She flinched. He had surprised her.
Eddie let the silence linger a while, and then broke it. “Who are you here to kill?”
Her lips pressed together in a sign that this was none of his concern and she would not be giving up the answer. Her tone was dismissive. “Those of us involved swore an oath of silence to protect each other, which I do not intend to break for a newspaper reporter.”
“Then why meet with me at all?”
“Our paths have crossed several times this week, Mr. Bourque—”
“It’s Eddie, please.”
“Yes—Eddie. Our paths have crossed and I want to know why.”
“I want to know who killed Danny—same as you,” he told her. “And I want to know who threw me in the canal after I fell through the floor.”
She was quiet for a while, and then said with resignation, “There are casualties in every war.” Eddie heard sadness in her voice, but didn’t trust it, not yet. She continued, “They tried to burn us to death. We barely escaped. I thought you had led them to us.”
Eddie knew better than to ask who had attacked her. That would have to wait. He said, “And you no longer think I led them to you?”
“No. I believe they followed me from Danny’s wake, just as you did,” she said.
“Why did they throw me in the canal?”
She shrugged. “Who can say why madmen do anything?”
Eddie pried for more about her past. It was a reporter’s trick. Get the subject to talk about herself, to share harmless details until she got comfortable. Comfort led to trust, which led to information. “You were under the Khmer Rouge when you were little, weren’t you?” he asked.
“You guess that by my age?”
“And by the figures you painted inside that old triple-decker.” It was an educated guess. Danny, in his love poem, had called her “my artist.” And the pain in those paintings was worthy of a holocaust.
She flinched again with surprise. Her tone was not so dismissive this time. “My mother died when I was an infant. My father taught music—piano—in Phnom Penh. When the Khmer Rouge soldiers came to our neighborhood, at first we were happy. Anything had to be better than the war.
“They told us we were in great danger in the city, from American bombs. And everyone had to leave. We took what we could carry and marched at the end of a gun for two weeks, to the countryside. The Khmer Rouge made surnames illegal, so families were mixed and confused. They banned money and tore up the calendar, so time could start over.”
“They enslaved you.”
She nodded. “We dug irrigation canals. I was thin—I could not lift the pick above my head. They fed us watery rice and we ate weeds or bugs we could pick.”
Eddie knew the history. The Khmer Rouge came at night for the educated people they perceived to be threats, and shot them. They starved countless others, or worked them to death.
“At night my father would put my hand on his, and his fingers would pretend to play the piano, maybe Bach or Claude Debussy, while he sang the notes,” she said. “One day my father caught a fish and cooked it for my brother and me. But a soldier discovered it. He said my father was greedy because he kept the fish as his personal property, and personal property was not allowed. This soldier walked him to the ditch I had dug. He brought my brother and me to watch. And he stood on my father’s back until he drowned.”
She told the story in a cold narrative, as if detached from it. Or was she simply so strong she could tell it without tears? Eddie could not tell, but he was beginning to see why Nowlin had fallen for her.
“I watched my father’s hand under the water,” she said. “His fingers played Debussy.”
Eddie wondered about his chances of getting a tale like this into print. Not from her, of course, she’d never speak for the record. And probably not in The Empire, the way the brass was spiking his stuff. But there were thousands of Cambodian immigrants in Lowell, and every one who survived the genocide had a story like Chanthay’s. And there were other papers in the world.
Part of him felt like a ghoul for obsessing over a news story, with Danny dead and his killers on the loose. But Eddie’s point in life was telling stories like this, no matter how cold-blooded it made him feel for the moment.
They passed Pawtucket Dam and crossed the river over University Bridge. The bridge surface is an unpaved metal grate. Eddie could see the river below. Car tires moaned over the grate like the wail of the undead. Eddie and Chanthay walked through the university campus, between dorms built of chocolate brick. They left the street and stuck close to the river as they approached Billings Mill. Eddie thought about Chanthay’s story. It clicked, and he realized his reporter’s trick had worked.
“You’re still fighting the Khmer Rouge, here in America,” he declared.
She scowled at him.
“Revenge,” Eddie said. “You’re here for revenge.”
Her face went to stone. That was all the confirmation Eddie needed. “But why was Nowlin killed?” he said, as much to himself as to her. “And why was he shooting heroin? Still too many questions.”
“What are you saying? Danny didn’t use heroin.”
“The autopsy says—”
Squealing tires cut Eddie off. He whirled. Two men climbed from a blue sedan. They were both short and dumpy-looking, in matching tan overcoats. Thick clothing beneath their coats gave them a top-heavy look.
“It is them,” Chanthay said. “Keep moving.”
They walked quickly toward Billings Mill, a brick monstrosity, five stories high. Arched windows run along each floor of the long sides of the rectangular building. A grassy slope from the riverbank climbs gently to the mill’s ground-floor windows. Every window was dark.
The two men marched toward them at a brisk pace. One pulled a pistol from his belt. It was black and long. The barrel grew fat near the end.
Chanthay grabbed Eddie’s sleeve and steered him at the building. “This way,” she yelled. “To the window.” They sprinted toward the wall of red brick. She sputtered, “Hired muscle…thirty-two caliber semi-automatics…sound suppressors…not accurate if you’re on the move.”
Eddie screeched, “They can’t shoot us out here!”
“They can…they will.”
Eddie slowed as they approached the wall. There’s no way in. His voice cracked, “Where do we go?”
“You’re wearing leather,” she answered. “Cover your head.”
She grabbed Eddie’s left arm with two hands and slung him forward with a grunt. She used his own momentum to heave Eddie towards a window, clinging to his arm just long enough to spin him around. Eddie staggered backwards four steps before his backside burst through the glass. Wooden panes hollowed by dry rot shredded to fibers. The window blew inward with a muffled pop. The sill tripped Eddie at the knees, and he toppled like a Ponderosa pine. His hands drew over his face. A shower of glass tinkled around him.
He looked up from a pine floor soaked by machine oil. The ceiling twelve feet above was a grid of retrofitted pipes beneath heavy crossbeams. Plasterboard partitions divided the space around him into crude offices, one of the many failed reuse plans for Billings Mill.
Chanthay hurdled through the window and helped Eddie off the floor. A one-inch cut on the pad beneath Eddie’s left thumb was white for a moment, before it oozed red. The lump on his head throbbed again.
There was a noise from outside, like a car door slamming. Red dust burst from a brick in the window arch. A bullet had knocked out a chunk.
A black pistol appeared in Chanthay’s hand. She ducked behind a partition.
“Go!” she yelled. “Run!”
Chapter 20
Eddie raced deeper into the old factory, which grew ever darker the farther he ran from the outside light. He gauged the vastness of the place by the distant glow of windows along the far wall. The mill looked as big as a city block. It was like running through a giant department store w
ith no lights. As he entered the shadows, he realized he was running alone. Skidding to a stop on the greasy floor, Eddie looked back. The two men outside held their guns inside their overcoats and marched toward the broken window. They walked with purpose, but didn’t seem rushed.
Chanthay held her ground behind an office partition.
She balanced on her toes, her knees slightly bent, poised to spring like a cat. She held the gun by her ear, pointing straight up. She was waiting for her shot, unable to chance a peek at her targets, content to let their footsteps be her guide.
A fool’s courage, Eddie thought. In a moment she would be dead.
No, he would not watch that happen. Loping strides brought him back to her.
She grimaced at his presence and shooed him away with the gun. Eddie grabbed a handful of her ski vest and pulled her to the darkness.
A bullet thumped the plywood partition like a kick from a steel-toed boot.
They ran together. Behind them, wingtips crunched on broken glass. Chanthay followed Eddie through alleys, between wooden crates stacked high on pallets, past dark mounds of machinery and oil drums rising into pyramids. The alleys were dark, but the obstacles were darker, and Eddie steered a competent path between them.
Billings Mill was not a modern-day success among the behemoths of the Merrimack. When the Lowell textile industry abandoned its cradle, entrepreneurs invested in the Mile of Mills, with varying degrees of success. Part of Massachusetts Mills was converted to luxury apartments. The old Boott Mill became a museum of culture and history. Lawrence Mills was to be a college campus, before the fire.
In the 1970s, a plan to develop Billings Mill into office space flopped. The next owners tried a warehouse. The pols frowned at the idea, and the business community yawned—no job creation. Billings employed two thousand men and women in 1875, and about nine muscleheads on the loading dock a hundred years later. Warehouse rents offered a low margin, and the place closed within a few years. Much of the crap stored there in the ’70s was abandoned, or offered to the owners in lieu of past due rent. It was an indoor junkyard under a pall of dust, a maze in the dark.
The paths through the junk turned and split at random, like the streets in the Acre. Eddie chose a zigzag course toward the center of the warehouse. There, the alley emptied into a straight avenue, the width of a driveway, running lengthwise down the middle of the building.
They slowed to a walk, choosing silence over speed. The pounding of leather shoes, still deep in the maze, stopped moments later. Their hunters had chosen silence as well.
Eddie caught his breath, and then whispered, “If they shoot us here we’ll be skeletons before anybody finds us.”
“I could have killed them both at the window,” she answered.
“Don’t think so,” he said. “Did you see their puffy shirts? Body armor. Fibrous layers—light but impenetrable. I wrote a story on it when the cops got new vests last year.”
“Then I’d have shot their faces.”
So sure, so confident. Maybe she would have. She was in the shadows; they were in the light. She had the element of surprise—even if they had assumed she was armed, would they have expected her to set an ambush? Then bang, bang. Two head shots from behind the wall, two dead hitmen.
It was possible, Eddie supposed. But he was unwilling to let her risk herself on lousy odds. Not for him, not while he skulked off into the darkness. She radiated an old-world dedication to a purpose at any cost, a quality Eddie had never sensed in such abundance. She was not to be wasted on a long shot.
The bank of windows opposite from where they had entered glowed like sunrise beyond a horizon of junk. Eddie’s hand bled and the blood slimed his fingers. “We can head for those windows and smash back out,” he whispered.
“If you think you can take it,” she said.
He smiled. A sense of humor, too. “We’ll find a crowbar or something this time.” It seemed she had forgiven him for ruining her ambush. Only their escape could have made him happier.
“Can you fight?” she asked.
“I won my first four fistfights,” he said, “but the last one was in fifth grade.”
“I will remember that if those men send children to find us.”
They crept along the center aisle. Eddie scanned to his right for a promising passageway toward the windows. Chanthay was a silhouette against a wall of crates. Her hands were folded before her, as if in prayer. In them she held her gun. Eddie could feel what her tiny weapon meant. Those men must risk their lives to take ours. The odds favored the pursuers—they had two guns—but the fight was fair, the stakes equally lethal.
Another pistol wouldn’t have done much to level the odds. Not in Eddie’s hands. He had never fired anything more potent than a BB gun. The kids in his neighborhood used to take turns shooting squirrels in the Dracut State Forest. Oh, how those rodents ran, ricocheting like rubber balls from a cannon. Eddie shot and shot, never could hit one. After a while he started to miss on purpose, and wondered later if he had done so all along.
Could he kill a man? Chanthay could, and with just one gun that was all that mattered. But could he? If he had to? He could shoot back, perhaps, into the darkness at an unseen foe. What the bullet found in the shadows would be its own business.
Eddie inched along on his toes, breathing silently through his mouth. He kept watch to the rear and looked for passageways. There was no fear, just hair-trigger alertness. Where was Fear? He had felt her presence when the first bullet struck blindly at the brick. But in the rush through the maze, he had run right past her. She was lost out there, too, somewhere in the junk.
Few passageways led toward the windows. One aisle started in the right direction, but soon veered off. Another path dead-ended after thirty feet. What about a direct route? Straight over the junk. The crates along the aisle were stacked about nine feet high. It was hard to tell if there was an easy way up there.
Something hit Eddie’s chest and crashed him to the floor.
He yelped in surprise. Am I shot? Chanthay clamped a hand over his mouth. She had shoved him down in mid-stride. He nodded that he was all right and she took away her hand.
Somewhere in the junk the footsteps pounded again. The men were running.
Chanthay pointed at Eddie’s left leg. It had vanished beneath the knee. He flexed the leg and it returned. His eyes trained on a square on the floor, twelve feet across, darker than the space around it.
“A hole,” Chanthay whispered.
Eddie yanked a button from his shirt and dropped it in. Several seconds passed before it rattled off something metallic. This was not an option for escape. Straight above, in the ceiling, was another hole of the same size.
Eddie leaned to her. “Probably an elevator,” he said. “Retrofitted into the building, and then torn out.”
The footsteps seemed louder than before. Echoes made it hard to tell from which direction they came. Eddie and Chanthay stepped around the hole and hurried down the corridor.
They passed an aisle to their left and someone yelled, “There!”
There was a white flash. Even with a sound suppressor, the noise shook the air. The slug popped against a crate above their heads. The shot sent Eddie running like a starter’s pistol for the hundred-meter dash. He had not trained much since college track-and-field, but muscles have amazing memories; his thighs pumped to top speed in three steps.
Another man yelled, “Kill her, grab him!”
Or was it, “Kill him, grab her?” Eddie did not wait to find out.
The end of the corridor came quickly. One staircase went up, another went down. Eddie bounded up the stairs three at a time. At the first landing, he looked back. Chanthay had just reached the bottom.
“Split up!” she yelled. And she vanished down the stairs.
Eddie kept going. Heavy footsteps banged up the stairs behind him. Just one set, he thought. They sounded clumsy. This guy’s in worse shape than me. Eddi
e flew up two more flights and ran out to the fourth floor. Its layout was similar to the first level below—a main corridor straight through the junk, with side paths snaking off. He ran down random paths—left, right, left, left, right. He threw himself behind a pallet stacked with wooden crates, and panted for breath. His left hand, still bleeding, was in a glove of blood and dust. He pressed his right palm on the cut, and held his hands over his head to help stop the flow.
Climbing the stairs had lengthened his lead on his pursuer, but now Eddie was too high up to jump from a window.
The stomping on the staircase stopped on the fourth floor landing.
Funny, Eddie thought. Before his ice ride down the canal, nobody had ever tried to kill him. And now, days after being left to drown, he was hiding from a professional murderer. The backbeat of his heart pounded in his inner ear. Sweat ran down his face. He thought about Nowlin, and wondered if Danny knew he was about to be murdered. Did he have flashbacks about what he had done in his life? Or visions of what he would never do?
Eddie shook those thoughts from his head—it was too soon to give up. But he needed a plan. Stay alive until Chanthay gets here with that gun. A fine concept, but a few details short of a plan. He had options. Assuming the building was symmetrical, he could negotiate the junkscape and find stairs back down on the other side. That would bring him closer to Chanthay. But the stairs down also headed toward the other gunman. And if the one already on his tail were to follow, Eddie would be in a sandwich. He would be meat.
Or he could head for the windows. Yes, it was too high to jump, but he could attract attention somehow. He could heave crates out the window. Real subtle. He’d be on me in a minute.
That left hiding. Yeah, hiding sounded good. Eddie crept around, looking for a crate to slip into.
The man with the gun yelled out, “This don’t gotta be so hard!”
The words soared over the junk and died to silence in the far reaches of the room. The sweat on Eddie’s face ran cold. The low voice with a New York City accent was raw and phlegmy. It sounded so close. Eddie had run at least a hundred feet through the twisting passages before he stopped to rest, but the hitman wasn’t half that far away in a straight line.
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