she knew she was safe and the other guy wasn’t coming back. “They didn’t do anything, they didn’t do anything,” she told me as fragments of her story came out at random. “They hit me a couple of times, but they didn’t do anything else, you know? I think… I think they might have, but they didn’t...”
“OK, Sophie. You’re OK.”
I checked Kris, but he was dead. The gut-shot kidnapper in the doorway had a wallet on him as well as the usual personal crap. A New York State driver’s license for Andrew Byrne of Allensburg, NY. An ATM card. A shade under a thousand bucks in cash.
I walked Sophie back to Kris’s car. She didn’t ask me about calling the cops and I didn’t bring it up. Someone would find the bodies eventually, but it’d probably be put down to a drug deal or something gone wrong. There was nothing much there to trace back to either of us.
Harsh, but what else could I do?
“Sophie,” I said once we were driving away, back to Boston, and she was on a more even keel. “Did those guys say who they were or who they were working for? The big one was Andrew and the other was Harvey, right?”
“They were brothers,” she said. “They were asking me if I knew where you were or how to get hold of you. I’m sorry about telling them your email…”
“No, no, you did the right thing.” I tried a smile. “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known where to find you.”
“Who was the other guy? Was he with you?”
“His name was Kris. He was a friend, I guess.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“Stop apologizing, Sophie. None of this is your fault. So why did Harvey and Andrew want me?”
“They talked about it. They were going to kill you. They were working for someone who’d hired them to do it, but they hadn’t been able to find you before… well…”
“Before the Tucker thing.”
“Yeah,” she said. “So they tried to track you down. They said they were the ones who’d put Rob in hospital. The big guy, Andrew, he seemed to enjoy talking about it.”
I pulled into a rest area and bought us coffee and doughnuts from the drive-through. We sat in the rain, and I watched some of the color return to her cheeks while she ate. I tried to figure out what was going on as I sipped my coffee. I knew Goddard blackmailed Heller into framing me, so why would he have hired the brothers to kill me as well? Unless he was hedging his bets by trying both, it meant that someone else wanted me dead. Damned if I could think who, though. Never knew I was that unpopular.
“So someone hired them to get rid of me. Did they say who?”
Sophie shook her head. “No, they only ever called him ‘him’. But they were planning to threaten him for more money.”
“A double-cross.”
“Yeah. They were going to blackmail him for more cash, or kill him if he didn’t pay up.”
Which meant they weren’t professionals. Not for any length of time, anyway. Thugs, maybe, given their first shot at murder. Once word had spread that they were the type to pull that kind of stunt with their employers, they’d never have lasted.
“Did they say anything about anyone else? Did they have anyone in Boston that they knew?”
“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think they’d even been to the city before.”
I dropped Sophie at her home in Cambridge. I didn’t like the risk, given the possibility of police surveillance on my known associates, but I walked her to the door of her studio apartment and helped her check there was no one waiting for her. She said she’d find a friend to crash with for a couple of days until everything was back to normal again, and I stay long enough to make sure someone was coming over to look after her.
“I’m not going to tell anyone about what happened,” she said. “I don’t want the cops to be chasing you even more. And it’s all over now, isn’t it?”
I nodded. “Yeah. I’m going to track down Harvey and whoever hired him. You’ll be perfectly safe. I don’t want you, or Rob, or anyone else getting hurt any more because of me.”
She smiled and hugged me tightly without saying anything.
I waited outside in the car until I saw Brandon climb out of a cab and hurry up to her door, then I pulled away from the curb.
According to their background checks, Harvey and Andrew Byrne looked to be regular small-town toughs, aged forty-one and forty-three respectively. A few convictions and charges between them for assault, extortion, conspiracy. Suggestions that they’d done that sort of work for hire. Both of them had addresses in Allensburg and neither had a regular job. Harvey’s last steady employment lasted six months and had come to an end two years ago. He’d been a driver for a haulage firm in Albany. Before that was another gap of about a year to some short-term warehouse work. The same pattern repeated all the way back. The same with Andrew. Listed family members amounted to only one, apart from his older brother — his wife Jackie, on whom I had nothing.
The brothers were small fry. No one would’ve hired them unless they knew their reputation locally. If it was Goddard that had done it, then he had to be a local too, and I’d find Holly somewhere near Allensburg.
And Harvey would know where she was.
I copied down his details, then drove out to the waste ground where I’d buried Victor’s gun.
53.
High hill country on the state boundary, wooded, dotted with small towns. The dive down into the Hudson valley to come, then the Catskills proper. I was waiting in a queue of half a dozen cars while traffic cops cleared a jack-knifed truck from the road up ahead, hoping they’d have no reason to look at me or the car.
I was wondering how I’d gotten into this situation. How far over the line I’d gone.
How far over it I was still to go.
I had lunch in the small town of Eastbridge. A diner by the name of Charlie’s House. Decent place, full of the scent of fresh coffee and doughnuts. Quick service by a local girl with a nice smile and a breezy manner. From my seat by the window I could see down the main drag all the way to where the Hudson curled past the promontory on the far side of the river. Trees almost bare, fall marked in their empty branches. For a moment, I pictured retiring to a place like this, being able to forget about everything and to relax, to withdraw from the world. To leave it all behind, forever.
Then I figured that was all
just horseshit.
We all indulged our little dreams, our momentary fantasies. A life, a fate, considered, given form and then cast aside in moments. Ten-second destinies. Heartbeat dreamworlds. We painted our future in lies, and sometimes we were foolish enough to believe them.
But not today.
I finished my coffee and quit the diner, leaving a decent tip for the waitress. Walked back into the present and cold reality.
Across the river, I drove along highways twisted by folds in the land, the upthrust slopes of the Catskills, forested and dark. Shreds of dark grey cloud, the tattered remnants of someone else’s rain, scudded across pale blue skies, chased by heavier weather coming in from the east. I passed through a couple of small mountain towns, clusters of buildings gathered around the road. Half an hour of this and I passed the sign welcoming me to Allensburg.
The first thing I saw when I arrived was a cemetery occupying maybe a couple of acres running up the slope to the right of the highway. A boarded-up chapel sat on the opposite side, a curling notice pinned to its doors. Then came the first waves of housing and small neighborhood stores. Blue collar homes running in belts up to either side. It was a minute or two until I hit the town centre and a few square blocks of small businesses and chain stores.
There were a few people out and about, but whether because of the oncoming rain or something else, the only ones I saw smiling were a couple of kids playing tag with each other as they followed their mom along the sidewalk.
I cruised past the address I had for Harvey. A narrow, boxy house whose small, widely-spaced windows, black against the pale walls, reminded me of prison. There was no sign of the pickup truck in the driveway, but over the back fence I saw laundry hanging out to dry. Someone was home, or else they’d be back. I drove off in search of somewhere to stay.
The Discount Motor Lodge was a two-story building shaped like a horseshoe around a central parking lot. Low-grade rooms with cable TV and sheets that smelled of cheap washing powder. A radio alarm clock running twenty minutes slow and without a working alarm function. I paid cash, did nothing to draw the attention of the staff. I couldn’t afford to be discovered now, not with Holly so close I could almost touch her.
The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut Page 25