A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  A set of descending triplets and she was quite suddenly back at the microphone, back face-to-face with the audience, who were by now stamping and stomping and even clapping a little as six-string Fender and four-string Rickenbacker snapped their waves of rhythms together.

  ‘If the river was whiskey . . .’ Bili beamed at a regular who had threaded his way to the bar, recognising where the song was leading. ‘And I was a diving duck . . .’ She bobbed her head, walked back a few paces, leaving more room to swing the long bass neck again, completing the verse and hammering halfway into the next one with the instrument talking instead of her voice. Stoner smiled and scouted the edge of the stage, half-wondering whether more instruments would be joining them. Not this time.

  Halfway into the verse, then: ‘I’d swim right to the bottom, Drink myself back up.’ The small woman and the big guitar bounced together through another verse of purely improvised duet with Stoner watching, listening and waiting for his cue for some closing chords. None came.

  ‘That’s it!’ Bili just stopped.

  Stoner stared wide-eyed. He’d stopped at exactly the same moment, unbidden and for no reason he could understand. Utterly and unconsciously in tune with his companion. Where there had been a bouncing, rollicking beat of blues there was now the silence. Followed by a pause . . . then the applause. Followed by Bili accepting a bow and a multiple measure of spirits from a hand in the audience.

  ‘Why do they come here?’ Stoner was laboriously pretending to re-tune his Fender. ‘It’s bloody noisy sometimes. Can’t hear to tune this bloody thing. Not that anyone would notice . . .’

  ‘It’s the cheap beer.’ Bili beamed at the audience who’d supplied a long drink. Bili beamed, the audience looked away, flattered but a little sheepish, too. It’s as though they had made an offering to a minor deity of some kind, only for the godling to pay attention, look up and say thanks. That never happens in religion, making music a better bet for those of a generous and worshipful disposition.

  ‘I do believe that it is the sheer art of it all.’ Stoner leaned back against his stool and watched carefully as Stretch eased himself into the piano player’s seat. Stretch was a big man, but delicate and subtle with his hands. He lifted heavy eyes across the piano’s scratched lid, and breathed heavily into the open microphone above his keyboard.

  ‘They come, my man, for inspiration. They come from a world of desperation and despair, keen to share with the Cube’s bright and optimistic vision of a future powered entirely by the blues and the booze. A world . . . they seek a world where all that matters is that the booze flows and the blues follows it, faithful, like a hound. Faithful, like love following beauty. Faithful . . .’

  ‘Christ!’ Bili pointed the long slim neck of her bass at the wide pianist. ‘Are you going to peddle philosophy? I bet these guys chose to pay us a visit to learn familiarity and understanding of the piano hammerer’s take on the world. Christ, man, they’d get more sense from . . .’ she paused for effect ‘. . . from a drummer.’

  ‘A drummer?’ Stretch and Stoner chorused like the well-practised act they were, while the former kicked off into an instrumental version of a tune so often stolen and plagiarised by generations of jazz club musicians that no one could be certain what the words were until someone started singing them. No one sang. Bili and Stoner chugged along following the piano’s leadership and the audience forgot whatever it was they were escaping, avoiding and evading by sitting and sharing expensive drinks in a grubby club late into the night.

  Stretch shifted key twice and the guitars followed. Shifted time signature twice, unannounced, and they followed that too. The audience shared the stormy passage. Stretch started to sing, in the wrong key for his voice but with considerable force; ‘There is . . . a house . . . in New Orleans’. Got no further than that; the key was perfect for Bili and she picked up at the second line, howling the verses through slitted watering eyes while the piano ground through its chording and Stoner appeared to drift. He picked up a pint glass of tap water from beside his stool and sank it all, raised the empty vessel to his companions and relieved Bili of the lead spot. It’s a good tune to jam to, for guitars and pianos and almost anything else, and the jam lasted for a half hour, shifting key once more before it returned home and Bili howled the last verse as though she really meant it, as might have been the case.

  The audience added their own appreciation, and applauded Stretch as he took a bow and introduced both himself and his venue and his fellow musicians.

  ‘Now walk’, he instructed them. ‘Now is the time for a little ivory magic.’

  And so he proved it to be.

  Bili headed off to the table of the free drinks provider, who shot comically to his feet, bursting with surprise and delight to be so honoured. Stoner laid his Fender into its case, wiped down the strings, and walked to the bar.

  ‘Your boss,’ announced the Chimp, the perfect bartender, ‘is not your friend. He leaves you messages. They are not sweet little love notes. Increasingly they are not. I have promised him that should you appear, no matter what the hour and no matter your condition, I will demand that you call him. Immediately and at once. If not sooner. Do you have a problem?’

  Stoner shook his head. ‘No more than the usual. Missing persons, you know how it is.’

  Chimp did not, of course, although he may have suspected. ‘Even for him, quiet man that he is not, he is being insistent. Not aggressive, but that condition is approaching fast, I think. Call him. Why not?’

  ‘Why not? How long have you got? How many reasons would you like?’ Stoner waved a hand towards the bar. ‘A drink while I think? Anything will do. Water would be best. Water makes lions strong, y’know. Failing that, whisky runs it a decent second. Has a package landed here for me? Maybe something you needed to sign for? Addressed to me? Looking – y’know – important? Personal? For me?’

  The Chimp shrugged his shoulders, shook his head, handed over a padded bag, and reached for an industrially proportioned bottle of sparkling water. ‘“Water is the strong stuff. It carries whales and ships . . .”’

  ‘“But water is the wrong stuff, don’t let it get past your lips.”’ Stoner knew the same song. As indeed did Bili, who had appeared at his side. ‘“It rots your boots and wets your suits, puts aches in all your bones; dilute the stuff with whisky, aye, or leave it well alone,”’ they chorused, to the bemusement of customers, audience and musicians alike.

  Glasses clinked. Bili spat out her first mouthful. ‘It’s bloody water!’

  ‘Of course it is. Stoner has a call to make.’

  Stoner tipped a cell phone, a note and some spare batteries from the bag into his hand. He sighed, read the note, sighed once more and dropped phone and batteries into a pocket.

  Bili turned to him. ‘The blonde? Your blushless paramour? A new romance? Your new fan from last night is here somewhere. At least she was a moment ago. Where, where, where she gone?’ Bili pointed at a bottle. It was uncertain exactly which of the many she was pointing at. ‘Fill me up, o Chimp. Make my life complete. The muse for my blues comes from a bottle. Like a genie. Rub, rub, rub, pour, pour, pour and kabam! Express solos are us. The blonde, JJ? She running you around as usual? I wish she would stop that. Or that you would stop trailing after like that two-dicked dog.’

  ‘Nah. Not her. The boss. Knickers twisted into more than their usual knot.’

  ‘You know why? If it’s urgent maybe you should call.’

  Chimp had gone back to keeping bar, Bili was acting as temporary conscience.

  Stoner sipped. ‘Another missing person. Thing is, I don’t know why he’s pestering. I’ve done no real work on this yet – although I did agree that I would. Wheels in motion, vague stuff like that. He knows that but is still pestering. Not like him, truly.’

  Stoner maintained a legend; a nebulously vague but consistent story that he was a private investigator who specialised in finding missing folk. He was never specific. Never entirely honest, but never
entirely dishonest, either. And he was a fairly private man anyway. So folk tended not to ask. It is a minor oddity of folk in general that they are more usually curious about themselves than about others. Very often, when they quiz nosily into another’s affairs it is a competition thing. They want to see where they fit. They want confirmation that they are successful in whichever parts of their lives they value, and a way of confirming their supposed success is to delve into the lives of others and run a comparison. Sometimes out loud, depending upon their levels of self-confidence and intoxication. Stoner almost always deliberately failed in comparisons of this kind. He rarely competed with most other men. Most other men had nothing, did nothing, he would value, so he was unrewarding in competitive conversation.

  And he could . . . and would . . . talk for as long as anyone could want on his favourite subjects. Although most men know that a Harley-Davidson is a large American motorcycle, and that a Fender Stratocaster is a guitar, and that the blues is a kind of music, few of them could compete with Stoner’s considerable knowledge on those subjects. So they usually retreated to discussing politics, football, beer and women, at which point Stoner could always pretend ignorance.

  ‘So call him. Cut the crap out of the way and we can stretch some strings, hey?’ Bili often talked sense, even when her grip on the real world was compromised by alcoholic intake.

  Stoner dug the new cell phone from pocket and flicked it to life. Nothing. Not a glimmer. He dug a battery from the pocket and fitted it, causing snorts from his companion.

  ‘Wow, JJ! What kind of super-asshole takes the battery out of their phone! Man! You worried about those black helicopters?’

  Stoner rolled his eyes, thumbed the button to call the only number in the phone’s address book. It was picked up at once. Stoner walked steadily and with deliberation to the rear exit, his favourite entrance, too, but doors work both ways.

  ‘Where’ve you been? Never mind. You’re where? At the club? OK. No need to leave. Just important to know where you are.’ The Hard Man viewed his troops as pieces on a board and moved them impersonally sometimes. ‘There’s another fucking body. It’s getting insane. Can you hear me yet?’

  Stoner had left the raucous environs of the club, the door had swung closed and only city background chatter interfered with the one-sided conversation.

  ‘It’s a cop this time. Another hotel. You can’t go look yet, so enjoy your evening. It’s someone we know, I think. Not so messy but more personal.’

  ‘A cop?’ Stoner was surprised. Killing police was usually so counterproductive from any criminal’s perspective that it was a rare event. ‘Who was it? Where?’

  ‘Near Oxford. Nice of you to be in touch. One question: you keeping this phone switched on or do I need to send someone to collect you?’

  Stoner agreed to leave his pocketful of electronics in an active condition, and they both hung up. There was no obvious winner in the hang-up race, either.

  A click.

  A metallic mechanistic click. A mechanism.

  Stoner slipped to the wall. Into shadow. No weaponry to hand. No sense of presence. No clue that he was not alone in the yard. Internal flinching as he recognised that he was not watching. Had not been watching. Caught. Unawares. The light click; a safety catch. He tensed in his shadow. The light click; again. This time the lighter lit and it flared and it lit its target cigarette. In the brief bright flare he saw a tall woman. Blonde, very blonde. Then all he could see was the dim glow of the cigarette.

  ‘Nice playing, mister music man.’ The blonde voice matched the hair. ‘You do your reputation no harm.’

  Shadows shifted and pooled, the haze from the doorway and the scattering of starlight did the view no good at all. None at all.

  Stoner was not at ease. He could not have missed her leaving the club to enter the yard behind him. He could not have missed her entering the yard from the silent street. He was neither deaf nor blind, simply dangerously distracted, which was as bad as a combination of the other two. Or she had been there through the whole of his phone conversation. He silently eased further into shadow. A woman who could move cat-silent was a concern. He could see an outline behind the leading light of the cigarette. Which did not phase in its brightness. It was not being smoked. It was an announcement, then. A marker. Perhaps.

  ‘Oh. Thanks. OK . . .’

  The bar door opened, the dark was damaged and Stoner’s retreat into platitude was shattered by Bili’s eruption from the door and her flight across the yard to its centre, where she stopped. The door closed. Darkness blinded again.

  There was no cigarette glow. None.

  ‘Hey hey, JJ.’ Bili was turning slowly on her feet, arms stretched wide as a tightrope walker. Her eyes gleamed a little with reflected starlight. Stoner wondered how that could be when he had been utterly unaware of the other woman, the blonde woman, the smoking woman. He slid to Bili’s side, tapping her shoulder from behind. She span, and fell against him. He caught her of course. And there they stood. Silent. Motionless. Daring to breathe. Staring. The light in the sky was the light in her eyes. Stoner found her beauty intolerable. She hung from him, turned her face up to his, eyes reflecting the infinity above. He leaned lower, kissed the top of her head. Slowly. For a while.

  ‘We making more music, babe? You calling me back inside?’

  Bili looked silently into him, turned, and with a ‘Yeah. Whatever . . .’ trailed back to the door. Her silent body slouched, displaying whole unspoken chapters of misunderstandings in its own unmistakeable language. Stoner watched her walking away from him.

  The blues come from the heart, straight from the heart – sometimes.

  19

  HELLO DARKNESS . . .

  ‘The geometry of violence has always been a particular fascination.’

  Stoner slipped into the shadows, silent, listening, feeling for the dark.

  No outward signs of intrusion. No lights where there should be no lights; no darknesses where darknesses were abnormal; none darker than they should have been. Stoner’s tradecraft was endless, relentless, excellent and plainly inadequate. The clue had been olfactory. No sight, no sound out of place. Until the short speech, delivered with humour. No menace. Stoner sank into a squat beneath the vague haze from the blacked-out window which was leaking a little light for exactly this situation. The shadow was deep, deeper against a faint haze of light than on its own. Contrasts could be killers. He sat in a comfortable squat, easy, relaxed. He knew the voice, was unthreatened by the voice. But unsettled by its presence. Here.

  ‘People always study the causes, the effects, the reasons, the results, techniques and consequences. Only easterners recognise the potential beauty in the unique opportunities of violence.’

  The trigger had been an aroma, the alarm intended to both reassure and unbalance.

  Stoner stood up, slipped silently into the shadow at the side of the dim window. Spoke, then squatted once more.

  ‘You brought your own blend, friend? This is serious stuff. And you even took time to grind it.’ He injected a tone of awe into his voice. Delivery otherwise flat and even. Unhurried and unworried.

  A single light clicked. A reading light illuminated Stoner’s favourite reading chair. Shard sat motionless facing him. One hand held palm-out, the other holding a beaker. He was unsmiling as well as unmoving, and he looked exhausted.

  ‘Pax, JJ. And an apology for the intrusion. The coffee is a gift, and there’s a kilo of beans less a single cup. We need more talking. And we need to reach an understanding.’

  ‘What was that crap about geometry?’ Stoner stalked grimly into the light. ‘Anyone else here I should know about? Your funny friends with garrottes and the Geronimo approach to relationships? Shouldn’t you have brought a box of almost inedible chocolates?’

  Shard remained seated, in as unthreatening a pose as he could manage. Stoner continued; ‘And how did you break in? I’ll need to fix that.’

  ‘You will. I didn’t break anything,
although I am about to. Break something. Break a trust. I entered through the front door, and I used a key.’

  ‘I do have a problem, then.’ Stoner stalked in thought to the coffee tackle. Measured beans. Ground beans. Boiled water.

  ‘You do. Do you run to a refill? It is good, and it wasn’t cheap.’ Shard was holding out the beaker. His expression was too serious to be threatening. Stoner walked to him.

  ‘Care to share? Care to show me something like . . . respect for my place? And your presence in it? Without my invite. Old friend?’

  ‘Catch.’ Shard threw the empty beaker.

  Stoner left it to fall to the carpet.

  No splash. No drip. Shard stood, shuffled legs out wide apart, raised arms level with his shoulders; Michelangelo Man made flesh. ‘More than that?’

  Stoner nodded. Shard stripped, completely, unhurried and not unhappy. Reached for the beam in the centre of the room and commenced slow, rhythmic pull-ups.

  ‘No excitement, JJ. No thrills.’

  And that much was clear. The prospect of violence, of harm, of physical action had always been an arouser to Shard, and aroused he was not. His body art mocked Stoner; rippling with no life of its own yet appearing amused, inked eyes following him.

  ‘Do you feel the need for a cavity search, JJ, or can I drop back to earth and sup a little more of my rather splendid coffee?’ Shard appeared heroically unflustered by the idea of a cavity search.

  Stoner turned away, returned to the coffee. ‘You started taking milk yet? Cream? Sugar?’ No reply. None needed. He turned back to Shard, now dressed and decent, handed over a fresh beaker of the hot stuff. Both men drank.

  ‘My problem, then. How bad is it?’ Stoner welcomed the fizz of the caffeine, and was thinking fast. He leaned into a tall chair, set the beaker down on a table and lifted a guitar from its rack. ‘Who? When? And most importantly, why?’ He fingered some chords but sounded no strings. Thinking. Watching. Waiting.

  ‘I have no secrets from you in this,’ Shard spoke flatly, a monotone intended to conceal nothing, although concealment and revelation were both untruths in hands as expert as his. ‘You are being set up.’ The emphasis was slight but the active verb had it. Stoner nodded.