The Blameless Dead

by Gary Haynes

‘You’re lying,’ Carla said. She wiped the corner of her mouth with the linen napkin and placed it beside her plate. ‘So, tell me, what do you like doing when you’re not being a lawyer?’

  He took another sip of water.

  ‘I like art. I like looking at a thing of real beauty, like a Pissarro or Castellini.’

  He spoke passionately about his love of art for the next few minutes. She smiled in a manner that suggested she was wondering if he was tough enough for what he’d gotten himself into. Maybe that was why she was acting odd, he thought.

  ‘I’ll leave the dishes till morning. A nightcap? I have a really fine port that I usually keep for special occasions,’ she said, standing up.

  Her frostiness was beginning to irritate him. He had an inkling that she was conflicted. But then he realized it didn’t have anything to do with him. It was all about her daughter. He understood that. Her line of work meant that her daughter could be put at risk, at least to a vastly greater extent than the child of, say, an accountant. Her current assignment had no doubt escalated that fear.

  He stood up too and walked around the table, meeting her by the cabinet. She turned to look at him. His eyes lingered almost involuntarily over the rich contours of her face. He was close enough to smell her again, a mixture of almonds and grapefruit, he thought. The cream she used on her skin, the lotion for her hair. She wasn’t wearing perfume.

  ‘It must be tough, having to deal with this for a living,’ he said.

  Ignoring him, she said, ‘You can sleep over in the spare room. I’ll bring you breakfast.’

  He decided it would be impolite to refuse. ‘If you’re sure?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Thank you.’

  She looked at him, her beautiful eyes stern yet sympathetic. ‘Sangmu’s date of birth is September thirtieth, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said, figuring she’d read it in the FBI case notes.

  ‘And she’s seventeen now, right?’

  ‘Yes. Eighteen in a couple of weeks.’ The skin on his cheekbones quivered and he clenched his right fist. ‘What is it, Carla?’

  She blinked, and her eyes shifted to his midriff. ‘All of the victims in New Jersey disappeared before their eighteenth birthdays. We don’t know why.’

  ‘But you think their eighteenth birthday is significant, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  He knew she wouldn’t say that she thought they were murdered on their eighteenth birthdays.

  ‘I’m sorry I’ve been a bad hostess. It’s just one of those days, and this is just awful, isn’t it?’

  He breathed out. ‘You haven’t been a bad hostess, Carla.’

  She touched his cheek with two of her fingers. ‘We’ll find her, Gabriel. I promise.’

  He wished he could believer her. He couldn’t remember a time he had felt more desolate, and there’d been many times he’d felt that emotion.

  54

  Warm tears had welled in Charlene’s eyes. She shook her head, almost imperceptibly. The woman crouched down beside her, and she trembled like the leveret she’d chased down in a ditch as a child.

  ‘He’s in Alabama. His mama lives there,’ Charlene said, referring to Billy Joe Anderson.

  ‘Zip code?’ the woman said.

  She blurted out, ‘36765.’

  She watched the woman stand up and put her vicious implements away. She took out a smartphone and played around with it with her thumb. She squatted down again. Charlene saw the online satellite image.

  ‘Point where. Exact.’

  She felt her body relax as the human rack unfurled. Even the throbbing pain in her ankle appeared to lessen. The man behind her let go of her right arm. She felt a tingling sensation there but dismissed it. She moved the image around with her forefinger.

  ‘There,’ she said, pointing to a field.

  She reached forward and was permitted to feel the outline of her swollen ankle, and her tears fell onto the soil.

  ‘Explain,’ the woman said.

  ‘He always bolts home. His daddy built a shelter,’ she said, without pronouncing the ‘r’. ‘Underground. He thought the world was going to end. He died of moonshine. Guess it did for him.’

  ‘Moonshine?’

  ‘Liquor. Alcohol.’

  ‘He thought there be nuclear war?’ the woman said.

  ‘No, he thought the four horses of the apocalypse were on their way. Did for most of his life, Billy Joe said.’

  The woman shook her head, as if she didn’t understand what had been said.

  ‘What else he tell you?’

  ‘He said that Johnny Hockey and him killed the Watson guy, but he alone killed the Jewish wife,’ Charlene said, compliant now.

  ‘Did he say why?’

  ‘He said the Watsons were rich, which they was. He said he’d take me to Vegas. He didn’t though. Can I go now?’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘What do you mean, what else?’ Charlene said.

  ‘Who did they give the stolen goods to?’

  Charlene shook her head. ‘I don’t know, except Johnny said there was a foreign guy Hockey knew.’

  ‘His name?’

  ‘He didn’t say his name.’

  The woman said, ‘Did you speak of this to anyone? To the Watson family when they say they give you money?’

  ‘No. I swear on my grandma’s grave.’

  ‘You not lie, girl. I know you not lie.’

  ‘I was brought up right. Told not to lie. I just told the Watson family Hockey’s address. I’m sorry. Real sorry. Now can I go?’

  ‘Sure, you go,’ the woman said.

  The woman raised her hand, like some ancient warlord, and the men stood up. They stepped back. She watched the woman move behind her.

  ‘I might need crutches,’ Charlene said.

  ‘No, do not think so. I help you up.’

  Charlene only felt the hands on her head for a second. It was how she’d been grasped by a faith healer once. Dreamlike, she heard the muted crack. For the briefest moment, an intense, white-hot pain shot through her neck and upper spine, like a trapped nerve multiplied a hundredfold. The last thing she saw was a bolt of lightning in a crimson sky.

  55

  Federal correctional complex, the next day.

  Gabriel interlinked his fingers. He glanced down at the metal table in the prison interview room before looking up at Johnny Hockey.

  He said, ‘They came for you, didn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ Hockey said.

  ‘Yes, you do. The attempted escape.’

  Hockey grinned. ‘They were after the bank robber. He’s known as Clay Bob in here on account of the fact his name is Bob and Jesse James was from Clay County, Missouri. A nod to the master, you might say.’

  Gabriel pressed the tip of his tongue against the roof of his mouth to stop himself from yawning, although he wanted to shout at Hockey and call him a liar, too. He couldn’t tell which the dominant desire was. But he’d mimicked a southern accent with a certain aplomb, he’d give him that much.

  Carla had brought him crispy bacon and scrambled eggs, after she’d asked him how he’d like his cooked breakfast. He’d put on fresh clothes, which he’d taken from a bag he’d put in the boot of his car before driving to Carla’s house, cargo trousers and a cotton shirt, rather than a suit, and had set out on the long drive to the federal prison. He hadn’t slept more than an hour last night. He’d had nightmares. They weren’t recurrent, but took the form of sequential episodes. The monk hadn’t featured, but a vicious dog had.

  ‘Listen, Johnny,’ he said. ‘I can’t represent you anymore.’

  ‘Because you still think they were out to free me?’

  Gabriel shook his head. ‘I got a tipoff that the FBI are looking at my bank records.’

  Hockey bent over and pinched his nose. ‘Do they have a reason?’

  ‘I got sloppy,’ Gabriel said, feigning concern.

  ‘Sloppy how?’r />
  ‘I had a relationship with a futures trader. A client.’

  Hockey snorted like a wildebeest. ‘Did you fuck her to find out which way the stock market was heading?’

  Gabriel took a sip of water from a disposable cup on the desk between them.

  ‘It’s complicated,’ he said.

  Hockey scratched his flat stomach like a primate.

  ‘No, it isn’t. A mathematical equation used to explain an aspect of theoretical physics is complicated. You think I’m a dumb fuck, don’t you?’

  Gabriel couldn’t be bothered to comment. He looked over his shoulder at the BOP officers. They had no interest in what was going on in the interview room. He turned back and saw that Hockey was glaring at him. He thought he was going to tell him to get the hell out of here.

  But Hockey said, ‘There’s a storm coming. All you believe in is doomed.’

  Hockey’s eyes went blank. There was nothing in them. Not fear, nor hate. Not joy or wisdom.

  It chilled Gabriel.

  56

  Newbern, Hale County, Alabama, the same day.

  The white SUV had been left at a garage in Tennessee and exchanged for a similar model in metallic grey. Keeping the same car but a different colour was an old trick that Fury had learned. For some reason she didn’t understand and had no wish to, it was less likely to be considered a getaway car than any other. It was more likely that a different car of the same colour would be stopped. She didn’t understand that, either.

  The SUV entered the outskirts of Newbern at 3.10 pm, although the bruise-coloured clouds made it feel like dusk. The town sign that declared a population of 223 lay among switchgrass. A few yards down, a pack of dogs mounted one another in front of the remnants of a little white-washed church. It was raining. The warm, torrential rain of a southern storm. Thunder boomed, and lightening streaked across the eastern horizon above a pine forest.

  Moving at no more than ten miles per hour, the SUV zigzagged to avoid the debris on the road. Piles of twigs and branches, broken slate roof tiles, flung wooden panels and chunks of dislodged masonry. Lead pipes had been snapped like balsawood, the timber frame houses reduced to tangled heaps. Many of the oak and willow trees had been rendered blackened stumps, and the crops of cereals and legumes they passed in the surrounding fields had been flattened or torn asunder. Cars and trucks littered the edges of the roads, upturned and windowless. Families were living in small caravans and tents. Some old people were just sitting on the indented remnants of the pavements, among the piles of sodden leaves, weeping or staring into the distance, like the insane.

  Fury had pocketed Charlene’s smartphone as she’d strolled back to the SUV. She’d taken out the battery and SIM card, then tossed the phone out of the window halfway from the murder site to Newbern. Charlene’s body had been burned with gas and her smouldering corpse buried amid a copse of spruce trees, ten miles from where she’d died. Fury had chosen the site having seen, online, a photograph of the spruce trees that were opposite the prison where Hockey was held. It was fitting, she’d thought.

  ‘What happened here?’ the driver said.

  ‘Tornado,’ Fury said.

  ‘Looks like the aftermath of a bombing raid.’

  It does, she thought. While some buildings were destroyed, others seemed remarkably intact.

  They reached the southern outskirts, and the residences that hadn’t been decimated rapidly deteriorated in size and construction. Fury hadn’t seen an inhabited corrugated-roofed shack since she’d done a hit in a shithole near Dimitrovgrad a couple of years ago.

  Here, the people sitting on those open porches that hadn’t collapsed looked either bloated or unhealthily skinny. Indolent too, she thought. They seemed to lack even a modicum of vitality or purpose, as if they acted purely on whimsies. Except for a black girl who was weaving in and out of the debris in bare feet, her white cotton dress streaked with mud, a stick in her hand, her legs the rich golden brown of brandy.

  Ten minutes later, Fury located the field easily enough. Satellite navigation was a tool sent from the gods, she thought, although whose gods, she wasn’t sure. But she would wait until dark before pinpointing the spot where she hoped to find Billy Joe Anderson.

  *

  The SUV pulled up beside an irrigation ditch. The rain that had half-filled it was still pouring. There’d been a hail storm, the solid pellets the size of marbles. Electricity shot out of the clouds with a neon glow. Fury told the men to get out and bring the pickaxe and shovels they’d used to dig a grave for Charlene Rimes from the boot. They wore oilskin jackets and wadding boots, she a padded ski jacket, zipped up to her chin, together with a green, wide-brimmed hat, and baggy Gore-Tex trousers.

  The moonlight was muted by scudding storm clouds. They leaped over the narrow ditch and trudged through the mud and grass. The field was isolated, about four miles from the town. There was a shed in the far corner, nailed together with what appeared to be odd pieces of wood and thin metal sheets. It had survived the storm, somehow. The rainwater danced on it and rusty old farm machinery lay about it.

  Roughly ten yards away, she saw that a segment of the field was slightly raised along the periphery. It wasn’t too obvious, but it looked unnatural, an almost perfect square. Twenty-five feet square, she guessed. It sagged a little in the middle too.

  The shelter, she thought.

  She wiped the heavy raindrops from her face and thought about the kill. If he said he hadn’t told anyone else about the hit on the Watsons, or didn’t answer convincingly the other questions Vezzani had written down and handed to her at the hotel, she felt that she would have to play with him, just to be sure. Then she realized she wanted to play with him anyway. It had been a while since she’d tortured someone. She had to admit that she had lost the taste for it with Charlene Rimes, and that was why she’d dispatched her swiftly by breaking her neck.

  She trusted the men with her, but things would be done to Billy Joe Anderson. She didn’t want anyone leaving their puke in the shelter or attempting to intervene, even verbally. That had happened before on a job with a different crew. Was there anything worse? She decided to take them back to the ditch and speak to them. To let them know what to expect. She hated losing her rhythm while she worked.

  57

  Billy Joe Anderson was a skinhead, with a small-boned frame and an addiction to sugar-laden drinks that were already starting to make his back teeth rot. Dressed in a T-shirt and jeans, he was sitting in the shelter, stirring a saucepan of beans on a portable gas stove as the sauce bubbled. A battery-operated LED light hung from a hook in the roof.

  The roof was made from plywood, with a layer of sand and polythene as a form of waterproofing. Any heavier and the roof would’ve been a bigger hazard than an outside explosion. Any lighter and the shelter might as well have been open to the stars.

  The underground shelter was, in fact, an in-ground swimming pool. Or to be more precise, the concrete frame of one. Billy’s dead daddy had told him that he’d gotten the idea from a survival magazine he subscribed to. A shelter proper could set a man back nearly five times as much, he’d said. Billy had thought that it was just about the only sensible thing the old sonofabitch had done in his otherwise useless life. There was no way a redworm would bother his sleep in here.

  He’d first hooked up with Hockey a couple of years ago. Hockey had told him he was sure he could kill people, although up until then his antics hadn’t gone beyond assaulting dark-skinned immigrants. Plus a couple of late-night arson attacks on unoccupied Muslim-owned shops in Albany. Now he was a killer, too.

  He knew that Hockey had been against killing the wife, Esfir Watson, but Billy Joe had felt an overwhelming desire to satisfy the bloodlust that the death of Jed Watson had engendered in him. He hadn’t been able to stop himself. She’d just walked through the front door as they were collecting the valuables. It hadn’t been planned.

  He’d gone on the run as soon as he’d heard that Hockey had been incarcera
ted. He’d bought a motorcycle off a Nazi Lowrider acquaintance, a guy named Jim Saunders, a friend of Johnny Hockey. He’d considered trying his luck over the border in Tijuana, Mexico. He’d figured he’d slip over a part of the border that wasn’t patrolled on a regular basis and avoid the fence, all 640 miles of it. He knew that less than half of the border was secure. But Tijuana had an ugly twelve-feet-high structure running down the length of the beach. It even extended into the ocean. Then he’d decided that a gringo with white supremacist tattoos wouldn’t exactly blend in, and the thought of doing any time in a Mexican jail was about as appealing as running naked through a bunch of organ pipe cactus plants. Besides, it was fucking chaos down there. Everyone said so.

  And so, he’d run home. There was nowhere else he felt safe.

  He knew Hockey would never snitch, but shit happened. Besides, Hockey had been his only source of work, so he figured that after it had all calmed down, he might go freelance for a while. He knew nobody would find him in Newbern. He’d dropped his smartphone in a skip in the Bronx before he left New York and hadn’t told anyone where he was going. Charlene had given information to the Watson family that had done for Hockey, but she’d never give him up, he thought. He hadn’t contacted her, as it could compromise him. He’d decided to stay put for a week or two, although he had enough non-perishable food for a month.

  He stopped stirring the beans, left the wooden spoon in the saucepan and raised his head slowly, as a stag did when he was hunting it. He’d thought he’d heard something, even above the fading storm. An unfamiliar vibration that meant the source was heavier than a muskrat, but not as heavy as a stray cow. It produced a form of paranoia that played with his mind and made him jittery. He grabbed his daddy’s old shotgun, that was resting against the plastered wall, put it in his lap. It was the only thing daddy left him, apart from a rusted harmonica.

  Maybe it’s just the wind and rain, he thought.

  Then again, maybe not.

  58