A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  Stoner’s face was innocence. ‘You speaking in a statistical sense? Or from some deep personal understanding of what two blokes might get up to if left to their own devices in a hotel room? It’s more likely that a bunch of blokes would be discussing football.’

  ‘Holy fuck, JJ. You do know how to wound. Football. Jesus. Why did I not think of that? Business executive offed in bizarre football tiff with gay lover in scabby hotel room shock. I can almost hear the headlines. You’re a genius. I always said you were, but no one would take me seriously.’

  ‘And apart from that . . . when was the last time you hacked some sucker’s head off? Have you ever chopped a head off?’

  ‘It was . . . a while ago. A long while ago. But you’re right. It’s not an easy thing to do. And it is as messy as all fuck. Seriously so.’ Stoner nodded his agreement. The Hard Man warmed to his line of thought. ‘How was it done? Could you tell? I’ll ask how the body lost its head. You drive that razor-like mind of yours and try to pretend that you can remember what the neck looked like.’

  The Hard Man dragged his cell phone from his pocket, thumbed a few buttons. Then he muttered, in a whisper which made their tables of audience strain to hear, ‘C17. Yep. U6.’ A long pause. Rubbing of the forehead. ‘M16. OK. Christ on a pedestal, I feel like the Man from fucking Uncle. Security codes? Even my bloody bank only needs the maiden name of my dead mother to agree that I’m me. Why do you want code of the day, fuck’s sake? Yes. Yes. Yes. Don’t be silly, chummy, I’m in a restaurant surrounded by passing innocents who will not go away even if I pull a very scary face and no I will not go and stand outside in the fucking street. How did you get this job? M16. Yes. That’s right. It’s a body. A dead body.’

  The Hard Man raised his eyes to Stoner’s, rolled them theatrically.

  ‘I know it’s not proper to discuss a body while I’m in a public place, and . . .’ his voice raised to a point at which it was the only audible source of entertainment in the dining room, ‘everyone can hear me because I am fucking shouting. Got that?’

  He stood up, staged a badly theatrical bow, and announced to the rapt audience, ‘This, laydeez ’n genmum, this is for what we pay our taxes. A round of applause for our public servant to whom I do speak, but with whom I cannot communicate!’

  Incredibly, the crowd of diners clapped, and loudly. A small cheer started. Stoner watched in awe. The Hard Man sat down.

  ‘I want to know how the head was removed. No. I want to know now. Not tomorrow. Find out. Call me back. Fuck. Me.’

  He ended the call with a flourish. Stood again.

  ‘I am sorry about that. Sorry for interrupting your evening. I shall be quiet now, and my good friend and I will discuss nothing but football until I get my call returned, and at that point we will sneak out, quiet as mice, trying hard to avoid paying, and will leave you to get on with your evening in peace.’

  Incredibly, a crowd of smiling faces returned to their table-mates, to their dinners, to their drinks and to their own evening manoeuvres and mating rituals.

  ‘If I live to be one thousand,’ Stoner spoke gently, ‘I will never underestimate the insanity of the common man. You could have passed a hat around and raised enough to cover dinner. You should be on the stage.’

  The Hard Man smiled. A grim and tiny smile. His cell phone hummed, quietly. He flicked it open.

  ‘Yes. C17. OK. OK. You’re sure? Thank you.’

  He listened in stationary impassive silence for a long time, then clipped the phone closed. Stared at it for a moment.

  ‘That is odd.’

  He looked up at Stoner. ‘We should walk and talk. No more booze.’

  He unrolled a trio of red fifties from an impressive bundle of banknotes, waved them at the waiter, dropped them to the table and rose to his feet. Not a trace of unsteadiness or humour.

  ‘Grab your hat.’

  They left. Eyes followed them, but no one called out to interrupt the suddenly serious tone of their departure.

  Outside. Dry, dark evening. Night close behind it. Crisp and cooling.

  ‘I don’t know how they know this. The head was chopped off some time after the death. The body lost its head while still alive. The head was removed with a saw. Possibly while the body was frozen. How do you chop off a significant body part using a saw? It would take weeks. This is what they think. They also think they’ll know for certain tomorrow. Sooner if I need it. There is more muscle behind this than I’d thought, JJ. I like that not at all. Loads of diligent motivated experts contradicting themselves. That is hugely expensive. A single incompetent can get things wildly wrong on their own. Saves a fortune and the result is the same. Confusion.

  ‘Neither of our deceased friends died near the hotel. The hotel room was booked online by a company which doesn’t exist. They’re chasing the card details . . . but that won’t get them anywhere, I think. They probably paid through Paypal using a stolen card. You’ll like the company name, too.’

  He glanced at Stoner. Who in turn glanced impassively back.

  ‘Murder, Mayhem, More Ltd. MMM. Sounds a bit like a law firm. But I do doubt that is what it is. I do doubt that indeed. Because . . .’

  Stoner interrupted.

  ‘That’s the name of the fansite, isn’t it? Murder Mayhem and More. The site where the movie of the head was playing. Crap.’

  ‘Crap indeed, my friend. Crap indeed. There’s a game afoot here, and it truly is not football.’

  12

  DESERTED CITIES, INVISIBLE DISCOS

  Stoner walked away. The Hard Man walked to his car. Leaned against it. Watched his employee departing. Watched until he was out of sight. No waves, no fake fond farewells.

  The Hard Man pulled his cell phone from its rest, flicked it open, dialled. Lifted the device to his ear. Listened. Listened some more. Dialled another number. Listened again. Said nothing. Tapped out a text message, closed the phone. Climbed into his car. Left the scene.

  Stoner walked. Inspiration arises from exercise. A great theory, a fine and laudable sentiment. Stoner walked for many reasons, not all of them involving fitness, and not all of them because he enjoyed walking. The best way to be alone in a city, he felt, was to be on the move. Movement always breeds comfort in the person involved in the moving, and it always breeds concern and doubt in anyone else. Watchers dislike moving targets. Watchers prefer to know the whereabouts of those they’re watching. And Stoner did feel watched.

  He had been feeling unusually uncomfortable without break since discovering the severed head, the least likely hotel guest of them all. Since before then. Since when? Answers come with exercise and with movement. He crossed the road. No reason to cross it. He could see no other soul taking their exercise in this the late evening, the early night. No followers. Followers are hard to hide in the island silence of the city walker. But he could not shake the feeling that he had company.

  Distance will always lose an invisible follower. It is impossible to remain invisible provided the watched puts in the miles. Following a walker is exhausting. Only regular walkers are fit enough to walk hard and long and fast. Stoner was fit and he enjoyed walking. He did not want a confrontation. He wanted solitude. He did not want to trap some know-nothing watching flunky. He wanted to think. Bodies without heads, heads without bodies. Songs without tunes, words without meaning. Connections are inevitable, predictable, but prone to easy misleading.

  There was a message here. Stoner and the Hard Man were in complete accord about that. But the message was obscure. No one murders without a reason, and no one gets murdered without a reason. Pointless murders confuse the professionals. If any action in this strange performance was inexplicable but linked, then it was deliberately so. Which reveals the presence of a professional. Amateurs are never any good at killing. They always mess it up.

  Professionals are always neat. If a professional is messy, then there’s a reason for the mess. The mess will be a neat mess. A structured mess. A mess with a purpose. For a profes
sional, ‘mess’ is a contraction of ‘message’. Always. But messages can be private; they need not be a public statement, an announcement.

  There is always a reason. Always. The victim always has a reason to die. The killer always has a reason to kill them. Find the reasons, the connections, and you’re well on the way to finding the whole story. And if that’s what you want, then fine. Almost nothing is insoluble. Finding courtroom evidence is something else. Finding out the tale behind the killing can too readily involve actions which are illegal and which are beyond the lawful and their custodians. Hence the Hard Man. When the law-abiding forces of the law grind into a wall of legislative obstruction, either the investigation founders or a contractor, an off-book contractor, becomes involved.

  Stoner felt watched. This was a familiar feeling. Paranoia is a uniting feature among the clandestine. Those who survive and prosper in the dim-lit world of the off-books operator are always and inevitably cautious, and with caution comes paranoia. He crossed another street. Then he crossed it again. He wasn’t hiding. He cared not whether a watcher was aware of his own awareness. He didn’t want to catch them. He wanted them to go away. Not because he was in any way concerned that a watcher might be reporting his whereabouts, his actions, to whoever paid them to be a watcher. But because he wanted to think. Thinking is best done without a nagging irritating interference, be it ever-so remote.

  He was walking briskly beside a park, a green breathing space long closed for the night. At the end of every day, the custodians of public facilities close them to the law-abiding payers of taxes, leaving them for the exclusive use of the non-legal, the nefarious. This must at some point have appeared logical to someone. Stoner laid his left hand upon the iron railing and vaulted into the park. And he ran. Hard, fast, relaxed and strong. Running hard on a full stomach and a lot of hard drink is not great for thinking, but it covers ground very fast, burns excess energies. And any watcher will need to run to maintain their watch, which renders them conspicuous. If running flushed a watcher then Stoner would explain to them that he felt a need for privacy and would suggest, in few words and with measured violence for emphasis were it necessary, that they respect this and left him to ponder in peace.

  He ran to the central feature, a fine Victorian bandstand which appeared deserted. The flesh and drug trades were enjoying a holiday, plainly. He paused, laughed quietly but deliberately audibly, and reversed his run, pounding with no false silence, no attempt at stealth, back to the old iron fence. His watcher was close. He could feel the eyes on him. Back at the fence, he dropped his jacket from his arms and hung it on the iron railings. Leaned on the iron bars and gazed about him, breathing hard. Looking hard. He saw nothing. No one. He waited.

  Nothing. Nothing at all. The night was a silent night, not a night of fear. He slung his jacket over his shoulder and walked across the park, alone. Comfortable in this. Able at last to concentrate upon the needs of the moment.

  The Hard Man was uncharacteristically concerned about the job. This was possibly the most surprising feature of it. Stoner considered the severed head to be some kind of histrionic gesture, an emphasis in a dialogue to which he was no party. The Hard Man’s level of concern suggested that he was more involved than he’d revealed. That although the strangely statemental nature of this killing was a mystery, the reason for the deaths themselves may not be. It is impossible to fully trust anyone involved in the business of commercial killing, and although they had worked together for many years, and although they mostly worked together well, and got on well enough on a personal level, accepting that the Hard Man’s private life was completely private so far as Stoner, an employee, was concerned, Stoner trusted the Hard Man only when he felt a reason to do so. The Hard Man hid himself too expertly and too effectively for an operator like Stoner to accept total trust. And his feeling was that, at this point in the job, the Hard Man held an awful lot more facts than he had so far revealed. Which in itself was interesting.

  It was also interesting and possibly relevant that the Hard Man was withholding data. This would no doubt involve some need-to-know justification, but that was usually an excuse, an interpretation, a device. Sometimes legitimate, more usually not. It was, for example, possible that the Hard Man already knew the answers he was asking Stoner to find. Confirmation is valid when black actions are required, particularly when those actions are required by an instrument of government, by an organ of the state. He would certainly hide that knowledge and understanding from Stoner, because if confirmation was what he wanted, what he was paying for, then it needed to be independent. And there is no flaw in that reasoning, unless it stood in the way of Stoner’s own task.

  Out of the dark park and into the semi-dark of the streets. Stoner was relaxed, confident once more. He was a shadow who hated the shadows he inhabited. He was a spook too easily spooked. That said, he was still alive and practising his arts, both in the dark and in the light, unlike so many others. And mostly he was happy with this. If he felt followed, felt the pull of a shadow, then he was uneasy and ineffective until he had chased it down or chased it away. He believed in himself and in the strong sense of perception which had grown as he had grown into his darker life. Some things are trustworthy, as are some folk. Most folk can be trusted, so long as the limits to that trust are plain and understood. But when push came to fall-over, Stoner primarily trusted himself. The other side to that coin was that he blamed himself when things screwed, as they did. He tried to be honest with himself, mainly because honesty itself is such a flexible, mutable, variable commodity.

  The faint worry, the unease he had taken from the evening’s meal with the Hard Man had been replaced by a small, smug feeling of pleasure. Had he flushed a shadow? Or had he simply eased his mind a little? In any case, had there been a shadow, it was as likely to be nothing to do with this evening’s topic as the other thing. Stoner walked on difficult streets sometimes, and he walked there deliberately. And was rarely alone in this.

  But whatever the reason, he felt good, and felt like some good company. He pulled the cell phone from his shirt pocket and thumbed a text to the dirty blonde. The evening may be history, but the night might still have legs. And the blonde’s professional callings were rarely of the all-night variety.

  No reply. That was unusual, unless she was asleep or working. Stoner walked towards her apartment, a new direction. A sense of purpose, a spring to the step. Still no reply. A half hour of walking to reach hers, then. A half hour’s thinking time, with a little added focus in that he’d need to reach some form of conclusion before he settled with the blonde, not least because he felt some regret that he and she had started mingling his work with their pleasure. Rules and boundaries can have purpose; in relationships as in all other areas.

  Midnight passed without much celebration. Stoner walked, crossed a street. Stopped. Looked. Listened. No sense at all of anyone following him.

  Walkers are a rare species on midnight streets. Citizens tend to drive everywhere. Stoner had never entirely understood the appeal of the inside of some dull family Ford over the airy outdoors. The visual appeal of the plastic dashboard was a minor mystery. He liked his own cars, but he preferred to walk. Unsure whether walking was more rewarding than his motorcycles, though. A familiar diversion, the two-wheeled one. He worked hard to avoid his passions becoming his obsessions.

  No reply. He was within a quarter hour of the dirty blonde’s apartment. Her home. Her home, which she considered to be hers and treated exactly as though it were hers but which in fact belonged to him. One of the many elephants which inhabited the many rooms of their relationship; the layers of overlap in their lives. The contradictions and conundrums, the chasms of dishonesty with made the shared truths so important, so uniquely, impossibly important.

  Stoner was standing outside. Outside his house. Outside the dirty blonde’s apartment. His house. The lights were lit. Some of them. Stoner stood and Stoner stared. He could never and probably would never understand how this coul
d be; how it was. It always was. He stared. The night grew deeper. He could stand for hours. It was part of what he did. How he held onto the things he had worked for so long to hold. To the things which held all his value but which had no worth. His delight, his desire and his disappointment. Always that disappointment.

  The lights dimmed, one after the other. Once the only light remaining was the welcome home light over the doorway, Stoner shrugged away his anger, his rage, his fury. Sat on them. Squashed them into a hard dark place, the place which grew the music he wracked from his Fender deep into deep nights at the Blue Cube. But that place of focus, that hardest of darknesses, was the place in which he functioned with ferocity, with creative malice. It was the place where mysteries resolved themselves. It was the place which had kept him alive and running when his brothers stumbled and fell. The place where dwelt the darkest of angels, the angel of his frustration and contempt; the angel who thought for him and who found the missing and the lost. Who revealed when he was under threat. His point of focus.

  His relationship with the dirty blonde included several understandings, among them the cardinal truth that if he appeared unannounced at her apartment or at her place of work the responsibility for whatever he found would be his – only his. He had his keys, of course he did, and he used them only when he was expected. She was not answering his calls, nor returning his calls.

  Stoner reached into the night; seeking with his soul for the answer to the Hard Man’s mystery, for a distraction. A killer was out there, another broken soul, and Stoner would be drawn to him. When his world was at its most broken, when he wished only to maim, to rend and to destroy, then he would surely feel the presence of that other torn and weeping soul. He felt nothing yet. The follower from earlier, the evening watcher, was gone. Bitterness and angry bile washed his palate. He turned away from his own house, which was not his home, and walked into the night, seeking someone to take away his irritation. No guitars tonight. He could hope for a mugger, a band of drunken, pillfuelled fools, but they would not appear. Where are your enemies when you need them?