Alpha Kill - 03 (3 page)

Despite all of that, he’d wake nights in his solitary bed in the new apartment he was renting, the sheets wadded in his fists, anguish wracking his body as though he was physically sick.

Beth. Beautiful Beth. What the hell have I done?

*

V
enn was approaching Brooklyn when something on the radio snagged him out of his brooding.

He turned the dial up.

“ – are coming in of a disturbance at Horn Creek Correctional Facility outside Rockford, Illinois. Details at this moment are scarce, but we’ve learned that a power failure this evening may have led to a riot within the complex. It’s understood that local and federal law enforcement agencies have responded. We’ll have more on that story as it unfolds.”

The newsreader moved on to something else.

Horn Creek.
That brought back memories.

Venn had been a narcotics detective lieutenant in Chicago until four years ago, when he’d left the force under a cloud. He’d despatched a number of offenders to Horn Creek during his time there. It was a high security institution, and in all his time in Chicago he’d never heard of a power failure there, or any significant disturbance which had made the news. Once you went in there, it was understood, you were under iron control. The only ways out were through serving your sentence, or in a coffin. Nobody ever got time off for good behavior, because good behavior was something you were by definition incapable of if you got yourself incarcerated there.

He flipped through the stations, but none of the other news channels were reporting on the incident at that moment.

Maybe he’d call up one of his old friends in Chicago when he got home, to see if they had any further information. Venn had burned his bridges with the Chicago PD top brass, but he’d still kept up some of his contacts with fellow cops there, who believed he’d gotten a raw deal when he’d been forced to leave.

In the distance, he saw the Manhattan skyline, bright against the oppressive October sky.

Venn was renting a brownstone apartment in Brooklyn, in Bay Ridge. It was several steps up from the seedy East Village bachelor pad he’d lived in until two years ago, but distinctly downmarket from the townhouse he and Beth had bought together west of Central Park.

He could afford better, but he didn’t care.

Venn parked the Jeep on the street and trudged up the steps to the front door, the buckets of fish hanging from his hands and his rods tucked under his arms. Cleaning and gutting his catch in the kitchen would give him a task to focus on, though he wasn’t sure he had either the appetite or the inclination to cook them afterwards. Into the freezer they’d probably go, to join a whole bunch of other stuff he’d probably never get around to eating.

After he’d taken care of the fish... a sandwich, a shower, a few pages of the Ray L’Heureux autobiography he was currently reading, and then bed. Maybe a bourbon, just one, as a nightcap.

A relaxed Sunday evening, ahead of a busy working week.

A
single person’s
Sunday evening.

Venn shook his head angrily. Sentimentality, maudlin self-pity, wasn’t his thing at all. He needed to snap out of it. Needed to get a grip.

Life went on.

He put down the buckets and was unlocking the door to his second-floor apartment when his cell phone rang.

Venn looked at the display. He expected it to be Harmony, his second-in-command, or the new guy he’d hired for his team. Or maybe Captain Kang, his boss.

Instead, Beth’s picture filled the screen.

He stared at the photo, cursing himself for not deleting it, something he’d told himself to do a hundred times.

He realized he’d been waiting so long the call was about to go to voicemail. Shouldering the front door open, he hit the receive key.

“Hey,” he said, trying to keep his voice nonchalant.

“Venn,” she said.

It was always
Venn
. It had always been Venn. Never
Joe
. He thought that the day she started calling him Joe, they’d become strangers to one another.

His detective’s ear caught something in her voice. A note of... worry?

“What’s up?” he said.
Something to do with the house?

After a pause, she said: “It’s to do with here. The hospital.”

For a crazy moment his mind whirled through the possibilities. “Beth, are you okay? Are you hurt?”

“No, I’m... fine. Nothing to do with me. Well, it
is
, kind of. I - look, I’m really sorry to ask you like this.”

“Beth, what’s wrong?”

“I need your help. As a cop.”

Venn dumped the buckets on the counter of the kitchenette, dropped the rods. He felt the adrenalin surge in his bloodstream.

“Tell me.” He was already heading for the bedroom, where he kept his gun in its safe.

“Not... like this.” Her voice was low, as if she was trying not to be overheard. “Listen, can we meet? If it’s not too much -”

“Where?” he interrupted.

She told him the address of a coffee shop a few blocks from the hospital. They’d met there many times before, when she’d come off shift and he’d snuck an hour away from work.

He shrugged into his leather jacket. “Be right there,” he said. “But, Beth... if you need somebody there right away, you need to call 911.”

“No,” she said. “It’s not like that. It’s not an emergency.”

“Still –”

“I don’t need a
regular
cop,” she said. “I need to ask
you
something.”

Before he could reply, she’d said a quick goodbye and was gone.

I
t wasn’t just the bite of the fall evening that made Beth Colby pull her coat around her as she stepped through the hospital doors and into the street.

Yellow cabs cruised by, seeing rich pickings in the constant stream of people emerging from the building. Beth ignored them. She preferred to walk.

She’d learned it was easier to spot followers that way.

A voice in the back of her mind said,
Don’t be ridiculous
. Why would anybody follow her? She didn’t believe she was in any physical danger. If anybody wanted to get at her, after what she’d learned that day, there were numerous ways of doing it that wouldn’t involve anything illegal.

Her career could be ruined, for one.

Beth checked her watch. A quarter of nine. If Venn had been home when she’d called him, and she assumed he was, then it would take him at least a half hour to cross into Manhattan and reach the coffee shop. Say nine fifteen.

She’d reach the coffee shop in five minutes, but she didn’t want to sit there alone. Nor did she feel comfortable remaining at the hospital. So she decided to take a walk, stretch her legs, allow the mild cardiovascular workout to flush through her brain. Maybe help her make sense of things.

Beth had been an attending physician for a little under nine months. Although she was confident in her job, and liked to think she was good at it, she couldn’t shake off a nagging sense that she was a fraud. That the hospital had made a colossal mistake in believing her to be experienced enough, or even old enough, to take on the responsibilities she now found herself with. She knew this was a common feeling among professionals in all walks of life, the disorientation of finally reaching a position of seniority after years of striving for it. But knowing this didn’t make it any les daunting.

She’d handed over to her resident, Kevin, an intense and gangly man just a couple of years younger than Beth. He’d peered at her through his glasses, as if sensing she was ill at ease, but he wasn’t yet relaxed enough with her to ask her something as personal as whether she was all right.

Beth turned onto First Avenue, where the lights were bright, and headed north.

When she’d made the decision to call Venn, she hadn’t hesitated. Truth be told, the idea had been growing in her mind ever since a couple of days earlier, when she’d first begun to notice the...
irregularities
. But she hadn’t thought about it until this evening, after her encounter with Dr Soper. On leaving his office, the decision had sprung fully formed into her consciousness.

Call Venn.

The awkwardness would have to be dealt with later.

Because she knew there was no use avoiding it, she let herself think of him.

Letting him know she wouldn’t –
couldn’t
– share his life any longer, let alone marry him, had been without question the most emotionally wrenching thing she’d ever done. Hands down. Not just because of the look of agony in his eyes, which was worst of all back in the San Antonio hospital when she hadn’t replied to his proposal, but because the prospect of no longer seeing him was almost too much for her to bear.

The psychiatrist Beth had recently started to consult, Dr Abrams, identified it as PTSD. And of course he was right. Beth recognized the symptoms. She was a textbook case. Hyperarousal, which manifested in the constant sense of fearfulness that clung to her like a shroud, the way her resting pulse had edged up to seventy-six beats per minute instead of her customary sixty-four, the physical jolt of panic she felt whenever a door slammed or a car horn sounded too loud nearby. Avoidance: every time Abrams tried to get her even to visualize what had happened to her, she fought down an impulse to scream at him, to run out the door, to do anything that would help her not see and feel and smell the gun pressed against her head, hear the guttural voices snarling in her ears.

And flashbacks. Yes, the most classic symptom of them all. The sudden intrusions, almost hallucinatory in their intensity, of the events on that July night. They’d appear before her, around her, like malevolent serpents rearing out of nowhere, and at the most inopportune times: during ward rounds, meetings with colleagues, or even when she was riding the subway home. On those last occasions, she wouldn’t be able to hold her composure, and fellow passengers would shift away from her, cursing their luck at finding themselves in a confined space next to one of New York’s thousands of crazy denizens.

Beth understood the genesis of the problem. She’d been in a situation beyond the normal range of experience of most people. A gang of drug cartel members had ambushed her in her own home, kidnapped her at gunpoint, and held her hostage for more than twenty-four hours. And it didn’t help that two years earlier she’d undergone several days of prolonged torment during which she’d been shot at multiple times, pursued across several states, and witnessed the violent deaths of scores of people. Oddly, she’d coped better back then. But Dr Abrams had a theory that that experience had primed her, and all that was needed was a new trauma to tip her over the edge.

Beth knew Venn blamed himself for what had happened to her. And she could understand why. But she didn’t blame him at all. And if it wasn’t for him, the drug men would have killed her.

She supposed she’d recover, at least partially and given enough time. But she knew she wouldn’t get over it as long as Joe Venn was in her life. Seeing him, feeling him close to her, was enough in those first days after the event to bring the memories crowding and screaming back. And she couldn’t live her life like that. It wasn’t fair on her, and it wasn’t fair on Venn either.

Nobody was to blame for all of this, except for the drug gang itself, most of whose members were dead. Nobody else was to blame, nobody deserved to be punished.

It simply was what it was.

Beth turned right, in the direction of the East River, feeling its distant breeze against her face. It felt colder than it should have, and in a moment she understood, and reached up to brush away the wetness on her cheeks.

As she doubled back toward the coffee shop where she was meeting Venn, a thought struck her. All she had discovered in the past few days, everything she’d learned this afternoon... was she reading too much into it? Had the trauma affected her so badly that her judgment, her ability to distinguish fact from speculation, was being distorted?

Venn would know, she thought with a sense of relief. At the same time she felt a pang of guilt. Here she was, asking him to help her, to reassure her that she wasn’t delusional, after she’d rejected him, cut him out of her life. Who the hell did she think she was, anyhow?

There wasn’t time to wallow in bitter self-recrimination, because she’d reached the coffee shop.

Stepping through the door into the aromatic warmth, she saw that Venn was already there.

A
lot of professionals over a lot of years had tried to figure out what made Gene Drake tick.

He despised them all, to a man and a woman.

In many ways, Drake respected the cops who’d taken him down, and the wardens and guards in the numerous prisons he’d found himself locked up in, far more. None of them treated him like a fascinating case study, or even an object of curiosity. None of them appeared to give a rat’s ass about why he was the way he was, why he’d lived his life the way he had.

They saw him simply as bad news. A highly dangerous beast, who would always be a threat to society, and who therefore needed to be removed from society and kept as far away as possible.

Drake, on the other hand, viewed them merely as obstacles to his freedom. And they knew it.

They had clear, unambiguous views about Drake, and he had the same about them. And he liked that. As far as he was concerned, relations between people ought to be simple. That way, you knew where you stood.

Drake recalled one group counseling session he’d been forced to attend, early on in his incarceration at Horn Creek. He and five other inmates had trooped into a room that looked like a kid’s nursery. Brightly patterned wallpaper. Stinky pink flowers in a vase on a desk. There was even a box of toys –
toys
, for Chrissakes – against one wall.

The counsellor, Luke, must have been forty years old, but dressed like he was in kindergarten, with funky yellow jeans and sneakers and a Tee-shirt. His hair was pulled back in a ponytail, leaving his balding forehead even more exposed, and a tiny diamond winked in one earlobe. He sat with his feet apart and his knees pressed together, as if he was trying to hide the fact that he had no balls.