A Quiet Man (Victor Book 9)

by Tom Wood

  The pressure released and blood raced through Victor’s leg, and the dark lake water around them became a shroud of swirling red.

  Victor kept fighting, working on his position, his grip, the movement of his legs. He let Garrett attack the wound because it kept the bounty hunter focused, busy on his own actions and not on Victor’s.

  They twisted around in a savage embrace, tumbling deeper, sinking faster.

  Light faded with every second until they were almost blind, struggling in darkness.

  Victor, losing more blood after already losing so much, knew he would run out of oxygen long before Garrett. All Garrett had to do was wait, not fight, but he fought hard with aggression and rage. He spent more oxygen than he needed to. The price of hatred.

  Garrett’s fingertips found the bullet hole in Victor’s thigh and clawed at it, trying to rip it open, to widen it.

  The pain made Victor lightheaded. He cracked teeth keeping his mouth closed against the instinct to open it and scream. He couldn’t afford to waste a single molecule of oxygen.

  Victor wanted to be behind Garrett but it wasn’t going to work. He was weak from blood loss, dizzy with pain. Disorientated in darkness. He couldn’t wait until his position was perfect because he would die before he worked himself into it. He settled on getting chest-to-chest with him, releasing Garrett’s arm so he could wrap both arms around the man’s back.

  Victor grabbed his own forearms as close to his elbows as he could, grappling Garrett as tight as possible.

  He braced and retracted his scapulas in a single, powerful instant, withdrawing his shoulder blades as fast and hard as he could with the strength he had remaining, driving his hands, his arms, against Garrett’s back and compressing Garrett’s ribs against him in a sudden, forceful squeeze.

  A cloud of bubbles expelled from Garrett’s mouth as his lungs were pinched shut and forcibly emptied of air.

  Garrett panicked.

  He ignored the wound, ignored the fight entirely, and tried to free himself from Victor’s embrace.

  Garrett pushed and kicked and screamed beneath the water.

  Victor closed his eyes and steadied his mind and held on, accepting the elbows and punches Garrett threw at him, ignoring the fingers that went for his eyes.

  Garrett, airless, weakened fast.

  The attacks became sluggish.

  Then they stopped.

  Victor opened his eyes to see Garrett’s own, wide and red, staring back through the gloom without blinking.

  Releasing him into the lake’s embrace, Victor began his ascent towards the surface. He was so weak he could barely swim – his left leg couldn’t move at all – but the distance was not far. Even wrapped together, they had not sunk deep.

  He headed towards the daylight above, but instead of the water growing clearer as he swam, it darkened further, and he heard the faraway voice of his uncle calling to him.

  EIGHTY-FOUR

  They hadn’t made it to the truck. Not even close. Naël couldn’t move with speed with his old back wound and neither could Joshua with his little legs. It had taken too much time to navigate the forest. As the truck had come into view, they had heard an approaching vehicle. The same deep rumble that had come to the cabin, only louder, faster, more urgent.

  Backtracking, they had gone to the rocks, the caves. There, they had hidden for a long time, shuddering at the boom of an explosion and the roar of nearby gunfire and then waiting in terror after it had ceased. Naël had held Michelle tight as she held Joshua.

  It’s just fireworks, baby.

  When the gunshots had ceased, they had waited and waited and waited.

  Between Michelle and Naël they had whispered about whether they should stay or go. An impossible choice. In staying, they might lose their chance to escape. In going, they might lose their chance to remain hidden.

  They figured the bounty hunters would find them if they stayed, sooner or later.

  Naël went first, to Michelle’s protestations, but there was Joshua to consider. Naël had to leave first and scout ahead to see if it was safe. It had to be that way.

  He found much blood and many bodies.

  He picked up a rifle.

  He found no signs of life at all.

  It was over.

  He fetched Michelle and Joshua and led them a different way back to the cabin, one that avoided the corpses. He told Michelle to get their things and pack them into his Land Rover. They were leaving.

  Joshua asked about Wilson Murdoch.

  Was he still coming with them to see the Grand Canyon?

  They exchanged questioning looks over Joshua’s head that he could not see and told him that Wilson Murdoch would come and visit them some day in the future. But they would send him a postcard.

  Michelle told Joshua to go fetch his vacation bag, and she and Naël talked back and forth. They had to go. They couldn’t stay a single second longer than necessary. But maybe he was still out there. Maybe he needed them.

  Could they really leave him behind?

  No, was the answer.

  They went back. They searched.

  Naël knew the forest and he knew how to track.

  They found Murdoch on the shore, face down in the mud where he had exited the water but then fallen, the last of his strength spent, or perhaps where the lake had washed up his listless form. The water lapped over his unmoving legs and small waves broke over his torso and head, covering him for a brief moment before withdrawing again. He had been washed clean. Blood loss and the icy coldness of the lake had paled his face to brilliant white.

  Naël dragged the body out of the water, stumbling and fighting the sucking mud with every backwards step. He shooed Michelle away when she tried to help because without his mother’s hand to steady him, Joshua approached, compelled by curiosity, and Naël did not want the boy to see a corpse up close.

  There were many wounds – cuts and contusions and even a bullet hole in his thigh. Despite Naël’s medical knowledge it was hard to know if the wounds had killed him or if he had drowned or died of hypothermia, or a combination of all.

  Adieu, ami.

  Michelle called from where she stood some metres away, holding back an increasingly anxious Joshua, who was not convinced by her assurances.

  Naël shook his head in answer and Michelle used a hand to stifle a cry. She turned Joshua away as he asked his many questions, and she tried to distract him by any means.

  Look at the forest. Look at the leaves. The colours. Look anywhere else. How old do you think that tree is? I bet it’s a thousand years old, don’t you?

  Joshua looked where his mother told him to look. He gave no answers, and Michelle wiped her eyes.

  Then Naël called to her, for her. Loud. Urgent.

  Desperate.

  Confused, she hesitated. Naël pleaded, and she told Joshua to stay facing the forest. To try and count the trees.

  She rushed to Naël and saw the pale, horrid form lying in the mud with him. She gasped in disgust and sympathy.

  There. Naël pointed to a trickle of bright blood on the washed-clean, corpse-white skin. Fresh blood from a heart that still pumped.

  Together they dragged and heaved until they were free of the cold mud and were on firmer ground.

  Naël pulled off his jacket and his shirt and tore his shirt into strips for makeshift dressings and tourniquets. They stripped away sodden clothes and Naël used the jacket as a blanket.

  Because of his old wound, Naël needed Michelle’s help to get Murdoch on to his shoulders. Every spare moment she reassured a teary Joshua that it was fine, that it was all a game that adults played from time to time.

  Naël could not move fast but he hurried every step through the trees, fighting back the burning in his lungs, in his muscles, in his joints, and the agony in his back. It was the very least he could do.

  He was so exhausted by the time they reached the truck he could not climb inside once they had laid Murdoch inside first. Michelle had t
o help Naël get behind the wheel and she and Joshua rode in the load bed, where she hugged him and sang his favourite songs.

  Accroche-toi, Naël willed.

  Hang in there.

  EIGHTY-FIVE

  Linette had never known anything quite like it. By the time she arrived on scene, the car had stopped burning. All that remained of the fire was a plume of black smoke rising from the charred shell of metal. At first, no one could get close enough to see how many corpses were in the car. Was it two or was it three?

  The one on the road was a mess. Stumps where legs should have been.

  Days would go by before they understood what had transpired. No one in Linette’s department knew anything about explosives. Experts had to be called in. A computer simulation was built to recreate the incident.

  Stainless-steel ball bearings would turn up for weeks afterwards. They never found them all.

  Jennifer Welch was simple enough to identify given the ID in her wallet. The three sets of remains in the car took a little more work. Dental records to the rescue.

  Welch and the three guys all had links to organised crime in Chicago. A crime boss had recently been assassinated, and there were rippling waves of secondary violence in the wake of the killing. A detective had been looking into Welch and her crew for years. He was not surprised the dangerous lifestyle she’d led had resulted in her ultimate demise. Though no direct link to the assassination in Chicago could be established, Welch was known to be an asset of the wider crime network. Was she killed for revenge or business or was it an accident? It was a question that would go unanswered.

  Linette had to take that one on the chin. She never liked leaving something unresolved, but there was no more she could do.

  At least the missing mother and child turned up. Michelle and Joshua came right to the station. She’d heard people were looking for her and her boy and didn’t know why. Joshua played with toys while Michelle explained she had spent a few days with her boyfriend at his cabin. She seemed a little twitchy to Linette, who asked several times if she was okay. She insisted she was and everything was fine.

  Did a man named Wilson Murdoch contact her?

  He had, Michelle answered, and added that she didn’t like him. He was strange. A bit obsessed, even. Michelle’s boyfriend had seen him off and they hadn’t heard from him since.

  Neither had Linette.

  She was annoyed at herself for getting swept up in a stranger’s fantasy. He had seemed so convincing and sure of himself. But she agreed with Michelle, he was peculiar.

  Linette thanked Michelle for letting her know she was okay, and saw her and Joshua to the exit. Michelle’s boyfriend, the French bartender, was waiting in his truck to take them home.

  Linette’s phone rang, and she half expected it to be Murdoch. It wasn’t. It was her dad calling again. He didn’t appreciate how busy she was dealing with the corpses from Chicago. He was driving her nuts with questions. He had become suddenly and intently interested in upgrading his home security system. She didn’t understand it. He already had one that cost more than she earned in a year.

  What could he possibly be so afraid of?

  EIGHTY-SIX

  Business had never been great. It would be charitable even to pretend it had ever been good in the first place. At best, it survived. Ticked over. No one ever got rich running a bar and plenty of folk lost everything trying to keep their simple dreams alive. Big Pete had seen it happen. He had seen it happen far too many times. Margins were tight to begin with and even the slightest downturn in the economy meant things went south fast.

  Big Pete was fortunate in that he had been running his bar so long the mortgage that had once seemed high had become almost manageable. That gave him breathing room. He could survive a slow month. He could survive two or even three.

  But when was surviving ever enough?

  Last few weeks the bar had ceased to be considered surviving and was now officially terminal.

  A slow, painful death.

  Big Pete might find a way to turn it around, sure. If he scraped by for a while longer, the tides might change. The summer would bring in an inevitable boost in business, but July was for ever away.

  Besides, he was too old to scrape by and had long ago decided that when life wasn’t worth living, no longer would he be sticking around just for the hell of it.

  Big Pete had no patience for that.

  Since the Nameless had ended up in broken pieces in his lot, the bar’s already sparse selection of regulars had thinned to a skeleton. Despite Big Pete’s efforts to convince folk it was safe, Officer Linette and co turning up every other day told them otherwise. And even those with a little more backbone were spending less. No one was going to risk an extra sip before driving home with the law hanging around.

  Naël quitting like that had been a blessing. He’d called. Assured Big Pete everything was fine and there was no danger and never had been, but he wouldn’t be coming back to work. Saved Big Pete from letting him go further down the line. That would have stung. Big Pete didn’t quite think of him as a son – because Big Pete’s real son was a lowlife of the highest order, so that would be an insult – but they were close. Real close. As good as family. Naël had packed up with almost no warning and moved on with that lady of his and her sweet little boy. They’d all stopped by the bar to say farewell and Big Pete had fought hard to keep his misty eyes from becoming full-blown waterfalls. He was going to miss them all, but they had the rest of their lives ahead of them, and he was glad they were throwing caution to the wind and starting over.

  They told him they didn’t know where they were going.

  Maybe they hadn’t wanted anyone to know.

  Best of luck to them.

  The young always left behind the old. It had to happen. Life had to move on. But with his bar’s doom an inevitability and his lack of appetite for a drawn-out demise, why did it have to move on so damn fast?

  When the phone rang, Big Pete could hardly be bothered to get off his stool and answer it.

  He only did so because he could feel the irritation of the skeletons around him.

  Since when did the undead get so tetchy?

  ‘Yello?’ he answered.

  A polite city voice introduced himself with a respect and formality Big Pete was neither used to nor appreciated. He liked folk to get to the point, yet this guy was talking in all sorts of terms and phrases Big Pete had no time for even when he wasn’t feeling so morose.

  ‘Whoa, whoa, fella,’ he interrupted. ‘I’m taking in only about one quarter of what you’re telling me and I’m only understanding a quarter of that.’

  ‘My apologies,’ the voice said. ‘This is purely a courtesy call to introduce myself and explain a little of what I can do to help.’

  ‘When have you banks ever helped anyone aside from yourselves?’

  ‘Well,’ the voice said, a little tight, ‘there’s a lot I can do for a man in your situation, and I assure you as your newly assigned WMA that’s precisely what I’m best placed to do.’

  ‘Let me revise my earlier statement on only understanding a quarter. Now, it’s making sense. You can smell blood in the water, can’t you? I’m bleeding cash, but that doesn’t mean I’m a sucker going to fall victim to one of your vampire loans. And I don’t want to remortgage to some incomprehensible new interest rate so you can steal my home even quicker. So, you’re wasting your time. But, sleazy banker as you are, I know you’re just doing your job. You got bills to pay, same as everyone else. Which means I’ll do you the singular courtesy of saying goodbye before I hang up … Goodbye.’

  ‘Wait,’ the voice pleaded, and Big Pete hesitated. ‘I assure you I’m not looking to sell you anything. Given your newly acquired liquidity you now qualify for our wealth management scheme and I’m your new adviser. That position means I work for you and will make sure your money grows in the fastest possible way.’

  ‘Did you just say my newly acquired liquidity?’

  �
��Yes,’ the voice said. ‘Your checking account now sits very healthily at a little over one million dollars thanks to the recent offshore transfer, so the first thing I suggest is moving that money to a more appropriate account with some urgency. If for no other reason than to safeguard it from things like identity fraud. I can help set that up right now over the phone. After that, we can discuss how to use your new wealth to its fullest potential and ensure the taxman takes as little of it as possible.’

  A little over one million dollars …

  ‘Uh-huh,’ Big Pete managed to say after a long moment, mouth hanging open so wide even the skeletons were wondering what was happening.

  His new wealth management adviser carried on talking about account options and interest rates and fees and savings and shares and investments and pensions, but Big Pete was only half listening.

  Instead, he was thinking about a man he barely knew. A fisherman. A quiet man.

  Big Pete smiled.

  You crazy son of a bitch.

  ‘Do me a favour?’ Big Pete asked the polite city voice. ‘Call me back tomorrow. I have a lot to process.’

  ‘Certainly, sir,’ the voice said. ‘I’ll do just that. I look forward to continuing our conversation.’

  ‘Me too.’ Big Pete set the receiver back on the cradle, used the tips of a couple of fingers to check the thundering pulse in his neck, and then called out in a loud voice, ‘You skeletons thirsty this evening?’

  Eyes turned his way, but no one said anything. The undead were such a distrustful breed.

  ‘Because,’ Big Pete said as he began popping caps from beer bottles and setting them in a line on the bar, ‘from now until close, all drinks are on the house.’

  EIGHTY-SEVEN

  Was a politician at the very bottom of society’s decency ladder or was it a lawyer? They weren’t sure, because where would that leave them? They were surrounded by plenty of both. It seemed where one gathered the others couldn’t keep away. All about money, of course. Both the politician and the lawyer would sell their mothers – if only they could find someone to buy them.