Fearless ; The Smoke Child

by Lee Stone

  At the top of the staircase was a corridor, narrower than the downstairs lobby. The ceiling was lower too, and an ancient ceiling fan mixed the stale air at a leisurely pace. Lockhart’s footsteps echoed against the bare walls as he climbed the last few stairs and the ceiling fan ground and complained as it turned. Upstairs, the Happy was even less appealing that below. The linoleum floors were replaced with bare concrete, and the walls had been painted matt white over rough plaster. Cream doors sank into the walls at regular intervals, and bare gray electric meters dotted the studwork next to them. Galvanized air con ducts were slung across the ceiling, almost low enough to force Lockhart to stoop as he passed underneath them.

  A plastic number nine was nailed on the door nearest the stairs. Kate was in six, Lockhart knew. He remembered the ugly oversized key fob that had sat on the table between them while they drank coffee earlier in the day. As he pushed further into the gloomy corridor, past number seven. Behind him, a door opened, and a shaft of yellow light spilled out into the corridor. Lockhart turned to see a lithe figure slipped out of number nine and disappeared down the stairwell and into the shadows. He smiled, wondering about the things probably went on in the rooms above The Happy, and wondering how many of the residents spent their lives slipping in and out of the shadows. His guess was that half the rooms would be occupied by Kep’s less salubrious night-time economy, and the other half by backpackers; young tourists traveling on a low budget and experiencing a slice of the world’s underbelly. People like Kate Braganza. Still, staying in The Happy meant seeing a part of the world that was a hundred times more interesting than any stay in a five-star resort.

  The next number confused Lockhart. He had passed room nine and seven and expected room five to come next. He figured that the even numbers would face them on the other side of the corridor. Room six, Kate’s room, would be two strides further along on the opposite wall. But the next door was not number five. It was an even number. It was number eight. Which was wrong. Very wrong. His stomach twisted even as understanding began to dawn.

  He turned fully now and began back down the corridor. Towards the shaft of yellow light. The light that was still spilling onto the corridor from the door nearest to the stairwell. The door that had clicked open like a shotgun in the silence, but which had never slammed shut. The guy who had slipped through it was long gone, lost in the shadows. But Lockhart wasn’t interested in him at that moment. He was only thinking of Kate and hoping that his gut was wrong. He strode back down the corridor, past room eight, and room seven, and back to the open door at the top of the stairwell.

  He reached forward towards the cheap plastic number on the door and pushed at it. And it twisted. Twisted right around until the nine became a six. Now the numbers made sense, and Lockhart’s foreboding grew. He reached forward and pushed the open door. It swung half open before thudding against something heavy on the other side. He edged inside, letting his eyes adjust to the bare sixty-watt bulb. The place was a mess. Kate Braganza was traveling light, but everything she had was strewn across the room. There was the carcass of a cheap dresser under the window, its three drawers upturned on the floor. A mismatched wardrobe had been similarly stripped. The weight behind the door was a suitcase. Lockhart recognized it from the airport.

  ‘Kate?’

  Nothing. He pushed into the room past the suitcase. It was yawning open, and the contents were strewn across the floor. Not a good sign. The room had a tiny functional bathroom cut into one corner, creating a narrow walkway into the main part of the room, and a blind spot that covered the furthest part of the room. Clothes were strewn across the hallway as he moved towards the center of the room. And blood. Not much, but enough. Lockhart’s stomach knotted. As he rounded the corner, he saw the source. Signs of a struggle. Make-up was scattered across the tiled floor and the room’s functional mirror, which was screwed to the concrete wall, was smashed where someone had been slammed against it. A spider’s web of cracks around an impact crater and a bloody smear in the center.

  He saw her reflection first, refracted in the broken mirror. She was on the bed, laying still with her back to him.

  ‘Kate?’

  No movement. No sign of her chest rising or falling. Lockhart rushed to her, pulled her shoulder, and turned her towards him. No resistance. She turned and fell like a rag doll. Her eyes were still open, but there was no life in them. No focus. Just a hint of her last emotion: fear. Lockhart leaned in and put his ear to her lips. They had already tinged a little blue. Held his own breath while he listened for hers. Hoping. But there was nothing. He pulled her from the bed and onto her back on the hard floor, all the while talking to her, telling her to fight. He worked on her, inflating her lungs and hammering on her chest, frantically to begin with until slowly hope ebbed away at the same pace that life drained from Kate. As he worked on her, he noticed the cut on her temple where she had been slammed into the mirror. And he saw the red marks around her throat. Still rising. Still waiting for the bruises to bloom.

  Nothing worked. When he was exhausted, he slumped back against the wall and got his breath. Looked at her for a long minute. Broken. Gone. Then he sniffed and thumbed his eyes. Took a breath and tidied her up as best he could. He closed her eyes and kissed her forehead. He looked around the room, at the strewn clothes and the toppled dresser. On the wall next to the splintered mirror, someone had carved a small cross into the plaster using a shard of glass. They had taken the time to carve a stopper at the end of each arm, so it resembled something halfway between a crucifix and a swastika.

  Lockhart left Kate where she lay and walked over the mirror. He ran his finger across the dresser and held it up to the light. Plaster dust. The carving in the wall was new. He turned and looked back one last time at the girl on the floor. He was torn, but there was nothing more he could do for her now. After a moment, he slipped out into the night. The further he walked, the angrier he became, and some primal instinct began to course through his veins. One thought began to push all others from his mind: find the man he had seen slipping away into the stairwell.

  4

  At the top of the stairwell, his hands shaking with adrenalin, Charlie Lockhart took a moment to catch his ragged breath. His first instinct was to fly down the stairs and head back out through the bar and into the night streets to hunt down the shadow he had seen slip away from the hotel room. He wanted to chase it until it gathered form and mass. Until it was a living, breathing thing that he could corner and capture and drag to justice. But he paused, and he forced himself to think. He gulped in air, holding it down until his pulse became more regulated. He had tried to pull people back from death before, but the horror of it never got easier. He was drenched with sweat and his stomach was knotted. His head was full of Kate and revenge, and nothing else.

  Within seconds, calmness and cold reason began to return. He had to be careful. He was the only person in Kep who knew Kate. That already made him a prime suspect, even before he placed himself at the scene. He had wiped the door handle with his tee-shirt as he left the room, and that had been the only surface he had touched. Someone would remember him drinking in the bar, especially after the row with the Scout Sniper earlier. He wished now that he’d slipped off into a dark corner and let the guy have his seat. Even so, the Happy was a fight-a-night kind of place, and Lockhart hadn’t even raised his voice. People might forget. But if he raced through the bar now, sweating and blowing and with death on his back, people would remember that.

  Avoiding prying eyes, he slipped down the stairs, looking for another way out. He found a handwritten Fire Exit sign on the bare wall in the downstairs lobby and followed it to a locked door behind a stack of beer crates. The lock had been forced from the inside. He was on the right track. He slipped back into the lobby, shielding his eyes from the unshaded bulb, and grabbed one of the bikes from the bottom of the staircase. He took it through the busted fire door and out into the street.

  He was hit by the noise and energy of the late
-night crowd. He struggled to focus. His mind was too full of Kate. Her lips turning blue to white. Her blank eyes staring out at him, seeing nothing. The dead weight of her as he had pulled her from the bed and onto the floor. The bruising and grazing around her neck and the feeling of hopelessness as he had forced oxygen around her stricken body. Those pictures were so vivid that they had forced almost every other memory from his mind. He felt the same way crash victims feel, trying to piece together the moments leading up to the impact.

  He forced himself to remember. He remembered the guy on the beach earlier, and Kate’s nervous reaction to being watched. She was beautiful, and must have been used to men staring at her, so what was it that had put her on edge? What had she known? What hadn’t she told him? He remembered being followed through the old French Quarter by the revving motorbike. And he remembered the guy in the shadows who had brushed past him just before he discovered Kate’s body. The guy in the shadows had seemed average in almost every way. He had walked slowly and stealthily. The urge to run must have welled up inside him when he left the murder scene, and yet he had controlled it. His hair had been cropped short, Lockhart remembered, but a few strands had grown long and had been pulled back from his crown in a ponytail.

  Lockhart pushed out into the late night shoal of revelers, looking for any sign of the stranger. He let the bike freewheel underneath him as he wove through the drinkers and dancers, the beautiful and the hopeful. The same cast of characters Lockhart had seen playing their similar parts in the same pantomime the world over. They would become more raucous and less elegant as the night went on. There was nothing wrong with that. That was the way of the world. The street carts had arrived, nudging impatiently through the milling revelers. Merchants were grilling fish and pork and selling clams and pickles. The smell of sweet meat perfumed the air, and the music had increased both in volume and tempo. Lockhart cut through the crowds, searching. Nothing and nobody looked out of place.

  He rode slowly so as not to attract attention. The guy he was looking for would be doing exactly that same: head down, walking fast, but not too fast. Trying hard to vanish. Most of the crowd were heading downhill towards the night market in the old town, and Lockhart figured that the guy from the shadows would probably have done the same. It’s easier to blend in if you move with the tide instead of swimming against it, Lockhart knew. People lose themselves quickly in crowds. He kept moving, methodically corkscrewing away from the scene of the crime in slowly increasing circles. He watched the faces and the bodies that passed in front of him. None of them fitted what he remembered of the man who had slipped past him in the gloomy corridor of The Happy.

  He was four blocks further out and losing hope when he reached a crossroads where the road broadened out into a wide marketplace. Tourists converged from every angle, grinding to a halt as they kettled together at the intersection. He felt shoulders closing in on every side. Impatient tuk-tuks filled the air with petrol fumes while they spluttered noisily, trying to negotiate a way through the throng. In the middle of the melee, he stopped and turned three-sixty, his eyes sweeping across the crowd and taking in the scene. No sign. Just a sea of unfamiliar faces. At the edge of the square, street vendors sold everything imaginable. Plastic tubs and wicker baskets hung above slow-moving crabs, their exhausted legs scratching at the sides of their containers in the vain hope of escape. Red Kampot peppers were drying on heavy twine, strung up like old-fashioned photographs waiting to develop. The vendors illuminated their goods with bare bulbs powered by filthy car batteries, and the whole scene was penned in by looming three-story buildings, which leaned in on all sides and blocked out the moon and the stars. And within the restless cauldron of humanity, there was no sign of Lockhart’s man.

  The ground floor facades of the grey-black buildings were bright and colorful, most of them bars or late night drinking dens. Between the stalls and the well-lit bars was a tight gap, which passed for a corridor of sorts. Lockhart’s eye was drawn to a lone figure shuffling between the vendors and the waiters. He looked out of place, walking too fast and with a pronounced limp. His right arm reached across his chest and clutched and his ribs, while the other hand was held up to his face. It was the guy from the beach - the one who had followed him through the old French Quarter and chased him through the karaoke bar. Now though, he looked much the worse for wear. He looked like he was in pain as he shuffled off the main drag and into an alleyway running along the side of a lively looking place called The Rabbit.

  On instinct, Lockhart started after him. He had no idea why the guy had been following him from the beach, nor why he had chased him through the karaoke bar. But maybe it was all connected. It was possible that Kate Braganza had been randomly murdered on the same night that he had been randomly chased. Possible. But not likely. And Lockhart was not a big believer in coincidences. He felt sure there had to be a connection between what had happened earlier in the French Quarter and what had just happened at The Happy.

  The early throws of shock and adrenalin were wearing off, and calm thought was returning to Lockhart’s mind. The why of it all was nagging at him, but he pushed that question away and jostled on through the crowd. The why could wait. He slipped past the vendors and into the alleyway, away from the light and the bustle. The air fell still, and the temperature began to drop as he went, and the bare brick walls edged in on either side of him until they brushed against his shoulders as he pushed deeper into the maze of alleyways.

  Twenty yards in, the path kinked, turning hard left and then hard right. The smaller bars fell away, replaced by long swaying grasses beyond a chicken-wire fencing, which kept Lockhart pinned close to the back walls of the Rabbit. A rusting air conditioner rattled as he passed, the sound of the party leaking out with the hot air. His eyes adjusted to the darkness, searching out the man who had been following him earlier. He had been moving so slowly through the marketplace, clutching at his ribs, that Lockhart figured he couldn’t be far away.

  He found him at the next turn, slumped against the wall like a wounded animal that had crawled off to die. He moved closer still to the stricken man and saw the cause of the bleed. The wrist with the watchstrap was pressed against his temple and his palm was clasped tight to his eye socket. The moonlight turned his blood black as it spilled from between his fingers, streaming down his pale skin and pooling in the dirt floor at his side. He was breathing hard, his spare hand clutching at his chest. He was young. From the sound of the rasping, Lockhart figured his ribs were broken.

  When he spotted Lockhart above him, the guy put his blooded hand out on instinct to protect himself, and Lockhart saw the gaping socket where his eye should have been. Blood, which had coagulated and clot behind the modest protection of his hand now came away from the hole in a clump, sliding down his cheek and staining his neck.

  ‘What happened tonight?’ Lockhart asked. ‘Who did that to you?’

  The guy looked up, dazed, and the sudden movement of his head caused more blood to flow from the wound like lava from an angry volcano. Lockhart could see a sinewy twine of nerves and arteries spilling from between his white knuckles and hanging across his cheek, hosing yet more red onto his face and the front of his shirt. The young guy used his elbows to pull himself a little higher up the wall, coughing hard and clearing blood from his lungs. When he eventually tried to speak, it was in earthy rasping grunts which Lockhart could not understand.

  ‘You followed me tonight,’ Lockhart said. ‘Do you remember?’

  After a moment he nodded, the exertion of which evidently dislodged something in his throat because he began to cough hard, wrapping his arm around his chest as though he thought his ribs might give way. Maybe they would. Someone had put him through a rough beating. Eventually he spat blood into the dust beside him and leaned back again on the brick wall of The Rabbit. Stale condensed water, harvested from the sweaty air of the bar, had pooled at the bottom of the air conditioner and Lockhart watched it slowly dripping onto the stricken man’s face.
He seemed not to notice, or at least not to care.

  Lockhart said nothing for a long while. They were on their own, the two of them, and he had more time to spare than the man bleeding on the floor. A sharpness had returned to the man’s remaining eye, and the endorphins that had numbed the pain of his injuries were wearing off. He wanted to crawl back to comfort. Lockhart would help him with that, after he had learned what he needed to know. But for now, his anger at Kate’s death left him feeling ruthless. He waited, so that when his question finally came the guy would want to hear it. He would jump to answer it, because he would know that answering would lead to the end of the conversation, and an end of the conversation would lead to the end of the pain. When the question came, the guy would grab it, the way a drowning man clutches at a rope.

  We are whoever we become when nobody is looking. That’s what Lockhart believed. We are measured by the way we behave when all consequence has long departed. When prying eyes are closed, and when there is nothing but God to judge us. We define ourselves when we are standing in a place like the alleyway behind the Rabbit Bar, in a tiny town that had long since fallen off the map. Lockhart was a compassionate man, but he was not a fool. He pulled at his own dark hair for a moment, combing through it with his fingers, watching the guy who had chased him through the French Quarter reduced to a mess on the floor. The guy who had followed him from the beach for a reason, just like someone had gone to The Happy for a reason. The one eyes man knew why Kate Braganza was dead, and one way or another, Charlie Lockhart would learn the truth.