A Quiet Man (Victor Book 9)

by Tom Wood

  ‘That is the real reason.’

  ‘Nice try,’ Castel said. ‘I’m not so easy to fool.’

  ‘I’m fooling you and I’m not even trying.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m looking for Joshua and Michelle,’ Victor said. ‘That’s the only reason I went to see Abe. It’s the only reason I’m in town at all.’

  Silence on the line.

  ‘Do you know where they are?’ Victor asked.

  Castel said, ‘What’s it worth?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Castel laughed. ‘K-ching.’

  ‘Everything to you,’ Victor said. ‘To you, telling me where they are is worth everything.’

  Castel didn’t understand. ‘That’s a hell of a lot for some skank and her freak of a kid.’

  Victor took a breath and held it for a second. ‘Did you see what I did to your man’s face?’

  ‘You’re going to pay for that.’

  ‘I was improvising,’ Victor said.

  ‘So?’

  ‘I didn’t plan it. I was using what I had to hand.’

  ‘So?’ Castel said again.

  ‘So,’ Victor echoed, ‘if you speak about either Joshua or his mother like that again I won’t improvise with you. I’ll plan exactly what to do. I’ll make sure I bring everything I need.’

  Castel laughed. ‘Touchy, aren’t you?’

  ‘If you know where they are,’ Victor said, ‘you need to tell me. Right now.’

  ‘Tell me what you’re really doing in this town and maybe I will.’

  ‘I can’t tell you any clearer than I have already.’

  ‘Are you working for another outfit?’

  ‘I’m alone.’

  ‘Did Fendy send you to keep an eye on me?’

  ‘This is the first time I’ve heard that name. I work for no one, I was sent by no one. I’m only here to find Michelle and Joshua. Once I find them, I’m in the wind. It can be that simple.’

  Castel kissed his teeth. ‘We’ve gone way beyond that point, pal. Whoever you are, whoever you’re working for, you messed up laying hands on one of my crew. Because we’re not just a crew, we’re family. Whatever outfit is backing you up isn’t going to save you from the Nameless. We’re wild dogs, we are rabid, and we are starving. We’re going to tear you to pieces. We’re going to strip the flesh from your bones with our fangs.’

  He howled down the line.

  ‘I’m going to make you the single best offer you’ve ever had,’ Victor said when the howls subsided. ‘The best offer you’ll ever have in your life, in fact. Are you listening? Tell me where I can find Michelle and Joshua and we never have to meet.’

  Castel said, ‘You’re trying to deal with me after what you did? You’re either insane or you’re the dumbest fool I ever did come across. You don’t negotiate with me, kid, you beg. You plead on your belly before my feet and kiss my gnarly toes for all the good it will do. Get it into your skull that we’re coming for you and you can’t escape our fury and no way do you get to make any kind of deal. Doesn’t matter where you hide, the Nameless are riding out. You try and leave town, you try and run, and we’ll never stop hunting you.’

  ‘I’m going nowhere,’ Victor said. ‘Come get me.’

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  After Linette had gone, McAllan took an airtight food container from the refrigerator and popped open the lid. He took a sniff of the salad inside. Some brown rice thing with all sorts of leaves and beans and crunchy vegetables in a low-calorie dressing. Some protein, some carbohydrates, some fats. Some of everything except taste.

  He had shelves full of such containers, each with a healthy meal prepared specifically for him by a nutritionist. McAllan’s doctor had called his cholesterol profile a time bomb.

  No, an atomic time bomb.

  He slid open a drawer to collect a fork and sat back down at the breakfast bar to eat.

  He set the fork down after two mouthfuls.

  He looked up at his two guys, neither of whom had said a word since the visit of the man going by the name of Murdoch. Both were waiting for McAllan to say something about it. He needed to say something.

  McAllan grunted. He thought. He considered. He remembered.

  ‘Some doors are closed to protect you from what lies on the other side … ’ McAllan mumbled. ‘What is that even supposed to mean? Who speaks like that?’

  The big guy in the sportswear said, ‘He was scared.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ McAllan replied. ‘He seemed frightened to death to me when he strolled in here all on his lonesome. Be a pal and mop up the mess he made when he pissed himself.’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘He wasn’t scared. I watched him the entire time. He didn’t shift his weight once. He didn’t take a step back. He didn’t so much as fidget. He’s ice.’

  ‘I told you,’ McAllan said. ‘Didn’t I tell you? I knew there was something wrong about him before we even knew about the vegetable with the tubes. This guy is bad news.’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘The worst.’

  McAllan stabbed his fork into the container and speared some leaves. ‘He refuses to leave the motel? That’s one thing. That’s bad enough. Then he comes into my house and disrespects me like that? No, no, no. That’s not right.’

  The big guy in the sportswear said, ‘I would have taught him a lesson had you—’

  ‘Not in my home,’ he said. ‘Not where I eat. Not where my daughter drinks her orange juice. But there have to be consequences. He’s got to go.’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘Why waste resources? He’s no one. Just some guy with too much time on his hands.’

  The big guy said, ‘Couple more days and he’ll be gone, I’m sure.’

  McAllan said, ‘You’re saying we should wait and see?’

  ‘I guess. Yeah. Sure.’

  McAllan sat back. ‘Since when have I been in the wait-and-see business?’

  The big guy in the sportswear knew the tone well enough. He wasn’t a man of words, so the definition of a rhetorical question was lost on him. Yet he understood there was no way to answer the boss without getting an earful, so he kept his lips together.

  McAllan didn’t keep him in suspense long. ‘I don’t wait and see. You know who does that? Losers. Losers wait and see. Losers hope for the best. Losers don’t do, they wait.’

  The big guy in the sportswear waited.

  ‘I’m past caring who he is,’ McAllan said. ‘I want him gone. I don’t care if he’s a cop, some long-lost associate of Castel, a rival player, a made man from Vegas or even the devil himself. This is my town and he’s overstayed his welcome. It’s time he hit the bricks or gets hit by them.’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘You told him you wanted him to stick around.’

  ‘I know what I said. I want him to think that, dummy. You don’t tell your enemies what you actually want. You make them think the opposite.’

  ‘We can handle it.’ The big guy in the sportswear pushed one fist into the other palm until knuckles cracked. A nonsense gesture, but it made him feel better. Useful. ‘Just say the word.’

  McAllan sighed and nodded at the same time. ‘I know you can handle him. But that’s not the important point here. This is no slight to your credentials as professional hard cases. It’s not like I pay you for your singing voices, is it? You can work him over. Of that I have no doubt. And then … ? We’re into aftermath territory. Currently uncharted. So, let’s explore this hypothetical. You break his arms, sure, and what then?’

  ‘He learns his lesson or we break his legs too.’

  ‘You break his legs too … why not? In for a penny … Sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Yet is it? Because in either of those incredibly distinct and unique scenarios he’s going to end up in hospital. He ends up in hospital with two or more broken limbs and sooner or later he’s going to talk to the police. He talks to the police and we’re hauled before a detective. We’ll have alibis, naturally,
but will that be enough to maintain our careful appearance of law-abiding entrepreneurialism? Is her Royal Highness going to believe we had nothing to do with violating the careful conditions of our continued cooperation?’

  ‘We tell him to stay quiet, he will.’

  ‘Did I say he hobbles to the police himself? No, I did not. I said he talks to the police. Did I say he tells them anything? No, I did not. But do you really think that any cop – and for argument’s sake, let’s say that dutiful officer happens to be my daughter – isn’t going to work out how that fisherman ended up in a double or quadruple cast? I’m guessing she won’t be sold when he insists to her that he slipped in the shower while scrubbing at his ball sack.’

  His man was silent.

  ‘Whatever you say to the fisherman and whatever he doesn’t say to my daughter is irrelevant here. We hurt him, we’re looking at scrutiny. Do we like scrutiny now? Because if we do then I’m afraid I missed that particular memo.’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘Then I’m lost. You want him gone but you don’t want us to get him gone.’

  McAllan said, ‘Do you snake your own drain?’

  The guy with the slicked hair said, ‘What?’

  ‘When your pipes are all blocked up with tied-off rubbers and great wads of your girl’s hair and no matter how much poisonous, carcinogenic, planet-killing chemicals you pour down there it don’t do squat … do you roll up your sleeves and bury your arm up to your elbow in all manner of your own filth?’

  Silence.

  ‘No,’ McAllan said. ‘You don’t.’

  The big guy in the sportswear said, ‘We outsource it?’

  ‘Someone’s grown a brain in the last ten seconds,’ McAllan said with a slow clap. ‘It’s a Christmas miracle four months too late. Of course we outsource it. Get a crew of wreckers from another town. Somewhere far away. Somewhere I haven’t even heard of, okay? I want no one we’ve done business with before, even at arm’s length. And I want a buffer. Use an intermediary to make the arrangement with the wreckers. I don’t want them even to know my name, okay? But I want scum. I cannot emphasise that enough. I want wreckers who like what they do. Get me sadists. I’m talking dead behind the eyes, yeah? Because I want them to put the fear of God into Murdoch. Have them hurt him so bad that in a year’s time he’s still limping. Hurt him so bad that a decade from now the very idea of ever crossing the border again twitches his sphincter.’

  The big guy in the sportswear nodded.

  The guy with the slicked hair stood. ‘I’ll start making calls.’

  McAllan shoved his salad away. ‘And for the love of Zeus will someone go get me a taco?’

  THIRTY-NINE

  The tail was easy to spot. The driver had no chance of remaining undetected for long because the roads were so free of traffic even an amateur would notice a car following. That car was an unremarkable sedan. A new model. Gunmetal grey paint.

  Victor had seen no comparable vehicle near McAllan’s property, but it hadn’t needed to be close to catch up with him. Victor kept his truck at, or below, the speed limit at all times. Plus, it was a hefty vehicle. A downside Victor could do little about since he needed the truck’s off-road capacity.

  Past tense, he realised. He had needed that capacity to get to the lake to do his job. The job he had completed two days ago.

  He drove on, not watching the car behind him because he didn’t need to watch it to know it was there. But he didn’t understand why it was following him.

  Victor thought he had made himself clear.

  He needed to send McAllan a new message.

  He applied pressure to the accelerator. The speedometer turned and the engine revved harder, and the old truck shook under the strain.

  The grey car was about a hundred metres behind him. By the time the driver realised Victor was accelerating, it was almost double that.

  Smooth empty asphalt lay ahead, flanked by trees. Cool air rushed into the cab through the ventilators. Victor strengthened his grip on the steering wheel to fight the truck’s tendency to pull to the right as the speed increased. The road was almost straight on this section but snaked a little now and again. Victor knew that wouldn’t last.

  Behind him, the grey sedan was accelerating hard to close the distance. A newer, faster car with maybe twice the horsepower-to-weight ratio. Victor couldn’t escape it.

  He wasn’t trying to escape it.

  As he drove further out of town the road changed, the snaking becoming sharper turns.

  Victor took the first of them and the grey car disappeared from his rear view.

  It appeared a few seconds later.

  Victor took the second, and the grey car disappeared from his rear view.

  It appeared a few seconds later.

  Victor took the third turn, and as the grey car disappeared from his rear view he decelerated hard enough to make the truck skid and swerve before it came to a stop.

  The grey car appeared a second later.

  Going faster than Victor had been driving to catch up, the driver couldn’t brake in time, couldn’t react quickly enough. He yanked the wheel to avoid crashing straight into the back of Victor’s truck.

  Tyres smoked and screeched.

  The driver fought the wheel and the car fishtailed past Victor’s truck, leaving behind a cloud of brake dust, tyre smoke and exhaust fumes.

  The car veered right, almost tipping on to two wheels, leaving criss-crossing parallel lines of burnt rubber on the road surface.

  For a second it looked as though the driver might keep the car on the road but it was only a brief moment of calm before he lost control and the vehicle entered a spin that took it off the asphalt and tipped it into the flanking vegetation.

  It rolled only once, on to the roof, and slid to a stop before it reached any trees.

  The driver had managed to force the door open and was crawling out as Victor neared.

  ‘You should be more careful.’

  The driver groaned but had no visible signs of injury. He had been wearing his seatbelt.

  ‘I appreciate you’re just doing your job, but your boss needs to understand consequence.’

  The driver, on his hands and knees, groaned again.

  Victor stood over the man and took his right arm and hand, manipulating the limb until the shoulder, elbow and wrist were all locked.

  ‘You can tell people it happened in the crash,’ Victor said. ‘Dislocated shoulder. Hyperextended wrist. Cervical fractures to both the radius and ulna. Radial fracture to the humerus. Multiple crushed phalanges.’

  The man groaned again.

  Victor said, ‘But you were lucky. It could have been a lot worse. Take a deep breath for me.’

  ‘Wait … ’

  ‘Tell McAllan this is me being merciful,’ Victor said, beginning to twist. ‘Tell him—’

  ‘I don’t work for McAllan.’

  Victor paused. There was desperation in the man’s voice and fear. Both expected. But something else too. He could tell this wasn’t a bluff.

  ‘I can see you don’t work for Castel,’ Victor said. ‘So if you don’t work for McAllan either, who do you work for?’

  The man said, ‘I work for their boss.’

  FORTY

  The wreckers were hired fast. Three cousins. Two on one side of the family, one from the other. For a moment, a different pair of guys almost got the job, two big-time heavies with prison convictions for violent crimes, but McAllan wanted three guys for the job, not two. He wanted it done right.

  McAllan’s guy had a former cellmate in Toronto who had a brother in Calgary who knew a bare-knuckle boxer in Regina who worked for a small protection racket in Winnipeg who had used the cousins from time to time. It took four phone calls and less than twenty minutes for the connection to be made.

  McAllan had his buffer and then some.

  The three cousins ran an illegal gambling ring that doubled as a loan shark business and which also washed some cash now an
d again. They liked to think of themselves as businessmen on the rise. Capitalists to the core. That their business had been started with money earned the old-fashioned way didn’t factor in.

  The cousins had robbed liquor stores and convenience stores and armoured cars and even a couple of banks. There had been a fourth cousin once, until a trigger-happy security guard shot him in the back of the skull when they were making a getaway.

  That corpse left behind after a robbery meant questions by detectives and the remaining cousins decided to roll back on the robberies before they gave those detectives enough to bury them. The cousins weren’t smart, but they weren’t stupid.

  They had always been in trouble. When they were young they were childhood enemies, fighting each other over the smallest slight. They broke bones. They put each other in hospital. Each one hated the other two. They didn’t mind getting hurt so long as they hurt the others more. Until they woke up to the fact they were harder to beat together. They could fight as three and not get hurt at all. Less hurt for each of them meant more hurt that could be caused. None finished high school. Only one of them had not been expelled. All three had spent more of their teenage years in juvenile detention than they had out in the world. They had rap sheets that ran into inches in thickness. Bad to the bone, they liked to think. No one who knew them would argue with that analysis.

  But few knew just how bad.

  They had robbed for the money and they ran their gambling ring in the spirit of capitalism, but they took pleasure from it too. That pleasure most often came when someone couldn’t pay what they owed.

  Then, it was open season.

  Not on the mark, of course. That wasn’t a good way of turning a profit. They went for someone close to the mark and they made the mark watch.

  They owned some warehouse space far away from anywhere. Inside was a room. Not quite soundproof but so well insulated it didn’t matter. Only someone inside the warehouse could hear what went on in that room. No one but the cousins used the room, and no one but the cousins who entered that room left the same.