by Robert Clark
Adrenaline coursed through my body. I bounced on the balls of my feet, ready to fight or talk or shout or run or some combination thereof. I wished I had a weapon of some sorts, just in case. If Neagley had a gun, Marie would hear if it went off. If he had a knife, I could outrun him. He was an older man, after all. I had the advantage.
I leaned up against a nearby tree and tapped out a beat with my heel on the stump. Used it to funnel my energy away from my mind. I needed clarity, after all.
I could hear the sound of the engine through the trees. A low rumble growing closer by the second. Then I saw it. Not the rental car Neagley had parked outside the hotel. It was the old sedan. In the light of day, the dark grey colour I’d seen on the school’s CCTV turned out to be an unflattering brown, closer to diarrhoea than tree bark. Two men sat inside. The two younger men. They pulled close and killed the engine and got out. Neagley was not with them. They walked around the hood and stood side by side, looking right at me. I stayed propped up against the tree, arms folded like I didn’t have a damn care in the world.
They were dressed in similar clothes. Skinny black jeans and combat boots, with navy denim jackets buttoned up. They were about my age and my height and my level of fitness, which put them at a one hundred percent advantage over me if it came down to fisticuffs. Two on one was never a great situation, but not impossible.
‘Are you the guy?’ asked the guy on the left. His hair was cut short. Not quite an army buzz cut, but not far off. His eyes were alight with aggression. He spoke in English, but his French accent bastardised the the into a ze.
‘Where’s Neagley?’ I asked. ‘I came to speak to him, not his errand boys.’
‘You say you have proof?’ said the other guy. His English wasn’t as good and his hair wasn’t as short. Long enough to slap a bit of product in it and make him look like a part-time model.
‘I’m not speaking with you,’ I said. ‘It’s Neagley I want.’
‘You hand over the proof,’ said the Part-time Model.
‘Or we’ll take it from you,’ said the off brand Buzz Cut.
‘You two want a fight, so be it, but you won’t be turning tricks for a while with your teeth halfway down your throat.’ I said.
‘Big man thinks he can fight,’ said the Part-time Model in French.
‘Big man knows he can fight,’ I said in French. ‘Big man knows he can kill.’
The Part-time Model smirked, and together they stepped forwards, hands coming up slowly. They weren’t inherent fighters. They weren’t trained. They didn’t bleed for fun. All they’d done is watch a couple Bruce Lee action flicks and figured they could dance the dance. Taking a step forwards was a decisive action. It implied intent. And in this world of mad dogs and monsters, that was all I needed.
I kicked off the tree and launched forwards, both fists coming up fast like I was rowing a canoe. I caught the model in the solar plexus and Buzz Cut with the ribs. Took the momentum right out of both men, but kept mine going. I spun on my heel and caught Buzz Cut with my right elbow in the neck. Right on the Adam’s apple. Heard his surprised gargle as a sign of momentary concession. And I moved back for the model.
He had buckled under the first blow, but not enough to go down. He used the change in stance to throw his weight into my gut and push me off balance. It worked long enough for me to bring my elbow down into the back of his head. He let go, but didn’t move his head quick enough. I swung my knee up and caught him in the mouth. He made a squeal and fell back.
Buzz Cut had rejoined the party. With a swing so wound up that I could have composed a symphony before he connected, he went for my head. I dodged and hit him in the gut hard enough to wind him. He gasped and turned away, like putting his back to me ended the issue. His mother never told him not to turn his back on a problem, because the problem might just swing his boot up between your legs and kick you in the groin. He learnt that soon enough.
Part-time Model was back on his feet with one hand up to his mouth and the other held up like a police officer commanding traffic to stop. Naturally, I saw the gesture as a reason to surrender and give them what they wanted, and not as something to bat out the way and go for another solar plexus jab.
Once was bad enough. Twice was unbearable. With my knuckles still bruised from Bruges, I wanted to avoid contact on the solid areas, but a nice squishy bit of gut was fine by me. Part-time Model groaned and dropped to his knees. The hand at his mouth was oozing blood.
Two men down without a blow to their attacker.
The Part-time Model looked up at me. His eyes burning with rage.
‘You knocked out my tooth,’ he said, each word pained and muffled behind his hand.
‘I did tell you not to start,’ I replied.
Looking over to the Buzz Cut, I knew they were finished. His hands were clasped around his groin, and the noises coming out of him were not those of a man ready for round two. I walked over and kicked him in the back, right where his kidneys were.
‘Where is Neagley?’ I barked.
He groaned, so I kicked him again.
‘I don’t know,’ he moaned, ‘he calls us and tells us to come here and deal with you. I haven’t seen him.’
‘Then get him on the line and tell him you did what he wanted,’ I said. ‘Tell him you’ve got the evidence for him.’
‘He wanted us to destroy it,’ Buzz Cut replied. ‘We were not going to see him again.’
‘Then you better come up with a solid reason why you have to, otherwise I’m going to turn you into a testicle piñata.’
He waved his hand in surrender as the phone in my pocket buzzed. I pulled it out. It was Marie.
‘This isn’t a good time,’ I said, but she cut me off.
‘I can see him, Mr Neagley,’ she said. ‘He’s driving away right now.’
Eighteen
I sprinted through the woods as fast as I could, leaving Buzz Cut and the Part-time Model to lick their wounds. I spotted Marie’s coupé through the trees. She’d pulled back onto the road with the engine running. I reached the door, swung it open, and threw myself inside.
‘Where did he go?’ I asked, out of breath.
‘This way,’ Marie said, stamping on the accelerator. The coupé had some serious oomph to it. It jumped from nought to sixty in a matter of seconds. It felt like being in a damn fighter jet. I looked ahead down the road. No one there. No cars coming in either direction.
‘Are you sure it was him?’ I asked.
‘Positive. I recognised him from your photographs. When he saw me parked up, he turned around and drove away. I called you immediately.’
‘Then he can’t have gotten far,’ I said. ‘Just keep going.’
The road twisted and turned, but there was nowhere else to turn off. As we cleared the woods, it straightened up in a long dash back to Prisches.
And there he was, maybe half a mile ahead. Just a small, silver dot on the sea of frosty green fields. Marie pushed the coupé harder, taking us way above the speed limit. She was determined. She wanted answers. I did too, so long as no cops spotted her driving.
The silver rental was older than her coupé, and I doubted Neagley would be speeding. Last thing he needed was to get pulled over too. Slowly, Marie closed the gap, and as we crested over a small hill, I saw the rental car take the first left up ahead.
‘That way,’ I barked, jabbing my finger at the turn.
Marie slowed as we entered the residential area, but not by lots, and took the corner with an ear-splitting tyre screech. The coupé drifted out into the oncoming lane, but she handled it with remarkable ease and got back in line.
The rental hadn’t drifted and wasn’t going twenty miles over the signposted speed limit. Instead, he adopted a different tactic. Confusion. He took the next turn right, and by the time we reached the junction, he had already turned again. Marie followed as fast as she could, but with the roads much busier within the town’s limits, it was harder to stick to her die hard pursuit.
>
At the next crossroads, I scanned left and right, spotting the rear of the rental as twisted out of sight, heading back in the direction we’d come. Trying to lose us in the residential grid. I told Marie. But instead of following, she twisted the car around and, over a crescendo of protesting horns, headed back down the road she’d just taken. Heading parallel to our target.
At the junction, she turned right. And I spotted it. Coming right towards us was the silver rental town car. Through the windscreen, I could just make out Neagley. It was him. We had him.
Throwing caution to the wind, Marie swung the car into the oncoming lane and stamped on the brakes. Neagley tried to pull around, but Marie countered, bringing her coupé within a metre of his car.
I was out into the street before he could put the car in reverse, and at the passenger door in seconds. I swung it open and dived inside.
‘What the hell are you playing at?’ Neagley barked.
I thumbed the record button on the device in my pocket.
‘Why did you do it, Neagley?’ I shouted. ‘Why did you kill Amie Giroux?’
‘Get the hell out of my car before I beat your ass and call the cops,’ he barked.
‘Go ahead,’ I said, calling his bluff. ‘I’ll go down, but you will too with the evidence we have.’
‘Bullshit, you don’t have anything. There’s nothing tying me to it.’
‘You so sure of that?’ I snapped. ‘I just had a lovely chat with Dick and Dom up in the woods. They told me everything.’
‘Get the hell out of my car,’ Neagley barked.
Marie had got out, and was storming towards the rental like a woman possessed.
‘Does she know who she’s got helping her?’ he snapped.
I said nothing.
‘Keep her out of here,’ he barked as she tried the door.
‘Give us a moment,’ I said as Marie’s head appeared through the gap.
‘I want to kill him,’ she shouted. ‘You murdered my sister.’
‘Give us a moment,’ I said again. ‘Go park up. I’ve got this.’
I closed the door before she had a chance to object. Car horns filled the air.
‘Son of a bitch!’ Neagley swore. As soon as Marie pulled out of the way, he set off at speed. ‘What the hell are you playing at?’
‘I just want to know what you did,’ I said, slightly worried that I was now in a car with a murderer I’d just outed. ‘I want to know why.’
‘You’re a goddamn psychopath, you know that?’
‘I know. Just tell me what I want.’
‘Then what?’ Neagley snapped. ‘You gonna go to the cops? I ain’t paying you one goddamn cent.’
‘Her sister deserves to know the truth.’
‘Then go tell her she should have paid a bit more goddamn attention to her sister, and maybe none of this would have happened.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘It means you don’t know shit, and if you’re gonna start accusing me of things, you should have the goddamn facts first. Now get out of my car before I turn you in to the cops myself. You’ve got a price on your head so big, I could buy a whole ranch back in Texas and still have change to spare. Don’t make me consider it.’
‘What facts?’ I asked, but he’d had enough. He pulled over to the side of the road and, over more protesting horns, turned to look at me.
‘Get the hell out of my car right this goddamn second,’ he barked.
‘What facts?’ I asked again.
‘You want know the truth, I’ll tell you when you know the whole goddamn picture and not a second sooner. Whatever it is you’re doing here, I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. So get the hell away from me this goddamn second, you hear?’
He let go of the steering wheel and pushed me with both hands. For an old guy, he had some strength to him. I fumbled with the door handle and got out, and as my feet touched the kerb, he set off at speed once more, leaving me sprawled out on the kerb, completely and utterly in the dark.
Nineteen
Marie picked me up on the corner where Neagley had chucked me out. The look she gave me was one of surprise.
‘What happened?’ she asked as I climbed in the sporty yellow coupé.
‘I’m not entirely sure,’ I replied.
Marie pulled back out into traffic. The busy street was full of watchful eyes, and after the last few minutes, I felt more exposed than a nude in a city centre. I ran Marie through the conversation - if you could call it a conversation - with Neagley, excluding the threats he’d thrown my way. Marie sat and listened to the whole thing from start to finish.
‘What does it all mean?’ she asked when I finished.
‘He said we don’t know the facts.’
‘We know he murdered my sister. What more facts could there be?’
I bit my tongue.
‘What?’ Marie asked.
‘He claimed you didn’t know your sister very well,’ I said.
The silence was as awkward as any I’d felt before. The kind that makes you want to crawl inside your own body like a turtle. More than once, Marie opened her mouth to respond, but the words never quite made it to her lips.
‘Look,’ I said after a long interval, wherein Marie navigated silently through unknown streets. ‘We can’t give up now. There’s got to be something we can-’
‘Something we can what?’ she snapped. ‘You were in the car with the man who murdered my sister, and all you can do is tell me how little I cared for her? I thought you were a private detective, Mr Callahan. Where is Mr Neagley’s confession of guilt? Where is the justice for my Amie?’
‘There’s something else to this,’ I said. ‘Neagley didn’t confess, but he didn’t deny it either. Any innocent person would want the world to know they weren’t involved in a murder. So he’s complicit somehow, and we have his number. We just need to work out why he did it. The police can track him down and make him say the words. All we need to do is give them the push they need.’
More silence.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘The confrontation didn’t go how I expected it would. His reaction surprised me, but from what he said, there’s more to this than we currently know, okay?’
Marie sniffed.
‘I’m sorry too,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t snap at you. You’ve done so much already for me.’
‘It’s okay. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I assure you.’
We headed back to Amie’s house with the meagre hope that we might have missed something holding us up like a threadbare rope. Without Amie’s password, we couldn’t get into the laptop, and unless she had some secret hidden basement we’d missed, I wasn’t hopeful the visit would conjure anything of substance. But it was forward momentum, and that always felt like progress was being made, even in the meekest of senses.
Marie pulled onto the street. The road was busier than before, and finding a space to park was harder than it had been earlier that morning. Marie parked up a few houses down from that of her sister and killed the engine.
‘What are we looking for?’ she asked.
‘Anything that might shed some light onto all this,’ I said.
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what are we doing here?’
I said nothing.
‘Mr Callahan, what are we doing here?’
Clutching at straws.
‘Looking for clues,’ I said. ‘We have to be sure we didn’t miss anything.’
With a nod that conveyed all the lacking confidence she felt, Marie opened the car door and climbed out. I did so too, stretching away the dismay as I swung the door shut behind me.
‘Excuse me,’ called a voice from the house we had parked up by. I looked up. A woman was standing in the doorway. She was an old woman. Frumpy with age. She wore a fluffy grey dressing gown over what looked like a nighty from the nineteen thirties. Her silver hair was tied up in curlers. She looked like the poster image gran
dmas all over the world aspired to be. Marie turned around and spotted her.
‘Yes?’ she said.
‘Are you Miss Giroux’s sister?’ the old lady asked.
Marie nodded.
‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ she croaked. ‘A terrible shame. Truly terrible. How are you holding up, my dear?’
Marie shrugged.
‘It’s been hard,’ she said.
The old lady looked at me.
‘Is this your husband?’ she asked.
‘No,’ Marie said, rather abruptly, ‘this man is my employee.’
The old lady looked from Marie to me.
‘James Callahan,’ I said, waving to her. ‘Pleasure to meet you.’
‘English?’ she asked.
I nodded. The old lady made a face.
‘Terrible shame,’ she said again, not specifying if she was talking about my nationality, or Amie.
Marie locked the coupé and started walking towards her sister’s house.
‘Thank you for your condolences,’ she said with a false smile, but the old lady flapped her arms about.
‘What about Nostradamus?’ she crowed, looking from Marie to me. Marie didn’t seem to hear her, so I just shrugged and followed after her.
Marie had the front door open by the time I caught up.
‘Are you okay?’ I asked as I crossed the threshold.
‘I’m fine,’ she sniffed in the way that people do when they are anything but. I reached out to touch her arm, but she hustled away before I could, and closed the door to the bedroom behind her.
I went back to the kitchen come living room. The smell of damp felt like it had intensified over the afternoon. I cracked open the kitchen window to counter it, like that would do much. The place needed a complete renovation. That or knocking down and rebuilding the whole thing from scratch.
I tried to take the place in with fresh eyes. To look at it like a genuine investigator might. To spot the inconsistencies in a drab and dull environment. I bent down and examined the carpets, looking for spots where it might have been pulled back to hide illicit secrets. Nothing. I checked the skirting and the wallpaper for gaps or recesses. Nothing. I climbed on the sofa and checked the hanging light fixture. Nothing. I pulled the television and drawers away from the wall to see if anything had fallen down behind. Nothing. I checked the cupboards and pulled out their contents for something hidden behind. Nothing. I checked under the sink and behind the pipes. Nothing. I checked inside boxes of detergent and cereal. Nothing. Nothing anywhere.