The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  He walked back in the direction of the BMW. I looked down at the girl, who’d realized the beating had stopped and was looking around her with tear-streaked eyes. Her face was already going red in places. She gasped at the unconscious form of Victor.

  “He was trying to keep more money than you owed him?” I said.

  She nodded and managed to get to her feet, still fighting to draw breath. “He said… interest. But I need… Who are you? What’s happening?”

  I started going through Victor’s pockets. “Right now, I’m asking myself the same question. I’m not Victor, which I guess is good for you.”

  He had about seven hundred bucks loose in one pocket, and a money clip in another with what at least another three grand. In his jacket, I found a slightly battered Berretta. It was loaded, but there were no spare clips. More for show than anything else, I guessed.

  “Is… he… dead?”

  “No. Broken nose, but he’s just out cold. You OK?”

  “Short on… breath, but I’ll be all… right.”

  “You got kids, boyfriend, any family?”

  She shook her head uncertainly.

  I pocketed the gun and tossed her the money. “Then take this, get a cab, throw your stuff into a bag and get on the next train out of town. Raise kids. Open a flower store. Have a good life. Just get well away from this one. And forget everything that happened here.”

  She went silent for a moment, then very quietly said, “Thanks. Why do… I mean, why did you do all this? I mean, with the cash and all.”

  I shrugged. “I need the karma. Go.”

  She scurried away with a last downward glance at Victor. I turned towards the BMW just in time to see the guy in the trench coat put a bullet between the eyes of the wheezing suit I’d crushed with the car door.

  41.

  He saw my expression. said, “What? You gonna complain? You gonna call the cops? To clear away the rest of these assholes and sort out this mess I can’t leave ‘em alive. Get fucking real, Alex. You’re not in Boy Scouts any more. These people were going to kill you.”

  I considered drawing Victor’s gun on him, but everything was starting to hurt big time and I was in no condition to pick another fight. “Who the fuck are you?”

  “When we’re away from here,” he said, and hauled the dead suit round to the BMW’s open trunk. The others were already inside. He looked some way younger than me. Mid to late twenties, maybe, but worn down. A ragged mop of bleached hair, equally ragged face a shade too pale to be completely healthy, trench coat over cargo pants and a t-shirt. Battered sneakers. Leather gloves.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Amazing the amount of room there is in these things. When you don’t have to leave breathing space, anyway.”

  “What?”

  “Parking the car some place out of the way. The harbor maybe, away from anyone much. It’ll be a few days at least before they’re found, and by then it’s just another mob murder.”

  I just stood there and stared at him, baffled.

  “Who’s that?” he said, pointing at Victor.

  “Some pimp who was having an argument back here when I showed up.”

  “He alive?”

  “Unconscious.”

  The guy reached into his coat and pulled out a pistol. It had an overly-thick barrel. One of those integrally-silenced weapons; I guessed the noise it made was because he was using ordinary shells, not subsonic.

  “Whoa, whoa,” I said. “You’re not going to kill him too. He’s unconscious.”

  “He’s a witness.”

  “He’s a shitty little pimp. You think he’s going to report any of this? To who? He’ll wake up, know he got caught up in something beyond him, and be fucking thankful he wasn’t killed. He won’t care about anything else.”

  The guy hesitated for a moment, fixed me with watery blue eyes. “You said he was arguing? Who with?”

  “A girl.”

  “A girl?”

  “A hooker. I gave her the money he had and told her to get out of town.”

  He shook his head. “Another fucking witness, Alex? What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking I’m not about to start murdering everyone I meet. I was thinking I’m not some psychopath and I was thinking this isn’t a fucking war zone. She’s got nothing to tell anyone, he’ll be glad to still have his kneecaps, so we’re done. Unless this place has CCTV watching its parking lot, in which case we’re fucked.”

  “Only inside the store.” The guy shook his head, thought for a second. “Help me find my brass, then we can go.”

  “Won’t someone spot the bloodstains?”

  “Behind the back of a convenience store in this neighborhood?”

  I considered that. The guy smiled.

  “It’ll have turned dark by morning. Look like motor oil or brake fluid. No reason to think it’s blood unless we leave brass for them to see.”

  He scanned the ground for shell casings. I tried to at least look like I was helping, all the while keeping one eye on the stranger. He moved quickly, eyes skipping over the asphalt. His head snapped up at every sound from the street beyond, meerkat-like. A minute of this, occasionally stooping to collect a casing, and he was finished.

  “I’ll take the BMW,” he said. “You follow in my car.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “Who do you think Gabriel Heller will blame for killing his men? If the cops get wind of it, do you think they’ll believe some story about a stranger in a long coat shooting them out of the blue?” He tossed me a set of keys. “And you drive off in my car and I’ll report it stolen.”

  I thought about my options. I didn’t have many, and I wanted to know who this guy was. “Fair enough,” I said.

  “It’s parked out front,” he said, and disappeared into the BMW.

  A silver Crown Vic was skewed across the gravel near the main entrance to the parking lot. It looked identical to the one that tried to follow me to Tucker’s on the night he died.

  Inside, the car had seen better days. Half a dozen empty Coke bottles on the floor, other trash, snack food and bits of paper. The interior was scratched, busted in places. It smelled like an old dog in a men’s locker room.

  The BMW rolled past me, and I swung into position, line astern. The guy drove cleanly and carefully, no speeding, stopping at every stop sign, obeying every light, always uses his turning signal. We headed east until we hit the harbor. Along one of the wharfs dotting the edge of south Boston, we found a couple of unused warehouses with a cracked ‘FOR LEASE’ sign on the fence outside. The guy popped the chain on the gate with bolt cutters from the trunk of the Crown Vic, and parked the BMW between the two buildings just like a regular visitor. Then he joined me.

  “Job done,” he said. “They won’t be found for a while.”

  “What now?”

  “Now, we talk. I’m hungry. Let’s find somewhere to eat. You like Moroccan?”

  “Where to?”

  “Theater District. I’ll give you directions.”

  The place looked like the cantina out of Star Wars. Dark alcoves, domed ceilings. An orange lamp in the centre of each table the only light. The guy stayed quiet until the food arrived.

  “Kris Lane,” he said between mouthfuls of couscous. He chewed like he hadn’t eaten in a week.

  I cracked open a tajine pot. “How do you know me?”

  “You were talking to Cody Williams. I saw that on the news. But more than that, you’re looking for Anderson.”

  “Anderson?”

  He looked at me. “I don’t know what he’d be calling himself today.”

  “The guy Cody was working for?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I guessed. His old crew all broke up, twelve years ago, something like that.” He took another forkful of grains. “You’re looking for him, that I know. I don’t know what Cody told you.”

  I didn’t rise to that. Chewed for a moment, paused for thought. “You seem to know a whole lo
t about all this. How come?”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  “Not yet. How come you know all about him?”

  Kris stared at me, hard, unreadable. “Anderson grabbed me before he found Cody,” he said. “I was his first one.”

  42.

  You’re a twelve year-old boy, son of a store clerk in Queens, New York. Your neighborhood’s poor, but it’s got pride. People keep their buildings clean, they sweep their steps in winter, kids go trick-or-treating at Halloween. Your mom tried to bring you up a good kid, and you do your best to make her happy. One day you’re walking to school.

  It’s a beautiful fall day. The trees are starting to turn properly, and the streets are peppered with red and gold. You’re breathing cool, fresh air, different to the baked lung-fulls of summer. It’s a good day to be alive. You’re thinking about the friends you’re going to see later, about the homework you haven’t done and the excuses you’ll use to cover it. You’re wondering if Mom will be making cherry pie tonight like she promised she would.

  Then the black car pulls up next to you and the guy inside flashes you a badge and said he’s a cop. He asks you your name, and when you tell him he nods and says he’s been trying to find you. Your mom’s been in an accident, he says, and you have to come with him so he can take you to her. The badge looks just like the ones off TV.

  You climb into the back of his car and he drives off. The car’s very big and it smells of leather. The cop doesn’t drive you home, or to the nearest hospital. He drives you across town, away from your neighborhood, to parts of the city you don’t know.

  When you start freaking out, he tells you he’s not a cop. He tells you his name is Mr Anderson, and he and his friends have kidnapped your mom, and if you don’t want anything bad to happen to her, you’d better do everything he says. You keep staring at the people in passing cars, hoping one of them will see that you’re in trouble and will help you out. Call the real cops. But they don’t notice you, or don’t notice that there’s anything wrong. And you’re all alone with this man and there’s no one to help you.

  The car pulls into the driveway of a brown house. The man walks round and opens your door, and tells you not to try anything because he’ll hurt Mom if you do. He walks you in front of him all the way into his house, and he closes the door behind you. The house smells of lemon air freshener and fried onion.

  The man takes you upstairs to an attic room, which is empty apart from an old rusty bed and a bucket. There’s one window looking out, but it’s small and it’s locked. You ask the man where Mom is, and he just laughs and says he doesn’t know, but you won’t be seeing her again. And he forces you onto the bed and does things to you.

  That’s how it goes for the first few days.

  No one hears you when you try calling for help. No one hears you crying alone at night. You’re closeted away, the outside world forever lost to you. Trapped in a nightmare place where there’s nothing but the man and his desires, where if you resist in any way at all he just hurts you more as punishment. Something that only adds to his enjoyment. If you’re good, he sometimes gives you little treats, like candy bars or clean clothes. They seem like a big deal for a moment, until you think of what you’ve done to ‘earn’ them. He acts like you should be grateful he’s taking such good care of you. Every time you eat a candy bar or slurp your Pepsi, it’s like you’re betraying yourself. Giving up hope.

  Then his friends start showing up and taking their turns with you.

  “Friends?” I said.

  “Anderson had a little circle of friends,” Kris said.

  “A pedophile ring?”

  “Something like that. There were six of them, including him. It was like a club night or something. The ‘Gang of Six’ I always thought of them as. Motherfuckers. They weren’t always all there, but it was like a group meeting, all arranged I’d guess. I don’t think any of them ever showed up unannounced.” He gulped his orange juice and ordered another from the waiter. I got another beer.

  “And they were all in on what was going on?” I stopped myself from saying ‘abusing you’. I didn’t know how he’d react.

  Kris nodded. “Hell yeah. Sometimes some of them would just like to watch, but they all had their turn some time. They were all guilty.”

  “I’m guessing you knew who they were. Or you found out since.”

  “Yeah, I knew. I caught enough names, overheard enough conversation. Like I said, it was like club night. They were relaxed, enjoying themselves. Anderson was the one I knew the least about. He was always careful. You say he’s calling himself Goddard now? Here in Boston?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. He’s still got links here, though.”

  “Heller.”

  “Heller was one of the Gang of Six?”

  “Yeah. Back then, I think he was just a thug for the local Mafia. Mid-level tough. That sort of thing. He’s grown since then.”

  “Gabriel Heller? Jesus. So he’s a friend of Goddard’s.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Kris said. “Not these days.”

  I finished my dinner. “They fell out?”

  “They all did. Because of me. And because of Cody Williams.”

  “What?”

  “One night, Anderson brought this other kid home. Some poor runaway he’d found. He treated him the same way he treated me when he first arrived — saying the same thing about how trapped he was, blah blah blah.” Kris scratched his head, looked away. “When he’d finished with him for the night, he locked him in the attic with me, and told us if we even looked at each other he’d punish us for it.”

  “But you didn’t obey,” I said.

  “I was good at looking scared and obedient and everything by then, I guess. I can’t say how strange and exciting it was to see someone else, someone in the same shit I was in, someone I could talk to. But I hid that excitement until Anderson was long gone. The kid was just crying, for hours and hours. But he talked to me a little when he calmed down. He said his name was Cody Williams. About the same age as me, no idea where he was or what was going to happen to him — to us. I didn’t tell him what to expect.”

  Kris must have seen something on my face when he said this because he added, “What was I supposed to do? Make him more afraid? Let that fucker know we’d been talking? It wouldn’t have helped him anyway. Nothing we could do, not against Anderson and not against the others. Fuck it, you know?”

  “So what happened then?”

  Kris finished the last of his drink. I made the universal airborne scribbling motion for ‘check please’. He said, “Anderson seemed to be real taken with the new kid. Almost forgot about me. He spent hours… with him downstairs. The rest of the gang all had their fun too. I guess they found Cody was more obedient, or easier to manipulate how Anderson wanted, than I was. Even with the act, they must have figured I was resisting them. Cody even fell for the whole ‘little treats and candy bars’ trick. I could see it in him. That was a real treat for him. Like a whipped dog suddenly being given a fresh bone by its master. Fucking scary. I had a bedspring free and when they were with him and I was alone in the attic, I was using it to cut out some of the wood around the lock on the small window.”

  We fell silent as the waiter arrived with the bill. I paid cash. “No one noticed?”

  “Maybe Anderson believed his own bullshit about how trapped we were. Maybe he was just caught up with Cody. Anyway, that was all I thought about. Getting out. Away from them. Took me a couple of weeks, then I did it. I got out, ran, disappeared into the city as fast as I could.”

  “You didn’t try to take Cody?”

  “He was downstairs when I did it. I needed him to be a distraction so I could get out.” We stood to leave. “He wouldn’t have come anyway, I don’t think. He was too scared. Too much in their control. But after I escaped, they had a witness on the loose who could identify them. So Anderson went into hiding someplace else. The gang broke up and had nothing to do with each o
ther again, and no one saw Cody until he showed up years later.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I had a rough few years. I was one fucked up kid. Imagine it.”

  We left the restaurant and stepped back into the cold night air. The streets were quiet and it was late. Places were shutting down. I could taste rain.

  “Did you go to the cops?” I asked.

  Kris shook his head. “Craig Warren. Member of the Gang of Six. Also a lieutenant in the NYPD. New York’s Finest. I was terrified if I did, he’d find out and find me again. I can’t explain how much I dreaded that. No cops. In fact, I couldn’t even look at a fucking cop for months after that without hiding in case they were looking for me.”

  “So you had a few rough years, and you’ve, what, been tracking them down in turn?”

  Kris said nothing, which I took to mean I was right.

  “If you wanted these guys so badly, but you were scared of the cops, why didn’t you try getting in touch with me or the Bureau when we were working on the Williams case? You must’ve known we would’ve had nothing to do with the NYPD.”

  “I had good reasons at the time.”

  “Good reasons.”

  “Yeah.” He nodded. “Good reasons.”

  I let it go. “What about now? Why follow me? And how did you know where I was or what the hell was going on this evening?”

  We reached the car. Kris unlocked it, slid across to open the passenger door for me, turned the heater on.

  “What?” he said.

  “Why follow me?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve been hoping you were going to find Anderson. That’s why I sent you those video clips.”

  43.

  I stared at him. “You sent those? Where the hell did you get them, and what the fuck do you know about them?”

  “There was another member of the Gang, lived out in Buffalo. He must have still been in touch with Anderson because I found those clips on his computer, maybe a year ago. I couldn’t find where he was or anything, just an email address I never got an answer from. But I hung onto the clips, because of who they’d come from. Then I saw on the news you were working with Cody, and they started showing pictures of those girls and I knew it was one of them in the film. I knew you’d want to find Anderson or Goddard or whatever the fuck he’s called now, so I sent you the videos.”