Old Acquaintance (Ray Guinness novels Book 2)

by Nicholas Guild

  It was a lot to mull over, and he would have Guinness’s permission to take his time. The deadline was cancelled; as the darkness approached, time was all in Guinness’s corner.

  Suddenly he heard a terrible, high pitched scream. A child’s scream, an animal mixture of fear and pain, something that should have come out of a nightmare but came, instead, out of a twenty foot camper which was disabled in the middle of the wilderness. The man inside had settled on his tactic.

  “You like it?”

  The voice was harsh and frightened and, what was worse, desperate. “You wanna hear some more?”

  Again, the terrible scream. Guinness wondered what he was doing to her in there, and if it could be any worse than murder.

  “While you’re having your fun,” he shouted, trying hard to struggle with a rising anguish, “just remember—if she dies, you die.”

  The only answer was another wild, glass shattering, uncomprehendingly terrified shriek. It was ghastly, but there was nothing he could do except to wait it out. Wait, and hope that the creep inside didn’t take forever to figure out that nobody was buying.

  In Scotland, at Mother Down’s academy for the training of Her Majesty’s murderers, they had run him through a whole series of lectures on the theory and practice of torture—the wringer, they called it. The technology of pain.

  First, how to do it. One learned that the hard part wasn’t knowing how to cause the proper amount of agony; that was easy, any idiot could manage that. The hard part was sustaining it. Keeping your victim going, sensible of his plight, attaining a level of suffering that would go on forever, never releasing him into either madness or death. It took a certain finesse, the proper mixture of patience and self control, to preserve someone alive and in his right mind, and in continual and unbearable torment. It took a kind of artist.

  Then—and this was the really significant lesson—they taught you how to go through it, and come out whole on the other side. Guinness had been lucky in his career; no one had ever really worked him over, not for hours and hours the way it sometimes happened, never so that he hadn’t known it would have a limit. But the man who had trained him had lost an eye, and one of his hands wouldn’t close all the way. He had been captured just four days before the invasion of Sicily, and the Germans had made good use of their time.

  “It’s not so bloody awful,” he would say, a great brute of a Welshman, who lived quietly with his second wife in Aberdeen and raised pigeons as a hobby.”The nerve endings will only tolerate so much before they give up in disgust and change the signals. The slobs can do anything to you, and after a while it almost becomes a kind of pleasure.”

  And then he would smile ruefully, not really expecting you to understand.

  “The great thing, of course, is never to let them know. When it begins to tail off, and you realize you can probably stand it, that’s the time you have to be careful. They understand all these things, and if they catch you drifting away from them, they’ll simply take it up again somewhere else and you have to begin all over again.”

  Of course, what would Rocky know about any of that?

  And that animal in there with her, he probably didn’t know how to write his name; he might very easily cripple her, or maybe kill her, out of sheer stupidity.

  Or maybe, which was just as likely, his only interest was in making her yell. One can cause a great deal of pain without doing much damage—just twisting arms and applying lit cigarettes to the soles of the feet, that sort of thing, almost parlor games. A less imaginative torturer might even, ultimately, be less of a danger.

  The screams started up again, and Guinness screwed his eyes closed and ground his teeth. If he marks her. . . If there’s a single scar, he promised himself, the bastard would spend the rest of the week just dying.

  And there was nothing he could do, not a goddamn thing. Except to wait. To wait and to suffer along with his child.

  Finally, after trying to be patient through what seemed like the better part of his life, Guinness noticed that the tiny window in the center of the camper body—really nothing more than a small ventilating grid, too covered with aluminum blinds, like the gills of a fish, to be seen through—was being cranked open, revealing, through a space no more than three inches wide, the upper halves of two faces, really just the eyes.

  His daughter’s eyes were huge with fear, swimming in tears that made them glisten even in the dying light of evening. The man he barely noticed.

  “C’mon out!” It was the same harsh voice, the voice of a man pushed beyond his limited resources of reason and nerve. “C’mon out! An’ throw y’r piece out first!”

  Guinness forced himself to laugh. He made it a loud, brutal, contemptuous laugh, the laugh of someone who knows when he’s being bluffed.

  “What’s the matter with you? You jerk, you think this is a John Wayne movie? It’s not me that’s got the problem.”

  The answer was a couple of shots from the camper window. One whined off a rock about a foot away from Guinness’s right ear, and the other slammed into a tree immediately behind him. Guinness twisted around a little to get a look at the hole—a .45 from the look of it, just like his own. So neither one of them was messing around.

  But no fear. Concealed as he was, with the rocks in front and the slight slope behind, there was very little danger of being hit. The clown could bang away all evening and, except for the sheerest accident, never touch him. He doubted if his friend in the camper would have all that much ammunition that he could afford to rely on accident. It didn’t seem very likely.

  And so they waited. In the lowering sunlight, they stared out at each other across the width of the road and a narrow little stretch of red clay and rock—or, at least, each stared at the spot behind which he knew the other was lying concealed; neither of them was quite stupid enough to show himself.

  The shadows of the trees lengthened, and the ragged skyline darkened, first to blue and then to light gray. In an hour it would be dark.

  Guinness decided that there was nothing to lose by trying. He didn’t delude himself that a reasonable offer would have any chance of success; there weren’t very many of these punks who, while they held a gun in their hand, could be persuaded that their position was hopeless, that their only reasonable chance of surviving was knowing when to quit. Certainly the man in the camper didn’t strike him as that sort.

  Still, there was nothing to be lost by trying. He supposed, at least abstractly, that anyone might have a right to a chance to live, even someone who tortured little girls until they screamed like parrots in a burning cage, and he didn’t feel all that honor bound to keep his word to Healy.

  “Send out the girl.” It wasn’t made to sound like an order; merely as an alternative to suicide. “I don’t care anything about you. Just give me the girl and I’ll turn around and leave here, and we can both go home. Be smart for once—you’ll never get ten feet from the door unless I have her back.”

  There was no response for several seconds. Then the front lights went on—he must have crawled up to the driver’s compartment—and the back door swung open, exactly as if someone had given it a little push and then sprung back to be out of the way. The interior lamps on; so along three sides the camper gave off a yellowish, haphazard light. Apparently someone was afraid of being snuck up on in the dark.

  Guinness shifted his position slightly; the wet earth was getting cold, and the whole front of his body felt clammy.

  “Okay, pal. Have it your own way. Take a good look around—those lights won’t last two hours. I hope you like what you see, because this is where you’re going to die.”

  There was no answer.

  And so they went back to their stalemate. It wasn’t so bad. At least there was no more screaming, at least he was leaving Rocky alone. You had to be grateful for the important things in such a situation, for being allowed to stay alive, for not having to watch anybody die, for not having to listen to your daughter’s skin being stripped off. Guinn
ess could afford to wait. And if he caught cold from lying on the damp ground, or the mosquitoes ate him for a late evening snack, it really wasn’t the sort of thing he wanted to complain about.

  The real torture was not knowing quite what to do.

  There were lots of possibilities, but each involved such appalling risks that it seemed almost criminal even to consider them, almost like murder.

  For instance, the walls of the camper didn’t amount to more than perhaps an eighth of an inch of aluminum siding and perhaps a little wood veneer on the interior. All Guinness would have to do was to pull the trigger, and whoever was on the other side would suddenly find his guts leaking out onto the floor; the problem was to know where people were located—you had to know what you were shooting at.

  He listened and watched, listened and watched. Once in a while he would see the edge of a shadow at the corner of the window, or falling across the door. Or he would hear something, a footfall or a cough. Half a dozen times he could have opened fire and been reasonably sure of taking out the man inside. The question, however, was always the same: where was Rocky? He never heard a sound from her. She might even be dead, a possibility which, for all its remoteness, caused the veins in his throat to swell sometimes until he thought he wouldn’t be able to breathe. So how could he fire? It would be scant consolation to kill the man with the rasping voice if he ended up killing Rocky at the same time.

  If only for one moment he could be sure where she was. . .

  He had, at one point, considered fairly seriously simply rushing the camper and hoping for the best. He could try circling around—in the darkness his movements would be nearly impossible to detect, and how much longer could the guy’s battery last?—and perhaps he could come in through the door to the driver’s compartment. It might work, taking full advantage of surprise; he might get a shot off, and get lucky.

  But the problem, again, was Rocky. He didn’t know the layout of the interior, and she might be anywhere. There might be bunk beds that would put her right at head level; so he couldn’t make sure of the thing by aiming high. It was just too damned dangerous.

  Well, somehow it would have to end. They couldn’t just wait like this forever. It would have to end.

  Eventually—and, unless the man inside had stronger nerves than the evidence so far suggested, in not too long either—the pressure would be such that he would have to make some kind of move to get away. It was worse for him, far worse; Guinness wasn’t locked in a little tin box, never quite sure of where his enemy might be at any given moment, always waiting for the surprise attack that would have to seem a far more reasonable strategy to him than it did to Guinness. Guinness wouldn’t have wanted to trade places.

  So eventually he would snap, whoever he was—and Guinness didn’t want to know who he was; not knowing would make him that much easier to kill—and he would do something stupid. And the odds were pretty good that, whatever it was he finally settled on, it would end up getting him killed. And very likely Guinness, or Rocky, would have to go along for the ride.

  Guinness really didn’t care very much about his own life. It wasn’t anything wonderful and wasn’t likely to get any better, and it was only a matter of time anyway until somebody made the right move and he ended up by the side of a road somewhere with his head shot in. If it was this road or some other really couldn’t matter much, if it was now or a month from now or five years. The life expectancy in his profession wasn’t all that great, and his own policy was way past due.

  But Rocky was nine years old. If she got out of this, she might live to be an old woman—that was even probable. And if she lived, then, in some remote and impalpable sense, Guinness might live. People said you lived through your children; it was the only sort of immortality he could bring himself to imagine, so it would have to do. And Rocky was the only child he was ever likely to have.

  He didn’t know her very well, hardly at all—the time when she had been a baby, his baby, the only time when she had ever really been his in any sense except the genetic, couldn’t count for much of an acquaintance. She was hardly real to him, except as the living center of a few of the hardest moments of his life. But the pull of his own blood was strong. She was all there was left of his life that would ever amount to anything, so she had to survive. She was the one imperative that was left to him.

  So he waited, and listened, and watched. And prepared himself for whatever would come. And hoped that he might live at least long enough to see his daughter crying over this as over a bad dream.

  At a few minutes after 7:30, he began to hear noises from inside the camper—just the sounds of someone moving around, he didn’t think it meant anything necessarily.

  And then a shape appeared in the doorway. Or, rather, two shapes, because the man was holding Rocky up in front of him. He had made up his mind now, and he was going for the whole number.

  The light was behind them, so Guinness really couldn’t see more than a silhouette. But he seemed to have Rocky around the waist, to be carrying her as a shield; Guinness could see her legs hanging loose, as if she were a rag doll. Her head was almost level with that of the man who was holding her.

  She wasn’t a baby anymore, though—she would be heavy for someone who had spent the last few hours under so much pressure. He wouldn’t be able to hold her up like that forever.

  Guinness couldn’t see the gun. Where the hell was the son of a bitch’s gun?

  “Okay now,” came the familiar grating voice, beginning to crack, almost as if from disuse. “Okay now, you stan’ up out ’ere. I wan’ a look at you—I tol’ you t’ stan’ up out ’ere.”

  Guinness waited, not speaking, not moving. He had to slow the thing down as much as possible, to make it last, to give the law of gravity a chance to do its work. Rocky was already beginning to slip a little. He could hear her crying, softly, as if she had cried out all the passion of her fear long ago and was almost too exhausted to care anymore if she lived or died.

  “You stan’ up—’r I’m gonna put a slug in ’is kid. Raht now!”

  What choice did he have? Guinness stood up, slowly, and keeping his gun, held in both hands straight out in front of him, lined up on the man’s head, but he stood up.

  Why didn’t the little creep shoot? Guinness kept expecting the bullet, wondering where it would hit. On his way down, he hoped he might live long enough to take the guy off, and then Rocky would be safe, but that was the best chance he could figure. Why didn’t the dumb bastard shoot and get it over with?

  It was several seconds before he realized that the stupid clown was in his own light, that probably he couldn’t see Guinness at all, certainly not well enough to risk a shot, not against an armed man.

  Rocky sagged a little further down—the top of her head was about level with the man’s upper lip.

  “Throw out y’r piece! C’mon, throw it out!”

  Guinness wondered for a moment whether or not the fellow might have slipped his cable; how far did he think he could push it? He kept his gun lined up, remembering how it pulled a little to the left, forcing himself to sight in on a spot just about an inch and a half above where he figured the outside corner of Rocky’s right eyebrow would be. What he would have given to be able to see a little better!

  “Throw it out!” the man shouted hoarsely. His gun was visible now, picking up a twinkle of light from the window—it seemed to be nickel plated and was surprisingly small for a .45. Guinness began to have something like the beginnings of a hope.

  “Throw it out now, or she goes.”

  Outlined against the light, he pressed his gun against Rocky’s throat, just beside the windpipe. He laughed grotesquely. He meant to pull the trigger; he knew he was dead meat, and he meant to pull the trigger. Guinness didn’t have a doubt in the world that he meant to pull the trigger.

  “You did it to Joey, di’n’t you?” Again the ugly laughter as he twitched his head a little to one side, indicating the body that had been on the ground between
them for nearly two hours now. “Makes quite a mess, don’ it! I take ’er head off, jes like ’at, if you don’ hurry up—I’m gonna count t’ three! One!. . . T—”

  A .45 makes a lot of noise, and this time it was all Guinness did hear, so he never knew how far the count got. He saw the man snap back, just as if he had been pulled from behind, and slam into the wall of the camper. It wasn’t until he heard Rocky screaming that he knew he had been right, that the man who was now lying on the ground, just so much carrion, had never fired his weapon. She was all right—if she could scream she was alive, and that was all that mattered.

  He walked down the slight slope and across the road, and stopped to gather up his shaking, sobbing daughter in his arms. She buried her head in his chest and let out all of her terror in great weeping shudders that seemed to go on forever; she seemed barely able to draw in a breath.

  “It’s all right,” he whispered, stroking her hair, holding her so that she wouldn’t look down at the corpse of the man who had nearly killed her. “It’s all over. I’ll take you home now.”

  The dead man was curled in upon himself like a fetus, his knees drawn up nearly to his chest. He was perfectly visible in the light from the camper door, a youngish man, slender, with bony hands. He was lying on his side. There was nothing remaining of his left eye, through which Guinness’s bullet had entered to take out a fair share of the back of his head; it was just a bloody socket. He had been right, though—it made quite a mess.

  Guinness knelt down, still holding Rocky to him, and took the man’s gun out of his dead fingers. It was small, almost the size of the little automatics women carry in their purses. Probably he had chosen it because it was easily concealed but would still do the job.

  But, like most of the smaller .45s of that shape, it was a double action; you had to pull the trigger a good deal harder than you did with the true automatics, the kind that were cocked by their own recoil. It would take more of a squeeze to fire than a man could manage while his brains were being turned into jelly.