Playing the Game (2 page)

            ‘Too right’, Tel replied to his friend’s question. ‘What you gotta remember is that these are
freelance
guys, ok? They don’t commit to one side or the other. They go where the money is good, whoever pays the most. You’re not telling me that your average Stormtrooper gives a shit about galaxy domination or whacking a fucking Jedi? I’ll bet the Emperor paid top dollar. And besides, Darth Vader has got to look better on a CV as a previous employer than Admiral fucking Aakbar!’

            Keasty chuckled. He had to admit Tel had a point there.

            ‘Anyway’, Tel carried on regardless, ‘this is a mute point, I don’t hold with any film that advocates incest and paedophilia’.

              ‘What the hell are you on about now?’ Keasty shook his head, ‘We are talking about one of, if not
the
, greatest films of all time. How on earth do you arrive at that shit?’

            Tel smiled. He had obviously, in his own clearly twisted way, thought this through. ‘Ok then, hear me out’, he instructed. ‘Luke Skywalker spends most of the first film trying to fuck his own sister! There’s your incest right there. And the paedophilia? Obi Wan Kenobi is first seen wandering round the dessert picking up young farm boys! He didn’t need ketamine to help him there did he? Not with the sand people going round knocking them out for him. Easy goddamn pickings! You’ve got to admit, you’d be seriously fucking worried if you woke up in some old man’s cave, not knowing how you got there, with a sore head, and the old guy’s asking you to play with his lightsaber’. By now Tel was laughing, ‘Am I right, or am I right?’

            Keasty had to concede, put like that it certainly made sense. ‘You’re sick is what you are, never mind right. Only you would take a family film classic and turn in into something that deranged’.

            A momentary pause in the banter was pierced with a thud; the sound of the mail dropping through the front door. Keasty got up to go and check it, hoping that it would include one of their several unauthorised subscriptions that would have upset his aunt if ever she opened them; the type of magazine you really didn’t want to leave lying around for your parents to find either. Hey, you had to have something to pass the time! Although it picked up as the morning wore on, usually it would just be him and Tel working till around eight o’ clock. His aunt usually came in around that time and worked through till they shut, with a couple more staff coming in later, including a sexy little waitress whose number both Keasty and Tel had been trying to get for the past couple of months.

            Thumbing through the mail, Keasty was disappointed to find only run of the mill stuff and not one of the various ‘subscription’ publications they had delivered to the Kavannagh on their behalf on a regular basis. Bill. Bill. Circular.

            Stopping on the fourth piece of mail, Keasty’s  brow furrowed. ‘Hey Tel’, he shouted ‘Who the fuck is Patton?’

4

            Usually I love it when I’m right, but when the white FedEx van pulled into sight at the stroke of six, a feeling of depressing familiarity overcame me. The Chemist hadn’t used FedEx before and I knew that despite wasting a couple of hours of our time grilling the driver, going through the motions, it would yield us precisely zero information that we could use to nail The Chemist. Nothing whatsoever.

            The antidote for the previous two games had been delivered in a brown package which had contained a syringe. The syringe itself had been clean, no fingerprints, no DNA, no fortuitous solitary hair that would given us some clue as to The Chemist’s identity. The Chemist was being extremely methodical, careful and precise. These weren’t characteristics that were usually conducive to catching an adversary. Likewise, the packaging was clean and common enough that it could have been bought in any one of around nine hundred outlets in Los Angeles alone.

            The last thing the driver, who it turned out was making his first delivery of the morning, was expecting when he pulled up to the front entrance of the station was four armed-to-the-teeth SWATS in his face, but nevertheless, that’s what he got. I have rarely seen anyone look so shell-shocked but hey, if I was a courier going about my daily business and four mean looking bastards armed with Berettas pulled me up during a routine job, I’d have probably looked exactly the same.

            The package was hustled into the forensics department with an urgent haste. I knew we’d have to run the same tests as before which would take a bit of time but until Fergs had cracked that code there wasn’t much else we could do. We could only hope that this time, The Chemist had slipped up and had inadvertently given us something we could use. I wasn’t holding out much hope.

            About fifty minutes passed with a tedium I was getting used to; the feeling of being able to do absolutely nothing. We used the time to go over a few old cases; we were still in the process of compiling a list of people who we thought
could
be The Chemist. Given my considerable success in Los Angeles over the years, it was a long list and for all intents and purposes, we might as well have been making a list of all the people I’d pissed off over the last decade in the LAPD, which given that I’d arrested some of the most notorious criminals in the state, many of which were with Charlie’s help, was turning into a formidable list.

            A couple of other officers took the courier for the usual interrogation but it was clear from the off that the driver was only doing his job and nothing more. Just like the previous two, he couldn’t give us any description of the person who’d given them the package, or anything else we could use. He’d driven from San Diego; the others had been from San Jose and Benicia. All from California, but to try to cover all courier services in such a vast area would be borderline insanity in terms of the scale of operation required, and even closer to impossibility to be in the right place at the right time. Of course, we would now contact the specific courier to try and get something concrete but it seemed like The Chemist was using them in such a way that when questioned, no-one in the courier firms could remember the order being placed or have any record of it being done so.

            Charlie and I were just about to check in with Fergs for a progress update with the code when we were blindsided by an excited Rebecca Newstead. Rebecca had been on the forensics team in the PD for around six years. She was a model professional and took great pride in her work. She had also rushed through a few bits and pieces for me over the years, which had gotten me some results sooner than I would have otherwise done.

            ‘Patton’, she almost seemed breathless. ‘We might have something – we’ve got the antidote of course – as usual no trace of evidence, no DNA, no nothing on the antidote itself; not even a
suggestion
of any latents, but we do have something else’.

            We followed her down the corridor to where the package was been subjected to the most intense scrutiny by another two members of the forensic department, who I did not know.

            ‘Look at this’, Rebecca gestured towards a scanner. ‘We’ve scanned every inch of the jiffy bag at a resolution of 208-1995, that is to say, the highest resolution specification we can possibly do right here and now’, she added, sensing quite rightly that the technical specifications meant nothing to Charlie or I.  ‘We split the lining of the bag and well, you would never see it with the naked eye, but we found this on the inside lining’.

             I took her place at the scanner and read three words, one of which made no sense to me. ‘Patton – Holland - Kavannagh’.

5

            Stella Edwards was trying to open her eyes, which was a struggle to say the least. She felt like she had the worst hangover she had ever had, multiplied by a thousand. Not that at the tender age of seventeen she’d had too many hangovers, but her mom did let her drink in moderation. She had overdone it a few times with her friends though! Pain was shooting through her body, from her head all the way down her back and she had a dull, numb feeling in her left arm and leg.

            Slowly, still unable to open her eyes, she thought she remembered someone stepping out of the shadows as she turned the key to her front door. She remembered dropping her school bag and raising her arms to try and fight off her assailant. But that was all she remembered.

            She tried to call out but heard nothing. Her mouth was open, she knew that, and in her head she could hear herself calling out, yet she made no sound.

            Where was she? She certainly wasn’t stretched out on the comfortable leather sofa in front of the TV with a takeaway, sneaking couple of glasses of her mother’s Beaujolais while she was at work, and then idly munching her way through a healthy supply of chocolates while she watched that new reality program that had just started a couple of nights ago, but had already gotten her hooked – which she thought had been her plans for last night.

            It took a further ten minutes for her to find the energy to open her eyes, only to find nothing but darkness. As she tried in vain to form any sort of reference, any sort of outline of her surroundings, her right hand brushed against a small cylindrical object.

            Fumbling around in the dark, it took her and undeterminable amount of time to figure out that it was a flashlight and even longer to turn it on.

            With what little energy she could muster, she lifted the flashlight to try and get a bearing of her surroundings. She slowly circled it around her and the realisation of just how much trouble she was in slowly but clearly dawned on her. She dropped her illuminator, cascading her back into darkness.

            She was in a box no more than six feet by three feet with nothing but darkness surrounding her from every angle. There was a ventilation pole going up – rather like a snorkel, but other than that, and the flashlight, absolutely nothing. Who had done this to her? Why was she here?

            As Stella closed her eyes again, the pain still shooting through her body, she let out a silent scream which would have terrified anyone, if only it could have been heard.

6

Last week

For one of Los Angeles hottest young journalists, life was spiralling out of control at an alarming rate. Hailing originally from Manchester, England, Paul Britland-Jones had relocated to LA after flying through his Journalism degree at Oxford with first class honours. Sure he’d had offers from the most prestigious of English publications but he’d never really been interested. For him, the ultimate goal was here in America – the land of the Pulitzer – The City of Angels, where success came with many, many more fringe benefits. Now at the age of 38, having spent ten years at the LA Times breaking stories sometimes days, not hours, ahead of his rivals, he had honed his journalistic instinct to a fine art. To this end, he’d had to make some unsavoury acquaintances in order to stay one step ahead of the game. It was not uncommon for him to talk to members of the Los Angeles criminal fraternity more often than his colleagues or editor at the LA Times.

Success, however, had come at a price. He owed money for favours long since cashed in, popped more Prozac than Tony Soprano and usually started his day with a neat double vodka. He hardly looked like the successful journalist that he was. At just over five foot five, heavy bags permanently under his eyes and stubble that would range from anywhere between a day to a week he would often compensate for this by indulging himself in ego-enhancing excess. Drink, drugs, hookers; you name it, he had dabbled in it over the past decade or so. Finding he owed substantially more than he was making, primarily due  to the crippling interest rates that members of the underworld applied to ‘favours’, he was now, having seemingly little choice left, turning his journalistic hand to blackmail. Nothing one would class on a major scale so far, but he had a feeling that was about to change.

It was a shade after four a.m. on a dark November morning. He stood in the shadows of the run-down, some derelict, buildings of Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles, with a hat pulled down low, collar upturned and fingerless gloves to try and stem the cold; his trusty Kodak Rangefinder 2000 hung around his neck ready for action. It was quiet at this time of night, which suited him just fine. He suspected it suited his target even more. Not that the police turned a blind eye to this neighbourhood, but they had bigger, more pressing, concerns. He was confident that he could go about tonight’s activities without the fear of being discovered by a member of the state’s law enforcement. Many of his rivals would just love to break a story about him being questioned by the police. He had members of the LAPD who tipped him off with nuggets of information so he was pretty sure some of his rival journalists would have similar unofficial informants only too willing to pass on his misfortune to them if he should find himself suddenly detained by the LAPD.

A sudden gust of brisk wind made Britland-Jones shudder, and he glanced around him, almost nervously. He was sure when he’d first arrived in LA, that this had been an up-market, prosperous neighbourhood, but now, with crime in this part of town rife, and constantly rising, it was now home to mostly crack heads, squatters and prostitutes – not a place where he was accustomed to hang out in the early hours of the morning, but a place where he was hoping to acquire some blackmail-worthy photographs of a certain someone.

Another half hour passed, with only occasional activity. A homeless person, difficult to tell whether they were male or female, shuffled off the street into a squat. A couple of teenagers sped by, trying a couple of doors on the only parked car on the street, presumably after a quick steal. Then, just as he was contemplating returning to his nice warm bed for a couple of hours, a door opened on one of the houses across the street. His eyes lit up as he brought the Kodak to his eyes – this is what he’d come for: