Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (17 page)

Somewhere along the way I was walking. I had no idea where the car was or when I had gotten out of it. My leg seemed to be hurting even through my drugged numbness, but it wasn’t bad enough to stop me from walking. It was dark and everything around me was wet, so I guessed a thunderstorm must have passed through.

I got to my flat and had the keys in my hand. As I fumbled for the lock I heard a car door open and shut behind me. I was slow in turning around, but when I did Laura was standing behind me. She looked like hell, with her eyes dark from tears and her work clothes rumpled.

She offered me a weak smile. “How was your day?”

When I fumbled for a response she touched my arm and peered in close at my eyes. “You’re stoned.”

I didn’t answer.

Her shoulders moved slightly, like a shrug but without the effort. “Got any to share?”

I opened the door and led the way up the stairs, opening the door at the top to my own flat. I could feel the world seeping back into my bones. My clothes were leaden with water. I lifted a bottle of bourbon from the kitchen cupboard and set two glasses on the counter where we had shared breakfast that morning. Felt like a lifetime ago. Laura came around behind me and pulled my coat back off my shoulders.

“Your coat is soaked.” She bent down and pulled at my jeans. “Eoin, you’re bleeding.”

“Am I?” I could hear my own voice. It felt disconnected from me, bored and uninterested.

Laura pulled harder at my jeans, undoing them and working them down; it was a struggle because the rain had stuck them to my legs. There was a gash down my calf, about six inches long. It was surrounded by blood but it didn’t seem to be bleeding much anymore.

“What did you do?”

“I have no idea.”

“What did you take?”

“I have no idea.”

“This is your bad leg, right?”

“Yes.”

“You need to start injuring the other one, balance it out.”

She started the tap running and wiped at the wound with a dishcloth, scrubbing at it hard and making some fresh blood flow. I felt faint. The world went away for a second. I blinked a couple of times and I was on the sofa. Laura was handing me a glass of water. My leg had been cleaned and dressing applied, wrapped tight around it. I felt pins and needles tingling away at my foot. I took the water and downed it. Laura then handed me a large measure of bourbon, and I sipped at it. She slid onto the sofa next to me.

“I’ve been suspended.”

She stated it calmly, matter of fact, but the words wobbled a little at the edges, holding down a load of emotion. The force had been her life even after she’d started cheating it, and I knew how it felt to lose everything.

I opened my mouth, but she placed her finger on my lips to silence me. “I don’t want to talk,” she said.

She scooted over and kissed me, slowly at first, biting my lower lip and sucking. Then she built up to something harder and hungrier. Searching. She slipped her own top off and leaned in. I was slow to react, my brain still processing my missing car, let alone what had happened since.

She pulled away and looked at me as if to say, hurry up. “I just want to feel something else,” she said. “Something better.”

I leaned back. “Feel away.”

I lay awake in the darkness of the bedroom. The skylight above me usually let in some moonlight, but the storm clouds blotted it out. I had Laura asleep beside me and a load of ghosts surrounding the bed.

People I’d lied to.

People I’d let down.

In the corner I could picture Rachel. She had been a friend, very briefly. A recovering alcoholic and one of the last people to see any good in me. She’d gone out of her way to tell me I was worth something and that I should let up on myself, before she’d left town after her best friend had been killed. In the darkness of my room I felt her staring at me. I imagined she didn’t like what she saw.

I tried to shake the last drugs from my brain but I realized what was holding on to me now was guilt. I’d never found a simple fix for that.

Laura patted my chest. “Where are you?”

“What?”

“Right now, where are you? You used to do this all the time when we were together. One minute you were in the room with me. The next, you’d be all tense and I knew you were somewhere else. I can practically hear your brain working away.”

I rolled onto my side to face her and found her lips for a soft kiss. “I’m right here.”

“Liar. You weren’t in the room earlier, either. I was with you, but you were off with someone else. Does she know?”

“Who?”

I heard her laugh a little. “You know who.”

She ran her hand along my arm, and I felt something I’d not noticed before. When she took my fingers in her own I felt it again. I pulled my hand loose and ran my fingers over the back of her hand, to her knuckles and up to her fingers, and there it was.

“You’re wearing the wedding ring again.”

“Yes.” She stroked my arm. Then she rolled over onto her other side, away from me.

I stared up again into the darkness, seeing only the black void of the skylight. When I looked around the room again, we were almost alone. The only people left were Matt Doncaster and Veronica Gaines.

We both slept in. My excuse was drugs, alcohol, and blood loss. Laura’s was that she had no job to go to. I left her sleeping and took a quick shower before heading out.

I walked around the block, looking for my car, and then to some of the public car parks nearby. Wherever my car was, I hoped it was in better shape than I was. My leg didn’t want to take my weight, and it took me a lot longer than it should have to walk to Casa Mia.

I’d failed. There was no point in trying to find the leak or the information now, because Branko already had both. And the deadline was up today. I needed to talk to Gaines and get her clear of trouble. I let myself in through the back entrance. She was at her desk, sipping coffee and reading through a stack of documents when I leaned into the office. She looked up and nodded, waved for me to come in, and I settled into the chair opposite. She was back in businesswoman mode, with sharp and expensive clothes and a suit jacket hanging off the back of her chair. The simple look that Claire never managed to make work. My heart stretched, and I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Laura the night before.

Does she know?

Indeed. There were many things Gaines didn’t know. If the cartel were good to their word, she was on borrowed time, and it was my fault. I added it to the list of things I needed to say to her, things I couldn’t find the courage to deal with.

“You going to keep this place when you sell out to the cartel?”

She leaned back in her chair and smiled, because she knew better than to be surprised that I knew. It was the reason she’d hired me in the first place.

“Yes. This place, a couple of tanning salons, and the wine shop I’ve just opened in Solihull. I figure I’ll move over there, get out of the way. And we’ll keep the Oak in Chapel Ash. It was Daddy’s first pub, so he wants it to stay in the family.”

“And how is the old man?”

I wanted to see her reaction, see if she knew I’d met with him the day before last. “Same as ever, just watching TV and gambling.”

She didn’t know I’d seen him.

“We have a ton of problems. An actual metric ton,” I said.

“Such as?”

Where to start? I’d kept the death threat from her, and she might not forgive me for that. I wanted to stall, see if there was another way to tell her. I started with the least important bit of news. “Well, the police are investigating you. Us. Becker has a whole team looking for anything they can match to you, called it forensic accounting. He’s cottoned on to the name Linda Haines, and he thinks it’s going to lead him straight to you. Is it?”

A cloud bigger than anything the storm had offered up last night passed behind her eyes, but her expression didn’t change. “No. I already knew about Becker, don’t worry about it. More important than that, though, are you one of my problems?”

“What?”

She slipped her laptop out from beneath the paperwork and opened it up, staring at its screen for a second as the machine clicked and whirred. The light from the screen shone against her face, showing a few worry lines. She clicked the mouse pad a few times and typed something in before smiling at me—the look she liked to give me when she thought she knew a million things I didn’t.

“This popped up in my saved searches last night.”

She turned the computer around to face me and pushed it across the desk. I leaned forward to read the screen. It was one of the national newspapers, the one that prided itself on being left wing but was really just about selling its contributors’ books. The headline read, “The Night Before The War.” I scanned the page and found I was reading a diary-like first-person account of life inside Hobs Ford. It spoke of riot police running drills outside the front gate and settlers standing round campfires, singing folk songs. It all sounded very poetic and evocative, but it didn’t seem much like the settlement I’d seen the day before.

Then I got to a part that I did recognize.

The prodigal son pulls me to one side. His name is Eoin Miller, and he’s the middle child of one of the camp elders. His heroics are well known in these parts; only two years ago he pulled immigrants from a burning building after they were attacked by a racist group. He’s put his work in the city on hold to come stand with his people. He looks over at the police, tightly assembled in their shining helmets to resemble a battalion of Darth Vaders, and sets his jaw. “They want a war,” he says to me. “We’ll give them one, and the whole world will see it on TV.”

I pushed the laptop away and swore under my breath. “That little shit.”

“So you were there, then?”

“My father got arrested. I had to go pick him up and drive him back.”

“And putting your life on hold?” She made a show of closing her eyes to quote from memory. “
They want a war, and we’re going to give it to them.
”

I waved it away. “Just some kid who wants to be a famous reporter. Probably thinks he can get a book deal or his name on an award.”

I was playing it cool but I filed the information away for later. I was going to find a way to fuck with this kid for twisting my words like that. Last thing I wanted was to be turned into somebody’s hero. I’d ended up in hospital every time that had happened.

She shuffled her documents into a neat pile and then zipped them into a slim leather case; she placed the case on top of the laptop and slipped the whole thing into a bag. She nodded and stood up, straightening out her shirt before slipping on her jacket.

“How do I look?”

You look great
. “Ready to go. Business?”

“Meeting with my casino guy at the airport. Then with my money men in Birmingham.”

I stood up and lifted her bag off the desk, pulling it toward me. She stared at me for a second, trying to figure out what was going on.

“You shouldn’t go.”

“What’s going on?”

“There’s been a threat against you. We need to get you somewhere safe.”

“When is there not a threat against me? I’m going to this meeting, whether you get out of my way or not.”

I buckled. Maybe we were better off in the car anyway. I could tell her about the cartel on the move, and we could drive to her father’s house.

Her car was shiny and red, and once we were inside, she started it by pressing a button on her set of keys.

“Fancy. Does it talk too?”

“Maybe I’ll let you chat to the navigation temptress later.”

The engine’s low hum barely changed as we pulled away and out onto the road. It never rose above a mild purr, and I did my best not to look as impressed as I was. I’ve never been a car person, but this seemed more like magic than engineering.

“So what’s going on?”

She waited until we were out of Wolverhampton before asking, almost as if the whole city was going to listen in on our conversation. We’d taken the Willenhall Road and the Black Country Route before climbing onto the M6 Motorway, and the car’s engine finally burst into a roar as Gaines eased across into the far lane and opened up. When I didn’t answer straight away, she looked across at me and raised her eyebrows.

“My leads on what happened at the hotel are dead. Literally.” I looked across at her. “The two bodies found after the hotel fire were Pepsi’s customers. A husband and wife. They’d ordered one of our girls for the night, and then rearranged at the last minute, our girl went to their place. The Bridge Tavern”

“Okay.”

“When Tony called me in to look at Jelly’s body, a hooker was there with him—but turns out it was just the wife playing the role of the drugged-out call girl. And damn well, too. If she wasn’t high she sure knew how to act like it. Anyway, once I found out who she really was, I started thinking it must have been she and her husband who murdered Jelly and Tony. So I went to their place, but they’d done a runner. And there was blood in their living room.”

“We know whose?”

“Maybe it was from one of them. More likely from Pepsi’s girl. Whatever happened, the husband and wife ended up dead in the fire.”

“Do I know them?”

“Craig and Maria Cartwright?”

She shook her head. “Nope.”

“Right. Well, they must have been in on it with someone else. Or maybe they were in on it with Jelly and betrayed him when they got a sniff that the cartel would pay more money than you to identify the leak. But if they were trying to pull off a job like that, things went really wrong for them.”

“Did they die in the fire? Or do you think they were already dead when it started?”

“I don’t know, but the cops must, since they found the bodies. I’d ask Laura but she’s been suspended.”

“What?”

“Becker made out like it was because of her links to you, but I think he was just fishing. If they knew you and Laura were such good friends, they’d already have arrested you. Real reason is that she was at the hotel on the night of the fire and her boss knows.”

Gaines slowed the car down for a second and shot me a look. “Why was she there?”

“She helped me clean up the mess. So anyway. Whoever the Cartwrights were working with must have seen them as a loose end. But they were also my only decent lead. So I went to Jelly’s place instead, thinking he might have a backup of whatever information he had brought to the hotel. Found a hard drive, but it’s gone.”

“Gone how?”

Deep breath. I thought things over in my head. How much to hold back? How much to share? “There was someone else after it. Some scary old silver-haired guy named Branko. He’s working for the cartel. He’s shown up twice, once at Jelly’s shop and once at his flat, when I was there searching for the hard drive. I left the device with Matt Doncaster. You know him, from the sports hall? Anyway, the police nabbed me, and by the time they let me go, Branko had gotten to Matt.”

I saw her worried look again, the one I’d seen back when this all started, tugging at the sides of her mouth in profile, but she kept her eyes on the road. What was it?

“So now the cartel has the hard drive?”

“I think so.”

“Wait.” She paused as she slipped into the middle lane, between two trucks, to overtake a car, then back across into the outside lane. “So how do you know all this? Branko and the cartel?”

“Your dad spoke to me and—”

“Daddy knows about the leak?”

Her voice rose higher than I’d ever heard it, the words said in the panicked tone of a teenager, and the car skidded across the fast lane. I called out about the traffic and she nodded, easing us into slower lanes of traffic, but she still looked rattled. I saw her hand drift to behind her ear between changing gears and absently scratch.

And then I had it. The panic. The strange looks. The fear she was showing over the leak. I’d assumed Gaines wanted me to find the identity of the person leaking information. But now I realized what she’d wanted all along was whatever “proof” Jellyfish had supposedly left her under the bed at the hotel. And if that was true, there was only one place for my mind to go.

“It’s you, isn’t it?” I said. “You’re the leak.”

She clenched her jaw and narrowed her eyes but kept them on the road. Her head bobbed as if she was having a debate with herself, and it seemed to be one that she lost because her shoulders sagged and she nodded.

“Yes.”