A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  He had been impressed by the ease with which Shard had located him. Stoner had booked the room online that same morning, using an email account created less than a month before. Shard plainly enjoyed some serious access if he could trace and identify such a short booking. In turn, Stoner thought he knew the access route, not least because he used it himself to extract information from the digital highways.

  Dinner had been a peculiarly pleasant affair. Shard was witty, intelligent and interested in many things. But they were there because of a killing. An as-yet unfulfilled contract killing. That subject raised itself finally. Shard had quite suddenly lost all of his animation, his amusement. His eyes had fixed themselves upon Stoner’s. A gaze intended to intimidate.

  ‘We’re looking at the same mark.’ A flat, straightforward statement. ‘When do you intend to complete?’

  Stoner drank, untroubled. ‘Tomorrow. Before noon. Is there a problem? Do we have a conflict? Are you his protector?’

  Shard had maintained his flat stare.

  ‘No,’ he said. Paused for thought. ‘And no again. Go ahead. Let’s do coffee.’

  Which they did. Then Shard had excused himself, heading for the rest room, from which he did not return. He’d settled the bill, too, as Stoner discovered a little later. An unsettling experience. Stoner finished the job, made the hit, fulfilled the contract and was duly paid for it. Of Shard there had been no further sign. Until now.

  Stoner’s cell phone buzzed and flashed its idiot message. He continued to ignore it. Drank coffee. Offered more coffee to his guest, who sat, still naked, gleaming across the table from him.

  The nakedness was a display, as it so often is. A demonstration of total confidence. Of unconcern. A reminder of shared times in a barracks. In the field. In faraway lands. Over distant oceans and under strange skies. As well as the disingenuous, disarming, unarmed innocence, nakedness was a distraction. Stoner was undistracted. He had seen it all before. And he understood that Shard was his match in close combat, if not more than a match.

  Asking questions revealed more about the knowledge of the person doing the asking than it was likely to uncover, so Stoner poured more, sat back and smiled. There were no threats.

  ‘Do we do small talk now, you and me?’ Shard smiled right back at him, amused innocence on prominent display. ‘Here I am, wearing just Brut and charisma, and you’re going crazy with the wonder of it all. Penis envy is a marvellous thing. You’re still stuck on that handsome tart of yours.’

  It was not a question. It was a provocation, a gentle one. Stoner was unprovoked. Men’s bodies were no mystery and held little interest. Shard was very fit, very strong, very deadly. Phones sang out. Several of them. For the briefest of moments, Shard’s attention wandered. Stoner was encouraged. He could have taken Shard at that point. He smiled.

  ‘Hidden your cell in a private space? Should I look away?’

  Shard smiled right back.

  ‘That will be everyone trying to catch both of us. Your friend will be warning you that I’m on the loose and my friend will be telling me that you’re nowhere near that club. Or we’ve both won the lotto. Wouldn’t that be fine?’

  Stoner sat. Shard sat. Cell phones sang a conflicting chorus, as harmonising as their owners. The phones went quiet. Then another called, a different signature tune this time.

  ‘JJ, delightful though it is to drop by and share your hyper-activity brew, we do need to talk about our bodies.’

  ‘Yours is exquisite. You should be proud of it. I would be. So would your mother, bless her and all who came in her. It is a tribute to the power of mindless exercise.’ Stoner smiled a crocodile smile. An air of assumed weariness settled like a predictable cloud over Shard’s features, but relax he did not.

  ‘Thank you. Thank you. Peer approval is always welcome. We both have a body. Well, to be less imprecise, I have a body and your pet plods have another. Cheerless Charlie – your best mate at the moment, I believe – wants you to find out who’s offed yours. We may have a problem. We may have a conflict of interests. Or we may not. Either way, these things deserve a resolution. I am, JJ, offering a co-operative approach to this.’

  Stoner gazed at his uninvited guest, his expression as blank as years of studious development could make it. Shard waited for a response, saw none approaching, carried on.

  ‘I think I’m being set up for this. I can’t tell you the reason at this point, but when you start digging – and you are an excellent digger, credit where it’s due – you will find a road leading to my door. That’s a false trail, a red heading or a dead herring, something like that. Make your own joke. There is an intention to bring us into conflict. I can think of several reasons for this and I can think of several folk in whose interests it would be.’

  ‘Care to share this?’ Stoner’s interest was steady.

  ‘Not if I can avoid it. Can we do the trust thing, you and me?’

  A pause. Stoner stretched the silence and then snapped it.

  ‘That is so tempting. It would be so easy to believe we share a motive. Sharing resources can only be good for us both. But it’s not a trade, my friend. I have nothing to offer you. You are no kindly benefactor; you give nothing away. Nor would I. I’d like to believe that your offer is sincere, but if I made it I doubt that it would be. We’re not that different, you and I. What would you hear if I made the offer to you?’

  Stoner, stood, stretched to tiptoe, walked to the coffee and poured more for them both. Set about making a fresh pot. Familiar, relaxed movement of the hands disguising the tension of his thinking.

  ‘Listen some more, JJ. Your big chief is presenting this to you as just another enquiry. Find him a hitter and he’ll give you a fat fee and be nice to the wife and family. That sort of thing. You will find the hitter is me. Well . . . you’re likely to uncover enough clues to convince you to suggest to himself that I am doing the deeds. Which – and this is true – I’m not.

  ‘My suspicion is that you’ll get your fat cheque at that point and that very bad man will arrange a hit of his own; me as the target. That would be more than inconvenient. I don’t know how many events you’re looking at so far, but you will eventually – OK, quite quickly – find out that I can be placed near the scene of several hits. All uncredited and increasingly messy. “No no!” you’ll cry, “Shard doesn’t do messy”, which is true, but your boss will take it to his masters anyway and they will reach out to me. Not convenient at all. It would be unwelcome, unusually unwelcome. It would interfere with a long job, and I don’t want that. You following this?’

  Stoner was. Following conspiracies is usually easy enough for paranoids.

  ‘You’re telling me that I will find your trail, start following your scent. You will observe that this is happening, take exception to it, and arrange an incident for me. A debilitating incident?’

  ‘Yep. Despite your decent approximation of a good cup of coffee, I would have to act, because the disproving would interfere with a more important venture. Fatally interfere with it, I think. You don’t have to believe me, JJ, but I would not be enthusiastic about debilitating you. I have no reason to lie. Unless I killed you, you would in any case come back after me, and life is far too sweet for that.’

  ‘A heads-up, then? Should I believe you? Trust you?’ A moment of tension. Stoner had placed the empty mug by the coffee maker, leaned against the counter, his back to his companion. Small silence. The silence pressured slowly, as did the tension. The coffee maker hissed, joining in. Stoner straightened, reached for the pot and poured. ‘More? Another cup?’

  The sound of an empty mug sliding along a table top, reaching exactly to the edge but no further.

  ‘It is good coffee. Believe who you like and trust who you like. Trust your instinct and believe your interest. It makes no odds. I’m only telling you what’s in my interests for you to know. My instinct tells me that you will catch a scent soon enough, and you will mistake that scent for my very own spicy odour. And inconsistencie
s, subtle side-aromas, you will consider to be my own efforts to put you off my own scent . . . and so on. Down that long road lies madness and conflict. A conflict between the two of us is no use. Tell it straight, Stoner; I don’t know who would walk away from that. Neither do you. Correct me if I’m wrong in this. It’s a long time since we did the dick-waving angry thing, but memory – not perfect I know, but generally reliable – reminds me that it was not fun and it was not profitable.’

  Stoner poured. Returned the cup. Stripped off his tee and leapt for the rafter, the same rafter from which Shard had hung himself to dry an hour earlier. Shard watched with a half smile. Stoner strung together a half-dozen brisk pull-ups, repeated them using his right arm alone, then his left arm. Swung himself down, stripped off shorts and showered. Shard applauded, slowly.

  ‘A one-hand clap for a one-arm bandit. That was very good. Good strong legs.’

  Stoner towelled down, pulled on fresh clothes, loose black cargo pants, loose black Transportation Station T-shirt, tight knee-high socks. Looked across at Shard and threw him another tee, same logo. ‘Have a dry shirt on me. Wear it to confuse our enemies. Who are who, as you’re in a sharing mood?’

  ‘Did I tell you how much I like your fortress of solitude, hey, Mister Stoner, sir?’ Shard was pacing around the unit. Touching nothing, observing everything on display. Padding barefoot, carrying coffee. ‘Always thought it was a good idea. Everyone should have one. More than one, really. And your bike in the living room, too. Very stylish. This the batbike, huh? Press button B and the booster blasters boot you into orbit; that sort of thing?’ He was standing by the black Harley-Davidson, slipping his feet into running shoes, shrugging on the free T-shirt.

  ‘It would need a battery. But yes of course. We’re all comic book heroes today, no? Comic book villains tomorrow. Great things to fiddle with. Fiddling aids the thinking, as my old mum might have said.’

  ‘Like running. Like sitting all night out in the rain on your big black bike, watching the water slide down the paint, spitting and boiling on the engine. Christ, JJ; how much thinking time do you need?’

  ‘Forgot to ask my old mum that. Sorry. Where are your elders and betters when you need them?’

  Shard smiled, grimly. ‘Someone is stitching me up. But it’s dafter than that. Someone – probably the same someone – stitched you up. Set you up for me to find as the operator in a hit about a month back. Nasty job. The mark died slowly and badly. Guts on the floor and him watching them twitch and dry. That sort of thing. Not a pleasant way to end things. Couldn’t see you doing that.

  ‘So it’s a double game. You fit the geography and the time frames, but not the MO, not the character of the killing. You know how it works. We sit and we sift our way through who’s where and who’s when and whether they’re contracting to any of the usual buyers and – guess what? – you’re in more or less that place at more or less that time, and the hit is someone your usual buyers would want their usual hitter to delete for them. But the MO is not you. Be a bad day for us all when you turn sadist. Cause a lot of head-scratching and soul-searching in our tiny little introverted world.

  ‘Meanwhile, your boss hauls you in to investigate a series. Increasingly messy, decreasingly sane hits. Have a look at these, he tells you, and you do. Then you go and consult the mighty timetables of our lives and discover, lordy-lord-lord, I’m in town every time. If I’m a lucky man, you then step back and ask the big Why question. Not why have I done the jobs, because the answer to that is always the same for all of us because we’re all the same; for the money. But why the mess? And if I’m especially lucky, you’ll come seek me out and you’ll sit me down and allow me to poison you slowly with some excitingly dreadful alleged instant coffee and we’ll talk it though.

  ‘But if I’m not lucky. Or if you’ve had another near-fatal fight with your girlfriend, the sweetly professional sex goddess, and if you’re feeling very sore at the world you might just notify your boss and take me out. Or seek me out and arrange a forced confrontation, which is much the same, hardly survivable for us both, being who we are and what we do.

  ‘And I didn’t want that. Because there’s something going on. If you took me on or if I took you on . . . there are only so many of us doing this, Stoner. Only a few. We know everyone between us, pretty much at least, so we know who’s playing the piper in this song and dance.’

  ‘It’s paying the piper, not playing him. Don’t you know your Shakespeare? But I do hear you. I hear what you’re saying, and it might make some sense. But not a lot of sense. Seems unreal to ask you this, matey, but why are you spooked? I wouldn’t force anything. If I thought you were doing the hitting I’d tell the boss and he’d do whatever he does. I don’t take on hits any more, anyway. I do music, me; sweet blues music. And I find things when I’m asked.’

  Stoner pumped the pedal of the hydraulic lift his motorcycle was sitting on and raised it so the engine was at eye level. Slid open a drawer of the tool chest and removed a socket. Hooked it onto the engine’s drain plug, removed it and watched the oil flow into a pan.

  ‘Shouldn’t the oil be hot before you drain it?’ Shard sounded interested and vaguely knowledgeable. ‘You mechanics are all the same; never do unto yourselves what you preach unto others.’

  Stoner looked distracted. ‘The engine’s never run on this oil.’

  ‘So you’re draining it? Why?’

  Amusement sped across both faces at the same time: ‘To give you thinking time!’

  ‘Exactly.’ Stoner stood back, replaced the tool in the drawer and closed the chest.

  ‘The oil in the Transporter needs changing, but you would have considered it impolite if I’d suddenly dived underneath that. Added to which, the Harley is better looking than the VW. How many more hits do you think there’ve been from this . . . competitor?’

  Stoner looked around for an answer, but Shard was striding towards the back door, cell phone against his ear, listening intently. He turned at the door. ‘OK for me to leave this way, JJ?’

  He didn’t wait for a reply, simply silently unlocked the door and was gone. The door closed again, also silently. The odour of engine oil provided an all-male accent to the pervasive cloud of coffee.

  Stoner’s cell phone called him again. He picked it up, flicked it open, observed how popular he was. Voicemail, the screen advised him, he had a-waiting. A-plenty, too. Press 121, it suggested, and he would become privy to its secrets. He did that. The Hard Man was brief at first. ‘Call me now,’ he had instructed some hours ago. The next two messages were the same. Then there was a string of no-message messages. Finally: ‘Harding is looking for you. You need to know that Harding is looking for you. He is looking for you with a view to terminating the relationship between you. Arm up.’ Which was strong stuff indeed for the Hard Man.

  There was no message from the dirty blonde. Not a one.

  Stoner poured the last of the coffee down a sink and set about preparing some weak, fragrant and mostly unappetising floral tea. The ritual gave him yet more time to think. Futures are long and varied. There are many more of them than anyone can ever understand. Shard had no reason to lie; few reasons even to admit an interest other than those he’d supplied.

  Hauling the same wrench he’d used to drain the oil from the motorcycle, Stoner re-fitted and re-tightened its drain plug. He poured the clean, unused oil back into the tank. Motorcycles are like guns; the more you strip them, the more you service them, the more you clean them, the more you learn about them, the more they reward your care with reliability, dependability of their own. Lives are like guns; reliability is never underrated, never overvalued. And everyone has but one life, even mystics and musicians. You can share your soul with the devil, but that bad man will always let you down.

  14

  THE WHITE ROOM

  ‘You do look interesting.’

  Dave Reve looked up at the suddenly twin reflections in the mirror behind the bar. The female reflection spoke again.
/>
  ‘I’m Chas. Who’re you?’

  Chas beamed at Dave in reflection. He gazed back, natural caution disguising itself as shyness; a well-worn technique. Flicked a hand at the browsing barman, two spaced fingers, more stylised horns than obscene instruction, and fixed the gaze into a smile. Too early for beaming. Too early in several senses.

  ‘Dave. Marry me and we become Chas and Dave. We could perform appalling English pub songs on a detuned piano. It would be the making of us. Generations of the drunk would sober instantly and leave their bars as we entered the room. Closet millionaires would share their millions for a promise that we would never again sing in their company. Questions of state would be asked whenever we performed, the UN would sit in emergency jam sessions and nations would go to war to avoid listening to us. The space race would be re-started as there would quite suddenly be a reason to put interstellar distance between humanity and ourselves. It would be an amazing thing, and I would ask you to consider it very seriously.

  ‘There are of course a couple of insects in the smooth liquid of this potential future. Firstly I’m a policeman, not one of the generically laughing kind, and secondly I am a married policeman. Whether that blissful domestic situation has any connection to the lack of professional laughter in my life I could not say. Should not say. Will not say until we’re better acquainted. Which I fear to be inevitable.’

  Chas slid down from the bar-chair and walked in a wide circle around the bar and its drinking inhabitants. She returned to her seat and sat again. She picked up the bottle of Bud which had landed before her and sliced the soaked label in an exact half with her thumbnail.