The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (34 page)

“Where’s the other one?” I said.

“Don’t know,” she gasped, and flung her arms around my neck, crying.

I dragged her out of the room. It looked like one guy had been bedded down here to keep an eye on her while the other was on lookout duty. A couple of sleeping bags, a camping stove, food and water.

The corridor was empty. I kept Sophie cradled in one arm as she clung to me, and covered the stairwell with my gun. Still no sign of the little guy.

Hit the top floor and broke out into a T-shaped corridor. At the far end was the room being used as a watch post. I saw the top of someone’s head sticking out of the doorway, heard whimpering.

I tried to watch the doors to the other rooms I passed as I made my way there, but it was impossible. Too many angles, only one gun.

The lookout post was a mess. The big guy was the one lying in the doorway. He had a pair of bullet wounds to his chest and most of his face had been blown away. By his hand was a bloodied hunting knife. Kris was slumped against one wall, covered in blood and gripping a semi-automatic shotgun in one hand. He must have fought it away from the guy. His pistol was lying on the floor some way away. He had a gaping hole in his gut, probably from the shotgun, and a half dozen slash wounds to his arms and face. One eye was gone, just a wad of blood and ichor, vanished beneath a vertical cut running from his scalp down to the top of his cheek. He was alive, conscious enough to be in pain, but he was a mess.

Sophie screamed at the sight of him, then stopped, started hyperventilating.

“Kris, Kris, can you hear me?” I said.

I wanted to lay a hand on his shoulder, show him I was there, that there was someone with him through the pain. But I didn’t have a free hand, so I had to watch him suffer alone.

He whimpered, breathing in stop-starts, the agony from his chest fighting it out with his need for air.

“Kris,” I said again.

I could barely make out the words, but it sounded like he was saying, “It hurts… it hurts… God… God… hurts…” Tears began rolling down his face from his one good eye and he stopped talking.

I heard the stairwell door open and leaned out far enough to see the smaller guy staring in utter horror at the corpse of his friend, face white. He saw me, his mouth opened like he was going to say something, and then he dived back inside. I lurched forward to follow but Sophie tightened her grip and cried, “Don’t leave, Alex! Don’t leave me alone!”

Behind us, Kris had gone silent.

Caught in a moment of indecision. The urge to hunt down the small guy with the scarred face, to find out who he was and make him pay for what he’d done. The petrified look on Sophie’s face, red eyes pleading with me not to go.

Hell.

“I won’t, Sophie, I won’t,” I said. I pocketed my gun and held her, comforting her as best I could.

Downstairs, I heard the roar of the pickup’s engine revving. It rocketed away from the factory like the Devil was following after.

Sophie began to calm down after ten minutes or so, once she knew she was safe and the other guy wasn’t coming back. “They didn’t do anything, they didn’t do anything,” she told me as fragments of her story came out at random. “They hit me a couple of times, but they didn’t do anything
else
, you know? I think… I think they might have, but they didn’t...”

“OK, Sophie. You’re OK.”

I checked Kris, but he was dead. The gut-shot kidnapper in the doorway had a wallet on him as well as the usual personal crap. A New York State driver’s license for Andrew Byrne of Allensburg, NY. An ATM card. A shade under a thousand bucks in cash.

I walked Sophie back to Kris’s car. She didn’t ask me about calling the cops and I didn’t bring it up. Someone would find the bodies eventually, but it’d probably be put down to a drug deal or something gone wrong. There was nothing much there to trace back to either of us.

Harsh, but what else could I do?

“Sophie,” I said once we were driving away, back to Boston, and she was on a more even keel. “Did those guys say who they were or who they were working for? The big one was Andrew and the other was Harvey, right?”

“They were brothers,” she said. “They were asking me if I knew where you were or how to get hold of you. I’m sorry about telling them your email…”

“No, no, you did the right thing.” I tried a smile. “If you hadn’t, I wouldn’t have known where to find you.”

“Who was the other guy? Was he with you?”

“His name was Kris. He was a friend, I guess.”

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“Stop apologizing, Sophie. None of this is your fault. So why did Harvey and Andrew want me?”

“They talked about it. They were going to kill you. They were working for someone who’d hired them to do it, but they hadn’t been able to find you before… well…”

“Before the Tucker thing.”

“Yeah,” she said. “So they tried to track you down. They said they were the ones who’d put Rob in hospital. The big guy, Andrew, he seemed to enjoy talking about it.”

I pulled into a rest area and bought us coffee and doughnuts from the drive-through. We sat in the rain, and I watched some of the color return to her cheeks while she ate. I tried to figure out what was going on as I sipped my coffee. I knew Goddard blackmailed Heller into framing me, so why would he have hired the brothers to kill me as well? Unless he was hedging his bets by trying both, it meant that someone else wanted me dead. Damned if I could think who, though. Never knew I was
that
unpopular.

“So someone hired them to get rid of me. Did they say who?”

Sophie shook her head. “No, they only ever called him ‘him’. But they were planning to threaten him for more money.”

“A double-cross.”

“Yeah. They were going to blackmail him for more cash, or kill him if he didn’t pay up.”

Which meant they weren’t professionals. Not for any length of time, anyway. Thugs, maybe, given their first shot at murder. Once word had spread that they were the type to pull that kind of stunt with their employers, they’d never have lasted.

“Did they say anything about anyone else? Did they have anyone in Boston that they knew?”

“No, I don’t think so,” she said. “I don’t think they’d even been to the city before.”

I dropped Sophie at her home in Cambridge. I didn’t like the risk, given the possibility of police surveillance on my known associates, but I walked her to the door of her studio apartment and helped her check there was no one waiting for her. She said she’d find a friend to crash with for a couple of days until everything was back to normal again, and I stay long enough to make sure someone was coming over to look after her.

“I’m not going to tell anyone about what happened,” she said. “I don’t want the cops to be chasing you even more. And it’s all over now, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yeah. I’m going to track down Harvey and whoever hired him. You’ll be perfectly safe. I don’t want you, or Rob, or anyone else getting hurt any more because of me.”

She smiled and hugged me tightly without saying anything.

I waited outside in the car until I saw Brandon climb out of a cab and hurry up to her door, then I pulled away from the curb.

 According to their background checks, Harvey and Andrew Byrne looked to be regular small-town toughs, aged forty-one and forty-three respectively. A few convictions and charges between them for assault, extortion, conspiracy. Suggestions that they’d done that sort of work for hire. Both of them had addresses in Allensburg and neither had a regular job. Harvey’s last steady employment lasted six months and had come to an end two years ago. He’d been a driver for a haulage firm in Albany. Before that was another gap of about a year to some short-term warehouse work. The same pattern repeated all the way back. The same with Andrew. Listed family members amounted to only one, apart from his older brother — his wife Jackie, on whom I had nothing.

The brothers were small fry. No one would’ve hired them unless they knew their reputation locally. If it was Goddard that had done it, then he had to be a local too, and I’d find Holly somewhere near Allensburg.
 

And Harvey would know where she was.

I copied down his details, then drove out to the waste ground where I’d buried Victor’s gun.

53.

High hill country on the state boundary, wooded, dotted with small towns. The dive down into the Hudson valley to come, then the Catskills proper. I was waiting in a queue of half a dozen cars while traffic cops cleared a jack-knifed truck from the road up ahead, hoping they’d have no reason to look at me or the car.
 

I was wondering how I’d gotten into this situation. How far over the line I’d gone.
 

How far over it I was still to go.

I had lunch in the small town of Eastbridge. A diner by the name of Charlie’s House. Decent place, full of the scent of fresh coffee and doughnuts. Quick service by a local girl with a nice smile and a breezy manner. From my seat by the window I could see down the main drag all the way to where the Hudson curled past the promontory on the far side of the river. Trees almost bare, fall marked in their empty branches. For a moment, I pictured retiring to a place like this, being able to forget about everything and to relax, to withdraw from the world. To leave it all behind, forever.

Then I figured that was all just horseshit.

We all indulged our little dreams, our momentary fantasies. A life, a fate, considered, given form and then cast aside in moments. Ten-second destinies. Heartbeat dreamworlds. We painted our future in lies, and sometimes we were foolish enough to believe them.

But not today.
 

I finished my coffee and quit the diner, leaving a decent tip for the waitress. Walked back into the present and cold reality.

Across the river, I drove along highways twisted by folds in the land, the upthrust slopes of the Catskills, forested and dark. Shreds of dark grey cloud, the tattered remnants of someone else’s rain, scudded across pale blue skies, chased by heavier weather coming in from the east. I passed through a couple of small mountain towns, clusters of buildings gathered around the road. Half an hour of this and I passed the sign welcoming me to Allensburg.

The first thing I saw when I arrived was a cemetery occupying maybe a couple of acres running up the slope to the right of the highway. A boarded-up chapel sat on the opposite side, a curling notice pinned to its doors. Then came the first waves of housing and small neighborhood stores. Blue collar homes running in belts up to either side. It was a minute or two until I hit the town centre and a few square blocks of small businesses and chain stores.
 

There were a few people out and about, but whether because of the oncoming rain or something else, the only ones I saw smiling were a couple of kids playing tag with each other as they followed their mom along the sidewalk.

I cruised past the address I had for Harvey. A narrow, boxy house whose small, widely-spaced windows, black against the pale walls, reminded me of prison. There was no sign of the pickup truck in the driveway, but over the back fence I saw laundry hanging out to dry. Someone was home, or else they’d be back. I drove off in search of somewhere to stay.

The Discount Motor Lodge was a two-story building shaped like a horseshoe around a central parking lot. Low-grade rooms with cable TV and sheets that smelled of cheap washing powder. A radio alarm clock running twenty minutes slow and without a working alarm function. I paid cash, did nothing to draw the attention of the staff. I couldn’t afford to be discovered now, not with Holly so close I could almost touch her.

With a roof over my head sorted, I drove a few miles out of town on the main highway, north and south, and looked at the larger side roads feeding off it. Now and then, a gravel track wound up into the tree-blanketed mountains. A few had a signpost or a hand-scrawled board indicating the eventual destination of these trails — isolated houses, tiny settlements, old industrial property. Many were entirely unmarked. I saw thin streamers of white smoke rising from the woods somewhere up towards the ends of a couple.
 

I wondered if Goddard was up there somewhere, looking back at me. Standing on his porch, or gazing through his kitchen window, out through the trees. Aware on some subconscious level that I was here hunting him. I wondered what he’d do to Holly if he knew I was here.

By the time I drove past Harvey’s house for a second time, the day was heading for dusk. The rain hadn’t arrived yet but the clouds had sunk even lower and a thick blanket of grey lay heavily over the mountains, sealing off the valley like a vast dark curtain. The thinning brown and yellow forest leaves cast the place in sepia.

Harvey’s pickup was in his driveway.
 

I passed slowly, then pulled into the parking lot of a closed sporting goods store at the end of the block. I couldn’t confront him in his house, in full view of the neighbors, with his wife inside, on his home territory.

I
wanted
to, sure, but I couldn’t.

But a guy like Harvey had to go out. A bar, a pool hall, some kind of regular haunt. Maybe he went hunting up in the woods. I got as comfortable as I could in the Acura and waited for him to make a move.