Before The Killing Starts (Dixie Killer Blues Book 1)

by James, Harper

  All the usual platitudes washed over his head in the warden's soft, reassuring voice, the calm, measured tones designed for talking at people of subpar intellect. The warden suddenly stopped talking and leaned forward. He rested his elbows on his desk, palms pressed together, like he was about to pray but his arthritic knees wouldn't let him kneel. Jackson, aware of the sudden silence in the room and not sure if he'd been asked a question, looked up into his earnest face. It was the sort of face you wanted to punch, see if you could get rid of that patronizing smugness that said I get to go home every night. Yeah, right, but having seen a photo of the warden and his wife at a charity ball, Jackson thought he'd take his chances in the shower block. Besides, today he was the one who got to go home. Wherever that was.

  'Look LaBarre, I'm not stupid,' the warden said. 'I realize you're not the usual, run of the mill prisoner we get in here.'

  Jackson acknowledged the statement with a small shrug. Did the guy really think he was about to explain everything now, five minutes before he walked out the door forever?

  'The other prisoners knew it too,' the warden said. Jackson sure as hell couldn't deny that. 'What you went through in here . . .' The warden trailed off and shook his head sadly. 'I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy.'

  Jackson nodded in agreement but didn't really see what he could add. Maybe something like what doesn't kill you makes you stronger seeing as platitudes seemed to be the order of the day, or maybe something a little more pithy, but he couldn't think what.

  'I don't know what really went on here—obviously access to that information is above my pay grade.' He gave Jackson a conspiratorial smile. A we're all running around in the dark together sort of smile. What a crock. The guy was just pissed because he didn't know what was going on in his prison.

  'I'm not sure I understand what you mean, warden,' Jackson said.

  The warden sighed heavily. Jackson could see from his expression that he knew he wasn't going to get anywhere, but he wanted to say his piece anyway. Jackson knew he was basically a decent guy and probably genuinely had the prisoners' interests at heart. A regular churchgoer, most likely. Perhaps he'd loaned the motivational poster to one of the inmates to put up in his cell. A coochy-coo picture and some cute words always made you feel better as you nursed your sore ass and contemplated another next ten years of the same.

  'I know you had it hard in here,' he said. 'You didn't go looking for trouble—you didn't need to—but you didn't back down either.' He paused and looked away. Jackson followed his gaze, through the window and to the world outside. The free world which is where he'd be in a few short minutes. He looked back at the warden and half expected to see him wringing his hands together.

  'I suppose what I'm trying to say is . . . I just hope it was worth it.'

  Jackson let out a sharp laugh, almost like a bark, not quite deranged in its intensity. He couldn't help himself. Even if he wanted to confide in this man, he wouldn't know where to start.

  'Are we done here?'

  He put his hands on the desk to push himself up out of the chair. The warden looked at his hands resting on the edge of the desk and Jackson saw a quick flash of disgust—or maybe it was just disappointment—cross his face.

  'Whatever happened in here, it's a pity you had to do something stupid like that,' he said, pointing at the tattoo on Jackson's hand between his thumb and forefinger. 'Why in God's name did you want to get a permanent reminder of all this . . .' He waved his arm, taking in the whole of his office and everything beyond it and Jackson was sure he nearly forgot himself and said all this shit, but the warden didn't use bad language.

  'Why remind yourself,' the warden continued, 'of what I hope, for your sake, turns out to be the two worst years of your life?' There was something close to despair in his voice that Jackson could relate to. He could imagine the guy getting up for work each day, sitting in a bright, sunny breakfast nook with his (ugly) wife, eating a big bowl of cheerios drenched with ice cold milk and feeling his heart sink as he contemplated the impenetrable brick wall that he had to spend another eight hours banging his head against, dealing with all the recidivists and perverts and baby-rapers and the occasional garden variety murderer.

  Jackson pushed himself to his feet and smiled. 'Don't worry, I didn't get that in here, I've had it years.'

  'I suppose that makes it not quite so bad,' the warden said grudgingly, twisting his head to take a closer look. 'What is it? It looks like the number 29.'

  Jackson shrugged and looked at it himself. He didn't really see it these days. 'Let's just say it's a private joke.'

  The warden stood and fired his hand into Jackson's, a little too eager perhaps and held longer than was strictly necessary, but a firm grip nonetheless that surprised him. He wondered idly if he'd open up the paper one day and read how the warden had reached the end of his tether and used those strong, callused hands to strangle his (ugly) wife as she prattled on incessantly in her whiney voice in the bright, sunny breakfast nook, the fat that hung down from her arms like pregnant bellies quivering as he squeezed the life from her and then buried her in the garden before driving to work like normal.

  He'd always had an active imagination and prison seemed to have made it ten times worse.

  Chapter 18

  The reception desk at Ellie's hotel was empty when Evan got there so he headed straight up to her room. He was fifteen minutes early but he knocked on the door anyway and wasn't surprised when he didn't get an answer. He didn't fancy going back down and sitting in the depressing lobby if he could avoid it so he sat down and leaned against the wall to wait. Half an hour passed and she still hadn't turned up. He thought about asking if they'd seen her at reception, but, after the trouble at the bar, he was getting a bad feeling about the whole situation. The less people who saw him here, the better. He got up and paced up and down, then tried the door handle and the feeling of unease intensified a notch as the door swung open. He let himself in and closed the door behind him.

  The room smelled of stale bodies and unwashed sheets, and it was empty. The bed took up most of the floor space. He took a step towards the bathroom and felt something sticky under his foot. He pulled off his shoe and ran a finger through the tacky liquid but he had no idea if it was blood or not. He took a couple of tentative paces towards the bathroom, as if a dead body in the shower stall was something you had to creep up on, and pushed the door open. She wasn't in there either. He let out a long breath. At least she wasn't lying naked in the tub, her eyes gouged from their sockets, legs bent at impossible angles.

  It was obvious the room had been searched—there hadn't been much in the way of clothes in either the closet or the dresser, but what there was had been strewn across the floor. The mattress had been pulled off the bed and was leaning up against the wall. There was a small suitcase lying open on the bed frame and a couple of pairs of shoes kicked into the corner. It didn't look as if she planned on staying in town for long.

  What he couldn't know was whether she'd been in the room when they were doing it. There was still the possibility that she was out and about, aiming to get back for their meeting at six and she'd been delayed. Or gone shopping or whatever else women do that makes them late every time. The other alternative was whoever searched the room had taken her away with them. All he could do was wait to see if she turned up.

  The only other furniture in the room was a threadbare armchair with a couple of suspicious looking stains on the upholstery. It was that or the bed so he settled into it to wait. Six thirty came and went, and by seven he knew she wasn't coming. He'd had a vague, nagging suspicion ever since he'd spoken to her on the phone. There had been something not right about the call. She'd sounded panicky when he said he was coming straight over and he was getting the feeling now that she just agreed to meet him to get him off the phone.

  If it hadn't been for what she said about Sarah he'd have dropped the whole thing right there. He'd almost got beaten up and now she'd gone missing—it was more
trouble than it was worth. But—and it was a big but—she had mentioned Sarah and he knew he had to follow it up.

  He pushed himself up out of the armchair and crossed to the bed and picked up the suitcase. It was a regular, small carry-on suitcase with wheels and a telescopic handle. The sort of thing that would be big enough for a week away for a man, or an overnight stay for a woman. On the outside there was a small, zippered pocket with enough room for your travel documents and a book to read.

  He unzipped it and felt inside and pulled out a slim diary. Did anyone still use a diary? Did anyone under twenty-five even know what one was? It was strange that whoever had searched the room had missed it. Maybe they hadn't but it wasn't what they were after.

  He looked at the date—2007—and was on the verge of putting it back when a sudden thought blind-sided him. He felt his stomach flip, felt his legs go weak. The room was way too hot; he needed some air. He crossed to the window and opened it and stuck his head out. He breathed deeply, couldn't get enough of it, sucking traffic fumes and all the rest down into his lungs.

  He looked at the diary shaking slightly in his hand, an up-yours buzz of anticipation taking his breath away. Maybe he didn't need Ellie's help after all. He remembered back to when he'd kept a diary, back in the day, before everybody lived their whole life through their phone. At the back there'd always been a removable section for names and addresses and phone numbers. Removable, so that you didn't have to write them out all over again every year. You could keep on transferring them for ten or twenty years, amending people's details as they moved and changed phones until the whole thing was a mess of crossed-out entries and new ones squeezed into every available gap until you finally bit the bullet and got a new one and cleaned it all up.

  He wiped his sweaty palms on his pants and opened it up at the back. Sure enough, there it was. A couple of loose pieces of paper fell out onto the floor. He ignored them and pulled the address section free. He could see from the number of amendments that it had been regularly updated over the years. He flicked through to the B's and there it was—Sarah Buckley. His hands were shaking harder now, but not so hard that he couldn't see, right there next to her name, the address of the house they'd lived in together and a number for the house phone and a number for her cell phone—a number he knew had stopped working the day she disappeared. There were no crossings-out, no amendments, no new number or address squeezed into the margins.

  He took a couple of paces backwards and dropped into the armchair. He flicked through the pages until he got to the S's but he knew it was no use. Ellie was a surname person, not a first name person. Sarah had been under the B's, she wouldn't be in the S's as well. He felt numb. For one stupid moment he'd really believed that he would find some new address or phone number for Sarah, neatly written under their old details.

  He felt so stupid. As if Sarah, having successfully disappeared off the face of the earth, would have given her best friend her new address and made sure she wrote it down in her diary for the whole world to find.

  He let the address book drop from his fingers onto the floor and leaned back in the chair and stared up at the ceiling. He closed his eyes and rested his arm across them shutting everything out. Or keeping it all in. He sat upright and opened his eyes to try to stop the images that he didn't want to think about crowding into his mind. He got up and walked over to the bed. The two pieces of paper that had fallen out of the diary were lying on the floor and he bent down and picked them up.

  One of them was a photograph cut in half. It was of Ellie and he immediately knew what it was. He pulled the photo that Ellie had given him of Dixie out of his pocket. The two halves were a perfect match, but it was no big deal. He'd been pretty sure at the time that the person who'd been cut out of the photo was Ellie. He had no idea why she'd cut it in half—it was the most natural thing in the world that a person searching for somebody might have a picture of the two of them together.

  It looked like they'd been on vacation somewhere. Somewhere hot anyway and they were smiling like they were having a great time. Then something else caught his eye and another nagging thought crossed his mind—a nasty idea about why Ellie might have cut the photo in half. It wasn't about her at all.

  There was another woman standing next to Ellie on the other side to Dixie. All you could see was her arm round Ellie's shoulders. But the photo hadn't been cut on that side—whoever had taken the picture had either been totally inept with a camera or had deliberately framed the shot so that only Ellie and Dixie were in it. He couldn't stop looking at that extra arm. The way it was casually draped round Ellie's shoulders. The slim hand wasn't gripping her shoulder so that you'd only really see the fingertips. No, it was more like the arm was around her neck and the hand was hanging down the front of Ellie's shoulder so you could see the whole hand. And the wrist. And the bracelet on the wrist.

  He felt fear spread down through his intestines and up into his throat; fear of having what he'd searched for these last five years suddenly in front of him; fear of finally knowing the truth however ugly it might be. It flooded his brain until he couldn't think straight, couldn't form a single, clear thought that wasn't distorted by what he wanted to see.

  There must be thousands of bracelets just like it, but that didn't stop his legs buckling for the second time in less than five minutes. Maybe hundreds of thousands of them, but that didn't change the fact that he'd bought one just like it for Sarah's twenty-fifth birthday and to the best of his knowledge she'd worn it every day since.

  Was that her hand? Was that her wrist? Her arm? Surely it had to be. Now, more than ever he had to find Ellie. Before he'd walked into this room the odds had been on Ellie stringing him along to get him to help her, with the slimmest chance that she was telling the truth. Now those odds were shifting and he knew he'd never be able to tell her to take her story and stick it up her ass.

  Something else crossed his mind. There were three people in the photo, so who was the fourth person taking it? Another girl friend? Another man? Two happy couples on vacation together? His brain was exploding. He wanted to be sick. This wasn't how things were meant to turn out. He didn't want to find Sarah to learn she'd left him for another man. No mystery, no disappearance, just an everyday tale of finding a guy with a bigger johnson. Or a bigger pay check. Or a smaller johnson. Or anything that wasn't him.

  He stuffed the two halves of the photo into his pocket and looked at the other piece of paper that had fallen out of the diary. It was just a plain sheet of paper from a memo block. On it was a name—MacQuaid's—which he assumed was the name of a bar rather than a person, today's date and the letter 'J'. He turned it over but there wasn't anything else. Maybe Ellie was spreading her business around. Perhaps she'd sent some other unwitting sap to a bar called MacQuaid's looking for 'J'. He'd ask her about that too if he ever found her. He folded the piece of paper and put it in his wallet, then put the diary back together, put it back in the zippered compartment in the suitcase and got the hell out of there.

  He came away feeling like he'd got a lot more than he bargained for and a lot less at the same time. He knew he wouldn't get a moment's peace until he managed to find Ellie and get some answers. He also knew now that the bitch would make him work his butt off for them.

  It made him want to punch the wall.

  Chapter 19

  There was nothing Ellie would rather have done than meet with Evan and explain everything to him. Unfortunately that that wasn't one of her options at the present time. After they'd finished at her hotel room Juan and José had put a sack over her head, tied her wrists and stuffed her into the trunk of their car. It was a little melodramatic, a bit of overkill, since she couldn't exactly see where they were going from inside the car's trunk, so what was the point of the sack?

  To get her in the right frame of mind, she supposed.

  They'd driven across town and hustled her into a building and one of them pushed her down a short flight of stairs into a basement. She'd stumb
led and slipped off the stairs, fallen screaming through the air, unable to see where she might land or even put out a hand to break her fall, but the other one had been at the bottom and caught her. They thought it was hilarious. Pricks. They pulled the sack off her head just long enough to stuff a dirty rag into her mouth and sat her on a hard wooden stool. They tied her ankles to the stool's legs and tied her thighs to the seat so the whole of her body below the waist was fixed firmly in place. Then they tied another piece of rope to her wrists and threw it over one of the exposed rafters above her head. They pulled the rope taut so her arms were stretched out above her head and tied it off on a cleat fixed to the wall. One of them had given the rope a quick tug which nearly jerked her shoulders out of their sockets and looped the rope one more time around the cleat.

  After they'd finished trussing her up, Juan—she assumed it was him from the smell of cigarettes—stood in front of her. She could feel his presence looming over her, hear his heavy breathing, but what was he doing? She could smell damp and something else she couldn't identify. Nobody said a thing or made any kind of noise. She could hear the blood pounding in her ears, taste bitter bile in her mouth. She was aware of a sudden shift in front of her. Pain exploded in her foot and screamed up her right leg, flooding her brain with white light, as he stamped down viciously on her instep. Her scream shattered the stillness even with the filthy rag in her mouth. She tried to twist away but she was tied tight. The stool flexed and creaked but didn't move. It was bolted to the floor.