by Jay Stringer
“And where were you when I called?”
“We had a room on the floor below. I was in there trying to figure out what to do next, how to fix things. Craig and Maria had started to unravel as soon as you showed up. They wanted to kill you as well as Tony,” she offered me a smile. “But I put my foot down on that one.”
“And were Craig and Maria already dead when you met up with me?”
“Another change in plan. They lost it after our fight with Tony, when they realized that you would be coming back if you didn’t hear from him. Craig kept saying he was going to kill you, Maria was screaming that I’d set them up, though how she figured that I don’t know, what kind of a setup would that be? Things got messy in a hurry.” The emotion dropped away from her face, she shrugged a little. “Turns out I’m good at all of this. It gets easy after the first one.”
Holy shit.
Holy.
Shit.
What a couple we made.
“Does Becker know Murray and Henry are with you?” She looked at me again with that proud look, but also a question in her eyes. “At the house, Henry used her mobile to call for medical help, not a radio. Small thing, but once you start looking at the whole thing from the right angle, small things add up. That wasn’t official police business. They used the siren for show, scare people off.”
“Joe’s been with me since the start. He was the arresting officer for Janas, let me handle it from there. He’s one of the reasons you got off so lightly with the immigrant thing. He did your interview.”
“I remember.”
“He asked the right questions to let you talk yourself out of it. He’s going to get a promotion once the dust settles on the Perry thing, and he wants a piece of my new business. He’s doing okay.”
“And Henry?”
“Sarah’s more recent. She has a few interesting tastes, and it’s an easier life for her to work with me than against me. They smoothed out a lot of my problems with the corruption case. They couldn’t stop Becker investigating me without incriminating themselves, but they could make evidence disappear in all the confusion of the Perry case. ”
“It would break Becker if he found out.”
She bit back her first reaction before nodding. “Yes. I hope he doesn’t. You know how caught up he is on doing the right thing.”
“So the cops don’t know anything about what happened at the Gaines house?”
She nodded. “Sure, they hear the same rumors as everyone else. Current word is that Dodge and his crew took out the Gaines family, that he’s going to take over.”
“And I bet Dodge loves that rumor.”
“He does. It’s the last push he needed. The remaining Birmingham gangs are falling in behind him, he’s the next big thing. Everyone is too scared of the rumor to pick a fight with him.”
“And Gaines?”
She placed her drink down carefully and wiped her lips with her thumb before reaching back down into her bag. She pulled out a little envelope and handed it to me. When I opened it, there was just a folded slip of paper inside.
I opened it and read:
Eoin,
Thanks for coming back and being my brother.
I’m going to be myself.
V x
“Where is she?” I said.
Laura put her hands up. “All that matters is that Veronica Gaines was taken out by Dodge,” she said. Then she gave me Gaines’s old eyebrow flick. “But you might get a few postcards from Spain, from what I hear.”
My heart lifted a little. At least she was alive and had a chance at making something of her own. At least one of us was getting out.
The restaurant’s manager stepped out of the kitchen and bent down to whisper in Laura’s ear. She listened, then nodded, giving permission for whatever he was asking. He smiled at me quickly before stepping back into the kitchen. I didn’t want to take the next step. I wanted to leave the questions unasked. And just maybe I could do it. Maybe I could leave it all alone. But even as I tried to convince myself to stop digging, I knew it wasn’t going to work. I’d reached the limit of things I could ignore.
“And you?”
“I’ll be fine.” Her mouth turned into something resembling a smile, but colder. “Dodge is onside. He wants the same deal he worked out with Gaines. I have the connections from the Janas notebook, and I’ve reached out to the cartel. As far as they know, we took out their man and the Gaines family. They just want to make money. I’m sure they’ll see sense.”
“And if they don’t? They’ll come in again, in force.”
Her smile looked as sharp as a stiletto. “Let them come.”
She reached into her bag again and pulled out a small square bundle wrapped in white paper. She laid it on the table between us. “That’s the money from under the bed at the hotel. The money Gaines was going to use to pay off Jelly. I don’t need it.”
I stared at the bundle. Then I pulled something of my own from my pocket and laid it on the bundle between us. It was my wedding ring. I’d never had the heart to get rid of it. Laura lifted up her hand to show me what I’d already seen, that she was wearing hers.
“I never filed the papers,” she said.
“Is that so I can’t testify against you?”
She looked genuinely hurt. “I’ve been protecting you. I thought, hoped, we could do this next bit together.”
Did I want to sit on that particular throne? I looked across at the woman sitting opposite me. The woman I thought had changed massively since we’d split up, but whom I now realized I’d never really known at all. How long would it last? How long could it last? Before one of us decided the other was a liability, or told a lie, or wanted to expand into something else. Gaines had the right idea.
I stood up and stepped round the table, bending down to place a tender and long kiss on her lips. I muttered something as I walked away, and even I couldn’t tell if it was “I love you” or “good-bye.”
Out in the car park Becker was sitting on the front of his car, smoking. He looked to have aged a decade in the short time since we’d sat in Simon’s apartment.
I handed him the digital recorder that I’d had in my pocket.
“It’s all on there,” I said. “And some extra things you might not want to know.”
He nodded and stayed silent, rolling the recorder over in his free hand.
“You going to use it?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “Everything’s changing, and the brass are embarrassed as it is. They want me to stay silent, let them do the talking. If I play along, I’ll have a golden ticket for life.”
“Sounds good.”
“Good?” He smiled, looked tired. “What’s that? I’m losing track. This is not the kind of thing I expected when I signed up, you know?”
I nodded. I leaned against the car, and we stayed there until he’d finished his smoke. “If I do use this,” he said. “You’d go down with her.”
“Yes.”
He slipped down from his perch and stubbed the cigarette out on the ground. “I should never have introduced the two of you.” He handed the recorder back to me. “Give you a ride somewhere?”
Becker escorted me right up to the front gate of the camp. Other police officers stepped in to try and stop me, but each time Becker got between us and pulled rank. Even when he was outranked.
They all knew who he was and, it seemed, they’d all heard the rumors.
Golden Ticket.
The settlers and protesters saw us coming and started to cheer, a few of them busying themselves with making a space for me to climb through. At the gate we stopped, and Becker put his hand out for a firm shake.
“See you on the other side?”
I waved at the gate. “You could join us instead.”
He grinned. “Not a chance.”
I laughed and climbed through the gap that had been made for me. I turned back to see Becker disappearing among the ranks of officers as he made his way back to the car.
I was mobbed by protesters and settlers, all of whom seemed to know who I was. A squat man I recognized from an earlier visit shouted for people to let me through, and they cleared a path for me to head farther into the camp. I looked around, and noticed the real settlers intermingling with the young middle-class tourist types; they were all working together.
As I headed toward my father’s caravan, I saw the journalist. He was wary, paused when he saw me, probably weighing whether to disappear. “You want stories?” I shouted. “If you’re still here when it’s all over, I’ll have a few to tell.”
“What kind?”
I smiled. “Maybe a comeback story. Ask me when it’s finished.”
The door to my father’s caravan opened before I reached for the handle. My sister, Rosie, jumped down the step and gave me a hug. My father was framed in the doorway behind her. He put his hand out, and I took it. He nodded back toward the gate, where the police were being joined by another breed: burly men in high-vis coats and padding, looking like bouncers from hell. Bailiffs. TV cameras were starting to light up and gather round. All of them on the outside, none of them inside the camp.
“They’re getting ready to come in,” he said.
I shrugged. “Let them come.”
“Every traveller has a home of his own, and he learns to appreciate it the more from his wandering.”
—Charles Dickens
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks always to my wife, Lisa-Marie. To my parents, to my brother of 25 years, and my sister of three years, and all my family in the midlands and Glasgow. Thanks also for the trust, faith, and support of my agent Stacia Decker.
Thanks also go to:
Al Guthrie. Steve Weddle. Ray Banks. Frank Turner. Dave White. Russel McLean. John McFetridge. Joelle Charbonneau. Scott Parker. Tony Black. Chuck Wendig. Charlie Williams. Reed Coleman. Sean Chercover. Brian Lindenmuth. Sandra Ruttan. Eva Dolan. Neil Martin. Kristin Centorcelli. Nigel Bird. Paul Brazill. James Murray. Rozza. Maxim Jakubowski. James Oswald. Paul Montgomery. Dave Accampo. Sarah Carter. Lola Smith-Welsh. Andy Bartlett. Jacque Ben-Zekry. Reema Al-Zaben. Alan Turkus. Anh Schluep. Paul Morrissey. Scott Calamar. Claire Edwards. Andy Cowley. Aidan Skinner. Ross Nicol. Gary Turnbull. Joe Murray. Neil and John Green. Dave Lockhart. Dave Stewart. Kenny Gilmore. Gilbert Neil. Rab Anderson. Will Smith. Gail McColm. Ryan Lindsay. Dom Pettorelli. Steff and Sandy.
And thanks to all of you, for sticking with Miller through three books.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PHOTO BY JOHN KEATLEY
Jay Stringer was born in Walsall, in the West Midlands of England. He would like everyone to know he’s not dead yet. He is dyslexic; hence he approaches the written word like a grudge match. His work is a mixture of urban crime, mystery, and social fiction, for which he coined the term “social pulp.” In another life he may have been a journalist, but he enjoys fiction too much to go back. He is the author of Old Gold and Runaway Town—the first two novels in the Eoin Miller crime series—and Faithless Street. He lives in Scotland.
