Dark Hollow

by John Connolly

  She brightened up a little. "I'll ask Walter to do it."

  "Does he know you're here?"

  "No. When I asked him to contact you, he refused. He's already been up there, trying to put pressure on the local police. They told him that the best thing to do would be to wait, but that's not Walter. He drove around, asking in the other towns, but there was no sign. He got back yesterday, but I don't think he's going to stay. I told him I had to get out of the house for a while, and that my sister would stay by the phone. I had the flight already booked. I'd tried calling you on the cell phone, but I could never seem to get through. So I came up here, and the police in Scarborough told me where you lived. I don't know…" She trailed off, then began again. "I don't know all that happened between you and Walter. I know some of it and I can guess at more, but it has nothing to do with my daughter. I left him a note on the refrigerator. He'll have found it by now." She stared out the window, as if visualizing the discovery of the note and Walter's response to its contents.

  "Is there any chance that the police might be right, that she has run away?" I asked. "She never seemed like that kind of kid and she didn't seem troubled at all when I met her, but people get funny sometimes when love enters the equation."

  She smiled for the first time. "I remember what that feels like. I may be older than you, but I'm not dead yet." The smile disappeared as her words set off a chain reaction in her head, and I knew she was trying not to picture what might have happened to Ellen. "She didn't run away. I know her and she would never do that to us, no matter how badly we had fought with her."

  "What about the kid-Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track."

  Lee didn't seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student-a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn't believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.

  "Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she's in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody…" She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. "Will you find her for me?" she repeated.

  I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of a hand emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting toward some kind of reckoning from which I couldn't save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.

  "I'll look for her," I said. "You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?"

  As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an off-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn't yet comprehend, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee's words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.

  "She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow."

  I brought her to the Portland Jetport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.

  "It's 'I Can't Marry You, You're Not a Virgin,'" said Angel. "At least they're not claiming to be virgins, else it'd be 'I Can't Marry You, You're a Liar.'"

  "Or 'I Can't Marry You, You're Ugly,'" offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. "Man, how they get the freaks for this show? They trawl the crowds at truck pulls?" He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.

  "How's Lee doing?" asked Angel, suddenly serious.

  "She's holding together, but only just."

  "So what's the deal?"

  "I've got to head north again, and I think I'm going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he's heading back to now."

  Louis shrugged. "Then that's where we going,"

  I sat down in an easy chair beside him. "There may be a problem."

  "Jeez, Bird," said Angel, "we're not exactly starved for problems as it is."

  "This problem have a name?" asked Louis.

  "Rand Jennings."

  "And he would be?"

  "Chief of police in Dark Hollow."

  "And he doesn't like you because?" said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.

  "I had an affair with his wife."

  "You the man," said Louis. "You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated."

  "It was a long time ago."

  "Long enough for Rand Jennings to forgive and forget?" asked Angel.

  "Probably not."

  "Maybe you could write him a note," he suggested. "Or send him flowers."

  "You're not being helpful."

  "I didn't sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you."

  "You see him last time you were up there?" asked Louis.

  "No."

  "You see the woman?"

  "Yes."

  Angel laughed. "You're some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we're up there, or you planning to renew old acquaintances?"

  "We met by accident. It wasn't intentional."

  "Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Jennings. 'Hi Rand, it was an accident. I tripped and fell into your wife.'" I could still hear him laughing as he headed for his bedroom.

  Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. "We screwed up tonight," he said.

  "Things got screwed up. We did what we could."

  "Tony Celli ain't gonna give up on this thing. Stritch neither."

  "I know."

  "You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?"

  "I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I'd die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't have a death wish. I wasn't going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere."

  Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. "If you felt it, then that's the way it was," he said at last. "Sometimes, that's all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I'm taking him down."

  "Not if I see him first." I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.

  His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semismiles.

  "Bet you a dollar you don't."

  "Fifty cents," I replied. "You've already earned half your fee."

  "I guess I have," he said. "I guess I have."

  Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue's trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard's car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.

  "Going somewhere?"

  "Yep."

  "You mind telling me where?"

  "Yep."

  He slapped his hand gently on the hood of my Mustang, as if to transfer his frustration into the metal of the car. "Where were you yesterday evening?"

  "On my way back from Greenville."

  "What time'd you get back into town?"

  "About seven. Should I call a lawyer?"

  "You come straight home?"

  "No, I parked up and met someone in Java Joe's. Like I said: should I call a lawyer?"

  "Not unless you want to confess to something. I was going to tell you what happened out at the Portland Company compl
ex last night, but maybe you already know, seeing as how your Mustang was down by the harbor last night."

  So that was it. Ellis was fishing. He had nothing, and I wasn't about to break down and beg for mercy.

  "I told you: I was meeting someone."

  "This person still in town?"

  "No."

  "And you don't know anything about what happened at the complex last night?"

  "I try to avoid the news. It affects my karma."

  "If I thought it would help, your karma would be kicking its heels in a cell. We found four bodies in that complex, all of them associates of Tony Celli, plus two dead feds and a mystery caller."

  "Mystery caller?" I asked, but I was thinking of something else. By my count, there should have been five bodies in the complex. One of Tony's men had survived and escaped, which meant there was a good chance that Tony Celli knew Louis and I had been in the building.

  Ellis looked closely at me, trying to assess how much I knew. As he spoke, he waited for a reaction. He was disappointed.

  "We found the Toronto cop, Eldritch, dead. Three bullets, two different guns. The one to the head was an execution shot."

  "I'm waiting for the but."

  "The but is that this guy wasn't Eldritch. His ID says he was, his prints and his face say he wasn't. Now I've got the Toronto PD howling at me to find their missing man, I've got a bunch of feds who are very interested in the John Doe who killed two of their agents, and I have four members of Boston's finest crew using up morgue space that the morgue can't afford to give them. The ME is considering relocating here permanently, seeing as how we're such good customers and all. Plus Tony Celli hasn't been seen since his night at the Regency."

  "He stiff on the bill?"

  "Don't, Bird. I'm not in the mood. Don't forget that Willeford is still missing and, until you came along, he knew as much about Billy Purdue as anyone."

  I let it pass without comment. I didn't want to think of what I might have brought down on Willeford. Instead, I said: "Bangor turn up anything on Cheryl Lansing?"

  "No, and we're no further on the killing of Rita Ferris and her son. Which brings me to my second reason for calling. You want to tell me again what you were doing in Bangor? And then Greenville?"

  "Like I told Bangor, Billy Purdue hired someone to trace his parents. I thought that maybe he might try to follow that trail now that he's in trouble."

  "And is he following that trail?"

  "Someone is."

  Ellis moved toward me, his bulk menacing, his eyes more so. "You tell me where you're going, Bird, or I swear to God I'll arrest you here and now and let ballistics take a look at that gun of yours."

  I knew that Ellis wasn't kidding. Even though the silenced guns now lay at the bottom of Casco Bay beside Mifflin, I couldn't afford to delay the search for Ellen Cole. "I'm heading north to a place called Dark Hollow. The daughter of a friend of mine has gone missing. I'm going to try to find her. Her mother was the person I met at Java Joe's last night."

  Some of the anger went out of his face. "Is it a coincidence that Dark Hollow is Billy Purdue's country?"

  "I don't believe in coincidences."

  He patted the hood one more time, and seemed to reach a decision. "Neither do I. You stay in touch now, Bird, y'hear?"

  He turned and walked back to his car.

  "Is that it?" I said. I was surprised to see him let it go so easily.

  "No, I guess it isn't, but I don't see what more I can do." He stood at the open door of the car, and watched me. "Frankly, Bird, I'm balancing the benefits of hauling you in and grilling you, assuming you'd tell us anything, against the benefits of having you wandering around and looking under rocks. So far, the scales are tipping in favor of the second option, but only just. You remember that."

  I waited a heartbeat.

  "Does this mean you've decided against recruiting me, Ellis?"

  He didn't reply. Instead, he shook his head and drove away, leaving me to think about Tony Celli and Stritch and an old man in a harbor bar, drinking beers and waiting for the new world to sweep him away.

  I had told Ellis some of the truth, but not all. I was going to Dark Hollow, and would be there by nightfall, but first Louis and I would pay a visit to Boston. There was a slight possibility that Tony Celli might have taken Ellen Cole, perhaps in the hope of using her as leverage if I found Billy Purdue before he did. Even if that was not the case, there were some things to be clarified before we went up against Celli again. Unlike the members of his crew, Tony was a made guy. It was important that everybody understood the potential repercussions if we were forced to confront him.

  Before I left to meet Louis at the airport, I stopped off at the Kraft Mini-Storage at Gorham. There, in three adjoining units, was what I had retained of my grandfather's possessions: some furniture; a small library of books; some silver plates; a brass screen for a fireplace; and a series of boxes filled with old paperwork and files. It took me fifteen minutes to locate what I was looking for and take it back to the car: a manila expanding file, held closed by a piece of red ribbon. On the index tab, written in my grandfather's ornate script, were the words Caleb Kyle.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Al Z operated out of an office above a comic book store on Newbury Street. It was an odd location, but it suited him to be in a place where tourists browsed among chichi clothes stores, sipped exotic teas or browsed in galleries. It was busy, there were too many people around for anyone to cause trouble, and he could send out for flavored coffees or scented candles anytime he wanted.

  Louis and I sat outside a Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor across from Al Z's brownstone office, eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and drinking large coffees. We were the only people sitting outside, mainly because it was so cold that my ice cream hadn't even begun to melt yet.

  "You think he's noticed us?" I asked, as my fingers gave up their efforts to hold the spoon without shaking.

  Louis sipped his coffee thoughtfully. "Tall, handsome black male and his white boy sittin' outside eatin' ice cream in the fuckin' winter? I think someone must have noticed us by now."

  "I'm not sure I like being called 'boy,'" I mused.

  "Get in line, whitey. We got a three-hundred-year start on that particular grievance."

  At a window above the comic book store, a shadow moved.

  "Let's go," said Louis. "It wasn't for the damn cold, brothers be running the world by now."

  At the top of a flight of steps, next to the window of the store, there was a buzzer beside a wooden, windowless door. I pressed the buzzer and a voice answered simply: "Yes?"

  "I'm looking for Al Z," I said.

  "No Al Z here," replied the voice, all in a fast flow of heavily accented English so that it came out as "Noalseeher." It was followed by a click and the intercom went silent.

  Louis hit the buzzer again.

  "Yes," said the same voice.

  "Man, just open the damn door, okay?"

  The intercom clicked off, then buzzed, and we passed through, the reinforced door springing shut behind us. We walked up four flights of stairs to where a plain, unvarnished door stood open. A figure leaned against the window beyond, small and bulky, its hand resting midway between its neck and its belt, ready to move for the gun if necessary. The only ornamentation on the wall was a cheap-looking black and white clock, which softly ticked away the seconds. I figured the surveillance camera was probably hidden behind it. When we entered the room and saw the television screen on Al Z's desk showing only an empty stairwell, I realized I was right.

  There were four men in the room. One was the short bulky guy, his skin yellow as a beeswax candle, who had watched us from the doorway. An older man, his flesh heavy at the jowls like a basset hound's, sat on a worn leather sofa to the left of the doorway, his legs crossed, a white shirt and red silk tie beneath his black suit. His eyes were hidden by small, round-framed sunglasses. Against the wall, a young buck leaned with his thumbs hooked into the
empty belt loops of his pants, holding his silver-gray jacket away from his sides to reveal the butt of a H &K semiautomatic at his waist. His gray suit pants were baggy, narrowing to pipe-cleaner thinness where they met his silver-tooled cowboy boots. The eighties revival was obviously still in full flow where he came from.

  Louis was looking straight ahead as if the room was empty apart from the fourth man who sat behind a teak desk inlaid with green leather, the desktop clean apart from a black telephone, a pen and notebook and the TV screen, which kept up its unceasing vigil on the stairs.

  Al Z looked like a well-groomed undertaker on vacation. His thin silver hair was swept back from the broad expanse of his forehead and slicked tightly to his skull. His face was craggy and wrinkled, the eyes dark like opals, the lips thin and dry, the nostrils on his long nose slim and strangely elongated, as if he had been bred for his powers of smell. He wore a three-piece suit of autumn hues, the fabric a mix of reds and oranges and yellows, finely interwoven. His white shirt was open at the neck, the collar narrow pinpoint, and there was no tie. In his right hand he held a cigarette; his left lay flat on the desk, the nails short and clean, but not manicured. Al Z acted as the buffer between the upper reaches of the organization and the lower. He solved problems, when they arose. It was his gift to be a problem solver, but there was no point in a manicure if your hands were always going to be dirty.

  There were no chairs in front of his desk, and the man in the dark suit remained spread across the sofa, so we stayed standing. Al Z nodded at Louis, then looked long and appraisingly at me.

  "Well, well, the famous Charlie Parker," he said at last. "If I knew you were coming, I'd have worn a tie."

  "Everybody knows you, how you gonna make any money as a private dick?" muttered Louis. "Hiring you for undercover work be like hiring Jay Leno."

  Al Z waited for him to finish before turning his attention from me to Louis. "If I knew you were bringing equally distinguished company, Mr. Parker, I'd have made everybody else wear a tie too."