by Tom Wood
‘We can keep this easy.’
The Smoker scrambled up and around, swinging a wild punch in the assumption Victor would be closing. With nothing to absorb the punch’s energy, the Smoker swung himself off balance.
‘I don’t have to hurt you.’
Victor swept his load-bearing leg out from under him.
‘But I will.’
The Smoker, down to his hands and knees again, grunted.
‘And then you’ll tell me everything you know about your boss.’
The Smoker spat out dirt and detritus as he stood.
‘You’ll be begging to tell me.’
Another attack, even less effective than the previous one because the Smoker was out of breath and letting his rage control him. Victor slipped the clumsy strikes and this time let the Smoker stay on his feet as he stumbled away until his balance recovered.
‘Who is he? Where is he?’
The Smoker, chest heaving, grabbed a thick fallen branch from the ground and charged forward, swinging it at Victor’s head.
A fast step forward propelled Victor straight at the Smoker, straight into the line of attack, but the branch-club was still mid-swing.
By the time it had finished its arc, it hit only air.
Victor was inside the Smoker’s reach, jabbing his right palm into the biker’s face; hooking his left elbow over his extended arms, grabbing them and pinning both to his flank; rotating his attacking palm to slip it around the Smoker’s head, controlling and pulling the head down into the knee Victor drove upwards at the underside of the Smoker’s chin.
Teeth cracked against teeth.
The Smoker became slack.
No exhale, no resistance.
Immediate unconsciousness.
Victor released the Smoker and let him fall face first into the undergrowth.
Faster than choking him out, and Victor needed the Smoker compliant for a moment until he was ready to ensure cooperation.
THIRTY-TWO
The Smoker was unconscious for almost ten minutes. He might have been out for a lot longer had Victor not begun revving the chopper’s engine. The sound would carry, of course, but he had rolled it deeper into the woods while the biker was KO’d, draped over it. The trees here were dense, the undergrowth tall. Not a perfect muffler, but good enough for Victor’s requirements.
The Smoker spat out blood.
‘I’m looking for a woman named Michelle and her son Joshua,’ Victor began. ‘They’re missing. No one’s seen them since the day before yesterday. Michelle used to date Abe, your former meth cook, who just so happened to die yesterday. I want to speak with your boss, that’s all. I want to know if he knows anything about Michelle’s and Joshua’s disappearance or if he knows who might.’
The Smoker used the back of one hand to wipe blood from his chin, grimacing and wincing. His eyes shot pure hatred Victor’s way.
‘I’m glad to see you’re back to your regular self already.’
Victor had bound the Smoker’s hands together in front of him with his own belt. The resulting bonds were not secure to any professional degree, but they didn’t need to be escape-proof. The Smoker wouldn’t be left alone to start any kind of attempt.
‘Can you talk?’
The Smoker said, ‘You’re a dead man.’
‘Then you have nothing to fear from me.’
‘I’m not scared.’
‘Good,’ Victor said. ‘That provides a useful benchmark to work from.’
The Smoker said, ‘What?’
Victor explained: ‘If you were afraid, if you were desperate, it would be harder for me to know for sure you were telling me the truth.’
The Smoker listened.
‘But because you’re not scared, because you’re defiant, it’ll be easier for me to know when you start talking that you’re telling me the truth and not what you think I want to hear.’
‘I’m not telling you a thing.’
‘Even better,’ Victor said. ‘Keep going with that. It makes this a whole lot easier. For me, I mean. Not for you. In fact, you’re making this harder and harder for yourself. Every wall you build up is just one more I need to knock back down.’
The Smoker was not convinced. ‘You’re nothing. You’re not scaring me one little bit.’
‘If you think I’m trying to scare you then you’re misinterpreting my intent. I assure you that I’m not trying to scare you.’ Victor paused. ‘But in a few moments you’re going to wish I had been.’
The Smoker was silent.
Victor said, ‘I’m going to ask you one last time. And I really mean that. I will not ask again. Instead, I’ll hurt you. And I’ll keep hurting you until you answer. If you don’t answer, I’ll continue hurting you until you’re dead. Then, when your boss sends another to find out what happened to you, I’ll ask him. And when he realises what happened to you, he’ll talk. He’ll be so keen to talk I’ll have to tell him to slow down. So, you can’t change the end result, but you can change how we get there.’
Victor revved the engine, hard. The exhaust roared. The chopper shook.
‘Who is your boss and where can I find him?’
The Smoker spat blood at Victor, who took hold of the Smoker’s head and pushed his face against the exhaust manifold.
It was hard to know the exact temperature, but Victor estimated it was between three and four hundred degrees. Nowhere near as hot as it could reach when the vehicle was in motion and the engine was working hard.
Still, it was hot enough so that the Smoker’s face sizzled against it. Hot enough that Victor could smell cooking flesh. Hot enough that the moisture in the Smoker’s skin boiled and steam hissed and clouded. Hot enough that Victor had to rev the engine even harder, louder, to drown out the high-pitched screams.
The Smoker thrashed in desperate attempts to push himself away from the source of his agony, but with his hands bound and unable to assist he could not match a fraction of Victor’s strength.
He kept the Smoker’s face against the manifold until the scent of cooking flesh became the scent of burnt flesh and until the cloud of steam became wisps of pale smoke.
When Victor let go, the Smoker didn’t fall. He couldn’t because his face was seared to the metal. To escape the burning heat of the manifold the biker had to pull himself free, which meant he had to tear away his face so that a blackened layer of skin remained fused to the metal and where his cheek should have been was a bloody open wound surrounded by a ring of charred crust.
The Smoker collapsed on to the forest floor. He was pale and sweating and whimpering. He was crying.
Victor asked no question.
‘His name’s … Castel,’ the Smoker answered in a weak voice between frantic gulps of air. ‘His house, our den, is on the other side of town … near the power plant.’
‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
The Smoker lay gasping and trembling.
‘I want you to tell Castel what happened here,’ Victor said. ‘I want him to see your face. I want him to know I’m serious and I’m going nowhere. But I also want him to know I’m not interested in his business, I don’t care about his meth. I’m only looking for Joshua and his mother. If Castel knows why they’re missing, then he needs to break his back getting that information to me before I come knocking on his door. And if he has them or if he knows who does, then his new number one priority in this world is making sure they’re released before I find them. Because if he thinks your face looks bad it’s nothing compared to what I’ll do to his entire body.’
THIRTY-THREE
Victor left the Smoker in the woods. It would take time for the man to wriggle his hands out of the belt around his wrists, but not too long. Victor didn’t want the biker to die out there. Not without first delivering his message. The question remained as to whether the Smoker would do that first or head to a hospital to have his face treated. If he did the latter, then he would no doubt call Castel from there. Not before. He would need a paypho
ne or to borrow a phone because Victor had taken the Smoker’s mobile after first getting the man to show him the code to unlock it.
He didn’t carry a phone unless there was a pressing need to use one. When he spent so much time and effort to avoid detection it would be counterproductive to have a GPS tracker on his person. Now, however, the benefits might outweigh the risk.
He wanted Castel to call.
Victor had no intention of driving up to the man’s house. That would make him defensive. If he was with his men, which seemed more likely than not considering the Smoker had referred to it as their den, then Castel would feel the need to establish his dominance in front of a threat and Victor didn’t want to kill anyone if he could avoid it. The town was small and there had already been one death during his time here. Not that he had killed Abe, but a dramatic rise in the county homicide rate that coincided with Victor’s presence was a problem he could do without.
It was the kind of thing that pinged the radar of the kind of people Victor spent his life trying to avoid. A mob boss assassinated in Chicago would have been noticed by those people. A subsequent killing spree in a nearby town would send them into a frenzy with the scent of blood.
Castel’s reaction would tell Victor everything that a face-to-face would reveal and bypass the potential for a massacre. Castel would either call him, come after him, or hole up.
If he called, then Victor could ask questions and listen to the answers before deciding his next course of action. If the call never came, there were two options left. If Castel didn’t come after Victor, didn’t come for revenge or to rid himself of the threat, then it meant Castel was holing up, and Victor would know for sure Joshua and Michelle were either in Castel’s possession or had been.
Then there would be no avoiding a massacre.
Beforehand, however, there was time.
But how much time was there left for Michelle and Joshua? The odds of finding them alive were worsening with every day, every hour.
The elderly couple were on their porch when Victor pulled up at Michelle’s house in his truck, so there was little need to stop the engine and climb out. Instead, he buzzed down the door window.
‘Any sign of them?’ he called.
The man shook his head. ‘Been out here all morning and I seen no one come or go. No light on neither last night.’
Victor remained silent.
‘I’m sure it’s nothing,’ the woman said.
Victor nodded. ‘I appreciate your help.’
‘We’re just being us,’ the man said.
Victor pulled away and headed back to the motel, driving slow. Slow because he had a lot to think about.
He was tired and needed rest, so he slept for three hours on top of the covers of his motel bed. He remained fully dressed because escaping a kill team could be hard enough without doing it naked or burning time to get dressed. He woke up when the alarm in his head, built over years of ceaseless practice, informed him he had rested long enough.
That same ceaseless practice made him reach for his gun – most often tucked into his waistband but sometimes resting on the covers next to him – but he had no gun. He carried one less and less often because he preferred to avoid enemies than shoot them. Still, practice had become instinct at some point and now that reach for a gun was so hardwired into his brain that he knew he would never be rid of it.
No sounds reached his ears that gave any indication a threat was nearby, so he sat up. A visual check followed and, satisfied, he climbed off the bed.
He brought the back of his hand up to his forehead and felt moisture. He realised his pulse was elevated.
Flashes of dreams threatened to form into inescapable memory, so Victor fought to think about anything else. He checked the room for any signs someone had been inside or tried to gain access but his countermeasures were uninterrupted.
He bathed, changed, and set out.
THIRTY-FOUR
Rowing machines were for suckers, McAllan knew, which is why he was a sucker. He tried to get on it every day and sweat out a few miles, but the boredom was killing him. He expected the physical exertion would be the hard part but no one warned him of the mental toll of exercise. Even the little screen that displayed a digitised route didn’t help. He had tried rowing along pixelated rivers, across lakes and down coastlines and none of it made a difference. Maybe it was the incessant, inescapable noise of the chain mechanism with its mocking, rhythmic whirr of irritation.
‘Can you turn that up?’ McAllan shouted.
One of his men, watching the TV in the nearby kitchen, called back ‘Sorry, boss’ and turned it down.
‘NO,’ McAllan yelled. ‘Up, not down.’
His man appeared in the little annexe that served as McAllan’s new gym. He looked confused.
‘All those roids have made your neck so thick that not enough blood can get through it and into your brain. Is that it?’
‘Boss?’
McAllan rolled his eyes as he rowed. ‘The damned television. Crank up the volume for the love of all that is pure in this world.’
‘You don’t want me to turn it down?’
McAllan, sweating and red-faced and irritated by the whirring and annoyed by his man’s stupidity, threw down the rowing machine’s cable handholds and climbed out of the seat. He pushed past his man, who had moved closer to seek an answer to his question, entered the kitchen, grabbed the remote off the island and thumbed the volume button until it was maxed and the TV was blaring out some trash show about storage lockers.
Bliss.
He shoved the remote into the hands of his man on his way back through to the gym.
‘What do I pay you for exactly?’
His man said, ‘My good looks and charm?’
‘Well, it’s not for your sense of self-awareness, that’s for sure,’ McAllan said, shoving him out of the way.
Settling back on to the hard little seat of the rower, McAllan took the handholds and started pulling. The blaring sound of the TV in the next room did help to drown out the noise of the whirring, although only for a few seconds before the TV fell silent.
‘Are you kidding me?’ McAllan roared.
He stormed back into the kitchen, finding his man on his phone, nodding and saying, ‘Uh-huh.’
McAllan stabbed a finger at the TV but his man shook his head.
He mouthed at McAllan, Hendon.
McAllan’s rage subsided. He took one of the tall stools at the breakfast bar and waited.
After a few more seconds’ interaction, his man took the phone from his ear to tap the screen. He set it down on the breakfast bar and McAllan saw it was set to speaker.
‘You’re on with Mr McAllan,’ his man said.
‘How you doin’, Hendon?’
She said, ‘I’m perfectly fine, Bobby. Working hard at your request.’
‘You sound tired,’ McAllan said. ‘You didn’t stay up all night, did you?’
‘Don’t worry about my hours,’ Hendon said.
‘You’re calling already,’ McAllan noted. ‘That tells me you’ve found something I need to know about.’
‘It’s more what I’ve not found.’
‘Hit me,’ McAllan said, eager.
Hendon took a deep breath. McAllan pictured her adjusting her reading glasses and referring to notes. There was a faint rustle of paper emanating through the speaker because Hendon was old school. She wrote everything down by hand. Which McAllan liked, because no one could hack a legal pad.
‘I’m going to skip the colour detail,’ she said, ‘and go straight to the relevant findings.’
‘When I pay you by the hour, you’d better.’
‘If I charged you for every hour I worked you’d have another stroke.’
McAllan chuckled.
‘So,’ Hendon began, ‘your Wilson Murdoch is an interesting fellow. He’s a native of Nevada and has never left the US until now. Sounds like a homebody or a world-fearing patriot, right?’
‘I see.’
‘He has his own business that is registered offshore and as such I can’t check his finances, I can’t see who else works for the company, and I can’t even see what that company actually does. It’s existed for only ten months so perhaps they’re still deciding.’
‘I thought you were skipping the colour,’ McAllan said. ‘On the clock and all that.’
‘Murdoch is so clean you could eat your dinner off him.’
‘Fat chance. You found out he’s not even remotely clean.’
‘But only because I went above and beyond on this one, Robert.’
‘Stop dragging it out for extra credit. You know I worship you.’
‘Anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m part of a network of private investigators that covers both Canada and the US. I know a guy in Las Vegas. I know him really well, as a matter of fact. I asked him to do me a favour because it annoyed me I had hit a brick wall thanks to Murdoch’s offshore company. This friend of mine got in his car and drove out to see Murdoch’s parents because Murdoch had an accident a few years ago. He hit his head while skiing in Colorado. No employment records after that until founding his offshore company almost a year back. You know what this friend of mine found when he drove out to see the parents?’
‘I can guess,’ McAllan said with a frown. ‘He found Murdoch in a back room with all sorts of tubes sticking out of him.’
‘Bingo,’ Hendon said. ‘Persistent vegetative state.’
‘The parents are religious, then? It’s against their faith to turn off the life support.’
She said, ‘Sometimes I wonder why you even need me.’
‘Because I don’t like to work any harder than I have to,’ McAllan said. ‘Anything else?’
‘That’s it,’ Hendon said. ‘Whoever your fisherman is, he isn’t Wilson Murdoch.’
‘I’ll make sure you’re paid the same day we get the invoice.’
‘I slipped it in the post a minute before I called.’
‘Do me a favour, yeah?’ McAllan said. ‘Never work for the wrong people. I don’t want them screwing up and losing you your licence. You’re too valuable to me, understand?’
