A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

It was easier to kill Beth — and Billy and the others. Maybe.’

  The ringing of the telephone on the Colonial writing table startled both of them. Lock stared at the spilt drops of bourbon staining his dark trousers, then he got up jerkily and lurched towards the phone.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Sir, a Mr Turgenev is at the front desk. He says he’s a friend of the family. He’d like to come up.’

  Lock placed his hand over the receiver and relayed the information to Grainger. ‘He wants to come up. Are you?’

  The fear was back. Grainger was rigid in the chair, the disregarded cigar held loosely between his fingers. The eyes moved rapidly, like wideawake dreaming or as if in search of a hiding place. Lock didn’t understand.

  ‘Pete wants to pay his respects, express his sympathy,’ he told Grainger as Turgenev came on the line. ‘Can you go through with it — say for five minutes?’

  Grainger nodded as if in spasm. The hand holding the cigar was once more fending away something unseen. ‘Sure,’ he said throatily. ‘Pete’s a good guy’

  ‘Yes.’ Then, into the receiver: ‘Come on up, Pete. Just don’t stay long, OK? Vaughn’s tired out from the flight.’ He put down the telephone and stared into the white-gold blankness of the net curtains. Grainger gradually relaxed. ‘Another drink?’

  ‘Hell, why not? It isn’t drowning anything but it takes the edge off it.’ He held out his empty glass, his features controlled; reinvested with grief and loss.

  Lock refilled the glass and hesitated over his own before deciding he didn’t need another drink. Not just yet. As he handed Grainger his glass, there was a discreet knock at the door. As Lock moved to open it, it was as if the old man was preparing himself for a bruising encounter or a game of bluff.

  Turgenev’s good looks were arranged in appropriate, sympathetic lines and planes, his eyes saddened. He took Lock’s hand in his own, murmuring:

  ‘I’m so sorry, John.’

  Then at once he moved into the room, his topcoat over his arm, his Russian fur hat in his hand, and gestured to Grainger to remain seated as he placed his hand firmly, empathetically on the old man’s arm. Bending over him, he made Grainger seem shrunken. Against the window’s blankness, it was an affecting tableau, a frieze that belonged on some classical temple.

  Then Turgenev lowered himself into the chair opposite Grainger, hat still in his hand, coat over his arm, his voice low and soothing.

  ‘There’s nothing I can say, Vaughn, I know that … but believe me, I understand your loss. I feel it myself … just like I feel for John —’ A glance towards Lock, hovering by the drinks tray. Turgenev shook his head at the proffered bottle and turned back to Grainger. ‘You’re not to worry about anything, there’ll be time for everything later. Nothing is urgent,’ he impressed.

  Grainger was nodding emptily.

  Lock turned away, but the two men at the table remained in the gilded mirror that confronted him. Turgenev leaning forward across the small space between them, his features heavy with sympathy, Grainger hunched into himself in the chair, staring at the smouldering cigar between his fingers. The frieze had altered, suggesting an ambiguous image; grieving old man being comforted — or old man being instructed on his determined future, as if being given news of his placement in a retirement home after the death of his family. The peculiarity and vivacity of the image struck him, but it was more than momentary.

  In the car — of course. He remembered now. Vaughn had made some scattered references to Grainger Technologies and its future, after Billy. Turgenev was a stockholder in a major way, there was the suggestion of a buyout. Vaughn ran the Grainger Foundation, the charitable corporation based in Phoenix. Would he surrender that to others now, too? In the mirror, he appeared resigned to a blank future. The impression was too powerful, too personal.

  Lock remembered Billy, appearing at the door of his study, sweating, angry and somehow powerless beneath the intoxication.

  Just like his father now. Turgenev’s long legs stretched out in comfort. In power. Power over…

  He glanced back into the mirror, then away from it again. He wanted to think it was paranoia, but the self-mockery would not quite come. It was in a log-jam, trapped between the man who had gotten out of the car opposite his apartment and skulked behind a tree, the tail-car to and from the airport, the man outside now on 16th Street — and Turgenev. Billy’s cowed, abrupt dismissal of him at the study door, Vaughn’s abasement now even though all Turgenev offered was sympathy. Vaughn making it look like threat.

  He disliked the insistent, feral intuitions. They took him back into the field, back to the Company. To the time when he and Billy had met Turgenev, he reminded himself. It had been years since Pete Turgenev and his past had evoked old instincts, habitual suspicion. But now in the mirror, Turgenev seemed to loom over Vaughn Grainger like a great, dark bird.

  What the hell is happening here?

  FOUR

  Extremely Old Professions

  The desert sunlight struck back from the bright shovels, from the chrome on the funeral limousines, from the cars of dignitaries and businessmen and politicians. The glints of hard light caught at his fugitive glances as he tried to avoid the omnipresence of the coffins and the dark hole into which they would, in another moment, be lowered. The vast, cloudless sky was as high as only desert air could be, but it nevertheless pressed down upon the large group of mourners in black clothing. They were seated in rows as for some college class photograph, facing with fortitude the pastor’s closing remarks. It was the easy bravery of remaining alive in the face of the death of others. Cars could be heard from the noisy highway beyond the cemetery.

  A Phoenix morning, already hot. Cactuses like a via dolorosa stretched away towards the mountains. Vaughn Grainger’s weight and the old man’s scents pressed against his side and his senses as Billy’s stricken father rocked slowly, inexorably as a pendulum, on the adjacent chair.

  Vaughn Grainger leaned on him now as he himself had leaned on Beth at that other funeral, when they had been made to sit beside their few relations in falling snow in front of the grave into which their parents were lowered. That was when his head had wanted to burst and he had felt dizzy and sick. All through it, Beth had gripped his hand to still his shaking and tears. When she released it, it was numb and bruised inside his glove from the pressure of her own undemonstrated grief. With a pain always easy to recapture, he remembered a neighbour’s comment that Beth didn ‘t seem upset. A strange child. You ‘d have thought she had more feeling …

  He felt the tears threaten, and heard the echo of the sounds he had wanted to make then, but could not. You don’t know anything1. You don’t know my sister at all!

  He blinked the tears aside. The desert light had begun to prism through them. He pressed away the memories with strong, practised, mental hands.

  Most of the mourners were unknown to himself and Beth.

  The state governor and his dumpy wife. Phoenix celebrities, receivers of Grainger Foundation charity, businessmen, some people from government, the state senator and his retinue, a few faces from Grainger Technologies he had seen at the Virginia house — rows of strangers’ faces, as if they had been hired to make it some funeral of the year, something worth putting in the local society magazine.

  Sunlight flashed semaphore from windscreens climbing Camelback Mountain, and the city’s high-rises watched the cemetery from an assured and lofty distance. He felt displaced here, separated from his own grief, from any sense of connection with the bodies in the two trestled coffins. Three days ago, the contents of one of them had been his dearest knowledge, his best companion. She had been a great distance away when he had seen her in the police mortuary, grateful amid the formaldehyde and clinical steel that she had been shot in the torso and the sheet had continued to conceal the wounds. Even so, memories of bodies had come back, from Afghanistan and other places, his mind eager to substitute a brutal reality for the quiet detachment of the place. The images of the
coffins being loaded aboard Vaughn’s Learjet brought back more formal, uninvolving times, coffins draped with the flag arriving from distant wars with which he had no connection.

  Vaughn had crumbled like an old adobe wall, staring at Billy’s dead face. Just as he now leaned against Lock’s shoulder and arm, a scarecrow no longer defying a wind.

  Beth’s coffin was raised by professionally gentle hands the ropes arranged, then it was lowered into the dry red earth. The old man tried to straighten himself for long enough and Lock scooped earth feverishly and cast it onto the disappearing lid.

  The silver nameplate mocked in reply. Then Billy’s coffin. The old man’s body pumped like a feeble heart, nothing but rushing, thin blood under ricepaper skin. Lock pressed some fragments of earth into Vaughn Grainger’s hand and the crumbs feebly followed Billy into the grave. The pastor murmured like an insect. Then it was done and other murmurs converged on them, the whole place a whispering, breeze-like enclosure of sympathy from which he wanted to flee. Earth began to rattle drily as he turned away, holding Grainger’s elbow; holding him upright, steering him towards the cab-rank of black limousines.

  Lieutenant Faulkner had called, just before the funeral cortege had set out. Some of Beth’s jewellery, he thought. They were sweating the guy who’d bought it — a record going way back to the Flood, he’d talk for sure … Yet there was a lack of expectation in the police officer’s voice. The paintings and the really valuable stuff — and thus the killers — remained as remote as

  … Beth, now they were filling in her grave. As isolated as his own fantasies of being watched and followed. Were these some grief-crazed projection, maybe, or an attempt to escape his present into the weird certainties of his intelligence past? Fantasies that couldn’t survive under a desert sky in a temperature in the thirties.

  He guided Grainger’s boneless, motiveless body through the shower of murmured sympathy and proffered hands, into the rear of the leading limousine, then climbed in beside him.

  Leather squeaked, the air-conditioning purred. He felt his forehead prickle with sweat. His eyes were dry.

  He wanted to be alone and a long way from Phoenix. Way beyond the Superstition Mountains, beyond the desert, out from under that immense sky that even the tinted windows could not keep at a safe distance.

  The limousine pulled out, made a slow, respectful turn on the gravel, and headed for the cemetery gates. Beside him, Billy’s father was sunken in a dumb rage and fear. Maybe it was as if death had bullied its way into his study or bedroom, or appeared beside his pool — threatening and immediate in a moment of relaxation. Was he thinking of his own death? Billy’s? Beth, of course, fulfilled some kind of consort role in Grainger’s universe.

  Billy had been married, his wife should properly be buried beside him; very little more than that. No … perhaps it was the possi bility of his own violent death that Grainger seemed to fear.

  He rubbed his eyes as the car drew out into the traffic of mid-morning. It was as if death was infectious. Vaughn Grainger seemed terrified that death would come for him soon.

  ‘You OK?’ he murmured.

  Grainger shook his head. His skin was ancient and grey, loose about his jowls like a poor disguise.

  ‘Scum killed him.’ Lock winced at Beth’s unimportance. ‘In his own house …’ He saw the brutal side of the old man’s nature, the one that had suited him to Special Forces in ‘Nam.

  The nature that Billy, too, had possessed and revealed in Afghanistan. His gnarled hands strangled something invisible on his dark lap. Yet the hands were defeated now, with no known enemy; without authority. He couldn’t burn their homes, raze their village — whoever had killed his son.

  He heard a stranger’s voice ask: ‘What do I do? What’s left for me, now?’

  Vorontsyev stared down at the dead features caught in the glare of a flashbulb, shunting the enlarged photograph between his ringers. Then he looked up.

  ‘So, he leads nowhere?’ Dmitri shook his head glumly, once more the cheated child. It was becoming his habitual, frozen expression. ‘A male nurse at the Foundation Hospital. We know everything about him, you’ve checked his room at the hostel, you can account for his movements, habits, friends, sexual inclinations — everything except why he should have had an interest in meeting Hussain?’ Dmitri nodded with a shamefaced expression.

  ‘He wasn’t even an addict?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And there’s nothing in his room to suggest he was a pusher?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Vorontsyev sighed, shaking his head. His eyes were still gritty with sleep. Beyond the window, the day seemed reluctant. Frost starred the windows.

  ‘OK — so, finding no heroin in Hussain’s possession or in that flat, we’ve checked every suspect, every lead … to come up with precisely nothing.’ At once, he sympathised with Dmitri, who wriggled like a boy on his chair. Vorontsyev could not excoriate failure more than Dmitri himself was doing. Mea culpa. ‘Look, I’m not blaming anyone,’ he insisted. ‘Except whichever bastard on the take tipped someone off in time for them to set the explosives! But not you, and not Lubin, who spotted it was deliberate.’ Lubin grinned, rubbing his hand through his thick hair, then at once assuming a lugubrious expression which he evidently felt suited the discussion. ‘So — what do we do? It can’t actually be terrorists, can it, Lubin? I mean, some group from outside? Raising funds for weapons and bombs by smuggling heroin?’

  ‘It’s one of the usual sources of income, sir — do you think so?’

  ‘No. The only terrorists around here are the Yankees and the Russian entrepreneurs.’ He smiled with a scowling, cynical relief.

  ‘It’s too neat. Terrorists wouldn’t have warned us off quite so obviously — would they?’ Lubin shook his head. ‘Which means this is a properly run business.’

  ‘Part of something bigger?’

  Vorontsyev shrugged. The sun was climbing tiredly above the car park’s close horizon.

  ‘I hope not. But terrorists — no. They’re out of the picture.

  They’d not have resisted blowing up a gas well or a length of pipeline, just to keep their hand in. Who would they be, anyway — Arctic Reindeer Freedom Fighters? This country’s full of shit, but they’re crooks, mafiosi, gangsters, not political. Who cares about politics?’

  ‘We — we have to go back to the hospital, then,’ Dmitri said.

  ‘Grill some of the poor bastards in the Addiction Unit ‘

  ‘- or the knocking shop. Everyone’s favourite brothel?’

  Vorontsyev offered in response. ‘We had it under surveillance, before Hussain’s little trip got us all excited. Worth putting a team back on it?’ He tried, too late, to suppress a yawn. ‘Not a comment,’ he added. Sleeping was often impossible in the neat flat to which hardly anyone ever came. When the music palled and the books failed to interest and his thoughts were as sombre as the face that reflected back from the uncurtained windows there was nothing to like, nothing to expect.

  ‘We weren’t acting on any hard information.’

  ‘I know that.’ He got up and crossed his office to the coffee percolator. Black-market coffee. He filled their cups, then his own. Coffee might aid the sense of conspiracy that he needed almost as much as Dmitri did.

  He was angry. Very angry.

  ‘We thought we had something four months ago, when those two addicts overdosed on heroin smuggled into them — thai dribbled away down the drain. We thought the knocking shop could be a distribution centre, since it caters for the R & R requirements of the gasfields, and the outworkers were the means of getting the stuff into Novyy Urengoy — that, too, drained away into the permafrost.’ He leaned towards them over his littered desk, his knuckled hands resting on two untidy heaps of files and reports. Abruptly, he sat down. Lit a cigarette.

  Relieved, Dmitri and Lubin scrabbled for cigarettes. The fug of collusion, of planning their way through frustration, filled the office.

  ‘So? Which is
it? The cleaners, orderlies, nurses at the Addiction Unit — or the girls and their clients at the best whorehouse in town?’ He blew smoke expansively at the ceiling.

  Lubin beamed. Welcomed aboard, unofficially promoted into confidentiality — trust.

  ‘We could try a raid on the brothel — before word of what we are up to gets-‘ Dmitri hesitated, rubbing his round face with both hands.

  ‘It’s all right. We need to remind ourselves — ‘ He looked darkly at Lubin. ‘- they have a source inside this building, maybe a dozen people on their hook. Fact of life.’ He drew on the cigarette.

  Marlboro. Cowboys smoked them. He coughed. He smoked too many of them, through the sleepless nights, the impotent days. ‘OK. We’ll raid the place tonight. After all, we’ve looked everywhere eJse for the bloody heroin — it can’t all have been cut, — sold, injected already, in two days. So maybe it’s there …’ He opened the first file that came to hand, then a second, a third. Names, dates, suspicions … hospital orderlies, cleaners, working girls, gasfield workers coming in for R &Ś R; to get drunk, pay for sex, fight in the streets … smuggle heroin back to the gasfield, or into town when they came back from the God-forsaken places where they’d originated.

  He dismissed the files with a gesture.

  ‘What about the TacTeam, sir?’ Lubin asked. ‘Aren’t they on our side?’

  ‘No. They just blame us for getting one of their boys killed.

  And demand we find whoever did it. But as to helping —? Forget it.’

  ‘So we’re on our own?’ Dmitri seemed pleased at his realisation.

  The sun was losing its blood colour now, still low over the car park.

  ‘Looks like it. What was that male nurse doing there? He had to know what was expected. He wasn’t related to the flat’s tenant, didn’t know him as far as we can discover. Drugs and a hospital — better cover than a brothel.’

  ‘But it’s more or less run, as well as funded, by the Yankees.

  More dangerous to use that than the knocking shop,’ Dmitri offered.