A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1)

by Frank Westworth

  First one, then two of his cell phones lit up in the half-darkness. He stood still, ignored them, watching and waiting. Took another phone from the leg pocket of his cargoes. It was silent and unlit. No missed calls. No more shots. Nothing from the phones. The motorcycle shone, a darkly shining show of its own. He moved around the room, listening, watching the windows for interruptions to their patterns of light and dark.

  Exactly the wrong thing to do at this moment would be to go outside, to investigate. Another wrong thing to do would be to do nothing, nursing concern and providing a home for worry. He fixed his gaze upon the motorcycle, letting his eyes wander over its many familiar mechanisms while his ears ran loose and random, seeking a message from beyond his walls. None came.

  The phone in his hand shook silently and its screen lit.

  Shard. He lifted it to his ear.

  ‘Did you feel it?’

  Stoner grunted. He enjoyed many games, especially those involving wit and wiles, but in their own place at the right time. This was not that time.

  ‘Feel what?’

  ‘The passage of an angel.’

  Cryptic, even for Shard, who sounded far from his best. Sounded breathless. Tired. Not running but showing every audible sound of a man who has run very fast and very recently. Stoner said nothing, tapped the mouthpiece rapidly twice to show that his silence had a purpose beyond simple antisocial behaviour. Shard caught that. His breathing was slowing, so no injury insult there.

  ‘You have a guardian angel watching over you. He passed close by and now is gone. Can I come in or are you coming out? It’s clear out here. I think.’

  An odd admission. It was either clear or it was not. Shard would know. Should know. If Shard was unsure then the safest place could be inside. On the other hand, rats get caught in traps, rarely in the open.

  ‘I’ll see you. Blue van. In five.’ Stoner hung up. The blue van was a Parkside fixture. It looked derelict, unwelcoming, although its tyres remained miraculously inflated, and its windows miraculously unbroken, its doors impenetrably locked.

  ‘Very good indeed. Very, very good.’ Shard looked tired. Sounded stressed. ‘Watching you. How did he know who you are? And if he knew who you are, and he could only have known that if he’d been told, how did he know where you are? No one follows you, JJ, you are the most paranoid man on the planet, and if you’d been followed you’d know you’d been followed. If you led them here then you intended to lead them here. Am I missing something? You playing me for a fool? Playing a game you’re not sharing? No prob with that; you want me gone, just say it.’

  The two men sat in the silent, closed dark of the blue van’s interior. It was dull, damp and smelled derelict, a faint odour of long-ago death lingered, providing a vague psychic sense of unease and disquiet.

  They sat on silent swivel seats behind the two front seats; rearward-facing seats made for watching, unobserved. Seats from which the occupants could see without much risk of being seen. The blue van was a lookout post. An inconspicuous, almost invisible, tired Transporter van of a certain age and anonymity. Unremarkable. Not worth a first glance, never mind a second, better look. Certainly not worth stealing. Not that such a theft would have been an easy undertaking, given that the blue van’s ignition system was a thing of minor wonder and a certain robust complexity. The last person to break into it had died in it. Maybe car thieves could detect the lingering confused spirit of their departed brethren, and maybe they couldn’t, but no one had tried since that unhappy day, long ago though it was. The would-be thief had died quickly, as was Stoner’s preferred approach to such things, but his remains had shared the blue van’s interior for some time. Which may have added to the vague odour of death which lingered. Stoner occasionally wondered whether the odour was noticeable to anyone who was unaware of the thief’s passing, but he wasn’t wondering that now.

  ‘I have a watcher?’ Stoner’s query was quiet. He was thinking. He asked again. ‘How? I’ve not been followed here. Not unless someone is very, very good.’

  He adopted a consistent approach to followers. As soon as he became aware of the tail he led them with enthusiasm. He led his followers to watch depressing Scandinavian monochrome movies, desperate domestics a particular preference. He led them for expensive meals in appalling restaurants, and on occasion he led them to galleries packed with art of the most catastrophic kind, the kind which would have made anybody sensitive doubt their sanity. On one particularly favourite day he had led a grimly suited and unsmiling woman to a display of art featuring female sex organs displayed in utterly mysterious but certainly unpleasant ways, and had stood stationary, apparently transfixed by a hideous image of genital mutilation, for over an hour.

  The watchers inevitably lost their faith or discovered another, and then Stoner reversed their roles, following them in their turn to discover their own basic secret; who was paying them to follow him and, preferably, the reason for their interest. The creative use of sensitive paranoia can never be over-stressed as a tool of this trade. But he had not been followed, of that he was as sure as he could be.

  ‘They followed you, Shard. No other way.’

  But Shard shook his head slowly.

  ‘Nope. Not unless they’re psychic. Your guardian angel was here before me. Whoever he warned away arrived after me, sure, but not by my route. I came by bicycle, me, and they came and left by car. I think that’s how it went.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yup. Eggs is eggs. Stuff like that.’

  ‘And it was a warning shot? How come?’

  ‘Warning two shots. Anyone who can find this place, who can watch you without being seen by you, and who wants to watch you not kill you . . . that person is competent in the extreme, and that person does not miss. That person is in the game with us, knows who we are and what we do. What they don’t know is what we don’t know either and we all need to find that out.

  ‘Nope. The shots cleared away someone else. Your most secret hidey-hole is turning itself into a regular Times Square, endless coming and going. And you’re really getting slack, JJ, if you were aware of none of this. Did you know I was here? Had I magically landed in your own private hideaway unseen, unheard and . . . unknown? As well as the intruder and the angel? Have you really lost the edge?’

  ‘Negatives on all counts. I’m not so slack. I felt observed . . . but it’s getting so that I feel that way all the time. I need a holiday. A quiet life. I need to be loved. Think I’ll go on a cruise. Tell me what you saw?’

  ‘Nothing. Patterns in the leaves. Heard it all. Arrived, hung the bike from a tree. Took a scout, like you do. Movement patterns in the leaves around your shed; patterns closing in. One, maybe two. No more than that, and not expert . . . not as expert as us. No way as expert as the shooter, who fired once. Odd echo. Non-directional, no flying foliage. Shot straight up, I’d guess. Patterns all ended. Much listening. Everybody’s listening. A world of calm and quiet; you did things with the lights in there.

  ‘Second shot. Same handgun, same non-directionality. One, maybe two, people left. One person followed, but that guy is very good. Proper tracker. No tracks. We’ll find the other guy’s traces, but not the second. Very good.’

  ‘And now?’ Stoner was not enjoying this conversation at all. Not a word of it.

  ‘Now we’re being watched again. Betcha. You feel it too, no?’

  Stoner nodded. ‘Why, though?’

  ‘Who you pissed off? Who’re you . . . umm . . . we working for? No jealous husband this, JJ. No breathless groupie. You’re being protected, man. You. You of all people. Fair boggles the mind, that does. Who would want to protect you right at the this time, and why? You’re looking for a hit man, a slicer, a head cutter-offer. It really does look like someone wants you to find him. So your watcher, protector, is a friend. A friend good enough and scary enough to scare off anyone getting near.’

  ‘I’m just working for the man, the same man. Same as ever these days. You know that. You’re .
. . well, you’re doing what you’re doing and we’re supposed to be looking for the same thing. This dickhead headchopper killer. We’re doing the seeking thing, not playing at being targets, right? And in truth I’m struggling with the whole thing anyway. There are signs, there are signals, all the usual crap, but truth is that if it wasn’t for the bodies I’d think this was just some ruse to set me up for the long fall. And that has been a long time coming, to be fair.

  ‘And ask this: this protector of yours – nice theory by the way – this hero lets you pass by? Or is he not as good as you and doesn’t spot your subtle camouflage as an elf on a bicycle or a tree sprite or whatever you’re meant to be dressed up in Lycra to look like. Tree sprite. I do like that. But it doesn’t dodge the question. Why let you all the way to me, but not the mysterious unknowns? Or . . . another question for you, Sherlock the cyclist; was the watcher protecting the second lot from you and me? You’d already seen them, I would have spotted them at some point long before they were a threat. That said, I would have wanted a serious conversation, not just a fight.’

  Shard was quiet for a while. He took a cell phone from his pocket, lit its screen and read for a moment. Shook his head. Passed the instrument to Stoner, who swore a little. Passed it back.

  ‘Coast clear,’ read the text message. ‘Number withheld.’

  ‘Your phone?’ wondered Stoner.

  ‘Hmmm,’ agreed the younger man. ‘Indeed. Let’s see.’

  He eased open the door nearest the building’s shielding wall and stepped out. Was gone. Stoner followed, walked briskly and openly to the perimeter road and started to run along it. Eased up his pace and ran steadily as one with no care in the world. The old industrial estate showed as little sign of industry as ever. Stoner nodded to a couple of familiar faces as he passed them. This running man was no stranger here, and fellow inhabitants kept their own counsel, minded their own business, as ever. He ran back to his building, let himself in. Tapped his terminal to life, left secure messages for both techno prisoners, contact points both physical and fallback, stressed urgency. Collected keys and left.

  Left as far as reaching the door and reaching for the lights. Stopped. Stood. Listened. Nothing. Nothing out of the ordinary, the predictable. The phone in his leg pocket shook again. He opened it and read it.

  Shard: ‘On my bike.’

  Point made. Or . . . a point avoided. Why was Shard at Parkside anyway? He was supposed to be investigating . . . whatever he was investigating. Or he could have been there to share data face-to-face, which was fine, except he hadn’t. Hadn’t shared anything.

  Shard could have made the whole thing up. Could have fired the shots himself and simply acted a part. That kind of paranoid thinking drives a man to drink. Stoner was too familiar with that; drink was a familiar country, he was no stranger there, nor to its less legal chemical neighbours in intoxication, delirium, denial and destruction.

  The Tasmanian Devil memory stick sat by his laptop. Uncopied. Unread in any great detail. He had been avoiding it – spannering tasks on a motorcycle are excellent displacement activities – when interrupted by the shots and the subsequent mild headfuck of his dealings with Shard, which were reassuring at best, ambivalent at least.

  Changing the transmission oils on most motorcycles is a task often neglected, Stoner considered. Although modern lubricants are of remarkable performance, especially when compared to earlier varieties, they still suffer from a lack of attention on the part of the motorcycle owner. The oils may appear to be as golden and as smooth as the day they were poured into their new metallic homes, but a combination of short rides and long intervals between those rides meant that the oils rarely reached the temperatures they needed to achieve to cleanse themselves of condensation and other undesirable contaminants. Stoner was of course aware of this, and unlike most of his fellow riders he looked forward to an hour of mindless spannering to provide him with thinking time.

  He unbolted the Harley’s transmission drains, after positioning a plastic tray beneath them to catch the released lube, and while the cold, thick, golden oil drained down he sat back to think. Watching oil drain slowly is more relaxing than playing an instrument. An instrument demands much of its player, and playing while thinking and dreaming produces solos as exciting as music for the funerals of the deaf, possibly less exciting than that. He sat back on a stool and watched the oil drain away as the daylight did the same. And he pondered.

  The victims were employees of organisations unfamiliar to him, with the exception of the policeman. Stoner was familiar with the police. He enjoyed a decent relationship with most of their officers most of the time. OK: some of them, some of the time. Mallis had provided job titles for them all, but again they meant little. ‘Chief Operating Officer’ could mean anything. It depended on what the business did to turn its shilling. ‘General Executive Manager’ likewise.

  The Tasmanian Devil did however include details of their bank accounts and the sums which flowed into and ebbed out of those accounts. They made interesting reading, as is so often the case. ‘Cherchez les dollars’, as a sage may once have suggested, and you could certainly find many things, although those things were not always obvious. A common feature of all the accounts was that as well as the regular, presumably salary payments, each of the dead men – and they were indeed all men – received a steady and substantial quarterly payment, which accrued through each of the three years the accounts revealed and were then paid to another account. The same account for them all. Mallis was not usually one to offer suggestions unless invited, but in the case of that account he’d appended a note suggesting that it did not exist. At any rate, it plainly did exist but he and his partner could activate it in no way at all. That account even aggressively refused to allow them to deposit funds into it. Stoner wondered what ‘aggressive’ implied in this context. How can a bank account – a series of numbers controlling other series of numbers – be aggressive about anything? As he watched the last drips of draining oil he decided that he most certainly did need an aggressive bank account. Whatever it was. The Bank Of Aggression. The Mutual Unfriendly Aggression Bank. Great idea. Can’t fail. No one would even attempt to rob it, surely?

  So the dead men were all conduits of some kind.

  Mallis had entrusted the Tasmanian Devil with no suggestions about what kind of organisation was involved, so Stoner sent a message to ask. The reply was swift: the techno prisoners could find out, but it would take a considerable amount of time and involve a considerable level of risk, which is translatable as meaning that the cost of such a seeking would be high . . . higher than usual.

  Stoner was sufficiently intrigued to dig further into the soupy mass of stats and facts encoded within the Tasmanian Devil. The mysterious account was certainly not based in the UK. This was no surprise, underhand banking was a global business and the fact that the prisoners considered it to be non-UK based made Stoner’s criminal mind decide at once that it most likely was in fact UK based. Deceptions inside deceptions. Enough to make the brain hurt.

  The last of the motorcycle’s oil drained into a stationary pool. Stoner dimmed the lights and evening descended, as evenings do.

  26

  FIRST LIGHT, LAST CALL

  No response from the Hard Man. No reply from Shard. Nothing new from the techno prisoners and not a single bleat from the dirty blonde. Stoner sat neglected, frustrated and a little confused. Irritated, also, although he would have denied that.

  Times of tension were always opportunities for enjoyment, either to ride down the road on one of the motorcycles, or stretch a set of six bright strings in the company of friends. In both cases, preparation is the key to delight. He had already and unnecessarily changed some inoffensive oils on the motorcycle he currently favoured for road use, so he turned his attention to his small collection of guitars. The Fender whose strings he preferred to bend was at the Blue Cube, so there was no opportunity for displacement behaviour with that fine instrument. Undaunted, Stoner
fetched a guitar case from a steel cupboard. He paused.

  He kept his guitars in flight cases to protect them from the hard knocks of long-term storage. Damage sustained while in use, while actually being played, that was OK in his musician’s world; damage caused by clumsiness while the guitar was resting between stages was unacceptable. The patina of regular and hard work was valued by electric guitar players to such an extent that the mighty Fender guitar company produced brand new guitars which were factory scratched, scraped and sanded to make them appear worn and played out. This was a mystery to Stoner. His preferred Fender guitar was actually worn and played out. It had been refretted a number of times; three or four, he was unsure. Its once lustrous sunburst finish was scarred on the back by generations of belt buckles. Its tuners were occasionally prone to a little slippage, its control pots to a little electrical leakage, its frets to a little buzzing and its rosewood fingerboard had built up drifts of muck which were a mute to both the strings’ accuracy and to any claims he might have made to being a safe pair of hands for such a rare and valuable – or simply old, depending on your viewpoint – instrument.

  Stoner loved the cantankerous old machine . . . if loving an assembly of woods, wires and plastics is sane. And if ‘love’ is indeed the wrong emotion, then he certainly valued the thing, not least because others ascribed such a mysterious value to guitars like this one that they sold for large amounts of money when they appeared on the market. He suspected that those who paid the high figures rarely played the old instruments, but respected the fact that these high prices made the guitars eminently stealable. He considered it unlikely that anyone either could or would break into Parkside looking for elderly American guitars, but stored them in steel cabinets in case they did.