3 Great Thrillers

by Churton, Alex; Churton, Toby; Locke, John; Lustbader, Eric van; van Lustbader, Eric

  Garner began to walk back the way they had come. “Right. Let’s get back to the interrogation so we can find out.”

  Jack turned, blocked his way. “I won’t let you continue torturing these people.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  Jack flipped open his cell phone, put it to his ear. “I’m due to call the president-elect anyway.”

  Garner put up his hands. “Look, look. I’m here to find the people who snatched the president-elect’s daughter. What’s your excuse?”

  “Torture doesn’t work,” Jack said. “Either the subject clams up till he dies or, more likely, he lies. He tells you exactly what you want to hear, but it’s not the truth. Fortunately, there’s a better way to determine if these guys are the perps.”

  Garner licked his lips. Jack could see his ire ebbing slightly.

  “So what’s your bright idea?”

  Jack folded his cell phone, put it away. “I go back in there, talk to Chris Armitage. Then I let him go.”

  “Are you insane? I won’t allow it!”

  “We release him and, when he’s recovered, Link as well,” Jack said. “We follow them. Put them under twenty-four-seven surveillance. If they’re involved, we’ll know it soon enough.”

  After considering a minute, Garner nodded. “This is your idea, you do the surveillance yourself.”

  Too late, Jack saw how Garner would make him pay for challenging him. Though Jack wanted more than anything to detach himself from Garner, run down his own lead with regard to Cyril Tolkan, he knew he couldn’t wriggle out of this assignment, so he nodded his assent.

  “I’ll need help keeping an eye on the two men.”

  “That’s your problem. Take care of it.”

  As he was walking away, Garner called after him, “You have forty-eight hours, bright boy. And after you fail, Iwill have your career.”

  16

  “Why is the light out?”

  From out of the absolute darkness, Alli Carson felt the air against her face and she shrank away, certain that he was going to hit her. In the days she’d been here, he’d never struck her, but the threat of violence was always in the air, keeping her immersed in a sea of terror. She was too frightened not to sit in it.

  “What have I told you?” Kray’s voice seemed disembodied, the heart of the darkness itself. “No talking except at mealtimes.”

  She kept her head up. He didn’t want to hurt her, merely to teach her a lesson not yet learned; she knew this now.

  “You need to focus your mind, Alli.”

  She could tell by the placement of his voice that he had sat down in front of her. She felt a little thrill of accomplishment at her newfound ability to discern the nuances of movement in sounds. This was Ronnie Kray, the same man Emma had met, whom Emma wanted to know more about. Now it was her turn. She had to keep that thought in the forefront of her mind. Emma had taught her how to be tough, how to go her own way. Emma was also fearless, a trait Alli had never been able to grasp. Perhaps now was her chance. Be brave, she told herself. Fate has put you in the same hands as Emma. You have the chance to finish what she started. You have a chance to understand this enigmatic man.

  “You have a keen mind,” Kray continued, “but it’s been dulled by your sheltered life. You’ve been taught to believe that you live a pampered life, but that’s a lie. The truth is you live the life of a prisoner. You’re forbidden to go where you want, you’re forbidden to say what you want. You can’t even make friends without your father’s knowledge, so that their private lives can be invaded by the Secret Service, just as yours is. You don’t own yourself, Alli. You’re a puppet, dancing to your father’s tune.”

  A chair creaked, and Alli knew that he had sat back. A whisper of cloth told her that he’d crossed one leg over the other. I can see, she thought, without seeing. She was grateful to him for having kept the light off, grateful for the opportunity he’d given her to sharpen her senses. For the first time since she’d known Emma McClure, she had stepped outside herself—the self, as Kray had so accurately said, that had been created for her.

  As if divining her thoughts, Kray said, “You exist at the pleasure of your father. The Alli Carson the country—the world—knows is a confection, a Hershey bar: an all-American girl, with all-American values, all-American ideals. When have you ever been allowed to say what’s really on your mind? When have you been allowed to voice your own opinion? Your lot in life has been to further your father’s political career.”

  She heard his voice, and only his voice.

  “Isn’t that right, Alli?”

  The darkness made it grow in power, until she could see it glowing like a jewel in her mind.

  “You have your own opinions, don’t you?”

  For a long moment she said nothing, though she felt the answer fizzing in her throat, clamoring to be exposed, to have its own life at last. Still, she bit it back, afraid. She realized just how familiar this fear was, how she had been afraid for years to say what was really on her mind, as opposed to what her father’s handlers had insisted she say publicly. Only Emma had known her real mind, only Emma could have taught her how to be fearless, but Emma was dead. She lowered her head and felt a great sob welling up in her breast, and hot tears leaked out of her eyes, ran down her cheeks, dropped onto the backs of her hands. It was so cruel, so unfair that her one true friend had been taken from her….

  “Focus, Alli,” Kray said in the manner of a professor to an inordinately bright student with ADD. “It’s important that you focus your mind, that you shake off the dullness of the old automaton Alli Carson, that you hone your mind to a diamond edge. Now, tell me, do you have your own opinions?”

  “I do,” Alli said, her throat unclogging as the words she’d been wanting to say flew out. She felt herself transported back to campus, walking with Emma, who had more or less asked her the same question: Do you have your father’s opinions, or are they your own?

  He sighed, it seemed to her with pleasure.

  “Then perhaps there’s a chance I can reach the real Alli Carson. There’s a chance I can undo what’s been done to you.”

  The creak of the chair. “You wish to speak.”

  How did he know that? she wondered. What marvelous power he possesed!

  “You have my permission.”

  “Why are you doing this?” she asked.

  “Because I have to.”

  He said it in a way that shook her. She didn’t know why yet, she was too stunned by her own reaction, but she was beginning to have faith now that she would come to understand what was happening to her, and why.

  She felt him lean in to her, felt the aura of his warmth as if she held his beating heart in her hands.

  “I want to share something with you, Alli. I have absolute faith in what I’m doing. Beyond that, I’m a patriot. This country has lost its way. There’s a shadow over democracy, Alli, and its name is god—the Christian god in whose name so many ethnic people have been attacked, decimated, or destroyed: the Aztecs, the Inca, the Jews of Spain, the caliphs of Constantinople and Trebizond, the Chinese, blacks, our own American Indians. Sinners all, right?”

  She could hear his breathing, like the bellows fanning a fire, expelling a hard emotion with each word. This emotion was familiar to her; she understood it without being able to define it. And she felt Emma close beside her, whispering in the nighttime dorm room in Langley Fields, so far away now, so very far. She began to weep again, silently—for Emma, absolutely, but also for her own fractured self, for the life she had been forced to live, for everything she had missed: friends, laughter, goofing around, being silly. Being herself, whatever that might be. That thought brought yet more tears and a weight in her chest she could scarcely bear.

  Through it all, Kray remained silent, holding her hands in the dark, keeping contact. She was unspeakably grateful for the silence, the human contact.

  “For more than a decade,” he said when her tears had at last subsided and her breathi
ng returned to normal, “there has been a conspiracy to hijack democracy. It’s only in the last eight years that it’s crawled into the light. Under the guise of knowing what’s best for America, a cabal of right-wing fanatics has made a pact with religious fundamentalists whose fervent wish is for a pure and Christian America. This alliance is a new twist on what Eisenhower ominously called the military-industrial complex. He feared it would take over the running of the country, and those fears were realized. Big Oil runs America, Big Oil determines our foreign policy. If the Middle East wasn’t filled with oil, we wouldn’t care one bit about who kills who there. We wouldn’t even know what a Sunni is, let alone why he wants to kill his Shiite neighbor.

  “But now the religious right has forced itself into the mix, now we have a president who believes he’s doing the work of god. But I and millions like me all over the world don’t believe god exists. Then whose work is the president doing?”

  Alli listened to him with all her senses. She felt taut as a drumhead, taken out of herself, given the privilege to emerge from her own body, to hover like a ghost above the human proceedings below. And with this sensation came a feeling of energy, and of power.

  “You and me, Alli, we’re being trampled by this religious stampede masquerading as a democratic government. How many times does this president have to say that he doesn’t care what the people or the Congress think, he knows what’s best for us, he knows what’s right? He means his god knows, but his god doesn’t exist. His morality is a delusion invented by the so-called righteous to bolster their claim that every decision they make is right, that all criticism directed at them comes from a radical left-wing element. They’ve tried to make an unswerving belief in god synonymous with patriotism, a healthy skepticism in god synonymous with treason. We have to fight this false morality; we have to stop it before its infection goes too far.”

  With one last squeeze, he let go of her hands. “Now you know me. I haven’t said any of this to another living human being.”

  He stood up; she felt his presence receding. She wanted to cry out for him to stay, but she knew she mustn’t. She’d learned her lesson.

  “I want to trust you, Alli. That’s my most fervent wish. But you’ve still got to prove yourself worthy of trust.” His voice was growing fainter. “I believe you can do it. I have faith in you.”

  17

  Jack never went home again. But he is afraid that his father will try to find him, that he will use the authorities to drag Jack back to the room with the stoplight blinking outside the window, hostage to the creaks and groans of his father’s nighttime footsteps. He knows he needs to disappear.

  Where do you go when you disappear off the grid the authorities have constructed? Back in the day, you joined the army; before that, if you had a romantic soul, it was the Foreign Legion. But those gilded days have been long drained to black-and-white. Off the grid for Jack means staying with Gus.

  Gus owns the Hi-Line, a pawnshop on Kansas Avenue, where the sidewalk is sticky with spent body fluids, and at any time of the year a dank and gritty wind rattles folding gates on dilapidated storefronts.

  Jack shows up outside the gated storefront at 7A.M. the day after the incident at the All Around Town bakery and waits there until Gus arrives.

  Gus shows no surprise whatsoever. “Huh, white boy develop a taste for grits.” He unlocks the gate, rolls it up. “I mightta known.”

  “I’m not going home.” Jack follows Gus into the Hi-Line, a long, narrow space with glass cases to the right, a wall of mirror to the left. It’s impossible to do anything in the Hi-Line, even pick your nose, without Gus seeing it. “I want to work for you.”

  Gus turns on the fluorescent lights, then the air conditioner, which begins to rumble like an arthritic pensioner.

  “Well, I mightta said no, despite what Reverend Taske tol’ me.” More lights come on at the rear of the store. “Huh, he thinks he knows everything ’cause he’s got a direct pipeline t’God.” Now the lights in the glass cases flicker once before illuminating the pawned goods. “I made some calls after I dropped you off yesterday. Now I gotta better line on Cyril.”

  Gus steps behind the line of counters, checks the till, puts in a stack of bills. He looks up, an expression of mild surprise on his face. “My name’s Augustus Turlington the Third, no lie. My name alone would get me into any country club in America. Until they see my black-ass face, that is.” He grunts. “So what a you doin on the customer’s side a the counter, anyways? You never gonna learn the business from there.”

  The Hi-Line is habituated by tattooed bail-bondsmen, furtive pornographers, rough-and-tumble Colombians, burly pimps, sallow-faced pushers, and beat cops on the take preceded into the fluorescent-lit shop by their bellies.

  At first, Jack’s job is simply to follow Gus’s orders, or so it seems to his clients. But what Jack is really doing is observing them, in the way only he can, absorbing the nature of the up-front business deals.

  “I want you familiar with what I do here,” Gus says that first morning. “I want you familiar with the folks who run in an’ outta here on a reg’lar basis, got me?”

  Gus lives in a large house at the end of Westmoreland Avenue, just over the Maryland border. Improbably, it’s surrounded by trees and thick shrubs. Jack has his own room on the top floor. When he looks out his windows, he imagines he’s in a tree house, all leafy bower, safely green. There is a bird’s nest dotted with bits of fluff and droppings in the crook of a branch, as empty now as it was full in the spring. In the mornings, the green bower is spangled gold; at night, it’s frosted by a silvery glitter. Except for the birds and, in August, the cicadas, it’s quiet.

  Sometimes, though, Jack hears music. There is a part of him that quails deep inside, but it’s the music itself—slow, sad, resigned even in its seething anger that draws him. Gradually, he conquers his inner fear enough to creep downstairs. Now he hears the male voice, deep, richer, more burnished than James Brown’s. He sits down on the bottom riser, arms clasped around his bony knees, rocking slightly to the rhythm. For an hour or more, he is inundated by the river of sorrow, soaking up sounds that seep into his bones, that in their sadness seem to lift him up on a golden chariot, transport him over the gummy rooftops, the blinking traffic lights, the blaring horns, screeching brakes, the drunken shouts, into a realm of pure bliss.

  After the last notes die away, Jack climbs back up the stairs, crawls into bed, and falls into a deep, dreamless sleep.

  Every night he hears the music, the ritual is the same: the soft creeping down the stairs, sitting alone, but not alone, connected to an invisible world by the music, by the lyrics, by the voices of men who’ve seen things he can’t even imagine.

  Weekends Jack is being taught the ways of God by Reverend Taske. His weekdays are spent at the Hi-Line observing, cataloging, and collating the sad parade of used bric-a-brac that down-at-the-heels customers bring in for Gus to evaluate and, if he deems them desirable, shell out meager cash payment. Most never return for their pawned goods, Jack learns soon enough, though they may be dear to them in ways no one else understands. Every month Gus holds an auction to sell what’s been there for a half year, the term of the Hi-Line agreement. Always there are several treasures among the old guitars, Timex watches, cameos, and gold lockets. He makes money on these transactions, to be sure, though after less than a week on the job, Jack is quite certain his living is made in the back room.

  During one such auction, Jack comes across a box of comics. Excited, he begins to paw through them, until he realizes that these are his comics. His father must’ve come in one weekend while he was with Reverend Taske, pawned them. At once, Jack knows that his father never had any intention of coming back for them. A terrible sense of freedom overwhelms him, a sorrow and a joy commingled precisely like that curious emotion that draws him to the bluesy music Gus plays at night.

  For a moment, he contemplates asking Gus to take the cost of the comics out of his salary. Then he opens one
, begins to read it. Almost immediately, he puts it aside, opens another, then another and another. He puts them all aside. Then he takes the box, puts it on the auction counter to be sold.

  It’s only when he looks up that he sees that Gus has been watching him all along.

  One morning about a week after the auction, there’s a present waiting for him when he comes down for breakfast.

  He stands staring at the large package resting on the kitchen table. Gus, in a chef’s apron, his fingers white with flour, says, “Well, go on, kid, open it.”

  “It’s not my birthday.”

  Gus expertly pours four circles of batter into a smoking cast-iron skillet. “You don’t want me t’have t’give it to someone else, do you?”

  Jack feels himself being impelled by Gus’s words. His fingers tremble as they rip open the paper. Inside is a square box with a grille on one side. He opens the top: it’s a record player. Inside are three albums, one by Muddy Waters, one by Howlin’ Wolf, one by Fats Domino.

  Gus, flipping corncakes, says, “Life without blues music, now that’s a sin. Blues tells all kinds o’ stories, the history of the people composed it.”

  He slides a plate of corncakes onto the table. “Eat yo’ breakfast now. Tonight we’ll listen to these records together. No sense you sittin’ all by yo’self on them hard stairs.”

  After six weeks, Gus decides Jack is ready to observe the backroom deals. The back room is a frigid twelve-by-twelve bunker outfitted with a sofa and two La-Z-Boy easy chairs, between which rests a sideboard on which sits an array of liquor bottles, old-fashioned and highball glasses of sparkling cut crystal. A girl comes in once a day to clean, dust, and vacuum. Gus is extremely particular about the environment in which his deals get hammered out.

  Jack fears that these deals somehow involve drug-running because that is one of the businesses Cyril Tolkan is into, and it seems clear to him that Cyril and Gus are rivals. He needn’t have worried. The deals are of another nature altogether.