by Switch (v5)
The victor spat into the unconscious man’s face and retreated to a corner where the tattered remains of a blue sleeping bag lay. No one else challenged him as he curled up on the bag and closed his eyes.
Sam glanced at Zack. His shoulders were stiff, but there was no sign of fear. Sam remembered how he had felt when he was sure his family was dead, how he was so certain there was nothing in this world that could scare him because he had nothing left to lose. Kalli’s death had sent Zack to that place, and Sam sensed he could be even more dangerous than the desperate people around them.
The hobbit shrugged as he turned away from the unconscious man.
‘It’s the same out there.’ He pointed indiscriminately across the river. ‘Only in that world, you don’t see it coming.’
Davey stood by the burning barrel, his upper body trembling as he muttered to himself. When Sam stepped into the circle of light, Davey glanced up and then quickly away.
‘Did he send you back?’ Davey asked.
‘Who?’
‘The one who wanted me to burn?’
Sam shook his head. ‘He thinks you’re dead. You’re safe.’
‘Never safe. Never.’ Davey’s eyes suddenly went wide with fear. ‘Was it the father?’
‘The father?’
Davey nodded rapidly. ‘The father of the boy. He cried all the time. I could hear him behind me. Crying. They asked him to leave once, but he came back. I could feel his eyes on me, burning into me. I still have the marks.’
Davey spun around and lifted his hair to show Sam his neck. Apart from a layer of dirt, it was unscarred.
‘He wants me to burn,’ Davey continued, ‘burn in hell.’
‘I don’t know who wanted to hurt you, Davey,’ Sam said. ‘That’s why I need your help.’
Davey shook his head vigorously and spittle flew from his mouth. ‘You’re a liar! You were a god, but now you’re a goddamn liar.’
‘I was never a god, Davey,’ Sam snapped. ‘I was a punk kid with a big ego that hadn’t been crushed to fucking pulp yet. High school is a launch pad for dreamers, but in the real world, most of us crash and burn before we get off the ground. That’s not worth worshipping.’
Sam bit back his anger and reached under his vest to produce the yearbook. He held it out, the silver and gold foil letters catching the firelight.
Davey licked his lips nervously before striding forward and grabbing the book. He retreated to his place beside the blazing barrel and carefully turned the pages. His fingers caressed the photos inside.
‘My signatures are gone,’ Davey said.
‘Sorry, do you have others?’
‘Yeah. Lots.’
Sam stepped closer. ‘Are the other signatures on programmes, Davey?’
‘Sure.’ Davey’s voice lifted. ‘You remember those cast parties? Man, did they get wild. Everybody singing Rocky Horror Picture Show and doing the Worm at the end of “Time Warp”? I felt up my first boob at one of those. Had a boner for a week.’
Sam’s own memories flickered through his brain: a legion of long-forgotten faces.
Zack stepped into the circle of light. ‘Do you still have them? The programmes.’
Davey’s smile faded. ‘Who’s this?’
‘A friend,’ Sam said. ‘He’s helping me find my family.’
‘Your family?’
‘The man who wanted to burn you has kidnapped them. We think he’s someone we knew.’
‘From school?’
‘Someone in your lighting crew, maybe,’ Zack interjected.
Davey narrowed his eyes.
‘We just need to see the programmes, Davey?’
Sam pressed. ‘Can you help us?’
‘Not tonight,’ Davey said. ‘I put them in a safe place after . . .’ He flicked his eyes at Sam.
‘Could we go there?’ Zack asked. ‘To your safe place.’
Davey shook his head. ‘Nobody goes there, man. Nobody but me. It’s protected.’
‘We can wait here for you,’ Sam said. ‘It’s important.’
Davey shook his head again. ‘Come back tomorrow. I’ll have them then.’ He returned to his yearbook.
Sam sighed and held up his hands in surrender. ‘OK, Davey, we’ll do that, but don’t let me down.’
‘I never did, Sam,’ Davey said quietly. ‘I never ever did.’
76
Detective Preston looked around the ransacked mall, tipped back his hat with the rim of a paper coffee cup, and whistled.
‘They hit every store.’ Hogan stretched out his arms and walked to the middle of the deserted concourse. ‘Every single one.’
‘It must have taken some crew to pull it off.’
‘An organized crew and one familiar security guard.’
‘Not the actor?’
Hogan nodded. ‘We have an eye witness. White locked the night guards in a room, disabled the alarms and cameras, and let the crew inside.’
‘That crazy son of a bitch,’ Preston muttered. ‘Did he hurt the guards?’
‘Nope. In fact, he made sure they were tucked out of harm’s way. Our witness is White’s regular partner. He said White was very calm about it, very reassuring that everything would be OK if he just stayed quiet.’
Preston scratched his nose. ‘This guy doesn’t make sense. He’s starting to piss me off. How do you kill one guy for a bleepin’ cellphone, but then be all Mr Friendly when you’re robbing an entire mall? How many stores are in here? Eighty? A hundred? The haul’s worth millions.’
‘If you know how to fence it,’ Hogan interjected. ‘And how would a security guard know that? I talked to robbery and they’re saying this stuff was probably loaded directly on to a ship to Russia. There’s a good market for American goods over there.’
‘And the only face we have—’
‘Is Mr White.’
Preston narrowed his eyes. ‘So what are you thinking, partner?’
‘Maybe there really is something to his story about his family being kidnapped.’
‘And somebody is making him do this crazy shit?’
‘It makes more sense than the alternative,’ Hogan said. ‘I can’t buy that White woke up one morning and decided to go on a random killing spree, and then become a criminal mastermind.’
Preston sighed. ‘Yeah, actors aren’t that clever.’
Hogan grinned. ‘Exactly. And if he wanted to get away with it, he wouldn’t be leaving all these witnesses.’
‘Which means whoever is really behind it—’
‘Can’t leave White alive,’ Hogan finished.
77
Sam sat on the bed, eyes dry and sore, while Zack kept watch out of the window on the one thing he had failed to deliver to the kidnapper: $1,000,000.
They had both stripped to their boxers in contemplation of sleep, but it hadn’t come. Zack had paced the room before taking up his station at the window, while Sam continued to replay his conversation with Davey, wondering if he should have pushed harder for the programmes.
Their only lead rested in Davey’s hands and every minute till daybreak seemed like an eternity.
Sam glanced over at Zack. He looked like a burned scarecrow, his boxers barely clinging to narrow, bony hips. For the first time, Sam noticed several misshapen patches of skin around his lower back. They were smooth like burn scars but ghostly white against his black skin, as though he had tried to wash himself in bleach.
Zack released a heavy sigh and turned to stretch his limbs. His back cracked audibly as he reached for the ceiling before bending at the waist to touch his toes. His movements exposed more splashes of white skin across his stomach and running down his legs.
‘It’s a condition called vitiligo,’ Zack explained. ‘It destroys the pigment of the skin.’
‘Sorry,’ Sam said quickly. ‘I didn’t mean to stare.’
Zack stroked his stomach. ‘I used to fret over it: applying body make-up every day and praying that it wouldn’t spread to a more visible area.�
�� He sighed again. ‘In India they call it white leprosy – charming, huh?’ Zack paused for effect. ‘Don’t worry, it’s not catching. Besides, you’re so damn pale, you wouldn’t know you had it.’
Sam attempted a smile, but it fell flat. His mind was preoccupied with other, more troubling, thoughts.
‘I stopped using the make-up,’ Zack continued softly. ‘Jasmine always told me it wasn’t important, that skin was skin. It took this . . .’ his voice broke ‘. . . this fucking tragedy to make me see how right she was.’
An uncomfortable silence filled the room before Sam changed the subject. ‘Do you trust Davey?’
Zack wiped at his eyes. ‘I don’t know him well enough. Why?’
‘I’ve been sitting here thinking that he has no good reason to trust me any more. He has his yearbook back, so why let me near his programmes?’
‘You’re right. If something was that precious to me and you set it alight, I wouldn’t let you near it again.’
Sam leapt to his feet. ‘Get dressed. We have to find him before he disappears.’
78
In the car, Detective Preston finished his coffee and crushed the paper cup in his hand before dropping it at his feet.
Hogan made a disapproving clucking noise with his tongue.
Preston ignored him. ‘Did you hear anything back on that camera we recovered?’
‘Not much,’ Hogan said. ‘Like I suspected, there wasn’t a hard drive inside to store images. It was just a drone sending its data to either a relay station or a nearby computer. Some of the components were unusual, though, so our guys are searching to see where it was manufactured. They tell me it’s definitely not American.’
‘Is anything electronic made in America these days?’ Preston asked.
Hogan shrugged. ‘I doubt it. I hear those darn Texans hate anything small, and it’s tough to be competitive when your MP3 players are the size of toasters.’
‘We don’t have the hands for it.’ Preston held up a pair of massive hands, each finger the size of a plump ballpark frank.
Before Hogan could make a quip, the radio squawked. ‘Hey, cowboy. Got a message for you.’
Preston snapped up the handset. ‘Let me guess, darlin’. You’ve made buttermilk pancakes for breakfast and you need to know if I’m on my way.’
Darlene’s cackle scared the static off the airwaves. ‘You wish, cowboy. No, I’ve got a big, strong, pretty-as-chocolate-silk-pie officer here who has info on your BOLO.’
‘Jeep?’ Hogan asked.
‘On the Jeep, Darlene?’ Preston asked into the handset.
‘Uh-uh. Mercedes. He talked to the driver.’
Hogan pressed his foot on the accelerator and made a sharp left-hand turn.
‘Keep him there, darlin’. We’re comin’ in for a chat.’
79
When Zack and Sam arrived under the Burnside Bridge, the place looked deserted except for two skinny dogs fighting over a yellow bone. The bone didn’t look worth the fight, but maybe, Sam thought, he had just never been that desperate.
In the light of day, the village was nothing more than a dirt path littered with empty cardboard boxes and discarded scraps of wood. A damp wind fuelled by dark clouds blew across the river.
Sam peered into the ironworks, scanning for any stragglers.
‘Over there.’ Zack pointed to a lump on the ground near a smouldering trash barrel.
Sam turned to see the wind had lifted the edge of a black trash bag to expose a pair of brown leather shoes. The legs sticking out of the shoes were wrapped in newspaper socks beneath a pair of baggy, mud-coloured suit pants.
Sam approached and lightly kicked the sole of one shoe. ‘Hey! You awake?’
An indecipherable grumble was the reply.
Sam kicked the shoe again, and then sprang backwards as the owner spun with unexpected speed, his hand clutching a broken bottle. The ragged edge of glass missed Sam’s legs by less than an inch.
Sam backed away. ‘We don’t want any trouble. We just need to know where everybody went.’
The man rose to his feet, his face forming a fierce scowl. His visage was made even more menacing by a ragged scar that ran from forehead to chin, crossing one eye. The empty socket locked on to Sam’s face, daring him to look away.
‘What time?’ The man’s voice was the snap of a rabid dog.
‘Just gone eight,’ Sam said.
‘Breakfast.’
The man began to walk away, dropping the broken bottle as he went. He didn’t seem to care that it shattered on the same ground where he might find himself sleeping that night.
Sam called after him, ‘Where’s breakfast?’
The man reached the stairs that led to the bridge deck. He turned slowly, spat on the ground and jabbed his thumb at the river. ‘Westside,’ he growled.
Sam looked over at Zack. ‘You get the car. I’ll follow Grumpy on foot.’
Sam followed Grumpy across the bridge. Pedestrians and cyclists gave the homeless man a wide berth as he snarled at every passer-by.
On the west side of the river, he continued up Burnside Street until he came to Third Avenue, and then turned north. Sam glanced behind him, saw the Mercedes crossing the bridge a block behind, and waved to get Zack’s attention before continuing on to Third.
The border between Chinatown and Old Town was packed with over a hundred homeless waiting in line for a free pancake breakfast on one side of the street and a sack lunch prepared by the Union Gospel Mission on the other.
As he waited for Zack, Sam watched Grumpy growl his way to the front of the line and get served a plate of pancakes.
When Zack pulled up, Sam slid into the passenger seat.
‘You spot him?’ Zack asked.
Sam shook his head. ‘He’s not in the line-up for pancakes, but there’s a huge crowd filtering through the Mission. Let’s wait.’
It only took ten minutes before Davey appeared at the Mission door. The prized yearbook was under his arm and he was so busy digging through the contents of his brown-bag lunch he didn’t look at the street.
Zack glanced at Sam. ‘Now what?’
‘He doesn’t have his backpack,’ Sam noted. ‘He wouldn’t leave it alone for long.’ He glanced around at the jostling mob. ‘We’ll follow in the car until we can park. Then continue on foot.’
Zack drove slowly out of the congestion of desperate, unwashed bodies.
80
Davey led them further north before cutting back towards the river. This forced Sam and Zack to leave the car on the edge of Chinatown. Davey turned north again as he passed Steel Bridge and headed for Broadway.
Zack wrapped his suit jacket around himself to cut the chilly, morning breeze. ‘He seems to be enjoying himself.’
‘I guess for him this is a good day,’ Sam said. ‘He’s got food in his belly, his yearbook back and it’s not rain—’ Sam stopped as the first drops of rain began to fall.
‘It’s just a sprinkle,’ Zack said hopefully.
The clouds thundered and split open at Zack’s words and large droplets began to fall.
Sam picked up the pace. ‘We can’t lose him. Come on.’
Davey sloshed through the rain at a half jog, oblivious to the company on his tail. Just before Broadway Bridge, he turned west across the park and headed in the direction of the rail yard. Zack and Sam kept close behind, the rain masking their footsteps.
Just before Davey reached an imposing concrete wall that marked the rear boundary of the Amtrak yards, Sam pulled Zack behind a small hillock and crouched down.
‘What are you doing?’ Zack’s teeth began to chatter.
‘It’s fenced on either side,’ Sam pointed out. ‘There’s nowhere to go.’
Davey stopped at the wall, bent over to catch his breath, and looked around. Sam kept perfectly still, letting the rain dissolve his silhouette.
After a moment, Davey moved to the edge of the wall and pushed against the wire fence. The fence folded under
his touch, revealing a slim gap.
Davey checked behind him once more, and then slipped through.
‘Let’s go.’ Sam darted across the last few yards of open ground.
81
Detective Preston stood with his back to the room and watched the sudden downpour. From the thirteenth floor of the Justice Center, 2,314 miles from the wide-open spaces where he grew up, the city before him was drained of all colour.
Behind him, Officer Colin Portsmith nervously drew condensation circles on the Formica tabletop with his paper coffee cup.
‘You saw the Merc yesterday morning?’ Preston repeated slowly.
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And didn’t report it?’
‘I . . . I didn’t realize at the time it could be the same vehicle you were looking for. The BOLO didn’t list a licence plate and there are a ton of Mercs out there. But my partner read the reissued alert this morning and remembered the damage on the car. She thought . . . you know, that maybe . . . I, um—’
‘You talked to the driver?’ Hogan interrupted. He sat in a chair directly across from the young officer.
Colin nodded sheepishly. ‘He looked like a businessman who’d received some bad news and went on a bender. I thought he was harmless and could use a break. I want to make it clear that my partner didn’t agree with my call.’
Preston laughed aloud and turned from the window. He looked down at the officer fondly, appreciating his loyalty. The good-looking ones were usually the worst, he had found. They were so used to receiving special treatment that they lacked an essential core of humility. This one’s parents had raised him right.
‘You don’t need to cover your partner’s ass, kid. The description we had was so generic we knew it was a long shot.’