Cry Darkness

by Hilary Bonner

  There was a hairdryer plumbed into the wall by the basin. Jones used it to swiftly blow-dry her hair into the sharp glossy bob she was so fussy about, which immediately made her feel considerably better.

  When she stepped out into the main room Connie was fiddling with the coffee maker.

  ‘Well, it boils the water, doesn’t it?’ she muttered unenthusiastically. ‘Don’t suppose we’ll come to much harm. Anyway … seems like there’s a lot more danger lurking for us than a few germs.’

  She turned to face Jones.

  ‘You look better.’

  Jones managed a weak smile.

  Connie rinsed the coffee machine then filled it with water and added the coffee. Jones watched for a few seconds as she produced a couple of mugs which she swilled under the tap.

  There was a television in one corner. Jones hadn’t seen the news since early that morning. She wanted to check if there were any further reports on the RECAP explosion, and to see if there was any mention of the incident with Marion and her. She switched on the TV just in time to catch a regional news bulletin.

  The fourth item featured their hit-and-run.

  ‘Passers-by report that the vehicle appeared to deliberately mow down the injured woman, and that it then reversed for a second attempt.’

  A shiver ran down Jones’s spine. Connie had turned away from her coffee-making activities, and was also watching.

  ‘Police are withholding the name of the victim, whose condition is said to be critical, until next of kin have been informed. A second pedestrian, another Caucasian woman, who left the scene of the incident, was believed to have been involved, and police are appealing for her and any other witnesses to contact them.’

  Connie uttered a big, deep sigh.

  ‘Critical,’ she murmured. ‘That means Marion’s alive, doesn’t it, Sandy? She’s alive.’

  Jones nodded her agreement. She was also hugely relieved, not least because of the sense of responsibility she felt for what had happened. But her thoughts swiftly turned to what else had been revealed in the bulletin.

  Police were withholding the victim’s name until next of kin had been informed. That meant they already knew who Marion was. Of course, Marion had been carrying her handbag which had presumably been found in the road alongside her. No doubt it contained her credit cards, her ID, her phone, and all the usual paraphernalia of modern life. But did whoever had attempted to kill her in mistake for Connie now know that they had targeted the wrong woman? That was the million-dollar question.

  In addition the police were appealing for the second pedestrian involved to come forwards. Did that mean they knew who Jones was too? She thought that was still unlikely, but couldn’t be sure. She so hoped her boys didn’t get to hear of any of this before she could safely speak to them.

  Neither Dom, nor his intervention, were mentioned. What did that indicate? Or did it not indicate anything at all?

  Jones glanced at Connie. She could tell that all she was thinking about was Marion’s welfare. Almost certainly she had yet to consider the wider significance of the report.

  The aroma of coffee was beginning to fill the room. It smelt wonderful, promising somehow to be even better than the tea she had earlier yearned for, and had more or less drowned all traces of the vaguely unpleasant odour that had previously lurked. Jones hadn’t thought it possible that her body could, at this time, display any desire for food or drink, but her saliva buds had automatically kicked into action.

  ‘Coffee smells done,’ she said gently to Connie, who nodded absently.

  Jones left her to her thoughts, made her way to the machine, and poured steaming liquid into the two mugs Connie had prepared.

  She raised a mug to her lips. The coffee was very hot and very strong. Just how she liked it. There was no milk, but she always drank coffee black. She could feel herself being jolted back to some semblance of life.

  She passed Connie the second mug just as Dom returned, carrying a large brown paper bag.

  ‘Gee, that smells good,’ he said.

  Jones found another mug.

  Meanwhile Dom emptied out the contents of his paper bag onto the worktop, alongside the coffee machine.

  ‘Hot pastrami sandwiches, and red velvet cake, a Harlem speciality, just in case you two honkies don’t know it,’ he said. ‘The best cake you ever gonna eat.’

  Connie ignored him and the food.

  ‘Do you have any news? Have you managed to find out anything about Marion? We know she’s alive—’

  ‘You do?’ Dom interrupted anxiously ‘How?’

  ‘It was on the TV news,’ said Jones. ‘They said her condition was critical.’

  ‘Did they identify her?’ Dom spoke sharply.

  ‘No. But I guess they know who she is already. The bulletin said that her identity was being withheld until her family could be contacted.’

  Dom nodded, looking grim. Connie put down her coffee and moved swiftly and suddenly towards him. She grabbed one of his arms with both hands. Jones could see that her knuckles were white, and her fingertips were digging into the sleeve of Dom’s jacket.

  ‘So, Marion must be in hospital somewhere, we’ve got to find her, Dom. I have to know …’

  Connie’s voice had turned slightly hysterical again.

  ‘Hey, Con, hey,’ said Dom, raising a big fleshy hand in what Jones presumed was supposed to be a calming gesture. ‘My girl’s on the case.’

  ‘Well, how’s she going to find anything out? They’ll only give information to family, won’t they? It’s not going to be easy …’

  ‘It won’t be too hard for my girl,’ said Dom. ‘I told you, she’s special.’

  Jones wondered what the hell the big man was talking about. Connie looked as if she was going to interrupt again, then turned away, beaten, and slumped onto a chair.

  ‘Have some more coffee, Connie,’ said Jones, holding out the other woman’s abandoned mug. ‘It’ll make you feel better.’

  Connie turned a jaundiced eye on her. Jones realized she must have sounded particularly trite.

  ‘Nothing will make me feel better,’ she responded sharply. ‘Except knowing that Marion is going to be all right.’

  Nonetheless she took the coffee and raised it to her lips.

  Dom picked up two packets of pastrami sandwiches, handing one to Connie and one to Jones.

  ‘So will food,’ he said. ‘And anyway, even if it don’t make you feel better, you gotta eat, Connie babe. We gotta keep functioning. All of us. People ain’t no different to machines. You, with all your fancy notions, Con, you ought to know that, girl. Gotta have fuel to keep going.’

  He opened a packet of sandwiches himself and took a big bite out of one.

  ‘Seriously goddamned good,’ he said.

  The smell of hot salted meat and mustard mingled with the aroma of the coffee. Once again, to her surprise, Jones’s felt her saliva buds react.

  She removed a sandwich from the packet Dom had handed her. And once she started eating she couldn’t get the food into her mouth fast enough. Her nausea had evaporated. She found that she was absolutely ravenous. When she’d finished the sandwich she started on the red velvet cake. It was the colour of new brick and melted on her tongue like butter, every bit as fine as Dom had said it would be.

  She was aware of Connie’s eyes on her.

  ‘It’s good grub,’ said Jones by way of encouragement.

  Connie narrowed her gaze.

  ‘If I ate a mouthful I would be sick as a hog,’ she said.

  The Dominator’s girlfriend arrived about an hour later. It had seemed much longer to Jones, and she suspected that to Connie it had probably seemed like a lifetime.

  She was not at all what Jones had expected. She hadn’t realized she’d been expecting any particular kind of woman to be Dom’s girl, but she must have been. This one took her totally by surprise.

  She was tall, blonde and elegant, with good strong features and intelligent eyes. Her mouth w
as wide and generous. She wore her long hair swept loosely back in a ponytail. She was well dressed in a stylish, navy-blue, pin-striped trouser suit, and when she spoke her voice had a musical ring to it.

  ‘Hi, I’m Gaynor,’ she said, smiling easily. Her teeth were perfect, her manner relaxed and confident.

  She was clearly a class act.

  Jones realized it had been not only patronizing of her to have rather different expectations of the big brash wrestler upon whom her entire survival now seemed to depend, but also quite probably racist. It hadn’t occurred to Jones that Dom’s girl would be anything other than a woman of colour.

  Dom beamed with pride as soon as Gaynor entered the room.

  ‘Whaddya think of my babe, then?’ he enquired.

  Connie clearly took the attitude that the question was rhetorical, if she considered it at all. Before Jones had time to think of an appropriate reply, Connie Pike began firing questions at the young woman.

  ‘What have you found out? Do you know where they’ve taken Marion? Is she going to pull through?’

  Dom’s girl was unfazed. She walked across the room to Connie and took both her hands in hers.

  ‘Marion is at St Vincent’s Hospital,’ she said. ‘She’s very poorly, but they say she has a good fighting chance. She’s just come out of surgery and she’s in intensive care. I’ve been told the next few hours are critical. Then we’ll know for sure if she’s going to pull through.’

  ‘Is she conscious?’

  ‘Well, she’s still under anaesthetic. She was knocked out, but apparently her head wounds are not believed to be that serious.’

  Jones realized that meant the truck could not have run over Marion’s head, after all. Relief washed over her.

  ‘Thank God,’ said Connie. ‘But what about her other injuries?’

  The younger woman did not attempt to avoid eye contact. It was almost as if she and Connie had formed an instant bond which demanded that there be no bullshit.

  ‘She has four broken ribs, a dislocated shoulder and severe injuries to her legs,’ said Gaynor.

  ‘You said she’d just come out of surgery?’

  ‘Yes.’ Gaynor’s voice was calm and matter of fact. ‘Her right leg was virtually severed by the truck. The surgeons had to amputate what was left, above the knee.’

  The line of Connie’s mouth was very thin. Her voice sounded strange when she spoke. Almost as if it wasn’t her voice at all.

  ‘And the other leg?’

  ‘They’re trying to save it. It’s broken in several places, and the ligaments are torn.’

  ‘Do they think they can save it?’

  ‘They don’t know yet.’

  ‘So what exactly are her chances of pulling through, with or without her remaining leg?’

  Gaynor shrugged. ‘They don’t know that either.’

  ‘Fifty-fifty then?’

  ‘Thereabouts.’

  ‘Only thereabouts?’

  Gaynor nodded. ‘Yes. I think that’s the best prognosis. A good fighting chance, that’s all they told me.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘I need to go to her,’ Connie said, for the umpteenth time.

  ‘The hospital and the police know her identity,’ Gaynor replied with quiet authority. ‘That means that the people who made the hit on her, thinking she was you, Connie, probably now know you are still alive and well. And if they don’t, they will soon. Marion’s next of kin, her son in Princeton, has been informed of the incident and her identity will be released to the media shortly. Someone has tried to kill you twice, Connie. They’ll try again. They’ll be waiting for you …’

  ‘That makes no difference. I’ll take my chances. My life is no damned good to me without Marion.’

  ‘Your life means so much in so many ways, Connie,’ Jones reminded her gently. ‘You are more likely than anyone else in the world to hold the key to whatever it is that Paul discovered. You have a duty to survive.’

  ‘Fuck duty,’ yelled Connie. ‘Fuck duty and fuck RECAP!’

  ‘Connie, there’s a good chance Marion will recover,’ Gaynor continued. ‘You haven’t lost her yet, remember? And how would she feel if she came through all this, and she’d lost you? If you’d done something foolhardy, something plain darned stupid, whether you thought you were doing it for her or not. If you’d put yourself in unnecessary danger. How would she feel about that?’

  Connie sniffed loudly. She looked as if she was fighting back tears again.

  ‘She’d be pretty angry,’ she replied, in a normal tone of voice again.

  ‘Yes,’ responded Gaynor. ‘She’d be angry. Like I’d be angry if it was that great lump of meat over there.’ She gestured with one thumb at Dom. ‘I love him like you love Marion, you see. Hard to believe as it may be.’

  She shot Dom a piercing look. He wriggled a bit, trying not to smile too much, Jones thought.

  ‘So,’ Gaynor continued, ‘I do understand, Connie. And I wonder, would you let me help?’

  ‘How can you help?’

  ‘Well, I could go to see Marion for you. It’s not the same, I know. But I will report back absolutely honestly, I promise you. And, if she’s conscious, I could give her a message.’

  Connie walked to the window and appeared to be looking out. Jones guessed she was seeing nothing at all.

  After a few seconds she turned around, and addressed Gaynor again.

  ‘Deal,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Just tell Marion she’s to hang on in there. She’s got to. For me. For us.’

  ‘I will.’

  Gaynor headed for the door.

  ‘Thank you,’ Connie called after her.

  Gaynor turned again to smile and incline her head, very slightly, in recognition.

  ‘There you go,’ said Dom, after she had left. ‘Told you guys she was special, didn’t I?’

  Jones nodded. Dom grinned at her over his shoulder as he headed for the bathroom.

  This was all very fine, thought Jones, but all they seemed to have discussed so far was Marion. Connie was in danger whether or not she attempted to see Marion. And Jones herself was probably still in danger too. Then there was the small matter of Paul’s discovery. A mighty step forwards in modern science which was apparently important enough, and presumably threatening enough, to lead people in high places to murder.

  One half of Jones wanted more than anything to find out exactly what Paul had discovered. Maybe she even wanted to help Connie continue Paul’s work, though she wasn’t sure about that. The climate had changed, but RECAP and everything it stood for still hovered on the dubious fringes of the scientific world. And Jones had a pretty amazing career. She didn’t want to jeopardize it any more than she almost certainly already had.

  How much of a target was she, she wondered? If she decided to go home, perhaps whoever was behind all this would just be glad to see the back of her? Or would they?

  Jones was tired. She was frightened. And she was bewildered. Nonetheless, the inquisitive, enquiring half of her, the half that had got involved with RECAP in the first place, didn’t want to even attempt to walk away quite yet.

  Her thoughts were interrupted by a series of bleeps from her burner phone. She’d been sent a text. It could only really be from Ed. She thought for a second. Dom had said she shouldn’t use the phone, although she still couldn’t believe that Ed was any kind of danger to them. But this was a text. Surely that was safe enough. In any case, she reckoned the importance of knowing what Ed had to say probably outweighed any small risk that might be involved.

  She’d just called up the message when Dom came back into the room.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing, lady?’ he yelled. ‘Haven’t I told you not to use that goddamned phone?’

  ‘It’s only a text, Dom,’ said Jones mildly. ‘Surely there’s no harm in picking that up.’

  ‘It’s the same. And you’re a doctor? What kind of brain you got? You’ve sent out a signal to the neares
t mast.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Jones was sure she’d read somewhere that text messages were not easily traced. Maybe she’d seen it on the web, that worldwide home of misinformation. People forget that you can only get out of the web what some other prat has put in it. Jones usually did not forget. However, her thought processes were still not working at one hundred per cent.

  Anyway, the damage, it seemed, had been done. The message was now displayed. It was indeed from Ed.

  ‘Meet me at the cornfield. Ten tonight. E.’

  ‘Let’s have a look at that.’

  Dom snatched the phone from her.

  ‘E?’ he queried. ‘Ed?’

  Jones nodded.

  ‘The cornfield? What the hell does he mean by that? You know what that is?’

  ‘I certainly do.’

  ‘Sure as hell ain’t a real field of corn. Not anywhere round here.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Anybody else know?’

  ‘I very much doubt it.’

  ‘Right. I guess you’re gonna want to meet him whatever I say ’bout it?’

  ‘Of course I bloody well do. Maybe he’s found something out. Maybe he knows something he didn’t tell me before.’

  ‘And maybe he’s setting a trap for you.’

  ‘No way. Ed wouldn’t do that.’

  ‘But what if he’s followed to this cornfield?’

  ‘Well that, Dom, is a chance I’m going to have to take.’

  FIFTEEN

  Jones was suddenly very determined. She felt it was up to her to get to the bottom of this mess, to make it safe for Connie to return to a semblance of normal life again, and to begin to rebuild RECAP, if she so wished. As she knew Paul would want. Although she suspected that the murderous forces responsible for the Princeton explosion would have found Connie in New York sooner or later, her own involvement had so far almost certainly done more harm than good. She resolved to at least attempt to redress that.

  Ultimately the Dominator seemed to accept that Jones’s mind was made up, and that she was going to meet Ed with or without his help.

  He even arranged a car for Jones to drive to the rendezvous. A big old Ford. Yet another favour called in, apparently.