A Wild Justice

by Craig Thomas

  Eventually, he walked off the aircraft, smiling conventionally at the conventional smile of the stewardess, the sports bag in his left hand, his right hand aware that he was unarmed. Would they guess he had come to Phoenix? How could they?

  The first cop seemed unaware of him, talking to a man in a loud check jacket and a straw hat. A family passed him, the man and woman bulbous in shell suits, children and suitcases towed behind them. He had no luggage to collect and headed for the cab rank, walking towards the blinding desert sunlight as if towards a searchlight. Another indifferent cop. He felt the sweat as a thin, damp line along his collar and forehead. Then he was out into the hard sunlight, his eyes squeezed narrow against its glare. The heat of the morning was already intense. He felt exposed in his grey suit and tie amid the splashes of bright shirts and colourful shorts and print frocks. He bent hurriedly into the driver’s window of the first cab and murmured:

  ‘Mountain Park Hospital, fast as you can make it.’ The driver’s shrug invited him into the rear of the cab. He looked around him. No one seemed interested in him, no one at all.

  He sat back in the plastic bench seat, the sports bag beside him, hot from his moments in the sun. He rubbed his unshaven face, feeling as trapped in his clothing as he did in the interior of the battered Chrysler. The cab driver’s Latino eyes studied him indifferently in the mirror. Lock turned his head and looked back along McDowell, then studied the cars that turned after the cab onto 7th Avenue. It didn’t seem as if anyone was tailing them, but he was suddenly too weary to be certain.

  The hospital gleamed like polished desert rock in the morning sun. He paid the driver, then glanced at the few cars that had turned into the driveway behind the cab. None of them seemed suspicious, no one stayed behind a tinted windscreen. He entered the air-conditioned foyer gratefully, his steps increasingly leaden as he headed for the Grainger Wing. As if he had come, unarmed, to challenge a lord in his castle, not to interrogate one old man concerning his twenty-year criminality. Lock took the lift to the top floor.

  A panoramic window looking over the park towards the New River mountains. Cactus and the flash of a hummingbird against the glass, come to sip at the provided liquor containers. He realised that the duty nurse recognized him.

  ‘Mr Grainger is very much better, Mr Lock,’ she announced.

  ‘We thought you’d returned to Washington?’

  ‘Uh, yes. But I—’ He shrugged. ‘There isn’t anyone else, no other family. I felt ‘

  ‘We understand, Mr Lock. I’m sure Mr Grainger will appreciate your visit.’ She got up. ‘I’ll just see if he’s awake, and prepare him.’

  She entered Vaughn’s room, leaving Lock alone in the corridor.

  A moment later she returned, beckoning him through the door.

  ‘I’ll leave you two alone together, Mr Lock. Try not to tire him.’ Lock nodded and the door closed behind him.

  He was immediately aware of his familiarity to the nurse, aware of his name and the photograph on CNN. The woman would be on the day shift, she would have had time to watch the news. He shivered. Vaughn Grainger, he realised as he became accustomed to the shadowy, blinded room, was watching him with fierce eyes. He moved slowly to the bed.

  ‘Uh — hi, Vaughn. How are you?’ he murmured awkwardly.

  Involuntarily, he glanced at the heart monitor, which bleeped softly, regularly, and at the tubes that connected the old man to the monitors and the medication. ‘Vaughn—?’ The old man was staring at him, but the fierceness in his eyes was lifeless, as if he had died or been paralysed in a moment of rage.

  Grainger raised his hand and indicated a chair beside the bed.

  Lock offered to take his hand, but it was withdrawn to the languor of the smooth white sheets. He sat down. The room seemed hot despite the purr of the air-conditioning. A bird sang outside the window.

  “I — had to come back,’ Lock announced, rubbing at his damp, prickling forehead.

  ‘Why?’

  Lock tried to reassure himself that he possessed sufficient time.

  He had glanced almost subliminally at the newspaper headlines as he passed the airport newsstand. He hadn’t made the front page. The Washington PD would not necessarily assume he’d come back here. Rather the opposite. There was time ‘Vaughn’

  He cleared his throat, leaning towards the old man’s sculpted, arrogant features propped against the plump white pillows; an invalid pope or king. ‘Vaughn, I know some things,’ he began. ‘I’ve been told some things. Reasons why Billy and Beth were killed …’ His words failed against the old man’s pleading and contempt. Lock was staring at two faces, Vaughn in the past and present, both there in the room.

  ‘What things?’ It was the Vaughn he had always known who triumphed, as if there was no right on earth that allowed anyone to question his actions. ‘What’s gotten into you, John?’

  It was a trick. The heart monitor bumped its green, charted line more quickly and more irregularly across the screen and he could hear Vaughn’s stertorous breathing. It was nothing but an old man acting a part too young for him; unsustainable illusion.

  ‘Vaughn,’ he pressed more confidently, ‘you know what things. Things about Tran, about you and ‘Nam … Billy, too.

  Those things ‘

  The liver-spotted right hand gripped his wrist like the talon of a hunting bird. Vaughn’s eyes blazed.

  ‘What in hell made you ask? Why in hell did you want to know?’

  He shook the old man’s grip away.

  ‘They killed my sister!’ It was an enraged whisper. Vaughn seemed more distant, shrunken, his face that of a stranger. ‘You think I could forget that? You think it’s something to forget?’

  Grainger’s head moved from side to side amid the pillows in what might have been distress rather than denial. His hand now patted the bed impotently. The heart monitor was like a radio picking up a distant and elusive signal. Then Grainger gestured at his mouth, then at the oxygen mask hanging over the head of the bed. Lock passed it to him. The room seemed filled with greedy sucking noises … which gradually calmed. Eventually, he removed the mask. The monitor had settled like his chest into regularity. Another trick? At any moment, just by calling or pressing his bell, Grainger could end the conversation. He would have to leave.

  The old man’s eyes glittered wetly.

  ‘You shouldn’t have looked, John-Boy. You shouldn’t have turned over the stones. There’s only ugliness there.’ His breathing was loud and tired.

  ‘I had to — don’t you understand?’ Lock pleaded in his turn.

  Grainger nodded reluctantly.

  ‘Yes — but it’s done you no good, John … You can’t do anything. Nothing. This is a grown-ups’ game, not an adventure.

  You won’t get called into the house for peanut butter and a bath just as the game gets interestjng, John.’ His hand was patting Lock’s now. ‘They won’t let you.’

  ‘Vaughn, my bridges have all been burned behind me. They saw to it. A dead girl in my apartment, the cops tipped off. I know how they play!’

  The revelation surprised Grainger. His skin became more pallid.

  The monitor bumped like the index of a failing economy.

  ‘You can’t do anything.’

  There’s nothing else I want to do,’ Lock replied.

  Grainger studied his features as he might have done that of some surgeon or priest newly arrived at his bedside, offering life and hope. To Lock, the regularity of the heart monitor was now clocklike, marking time he could not afford.

  ‘They’ll kill you, John. I can’t let that happen … not after everything.’ He was suddenly weeping uncontrollably, silently, the tears running down the pale, leathery old skin of his cheeks, darkening the collar of his pyjama jacket. ‘John-Boy, I just can’t tell you — I You can’t do anything except get yourself killed, and I can’t let you do that.’

  Silence, then, into which the hum of machines entered quietly. Then the noises of the distant hospital r
outine. Vaughn’s breathing, his own, the soft blipping of the heart monitor.

  Eventually, he said gently: ‘You have to tell me, Vaughn. You just have to.’

  Another silence, before: ‘How much do you know?’

  ‘I know about you and Tran — I know how you turned the company around in the ‘70s. With heroin.’ He glanced at the monitor, but there was no quickening of its trace. ‘I don’t know if Billy was involved way back — ‘ Grainger shook his head.

  ‘He wasn’t,’ he growled defiantly. Lock nodded, attempting a smile.

  ‘I know how you brought the drugs in. I know why you did it. A guy called Kauffman in the CIA-‘ It was evident that Grainger recognized the name, ‘-he told me all he knew, which was most of it.’

  Each phrase, each nugget of accusation, prompted a small jerk of Grainger’s head. There was pain in his eyes, together with defiance. Rather than guilt, there was the sense of a gambler who had lost; no self-revulsion, just a flinty admission that the game was over and he had been beaten. Guilt was for the little guys, the no-accounts. The realisation hardened Lock and enabled him to say curtly:

  ‘But it went on, changed into a new inning, right? The game wasn’t over when you turned the company around, when you were riding high. Why, Vaughn? Was it too hard or too easy to stop?’

  Grainger’s gnarled hands closed into fists on the sheet. The accusations demeaned him. Lock was contemptuous of him, morally superior. Grainger’s features sharpened, became cold as in death.

  ‘You’ll never know,’ he replied. ‘Will you, John-Boy? You’ll never know.’ The dismissive chuckle rattled in his throat. The heart monitor was steady as if by an effort of will.

  ‘One thing I do know, Vaughn — and it’s a fact — Pete Turgenev’s the main man. Not you.’

  It was true, then. The blanched skin, the pinpricks of pink on the cheekbones, the glare in his eyes — and the hands, working with the cotton of the sheet as if it was something that writhed in his grip and fought him.

  Lock said: ‘It’s a long time since you headed the whole thing up — isn’t it, Vaughn? Neither you nor Billy has been in control. Pete’s the studio boss — uh?’

  Grainger did not reply. His glittering, pale eyes moved furiously, seeking escape, justification, perhaps even continued silence. Lock was aware of the warm room, the heat of tension that seemed to enclose them, the bed, the dazzling frame given to the blinds by the desert morning outside the steady, almost monotonous blips of the heart monitor, charting Grainger’s life like a seabed.

  ‘What happened, Vaughn?’ Lock asked eventually, in a soothing voice, trying a change of mood. At once, the old man’s eyes softened, became calmer and less focused. ‘When did it all start going wrong?’

  Another silence, the heart monitor like a ticking watch marking Lock’s sense of time wasted, making his body jump with nerves.

  ‘A long time ago,’ the old man offered to the ceiling, as if Lock was a priest from a faith still disavowed. ‘Somehow Turgenev knew about Vietnam … the guy was KGB, wasn’t he? He’d know those things, or make it his business to find out. He came with an offer — to Billy. Billy almost threw him out. I-‘ The voice faltered. ‘I had to — to put Billy straight on a few things …’

  The hands worked at the cotton sheet again, this time in furious smoothing motions. Lock sensed Billy’s outrage, and was thankful for it. ‘Billy liked being a mw/ft-miHionaire,’ Vaughn Grainger offered to the room by way of justification.

  ‘Heroin smuggled via Siberia, right?’

  ‘Right. We went ahead. We wanted to get into Siberia, open it up. It gave us the funds when the banks weren’t lending to expand. Heroin was a loan, no more than a wise investment.

  ‘Tran and other people had the network, from back then. We just activated it.’ Then, contemptuously: ‘The CIA used heroin as another currency — we did the same, John-Boy!’ There was no special pleading in the rage, merely an informative tone. This is the way the world dances, boy, and you’d better get used to it. Perhaps he’d told Billy in the same manner?

  ‘I understand,’ he soothed.

  There was a bright gleam of disdain in Grainger’s stare.

  ‘Not you, John-Boy — not you. You think the world works another way. It doesn’t.’

  ‘What happened that made Billy’s death necessary?’

  Grainger swallowed; an ugly, guttural noise. Then he said:

  ‘Turgenev wanted to take over — just like that. He had a plan all ready to present to us here in Phoenix. Last week, was it …?’ The old man seemed terrified at the vagueness of memory rather than at the recalled events.

  ‘Yes, last week,’ Lock confirmed, feeling nauseous.

  ‘Billy was stalling him, trying to bring in big new investors, interest the banks in rescheduling the company debt … Turgenev knew he had the arm on us, he knew we couldn’t stand up to his dummy corporation trying to buy us out — or we’d all go down the tubes and into jail for a thousand years apiece!’

  The hands were strangling something on the bed again, the head was raised slightly from the pillows, the neck muscles ropelike, the eyes staring.

  Lock snapped: ‘So you knew he must have killed Beth and Billy, right from the beginning!’

  ‘I swear to God, no!’ His head turned to stare at Lock, appalled that he could have been so misjudged, so blackened. ‘I knew hardly anything, almost nothing at all … Billy explained here, last week, the week before. I was involved only with the Foundation-‘ It sounded so much like plea-bargaining that Lock was revolted by it. ‘It was only then I found out that Turgenev and some other people, the Russian mafia over here, in our country, wanted to move in and move us out. I swear to you, John, I didn’t know …’ What had begun as a protestation became, even as he spoke, a recognition of weakness and self contempt. He lay back on the pillow, releasing Lock’s hand, and stared defiantly at the ceiling, where the blind’s shadow was thrown like the white bars of a cage imprisoning darkness. Then he announced: ‘The asshole government, the banks, the big corporations — no one realises the Russian mafia’s here, organised, in big numbers. They’ll wake up to it too late to do anything about it.’

  ‘You knew he’d killed them, though?’ Lock prompted, their breathing audible in the room, almost masking the heart monitor as it returned to calm. It hurried once more as the question was asked.

  Grainger shook his head. ‘I didn’t know. Maybe I–I didn’t believe it. Maybe I underestimated … I didn’t know, not right off.’

  ‘But eventually …?’

  ‘No one wanted Beth killed, John.’

  Turgenev did.’

  ‘His goons killed her.’

  ‘His orders. You know that, Vaughn.’

  After a long time: ‘I know it.’

  Lock sat back in his chair, drained. The old man seemed calm, empty, waiting to die rather than recover. There was nothing more he could learn — and there was nothing more he could do, or wished to do, for Vaughn Grainger. The room was intolerably warm, as if the air-conditioning had failed. It was finished now — or begun. Perhaps that was the reality. Had he wanted Grainger to deny everything, turn him around so that he could go back to Washington and to being who he had been until last week? He shook his head. No, he hadn’t wanted that.

  But hadn’t expected this emptiness either, this vacuum inside himself.

  Grainger startled him. Still staring at the narrow ribs of sunlight thrown on the ceiling, he said:

  ‘You take care, John. You take good care.’

  There was a sense of concern and even pride in the voice.

  Perhaps, most weirdly, a sense of recognition, as if they were united now, the same kind of people.

  He stood up. Accepting everything else, he could not permit the chasm between himself and Grainger to be bridged. He turned away, hearing the old man murmur:

  ‘Take care, John. Good luck’

  Then he was through the door and the nurse looked up in a moment of concern, then a
longer instant of bright optimism.

  ‘You didn’t tire him too much?’ she chided.

  ‘What-? Oh, no. Thank you, sister. I have something to do now, you’ll excuse me?’

  ‘He shouldn’t be using you to run business errands for him, Mr Lock. The doctors prescribed complete rest ‘

  He turned on her angrily. ‘I think he’s easy in his mind, nurse.

  I really do!’

  He turned away from her and down the corridor, her little puffs of offended professionalism sounding like the noises of a small engine. He waited for the lift without glancing back at her, then descended to the foyer of the Grainger Wing. Its emblem, name, motto, all offended; paint on a skull, white on a whore.

  Conscience money. He strode towards the entrance, the sports bag swinging at his side like a weapon. The doors sighed back, allowing him into the heat and light.

  He stood, half-blinded, on the marble steps, his ringers dabbling in his breast pocket for his sunglasses. He saw no police vehicles, no one watching him, as his eyes adjusted to the glare.

  As he slipped on the glasses, there was a faint noise near his head like an angered insect. Nothing else for an instant, but even before he could raise his hand to waft it aside, the glass of the doors behind him shattered.

  He heard a scream, drawn out and low, as adrenalin surged through his body and he fell, then rolled across the steps. Gunshot, silenced weapon. More shattering glass, then he saw marble chip and fly up from the impact of a third shot, beside his head. He heard it whine away in ricochet.

  Heard, too, the noise of police sirens

  Pyotr Leonidovich Turgenev scanned the sheet he had removed from his secure fax, nodding in self-compliment. The takeover of Grainger Technologies by his dummy corporation in America was meeting with little in the way of resistance. GraingerTurgenev would become, apparently but not in reality, an entirely separate and autonomous company, the dummy corporation buying out the Grainger shareholding. He placed the fax sheet on his broad walnut desk and walked to the wall length windows of his study. Elsewhere in the office suite, even late in the evening, his secretaries and assistants continued to monitor his business interests, share purchases, currency dealing.