Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time (37 page)

Blanchard was silent.

“That’s fine by me, we’ll have ourselves a coupla drinks, hey? Let Papa and Mr Warren in on the party, they’ll keep us both company.”

I heard the barrister take a sharp breath before speaking to me; when he did, his tone was concise and brittle.

“Mr Ellington . . . I warn you, if you choose to go down the path of trying to illegally enter my home then you will be making a very big mistake. I’m not a foolish man and I’ll be taking precautions to see to it that you won’t be a nuisance to me, is that understood? Be aware, my property is very well protected. You’d be a fool to attempt a break-in or to think you can put the frighteners on me. I’m not easily threatened, Mr Ellington.”

Like a great chess grandmaster he’d made his move and was now patiently waiting for my response. I didn’t want to disappoint him.

“But I ain’t threatening you, Mr Blanchard. You need to understand, I’ve gone way past the point of issuing threats. I know that Papa Anansi and Mickey Warren have been doing a lot of grunt work fo’ you: supplying your so-called ‘Erotica Negro’ evenings with top-grade, good-looking black girls, drugs, maybe some illegal hooch and then taking to butchering anybody who displeased you or stuck their noses too far into your seedy, secret little world.

“But last night one of those goons of yours went and killed a friend o’ mine. Those bastards took the life of a good man that never hurt a soul and who sure as hell didn’t deserve to end his days being run through by one o’ your hired blades. Well, I got news fo’ you: I’m ’bout to pull the plug on what you and those killers you pay off have been up to. You git into your head real quick how serious I am ’bout all o’ this. I ain’t just coming to pay you a visit ’bout Stella Hopkins; I’m coming to settle what you and your people did to my friend Carnell Harris and to those poor young women. So don’t be thinking I’m just spouting hot air here; you in some deep shit mister and I’m ’bout to bury you in a whole lot more of it. So why don’t you git your ass into the back o’ your limousine and git your driver to get you home real quickly.

“You wanna call the police to fight your battles, that’s fine by me, bring ’em along, but I’m thinking you probably wanting to keep this mess between us.”

I could hear the barrister breathing hard through his nose. When his reply came it was far calmer than I’d expected to be: cool, in fact.

“Very well, Mr Ellington, we’ll see you later. I’ll look forward to it.”

He was about to cut me off.

“Oh, and Mr Blanchard?” I called down the phone after him.

“Yes, Mr Ellington?” He remained as cool as ice as he spoke.

“If you considering letting another dog out with those two thugs that are in your employ, then take my advice and git yourself a bigger one. Cos that last fucker I came up against at your place, he wasn’t up to the job!”

I slammed down the phone and then looked across to Cut Man Perry, who was staring back at me with a look of horror and disbelief on his pallid, pained face.

Vic walked back into the office with a large khaki ex-army-surplus bag; he held it out in front of him and nodded at me to take it.

“No peeking inside now. I’ll meet you back at the car; I just need that quick word with Cut Man here. And don’t worry . . . I ain’t gonna be long.”

I did as he asked and left Vic alone with Cut Man. I walked out of the stinking office, back down the hallway and made my way out to the street towards the car, knowing that behind me back in the gym my cousin could be committing any number of cruel acts of violence against the immoral aged businessman, and as I dropped the heavy bag into the boot and slammed down the lid, I realised that today I didn’t give a damn.

I sat in the driver’s seat of the Cortina waiting for Vic. True to his word, he didn’t take long having his “quick” chat with Cut Man and I watched in the rear-view mirror as he sprinted across the road with a rolled-up document in his left hand and a big smile on his face. My stomach stopped knotting itself up and I relaxed a little, in the hope that that my unpredictable cousin hadn’t caused the carnage back at the gym that I was dreading he would. Vic came round to me and opened up the door, still smiling.

“Hey, where’d you stash that bag, man?”

“It’s in the boot, why?” I asked suspiciously.

“Why you always asking damn fool questions? Just git your sorry ass outta that car and follow me, will ya!”

He winked at me, then walked around to the back of the car and popped open the boot. I could hear him opening up the bag as I made my way round to him. Vic glanced behind him shiftily as I joined him at the rear of the motor. I looked at me and grinned, then pointed into at the opened holdall.

“I got us a little main-line protection on board, brother.”

Inside the bag, mixed up in between a couple of large torches, several lengths of heavy-duty naval rope, a tyre iron and a pair of ancient-looking binoculars, were a trio of what had to be unlicensed firearms. Two Colt 45 army-issue pistols sat next to a cut-down Spencer pump-action shotgun, with a half-dozen boxes of mixed ammunition thrown in for good measure. Vic closed the bag and dropped the hood of the boot back down, tapping the top of it as he walked whistling to himself back round to the passenger seat of the car and got in. I joined him and looked over at my cousin, who was drumming his fingers on the dashboard excitedly.

“Look, Vic, I ain’t gonna ask you where you got all that firepower from, but you can at least tell me why you’re holding that ream o’ paper like it’s made of sheet gold?”

“I just made me a new deal with Cut Man. I told him that I could keep his name outta all this mess he’s got himself in if he considered his options carefully.”

“Yeah . . . and what were they?”

“He could either sign the deeds of his gym over to me or I could make sure the law found out his name was linked to drugs and dead whores. He came to a real quick decision and you’re looking at the new owner of Perry’s gym.” Vic shook the deeds in front of me cheerfully. “Now let’s git movin’; you can fill me in on what goes down next while you drive.”

Before going into detail with Vic about what was about to go down, I drove round to my digs, left the engine running in the street, and ran up to my bedsit to pick up my wallet, little notebook and the slip of paper Earl Linney had given me a few days back with his address and contact numbers on.

When I got back into the car, Vic looked at me, then nodded his head towards my digs and laughed.

“Shit . . . I thought you’d gone inside to bring that mean ole bitch of a neighbour o’ yours as some extra back-up!”

I looked out towards my front door and saw Mrs Pearce standing in her bay window. She held the curtain back and stared down at me, then raised the palm of her hand and rested it on the glass pane of the window and mouthed the words, “You take care, Mr Ellington,” before she slipped back behind the curtain. I turned to look at Vic, who shook his head in bemusement.

“You sure like hangin’ round with some funny old muthafuckas, you do know that, don’t ya, JT?”

We burst out laughing at each other as I drove away down the road, both embracing a brief moment of lightheartedness and realising that the next few hours would hold little laughter for either of us.

*

It was after twelve thirty in the afternoon when I stopped just outside of Bristol at a petrol station and filled the car up with fuel. I then got on to the main A38 road out of the city and started at speed on the fifty-mile-plus journey down to Cricket Malherbie and Terrence Blanchard’s home. Vic sat peacefully next to me with his eyes closed; his hands on his stomach, fingers knitted together, his chest rising up and down slowly.

“Hey, you asleep?”

Vic opened one eye and peered over to me, a none-too-happy look on his face.

“Shit no! Asleep? I damn well ought to be, the way you chugging along in this ole hearse . . . Can’t you git a bit more poke outta it?”

“Poke, I’ve been pushing the damn ting to its limits fo’ the last ten miles; this ain’t no Ferrari GTO, you know!” I snapped edgily at my cousin, and I gave the accelerator another push towards the floor.

“It ain’t no car either, brother, it’s a piece o’ crap. You need to git yo’self a set o’ decent wheels when all this bullshit is over, you hear me?”

Taking no notice, I drove on through the bleak wintry countryside, telling him how I wanted things to play out when we got to Blanchard’s place. Vic was looking out of the passenger side window when I’d finished what I was saying. He didn’t turn to look at me when he decided to speak.

“What makes you think that this Stella Hopkins is still alive, JT? If Blanchard’s as nasty a piece o’ work you say he is, then he’s gonna have had her wasted by one of his punks as soon as he got wind that you were on to him.”

“I don’t know fo’ sure, Vic, but I gotta a real strong gut feelin’ ’bout all this. I have to find her, and Virginia Landry said she saw a scared young woman who never spoke and who was made to watch while she was molested. Stella’s mute, so who’s she gonna tell ’bout the evil tings she’s seen? She can’t speak and she sure as hell can’t hear anybody ask her questions ’bout what’s could o’ happened to her. No, Stella’s useful to a warped bastard like Blanchard. It’s about power and control and the fact they thought they could git away with it.”

Vic stayed staring at the passing countryside.

“I gotta ask you this, brother . . . What’s she to you?”

“I don’t know. Maybe just cos she needs my help but can’t ask. I do know there’s a heap o’ people interested in her fo’ different kinds o’ reasons, and a wealthy guy wants to pay out a heap of cash fo’ me to try to find her and to keep the police outta the picture. I got so many damn questions I can’t answer, Vic. I wish I could, but I can’t. All I can say to you is, I’ll find the truth . . . You gotta trust me, cousin . . . You just gotta trust me.”

I looked across to him and he stared back at me, shaking his head slowly, tutting to himself.

“Shit . . . You don’t need to talk ’bout trust, JT, we is family.”

Vic smiled, reminding me of the little boy who I had grown up with, before he frowned and his placid features changed suddenly and he became severe, savage almost.

“You just remember what I said ’bout Papa earlier: he’s mine. He made the play on Carnell and he’s gonna pay fo’ what he done to him, you understand me?”

I said nothing, but nodded sharply at Vic and returned my eyes back to the road, and I kept looking straight ahead of me with neither of us speaking again for the rest of the journey.

Outside, snow still lingered in the fields and hedgerows. I gripped at the steering wheel as an unnerving, eerie presence clutched at my chest as I drove. The bleak feelings of tragedy and death were now an unwelcome companion on our journey, my kin and I approaching ever closer both to an adversary who would seek to destroy us at any cost and to a cruel truth I would find hard to understand, let alone accept.

It was just after three o’clock when we drove through the Somerset village of Knowle St Giles and into Cricket Malherbie and out along the single-track road towards Terrence Blanchard’s imposing estate. I pulled up outside of the property next to the impressive wrought-iron gates surrounded by the high sandstone wall that secluded the wealthy barrister from the rest of the world, and the thought hit me that in the cold light of day the place was a lot bigger than I had remembered. Vic pursed his lips and whistled as he gazed up the gravel drive towards the mansion.

“This dude Blanchard really knows how to live; how’d you think he’d react if Mum and Dad and me decided to move in next door?”

He slapped the dashboard with the flat of his hand and beamed a toothy grin at me. I moved off and drove further along the badly maintained road, until around three hundred yards after the retaining wall had ended I came across a small dilapidated barn that was sitting in a grassy field behind a large old wooden gate. I pulled in beside the gate, got out and climbed over it into the field, and walked towards the barn. It was red-brick built with a short pitched grey slate roof, around twelve feet long by nine feet wide, with no windows to see inside and double doors that were practically dropping off their hinges. There was no lock and it had been poorly secured by baling twine that was loosely knotted in a futile attempt to keep both panels closed.

I untied the knot and opened up one of the doors. I took a look inside the almost empty outbuilding. A few spades, scythes and oversized iron sieves where hung on rusting nails from the heavily cobwebbed walls. At the back of the barn was a selection of what looked like ancient ploughing machinery, but there was little else. The most important thing was that there was more than enough space to hide a Cortina inside. I dragged the large door panels carefully back, walked to the gate and pulled it open. Vic looked bemused as I reversed the car the short distance into the waiting deserted storehouse. He then wound down the window, stuck his head out and shouted, “You thinkin’ o’ making an offer on the place, JT? It sure is a step up from the tatty rathole you’re dossin’ down in at the minute.” He chuckled to himself and got out, slamming the door behind him.

“Sshh! Keep it down will you.”

I shook my head to myself as I went to draw the barn doors to.

“Who they hell am I supposed to be disturbing out here, fo’ Christ’s sakes, the rabbits? We’re in the middle o’ nowhere!”

“I don’t care, we need to keep a low profile . . . You know that.”

Vic ignored me and walked round to the rear of the Cortina, popped open the boot and leant inside. He returned with the two Colt automatics and the shotgun, and dropped them ceremoniously on the bonnet of the car, then pulled out a couple of boxes of ammunition from each of his coat pockets. He threw a box over to me, then picked up one of the handguns and held it by the barrel in front of me.

“Here, you still know how to use one o’ these?”

“Yeah . . . You don’t forget.” I took the blued-steel Colt from him and cradled the walnut grip in the palm of my hand, getting used to the weight, then pushed the small button at the back of the trigger guard to release the magazine. I took eight bullets from one of the boxes, slid them into the clip and snapped it into the stock, pulling back the slide, and put a round into the chamber. I slipped the gun into my waistband at the back of my trousers and watched as Vic loaded a handful of twelve-gauge shells into the shotgun’s magazine; then he rapidly worked the forestock back and forth, sending a cartridge into the elevator ready to fire. He rubbed his hand appreciatively along the length of the barrel, then placed the gun back onto the bonnet of the car and began loading the other Colt automatic’s magazine with bullets.