by Tom Wood
This chair was as close to fifty-fifty as he had known.
The only downside to this particular chair was the noise it made. The padding was tight vinyl and was prone to make the telltale friction squeak if he applied too much pressure when adjusting his position. Not loud but noticeable, and the line by which life and death were separated in Victor’s world could sometimes balance on such exactitudes.
He had no second book to read – he was not supposed to be here – and rereading the same one had no appeal, so he counted the tiny blobs of raised texture in the wallpaper. There was no uniformity in the pattern because such texture was designed to hide unevenness in the wall behind. Victor was grateful for this as each panel of paper was therefore unique. Each panel’s total could not be predicted. Facing the door, he could only count the blobs on two of the room’s four walls. When he had finished counting every panel he could see, he started over, checking his previous count against the new one.
With thousands of tiny blobs per panel, no count was the same. He was off by one or two each time. Accuracy above ninety-nine per cent, but not perfect.
The first ray of dawn came before he had completed his fourth round of counting, but he kept counting because he disliked leaving any objective unfinished.
In doing so he realised he had made an additional mistake on the third round. He had settled into a rhythm, a routine.
Victor was not pleased with this lack of focus.
After bathing, after dressing, he stepped outside and noted which cars were still there, which had left, and which were new.
He crossed the lot to check the motel office. The manager was watching a small TV on the counter. He looked dishevelled. Tired. Maybe he had been up all night too.
The manager shook his head without looking. ‘Still nothing from Michelle.’
‘Any calls for me?’
‘Nada.’
The TV showed a local news broadcast featuring amateur footage of a trailer burning against the backdrop of a night sky. The trailer was positioned by itself, away from the others at the park. Professional camerawork then showed the smouldering aftermath of the inferno, being dealt with by firefighters. A reporter mentioned that one man was thought to have died in the blaze.
Victor watched with interest.
The manager said, ‘I’ve told McAllan that you’re still here. I told him what you told me to tell him. Word for word. He’s not a happy man.’
‘Could be the result of a vitamin D deficiency,’ Victor said. ‘He was looking a little pale yesterday.’
‘You really shouldn’t be here.’
Victor said, ‘Tell me something I don’t know.’
He left the office, thinking about his visit to Abe and the news that Abe was now dead and the meth lab ashes. Victor didn’t believe in coincidences. Which meant Abe had told his boss – the boss who was trouble – about Victor’s visit and that boss hadn’t liked what he had heard. Maybe he thought Victor was a rival or a cop or perhaps he was just a convenient excuse to close the lab down and get rid of an incompetent cook.
But now the Nameless knew about Victor.
Well, Wilson Murdoch.
Then they knew he was staying at the motel, which meant if they were in the least bit concerned about him they knew how to find him.
No choppers were parked in the motel’s lot … but he saw one parked off the highway, on the far side from the motel. There was nothing but vegetation there – overgrown grass with the forest behind: no reason to be there at all, yet the rider was sitting on his vehicle and smoking a cigarette like it was the most natural thing in the world. The gloom of the dawn hid him and the vehicle somewhat, but the rider should have rolled it into the trees behind. He should have at least crouched down in the undergrowth.
The level of incompetence was staggering.
Victor wasn’t surprised to see one of the Nameless performing surveillance on the motel given what they had done to their own meth lab, but he hadn’t expected them to be so obvious. He reminded himself this was a biker gang, old school outlaws as Linette had said, civilians not professionals. Their world and his world were different. Their rules were not his.
He crossed the lot to his truck, acting as if he needed something from the load bed and pretending the biker was inconsequential. He pretended not to notice the Smoker’s whole posture change when he realised Victor was the man he was there waiting to see. Abe had told them about the truck, of course.
The Nameless had on a sleeveless leather vest that showed pale arms with lots of tattoos, obvious even in the dim light of an early, grey morning. He wore a black bandana and blue jeans. There were no weapons Victor could see, but the man’s knuckles shone with many rings. Even if worn purely for decoration, they would make for effective knuckle dusters.
He had no rucksack, no satchel. No bag attached to the chopper itself. Which meant no supplies, so either he wasn’t staying long, or he was ill-prepared for extended surveillance. Maybe his first time ever as a watcher. A rare thrill on paper because he had no idea what watching actually meant. The boredom, the tiredness, the mental fatigue of paying attention for long periods of time, the need to balance watching with unavoidable issues like needing to urinate.
He was no threat in the way no single civilian could be a threat, but he was here because the gang leader considered Victor a threat. But why? Because he had hurt Abe? No, they had killed Abe. So, perhaps they didn’t like the fact Victor was asking questions about Michelle and Joshua.
Did they want to know more about the guy asking these questions or did they want him gone? The former, he decided, because if Abe had even hinted at Victor’s capabilities, the leader who was trouble would have sent more men to drive him out of town.
Hence, the leader operated with a degree of reserve despite burning down Abe’s meth lab with Abe inside. Which seemed contradictory and only increased Victor’s eagerness to meet the man.
The Smoker on the chopper didn’t yet realise he was the invitation to that introduction.
As Victor left his truck, the smartly dressed crew from Chicago were climbing into their sedan: two men in the back and one in the passenger seat.
Welch had the driver’s door open and was standing next to it, waiting for Victor to look their way.
When he did, she held his gaze for a long moment, face expressionless, then nodded a single time at him.
He nodded back.
She climbed behind the wheel and pulled the door shut.
None of the four so much as glanced in his direction as the car drove out of the lot, nor as it joined the highway for the drive south to the border.
He watched them go, thinking that ten years back he would not have knocked on their room door. He would have kicked it in or climbed through the bathroom window to take them by surprise and killed them all without even considering an alternative. He would then have spent the night cutting up their corpses and bagging the pieces. A time-consuming, labour-intensive process because it was demanding work to dismember four people without the right tools, made harder still when it was necessary to avoid leaving an incredible amount of mess behind.
But more interesting than counting blobs in wallpaper, he thought.
The lake would have been the obvious place to get rid of those bagged pieces but given he had already disposed of the rifle that way, he would now be driving off to bury the corpses in the forest. No shallow graves. He would have needed to dig deep holes to avoid animals unearthing them to get at the meat. That might have taken all morning.
Then he would have travelled back to Chicago to kill their boss who had been his client. Almost a repeat of the contract he had just fulfilled only without payment for his time and for his efforts. Far more dangerous too, because his new target would be expecting him to show up given his crew had gone silent. He would be well protected. It would have been certain to end up loud, messy. The chance of injury would have been significant. It would have been no clean kill. There would have been multi
ple dead. Henchmen. Guards. Maybe civilians or cops caught in the crossfire. Potentially a whole organised crime faction wiped out so he could kill one man and eliminate a single threat. Impossible to do without leaving evidence, without creating a trail for others to follow, whether vengeful associates, dogged detectives, old enemies who had never given up hunting him or other professionals eager to collect the resulting bounty.
All avoided because of a conversation.
Better to side-step a threat than defeat it.
Change was slow but inevitable, Victor told himself as the car disappeared from view.
Of course, he realised, as he returned to his room and heaved open the bathroom window, ten years ago he wouldn’t have remained in his staging ground a single second longer than necessary.
He would have avoided the threat altogether.
THIRTY
The Smoker smoked because he had nothing else to do. Castel had told him to get to know the fisherman. But what did that really mean? The Smoker hadn’t pressed for clarification and had expected the specifics to become obvious once he was at the motel, but there were so many unanswered questions. How closely was he supposed to get to know him? Take him to lunch? If the fisherman left the motel was the Smoker supposed to follow all the way to Alaska? How long was he supposed to get to know him for? Until they were best buds? With the lack of anything to do but smoke and think, the Smoker spent too long with those questions going round and round his head, and he realised his hand was shaking as he lit up another cigarette.
Of course, he should have asked Castel for more information, but you didn’t ask Castel to explain himself. You said ‘Sure thing, chief’ and got it done.
Or you ended up like Abe.
The Smoker was getting it done. It meaning nothing.
Until …
The fisherman stepped outside. Which was quite the surprise. The Smoker had assumed he would be in his motel room, sleeping or watching TV or masturbating or whatever else people did before the sun had fully risen.
He first went to the check-in desk, then went to do something with his truck without a care in the world. He didn’t notice the Smoker on the opposite side of the road, watching him.
Was this the guy poor dead Abe had talked about? If Castel was worried this guy was a cop or from a rival outfit, he needn’t have bothered. Didn’t look like much. A regular nobody.
The Smoker relaxed. He could do this. He could watch this nobody all day long if necessary. Idiot didn’t know he was a marked man. He was lucky Castel wanted information first because the Smoker could ride right up to him and strike him on the back of the head with a crowbar as he passed.
Wouldn’t take much speed and the nobody would be a no one.
The Smoker imagined himself as a knight of old, charging a rival, his chopper a steed and his crowbar a lance. If only there was a fair maiden whose hand could be won, the Smoker’s fantasy would be complete.
The fisherman was not exactly out in the open, the Smoker thought, so a little more creativity might be needed. Which was fine with the Smoker. He liked to fight. Had lived for it at one point when he was younger. That was how he had ended up with the Nameless. The Smoker had spent enough nights in lockup after brawling that one of those nights was in the company of one of Castel’s crew. With nothing else to do but talk they had bonded, and within a few weeks the Smoker was buying his first chopper with the profits of a drug deal.
He had never looked back.
The fisherman finished with his truck and left the Smoker’s line of sight. Back to his room, no doubt. Which was fine. The Smoker would see him when he left again.
Only he wasn’t going to leave any time soon. He might not leave for hours.
The boredom grew and grew, and the Smoker did whatever he could to pass the time, to limit the tedium. He cleaned his nails with the tip of his switchblade. He trimmed them with the same knife. He shaved little squares in the hair of his forearm. He held his palm over his lighter for as long as he could stand it. He practised tricks with the lighter. He threw it up into the air and caught it again – underhand, overhand, with the other hand.
The worst part was having to ration his smokes. Once he realised the fisherman wasn’t going anywhere and Castel sent no further instructions, the Smoker knew his pack of cigarettes wasn’t going to last the day. He had gone through half by the time he worked this out, so he was already up against it.
The flipside to this hell of his own making was that he only lit up when he couldn’t put it off any longer, and the resulting rush of relief was incredible. He savoured every inhale, every exhale. He smoked those precious cigarettes all the way down to the filter. He didn’t waste a single flake of tobacco.
The cigarettes helped stave off any hunger but they did nothing for his thirst, which grew and grew until he feared death by dehydration more than he did Castel, so the Smoker crossed the highway to go and use the vending machine at the motel.
He had plenty of cash on him and bought himself two bottles of soda and a bag of trail mix.
He downed the first soda before he had left the parking lot and tossed the plastic bottle to the ground before he crossed the highway.
Halfway across he realised something was wrong.
Where was his chopper?
Not where he had left it, that was for damn sure.
He went from a stroll to a jog, crossing the rest of the highway at increasing speed.
He saw the cigarette butts in the grass and the flattened-down areas of undergrowth where the tyres had sat for half the night.
The Smoker slapped the pocket of his jeans and felt the reassuring jab of his keys and the resulting relief that no one could have ridden it away. He would have heard it, wouldn’t he?
It was light by now but overcast and dim, and it took a moment’s frantic searching until he saw a narrow trail of bent-over and compressed grasses that led from the highway into the treeline.
What the actual … ?
Someone was trying to steal his ride by rolling it away. They must have thought he had parked it up for the duration, not realising he was just grabbing a soda.
The Smoker tossed away the second bottle and the trail mix because he was going to need both hands to beat all kinds of hell out of the thief.
You don’t mess with the Nameless.
The Smoker hurried into the treeline to catch up with the thief, but beneath the canopy the woods were so shadowed he lost sight of where he was going within seconds. It was impossible to see where the chopper had been led, where the undergrowth had been broken down.
Trees everywhere. Shadows everywhere.
Figuring the thief would have continued the way he was already going, the Smoker did the same, dashed deeper into the trees, angry and urgent.
He loved his chopper more than he did any human being he had ever known.
Every second he hurried forward without sight of it, his fear of losing it for ever increased and his anger towards the thief who had taken it multiplied into a boiling, murderous hatred.
The Smoker was going to kill him. He was going to tear him apart.
The Smoker couldn’t find him. The Smoker was lost.
In his desperation, he roared.
In his haste, he stumbled.
In his rage, he fell.
Climbing to his feet, the Smoker yelled ‘Where are you?’ at the shadows all around him.
‘Behind you,’ the shadows answered.
THIRTY-ONE
To his credit, the Smoker didn’t panic.
He didn’t hesitate. He reacted fast. He was primed, ready. He spun around, pivoting in a rapid one-eighty, left hand rising in a defensive guard as the right dropped to his waist, to the knife holster on his belt.
A click.
A flash of moonlight on metal.
A swish of the blade cutting air, rising fast, thrusting for Victor’s neck.
The Smoker’s eyes glimmered, triumphant.
Victor disarmed him.
A simple action because Victor waited until the last instant, until the Smoker had overextended and left himself vulnerable. Victor struck the back of the Smoker’s hand as he hit his inner wrist, both of Victor’s hands striking simultaneously.
Sometimes, the shock of the dual impacts meant the knife – or gun, or whatever weapon – flew out of the holding hand, the enemy unable to keep their grip closed. Other times the weapon remained held, but the pain was so great, the nerves so overstimulated, that the grip had no strength. That was the better outcome because then the weapon could be taken.
The Smoker released the knife.
It flashed in a sudden arc before disappearing into the darkness of the trees.
To his credit, the Smoker still didn’t panic.
He was already moving forward, so followed through with the momentum, hoping to collide into Victor, to wrestle or headbutt or bite or bulldoze.
Victor wasn’t sure of the Smoker’s exact intention because Victor was already pivoting on his back foot, slipping out of the Smoker’s line of attack.
The Smoker fell.
‘Who’s your boss and where can I find him?’
The undergrowth cushioned the fall, and the Smoker was up to his hands and knees within a couple of seconds, humiliated more than hurt.
