by Rob Ashman
Lucas pulled her close.
‘What did Darlene say, Heather, the last time I called? What did she say?’
Heather tugged at her hand.
‘I don’t know, please let me go.’
‘No, and neither do I. And why is that, Heather?’
‘Please let go.’
‘Because you wouldn’t let me fucking talk to her,’ Lucas hissed in her ear. ‘So when you’re lying in bed tonight, staring at the ceiling, trying to work out why your life is such a car crash, think about me turning back the clock and picturing your brains splattered over that car park floor.’
Lucas released her and stepped away, leaving Heather with a pink complexion and an open mouth.
That certainly did the trick and Lucas hadn’t seen or heard from her since.
Unfortunately, that was his only show of emotion in a morass of numbness. Afterwards Lucas went back to sitting for days staring at nothing a thousand yards away.
In the early days he couldn’t bring himself to stay at his house. He hated everything about it. Every room reminded him of a time when his wife filled the place with warmth and laughter. Now it was full of nothing. It was too painful, so he filled a bag with clothes and moved in with Harper, which was a mixed blessing.
Harper wanted to play host and slept in the spare room with a mattress on the floor. Lucas took Harper’s bed, with broken slats in the base. The sagging mattress gave Lucas the feeling of being sucked into a black hole every night. Eventually his back hurt so much he made Harper swap.
Another peculiarity of living with Harper was his refrigerator, which could simultaneously keep things cold at the bottom and room temperature at the top.
‘Don’t put food in the top of the refrigerator,’ Harper told him. ‘It’s not cold.’
One day Lucas suggested it might be a good idea to buy a new one.
‘What for?’ Harper rejected it out of hand.
Also, the freezer defrosted itself whenever it felt like it, which meant mealtimes were a constant round of feast or famine. They either had to cook enough food to give a horse a heart attack or not enough to feed them both.
With the help of this absurd normality, Lucas started to get back on his feet. He gradually spent more time at his home and after three weeks waved goodbye to Harper’s hospitality and moved back in. Which was a blessed relief for both of them.
The bereavement counselling provided by the force was the best on offer, but it didn’t help. They met every Tuesday evening, a sad collection of people struggling to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. It was led by a young woman whose police officer husband had died in a road traffic accident.
She was good, but Lucas felt little benefit from attending. On reflection, this was probably due to him meeting up with Harper after the counselling sessions and spending the remainder of the evening drinking himself into oblivion. When he woke the next morning he couldn’t recall a thing the woman had said or anything about the class.
It had been almost a year since he laid his wife to rest in Roselawn Cemetery. Lucas ghosted from day to day achieving the mundane – laundry, shopping, watching TV and drowning himself in a vat of whisky and beer every night. He ate all the wrong foods and drank enough alcohol to give three people liver failure.
Harper had well and truly fallen off the wagon and Lucas was fast joining him in the gutter.
The force offered to pension him off, so Lucas accepted early retirement, and the gross misconduct charges evaporated with no further action. His boss was fantastic after Darlene’s death, which pissed him off. The man was a total dick. Why did he insist on being generous, caring and supportive at the very time when all Lucas wanted was someone to hate.
The various payments from his wife’s life insurance policies meant Lucas didn’t have to work, which was just as well. His life was a collection of nondescript days where nothing happened, and forgotten nights where he drank until he blacked out. It was a sad sequence he repeated over and over again. Everytime he tried to break the cycle his resolve clattered to the floor. Try as he might the scabs kept coming off his life, exposing the deep wounds below, and preventing the healing process taking place. His life was in a flat spin and he couldn’t pull out of it.
The phone rang. Lucas picked it up.
‘Hello.’
It was Chris Bassano’s father.
4
It was testament to the depth of his decline that Lucas no longer minded meeting Harper in the worst café in Florida. In fact, over the past year, he was at risk of being considered a regular.
There was a time when he would physically recoil from his suits if they hadn’t made it to the dry cleaners following a visit to the café. Nowadays the reek of stale smoke and bad hygiene permeated his clothes and he put them on without even noticing.
Lucas shoved open the door and was enveloped in the stench of a hundred wet dogs. The neon signs buzzed behind the bar and grey smog clung to the ceiling like rain clouds. The guy behind the counter looked up and acknowledged him, not with a ‘Good morning, sir, I will be your server today’ type of greeting, this was more of an imperceptible nod of the head.
Harper was in his usual spot, with a steaming mug of black sludge in front of him. He looked up and raised his hand. Lucas moved between the tables and chairs, which looked like the leftovers from a yard sale, and pulled up a seat. Their usual topics of conversation eluded them.
‘I can’t believe it,’ Harper said.
‘I can,’ Lucas replied. ‘Mechanic was never going to stop at killing Darlene.’
‘Are they sure it’s her?’
‘No, they haven’t a clue. But it’s Mechanic alright, her signature is all over it.’
‘How did he …’
‘Massive blood loss, the autopsy report said he died in minutes. She attacked him in an alleyway outside a club. It was some kind of singles night, a masked ball with over three hundred people there. No membership required, just buy a ticket and turn up. You know what Chris was like, she probably came onto him and he swallowed the bait. She took him outside and sliced him up.’
‘Did they find …’ Harper hesitated again.
‘No, the SOCOs tore the place apart, but didn’t find his cock and balls. I can only assume she took them.’
‘They’re probably in a jar taking pride of place on her dressing table.’
‘She did that before with the military guy who raped her, remember?’
‘Yup, she called an ambulance for him though.’
Lucas clenched his fists on the table.
‘Bassano’s family are devastated. His father called to break the news.’
‘They get their kid back on his feet only for this to happen. What have the police said?’
‘It looks like they got jack shit. No CCTV, no forensics, and of course from their perspective, no motive.’
‘And if we give them the motive, we open ourselves up to a whole world of pain.’
‘Exactly.’
The two men sat in silence. The guy behind the counter appeared carrying a mug and slopped it down in front of Lucas.
Harper waited until he had retreated out of earshot. ‘We gotta kill this bitch.’
‘Agreed. If we don’t, it’s you or me next.’
‘Are you up for it? I mean you’ve taken a beating and I wouldn’t blame you if you needed more time.’
Lucas put his hand on Harper’s arm. ‘I want her dead. I want to videotape the life draining from her eyes, so I can watch it over and over again.’
‘Yeah, I get that, but are you up for it? Grief is a funny thing, man. It hits folk in different ways.’
‘You sent me that letter containing the sugar packets because I needed something to fight for, something to stop me hitting the self-destruct button. I hated you for doing it but you were right. Well, I reckon it’s time for me to get off my ass and fight again. She’s taking away the people I hold most dear and I have to stop her. And besides she can’t kill you,
you’re the only one I have left.’
‘You are in one sorry-ass state if I’m the only one you have.’
‘Yes, I am.’ Lucas held up his mug. ‘To killing the bitch.’
Harper held up his drink. ‘Let’s kill her good.’
They drank the hot, bitter coffee and both reached for the sugar bowl.
‘The question is, where do we start? She could be anywhere,’ said Lucas.
‘While you’ve been out of commission, I’ve been doing some digging.’
‘What have you got?’
‘I figure there’s no point trying to look for Mechanic. We know how good she is at disappearing and if the cops can’t find her, we sure as hell won’t. But we do have a new piece of the jigsaw which we didn’t have before.’ Harper reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a sheet of paper.
‘What is it?’ asked Lucas.
‘Are you sure you want to do this?’
‘Do what? What have you got? What new piece of the jigsaw?’
‘The bullet that killed your wife.’
It stopped Lucas in his tracks. His head went down and he closed his eyes.
‘You okay?’ Harper asked, knowing this would be difficult. ‘That’s why I haven’t said anything before. Are you sure you’re ready for this shit?’
‘I’m fine, go on.’
Harper flattened the page on the table. ‘The bullet which killed Darlene, and the rifle that fired it, were serious pieces of kit, real high-end stuff. I got an extract from the ballistics report, this was military grade ammunition. It’s not your weekend warrior weaponry. You don’t use this to shoot squirrels with your buddies, this is designed to kill people, from a very long distance.’
Lucas picked up the paper. ‘This is specialist kit. It says here it has a boat tail narrowing at the bottom of the shell. That’s proper sniper gear.’
‘Yup, purely limited edition, this is latest issue ammunition.’
‘Where the hell would Mechanic get her hands on that? Not to mention the rifle to fire it.’
Harper folded away the paper and put it back into his jacket.
‘That’s not the right question. The question is how would she get her hands on it?’
Lucas considered the nuance carefully. ‘That’s right. Because it’s obvious where it came from. It came from the military. But how would she get her hands on it?’
‘The only thing I can think is she’s got a contact currently serving in the armed forces. Maybe someone she’s worked with in the past?’
‘That would fit. And if we find that person, we get a lead on Mechanic.’
‘Kit like that isn’t going to come cheap.’
Lucas tapped the table, catching up fast with his friend’s train of thought. ‘And what do we always do when that happens …’
‘Follow the money.’ Harper finished the sentence.
Lucas got up from the table, motioned to the bartender, and sat on a stool as a telephone was placed in front of him.
‘Who are you calling?’ Harper asked.
‘Moran,’ Lucas replied punching in numbers.
Harper threw his hands in the air in protest but it was too late.
‘Hi, can you put me through to Detective Rebecca Moran, please.’ Lucas cupped his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘Trust me on this one. I know what I’m doing.’
‘Detective Moran,’ she answered.
‘Moran, this is Lucas.’ He paused. ‘Mechanic has killed Bassano and we need your help.’
‘Fuck off.’
The line went dead.
5
Detective Moran had spent the last twelve months trying to rebuild her life and behave like a normal person. The trouble was she no longer knew what that looked like. If her dealings with Lucas and the plot to catch Mechanic became public knowledge, she was dead meat. She would not only lose her career but her liberty as well. The call from Lucas had ignited her worse fears. It wasn’t over.
The hit on Darlene was unimaginably cruel. But as far as the cops were concerned, it was a one-off incident, probably the work of an ex-con with a grudge. In the police interviews which followed, no one mentioned kidnapping Jo Sells, the motel killings, the adverts in the paper or the link to murdering Bonelli. Lucas kept his mouth shut and Moran stayed well clear. That was the way it had to be.
After Darlene’s murder Moran severed all ties with Lucas, Harper and Bassano and refused to return their calls. She froze them out, she had to. She wanted to forget it ever happened and move on. What she didn’t need was Lucas dredging it up again.
In her quieter moments Moran still craved the prospect of catching Mechanic but she had to put that ambition behind her. Her immediate priority was to keep out of trouble and bury anything connecting her to the bitch.
In the months following Darlene’s death, Moran had continued to work with Mills on the motel murders and the drug killings, but neither investigation had gone anywhere. Mills had screwed up both of them, which suited Moran just fine. Thankfully, under his leadership, no one had managed to join the dots and work out that the same killer was responsible for both crimes. And, come what may, Moran was not about to put her head on the chopping block and point that out.
After a while both investigation teams were scaled back and Moran was transferred to another case. This one involved the shooting dead of a police officer while making routine house-to-house calls in the hunt for Jessica Hudson, Harry Silverton’s bodyguard. The evidence suggested Jessica was lying low after the Bonelli killings, and it was critical to Moran that she remained off the grid. After all, Moran was the only person in the force to know that Jessica Hudson and Mechanic were one and the same, a piece of information she had to make disappear if she was going to protect herself.
The shooting dead of the officer took place in Vegas, in a small apartment which was rented to Mrs Nassra Shamon. She was an Omani woman in her mid-forties and had moved in only days before, paying one month’s rent up front in cash. Her paperwork checked out and the rental agency had the relevant photocopies of her ID and visa. There was nothing to suggest the shooting was linked to the other cases.
The bathroom window at the apartment had shown signs of being forced, and Moran concluded the most likely scenario was that the officer disturbed a burglary in progress. When he intervened he was killed. The other likely scenario was Shamon came back, found him dead, panicked and did a runner. Immigration records showed she had not left the country, but try as they might they couldn’t locate her.
It appeared straightforward but for two worrying facts which bugged Moran: whoever killed the officer took the time to dig the slug out of the wall before leaving, and the whole place had been wiped clean of prints.
Moran arrived at the station early and set about her work. It had been three days since Lucas called and there had been no further contact. Her blunt response had obviously had the desired effect.
Moran heard Mills’ voice booming across the corridor.
‘Yes! You little beauty.’ He was ecstatic about something. ‘Got you, you tricky bastard.’
What the hell was he doing in at this hour? Moran left her desk and followed the noise.
Mills sat in an adjacent office in front of a flickering monitor. He was moving a thumbwheel back and forth on what looked like a giant video recorder.
‘What is it?’ Moran asked.
‘I’ve been ploughing through these all night. It’s taken the best part of a year to get hold of them.’ He pointed to a wall of VHS cassettes stacked on the table.
‘What are they?’
‘They’re not blue movies, that’s for sure. They’re the CCTV footage from the street where Ramirez was killed. You know, the one who got his throat cut and pushed out of a car.’
‘Yes, I remember, but so what?’
‘We’ve been working on the premise that whoever was inside the car killed him and dumped his body on the sidewalk. Our problem is that we have not been able to ID the car or the people in it. We’
ve got a street full of shoppers and no one sees a damn thing.’
‘I remember the witness statements were pretty flaky.’
‘Yeah, plus the fact those useless suckers at the city council managed to lose the damn tapes. Well, watch this.’
Mills turned the wheel and reversed the tape. Moran saw a car pull up at the kerb, and then the two guys in the front got out and walked away. The camera angle wasn’t good but she could just make out Ramirez sitting in the back, leaning out of the window.
‘So the first thing we got is a BMW 3 series with a good shot of the plates. Got that?’ Mills was like a schoolboy demonstrating a magic trick to his friends.
‘Yup, that’s clear.’
He turned the thumbwheel the other way and the action on the screen went into fast forward.
‘Watch.’
The people on the screen fizzed around Charlie Chaplin style as the film sped forward. Moran could still make out the sequence of events unfolding before her. The BMW was parked at the side of the road and a woman wearing long robes and a hijab approached the vehicle with her hands outstretched. People on the sidewalk did their best to avoid her. She stopped in front of the back window and Ramirez waved her away. It looked like the woman was begging for money. She moved in close, her back to the camera. She stumbled as though he had pushed her. She straightened up, turned and walked away.
‘Watch now,’ Mills said as he wound the wheel back with his thumb and slowed down the film.
The two men returned to the car carrying grocery bags and jumped in. The car pulled away and then came to an abrupt stop. The passenger leapt out, flung open the back door and Ramirez toppled out onto the sidewalk, his throat sliced open.
‘Gotcha,’ said Mills hitting the freeze-frame button and zooming in. He jabbed his finger on to the screen, pointing at the man next to the car. ‘At last you and me are going to have a little talk.’
Moran wasn’t looking at the man, she was looking at the beggar woman shuffling up the street towards the camera. She was looking at Nassra Shamon.
She tried desperately to make sense of what she was seeing. Why would a woman who paid a month’s rent in cash be begging for money on the street?
