Midnight on Monday: his third night in the clinic. What might pass for a quiet night, for all Johanssen knows.
An old man’s complaining of chest pains: he says he’s going to die, except the ones who tell you that mostly don’t. Two members of rival gangs—one white, one black, minor wounds, not life threatening—are strapped down on trolleys a few feet apart; occasionally they scream abuse at each other. An asthmatic’s breathing comes out in tight panicky gasps: Riley’s pumping oxygen into her. And a skinny guy has slashed his own arms. The bright curl of Cate’s needle flashes in the light from the overhead bulb, but the man doesn’t flinch: his gaze, softened and blurred by sedative, is drifting somewhere over her head. For the first time since Johanssen arrived, her face is intent and peaceful.
Then the doors bang open, and they bring the man in.
His skull is smashed, the gray-white of brain tissue visible through the blood and fractured bone. It’s like a battlefield injury, the product of high-cal bullets or explosives. He shouldn’t be alive. But then his mouth moves, and he says, quite clearly, “Help me”—as if he’s asking for a little thing, a hand with a heavy box or someone to hold a door open for him. Then his face goes slack, and his body heaves, once, a basic animal response. He vomits, chokes—one of the gang boys says, “Fucking Christ,” and Cate snaps, “Clear it.”
Johanssen slides gloved fingers into the man’s mouth, pulls the tongue to one side—it’s slack, inert—and scoops the vomit away.
“Ventilate him,” Cate says. She’s at his elbow, trying to get a line in, working in a trance of concentration as if by willpower alone she can keep the man alive while Riley prepares the fluids. But the man fits again, back arching, limbs in spasm: once, and then again, and then for the last time, the last rattle of breath, and it’s over.
Beside him Cate reaches out as if there’s something more she can do, start CPR, try again, but Riley says, “Cate?”
Straightaway her gaze punches out at him, but he says her name again, softly, and she looks away, and her hands drop.
For a couple of seconds after that, no one moves. Then Cate says, “Tidy him up, will you?” and her face has that closed look again. She strips the latex gloves from her hands, bins them, and walks out. A second later her feet hit the stairs.
Riley swears wearily, under his breath. He crosses the room and bangs out through another door to the storeroom where they keep the body bags.
The gang boys are watching wild-eyed from their trolleys, but the old man craning from his bed seems satisfied, as if all this has just confirmed his view of the world, when Drill leans forward, slides his fingers into the cavity in the dead man’s skull, and begins to probe the cooling brain.
One of the gang members gags. The other whimpers. But Drill’s face is suddenly very young and full of wonder, like a child seeing snow for the first time.
Riley says, “He killed some kids. Three, that they know of. Different MO every time. Liked to experiment. That fucked the profilers. They got him on forensics in the end—Drill’s not the confessional type.” Flick goes the ash from Riley’s cigarette. He takes another drag and blows out a stream of smoke. “He’s twenty-four, y’know?”
“Looks seventeen.”
“Yeah.”
They’re standing outside the clinic doors, in the shelter of the awning. By the compound entrance, men huddle in waterproofs, and the floodlights are haloed in rain.
“They reckon he started as young as twelve. Funny kid. Curious. ’Bout life. ’Bout pain. That’s why he likes this stuff. Every night he gets to stand outside the human race and look in.”
For a moment Riley goes back to his cigarette. The wind gusts, and the rain blows in at them a little, and then away again. Beyond the fence, lights are on in the council blocks, figures moving within. Out of sight, a street or two away, someone’s calling a name, over and over.
Riley says, “He heard about this place. Came to the compound, hung around the gate, kept asking to be let in. Said he wanted to watch. Everyone told him to fuck off, but he always came back. Cate got to hear about it. Went out, talked to him, then talked to Quillan. Persuaded him to let the kid in. A week he was in here, every night, still as a fucking stone, watching. You’d be treating some bloke with his guts hanging out and there’d be this weird kid at your elbow.” He shakes his head at the memory. “Then she started getting him to do stuff. He’s good. Doesn’t blink, doesn’t freak out. You just don’t leave him alone with anyone. And his bedside manner’s never going to be much. But, fuck”—his sharp features twitch into irony—“we’ll make a valued member of society out of him yet.” Riley gives a soft whuffling laugh. “Spooks you, doesn’t he? I thought nothing got to your sort.” Another drag on his cigarette, another stream of smoke. “The thing you were in for, in the States,” he says.
“It was just something that had to be done,” Johanssen says. It’s all he’s going to say. Killing the girl could have been a crime of passion, but what happened to the boyfriend makes Ryan Jackson slippery, treacherous, sick, and he needs them to trust him.
For a minute after that they stand watching the slow drift of rain across the floodlights.
“So where d’you learn this stuff?” Riley asks at last.
Johanssen shrugs. “Around. Just picked it up.” Riley’s look says Oh yeah? but he meets it, and Riley glances away. Then, “You?”
Riley grunts. “Army. Combat medic. Basra, Helmand—oh yeah, I’m a proper fucking war hero.” He draws on his cigarette again. “Got out after Helmand. A bit of this and that. Ended up with a habit—you know? Needed some money for it, asked this guy, he wasn’t playing. I had to get serious about it.”
Get serious. Brice in the yard: Would you say we’re serious?
Riley says, “Once I started on him, well, it got hard to stop.” Another draw, another flick of ash. “You know how it is. It gets hold of you,” Riley says, and he’s talking into the darkness. “It gets hold of you. Life’s so fucking cheap, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Johanssen says.
Another minute passes.
Riley says, “I was here in the beginning. They were going to knock all of this down”—his arm sweeps out briefly, into the rain—“and then someone decides it’s a good idea to put us in here. Took the boards off the windows, hooked up the services, and bang, we were in. Fuck knows how they thought it would work. Half the folk wandering around like zombies, the other half …” He shakes his head.
Johanssen says, “Quillan sorted it.”
“Oh yeah, he sorted it.” He pauses. “There’s a trick to it, y’know. Doing just enough to keep everyone in order, but not so much the bosses can’t ignore it … That’s what he’s good at, Quillan. Walking the line. And making any trouble work for him. The gangs in this place? He plays ’em off against each other, keeps ’em at each other’s throats, keeps ’em busy.” He takes another drag. “Same thing with Brice. Brice is a sick fuck, and Quillan knows it, he knows you don’t leave a guy like that with time on his hands. You give him something to focus on. And that’s what Quillan does. Finds someone to dangle in front of Brice, keep him occupied. Absorb his energies a bit.” Another drag, gaze dead ahead.
“Someone like me, you mean.”
Riley turns toward him and his eyes are hard, the light in them very flat. “Why d’you think Quillan let you stay? ’Cos you’re an asset to the team? And Brice is learning to live with his disappointment, is he?” Riley snorts. “He wants you, and he’s going to have you, and it won’t be something simple like a knife in the guts when no one’s looking, not after the public beating you gave him, no: he’ll want to put on a show. And while he’s planning that little show, he’s under control.” Then he turns away: squints across the tarmac through the veil of smoke and rain. “Me, I’m just a spectator.”
He takes another drag on his cigarette, but it’s almost down to the filter: one last draw and he flicks it away—“Fuck this, I’m getting some sleep”—and goes back in th
rough the door.
A handful of casualties trickles through the gates toward the end of the shift. There are no more crises. The old man with chest pains dozes smugly on his trolley, sure of a day trip to the Emergency Medical Center beyond the wall: a clean modern clinic, a cup of tea while he waits for examination, maybe even a day or two in a ward … The gang boys have fallen silent, their stocks of obscenity exhausted for now. The self-harmer floats in his narcotic trance. Cate’s bandaged his slack fingers so that if he wakes he can’t mess with his wounds: his mittened hands give him the look of a bantamweight boxer out for the count. She scribbles a crude medical history—background, intervention, medication—for the benefit of the staff beyond the gates, pins it to the man’s clothing with a safety pin, and scrubs her hand across her tired face. Her handwriting’s spiky and thin, as if she’s struggling to focus.
At the end of the shift she takes her plate up to her room, and later there’s that scratching sound again.
He’s lying on his bunk when he hears the soft creak of the stairs as she goes down. He waits, straining for the sound of the outer door closing. It doesn’t come. She’s still in the clinic. After five minutes he rises, pulls on his clothes and follows.
She’s at the counter just like before, the blades spread out in front of her. What’s she doing? Cleaning them? Counting them? When she sees him she says, “You’re going out again.” She must have watched him leave to do his first circuit yesterday. He aborted when the tail got nervous, but it’s given him their measure; he’ll try again today.
“That’s right.” He goes to the sink, runs the cold tap, scoops water into his mouth. Her gaze has followed him.
“Where to?” she asks suddenly.
“Just out.”
“Why?”
He shakes the water off his hands, meets her look. “See if Brice will try to kill me.”
“He doesn’t kill,” she says, but neutrally: just an observation. She reaches one hand toward the hardware in front of her. Her face is like the surface of flat water; tiny movements like ripples show the currents underneath.
“Quillan’s having me watched. I’m safe enough.”
She just picks up another blade.
He thinks she’s done, and he’s turning away when she says, “The head injury. You okay with that?” Her eyes are cool. No sign of the woman from the clinic earlier, the one who couldn’t stand to lose a patient, who had to keep on trying.
“I’m okay,” he says.
“Seen it all before.” It’s not a question.
“Some of it.”
She sits back in her seat, folds her arms. Regards him.
“There’s a scar two inches long on your right forearm,” she says. “From a cut, probably a blade. On your left shoulder, a burn. Old, I’d say childhood. Something flat. An iron? On your left thigh, a puncture wound, quite deep at the time. Ragged. Sharpened screwdriver? Multiple small cuts to both shins. A scar below your right ear and another above the hairline. A scar by the left hinge of your jaw. And your knuckles.” She pauses. “It’s always been part of your life, hasn’t it? And seeing a man with his head blown open, that’s just part of your life, too.”
She shrugs and reaches for another blade.
“There are worse ways to go,” he says.
A man screaming behind a door in a remote farmhouse.
“Yes,” she says, “there are,” but her face has tightened.
He goes out, across the yard. The crowd on the gate eyes him, but no one says a word. The gate swings open, and he steps through it, then turns right to skirt the council estate. Twenty meters on, a tail slots into place behind him. He keeps his head down, keeps walking.
He loops across the Program at random. Northeast first, past the boarded-up chapel and the mosque, as far as the admin block with its listless queues. Then due south, along the eastern fringe of the council estate: music blares from balconies and people watch him pass. At a small shop, dark and musty smelling, the goods still in their boxes in a roped-off area, he asks for chocolate and cigarettes, pays with counters, and comes out again. Dead ahead is the Women’s Area, two snatches still parked across the junction. He turns away and angles southwest, back into the heart of the Program, heading for the workshop on Houghton Street.
A week since he first crossed the place. A week, and most of it spent inside the compound, but already he’s begun to wire himself into the environment, read its codes. The pecking order and the power struggles and the personalities. The fixers and the operators, the entrepreneurs with their projects, their sidelines, their clever little dodges. The drudges and the victims and the broken people, and the ordinary ones who’re just trying to make the best of it. The patrols. And among the loiterers, but apart from them: Quillan’s men, keeping an eye on everything, enforcing the rules, taking their cut.
Whatever he does from now on, they’ll be watching.
And there it is, just like Karla said: an abandoned brick-built workshop, standing apart on an island of cleared ground as if someone was about to demolish it when they decided they might have a use for it after all, another training center or a light-engineering plant. He makes one slow circuit from the cover of the surrounding streets, pretending not to look, then turns away. It’s enough for one day.
Four minutes later he begins to notice.
Just small things. The flash of a face turning toward him in the street ahead and then immediately away again. A flurry of movement in an alley as he passes, no one there when he doubles back. They’re not Quillan’s. Quillan’s tail is plodding on behind him. He sharpens his awareness, tries to get a fix on them, fails.
Then he turns left to come up behind the Grisham Hotel again, and it happens.
There must have been a signal. Suddenly Yellow Teeth’s coming toward him from the left, another man moving to cut him off on the right, and when he spins, a third—the skinny dark one, could be a girl—is closing fast with a knife.
He whips around again, and there’s Brice.
Yellow Teeth and the one on the right grab for his wrists, pinning him between them, Yellow Teeth trying to force Johanssen’s arm behind his back. The blade presses into his jacket, notching itself against his spine. Johanssen twists again. The tip of the blade bites. He freezes.
Yellow Teeth reaches into Johanssen’s jacket, pulls out the green ID card, passes it to Brice. Brice looks at it, smiles at the photo, pockets it. Then takes a step closer, and another.
His mouth dips to Johanssen’s ear. He whispers.
The one with the knife takes a sudden breath. It’s like a trigger. Brice steps back, turns away. The two others release Johanssen so fast he might be toxic. The knife pulls out. They’re gone.
Two of Quillan’s men have come up behind him. One of them’s craning around. The other says to Johanssen, “You all right?” He looks rattled. Johanssen doesn’t answer.
In the clinic he pulls off his jacket. The back of his shirt is sodden with blood, but when he peels it off and peers at his reflection in the door of a steel cabinet the cut’s just a centimeter across and clotting already. Awkwardly he cleans and dresses it, then sponges the jacket where the blood has stained the lining around the tear, and bins the bloody shirt.
Losing the ID means nothing, makes no difference. People must lose their cards all the time. The handprint, the retinal scan, are all the ID he really needs.
But somewhere along the line he’s stumbled, slipped up. Brice thinks he’s someone else. Brice wants to know who.
Brice wants the card because it has his photo on it.
Brice plans to ask some questions.
But no one knows Ryan Jackson in here, do they? And Charlie Ross is dead.
In the bunk room he makes his way past the sleeping figures, undresses, lies down on his side.
Soft snores. Someone mutters. From the room upstairs, a single word, a small thin cry, a whimper. Above his head, dust motes spin in a sliver of light. He breathes them in and counts.
But there’s still Brice’s breath against his cheek and Brice’s voice, all crooning intimacy—
How did it feel when the tube went down your throat?
More than an hour passes before he sleeps.
DAY 14: TUESDAY–DAY 15: WEDNESDAY
KARLA
The first of Ellis’s recordings arrives on Tuesday.
Just gone noon a man with a heavy Turkish Cypriot accent phones, demanding to speak to “lady with Mondeo.” “You leave package behind!” he announces. “I keep it for you! I keep it safe!” He sounds both proud and indignant. I’ll never know why he uses that accent for our phone calls: his English is as good as mine.
For once I’m glad of the distraction, though it means the usual weaving journey by taxi and bus and underground and bus again, a weird schizophrenic zigzag across the city and back, this morning’s surveillance footage playing in my head all the way.
A view of a street, and Johanssen. One second, two at most, to register the tension in his body, the way his head turns and turns again, before three figures come at him from different angles. The struggle’s brief. Johanssen freezes. Someone’s got a knife.
A fourth person saunters into the frame. One of the others takes something from Johanssen’s jacket and passes it to the newcomer. He glances at the item, pockets it, then steps in close—
Is this it? Is this how it ends?
The man turns away. The others release Johanssen and scatter.
Two more figures run on. One just stares at Johanssen. The other looks around wildly: jerky, edge-of-panic movements.
The clip ends.
The first time I watched it, I unclenched my hands to find my fingernails had made half-moons in my palms.
Don’t be a fool, you knew what it was like in there, and so did he.
I replayed the clip. Again Johanssen was seized, again he froze, again the man took the item, then stepped closer and delivered—what? Not a blow. A message? A threat? A kiss?
And once more, but this time when the stranger turned away from Johanssen, toward the camera, I locked the image and opened the copy of the Program inmate list.
The Distance: A Thriller Page 16