Dash appeared at the side of my car with Dot in tow. ‘All clear, Jake,’ he grinned, evidently enjoying the conspiracy. ‘We’ll hold him for a couple of minutes, okay? Better put your foot down.’
‘You’re a wizard, Dash,’ I told him. ‘You can stay here as long as you like.’
‘Cheers, mate – that’s real sweet.’ He looked at Dot, who looked faintly wistful. ‘But some of the guys are talking about moving on. Maybe to France for a while, or Spain. We don’t want to overstay our welcome.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ I was, too. They were a breath of fresh air. ‘But best of luck to you.’
‘It’s time we moved,’ Dot agreed. ‘It’s been great here, but we can’t stay for ever. But you keep in touch, Jake, right?’ She looked at Dash for support, and he nodded vigorously and pounded my arm in a surprising if clumsy show of affection. It was like being thumped by a friendly gorilla.
‘Too right, or we’ll bloody come find out why!’ He grinned and stepped back. ‘You’d better scarper before your friend figures out what’s going on.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said. ‘And keep my coffee mug safe. I might catch up with you one day and want to use it.’
TWENTY-TWO
Clayton called and told me to come round. The US trip had come up earlier than expected and he needed me. Now. I dropped what I was doing, which was staring at four walls, and headed to his office. Being on the move was a relief and promised some action that might stop me sinking into depression.
‘This one’s important, Jake,’ Clayton told me as soon as I arrived. He ushered me into his office and poured coffee from a silver vacuum jug. On the desk alongside the cups lay a brown envelope, like so many of the others I’d delivered for him. The address was written in a careful hand: Gus Mekashnik, 184 Cedar Point Road, Lake Lure, N. Carolina.It was followed by a flight number and time. ‘Your ticket’s waiting at the airport.’
‘Fair enough.’ I picked up the envelope. I’d never been to Carolina, north or south; to me it was simply a spot on the map somewhere in the middle of the US.
‘Mekashnik lives near a small town called Lake Lure. Quiet, splendid scenery, so I’m told, about eighty miles west of Charlotte, North Carolina. Not exactly on a major highway, if you get my meaning, but don’t let the backwoods location fool you. Mekashnik’s as sharp as a tack and didn’t get where he is by sitting on a porch all day whittling sticks and chewing tobacco. Don’t hang about: get in, drop the package and be on your way.’
A worm of anxiety squirmed in my gut. I’d felt it before more than once and was fast becoming accustomed to it. But this was the first time Clayton had given me what was, in effect, a warning. It was also his longest speech yet, prompting me to break an unwritten rule and ask a question.
‘What does he do for a living?’
Clayton looked surprised, but I managed to stare back without flinching. If he was sending me into a situation where he felt I ought to be careful, he at least owed me some honesty. He put down his coffee and paced over to the window, as if deep in thought. Then he turned and looked at me as if it was decision time.
‘That’s a fair question,’ he said quietly. ‘I should have mentioned it, sorry.’ He walked back to his chair and sat down again. ‘Gus Mekashnik sells guns and other… materiel.’
I must have looked surprised, caused by hearing the inflection he placed on the second ‘e’ in materiel. I knew enough to know that meant military equipment. Clayton gave the ghost of a smile and explained. ‘To use the correct term he’s a federally-licensed firearms dealer, and he’s been at it for a long time. I think he’s somewhere close to the top ten in dealers in the US, if it helps. Does that make you feel better?’
‘So he’s legit?’ It at least made me feel a little safer. Not the fact that he dealt in weapons of death, but that he was regulated by the US Government. I figured there was a chance there had to be some kind of controlling influence there. You take what comfort you can in these situations.
‘Well, he doesn’t deal out of the back of a truck in alleys, if that’s what worries you. I’ve never met him, but our paths have crossed on occasion. He’s a businessman like any other. The only difference is, you want it, he’ll get it – for a price.’
‘Like Harrods.’
He didn’t even blink. ‘I wouldn’t know.’
‘So who does he sell to?’ For some reason I got a picture in my mind of the crazy doomsday militia groups and survivalist gun nuts who camp out in the hills, pick up their automatic weapons as they get out of bed and drive armoured half-tracks for fun.
‘I didn’t ask. Everyone has the right to bear arms – it’s in their constitution and selling guns is a legitimate profession. I did hear he recently began trading overseas because there’s been a drop in sales since Trump came in, although how long that will last is debatable. He’s also rumoured to have personally disposed of at least four men who crossed him.’
‘What?’ My Adam’s apple did a double bounce, a result of speaking and swallowing simultaneously. What the hell?
‘Apparently he buried them in more than four locations.’ He waited blank-faced for a couple of beats while I worked out the maths, then smiled. ‘I’m pulling your leg.’
I opened and closed my mouth, relieved and confused at the same time. So Clayton had a sense of humour? Good to know, but there’s a time and place. I looked at the delivery envelope and wondered what was inside it. Papers, by the look and feel of it. But what kind of papers could Clayton be delivering to an arms dealer? And what did it say about Clayton himself?
‘Before you ask,’ he said, ‘I have no idea what the documents in the envelope might be. This is a delivery on behalf of a client and we’re simply the intermediaries. As I said, if you don’t want this one, please say so. I’ve never believed in sending a man out to do something he’s not happy with.’
I believed him, and with all that information, such as it was, I already knew I would still go through with the delivery. What the hell else was I going to do – sit there in London and wait for Basher to catch up with me? Even so, a tiny voice in my head told me I’d finally lost whatever limited grey matter I might have possessed. I wasn’t sure if I was driven by pride, obstinacy – or plain stupidity – but whatever it was, I was in. A part of me wondered what Marcus would say if he knew. I was concerned about that. I already knew what Susan would say – and found I didn’t give a damn. Wow. Look at me – a new man.
‘Right,’ I said, and stood up. ‘I’ll do it.’
He nodded, and I got the feeling he wasn’t surprised. In his business he must have got very good at reading people. ‘Good man. To be honest, I’m not sure who else I could have asked if you’d decided not to go. My other people are all tied up.’
I’d wondered about that. In a business relying on people, I figured he must have other couriers like me, roaming the globe with parcels for faceless persons in faraway places. You don’t get to sit behind a smart desk and pull strings without having some kind of regular income.
‘Even Francis?’ His assistant seemed perfectly capable and looked as if he could chew the wheel nuts off a moving truck without blinking. And he made great coffee.
He shook his head. ‘Francis is an amazing man. He’s intelligent, resourceful and doesn’t know the meaning of fear. I’ve seen him in action in Afghanistan, among other locations, and there’s no better man to rely on in a fight. But when Francis walks into a room everyone knows what he is and what he does and reacts accordingly. That can be useful in certain situations but not this one. People like Mekashnik like to feel top dog at all times, and Francis has a way of causing their hackles to rise. It’s not his fault, it’s the way he is.’
He didn’t add anything, and I figured out the rest for myself. Francis could intimidate people or fight his way out of trouble if he had to. The Gus Mekashnik delivery required a less obvious approach: a talker rather than a fighter. Right up my alley.
‘I can live with that.’
&nbs
p; He smiled and reached into his desk drawer and handed me two white envelopes. ‘Good man. There’s a bonus payment up front.’
‘Danger money?’
‘There’s no such thing. Call it an inconvenience allowance – for the extra time and distance travelled.’
I pushed the second envelope back across the desk to him. I figured I could trust him, which was a long way from where I’d first come in. Right now I didn’t have time to arrange a new bank account and didn’t want to carry around more cash than was clever. It would be handy to have something waiting for me when I got back.
‘Hold it for me, would you? Hugo will know where to send it.’ I winced as I said it. It sounded absurdly dramatic, as if I was going over the top of some far-distant trench into the jaws of death.
But Clayton didn’t seem to notice, or if he did he kept his thoughts to himself. He slipped the envelope into a drawer and gave me a half smile with a hint of genuine warmth. ‘That’s not a problem. Have a good trip and keep your head down.’
TWENTY-THREE
One-eight-four, Cedar Point Road turned out to be a large colonial-style house covered in white clapboard, and surrounded by about two acres of rough lawn dotted with a few bushes to break up the view. It lay on a side-road leading up into the Chimney Rock State Park near Lake Lure, a spit from the Pisgah National Forest in North Carolina’s southern Appalachians. It must have taken a lot of hard work to hack it out of the dense woodland, which spread across the undulating slopes like a thick coat of fur as far as the eye could see.
After touching down at Charlotte airport and weathering the steely questions from US immigration, I’d hired a 4WD Blazer and taken a relaxed drive west past Gastonia and Forest City and out on Route 74 towards Asheville. Two hours after leaving the airport, I discovered the satnav had lost all trace of the address. I stopped three times and discovered that the locals didn’t know where my destination was and plainly couldn’t care a whole heck of a lot either. I drove slowly along a winding lakeside road until I came across a small bunch of dusty shops and one restaurant-cum-fast-food joint. The name over the door read ‘Cappy’s Diner’, and promised home cooking just like Momma used to bake, as well as the lure of a free trail map with every purchase over two dollars.
Since Mekashnik wouldn’t know what time I was arriving, I figured I had time to smell the coffee and see if Momma knew how to bake a cake or whether she was lying through her cotton-picking teeth.
I waited while a couple of tourists from somewhere further north finished ordering enough food to feed a small army, and gave my order to a grizzled character standing behind the counter arranging some flapjacks. I guessed this must be Cappy. He was surrounded by plastic containers of scones, biscuits, cakes and other assorted goodies, proving that even if Momma couldn’t really cook like they did at home, she certainly had some kind of production line going. He nodded sleepily and said, ‘Sure. Take a seat.’
By the time he came over with my coffee and jumbo maple-syrup flapjack, two locals had drifted in, wearing plaid work-shirts and baseball caps, and both on the high side of sixty. They had the same grizzled air of the great outdoors about them as Cappy, with hands like shovels and eyes squinting into the distance like Marlboro Man. They nodded silently to Cappy and gave the rest of us doubtful looks, then parked themselves on high stools at the counter. The way they eased themselves into position made it look like they’d been using the stools since they were old enough to jump.
‘Mekashnik,’ I said to Cappy, as he placed my order on the table. ‘Do you know where I can find his place?’
He squinted at me and cocked his head slightly. ‘Say what?’
‘Mekashnik,’ I repeated. ‘Cedar Point Road. It’s around here somewhere, I think, but the satnav doesn’t know where.’
There was a squeak as both the men at the counter turned on their stools and stared at me. My question had carried in the quiet room, and they were watching Cappy to see what he was going to say. Maybe this was what amounted to excitement in these parts. Ooh, a lost tourist!
Cappy shook his head and wiped away an imaginary crumb. ‘Nope. Can’t say I do.’ Then he turned and walked away, flicking his cloth as he went. I had the feeling that if there had been a spittoon in the corner, he would have filled it. He was lying, of course.
The two locals continued staring at me as if I’d passed wind, then turned lazily on their stools and muttered between themselves. In old westerns, this would have been the point where the honest townsfolk would have had a meeting and demanded to know what the mysterious stranger wanted. Then the local Black Hat would have strode in and gone for his hog leg.
I bit into my jumbo flapjack and thought kind thoughts about Momma. She knew how to bake all right. A pity she hadn’t taken a hickory stick to Cappy’s butt when he was knee-high to a grasshopper, and taught him some manners at the same time.
I saw a local map on the next table and scoured it for Cedar Point Road. If it existed at all it had to be right in this area, but I couldn’t see any sign. If Cappy’s clipped response was anything to go by, Gus Mekashnik must have upset the locals so much they’d excommunicated his address, if that was possible. It made me wonder why a man dealing in weapons at Mekashnik’s supposed level would want to live out there in the middle of nowhere. Did the locals – who were probably fairly keen on Sunday prayer meetings – know what his business was?
I finished my coffee and left the diner under the steady gaze of the three men, and wandered along the street to a small wooden building with a ‘U.S. Post Office’ sign outside. This should be the best place to get the information I needed. I walked inside and found it wasn’t anything like post offices in England, merely a room full of mail boxes and a large bulletin board covered in local notices, with no staff in evidence anywhere.
When I stepped back outside I found one of the grizzled workmen from the diner waiting for me.
‘You’re lookin’ for Mekashnik’s place, I hear.’ he said. He had a large lump of something in one cheek and looked about ready to spit whatever it was out on the road. I got ready to duck in case his aim was off.
‘That’s right. Do you know where it is?’
He nodded and jerked with his chin back along the road in the direction of Charlotte. ‘I figure you came from the airport. Go back the way you came towards Forest City for about a mile, then turn left up a side-road. There’s a sign pointin’ to a Forestry depot… that’s if it ain’t fallen down again. That’ll lead to Cedar Point. Mekashnik lives about two miles along on the right. Fancy big place – you can’t miss it.’
How many times have I been told that before and driven right past a place? I thanked him for the information. ‘How come Cappy didn’t know?’
He frowned. ‘Who?’
‘The man in the restaurant.’
The light dawned, and he almost cracked a smile. ‘That’s ain’t Cappy… that’s his son, Norm. He and Mekashnik don’t get on so well. That map you were lookin’ at? He prints those for customers. He deliberately missed out Cedar Point just to piss him off.’
‘Why don’t they get on?’
But he’d obviously gone far enough in helping me. ‘You’d have to ask him that,’ he said, and turned and walked away along the street.
I climbed back into my rental car and drove back along the main road until I came to the turning into Cedar Point. It wasn’t so much a road as a narrow, metal track, and by the twin trails of bark, mud and twig debris on the surface, the Forestry workers were the main users. I only saw two vehicles on the way – both pumped-up Toyota pickups covered in bumper stickers and driven by young men wearing high-crowned baseball caps and vague, hi, y’all smiles.
I passed one property with locked gates and a melancholy air of desertion about it, and continued on for a good quarter mile until I spotted a wire fence which led me to a large pair of wrought iron gates on rollers. It all looked very old and weather beaten, but I guessed the construction was probably no more than five year
s old – it had that carefully-designed look about it.
Out front was a standard mailbox on a pole, the kind with a little plastic or metal flag so you could see if anything had been delivered. The body of the mailbox had been drilled with an ominous-looking hole, like the sort you see in westerns or on war reports about Kabul.
I thumbed the button on the entry-phone built into one of the stone pillars and waited while the insects and heat and silence settled around me like an itchy blanket. If this was humidity, I’d seen worse, but I couldn’t recall when it had affected me more. Maybe it was all the trees hemming me in or the flight from London finally catching up with me. Somewhere in the distance I was sure I could detect the sound of running water, which made me feel even hotter.
‘Yeah?’ A reedy voice came from the entry-phone, sounding bored.
‘Jake Foreman to see Mr Mekashnik,’ I announced, and wondered if they would allow me to take a shower or point me towards the nearest lake where I could throw myself in for a week or two.
‘Who?’
‘Jake Foreman–’
‘No. Who’re you lookin’ for?’ Now the voice sounded testy, as if I’d spoiled an afternoon nap with some damn-fool question about a house owner who was most likely down at the next property, anyway.
‘Mr Mekashnik. Gus Mekashnik.’
‘Oh. Gus. Hell, why didn’t you say so? Are you the guy from England?’
‘Yes.’
Smart Moves Page 15
