Silencer

by Campbell Armstrong

  ‘Listen, I was twice as bored in Pasadena managing a laundromat and sniffing all those fucking cancerous chemicals they got in them places,’ McTell said, ‘but I don’t figure I owe Dansk a goddam thing. I’m sick of his shit attitude and the way he does things.’

  McTell drove in silence for a time. ‘Let’s see the gadget.’

  Pasquale removed a black plastic box from his right side pocket. It was about 4 inches by 4, battery-operated. He flicked a switch and a panel lit.

  ‘Who made that box?’ McTell asked.

  ‘Who what?’

  ‘There a manufacturer’s name?’

  Pasquale turned on the map light and studied the box. ‘Cisco Electronics Inc., San Luis Obispo, Cal, it says here.’

  ‘American. Call me a patriot.’

  Pasquale peered at the red digital numbers on the box. ‘The only condition Loeb laid down is we got to do the thing in an isolated place.’

  ‘No problem,’ McTell said. ‘It’s a big empty state, Arizona.’

  70

  Amanda kicked off her shoes, changed her clothes from the business suit to jeans and a long-sleeved shirt of John’s. She lit a cigarette and drew smoke deeply into her lungs. The nicotine didn’t relax her. The palms of her hands were damp and some kind of nerve worked like a pulse in her throat. The unlit rooms of the cabin cramped her. The night was all tension and expectation, the silence that of a very delicate cease-fire. The dark had a heavy stillness and the air smelled like a pine coffin and the moon was behind cloud and sailing.

  She crushed her cigarette in the fireplace and thought of Gannon strolling quietly round the cabin. She’d called Kelloway and badgered him into contacting the Flagstaff PD to see if members of the local force might provide more backup, and he’d been grudgingly obliging. A mile down the path, two cops armed with rifles and night-scopes watched and waited for unusual sounds and sights in the dark, and another, a deputy called Clarence Griffin, was posted close to the old bridge.

  And now she wondered if she’d done enough or if her idea was flawed, or if she should have listened to Rhees and changed tack and gone to another destination far away. But she’d made this decision and she couldn’t back out even if she’d wanted to, and she didn’t, despite the menacing quiet of the forest and the arrhythmic nature of her pulses.

  She lit another cigarette. She tilted her head back and realized she was listening as she’d never listened before in her life. If a pine needle drifted from a branch she’d hear it. If a grass snake stirred, she’d register the whispered slither of its movements. She was fine-tuned to whatever happened outside the cabin.

  She sat on the floor, her back propped against the wall. She studied the dim shape of Rhees in an armchair on the other side of the room. He’d defiantly refused the wheelchair. He’d turned down the suggestion of going to a motel room and waiting alone. He’d been adamant and unusually stubborn, as if he felt a need to match her determination with his own. If he couldn’t make her change her mind, then he’d stay with her and to hell with his pain.

  He sat in shadow and said nothing, and she wondered if there was reproach in his expression, or fear, but she couldn’t see his face, just the pale outline of his plastered arm and the sling, and the white stripes in his shirt.

  She flicked her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘You OK?’ she asked.

  ‘You’re whispering,’ he said.

  ‘Yeah, I guess I am. You think this is a bad move, don’t you?’

  ‘When it comes to you, Amanda, it’s like being caught up in a whirlwind, and I don’t see much point in criticizing a force of nature.’

  ‘You didn’t have to be here,’ she said. ‘You had choices.’

  ‘The only feasible choice was to stay with you, at the eye of the storm.’

  ‘You haven’t answered my question,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a bad move if it turns out wrong. It’s a good move if it works.’

  ‘Fence-sitting,’ she said.

  Rhees said, ‘I’ll tell you something I’m a touch more certain about: you don’t really want Dansk captured, you want him gunned down by one of your posse out there. This notion you have about handing him over to Kelloway is one you’d like to believe in, but I get the sense you want blood. Tell me I’m wrong.’

  Dansk’s blood. Maybe there was a truth in Rhees’s words she didn’t want to acknowledge. Maybe a hardening had taken place inside her and she wanted him dead. But there were mysteries still, and they confounded her.

  ‘I want him any way I can get him.’

  ‘Dead or alive,’ Rhees said.

  ‘I’d prefer alive,’ she said. ‘The other way, he can’t answer any questions, and I have a few I want answered.’

  She lit another cigarette, masking the flame of the lighter in her hand.

  ‘He kills Willie and Mrs Vialli. Willie, OK, I can understand. He’s a cop poking around asking questions. But Bernadette? Your average suburban widow, for God’s sake … except for one big difference. She happens to have a son in the Protection Program and she’s not happy because he’s been silent too long. And when he does get in touch, it’s in a form she finds iffy. Question: Where the hell is Benny?’

  Rhees said, ‘For God’s sake, leave it to Kelloway, Amanda.’

  She walked the room quietly, window to door and back again. She stopped behind Rhees and laid her hands on his shoulders and a dark thought formed in her brain.

  ‘Benny’s dead,’ she said.

  ‘You can’t know he’s dead, Amanda.’

  ‘Benny’s dead and Dansk’s responsible, and the only goddam reason I can think he’d have for killing her was to keep her from discovering the fate of her son.’

  ‘I don’t know where you’re going with this,’ Rhees said.

  The patterns in her head kept spinning and shifting. She heard herself say, ‘Why wasn’t Bascombe high on Kelloway’s list of people to talk to? Lew was supposed to be digging up information for Willie, after all. So why did Kelloway call Justice first? And Loeb – what did the big Chief learn there? When I phoned him to beg for more bodies, he didn’t mention his talk with Loeb. Why? Because it amounted to nothing? Because Loeb fobbed him off? Why?’

  ‘Leave it,’ Rhees said.

  Leave it. Leave it all to Kelloway. Hail to the Chief. Her thoughts were greyhounds on a slippery track, and she couldn’t follow them and the hare they chased was out of sight.

  Rhees said, ‘There’s the more pressing matter of Dansk. If he’s out there, he isn’t going to walk blindly into a setup, Amanda. He’d know you’ve got cops staking the place out. He may be outnumbered for all we know, but maybe he hasn’t been out-thought. Which scares me more than a little.’

  Amanda heard the sound of Gannon’s quiet footsteps on the porch. She inclined her face, bringing the surface of her cheek against John’s. ‘I wish,’ she said.

  ‘Wish what?’

  ‘Forget it. It doesn’t matter –’

  ‘Wish I wasn’t here? Wish I’d stayed in some nice safe motel room so you didn’t have to take any responsibility for me?’

  ‘Yes. No. I’m not sure.’

  He touched her hand. ‘If there has to be bait, you’d rather it was just you dangling.’

  ‘I want you to be safe, that’s all. I don’t want anybody to hurt you again.’

  ‘Eye of the storm, Amanda. It’s no place to be alone.’

  ‘There’s protection,’ she said. ‘I wouldn’t be alone.’

  ‘Four cops. An army would make me a little less uneasy.’

  She kissed him. He rested his hand against the curve of her hip. She drew the flat of his hand across her stomach, and for a second she thought it was possible to believe nothing had altered. And then the telephone rang, harsh and unexpected. She picked it up on the first ring.

  Dansk said, ‘Nice quiet countryside, Amanda. Nothing moving except a few old raccoons, unless you count me.’

  She didn’t respond. Her hand on the receiver was stiff a
nd suddenly she was cold.

  Dansk said, ‘The woods are lovely dark and deep, et cetera.’

  She still didn’t reply. She realized she was holding her breath.

  Dansk laughed. ‘You figured it all out yet, lady?’

  71

  Dansk left his car hidden under shrubbery a quarter of a mile from the old bridge, and moved through the trees, ducking now and again to avoid low-hanging branches. You had to be careful what was underfoot: roots, rotted trunks, gopher holes. He went cautiously, but with a certain ease. He’d backpacked in rough places, he’d put in hard time on survival courses courtesy of the US Marshals Service, spent weeks alone in remote Appalachian hill country where all you got was a knife and a box of matches and a length of twine and a safety pin, and fend for yourself, buddy. And I did it, he thought. With flying colours. This was a walk on the beach by comparison. Easy-peasy, watch where you step, concentrate. Listen to the language of the pines, what the landscape is saying. He stopped moving, crouched low, studied the darkness.

  In the right-hand pocket of his dark-blue jacket he had a Coke bottle into which he’d siphoned gasoline from the tank of his car. He’d stuffed the neck with wadded Kleenex. He had a second bottle in his left pocket, also filled with gas and similarly fused. In his right hand he carried the hefty wrench he’d bought at the filling-station, the Ruger was in his left. He’d tucked the flashlight in his belt and the mobile phone was in his back pocket with the ringer switched off. The last thing he needed in the stillness of the night was a call from McTell or Pasquale, the sound of buzzing in the pines.

  If they phoned.

  Earlier, he’d tried to make contact with them from his car, but neither had answered. He’d assumed at first that they’d made a rendezvous, and maybe they’d left their cars to take a leak at the side of the road, but ten minutes later he was still getting no answer from either. One possibility was that they’d stopped for pizza or to grab a hamburger. They were always chowing down unhealthy fast-food fodder. Another was that they’d crapped out, decided to quit, go their own way. But they’d never run from a situation before, so why start now? Afraid of the cop presence?

  Or something else.

  Such as what? He wondered if maybe Loeb had contacted them, ordered them out of the picture, part of his dismantling operation. We’re shutting down. We’re hanging a sign in the window: Out of Business.

  They’d both been off-centre recently, McTell more than normally sullen, Pasquale remote. Fuck them. Dansk was only half interested anyway, inclined to dismiss them. It was a shabby world. You can’t trust people, they disappoint. What it comes down to over and over is that there’s only one person to rely on in the end: Anthony Dansk. Your good self.

  He didn’t need McTell and Pasquale. He was weary of dumb killers and their idiot resentments. They were like boulder-filled baggage he had to haul, directing them to do this, go here, go there. They couldn’t think for themselves, they didn’t have enough brains to boil a fucking egg. He was better on his own because he’d always preferred his own company. Maybe he should have worked alone from the beginning, doing the surgery by himself. God knows he was capable of it, and he was comfortable with it.

  He kept moving. It was surprising how little sound you made if you concentrated, if you were aware. The darkness was a warm embrace. Come on in, Anthony, there’s nothing to fear.

  The forest filled his head like sweet music. McTell and Pasquale would’ve been noisy, crushing twigs and cones underfoot, disturbing birds and alarming skunks. They wouldn’t have heard the music.

  Come in, keep coming, Amanda isn’t far away.

  He thought of her in the darkness ahead. Her and Rhees. He pictured her when she’d plucked the eucalyptus leaf outside her house. He saw Rhees’s hand dropping to her ass. Oh that intimacy. He remembered the way he’d grabbed her wrist in the hotel room and forced food to her lips, and the feeling of power that spiked through him and the warmth of her breast.

  He also remembered calling his mother to tell her about a girl named Amanda. His mother seemed very far away from him at this moment, a distance greater than 2,000 and something miles. She seemed locked inside the prism of his memory like a butterfly pinned in a glass display case.

  He stopped suddenly, alert to a slight alteration in the melody in his brain. A change of modality, major to minor. He stood very still under a tree that oozed a resinous odour. The sound was faint but he zoned in on it. He recognized it as the noise made by somebody’s stomach, a churning of intestinal juices.

  The source of the sound was somewhere to his right, 5 or 6 yards, maybe more. You had to make allowances for the way noise carried here. There was barely any light. The moon was shrouded by thick strands of cloud.

  He stepped to his right. He had the sensation of floating just above the ground. He weighed the wrench in his hand, 12 inches of hard steel, something you could believe in. That’s what you needed in life, something to believe in. Like this work Loeb had wanted to close down and walk away from. Close the book. Burn it. Leave the prosecutor alive and look after our own asses.

  Right, rob me of my life, Loeb. No way.

  The man in the trees was about 6 feet tall and wore a dark windcheater and black jeans. He had a holstered weapon on his hip and he was standing very still. Maybe he’d sensed something, aroused by a faint instinct to the fact that there was a change in the atmosphere, only he couldn’t quite pinpoint it.

  A guard, Dansk thought. He wondered if this was the cop who’d driven Amanda and Rhees up here from Phoenix, or if Amanda had managed to stock the woods with reinforcements. It was the kind of move she’d make. You see one cop in the Bronco, but what you don’t see are the others in the pine forest. Just keep coming, Anthony. I have a few tricks left.

  I’m ready for you, lady. Always have been.

  He edged forwards. He felt a weird tingle in the tips of his fingers, as if the steel of the wrench had turned to ice and welded skin to metal, like the effect when you took something out of the deep-freeze.

  The man turned his head a little, away from Dansk. Dansk stepped forward and swung the wrench with all his strength and felt it split the skin and sink into the base of the man’s neck. The man went down at once and Dansk straddled him, noticing that one of the guy’s eyelids quivered uncontrollably as if a circuit of nerve-links had been severed with the blow.

  ‘How fucking many of you?’ Dansk whispered.

  The guy rolled his face to the side. Blood was flowing from the place where neck and shoulder had been punctured, and the eyelid kept flickering open and shut. Dansk brought the wrench down a second time into the side of the guy’s neck.

  Pine needles adhered to the guy’s lips and teeth. ‘Go fuck yourself,’ he said.

  Dansk was centred, he’d found a balance in himself. He hammered the wrench into the guy’s head with controlled force. ‘How many, fella?’

  The guy moaned and said, ‘Three …’

  ‘Three where?’

  ‘Two … a mile up the path.’

  ‘And the third?’

  ‘The cabin.’

  ‘Thanks,’ and Dansk smacked the wrench down again and again, three times, four, he lost count, it didn’t matter. And then it was no longer what you’d call a face, it was bloody and broken and ugly, hard steel had splintered bone and demolished the skull and mouth and blinded the eyes.

  Dansk stopped, listening for the sound of breathing. He heard none. This one was gone. Like that. Life battered out of him. Face, skull, blood pouring from shattered veins. Life is a skinny thread, snip.

  He reached down and touched the guy’s groin, wondering if there was a discharge of piss, but the guy was dry.

  Dansk stood up and his eye followed the overgrown path as far as he could see in the diminished light. He was conscious of the scent of gasoline from one of his pockets, where a bottle had tilted a little and fuel soaked the wadded tissue.

  Two other guards a mile along the path, and one at the cabin. Aman
da and Rhees inside.

  I’m coming, I’m on my way. There’s no stopping me.

  He went between the trees with the blood-wet wrench in his right hand, and he walked as close to the path as he could. It was choked with fern and stunted bushes and scrub. Here and there stray pine saplings had taken root but, overshadowed by the density of older trees, they grew stilted and starved. Survival depended on how much territory you could claim for yourself.

  I claim this forest. This whole goddam thing and everything in it, especially the former prosecutor. This is my dominion. McTell and Pasquale could never have understood this.

  The only thing they knew was thuggery. They didn’t understand the true nature of killing, they thought of it as simple disposal. But you weren’t just ending the life of somebody, no way, you were changing history. A man beaten to death was no simple brutal act, it had consequences you couldn’t begin to foresee – bereaved wife, orphaned children, an empty chair at dinner, a coffin, lawyers checking last wills and testaments, insurance agents scanning policies. Killing was a form of rearranging the patterns of reality, breaking a sheet of stained glass into a sudden amazing kaleidoscope in which you could watch all the coloured flecks revolve in an infinity of configurations. Even on a simple level, the dead guy’s clothes would need to be stacked inside boxes and donated to Goodwill, and somebody else would go round wearing them, unaware of the fact that they’d once belonged to a guy battered to death in a pine forest by a wrench.

  You don’t touch just one life in killing. It was a stone dropped in water: the rings spread and all kinds of people were changed, some in big ways, others in small. Some were heartbroken, others got used Levis from a charity store.

  On your own you can change the world.

  He kept going, his body hunched a little, shoulders down. He wasn’t thinking now. He was all motion and hard focus and silence. He’d stepped up a gear. He was cruising through the trees, sensing treacherous dips in the earth before he reached them. His night vision was acute, vulpine.