Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  As I watched Tony Clean’s man smoke his cigarette, something caught my attention to my left. The windows on the mezzanine, which would once have looked out onto the lot below, were now boarded up and no light shone through them. The only illumination came from a jagged hole in the wall, ringed with damp where the plaster surrounding an old air-conditioning unit had given way and fallen in a heap to the floor below, taking the unit with it. The hole created a kind of murky pool of light between two masses of dark at either side. In one of those unlit areas, I sensed a presence. A pale figure flickered, like a piece of paper gently tumbling. I moved forwards, my heart pounding and the gun heavy in my hand.

  From out of the blackness, a face appeared. Its eyes were dark, with no whites showing, and a dark necklace seemed to hang around its neck. Slowly, its mouth became visible, the zigzagging black thread sealing it shut and, beneath it, the mark left by the rope was deeply indented on her skin. She watched me for a moment, then seemed to turn in on herself, and there was only emptiness where she had been. I felt a cold sweat on my back and a feeling of nausea swept over me. I gave one more look at the patch of darkness, then turned away just as a sudden soft cry of pain came from below me.

  I paused on the first step, and waited. Around me the rain fell and water dripped. There was the sound of a shoe softly scuffing on the wood below and then a man drifted into view on the right-hand stairway, wearing a tan raincoat from which a bald head emerged at the collar. Stritch raised his strange, melted-wax features and his bleak, colourless eyes regarded me for a moment. Then his too-wide mouth broke into a smile from which all humour was absent and he withdrew back beneath the mezzanine. I wondered if he knew yet that Abel was dead, or how much of a threat he considered me.

  The answer came within seconds as the silenced rounds tore through the soft damp wood of the stair rail, splinters spearing the gloom. I sprang up the remaining steps, the bullets following me as Stritch tried to gauge my position from the sounds I made. I felt something tug at the tail of my coat as I reached the top of the steps and knew that he had come close, very close, with at least one of his shots.

  I got to the second floor and headed after Louis. There was a kind of lobby inside the door, with an old raised receiving desk to my right behind which lay another storage bay, part of a succession of small bays that led to the back of the building, each connected by a single doorway so that, if the light had permitted, I could have seen straight through to the far wall of the warehouse. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the bays still contained battered desks and broken chairs, rolls of rotting matting and boxes of discarded paperwork. Two corridors stretched away on either side, one directly in front of me and one to the right. I guessed that Louis was already making his way down the right-hand corridor so I moved quickly down the other, casting anxious glances over my shoulder to see if Stritch had appeared yet.

  A burst of gunfire came from ahead of me and to my right, answered by two softer shots fired in close succession. I heard voices shouting and running footsteps, the noises echoing around the old building. At a doorway to my right, a figure in a black leather jacket lay slumped on the floor, blood pooling around its head. Louis was already making his mark but he didn’t know that Stritch was somewhere behind us, and it was important that he was told. I moved back into the corridor in time to see a flash of tan move behind the receiving desk. I stepped sideways, moving past the prone form of Tony Celli’s man until I could see past the top of the desk, but there was no sign of Stritch. I ran quickly to the doorway of the next bay and peered round the door frame in time to receive the muzzle of a silenced pistol in my right temple.

  ‘Shit, Bird, I almost blew your head off,’ said Louis. In the semi-darkness he was almost invisible in his black clothes, with only his teeth and the whites of his eyes showing.

  ‘Stritch is here,’ I said.

  ‘I know. Caught a glimpse of him, then got distracted by you.’

  Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of more firing ahead of us, the same gun shooting each time, loosing off three shots with no return of fire. There was more shouting and then a burst of automatic fire, followed by footsteps running up a flight of stairs. Louis and I exchanged a nod and began to make our way towards the back of the building, one of us at each side of every door frame to give us a clear view of the room beyond and the section of corridor at either side. We kept moving until we reached an open service elevator, in which another of Tony Celli’s men lay dead. Alongside the elevator, a single flight of stairs wound up to the top level, where Stritch had presumably gone on ahead of us. We were on the second step when I heard a sound behind me that was chillingly familiar: the twin clicks of a cartridge being jacked into a pump-action shotgun. Louis and I turned slowly, our guns held up and away to our sides, to find Billy Purdue standing before us. His face was streaked with black, his clothes soaked through, and on his back was a black knapsack.

  ‘Put your guns down,’ he said. Somehow, he had found a way to hide from his pursuers, and from us, among the old furniture and office waste. We did as we were told, casting cautious looks both at Billy’s gun and the staircase above us.

  ‘You brought them here,’ he said, his voice shaking with anger. ‘You sold me out.’ There were tears running down his cheeks.

  ‘No, Billy,’ I said. ‘We came to get you to safety. You’re in a lot of trouble here. Put the gun down and we’ll try to get you out of it.’

  ‘No. Fuck you. There’s nobody here for me now.’ With that, he fired two bursts from the shotgun, spraying the wood and plaster behind us and forcing us to dive to the ground. When we looked up again, splinters and grit in our hair, Billy was nowhere to be seen but I could hear his running footfalls as he headed back in the direction in which we had come. Louis immediately sprang to his feet and moved after him.

  More shots came from the floor above as I rose, automatic fire followed by a single shot. I took the steps slowly, my neck craned to one side, my hands slick with sweat. At the top of the stairs, beside the elevator, another of Celli’s men lay huddled in a corner. Blood flowed from the bullet wound in his neck. There was something else about him too, something I almost did not see.

  His trousers were opened, the zipper pulled down, and his genitals partially exposed.

  Before me was a doorway, and beyond the doorway was total darkness. In that darkness, I knew that Stritch waited. I could smell his cheap, sickly cologne and the dark, earthy odour he used it to conceal. I could sense his watchfulness, the tendrils he sent out to test the air around him for prey. And I could feel his desire, the sexual charge he took from hurting and bringing lives to an end, the aberrant sexuality that had led him to touch and expose the young man in the corner as he lay dying.

  And I knew with absolute certainty that if I set foot beyond that doorway Stritch would take me and kill me, and that he would touch me as I died. I felt the shadows move around me, and a child laughed in the dim light below. It seemed to summon me back from the brink, or perhaps it was my own fear making me believe that was the case. For whatever reason, I chose to leave Stritch in the darkness and return to the light.

  Louis approached as I made my way backwards down the stairs. His pants were torn at the knee, and he was limping slightly. ‘I slipped,’ he said, spitting the words from his mouth. ‘He got away. What about Stritch?’

  I indicated the floor above. ‘Maybe Tony Celli will do you a favour.’

  ‘You think?’ said Louis, in a tone that said he didn’t believe it was likely. He looked at me more closely. ‘You cool, Bird?’

  I moved past him so that he could not see my face. I was ashamed at my weakness, but I knew what I had felt, and what I had seen in the blood-red eyes of a dead woman.

  ‘My concern is Billy Purdue,’ I said. ‘When Stritch finds out that his buddy is dead, he won’t go anywhere until he’s settled the score. You’ll get another chance.’

  ‘I’d prefer to take this one,’ he replied.
r />   ‘It’s pitch black up there. You set foot on that top floor, and he’ll kill you.’

  Louis remained standing, watching me, but he did not speak. In the distance, I heard the wail of approaching sirens. I saw Louis hesitate, balancing the risk of the police and the shadows on the floor above with the opportunity to try to take out Stritch. Then slowly, with just one glance back to the stairs leading up to the darkness of the third floor, Louis followed me.

  We reached the main bay where we had met the old man. ‘We go out the front, we may run into Tony Celli’s wheelmen, or the cops,’ I said. ‘And if Billy went out that way, then he’s already dead.’

  Louis nodded in agreement and we headed down to the door at the back of the warehouse, where the man Stritch had killed lay half in, half out of the doorway, one arm across his eyes as if he had glimpsed the heart of the sun. Across the lot, I could see the Mercury. It growled into life as Angel shot across the lot and turned the car, then stopped to allow us to get in.

  ‘Any sign of Billy?’

  ‘No, at least none that I saw. You two OK?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said, although I was still shaken by the fear I had felt on the top floor. ‘Stritch was in there. Came from the back of the building.’

  ‘Seems like everybody knows your business except you,’ remarked Angel as we tore out of the lot and followed the tracks back in the direction of India Street. Just before they ended, he swung the wheel to the right and sped through the gap in the wire fence to bring us into the parking lot at One India. He killed the lights as sirens wailed and two black-and-white police cars raced up Fore Street. Then we waited to see if Billy Purdue might show.

  While we sat in silence, I tried to piece together what had happened. The feds had either been monitoring my phone or had managed to find some trace of Tony Celli’s crew. When they moved, Abel contacted Stritch and told him where to go, with the intention of joining him after taking care of the feds. With three different groups of people after him in one enclosed space, Billy Purdue had still managed to get away.

  And I thought too of that half-imagined figure I had glimpsed in the shadows. Rita Ferris was dead and, soon, the snow would be falling on her grave. My mind was playing tricks on me, or perhaps I hoped that was the case.

  No one came towards us on foot from the direction of the complex. If any of Tony Celli’s men had survived, I figured that they would head north instead of coming straight back into town and risk meeting the cops.

  ‘You think he’s still in there?’ I asked Louis.

  ‘Who? Stritch? If he is, it’s because he’s dead, and I don’t believe Tony Celli has anyone that good on his side, assuming anyone was left alive in there,’ replied Louis. Again, I caught that thoughtful look in his eyes as he examined my face in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘I tell you this,’ he said. ‘He knows now that Abel is dead, and he’s gonna be real pissed.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Louis and Angel dropped me at my Mustang, and then followed me to Java Joe’s. I felt drained, and sick inside: I thought of the look in Abel’s eyes before he died, and the sight of the young gunman violated at the moment of his death, and an old man loaded with sneakers and copper wiring running into the cold, wet night.

  At the coffee shop, Louis and Angel decided to stay outside in the Mercury drinking take-out mochas. Lee Cole was seated by the window, her jeans tucked into shin-high fur-lined boots, a white wool top buttoned to the neck. As she stood to greet me, the light caught the streaks of silver in her hair. She kissed me softly on the cheek and held me tightly. Her body started to shake and I could hear her sobbing into my shoulder. I pushed her gently away, my hands on her shoulders, and watched as she shook her head in embarrassment and searched through her pockets for a tissue. She was still beautiful. Walter was a lucky man.

  ‘She’s gone, Bird,’ she said, as she sat. ‘We can’t find her. Help me.’

  ‘But she was with me only a few days ago,’ I said. ‘She stopped off here for a few hours with her boyfriend.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. She called us from Portland, told us she was heading on with Ricky. Then she rang us one more time on the way to some place farther north and that was the last we heard from her. She was under strict instructions to call us each day, but when we didn’t hear . . .’

  ‘Have you been in touch with the police?’

  ‘Walter has. They think she may have run off with Ricky. Walter argued with her about him last month, about how she should be concentrating on her study and not on chasing boys. You know how Walter can be, and retirement hasn’t made him any more tolerant.’

  I nodded. I knew how he could be. ‘When you get back, call Special Agent Ross in the FBI’s Manhattan office. Mention my name. He’ll make sure that Ellen’s name is in the NCIC database.’ The National Crime Information Center kept records of all missing persons, adults and juveniles, reported to the police. ‘If it isn’t, it means that the police aren’t doing what they should be doing, and Ross may be able to help you with that as well.’

  She brightened up a little. ‘I’ll ask Walter to do it.’

  ‘Does he know you’re here?’

  ‘No. When I asked him to contact you, he refused. He’s already been up there, trying to put pressure on the local police. They told him that the best thing to do would be to wait, but that’s not Walter. He drove around, asking in the other towns, but there was no sign. He got back yesterday, but I don’t think he’s going to stay. I told him I had to get out of the house for a while. I had the flight already booked. I’d tried calling you on the cell phone, but I could never get through. I don’t know . . .’ She trailed off, then began again. ‘I don’t know all that happened between you two. I know some of it and I can guess at more, but it has nothing to do with my daughter. I left him a note on the refrigerator. He’ll have found it by now.’ She stared out the window, as if visualising the discovery of the note and Walter’s response to its contents.

  ‘Is there any chance that the police might be right, that she has run away?’ I asked. ‘She never seemed like that kind of kid and she didn’t seem troubled at all when I met her, but they get funny when you introduce sex into the equation. I know I always did.’

  She smiled for the first time. ‘I remember sex, Bird. I may be older than you, but I’m not dead yet.’ The smile disappeared as her words set off a chain reaction in her head, and I knew she was trying not to picture what might have happened to Ellen. ‘She didn’t run away. I know her and she would never do that to us, no matter how badly we had fought with her.’

  ‘What about the kid – Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track.’

  Lee didn’t seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student – a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn’t believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.

  ‘Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she’s in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody . . .’ She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. ‘Will you find her for me?’ she repeated.

  I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of Cheryl Lansing’s granddaughter emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting towards some kind of reckoning from which I couldn’t save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.

  ‘I’ll look for her,’ I said. ‘You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?’

  As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an o
ff-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn’t yet recognise, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee’s words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.

  ‘She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow.’

  I brought her to Portland Airport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.

  ‘It’s I Can’t Marry You, You’re Not A Virgin,’ said Angel. ‘At least they’re not claiming to be virgins, else it’d be I Can’t Marry You, You’re A Liar.’

  ‘Or I Can’t Marry You, You’re Ugly,’ offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. ‘Man, how they get the audience for this show? They drag dollar bills through the trailer parks?’ He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.

  ‘How’s Lee doing?’ asked Angel, suddenly serious.

  ‘She’s holding together, but only just.’

  ‘So what’s the deal?’

  ‘I’ve got to head north again, and I think I’m going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he’s heading back to now.’

  Louis shrugged. ‘Then that’s where we going,’

  I sat down in an easy chair beside him. ‘There may be a problem.’

  ‘Jeez, Bird,’ said Angel, ‘we’re not exactly starved for problems as it is.’

  ‘This problem have a name?’ asked Louis.