Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3)

by Jay Stringer

  Sounds rose and fell, leaving behind hissing and popping noises, and I realized it was all happening in my ears. I shook my head to try and break free from it. Laura touched my shoulder, and I looked up at her. She said something but my ears didn’t pick it up. The words flattened out into a monotone mess that speeded up and slowed down. She said it again, and this time I heard the last word. “Okay?”

  “Are you okay?”

  I blinked.

  She still had Ross’s gun in her hand. The same gun that had just fired twice, killing Claire Gaines. A million questions jumped into my head at once. How? What? When? How? Why? What? But? Who? I was aware enough to know I was going into shock, but not fast enough to fight it off.

  “You people are crazy.”

  I turned to see Dodge clinging to the side of the pool where Laura must have left him, his face down on the tiled floor and his legs in the water. Blood spread out around him in the water. I knelt down and started to pull him up, but his clothes were sodden and I seemed to have no weight or strength in my arms. I felt distant from the scene. Eventually we managed it between us, and he flopped onto the tiled floor with a wet smack. He was cursing loudly, but only the occasional word broke through the din in my ears. Laura was kneeling over Veronica, who was now slumped in an untidy heap on the floor, her own blood pooling around her.

  I started to hear police sirens and shouting outside. Then the banging on the front door changed, and I heard the sound of the wood splintering. People called out Laura’s name and mine. Murray and Henry—Becker’s two lapdogs—appeared in the doorway, carrying guns. Henry pushed Laura aside and looked down at Veronica, pulled out a mobile phone and started shouting something into it.

  Murray put his hand on my shoulder and waited until I was looking him in the face before speaking, to make sure I caught what he said.

  “Take off.”

  I blinked at him and thought, Take off? I can’t fly. Then I snapped to, shaking off the shock, and realized what he was saying.

  “We can’t cover for you if you stay here,” he said.

  I went home and waited. Through the fog of the shock I couldn’t even remember who’d driven me home, or if I’d just paid a huge taxi bill.

  The world was going to come crashing in through my door at any minute. Cops wanting to pin the hotel fire on me, cops wanting to pin corruption on me, and worst of all cops wanting to pin multiple murders on me.

  I did the only sane thing.

  I cracked open a drink and sat on the sofa.

  The Maker’s Mark felt like drinking a tuxedo after the mind-fuck of my father’s home brew. My guts began to call, rattling the cage walls for a handout of some lovely drugs, but it lacked the intensity of before, like a demon with a loosening grip. I pictured Matt’s face each time the urge came calling. There was a ringing in my right ear that wouldn’t go away. I flicked on the twenty-four-hour news channel and tried to listen and tune out the ringing in my ear at the same time. There was nothing splashy on at the moment, but I knew there would be soon.

  A corrupt Police and Crime Commissioner.

  An abattoir of murder in Solihull.

  An apartment full of secret videos in Tipton.

  Two people dead in a hotel fire, the fire that tied everything together.

  There were still a lot of loose ends, so many that the only choice I had was to ignore them or write them off as coincidence. Neither of which was my style, but I realized I didn’t have a lot of choices. I sat and drank some more. Waited some more.

  And nothing happened.

  The news never broke out into a fever of crime and guns, into a glamorous story of dead crime families and huge armed police raids. There was no blood in Tipton. No sex, no glory, no news.

  The sky outside lightened from black to amber, then to orange and blue. Birds started to chatter and traffic picked up on one of the city’s busiest streets. I heard the footballer across the hall leave for work, and I felt all the excitement and adrenaline finally wash out of my system.

  I blinked and the day went by.

  When I woke up it had settled into evening. My clothes smelled like I had fought a war in them. I limped up to the shower and peeled out of the clothes. The wound on my leg from the night I’d lost my car was starting to scab over and it itched like hell, but I pushed it out of my mind. I hadn’t eaten in over twenty-four hours, but I couldn’t find hunger. It didn’t seem to be there.

  Something else was gnawing away at me.

  Loose ends.

  Questions.

  How did the Cartwrights really factor into it?

  Who’d taken the mobile phones off Jelly and Tony at the hotel?

  I tried to push the thoughts away. Ignore them. Embrace coincidence.

  I put on my first clean clothes in two days and settled back on the sofa. I watched the world on the television. More news had happened, but nothing exciting. A football match had been played. A celebrity couple had broken up. A politician had changed his mind on something. On the hour they announced that Michael Perry was resigning from his post and would be releasing a short statement later, but there was nothing further and it was left to the news anchors and the pundits to pad the story with general discussion about whether the police needed an elected PCC and how much a new election would cost the taxpayer.

  I expected this to be the moment. The dam would break and hell would come bursting through. Every lie I’d told, every moment I’d cheated, every fate I’d messed with. I looked over at the door, wondering if I could will it to happen.

  Nothing.

  I gave up waiting for the world to break in and took myself out to the world.

  I limped downstairs and out onto the darkening street. Within minutes, I was standing at the door to Posada, which for a time had been a second home to me. It had been a safe haven for my grumpiness in the days after the marriage had broken down; its walls were dark and uninviting, its lighting dim, its bourbon selection good. Most important, the regulars had known to talk to me only if I started a conversation.

  They all turned to look at me as I walked in, but I didn’t recognize a soul. Even the ones I had known. Everything looked and felt different. The walls had been repainted and the bar was brighter. The staff looked younger and hipper. But I realized it wasn’t them I was noticing, it was me.

  I was the change.

  I’d dropped off the edge of the world and come back different.

  I nodded at the people who recognized me, and left. I crossed the road and walked on past the church and down to Molineux, the football stadium where I had spent much of my youth, trying to feel that I belonged to something, finding a cause to believe in. Then my feet took me farther on, three streets over, to the house I’d shared with Laura while we were together. There was a car on the driveway, and the lights were on so I could see into the living room window. I saw a young father playing with a baby.

  I thought of the last time I’d seen two people I cared about. Laura, strong and scary, a killer holding a gun. Gaines, close to death, covered in her own blood, with a cop shouting into a mobile phone for help.

  A mobile phone?

  Not a radio?

  I found Laura’s number in my phone’s contact list, but then slipped the phone back into my pocket and carried on walking. My feet led me to Casa Mia. I stood outside in the darkness, but the restaurant was lit up. It wasn’t too late for dinner yet and the sounds of laughter and clinking silverware came from inside. It looked like a busy night. Who was running it?

  The loose ends tied off in my brain.

  I knew what I’d missed, or what I’d ignored, and I wished I didn’t.

  I eased down the ramp in the basement of the old hospital, using my phone’s light as a torch. The smell was noticeably different from the last time I was here. There was a rot in the air, like warm compost.

  I s
aw that we’d left the morgue’s door open, which explained the smell.

  I stepped through into the morgue and found the two dead bodies we’d left there. Both were now bloated, their skin lined with the cold marble creases of death. I took Tony’s wallet out of my pocket and laid it on top of him, saying a brief prayer to whoever was listening. I didn’t want to be carrying him around anymore. I turned and looked at Jelly. I thought of all the trouble he’d caused, not just in the last few days but in all the years I’d known him. I thought of all the times I’d had to bail him out of a situation, and all the times I’d used him, and hoped the tally was at least equal.

  Then I turned to the third body.

  She was in a similar state, and now I knew why. I pulled back the white sheets from her puffy face, and found her features easy to read.

  Joanne Rhys.

  I called for a taxi once I was up high enough for the phone reception to kick in, and arranged for it to pick me up across the road. I walked out through the abandoned front courtyard.

  Past my car.

  Its last resting place. Dumped here on the night of the storm. A pile of cracked bricks showed where the car had plowed through the low wall beside the metal barricade. It would have taken me a couple of hours to walk home from here, so I hoped I’d had a good time crashing it. I wasn’t surprised that some vandals had burned it for fun, or that it hadn’t been towed away. It wasn’t a priority, and it wasn’t like I’d reported it stolen to the police and asked them to take action.

  It was possible someone had stolen it from wherever I’d left it, and taken it for a joy ride, just happening to leave it here. But I’d given up any attempts to believe in coincidence. Had I already figured everything out the last time I was high, only to bury it away again when I woke up?

  I picked at my itching leg and felt the wound open a little.

  I fucked up.

  I walked into Casa Mia.

  The late-night crowd was thin but loud, people at every third table working on bottles of wine or half-empty cocktails, raucous laughter filling the gaps in their conversations. I saw Laura sitting alone at the table nearest the kitchen. She was reading through a stack of documents and had a shot glass of something clear.

  She looked up and saw me just after I spotted her. Our eyes met, and we had a conversation with them from across the room. I headed over anyway, deciding it was time to stop letting things between us live in the margins and between the lines.

  I pulled out the seat opposite her and sat down.

  “How are you doing?” she said. “I was wondering when you’d come round.”

  “I think you fucked up my hearing with those shots. But better that than dead, I guess.” I looked around. “Bit risky you being seen here, isn’t it?”

  “I’m not under investigation anymore.”

  “You keeping your job?”

  She traced her finger across the tablecloth for a while, idly drawing a pattern. “There’s no official punishment. There’s no official case. They know enough to be pissed, but not enough to push it. The thing with Perry needs a hero, but it’s Becker’s turn, and he’s pulled the facts together in a way that makes him look like a genius. They have a good story. So now’s not the time for them to pick any more fights.”

  “Becker dropped the case he was making against you?”

  “Seems a lot of the evidence vanished. But I’ve been given personal leave and invited to resign. Even though there’s some proof of my good intentions, they still see too many broken rules. So they’ve opened the door for me to walk through quietly.”

  “And you’ve walked right here.”

  The waitress came over with a glass of amber liquid. They knew my favorites here, so doubtless she’d brought me one of a select list of bourbons. And, let’s be honest, sometimes you can’t tell them apart. I sipped at it and let the warmth spread to the back of my throat.

  “Back at the house Claire said she’d been trying to take over since ‘the Polish thing,’ and I’ve been going through this—” She held up a couple of the documents. “My own files from the Janas case. And everything makes far more sense if she was involved—if she was the one who was pointing him toward who to meet. How he turned up suddenly having a full knowledge of how everything in town worked. Do you think she was planning things that far back?”

  Tomasz Janas was the reason I was working for the Gaines family. A Polish drug dealer who had tried to step into the local trade and steal away a slice of everyone’s business. He’d gotten himself and a bunch of other people killed, and at the end of the whole mess, I’d ended up with spliced intestines and a drug habit. I felt a vague tug of interest at Laura’s question, but I had other loose ends to tie off first.

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m more interested to know how long you were planning things.”

  She smiled and traced on the tablecloth again. There was an odd look of pride in her face, like she was happy I’d stepped up and worked it all out.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the truth. I don’t know when I was honestly trying to stay clean and turn Gaines, and when I wasn’t. I don’t think I ever knew. I kept telling myself one thing, but maybe it was always the other.”

  I knew how that worked.

  “When you gave Gaines Janas’s notebook, the one I found—”

  She nodded. “I never did. I gave her an edited version, hand-selected some of its pages so a portion of the information would be missing. I told her the original had been destroyed.” She reached inside her bag and pulled out the notebook, laid it on the table between us. “If you want to get rid of it, be my guest. I’m sick of carrying it round.”

  “And Jelly?”

  Now she wasn’t so keen to talk. She bit her bottom lip and leaned back in the chair. Just when I thought she was going to keep silent she spoke. “He came to me, through Joanne. She’d been going out with Simon for a while, the two of them had dreams of making movies. They got their wish, I guess, thanks to Jelly. Anyway, Jelly showed me videos of me and Gaines. Said he was going to take them to the press, or to Perry, unless I paid up.”

  “How did you know Joanne?”

  “Through the Cartwrights. I’m not clear on all of it. Whether she had been turning tricks before she worked on the video scam, or whether she’d joined up the agency in order to find people for Jelly to blackmail. Either way, she’d been with the Cartwrights a few times as a call girl and they’d hit it off so much they’d ended up friends of a sort. She’d started drinking in their pub, then came out with us all for a few drinks. Finally, she started trying to get friendly with me to set up the approach.”

  “And how did you know the Cartwrights?”

  A shrug. She gave me a look. Surely you already know all this? “Craig was a cop for a while. Not a very good one, but after you and me—well, after you—he was a good friend. And Maria was one of Janas’s crew. Came over with him but laid low when she saw everything was going wrong. I’d been working on turning her at the same time as Janas. I felt bad for her, thought she might be able to get with a regular guy and have a better life. So I introduced them. They hit it off.”

  “When we visited Simon’s apartment and found the videos, you didn’t find the key under the mat, did you?”

  “I’d taken it at the hotel. Jelly had two sets of keys, and I could never find which house the second set belonged to. And the phones. Thought I could use Jelly’s phone to find the address, destroy his backups. I tried a PNC, tried the electoral roll, see if he was registered to vote at a different address. Nothing. Couldn’t pull the records of his phone contract without attracting more attention. But then you saved me, led me right to the place.”

  “And then when Jelly tried to set up his big scam on you, you called in a few favors with Craig and Maria. You could have come to me, you know. Or Gaines. We could have fixed it all.”
/>   “There were other videos. Ones I wouldn’t want you to see. Or anyone.”

  “What have you done with them?”

  She looked away. I wasn’t going to get an answer to that.

  “I went to the Cartwrights’ pub,” I said. “I found blood. Joanne?”

  She met my eyes and didn’t blink. “It escalated quickly. We brought her back to the pub but getting her to talk took some persuasion. She filled us in on Jelly’s meet-up with Gaines at The Hound, and we started thinking on our feet. We hadn’t factored in that he would meet with her that same night.”

  “And it was you who did Joanne? Or one of the Cartwrights?”

  She didn’t answer. I was glad. There were some details even I didn’t need to know. Some loose ends could stay that way. She sipped at her drink. Her hand was shaking slightly.

  “Talk me through the hotel.”

  “It all happened too fast. And too badly. Maria pretended she was a gift from Gaines, a sweetener, and got Jelly high. We hadn’t intended to, I mean—” She seemed to think better of it. “What’s the point, we knew what we were doing.”

  “And I need to know,” I pushed. I didn’t want to, but I needed to. “On this one, I need to know. Who killed him? Who killed Jelly?”

  She tried to meet my eyes but couldn’t. She watched an imaginary spot on the far wall for just long enough to break my heart. Then she finally turned back with moist eyes.

  “And then,” she said, skipping ahead to do us both a favor. “Someone must have heard, raised the alarm. Craig was keeping watch, heard the elevator. The noise that thing makes, it saved us.”