Hidden River (Five Star Paperback) (31 page)

They found me. An object smashed into me and I went down again. My eyes saw white. I bit through my tongue. I rolled to the side. I’d taken another hit. Above my left knee this time. I reached down and my hand came back with blood. Shotgun pellet. I couldn’t tell if my patella was smashed. A lot of blood. I yelled and burst into tears. Scrambled away. Pathetic. I had failed. For Victoria, for me. For everyone. I, who was so goddamn smart. Jesus. My eyes closed. She was cleverer than me. I could see that now. I had been bested. Arrogance. Hubris. I blinked. Crawled behind a big tomb bedecked by angels. The men were moving too. Getting a better position. I had to move. I slithered toward the embankment, under monuments, gravestones and Celtic crosses. A sign told me that I was in section K, block 1, wherever that was.

My head was light. I couldn’t breathe. A tunnel collapsed my vision into a single fatal exit and the downpour took on a dreadful cadence. Funereal and mocking.

I should have listened to Pat.

No, it went further than that. I had fucked this up from the start. From the very day I landed in America. And now I was going to die.

At least it would be my just desserts. The punishment for such incompetence should be death. I took another breath.

“Lost him,” one man yelled.

“No, over there somewhere,” another replied.

“I’ll go around,” said the first.

Trapped, but I would try for it. The least I could do. I got up, I staggered on. Impossible. Shambling. Ahead of me somewhere in the pitch black were steps that led to the back entrance to the cemetery, the closed gate, the wire fence. Twenty or thirty wide-spaced cuts into the side of the hill, filled with pounded stone, leveled. I could have run them in thirty seconds on a good day. Now, at night, in the middle of a storm, with a shoulder wound, a leg wound, and with at least three gunmen less than the length of a basketball court away and zeroing in on me, it would be a bloody epic. Three men, one armed with a shotgun and the others using bloody automatic rifles.

I made it up about three steps, slipped on the dirt, fell. Tumbled down the hill, slewing in the mud. My head hit the side of a cast-iron litter bin. Sickening pain, a big cut above my ear. The shotgun tore up the air to my left.

“There he is,” someone yelled.

I slithered behind a stand of trees. I couldn’t see them but somehow they could see me. Maybe they had night scopes. Or, more likely, maybe they just knew there was nowhere else I could be. I gasped for air, panicked, waited for the big hit.

The rain a knife blade. My scalp on fire. My knee screamed, my chest gurgled, the wind blew down. I threw up in my mouth. Junk sick.

I saw a storage shed for lawnmowers. I crawled behind it. Safe for a few seconds. I took a deep breath. Calmed myself. Options. I wasn’t dead yet. I had the dark. I had a gun of my own. And the rain so thick it was nearly impossible to see. The boys would have to come close to administer the coup de grâce.

I did a quick triage. I’d been hit in the chest, but the vest had protected me.

The shoulder wound was a ricochet off the Kevlar. I felt around, it wasn’t serious. I was bleeding, but no major blood vessel had been punctured and it hurt like hell—a good sign. The shotgun pellet in the leg wouldn’t kill me. I put my finger through my soaked jeans to the skin. A lot of blood, but I could wiggle my toes. My tendons and nerves were ok. All that shooting and I’d really only been fucking grazed.

More shots, yells of organization: “Where’d he go? Where’s that fucking light? Who had the light?”

Only male voices. Amber, of course, was well out of this. Back at the car. Gone. Already left town. I took out the .45. Blacked out for a second. Where was I? I was in the middle of a graveyard. Shooters above and to the side of me. Three points of a triangle and I was at the center. They were good. Pat had been right. I was an idiot, an amateur dealing with professionals. It made no sense, Amber, why would you hire three more potential blackmailers? Goddamnit, it made no sense. Forget it. Had to get out. If I could make it to the fence on the far left of the cemetery. About fifty yards. Could I walk it? I’d have to crawl. Ok. Ignore the pain. Let’s go.

Caked with filth, I slithered my way over graves, cleaning the vomit out of my nostrils, sliding carefully along the ground.

Suddenly someone shouted triumphantly: “There he is.”

They turned a dazzling portable spotlight on me. One of those with thousands of candlepower.

And I knew if I didn’t move I was a dead man.

An M16 threw fire at me from the trees. I struggled to my feet and ran for the fence, ignoring the pain from the pellet above my knee. The rain made it difficult to see, to get purchase on the ground. I slipped and fell between the pillars of a massive tomb. Bullets smashed into the marble, sending chips everywhere. I ran for the fence, dodging between graves, taking cover between granite tombstones. Shots and fire overhead. A man in front of me. I was heading straight for him. His back to me, a big dark shape in the night and rain.

An automatic rifle churned up the mud ahead of me, smacking into granite, tracer bouncing everywhere, like fireworks.

“Frank, stop shooting, you’re going to hit fucking Manny, Frank, cut it out,” a voice yelled.

I ran toward the man.

“Jesus, Frank, didn’t you fucking hear me? Stop shooting.”

The M16 abruptly stopped.

“Manny, Manny, he’s over there, he’s right there.”

The voice was yelling desperately, behind me and over to my left. The big light came full on me again.

“There he is, Manny, turn around.” Another voice.

“Where?”

“Manny, he’s right there, at that big cross behind you.”

Manny, in front of me, turned at last when we were fifteen feet apart. White guy with a beard and a flat cap. Soaked through. Probably waiting here for hours. He began raising his shotgun. He hadn’t kept it leveled because he hadn’t wanted water to get into the barrels.

That’s what killed him.

I straightened my weapon, pulled the trigger. Pat’s big Colt banged. Flame from the heavy barrel. I’d cleaned it, but this weapon hadn’t been fired in combat since the Battle of the Ardennes. I screamed, charged him. Ran into the dark, shooting. Half a clip. Like an insane man. Blinding flashes from the .45. When my eyes cleared, no sign of Manny, he was down.

Yellow fire all around me from the M16s. The Fourth of July and Guy Fawkes night and a riot drill and every other nightmare rolled into one.

I could see gravity in the parabola of the tracer. The bullets smacking into the wire fence around the cemetery. Ringing off the concrete walls, bouncing a thousand feet into the air.

I ran like a shit-kicker now. I sprinted to the cemetery fence. I needed both hands, so I dropped the .45. I climbed over the five-foot wire mesh, fell to the ground, scrambled across the car park on the other side.

More tracer, more bullets. M16s in the middle of the town. But this was Fort Morgan after midnight, during a thunderstorm. Empty.

I kept running. The car park was well lit up. They found me easily in the lights and shot at me but the shots were wild, they rang and screamed off the railings, and the shooters didn’t focus them properly. They were excited, not taking their time.

I saw a Volkswagen camper van parked on an overlook near the river.

I yelled. “Help, is there anyone there? Help.”

I ran to the van and banged on the window. Bullets slammed into the side of the vehicle, puncturing tires and windows. Glass and metal shards smacking into me. A bullet careened off the Kevlar vest, knocking me to my knees.

“Fucker,” one of the men screamed behind me.

I got up and turned to see two men climbing over the cemetery fence. They had shoulder-strapped their rifles. Bearing down. Big men. White guys. Heavy, but tough. Where had they come from? All the trouble they took to silence a simple blackmailer in Denver, and Charles somehow hires three professional killers to shoot me?

I ran past the sugar factory, the Walgreen’s, a video store. The shops all closed. The street deserted.

“Come back, you fucker,” they yelled, shooting pistols now.

A bullet clanged into a stop sign. I ran on, wounded, slowing as they gained.

Only one thing for it now.

Only one way out. The river. I cut across the deserted I-76.

I sprinted to the end of a lane and vaulted over the safety railing that led to the embankment over the South Platte. I stole a final look back. They were still shooting at me as they ran.

I took a breath, jumped.

A moment in the river-cooled air.

I landed in the water.

Sank like a fucking stone….

Coldness.

Smothering, death-bringing cold. Annihilating, electrocuting cold. The air crushed from my lungs.

My body writhes. Shots in my wake. I gasp for breath. I swallow greasy, frigid water and sink and am rocketed downstream. I fall through the poisons and heavy chemicals toward the choked sandy bottom, clutching, screaming, down-down-down.

I touch bottom, I’m dragged along rocks.

My blood freezing, my eyes open.

So this is how it ends.

In this river. With these gray claws and ash tide. The Platte with its hard line and dead current. This river. Like the gun, to the Mississippi, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic. This river. To its black, tenebrous heart. And I go to you and I see you in the dark. I see your traces along the trail that you have beaten to the Great Perhaps. And are you there, Victoria, and are you there, Mum? It’s cold, it hurts. And I smile. This river. This time.

But no.

Not yet.

That will come.

But not yet.

My fingers find the Velcro straps of the Kevlar vest. I pull them, the straps loosen, the Velcro rips, the vest falls off me and I tumble upward to the surface. I suck a desperate breath, float for a minute in the fast-moving water, before smacking into a rock on a sandbank. I lie there for half an hour.

Wade across the shallows to the bank.

Walk.

Shivering, oblivious to the rain, shoulder wound, leg wound. Two miles back to Fort Morgan. Empty streets, neon signs, and not another human soul.

Adrenaline fighting against blood loss and exhaustion.

Three floors to Pat’s apartment. The door.

“Help me,” I manage and Pat turns, horrified, toward me.

And I fall at his feet and slip into that other realm where things made sense and the guilty suffered and equity lived and we all were saved.

11: THE LAST INCARNATION OF VISHNU

A
sh on the fire escape. Images. A black cloud. My mother’s hand. Her cold fingers. What will you do, son?

I’ll join the cops, Ma.

No, no, don’t do that, it’ll upset your father, stay at university, it’s for the best.

Ok, I will, Ma. I will….

Them’s brave boys that are out in that, John mutters.

Aye, I say.

We sit and drink and the smoke comes slowly overhead like a continent. Ash from the big wildfire near Greeley. John walks to the rail and is almost lost in the vertical cliff of choking smog that hangs in a blanket above the buildings. A stink of fire. Water-carrying planes flying overhead. I’m waiting with him on the narrow fire escape steps. I’m standing and hugging myself and he is hunched over and spitting down onto the dead potted plants of the floors below.

We both smell of smoke. He passes me the bottle and I take it in my left hand. The American whiskey tastes sour. I gulp down a big swig of it and the fake heat evaporates the cold out of my ears. I give him the bottle back and he swallows down the rest. For a minute I think he’s going to throw it onto the ground and see if it smashes, but instead he sets it carefully on the iron slats of the fire escape.

We can maybe get ten cents back on that bottle, I say.

He turns to look at me and shakes his head, his shaggy hair still as his face moves. It’s a weird effect, not unconnected to the booze. I laugh a little.

I’m drunk and cold, I tell him.

If you’re cold, you can’t be drunk, ya big wean, alcohol numbs the senses, he announces in a tone of pissed authority.

Bollocks, I think. But I don’t want to argue with him. After all, he is dead.

Let’s go in, he says, this overhang is barely giving us any shelter. This smoke can’t be good for your lungs. Gimme a hand to get this thing open.

He gives me his cigarette and tugs on the window and tries to pull it up. It sticks on the first shove and he has to thump it. A heap of red ash falls on us from the wooden board covering the air conditioner on the next floor.

Hey, watch what you’re doing, John, I say.

Relax.

He bends his body and pushes past me, climbing in through the window, over the grille of the security gate.

Aye, like you couldn’t wait for me, I say sarcastically and look around at this sorry excuse for a town, the orange sky, the old buildings, shriveled and spectral. And all I can think about are the gray waves that separate us from our home. A moat between me and the braided dark.

Eagla, mathair, eagla,
I whisper into the stinking air.

Are you saying something? he mutters from inside.

No.

Aye, well, get in and we’ll get this window closed, so we will. Quit your gabbing and get moving, he says suspiciously.

I put a leg over the metal trough. It’s sharp and comes up to my groin, so I can’t lean on it. I end up falling in and landing in a clatter on the floor.

Keep your comments to yourself, I say before he can call me an eejit.

You care about my comments, he says, with a sly grin on his pale face. Anyway, it’s late and it’s time we were in bed, he says.

I am in bed, I say.

And he looks at me, surprised.

So you are, he says. What are you doing?

I’m recovering from drowning and from Pat taking a shotgun pellet out of my leg and the fact that I’m going off ketch forever.

You’re not.

John, I have to. They’re having a fund-raiser, a ball. We saw it on Channel 9. And I’m going. And this time I won’t screw up. This time I’m going to kill him. I’m quitting ketch. Pat’s helping me.

John looks at me skeptically.

You couldn’t kill someone, he says, and don’t say you killed that guy in the cemetery, there was no report about it in the paper, they must have taken him with them.

I gave him half a clip, I protest.

How many hit him? John mocks.

The dying man, who has been in the corner the whole time, looks up at me. His flat cap is askew, shotgun by his side, he’s still soaked, but with blood, not rain.

Enough hit me, he says.

John snaps his fingers in front of my face.

Ignore him, he says. Continue.

Pat’s making me healthy, I say.

Sure, he’s in no fit state himself, he says.

He’s fine. End of conversation. All right?

Aye.

And now I have to see Ma, and I have to reveal the black secret at the heart of the Troubles.

That’s ok, just don’t say that thing again.

What thing?

I am the Last Incarnation of Vishnu, the Avenger, Storm Bringer, Lord of Death.

Ok. I won’t, I say, and pause for effect and then announce: I am the Last Incarn—

He turns off the light….

* * *

Ma is in the ground six weeks, and I’m on the Scotch Quarter being interviewed. They’re accepting my application to join the police. It has annoyed my lefty, progressive father, and that’s the beauty of the thing.

“Alex, we always want someone who has experience of the law and your A levels are outstanding, do you have anything you want to say?”

Do I have anything I want to say?

My eyes fluttering…

The bedroom spinning.

Pat gives me the bucket and I throw up.

“Neither poppy nor mandragora will ever medicine to thee that sweet sleep which thou hadst yesterday.”

“What?”

“Not poppy, not mandragora (whatever that is) will give me that sweet sleep of yesterday. I see that now. Heroin takes, never gives. That and that alone can explain so many mistakes since coming to America.”

“And you say heroin is to blame?”

“Yes.”

“But earlier you said heroin saved your life?”

“It did.”

“How?”

Like this:

I’d been a policeman for nearly six years. A full detective for three. I had gone straight into homicide. As Commander Douglas of the Samson Inquiry will tell you, this is practically unheard of. Being groomed, and I knew it. I was being used, but I wanted to be used, I wanted to make my way up. There were factions within the RUC that didn’t like the way things were. Fine, use me to further your ends. My talents, my skill. My
techne
.

All the way to the black heart of the Troubles.

A secret. Ostensibly, the rival paramilitary forces of the Protestants and the Catholics, the UDA and the IRA, were deadly enemies; but in the late eighties and early nineties, while they were killing each other in bombings, shootings, massacres, something brought them together.

Heroin.

Ireland was an island and it was impossible to get drugs there, especially when the paramilitaries had a thing for killing drug dealers and proving that they were as legitimate of respect as the police. But in 1993 at a secret meeting in Jake’s Bar in Belfast, it was decided to divide up Ulster between them. Heroin was just too big a moneymaker to ignore. Had to be secret. Had to be hush-hush. The IRA’s backers in Boston and New York and San Francisco would have been upset if they had known the IRA was in the drug-dealing business. And the UDA’s backers in Belfast and Glasgow would have had similar qualms.

After six years as a police officer I was appointed DC/DS, Detective Constable/Drug Squad.

Heroin, the gateway drug, was giving the paramilitaries millions and they were still bombing bars and factories and driving people into their arms for protection. That was why people like Victoria Patawasti had to leave Northern Ireland in the first place.

Yes, thinking, remembering it.

Lying here, in this bed, Pat bringing me soup.

“Are you ok, son?”

“I’m ok, Pat. Hey, it’s snowing.”

“No. It isn’t, Alex. It’s just ash from the wildfire, don’t worry about it, just relax, they have it eighty percent contained.”

“Look, Pat, the snow,” I say, but he’s gone and it’s night. I put my head out the window and the snow stings me in the iris making tears that skitter down the lines of least resistance on my face, half-freezing before they slide off my chin.

I can stare right through the clouds, through the dark. The snow is coming not from the sky but from the blue-faced moon, where the Celts believed the dead go. You sent it, Ma. Drizzling from the ether and the high atmosphere and down the roof onto this bed. It moistens my lips.

Morning.

“Eat your soup,” Pat says, and kisses me on the forehead.

“The case,” I tell him.

I followed it for months, it wasn’t that important, but it led to a suspect. Was it all a setup? My mentor was Chief Superintendent William McConnell. Big man, forties, old school. I trusted him.

“Alex, follow this where it leads, I’ll back you up.”

“I will, sir. I will.”

Stakeouts, undercover, but more the paper trail. Made an arrest. Stuart Robinson, a CPA. Ha. Just like how they got Capone. Does no one ever learn the lessons of history? I cracked him, I broke him, I trapped him in his own lies. He gave me names and I found it out. It was waiting to be found out. I don’t flatter myself. I saw it, a black secret. The IRA, the sworn enemies of the police, worked with a tiny corrupt unit within the police to control the flow of heroin into Ireland. The IRA and dirty cops. The bad guys and the good. Samson was on the right track. Buck McConnell, Commander Douglas were on the right track. It was all true. It went to the highest levels of the cops. Dangerous information. And what did I do, reading the accounts, that rainy night in Carrickfergus in my apartment overlooking the marina. What did I do?

I could take the evidence outside the RUC, to Special Branch in England, and forever live my life a fugitive, knowing that one day they’d get to me, they always do.

One bright morning in Perth, Australia, I go out to get my paper and a man with an Irish accent says hello, Alexander, and shoots me in the head.

Or I could bury the case, pretend it never happened.

Maybe I am a coward. I sat on it, in indecision, and that night…

Pat comes in with tea. Chitchat. I stroke my beard. I have a beard again. It’s been days. Weeks?

“You were saying?” Pat asks, liking when I talk, he says it helps me.

“That night…”

Heavy fog had smothered the wind and for once the gossipy yachts, dinghies, and small craft were silent.

My apartment at the marina. The quiet woke me. Gulls and distant foghorns up in Belfast. I sat in the bed and weighed my options. I was sweating, afraid. Death and exile on the one hand, or do nothing and forever live in shame. I heard the sound of hobnail boots on the marina pontoons. I grabbed my service revolver, but I put it down again.

The interrogating room. Classic twist. The roles reversed.

“I’m saying nothing until I see a lawyer.”

“You won’t be seeing a lawyer, Alex, you’re being held under the Prevention of Terrorism Act.”

“I want to speak to Buck McConnell.”

“Chief Superintendent McConnell has taken early retirement as of this morning.”

And I knew if I blabbed they’d kill me. They suspected that I knew the names of the corrupt cops but if I confirmed it, I’d be dead. They held me for two days and I said nothing and they released me. It gave them and me time to think.

What do I do, go to Scotland Yard, Special Branch, to the newspapers? I’d be hunted, killed. Say nothing, wait for the shoe to drop, I’d be hunted, killed. Run? Where?

I walked home from the barracks, afraid of every passing car.

Yes…

Pat sponges me down and cleans me off. Gives me green tea that he says is loaded with antioxidants, I throw it up. Why was it so hard going off junk when I wasn’t a junkie? Pat helps me to the toilet and I drizzle diarrhea and sob.

The bed.

The apartment overlooking the boats. Death one way. Death the other. Racking my squirreled-up brains.

And I hit upon a solution.

A third way.

Brilliant. The scourge would save me. The biter bit.

I found my undercover stash and like I’d watched, but never done, I injected myself with heroin and tracked up and down my arm until it looked like I was a junkie. Hit, rest, hit, rest, needle marks. And then I signed into the police station, broke into the evidence room, and got caught stealing half a click of heroin under my jacket. I was arrested on the spot. They found the track marks and it was such an obvious cliché, they bought it, the drug squad officer who uses. Maybe to establish credibility with dealers undercover, maybe because he was tempted, maybe he was weak. But it happened. Pathetic. Caught fucking red-handed. Where do these eejits come from?

And the higher-ups saw too. I was a junkie drug-squad officer. Caught stealing. How to handle it? Prosecute me?

No.

I would resign in disgrace, my file would be closed, we would hush it up.

Perfect. If I shut up and behaved myself, we’d leave it at that. And if I tried to whistleblow, I would have no credibility, no one would believe me, a junkie peeler caught stealing ketch from the police evidence room.

No need to kill me now. I wasn’t blabbing, I wasn’t going to anyone. I could never make my case. I had a record and no moral weight and I would live.

I had saved my life. And every day I kept using and I kept buying and I was safe.

Heroin had saved my life.

Or it had for six months till Commander Douglas from the Samson Inquiry came along and made me an offer I had to refuse….

Pat nods. Rambling and arse backward, but Pat has got the gist of it.

“So why can’t you go home now?” he asks.

“They think Commander Douglas will compel me to testify anyway, my evidence alone would not be credible, but it will add to the overwhelming weight of evidence Samson has compiled. They have to plug the hole in every dyke. Have to kill me, just in case. I’m not safe anywhere.”

“That’s why, Alexander, it’s better that you stay here and do nothing and get well,” Pat says.

“Pat, I have nothing there, I have nothing here. The reason I’m getting well, the reason I’m quitting junk, is so that I can fucking shoot Charles Mulholland, the killer of my two friends. Don’t you see, man’s crazy. Gotta be stopped. I’ve got to do it before the announcement on August sixth, before he gets to run for Congress. If I can do it, I can wipe the slate clean.”