A Quiet Man (Victor Book 9)

by Tom Wood

  ‘I understand.’

  ‘Good,’ Garrett said, keeping the gun aimed at Victor but backing away to the door until he could open it without taking his gaze from Victor. ‘I’m hoping to get this done without shooting anyone at all. Least of all some unlucky sap who picked the wrong mother and kid to befriend and wrong house to crash inside. You’ve made my life harder but that doesn’t mean I need to end yours unless you force my hand.’

  ‘Not harder,’ Victor said. ‘Better.’

  Garrett said, ‘What?’

  ‘It’s better for you that I spooked them and they’ve already run.’

  ‘Oh yeah, how did you work that out?’

  ‘Because had I not spooked them, had they still been here, to get to them you would have had to go through me first.’

  ‘I’m not sure how that’s better for me,’ Garrett said as he backed away through the open door. ‘Considering you’re only a fisherman.’

  ‘That’s just a hobby,’ Victor said. ‘It’s not my job. It’s not what I do best.’

  FIFTY-NINE

  Fendy called the Smoker’s cell phone first thing in the morning to say she had the list of quarry workers for him, so Victor drove into town to collect the physical copy. It was four sheaves of white printer paper with a list of around a hundred names, with columns for telephone numbers, addresses, citizenship, ages, hourly wages and other details that were superfluous to his requirements.

  He didn’t collect the list from Fendy but from Sal, who was waiting outside the building for him, smoking a cigarette.

  ‘How do you feel?’ Victor asked him.

  ‘Like I was in a car crash yesterday.’ He paused. Almost smiled. ‘But it could have been a lot worse.’

  Victor nodded.

  He took the list the short distance to the police precinct and asked at the front desk for Linette, who came to him after a minute’s wait.

  He handed it to her when he reached to shake hands in greeting.

  ‘What’s the hurry?’ she said. ‘Beyond the obvious, I mean.’

  ‘I’m just paranoid.’

  She gave him a look that said she didn’t believe him. ‘Really?’

  ‘I have a bad feeling.’

  ‘A bad feeling?’

  He said, ‘Humour me.’

  ‘I’ll work through it as fast as I can,’ she said. ‘I’ve been doing everything I can to find them, as fast as I can.’

  ‘I know,’ Victor said.

  ‘Has something changed since we last spoke?’

  There’s eight to twelve bounty hunters scouring the town for Joshua as we speak and if they find him first, they will kill Michelle and her boyfriend because she’ll never let them take her son away from her.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She tapped him on the chest with the papers. ‘Then relax, I’m all over this. I’ll have the boyfriend found by nightfall.’

  It’ll be all over by then, he didn’t say.

  ‘You can help if you like.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Victor said.

  She seemed offended. ‘Don’t want to sully yourself with a menial task like paperwork?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ he said. ‘I have to go fishing.’

  She was confused and even more offended. ‘Did you say you can’t help because you have to go fishing?’

  He nodded. ‘Right now.’

  SIXTY

  ‘Do you have any wet suits?’

  She gave him a funny look because it was as obvious as shit on a shoe that she didn’t sell wet suits.

  ‘If you can’t see one that’s because we don’t have any,’ she said. Plenty of sarcasm but at least she didn’t curse.

  He nodded. Not annoyed. Not disappointed. Not surprised. He might have asked in case they had a back room with stock not on display. She felt a little bad for her attitude, but she had to deal with a dozen dumb questions a day and sometimes it was simply too much to ask to remain polite through it all. Saints sinned for less.

  ‘We’re not that kind of sporting goods establishment,’ she added to ease her guilt. ‘Might have better luck further east at one of the bigger towns.’

  He said, ‘I’ll bear that in mind,’ but she suspected it was now or never for that wet suit.

  He had a calm, even exterior. He didn’t seem to be in a rush yet he stalked the aisles with such ruthless efficiency, taking items from the shelves with no hesitation, no deliberation, that she could tell he was on the clock. Time was of the essence.

  She wondered how a man could be in such a hurry without hurrying.

  She ran the items through the register and he packed them into a large sports bag that he had given her first to scan.

  He was buying an eclectic collection of goods, no doubt.

  Flares.

  Four nylon fishing nets.

  Thin rope.

  Thermal clothing.

  Duct tape.

  Lead fishing weights.

  A box of .338 calibre ammunition.

  A beach towel.

  A camping stove.

  Swimming goggles.

  Twelve tubs of petroleum jelly.

  With each scan she grew more confused and more curious. It was not her nature to make unsolicited conversation with the customers, but this particular man was testing her resolve.

  She cracked when she huffed and struggled to turn the heavy plastic case containing dumbbell bars and an assortment of weights. Had to be thirty or forty pounds. He had four such cases in his cart, lifting each one out with almost no effort.

  ‘Doesn’t look like you need them,’ she said, taking the second case from him.

  He humoured her with a shrug. Not a talker.

  ‘You got another two arms hiding under your shirt?’ she joked as the third case was passed to her to scan.

  Again, he humoured her. This time with a slight upturning of his lips. Not a smile but something approaching one.

  He paid up and wished her a good day.

  The cases could not fit in the bag, of course, but he slung it over his shoulder and tucked a case of weights under each arm and carried the other two in his hands. They had handles.

  She watched him go, with his eclectic collection of purchases.

  She watched him go, all the way to his truck outside in the lot.

  A curious man.

  A quiet man.

  ‘Excuse me,’ snarked a woman with a cart full of diapers, waiting to pay. ‘But is this lane actually open?’

  SIXTY-ONE

  With little wind, the lake was still. The gentle tremor on the surface was only visible up close, at the shore where the water lapped or from up on a boat, looking down. At the centre of the lake floated a two-man rowing boat. A practical, plastic vessel bought for cash by a salesman from Nevada on a fishing trip. The oars were inside, side by side.

  His clothes were in a neat pile on one of the seats. A towel was folded next to the clothes, and a camping stove sat next to the towel.

  Save for a little lake water sloshing between the seats, the boat was empty. It floated upon the surface, unpiloted and unmoored. From the faraway shores it was not possible to see whether it was piloted or not. From those shores it seemed no different from any other small vessel used by people looking to catch the many cold-water fish in this lake or the others like it.

  At this time of year, in April, the lake was around four degrees centigrade at the surface, growing rapidly colder the closer the water was to the bottom, which reached over two hundred metres at the deepest point. Here, below where the boat floated, it was a mere forty metres to the bottom and a little above freezing at that depth.

  Typically, a human might be able to stay conscious for around fifteen minutes when exposed to water so cold and would succumb to hypothermia in well under an hour if they didn’t first drown after passing out from shock.

  It would be several weeks before visitors even paddled at the beaches.

  Near the boat, bubbles rose to the surface. Most popped. A few li
ngered on the surface.

  More rose. More popped.

  More and more.

  The calm, gently rippling surface of the lake ended in a sudden eruption of water as a pale, almost white, hand emerged, followed by a pale arm and then another hand, and another arm, reaching, stretching, coming back down to slash at the already broken surface as Victor’s head cleared the water.

  He inhaled, gasping, sucking in an urgent, desperate breath, his first for almost two minutes.

  He was close to the boat and reached out with one hand to take hold, to make treading water easier, getting back his breath as his bare arms, shoulders and head steamed. His teeth chattered. He shivered. Goose pimples covered his skin. He felt weak. Exhausted.

  One minute’s rest was all he could afford. One minute’s rest meant three minutes’ total exposure. Three minutes’ exposure meant he had twelve left before he was pushing biological limits. He was far fitter and stronger than the average person, though far leaner. Less body fat meant less insulation. On paper, he had four more attempts. But weaker each time. Slower. Each attempt longer than the previous one.

  He was so cold, so fatigued, he knew he had only two remaining, knew he wouldn’t have the strength to ascend a fourth time. Maybe not even a third because of the extra weight he had to bring back with him. He might be so slow swimming back up that he never reached the surface, the threat of hypothermia never becoming a risk because he would succumb to hypoxia and drown somewhere below the surface in the icy dark.

  With his free hand he slapped himself in the face, hard, replacing the doubt with stinging pain.

  Pain brought focus.

  He inhaled deep breaths, one after the other, saturating his blood with oxygen.

  He took hold of the closest sack of rocks and used the knife to saw through the rope attaching the sack to the side of the boat.

  It dragged him back below the surface.

  To reduce drag and increase the speed of descent, he kept his ankles together, his thighs pressed together, his shoulders rounded forward and his elbows as close together as his musculature let him. The mass of the rocks pulled him deeper and deeper. He could swim down, perhaps faster, but doing so would burn too much oxygen, create too much carbon dioxide. He needed to conserve every iota of energy for the swim back up.

  He was not going deep enough for the bends to be a concern or for decompression to be required, but he felt the ever-increasing pressure in his ears, in his head. He knew it was colder the deeper he descended, but he was already so cold as not to notice that variance.

  He had never felt so cold.

  As he neared the bottom of the lake, he saw the pale haze of flares colouring the dirty gloom in red. Each one was weighted with taped lead fishing weights. Before the first descent he had thrown and dropped a dozen of them. An imperfect system, but his resources, his options, were limited. His window of time almost non-existent.

  Thirty-five seconds to the bottom of the lake and a minute to swim back to the surface left around twenty seconds to search. He needed that light to have any chance.

  He released the sack of rocks as soon as the soles of his feet touched silt and sand.

  The first descent, he had searched to the east, so this time he searched west. The light from the flares was not as effective as he had hoped because the water was dense with sediment so only small, distant areas of the lake bottom were illuminated with fiery red light. Between them was inky blackness.

  Two weighted sacks lay on the bottom of the lake close by, but it was a third one he had twenty short seconds to locate.

  If his recollection of where he had disposed of the rifle used for the Chicago job was off even a little, he would never find it. But he remembered the distant spur of land jutting into the lake to the south and the white of the lakeside house to the north.

  Twenty, nineteen …

  The rifle was here, it was close, hiding in one of the areas of blackness outside the pools of red light.

  Fourteen, thirteen …

  Victor pushed himself through the water, stirring up clouds of silt that only darkened it further. He reached blindly with his hands, his feet.

  Eight, seven …

  Within just a moment there were only seconds remaining until he had to ascend. Each second increased the burn in his lungs and the compulsion to inhale air that was not available. He exhaled carbon dioxide through his nose, a little at a time.

  Four, three …

  His fingers touched only sand, his left foot kicked only stones, but his right toes stung against something harder.

  One.

  No time left to check further.

  He should ascend – he had to – but instead he pivoted around, found the familiar texture of hessian.

  He grabbed it, pivoted back so he was facing up, and swam.

  The rifle weighed ten kilos and another ten kilos of rocks inside the sack made for twenty in total. A manageable weight on land but there were forty metres of water above him trying to force him back down. His ascent was slow, his legs pushing as fast as he could work them but only one arm to pull with as the other hung uselessly and immobile thanks to the weighted sack.

  The exertion was extreme.

  He had expected it to be as hard as anything he had ever done but the reality was beyond his reckoning.

  Gravity pulled him down.

  The weight of the lake pushed him down.

  He had stayed too long on the bottom, he knew. He had spent precious oxygen he needed for the swim up.

  Before, he had ascended in one minute with both arms and no rifle and rocks.

  Now, after one minute, he was still surrounded by darkness.

  The red light of the flares below had disappeared into the murky depths, and neither could he see the glow of the flare dangling from the boat to guide him back.

  There was no more carbon dioxide to release but his lungs burned. The compulsion to breathe was an incredible force that took all his will to fight.

  He kept kicking with legs that became more sluggish with each movement, the water becoming thicker and denser as his vision began to fail.

  His one usable arm slowed until he could no longer use it.

  He told himself to keep swimming, to keep fighting, to never give in.

  That voice seemed distant, distorted.

  Not his voice but the voice of his uncle.

  If I lose another hen you get the strap.

  The rifle, disassembled in the sack, was long and unwieldy in his hands. Hard to aim underwater.

  He didn’t want to shoot the fox.

  Wait until it’s in range, his uncle told him, but he couldn’t. He squeezed, so nervous he wasn’t able to wait.

  He missed.

  But he knew he’d hit. He had seen the flash of red. He had never been able to forget it.

  He remembered his uncle’s smile, that singular moment of pride that Victor had sought so hard to replicate.

  And if he had missed all those years ago? If he had received the strap he had feared so much instead of that unexpected praise?

  Would he even be Victor?

  Would he be drowning in a lake, alone in the dark, hallucinating as the oxygen deprivation affected his brain’s ability to function?

  He didn’t care.

  He didn’t care because after hallucination came euphoria. Endorphins flooded his brain and he felt an incredible sense of wellbeing, of contentment.

  Maybe his first ever moment of genuine happiness.

  His legs, kicking still on instinct, slowed.

  His ascent stopped.

  Victor had spent every waking moment for as long as he could remember trying to stay alive, yet now he was content to die because he did not want to end this perfect feeling.

  Alone in the dark and cold, drowning, Victor smiled.

  In the rush of endorphins, he wanted to share that happiness. He needed others to know this feeling. This was life, finally.

  Dying was living.

 
He needed to tell people about it.

  He needed to tell Joshua.

  Joshua.

  Joshua.

  Victor kicked his legs with the last of his strength, no longer feeling euphoric but feeling the need to survive another second, another day. He had to survive. He was needed.

  He could no longer sense direction. He could no longer sense anything.

  He only knew he had reached the rowing boat because he hit the top of his head on the bow.

  He ignored the pain because he felt none and manoeuvred clear of the boat, grabbed hold of one of the weighted nets attached to the side with his free hand and pulled.

  Nothing happened.

  He had no strength left to pull. No energy left to kick. He couldn’t force himself out of the water with the weight of the rifle and rocks dragging him down.

  Less than an arm’s length from air yet he couldn’t reach it.

  He kicked and pulled with everything he had, with his limbs leaden and his vision almost black and his lungs on fire, and he didn’t move.

  He kicked and pulled and felt his grip on the net above failing.

  Underwater, Victor roared.

  No euphoria now.

  Only exhaustion and agony and defeat.

  He roared and released the sack from his grip.

  He kicked and pulled and his head cleared the surface and he sucked in air as the rifle sank back down into the gloom.

  SIXTY-TWO

  It took a long time before Victor stopped shivering once he was back on the boat. The small exertion of climbing out of the water had almost beaten him. His strength was so depleted and his energy levels so low, what should have taken seconds took nearly a minute of heaving and struggling, hauling and slipping.

  Aboard the boat he saw how white his skin had become, so pale it was almost translucent. Veins seemed drawn over him in scribbles of blue ink. Goosebumps covered him. He was sure his lips were even bluer than the visible veins.