Game of Death

by David Hosp

  I look at my watch. It’s not quite noon. ‘I’ll stop by this evening, just to check again.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  ‘I want to.’

  She tilts her head. ‘I may be busy.’

  I nod. ‘I won’t interfere.’

  ‘No?’ she sounds almost disappointed. ‘No, of course not. I’ll see you out.’

  We leave her apartment, and it’s like crossing over into a different world. She opens the front door for me. ‘It was nice to see you again,’ she says.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say.

  ‘For what?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘But I am.’

  She touches the bruise on my face. ‘You be careful, okay?’ Then she steps back and closes the door.

  ‘Where have you been?’

  I open the door to Ma’s house, expecting to find Ma sitting at the kitchen table, where she spends most of the daylight hours. Instead Yvette leaps up from the table, her face flushed with worry.

  ‘We went out to Gunta’s house, down in Hull. I met him at the jail, and he told me François had a key, so we figured it was worth a shot. We were right; it was worth a shot. He was there.’

  Yvette’s eyes go wide. ‘Did you catch him?’

  ‘No,’ I respond. ‘He attacked me, and things went wrong.’ I can feel her eyeing the bruises on my face.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m fine. He got away. They set up a police roadblock, but either he got through it or he’s still out on Hull. They’re not gonna keep it up indefinitely, so it’s safe to say he’s free for at least a little while longer. I’m sorry, I should have called sooner; I didn’t mean to make you worry, it’s just that I was—’

  Yvette cuts me off. ‘It’s not that,’ she says. ‘It’s your mom.’

  A bolt of panic goes through me. ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘She had a relapse. A bad one.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Last night. Cormack found her collapsed on the floor. He took her to the hospital.’

  My mind is racing. All of a sudden any thought I have of François or Kendra or my company melts away. No matter how bad things have been, I don’t think I’ve ever really accepted the notion that the cancer would end up beating Ma. Nothing has ever beaten Ma; she’s the ultimate survivor. Me and the cockroaches, she used to joke. We’ll still be here after the bombs go off. I always believed it in my heart, even when my head was telling me that her time was limited. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I say. ‘I’ve got to get to the hospital.’ I start toward the door.

  ‘Wait, Nick!’ Yvette calls after me. ‘She’s not there!’

  I turn to look at her. The horror of the only other possibility overwhelms me. I feel as though my legs have gone numb and I may collapse. ‘She’s . . . ?’

  ‘No, don’t worry. She’s back here.’

  ‘Here? This house?’

  Yvette nods. ‘It was touch and go, but she came out of it around two this morning. I guess they tried to keep her at the hospital, but she was having none of it. She refused further treatment and started throwing things.’ Yvette smiles sadly at the thought. ‘Even with one foot in the grave, she’s still not someone to mess with.’ For a moment she looks as though she regrets the way it came out. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it that way,’ she says, coming over and taking my hand.

  She’s too close a friend, and I care too much about her, to take offense. ‘Don’t worry,’ I say. ‘It’s true. All of it. I’m surprised they didn’t declare her a danger to herself and commit her.’

  ‘They wanted to.’

  ‘What stopped them?’

  ‘Cormack.’

  ‘Ah.’ It makes sense. I have no doubt that Cormack would be exceptionally persuasive in a situation like that. If any doctor tried to have Ma committed, he would have had a short, loud, definitive conversation with Cormack that would have left no doubt as to the inadvisability of such a move.

  ‘But why wouldn’t she stay?’

  Yvette looks away, and I can see the tears forming in her eyes. ‘She said she wanted to die here.’ I nod and squeeze her hand. She looks up at me, the tears flowing freely now. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says, a little sob escaping her throat.

  I take her in my arms and hold her. She feels warm and soft and real. She’s been a part of my life for almost longer than I can remember, and we fold into each other with a natural sense of understanding and silent communication. I hold her tight as we rock back and forth. It feels so good, in spite of the bleakness of the occasion, but after a moment I push away. She tries to hold on another moment, but I break free. She wipes her eyes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says again, and I wonder how she means it.

  I touch her shoulder. It feels so impersonal, but it’s as far as I’m willing to trust myself. ‘It’s okay,’ I say. ‘I’ll be okay.’ I realize that I’m crying, too, and I wipe away my own tears. ‘She’s upstairs?’

  Yvette nods.

  ‘I’m going up to see her.’ I need to see Ma, but I’m also running away, and Yvette knows it. She looks so good standing there in Ma’s kitchen, and there’s a part of me that wants to crawl back into her arms, but I can’t. I’m not even sure why not anymore, but I know that I can’t. ‘When did you get here?’

  ‘They were bringing her in when I got back from . . . from seeing Taylor Westerbrooke.’

  ‘You never went home?’

  She shakes her head. ‘Cormack said he had to put some things straight down at the docks, and he’d be back early this afternoon. I stayed with her.’

  ‘Why didn’t you call me?’

  ‘Your mother wouldn’t let me. She said you had your business to deal with, and she wouldn’t have me taking you away from that.’

  ‘You should have called me.’ There is reproach in my voice.

  ‘Maybe. But she said it wasn’t my place to butt in. I thought maybe she was right. I thought maybe . . . ’ Her voice trails off.

  ‘Go home,’ I say. ‘Get some rest and I’ll call you if anything happens.’ I head upstairs, afraid to turn around and see her face.

  I remember times, when I was younger, feeling petrified walking up the stairs in my parents’ house. There were the times when I was a child and I’d done something wrong, and I was sent upstairs to await my father’s punishment – my father was a firm believer in traditional parenting methods, which used corporal punishment to ensure that lessons were remembered. There were the times, after my father had died, when I was sneaking in after being out late at night and I knew for certain that Ma was waiting up to catch me – and my mother’s version of corporal punishment made my father’s whippings feel like backrubs. But I’ve never known fear walking up these stairs the way I feel the fear now. Ma’s tough. More than that, she’s hard, and her maternal love is a volatile phenomenon. And yet it’s the only constant I’ve known in my entire life. A world without her would be a world unmoored. I would be adrift, and I’m only now realizing this. It is the most terrifying thought I’ve ever had.

  Her door is closed and I have to inch it open. ‘Ma?’ I say softly. She doesn’t answer. ‘Ma?’ I say a little louder. The door is open wide enough for me to see in now, and she’s lying on her back in her bed, propped up on the pillows, the oxygen tube running to her nose. Her eyes are closed, and it doesn’t look like she’s breathing. ‘Ma!’ I say in a loud voice. She twitches and her eyes slap open.

  ‘Jesus, Mother and Mary,’ she says. The effort to talk brings a coughing fit that lasts for thirty seconds. ‘Are you trying to kill me, boy?’ she demands quietly. ‘It won’t take much.’ She looks at me without turning her head. The years that seemed to have melted off her in recent days have returned and brought friends. She looks ancient and frail. I smile at her. ‘Don’t smile at me,’ she orders. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’ll make me think I’m dead already.’

  ‘I heard it was a rough night,’ I say, entering the room and taking the seat near her bed so that she can see me.


  She looks at the bruises on my face and frowns. ‘Not nearly as bad as yours, from the look of you.’

  ‘My night was fine,’ I say. ‘It was the morning that sucked.’

  She laughs. ‘Me too. I don’t even remember the night; as far as I knew, I was asleep. That wasn’t bad – waking up was a bitch.’

  ‘How’re you doing, Ma?’ I ask, striking a more serious tone.

  ‘I’ve seen better days,’ she says, matching my sobriety. ‘But then, I’ve seen worse days, too.’ She raises her hand, and I take it. I wonder when I last held my mother’s hand. It’s been at least a decade and a half, by my memory. It feels oddly intimate. ‘I remember when your father passed. The boys came up here from the shore to tell me. They told me how good a leader he’d been. They told me there would be revenge.’

  ‘Against the ladder?’

  She gives me a confused look.

  ‘It was an accident, right?’

  It takes her a moment to get the joke. ‘You knew.’

  ‘I suspected.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Fourth grade, I think.’

  ‘You always were the smart one. Your father, he had street smarts. That’s important, particularly in these streets. You’ve got those smarts, too, but you’ve got so much more. More than your father or I ever knew what to do with. Where you got your brains from, I’ll never know, but it wasn’t from either of us.’

  ‘You’re plenty smart,’ I tell her.

  ‘Don’t lie to a dying woman.’ She looks at me. ‘You did right getting out of here. It would have been a waste. You’re destined for something better.’

  I shake my head. ‘I’m not sure,’ I say. ‘My job . . . ’ I can’t bring myself to tell her everything. There’s too much, and I wouldn’t know where to start. Even if I could, I wouldn’t want her to know the ugly truth of wading hip-deep through the swamps of the fantasies of the lonely. I wouldn’t want her to know how tawdry it all seems now.

  ‘Good God, not the job you have now, boy,’ she says. ‘They’re a bunch of charlatans. Anyone can see that. This isn’t where your greatness lies. You’ll be great in spite of what you’re doing now, not because of it.’

  I’m not sure what to say. ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Street smarts,’ she says. ‘I’ve got them in spades.’

  ‘Yeah, Ma. You do.’ She gives me a tired smile, and it feels like a gift. ‘Close your eyes and get some sleep, okay?’

  ‘I will,’ she says. Her voice is breathy. ‘And I’ll be downstairs for a drink with you before you know it.’

  I rest her hand on her chest as I get up from the chair. I suspect she and I have shared our last drink, and the thought leaves me so lonely I can’t put it into words.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  I’m back downstairs, sitting at the kitchen table, an untouched glass of whiskey in front of me. I don’t know for how long I’ve been sitting here. Maybe twenty minutes, maybe an hour. The afternoon sun is still bright outside, and the heat is stifling in the little house. Last summer Ma finally broke down and let me put air-conditioning units in the bedrooms, which is a blessing, but the rest of the house feels like a sauna.

  I take my phone out of my pocket and dial Killkenny’s number. He picks up on the second ring. ‘Yeah,’ he says.

  ‘It’s Nick. I’m just checking in to see if anything’s happened.’

  ‘Nothing good,’ he says. ‘They found the Mercedes abandoned in the alphabet section of Hull. No sign of our boy.’

  ‘Any cars reported stolen in the area that he might be using now?’

  ‘It’s Hull. Cars are stolen all the time.’

  ‘Okay, I get it. Anything else?’

  ‘Preliminaries came back on the Westerbrooke girl. Doc puts time of death at around ten. Looks like she was partying for at least five hours before that.’

  ‘How can they tell?’

  ‘Bar food in her stomach, partially digested. Also scored a point-two-three on the blood alcohol scale – nearly three times what would get her a DUI. Full toxicology will take another week, but Doc suspects from the other evidence that we’ll find an ample amount of coke in her system. Last time anyone saw François was at the NextLife lab when we busted Gunta. Apparently he never even went back inside, so he had plenty of time to get things ready, meet the girl, ply her with drugs and booze and strap her in for her final ride.’

  The callous reference to the murder victim offends me, but I suppose if you spend your entire life dealing with the sorts of things he deals with, you probably get pretty hardened to it all.

  ‘What now?’ I ask.

  ‘We’ve got his description and headshots out on the street and up in the post offices.’

  ‘Good, so if anyone went to the post office anymore, we’d have a shot at catching him?’

  ‘Best we can do. We’re also talking to people at NextLife to see whether anyone knows where François might hang out. He rented the dump where he did the Westerbrooke girl under a false name, so we’re running that through the system, too, but the reality is that he could have another five apartments like that rented already.’

  ‘Great. You’re really cheering me up.’

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get him. It may take another body or two, but he’ll fuck up.’

  ‘Spreading more joy.’

  ‘I’ll let you know if we get a line on any other information.’

  ‘Okay.’ I hang up and put the phone back in my pocket. The whiskey in front of me looks appealing, but I wonder whether it will actually make me feel better. I think probably not.

  I get up and walk into the small living room. It’s the place where I spent my boyhood, sitting on the floor playing with games while I listened to the adults talk about adult things. When I got older, I used to think about those times and marvel at the corruption of it all – the blasé manner in which my father and his friends used to talk about breaking the law. Now it occurs to me that the rest of the world has gone the same way, they just use prettier words.

  Looking out the window, I can see a herd of kids playing in the vacant lot across the street, marauding in some game that seems like a cross between baseball and rugby, where it’s clearly legal to tackle the runner. That’s what people learn early, I suppose – it’s more fun to make up the rules as you go along than to follow those that someone else has set down for you.

  I hear the door open and close. ‘Cormack?’ I’m still standing there, looking out the window, when I feel the shadow of a figure cross the living-room doorway. I turn, expecting to see Cormack there, but he’s not. Instead the entire doorway is blocked by NetMaster.

  ‘You don’t listen, Nick,’ he says. His accent sounds as menacing as ever. ‘I thought I was clear, but perhaps not.’ I notice for the first time that he is holding a knife. I’m thinking quickly, trying to figure out whether there is a way past him. The door he’s blocking is the only way out of the room. There are two windows, both half open to catch any breeze that might cool the house, but neither opening is wide enough for me to get through.

  ‘I’m not sure what you’re talking about,’ I say.

  ‘I think you are.’ He takes a step into the room, toward me. It’s a small enough room, and he’s a large enough man that there is little space separating us now. Yvette mentioned that Cormack was coming back shortly. I need to buy time, I realize.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’ I enquire, stalling.

  He steps to the windows and closes them. I assume it’s to keep any shouting from reaching the streets. I could tell him it doesn’t matter much; neighbors are slow to respond to commotion around here.

  ‘The name – NetMaster – what’s that all about? Are you auditioning for the role of a comic book villain?’

  He smiles and I see those tiny, sharp rodent teeth again. ‘Ah,’ he says, nodding his head. ‘You are a funny person. I like humor.’ He’s moving toward me again.

  ‘Seriously, though,’ I continue, backing up to
the wall. ‘Why?’

  ‘My real name,’ he says, ‘I could not use anymore. It was too well known among the authorities at Interpol. That is why I came to this country. In this country people can start over – they can choose who they would like to be.’

  ‘And you wanted to be a psychopath?’

  He smiles again, and I remind myself not to make him do that anymore. ‘Josh Pinkerton suggested that when he agreed to hire me. He sought me out, and he thought it would be . . . what is the word . . . intimidating.’

  ‘And you believed him?’

  He looks at me, frowning.

  ‘He was fucking with you. You don’t see that?’

  He shakes his head, but I can see the hint of a doubt in his eyes. ‘You are wrong.’

  ‘You don’t think he’s laughing at you behind your back? Please . . . he’s totally screwing with you. And now he has you coming out here to do what? Try to intimidate me again? That didn’t work the first time, remember?’

  ‘Who said I am here to intimidate you?’ he asks. ‘This neighborhood is not so safe, I think. Someone could break in to steal what you have.’ He holds up the knife. ‘They could kill you in the process. Then kill your mother.’

  The mention of my mother sends me over the edge. I lower my head and run at him, taking him by surprise, driving into his stomach to knock the wind from him as I grab for the knife. He stumbles back, off balance, and for just a moment I think I have the advantage. He hits the wall next to the door, and I make a break for the kitchen, but he grabs me by the arm and it’s like being caught in a bear trap. I try to pull free, but he gives a hard tug and I hit the floor.

  I hear a noise from upstairs, and I wonder whether Ma has given up the ghost. A part of me hopes so; the chances that I’m getting away from NetMaster are slim, and I’d rather not have his the last face she sees as he makes good on his threat to kill her.

  He’s on me instantly, and I marvel at his quickness. He has me by the throat and he’s holding the knife in front of my face. I wonder whether he’ll actually go through with it, or whether this is intended to drive home the intimidation factor. If it’s just to intimidate me, it’s starting to work.