Crime (41 page)

A consoling touch on his arm by Ian Gellatly, Dundee FC’s chairman. Mercer nods in sober, dignified appreciation. With sadness, he thinks of team manager Alex MacDonald, whom he saw head dejectedly into the tunnel at the final whistle. Internally debates whether he should go down to the dressing room and be with the players, or give them a little space. Retreats somewhere briefly to reprogramme the smile. The businessman calculates the loss in economic terms, before re-emerging with a sparkling grace.

* * *

Ray Lennox rose on Sunday, having slept fitfully. His father had suffered a minor heart attack and was still in Dundee. He would be transferred tomorrow to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh. A new regime would be undertaken; diet change and medication, anticoagulants for the blood. There was a sense of revenge afflicting Ray Lennox. A need for justice. Emotions battled within him. He was determined to have it out with Les. To get clarification: friend or foe. He didn’t care which any more, he just wanted to know.

He got on the bus to Clermiston and ducked down the side lane to Les’s back door. But as he headed down the narrow paved passage that ran between the houses, Lennox was accosted by that stillness he now knew so well; the foreboding sense of something being not quite right. Then the calm was desecrated by urgent shrieks of terror filling the air. Ray Lennox could see a flash of fire, and it was hurtling towards him. Unable to avoid the burning projectile, he shut his eyes, giving thanks that it missed his face, though coming close enough for him to feel the sooted flesh in his throat, and the hair under his nose singe. He turned to watch it ricochet off the pebble-dashed wall of the house behind him, and fall on to the paving. The ball started dancing frantically and a terrorised eye in the flame begged for mercy as the stink of burning flesh and filthy feathers filled his nostrils.

Lennox backed away as the creature toppled, crumpling into silence. In the direction of the loft, Les Brodie’s eyes seemed as small and reasonless as the burning pigeon’s as he held another bemused bird at arm’s length and was dousing it with petrol from the spout of a small can. Lennox felt his skin burn under the heat of his gaze. Turning quickly, he fled back up the side lane and into the front street, his boyhood friend’s mocking laughter following him all the way.

Another squealing, flaming comet shot into the sky above him, clearing the rooftop of the house, before the ball of flame plummeted and bounced along the road. Lennox didn’t look back; he headed swiftly towards the bus stop as a maroon-and-white double-decker drew near. Les had given him the answer he needed.

20

Sales Conference

THE NIGHT HEAT
swarms out of the mangrove swamps as Lennox takes the Interstate 75 east. He drives touching the 100 mph mark, the Volkswagen resonating dangerously as it bullets along the almost deserted Alligator Alley, heading for a hotel by Miami airport, and a training course.

He’s read about groups of guys, usually nerds, who get together in seminar settings, sharing techniques on how to pick up women. They draw on a mixed bag of behavioural and situational approaches: transactional analysis, neurolinguistic programming and pop and pseudo psychology. Most are simply wanting to increase their drawing power in the sexual marketplace; bright, obsessive losers, they are trying to circumvent their social unease with females. For others, the women are practically incidental; it is more about inter-male bonding and competition, the schoolyard boasting of sexual conquests – real or imagined – taken into adulthood.

For some of the more extreme members of these groups, the thrill of picking up women and sharing in techniques and triumphs soon becomes passé. Many are openly dysfunctional; obvious victims of abuse, with an embittered and displaced vengeful aspect to their character. They are chickenhawks who’ve flocked together and their
raison d’être
is to seek and befriend vulnerable lone parents with prepubescent children.

The seminar is a house of paedophiles, at least one of whom is a copper. Lennox had become a policeman because he hated bullies. Then he’d been disillusioned to find out that, like everywhere else, the police force had its share. Right across the world, men like Dearing, attracted to wielding power over others, would hide behind the badge of service. He could do nothing to stop them, so, in his cynicism, had almost become one himself.

Without the righteous fire of his anti-nonce crusade, Lennox was too sensitive to cope with the savagery that surrounded him in Serious Crimes. Only through booze and cocaine could he talk its language, understand its dumb code on the requisite emotional level, even if the substances which gave him the zeal for the culture of violence curtailed his effectiveness at its practice. The martial arts, the kick-boxing, they only helped when he was physically capable of training three times a week. Then the gloved fists of other men in his face were reduced to annoyances, to be caught, blocked, sidestepped, countered.

Lennox freezes as a rhythmic slash of propeller blades overhead signals a helicopter closing in. Its searching light beam lasers the road behind him.
Surely Dearing couldn’t
… But the sound is fading away over the Everglades, the biggest uninhabited roadless land mass in the United States. Of course choppers would scan its lush density; taking photographs, looking for drug smugglers, illegals, terrorists or just civilians behaving unconventionally.

Dedicated swampland becomes uncompromising city within the toss of a Frisbee, and Ray Lennox, the displaced Scottish cop who knows he can never do this job again, pulls into the Embassy Hotel car park, the seminar already an hour in. After the grimy functionalism of airport-zone Miami, to step into the hotel’s ornate pink-marbled and gold-leafed courtyard of fountains and pillars is to enter corporate Eden. The diverse flora are so thoughtfully planted and meticulously maintained, through his glassy eyes they look like a shiny Photoshopped brochure. He studies the black felt-ribbed board, almost expecting to see NONCE CONFERENCE indicated by the white plastic lettering.

CONFERENCES AT EMBASSY AIRPORT HOTEL

Thursday, January 12

JONES BOATYARD INC.

Palm Beach Boardroom

8 a.m. – 5 p.m.

2005 HISPANIC JOB FAIR

Key Largo 3 & 4

10 a.m. – 8 p.m.

SONY ELECTRONICS DEALER TRAINING

Upper Atrium

11 a.m. – 1 p.m.

SUNDANCE MEDIA

Binini

3.30 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.

FEUER NURSING REVIEW

Key Biscayne

3.30 p.m. – 4.30 p.m.

SUICIDE SURVIVORS

Key Largo 2

7 p.m. – 9.30 p.m.

SALES FORCE 4 TRAINING SEMINAR

Key Largo 1

8 p.m. – 11.30 p.m.

Key Largo. Lennox thinks of the film. Bogart and Bacall. Asks a receptionist to point the way. She reminds him of Trudi in her body language and wary, slightly artful smile, to the extent of oblique but poignant arousal, as she indicates a flight of stairs. Climbing them quickly, he arrives at a mezzanine floor, clocks Key Largo. Head surreptitiously craned round the door, he looks inside from the back of the small room: five men seated round a table. Dearing isn’t present, but the others look furtive and traumatised. He steps inside to confront them. — So this is the place, is it?

One bespectacled man in his thirties, sweating in spite of the air con, regards his approach. — I’m sorry, Mr …?

— Lennox. Where’s our friend Dearing then?

— I’m Mike Haskins, the man offers. — There’s no Dearing
here
. He puts his glasses on to his head and studies a folder. — And I’m afraid I don’t seem to have your name down here, Mr Lennox …

— No. You won’t have. I just want you to tell Dearing –

The man has put his specs back on his nose and is focusing on Lennox. — I think you might have the wrong room. This is the Suicide Survivors group.

— Eh … Key Largo … Sales … Lennox says timidly.

— This is Key Largo 2, the man patiently informs him, — Key Largo 1 is across the way.

— Sorry … sorry. Lennox skulks out into the corridor. Guzzling some deep breaths, he composes himself, elects to play it softly. Let the police have the big showdown. He ducks his head round the door of what is a bigger seminar room. A man standing at the front makes a PowerPoint presentation. He can see the backs of eight heads, in a semicircle. Only one turns, glancing at Lennox, squinting, then looking back to the presenter. Lennox withdraws. He’s seen him before, in South Beach: the Deuce and Myopia. Close to him, another recognisable figure. He hasn’t turned round, but there is no mistaking the denim back of Lance Dearing.

Lennox swiftly concealed himself behind some stacked chairs in the hallway. He can hear the speaker clearly. — What do I do when I get a lead? Nothing. I sit back and plan. I find out everything I can about the customer, before I present the product. The initial product is
not
your own wants and desires. This is crucial: the product is completely tailored to the customer, at first. Only when the customer is completely hooked do we start to think about modifying client behaviour.

Then familiar tones set him on edge: Lance Dearing. — An ol dog knows you gotta hunt the fattest, juiciest lil’ fleas with a wet tongue rather than a sharp tooth.

— Amen, another voice endorses.

He has heard enough to know that confrontation will be useless, and the lack of any obvious police presence makes him wonder about Chet’s alarm-raising capabilities. But he has the evidence, and Chet and Johnnie. He decides to get Robyn and leave them to it.

Then he hears the announcement of a coffee adjournment, and the gratified sounds of men stretching and rising eagerly, as chairs slide along the polished wooden floor. Instead of going downstairs, he quickly heads to the restroom, bolting the small cubicle shut, sitting and waiting. Two men enter: urine blasts against porcelain and the salts in the bottom of neighbouring latrines.

— How ya doin, Tiger?

— Ah’m good.

Tiger
. Lennox sweats, feeling his blood pounding as if his heart is where his brain should be. He pulls the flush and moves out of the cubicle; stands alongside one of the men, who is washing his hands, while the other still pees. He looks at the delegate badge on the man’s lapel: C.T. O’HARA. He’s a big, full-faced guy with a benign smile. Wedding ring. Looks like a regular dad. Away from home a lot, working hard in sales to generate a college fund for his kids. Who married this monster, slept with him every night? Wouldn’t they just
know
?
Why
would they?

The big guy gives his hands a cursory blast under the electric dryer and in departure teases his colleague who has advanced to the basin by Lennox. — You’re gonna miss those chocolate-chip cookies, Tiger.

— Don’t I know it. Them boys got appetites, Tiger grins, displaying a row of capped teeth, as his friend departs.

Lennox looks at his oily black hair, the snidey, reptilian cast of the features and the name tag confirming:
J.D. CLEMSON
. He could envisage him buying Robyn drinks in a bar. See him alone with Tianna …

He pulls his arm behind his back to scratch at his shoulder blade as he steps closer to Clemson. Sees the beast look up with a faint, vaguely uncomprehending smile on its lips, before he shoots the elbow forward at speed into Clemson’s face. A satisfying crunch is followed by a screech and blood erupts, splattering across the white sink. Lennox pivots behind Clemson and forces his face down on to the edge of the unit, hammering it repeatedly, as teeth and bone crack and the man grows limp in his now painless hands, emitting nothing other than a low, gurgling groan. — Savour this moment, Lennox says to him, — cause this is as good as it gets for you
from
now on in. Your old life is over.
This
is what you were put here for.

Lennox releases his grip. As the bloodied Clemson falls slowly, sliding down, drunkenly trying to cling on to the unit, Lennox kicks him in the face, assisting his sprawl to the marble floor. He can’t cease stomping Clemson, can’t end the intimacy, yet he makes himself halt. But not before his senses have been assailed by that brief insight all men might be permitted before they become killers, that the achievement of that goal will produce an irreperable emotional downshift.

Phantom-like and serene as he opens the door and looks down the mezzanine’s narrow hallway, he feels as if he’s watching himself in a dream, where narrative perspective shifts from first to third person, usually when the nightmare becomes unbearable. He walks past the seminar rooms. Key Largo 2’s door is closed. He glides by the half-open Key Largo 1 without looking in, the buzz of men chatting over coffee never changing in register as he passes. Then adrenalin shoots into him with the realisation that the police might just arrive to witness his brutal assault. He scoots down the stairs, across the hotel lobby, vaguely aware of KC and the Sunshine Band’s ‘Don’t Go’ playing in piped music, and runs across the lot to the green car.

As he drives past the airport, he thinks again about what Les endured, wondering how he would have coped with similar treatment. As a copper he was drawn to Serious Crimes, and he would often look through the sex offenders database, to see if he could recognise their three assailants. His mind played tricks; sometimes he was convinced he had identified one of them, only later to be certain it was someone else. But he knew that he hated all sex offenders: every one of those terrible, wretched specimens. Bringing them to book was the one and only thing he believed to be
true
policework. The system was played solely for the leverage to get to them, the
real
villains. This power was craved because he’d declared war on paedophiles. Never a policeman, Ray Lennox is a beast hunter and now that he has their scent he’s compelled to take this as far as he can.

21

Showdowns

LENNOX REALISES HIS
fraught and hasty retreat from Dearing has confused his mental map of Miami. He finds himself heading east on the Calle Ocho strip of SW 8th Street at Little Havana, past the Cuban bakers and furniture shops, where groups of old men chat and smoke in the cooling air, as the central business district’s skyscrapers glow in the distance.