Ghosts

by Matt Rogers

  Now Gates came back to the phone and said, ‘Okay — oh damn, that was good — okay. Where are you?’

  Slater had his foot on the accelerator of the Bentley. They weren’t using the BMW for obvious reasons. The big rental car generated considerable power, though. Slater veered onto Blue Diamond Road and shot past trawling traffic, twenty or thirty miles over the speed limit.

  King said, ‘Blue Diamond Road.’

  ‘Woooo!’ Gates screamed. King could imagine him pacing the room, sweating, reading the updates from his tech guy. ‘He should be coming at you any moment. My guy just spotted him on a CCTV on South Jones Boulevard, facing that road. So depending on where you are…’

  An LVMPD cruiser screamed past in the other direction, matching the pace of their Bentley. King caught it as nothing more than a flash of white and black, but it was speeding and it wasn’t using its lights or sirens.

  Bingo.

  Slater braked hard, pulled to the shoulder, and wrenched the wheel. The Bentley jerked and jolted over the rough median strip hard enough to throw King against his seatbelt. He took all the pressure on his collar bone, which might have resulted in injury if his body wasn’t fully accustomed to getting smacked in every direction. Slater kept both hands on the wheel as he nearly threw the rear out, but he recovered the turn in a half-competent drift and mounted the opposing lane. A couple of cars swerved to avoid the new arrival. Drivers leant on horns. Slater didn’t notice. He hit the gas again and, with the difficulty of the divided roadway behind them, charged after Ward’s cruiser with renewed vigour.

  Gates said, ‘His registration is—’

  ‘We’ve got him,’ King said.

  ‘You’ve subdued him?!’

  ‘No,’ King said. ‘But we’re after him.’

  ‘Good,’ Gates said. ‘That’s real good, my friend. You get that bastard and you bring him—’

  ‘Where are you?’

  A tiny pause.

  King followed up with, ‘We need to know where you want him.’

  Gates said, ‘I’m back at Wan’s. Only temporarily. Hiding in plain sight, as it were. I know this place like the back of my hand so I can fortify it to the—’

  King killed the line.

  There was nothing more they needed from Armando Gates.

  The pimp had dug his own grave.

  They were only a few hundred feet from Ward’s rear bumper, and gaining fast. The Bentley was fearsomely impressive under the hood, and the stock police cruiser couldn’t match it.

  Slater said, ‘Where is he?’

  ‘Wan’s.’

  Slater shook his head. ‘You can’t fix stupid.’

  ‘We shouldn’t have done this,’ King said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Started this war.’

  ‘It was the best—’

  ‘Gates is a coke fiend,’ King said. ‘He marketed himself as a competent criminal when we were with him, and that’s why we made that call. But he’s fucking crazy. And so is Keith Ray.’

  Slater nodded. ‘And now Ray has Alexis.’

  ‘Gates could have her,’ King said. ‘There’s always—’

  ‘Gates doesn’t have anything,’ Slater said, highlighting the pimp’s incompetency. ‘It’s Ray.’

  ‘And now they’re in a war. That we started. We got her wrapped up in this.’

  Slater banged the wheel.

  He said, ‘Don’t start with that. I had reservations about letting her try anything. It’s on me.’

  ‘It’s on all of us. Violetta, too. It was a group decision.’

  ‘She’s okay,’ Slater said. ‘She’s fine. I swear to God, if she’s not…’

  ‘One step at a time,’ King said. ‘Breathe. We get Ward, we figure out this whole damn puzzle.’

  Ward sensed the Bentley on his rear. The cruiser took the exit onto South Decatur Boulevard at breakneck speed. Out of the corner of his eye, King saw Slater smile.

  You want to get into a battle of nerves with someone, you best hope it’s not Will Slater.

  Slater took the exit faster. He pulled alongside Ward on the boulevard, slowed an ounce, and then swerved.

  The Bentley was massive.

  The cruiser wasn’t.

  The hood crushed the rear right-hand-side of the squad car and sent it into a wild tailspin, complete with screaming tyres and plumes of smoke from the burning rubber. It rotated two full revolutions before it mounted the kerb — thankfully devoid of pedestrians — and hit the side of a brick shopfront, lurching to a violent halt.

  The impact slowed the Bentley hard enough for Slater to regain control, and he veered onto the sidewalk and shot down a laneway between the two shops. He skidded to a halt, aiding the deceleration by smacking the side of the big car into a dumpster. It came to rest with all the rapid momentum loss of a full-scale car wreck, but King and Slater were braced for it.

  King launched out of the passenger seat, his SIG raised before Ward had managed to peel himself from the wreckage of the cruiser. He was bleeding from the mouth, and his uniform was torn in a couple of places, but aside from that he seemed largely unharmed. If nothing else, the man was fast-thinking. He already had his service weapon out, and he aimed it at King as he staggered into the alleyway.

  King didn’t want to shoot.

  They needed him alive.

  Slater was out of the Bentley, too, with his own gun aimed at Ward’s face.

  An old-fashioned Mexican standoff.

  Then they all heard it.

  A car taking the exit off Blue Diamond Road at ridiculous speed, rivalling how fast Slater and Ward had exited. No sirens, so it wasn’t another squad car coming to investigate. Which only left one option.

  Ray’s men, in pursuit.

  Like a ticking time bomb dropped into the fray.

  Ward heard it too, and panicked.

  ‘Get out of the way!’ he screamed at King, shaking his pistol. ‘I’m not—’

  The roar of the engine droned closer.

  King said, ‘Alan, they’re coming for you.’

  Silence.

  Ward couldn’t help it.

  He threw a glance over his shoulder.

  Slater materialised in front of him like an apparition. When Ward turned back Slater smashed his gun aside, kicked one leg into the other, then headbutted him as he lost his footing and pitched forward. The impact of skull on skull sent Ward tumbling backward — Slater had a harder head. The cop went down like a rag doll and Slater kicked his service weapon aside.

  The approaching engine was right on top of them.

  In unison, King and Slater melted behind dumpsters.

  Like they’d never been there at all.

  The car pulled into the laneway and the driver killed the engine. Four men piled out in a collective wave of adrenaline — three had sub-machine guns and one had a full-auto assault rifle. MP5s and a HK respectively. Heavy duty firepower. They swarmed Ward, four barrels aimed at the semi-conscious cop, hooting and hollering between themselves.

  Tasting the sweet, sweet thrill of victory.

  Because there's no hunting like the hunting of man.

  One of them tutted. ‘Alan, Alan, Alan.’

  Another said, ‘Wrong call, motherfucker. Running wasn’t smart. You didn’t even kill him.’

  A third said, ‘What the hell did you do to yourself?’

  The fourth didn’t say anything.

  He’d realised that someone else had done this to Ward.

  43

  Time passes in excruciating fashion when there’s no external stimuli.

  Alexis sat in the dark room, keeping the tendrils of insanity at bay. Her vision was non-existent. Her heart thudded twice as loud when it was the only thing she could concentrate on. There were muffled sounds from out in the warehouse, but they were at the edge of her hearing.

  A whole lot of her wanted to cry, to break down, to scream and curse and shout for help. Slater had imparted enough of his stoic mindset for her to know the wa
y forward, but there’s a giant rift between knowing what to do and actually doing it. The logical part of her brain said, Crying, screaming, pleading — it achieves nothing. There’s no benefit to it whatsoever. Focus on what you can control. Stay calm, stay alert, stay ready. Breaking down only wastes your energy and destroys your ability to make your own choices and do things your own way.

  But now she couldn’t see, and her breathing was heavy and laboured, and the fact that Ray had promised to come back for her hung over her head in an invisible cloud. No part of her wanted to stay composed when that door opened and that sweaty disgusting old man stepped into the room.

  Nevertheless, she was going to do it.

  Because what other option did she have?

  Seconds or minutes or hours passed. She wasn’t sure which it was. Her mind went everywhere and nowhere. She got stuck in endless thought loops, and fought her way out of them, and succumbed to them again. The battle in her head was incessant.

  Remember Beckham, she kept telling herself. Remember Beckham Lang.

  He was Violetta’s ex-boyfriend, paralysed from the neck down many years ago after a failed assassination attempt from the Sinaloa cartel. Alexis and Slater had rescued him from a disability centre after word spread that the government was seeking to eliminate Beckham to get to Violetta. They’d set him up in a new home, given him a new life, and he’d taken it all in stride with unwavering self-confidence. He was the most inspirational person she’d ever met.

  She recalled his words.

  ‘I separate everything I can potentially do into the tasks that have positive outcomes, and then I do only those things. I have no expectation of anything else. It helps me stop thinking about what could have been, because that’s useless, isn’t it? We’re living in this reality.’

  She would never forget them.

  So when the door opened and light flooded the small back office, she sat up and adjusted the wrist that was handcuffed to the desk leg so she could look Ray in the eyes. He loomed over her, and she couldn’t stand up, but she didn’t cower. She didn’t wilt.

  She controlled what she could control.

  Ray was hot and flustered from barking commands. He wiped his dirty forehead with a dirty palm, slicking his wisps of hair straight back, and spat brown spit into a wastebasket beside Alexis.

  She said, ‘Come to say hi?’

  He regarded her. ‘You’re either certifiably insane or stupidly brave, sweetheart.’

  She didn’t react.

  He said, ‘You know what I’m going to do to you.’

  She didn’t react.

  He crouched down so they were eye to eye. ‘You’re lucky I’m a private man. My men are out there working hard. I need to be a strong leader. I need to lead from the front. I can’t be wasting my time messing around with you in here — not until they’re off the clock. Not until we’re bunkered down for the night. I don’t like the idea of them sitting outside, listening.’

  ‘So then what are you doing now?’

  ‘Interrogating you.’

  ‘This doesn’t feel like much of an interrogation.’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  Ray reached out and grabbed her by the throat.

  She coughed and spluttered but didn’t panic. She couldn’t control Ray cutting off her airways. She could control her response to it. She let him choke her, and she sat there with her face reddening and her eyes turning bloodshot until finally he released her grip. She spluttered again as air flooded in, but she didn’t double over. She didn’t hunch.

  No cowering.

  He looked at her with newfound respect. ‘You’re tougher than you look.’

  ‘How do I look?’

  ‘Like your ordinary showgirl. Maybe even better looking than them. More privileged. Like the whole world is going to fall into your lap just because you’re hot.’

  ‘You’ve got a lot to learn about impressing women.’

  Ray smiled the same brown smile. ‘You say that chained to my desk.’

  She masked a shudder.

  ‘You look like me, you never get what you want in that department,’ Ray said in what she interpreted as a rare moment of self-reflection. ‘My whole life I was alone. It made me the sheriff of the whole county. But then I’d go home to an empty house. I’d pour myself a drink or five and go to bed and get up and do it all over again. I reached the top of my field. I asked myself, is this it? Then I realised something you and your smugness haven’t yet figured out. I realised I could simply reach out and take whatever I wanted. So that’s what I’ve done to you. You want the truth? I don’t care how you know me. I don’t care why you were looking for me. You’re here now, and you’re mine, and nothing you say or do is going to change that, sweetheart.’

  She thought, Why the hell is he telling me this? His train of thought is all over the place.

  Then it clicked.

  Out there, he was the alpha male. The top dog, inspiring loyalty in the ranks, convincing ex-cops and ex-decent-human-beings to come and work for him and his operation. But it was all founded on his own frailties, on the simple fact that no woman would look twice at him when they realised what a sick, perverted old man he was. He’d dipped a finger into the fountain of power and then jumped in with his clothes on. But that meant out there he had to be flawless, rigid, lacking any and all weaknesses. In here, in the company of a stranger who couldn’t judge him because she was his prisoner, he could speak freely.

  He could admit it was all because of his own misery.

  But he’d come back round at the end of his speech, re-injecting the power dynamic.

  You’re mine.

  Alexis said, ‘When this is over, everyone’s going to know how pathetic you are.’

  A pause.

  She said, ‘All I see is an old man overcompensating for the flaws he never had the balls to fix.’

  She left it at that.

  He slapped her so hard in the face she thought it knocked her unconscious. But her vision only went dark for half a second, and when it returned she saw him broiling with rage, practically shaking from the flood of emotion. She’d touched a nerve.

  She smiled.

  This doesn’t affect me.

  He went to hit her again, despite her non-reaction to the first strike, but something held him back.

  She noticed it, too.

  A couple of Ray’s men just outside, milling around the half-open door, searching for the source of the smack of palm against cheek.

  If he kept hitting her, it’d prove to them that she’d cut him to the core with her words.

  He had to show restraint, despite no part of him wanting to.

  He stood up, hissed, ‘I’ll be back later,’ and stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

  In the dark, she kept smiling.

  44

  The fourth guy died with his secrets as King put a round through the side of his skull.

  The other three didn’t fare much better.

  The two with sub-machine guns didn’t react fast enough. They turned in half-circles, fast, hearts thumping and hands shaking, so they didn’t even manage to aim before Slater shot each of them once in the head.

  The last guy did okay.

  He had the automatic rifle, and instead of aiming and firing he recognised that this was an arena where milliseconds counted, so he put on the metaphorical gladiator helmet and simply squeezed the trigger and sprayed the whole laneway. But the dumpsters absorbed any shots that might have shredded King and Slater otherwise, and King finished him off with a sharp three-round cluster to his face and chest. He wasn’t wearing protective gear. He died gruesomely.

  But his finger held on the trigger, gripping it in his death spasm, and he went down still spraying.

  Right next to Alan Ward.

  Bang-bang-bang-bang.

  The gunfire fizzled out, and the rifle fell from his grip.

  Slater held his breath.

  King closed his eyes in resignation.

&
nbsp; Ward lay still.

  Then the shock brought him back round, and he woke up screaming.

  It was like someone had jump-started Slater with a defibrillator. Hope came rushing back, and he ran out from behind cover with his heart in his throat. It didn’t take long to figure out Ward had taken a bullet to the thigh. The shock of the wound, coupled with the beating he’d sustained seconds earlier, had overloaded his senses and made him pass out. Now he was awake, grunting and groaning, clutching his leg.

  The bullet had missed the arteries.

  Slater put pressure on the wound. Beside him, King breathed, ‘Back in business.’

  ‘Remind me why we do this.’

  ‘For the kicks.’

  They helped Ward to his feet. He didn’t offer any resistance. He was almost catatonic, from shock and pain and the lingering fear of getting carted back to Ray. Slater tied a crude tourniquet over the thigh wound, then used plastic cable ties to secure his hands behind his back. They helped him to the Bentley, shoved him so he splayed across the rear seats, then got back in their own seats.

  Slater separated the car from the dumpster he’d used as an added braking mechanism and reversed out of the alleyway. There were two thumps as they rolled over two bodies. Then they were out on the street, which was understandably deserted. People only hang around to gawk and film shootouts in movies. In reality, when you hear unsuppressed gunfire in suburbia, you take cover and put your head down and pray for your life.

  He gunned it away from the scene before any potential witnesses got brave.

  Ward thrashed in the back.

  Slater said, ‘Relax. We’re not going to kill you.’

  Ward said, ‘Who … who are you two? I’ve never seen you before.’

  ‘We’re not with Ray.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘We’re here to help.’

  ‘You beat the shit out of me.’

  ‘You got into bed with an ex-sheriff running a sex trafficking ring,’ Slater said. ‘I’d say it’s deserved.’

  ‘Don’t you know—?’

  King held up a palm. ‘We know you ran. Tell us why.’

  ‘Tell me who you are first.’

  King turned in his seat and aimed the SIG at Ward’s forehead. ‘We make the demands here. Not you.’