The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut

by John Rickards

  I nodded. “They’ve seen the news.”

  “Yeah, they have.”

  “And they know I work with you.”

  “Yeah, they do.” He dropped his head.

  “And they’ve been getting a little twitchy about employing a company with a murder suspect on their books. I know it’s only ‘police want to speak to’, but the cops don’t release a name unless they’ve got something to back it up, and people come forward if they’ve got nothing to hide. So just about everyone’s thinking ‘he did it’.”

  “Yeah, that’s about the shape of it. Some of them are saying they’re not sure about taking us on. They never say why, but they ask about you, and it’s pretty damn obvious. We’ve lost out on a couple of jobs, and there’s a few more who are nervous. And it’s getting worse the longer this goes on. So…”

  “Yeah.” I nodded.

  “I’m going to have to put out a statement saying that I’ve suspended you pending the outcome of the police investigation, that we urge you to come forward, and to say that if it turns out you were prevented from coming forward by circumstances we don’t yet understand and you’re exonerated then we’ll re-evaluate the situation then, yadda yadda yadda.”

  “Take my name off the letterheads.”

  “Basically. Disown you. Disavow you. Whatever spooks call it.”

  “Fire me.”

  “Officially. The association’s just hurting the business too much. It’s not like the market’s bottomless or our profits can take the hit. I wanted you to hear it from me before you caught it any other way. I got your back, but I can’t have you back until this is all done and forgotten.”

  I shrugged. “It’s no big deal, Rob. You’ve got Teresa, you’ve got four other people working for you, and they suffer when work suffers. You’ve always been good to me. You gave me a break when the Bureau had given up on me, and I still appreciate that. You could’ve put that out, gone on the evening news to tell the world I was always an asshole, and I’d still have forgiven you.”

  “You’d have been pretty pissed.”

  “Sure. But you could’ve explained and I’d have believed you. Eventually.”

  “Heh. Anyway, you got everything you need? I’ll keep your email clear, dazzle the cops with bullshit if they try to access it. You hang onto the car for as long as you need it. And if you need us to do anything for you, same as now, just get in touch. We’ll sort something out.”

  “I will do.” I glanced up at the clouds. “Hell of a day for all this.”

  “Hell of a day.”

  “End of an era. You’d best get back, Rob. No sense either of us sitting around in weather like this any longer than we need to.”

  We shook hands. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done that. “Good luck, Alex, and keep in touch. I’ll see you when all this has blown over.”

  And then he was gone, taking another piece of my old, normal life with him. And so was I.

  Kris and I met not far from the apartment Sophie had told me was Perry’s. The neighborhood was like a Victorian industrial ghetto. Buildings like tall dark sweatshops. The streets felt blocked-in on all sides, gloomy, walled. The scent of broken dreams on the air.

  “You want me to keep an eye outside,” he said.

  “Right.”

  “You’re expecting trouble?”

  I shook my head, said, “Not really, no. Rob didn’t seem to think there was anything odd about the information.”

  “So why leave me outside? Why have me here at all?”

  “I don’t want you following me up there and spooking Perry, and the only way I can be sure you won’t is if you know what to do.”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t spook him.”

  “Okay. I don’t want you coming up there and putting me in the middle of another fucking bloodbath. How about that? Perry could give me Goddard or Heller or both. This is important.”

  “Whatever. You want me to hang back, I’ll hang back.”

  He wound up the window on his car. The conversation seemed to be over, which suited me fine. I walked down the street to Perry’s building, eyeing the area up as I went. Looking for anything amiss, anything that doesn’t belong here. A car too expensive for the neighborhood. A guy loitering nearby with clothes that hadn’t worn in yet.

  I saw nothing.

  The inside of the building mirrored the streets outside. Drab brickwork and one gloomy stairwell that wrapped around a central elevator core. A bank of mailboxes with apartment numbers but no names. The smell of dog hair and bug spray. Perry’s apartment was at the end of a short corridor on the third floor. No sound from the neighbors’ places, but I heard a TV playing in his.

  I knocked and the door swung all the way open, held by a big guy in a suit jacket and polo shirt. His matching twin stood by the wall beside him, watching me, while a third man sat in an armchair facing the doorway with a gun pointed my face.

  45.

  “Good afternoon, Mr Rourke,” he said. “Please come in.” His voice was gruff but cultured; a real well-mannered tough guy. He had close-cropped greying hair and a bristling mustache, like an aging Army sergeant major in a five thousand dollar suit.

  I could have tried running, shooting me in the corridor would have been an easy task for a child, let alone these guys. So I stepped into the room and let one of the twins close the door behind me.

  There was no sign of Perry in here, and it looked like the apartment hadn’t been occupied in a while. I felt like an idiot.

  “My name is Mr Rutherford, and if you so much as think about stepping out of line here, I will shoot you,” the man with the gun said. His eyes were flat and cold, and if he wanted it, I knew I was a dead man. He probably wouldn’t even have blinked before pulling the trigger. “If you’re lucky, I may only take one of your knees as a warning first. If you’re not, or if you threaten either me or my employer, I will kill you. My employer wants to speak to you, so he’d like you alive. But he doesn’t want it enough to give you the chance to mess us around again, so you won’t get that chance. You’re a smart man, Mr Rourke. You should know the odds here.”

  “Who’s your employer, Mr Rutherford?”

  “Like I said, you’re a smart man.”

  “You work for Gabriel Heller.”

  Rutherford nodded, but didn’t take his eyes off mine. I could feel the twins looming over each of my shoulders. “I’ll be taking you to see him, Mr Rourke. And you’ll be coming along quietly, and you’ll behave yourself.”

  He said this with a clarity and calmness that left me in no doubt that he’d happily make good on his threats if I did otherwise. Some people were all bluster when they said things like that. You learned to spot them easily enough. Rutherford wasn’t one of them. He had an air of absolute finality about him.

  “That’s fine, Mr Rutherford. I want to talk to your employer too. There’s things we’ve got to discuss.”

  “I’m sure. Lawrence here is going to search you for weapons, and then we’ll go to see Mr Heller.”

  Without a word, one of the twins began patting me down. My gun was in the car back down the street, so he was out of luck. Part of me wondered if that would be the only traces I’d leave behind — an empty car and a loaded gun.

  Rutherford and the twins took me back downstairs and out to a waiting Opel. It was a few years old and dusty. A guy in a battered jacket and a baseball cap was behind the wheel. I thought maybe I’d seen him standing further down the street on the way here, but now I understood that these guys wouldn’t look out of place in this neighborhood because chances were they owned this neighborhood. I couldn’t see Kris or the Crown Vic anywhere.

  “Do you like ballet, Mr Rourke?” Rutherford asked as we cut across town.

  “I’ve never been.”

  “You should, I think. The precision of the routines. The grace and elegance despite the physical hardships. The sacrifice the dancers make for the sake of art. It’s beautiful, yet tragic, as even the best have only a f
ew short years at the peak of the profession, and their reward could be a lifetime of pain.”

  “You sound like a serious fan.” Stating the obvious, but there wasn’t much else to say to that.

  Rutherford nodded. “You could say that. If you get the chance, the Kirov Ballet is performing Sleeping Beauty at the Wang Theater for the next month.”

  “It’s good?”

  “Breathtaking, Mr Rourke. Breathtaking.”

  “I’ll check it out if I get the chance,” I said.

  The car lapsed into silence for a while. Squeezed in the back between the two twins, I was in no mood to try starting a conversation of my own. I was trying to watch the streets, see where we’re going. Somewhere between plotting an escape route and sampling as much of what might be my final journey as I could.

  Eventually, we swung into a narrow alleyway and pulled up next to a set of red loading bay doors. We got out in formation, and Twin Number Two rolled them open. Rutherford gestured for me to step inside. The car pulled away as I walked into the concrete cavern of the garage beyond. The three of them showed me through a side door into a small storeroom with a single chair in it.

  “Take a seat, Mr Rourke,” Rutherford said. “Mr Heller is a busy man, so I suspect you’ll be waiting here a while. Lawrence will be outside should you need anything.”

  I looked at him and the twins, once more weighing up the odds and my chances of making a break for it. I didn’t see it happening. Rutherford was back out of reach and the other two were built like wrestlers. So I did as they said and stepped into the storeroom. The door thudded shut behind me and the lock ratcheted into place.

  46.

  The place had to be a club of some kind. Not Metro’s — this was a different building — but after the first three hours alone in the storeroom, I could definitely hear bass thrumming through the walls. Either Heller was busy, or he liked making his ‘guests’ sweat a little before he saw them. Or maybe he was just deciding what to do with my body after they put a bullet through my skull.

  The door was heavy steel and the only other opening was a tiny grate-covered drain in one corner. I tried testing Lawrence by asking to go to the bathroom, but he just told me to hold it or piss myself. No budging.

  It was gone nine in the evening by the time I heard voices outside and the lock shucked back. Both twins there, and Rutherford standing between them. “Mr Heller will see you upstairs,” he said.

  They led me up a couple of floors by a back staircase, out of the way of the club’s patrons and regular staff, and out behind a bar in what looked like a private function room of some kind. Lamplit tables in shallow alcoves, all painted up to look like some kind of tropical ocean scene. Coral reefs and kelp. It looked hideous. A balcony to the right, running across the roof of the floor below, had a view of the harbor. The French windows leading onto it were closed and probably locked, but I kept it in mind. Along with Rutherford and the twins, there were three other guys in the room. Two of them in position near another set of doors, which I guessed led down to the club proper, and one heavy-set guy maybe a year or two older than me in a very expensive suit, sitting at a table by the side of the room.

  A TV set above the bar was playing the evening news on mute. I had no idea what the anchor was saying, but they were showing Rob’s picture on the screen.

  Behind me, Rutherford said, “In you go, Mr Rourke.”

  I ignored him, kept staring at the screen. Cut to the outside of a hospital. Cut again to shots of emergency vehicles outside Rob’s house. Police, paramedics. Someone putting up crime scene tape. I saw the words ‘critical’ and ‘brutal assault’ on the news ticker before Lawrence pushed me forwards.

  The guy at the table stood up.

  Heller. I recognized him from old news stories. His expression was unreadable, but he didn’t look too friendly. He waggled two fingers at me, waving me over. I felt my temper rising. The son of a bitch had put Rob in intensive care and he was acting like I was here to arrange a fucking car loan.

  “I bet you wish you’d never got involved with all this,” he said. A thick New York accent untouched by his years in Boston. Robert De Niro with a bad throat and a couple of Valium. “You’re in seven kinds of shit, Rourke. Sit down.”

  I took a seat and he nodded at my escorts. Rutherford and the twins walked away to join the rest of the gorillas.

  “Mr Heller,” I said, fighting the urge to jump over the table and squeeze his throat until his eyes popped for what he’d done to Rob.

  “You have any idea what you’re into?” He kept his voice low, hard to hear over the bass from downstairs. “You must do, smart guy like you, else you wouldn’t be asking about me.”

  “You tried to frame me for murder, Mr Heller. Until then, I had nothing to do with you.”

  “And if things’d worked out like they should’ve, you wouldn’t have nothing to do with me now. You’re a resourceful man, Rourke. You’ve dodged the cops so far, and I had a buncha guys watching you and they all vanished.”

  Thought: fuck you, you piece of shit. Said, “Everyone wants a vacation this time of year. They probably went to get some sun.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  “So you set the cops on me, and had people after me, and now you want to talk to me, Mr Heller. Why the change in tack?”

  “When it became clear how resourceful you are, it struck me that you might not be just some dumb jerkwad who fell into something that didn’t concern him. I want to know what you know.”

  “Couldn’t get any information out of my partner, you fat sack of crap? That why you’re asking me?”

  I must have said this just a little too loudly because I heard Rutherford or one of the gorillas move at the back of the room. Heller waved them back into position and fixed me with eyes like a shark. “What the fuck are you talking about? Fuck would I want with your partner?”

  “Rob’s in hospital right now with God knows what done to him by your guys. I saw it on the news coming in here.”

  “My guys?”

  “Your guys went to the office to talk to him the other day. He told me. He didn’t give them what they wanted to know, so you had them come back later and beat the shit out of him until he talked.”

  “My guys haven’t been near your goddamn office,” he said, jabbing his finger at me. “Fuck would I need anything from him? Only time we talked to him was to set up your meeting with Mr Rutherford, and that was a phone call.”

  “Harvey and Andrew. One big, one little. Little one’s got a scar on his cheek. Your guys.”

  Heller looked past me and called out, “Rutherford! Two guys, Harvey and Andrew, little and large. One with a scar on his cheek. They ours?”

  “No, Mr Heller. We have an Andrew, but he’s currently out of town. We don’t have anyone by the name of Harvey working for us.”

  “There you go, Rourke. Not my guys.” His voice dropped again. From the look on his face, like I’d offended him by even mentioning it, instinct told me to believe him. Instinct had a habit of being wrong, of course. And if it wasn’t Heller’s people looking for me, and Heller was the one tied to Goddard, who the hell were they?

  “If they did whatever to your friend because of you,” Heller said, “then maybe you’re in even worse shit. You got a lot of enemies, seems.”

  “Yeah. Seems.”

  He let me digest the information for a while. “So you want to talk to me, Mr Heller, and find out what I know about…”

  “Who it is whose affairs you’ve interfered with. Everything you know about him.”

  I nodded. “Which is interesting, because I want to ask you the same thing. And I’m guessing that what I know is right, or else you wouldn’t have your goon squad way over there where they can’t hear what we’re saying.”

  “Is that so?”

  “I guess it’s the same in the real world as it is in prison,” I said with a grim smile. “No one wants people to know they’ve got a thing for little kids.”

  For
a moment, I thought he was going to snap and kill me on the spot. His eyes bulged, his nostrils flared and he seemed to be biting his tongue like it was a piece of prime rib.

  “Your guys wouldn’t like it if they found out, would they, Mr Heller? I bet some of them have families of their own. Shit, I expect you like to act like a respectable family businessman yourself. They’d turn on you real quick if they knew what you like to do to children.”

  His expression was stony enough to mine it for granite. “What do you know about him?”

  “Anderson, or whatever his real name is? You know his real name?”

  “If I did, he’d be dead by now.”

  “He had a couple of little boys he kept at his house when he lived in New York. One of them was a scrawny kid called Cody Williams. You and him and a bunch of other guys used to get together to take turns fucking them.”

  He showed no reaction this time. Said, “Continue.”

  “And then one of them escaped and you boys all went your separate ways. Anderson moved, you came to Boston to become part of whatever operation this is, and you never saw him or the kids ever again. Not until we busted Cody for snatching little girls.”

  “Williams told you all this? Little fucking loudmouth. We should’ve shut him up years ago.”

  I didn’t correct him. “You used to know Billy Perry too, right? I imagine you must have been tempted to ask him about what Cody talked about.”

  “Haven’t seen him in ages either. Not since he shacked up with one of my girls in Roxbury. Hey, Rutherford,” he called out. “Who was the piece of ass quit working to start a family or some shit with Billy Perry?”

  “Di Marco, Mr Heller. Gwen Di Marco.”

  “Was she cute?”

  “I honestly can’t remember, Mr Heller.”

  Heller looked back at me with a smirk and lowered his voice again. “That’s all that Billy Perry means to me. He never said anything about Cody, and I never asked. If he’d have known something I’d have killed him. And you don’t need to find him to find me, because I found you first, Rourke.”