by R. J. Jagger
“I don’t know.”
Wilde took one last drag on the cigarette and flicked it into the street.
“The main thing tonight is for you to stay safe,” he said. “Keep that window open. If there’s any chance at all that he’s back, get out of there. Do you have the suitcase picture of Constance Black and Jessica Dent?”
Alabama felt inside her pants pocket to be sure.
“Yes.”
“Check the flashlight to be sure it works.”
She flicked it on.
“All right,” Wilde said. “If one of the camera-club pictures turns out to be Constance or Jessica, take it with you but try to remember which box it came out of.”
“Got it.”
“I shouldn’t be letting you do this,” he said. “I’m going to go to hell.”
Alabama smiled.
“Wrong about the first part, right about the second.”
“Thanks for the encouragement.”
“No problem.”
Ten minutes later, Raven bounded out of the house and flicked a cigarette towards the street as he slipped into 1948 Nash Airflyte.
“We’re up,” Wilde said.
Alabama got out and slipped into the shadows.
“Good luck.”
“You too.”
Wilde waited until Raven got to the end of the street, then followed.
Nicole.
Nicole.
Nicole.
Where are you?
What’s going on?
62
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
Durivage and Zongying hung in the shadows across the street from Grace Somerfield’s house waiting for Emmanuelle to come out. Ten minutes into it, they caught a flashlight splashing across an upstairs wall, there for a microsecond and then gone just as fast. After that they got nothing. An hour passed. Durivage’s pacing got more and more pronounced.
“She left out the other side,” he said.
“We don’t know that.”
“It’s been too quiet for too long,” he said. “Wait here. I’m going to go in.”
“What for?”
Suddenly the silhouette of a person appeared in the back yard, barely perceptible against an almost-equal darkness. Durivage nudged Zongying and said, “Shhh.” The figure made it to the sidewalk and then headed away at a brisk pace.
They followed.
The woman came under a streetlight.
It was definitely Emmanuelle.
She wasn’t holding anything.
Her arms swung freely.
“If she was looking for anything bigger than a piece of paper, she didn’t find it,” Durivage said.
The plan was simple.
Follow her.
Find out where she was staying.
Then regroup.
Emmanuelle took a right at the first side street, temporarily masked by a string of hedges. When Durivage and Zongying got to the same corner and looked down the street, Emmanuelle wasn’t where she should be.
She wasn’t anywhere.
Durivage made a fist and pounded it into his other hand.
“She spotted us,” he said. “She’s gone.”
Silence.
Then Zongying said, “Now what?”
Durivage turned and headed back towards the car. “Now we need to get into that house and figure out what she was searching for,” he said.
“Now?”
“Yes,” he said. “We’ll need flashlights though.”
“I have one in the trunk.”
“You’re such a prepared little criminal.”
“I don’t know if the batteries are any good.”
The batteries weren’t perfect but they were strong enough. The back door lock had been pried out with a screwdriver, a clumsy job that looked like what a teen might do. They entered and found themselves in a kitchen.
Emmanuelle, it turned out, hadn’t been neat.
Drawers were pulled out and left that way.
Cabinet doors hung open.
Cushions were tossed.
Books were scooped off shelves.
Upstairs in the master bedroom was a wall safe, unlocked with the door hanging open.
Nothing was inside.
The master closet had been ransacked.
“What are we looking for exactly?” Zongying asked.
“We’ll know it when we see it,” Durivage said. “Whatever it is, it’s still here somewhere. I can smell it.”
63
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
After the man left, Jina grabbed her one and only bottle of wine, unscrewed the top and took a long drink. The alcohol stung her mouth but felt good when it dropped into her stomach.
Everything softened.
She took another swig, looked out the window for a few moments and then sat down on the couch.
Noon tomorrow.
That’s how long she had.
Now what?
64
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
As Wilde tailed Raven through the Denver nightscape, the interior of the MG was cold and empty and his blood was slow. Nicole should be sitting right there, right next to him, right now. She wasn’t. What the hell was going on?
Where was she?
If she changed her mind about him, why?
What did he do?
How did he suddenly fall short?
Raven pulled Wilde down 8th Avenue into downtown, then west into that jagged industrial area by the South Platte. The traffic thinned, the asphalt turned to gravel, then the gravel turned to dirt. Wilde had to drop back, even out of sight at times, and finally turned his headlights off altogether. Broken warehouses of abandoned war-related industries cluttered the area.
He came to an intersection.
The taillights of a car were stopped a block down. They brightened for a heartbeat then went out altogether.
Wilde backed up out of sight and killed the engine.
Then he hugged the shadows and headed down the street on foot.
This would be a perfect place to stash a woman for a day or two.
Is that what Raven was doing?
Was he stopping by to check up on someone?
Wilde took one quiet, purposeful step at a time.
He should have brought the gun.
He spotted a rusty piece of rebar in the dirt and picked it up.
It was nasty in his hand.
He didn’t care.
In thirty seconds it might save his life.
65
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
After an unsuccessful hour inside Grace Somerfield’s house, Durivage and Zongying headed home to find Kent Dawson’s car in the driveway. Zongying stopped in the street, shifted into neutral and stared at it in disbelief.
“What do we do?”
Durivage studied the vehicle.
Silently.
The confrontation was here.
Someone was going to be dead very soon.
It might be him.
“Wait here,” he said. “Keep the engine running. If Dawson comes your way, get the hell out of here and don’t come back.”
“Davit!”
He stopped at her side of the car, leaned in and kissed her.
Then he headed for the house.
Dawson was sitting on the sofa smoking a cigarette.
“I told you to be out of town by dark,” he said.
“It looks like I didn’t listen,” Durivage said.
Dawson smiled.
“No, it looks like you didn’t. So now we need to wrap things up. I’ve been sitting here, thinking about how best to do it. I’ve come up with an idea. You want to hear it?”
Durivage leaned against the wall and crossed his arms.
“Go ahead.”
“I propose that you and me get in my car and dr
ive somewhere where no one’s going to bother us,” he said. “Then we settle it, man to man, with just our fists. A fight to the death.”
“Where were you thinking of doing it?”
Dawson shrugged.
“My guess is that after you killed Spencer, you dumped him somewhere off the beaten path. Why don’t we do it there? It’d be sort of fitting, don’t you think?”
Durivage considered it.
“Wait here,” he said.
He walked out to Zongying, leaned in the window and said, “Me and Dawson are going to take a little ride. I’ll be back in an hour, an hour-fifteen tops. I’m going to need you to stitch me up when I get back. If you don’t have the supplies, go out and get them while I’m gone.”
“Davit!”
He kissed her.
“It’s going to be fine,” he said. “Pick up some whiskey too.”
He walked back into the house and said, “Let’s go.”
66
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
With a half bottle of wine in her gut, Jina locked her apartment, got on her Schwinn Spitfire bicycle and pointed the front tire south on Santa Fe. A half hour later she pounded on the front door of a dark house. No one came. She kept pounding until a very surprised Taylor Lee pulled it open.
“We need to talk,” Jina said.
“Have you been drinking?”
Jina pushed past her.
“I need to use your bathroom first.”
Then, after first things first, she told Taylor about the client’s visit, particularly the fact that if he didn’t have the scroll in hand by noon tomorrow, he’d kill Taylor first then Jina.
Taylor’s hands shook.
“Was he serious or was he just shaking the tree?”
“Serious.”
“Are you sure?”
Jina nodded.
“Positive.”
“So what do we do, call the police or hire a bodyguard?”
Jina frowned.
“I saw you in the cab last night,” she said.
Taylor tilted her head.
Confused.
“What?”
“You know what I’m talking about,” Jina said. “I already told you about that man who came over to my house last night pretending to be my client and demanding the scroll. I had it right there in my apartment and could have given it to him, but he was clearly a fake. He wasn’t a real client, he was a puppet with someone else pulling the strings.”
“Right, you told me that.”
“What I didn’t tell you is that when he left, I followed him to a payphone,” Jina said. “He made a call and then got picked up by a cab. In the backseat of that cab was a woman. That woman was you.”
Taylor shook her head.
“That’s crazy.”
“I saw you.”
“There’s no way you could have seen me because whoever you saw wasn’t me,” Taylor said.
“Just admit it was you and tell me why you did it,” Jina said.
Taylor stood up and opened the front door.
“It’s time for you to leave.”
Jina walked out.
The ride home was long and lonely.
She hadn’t gotten what she went for. She was hoping to read something in Taylor’s face or hear something in her voice to find out if she was the woman in the cab.
She didn’t get that.
She still wasn’t sure.
67
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
The remoteness of the area and the darkness of the night sharpened Wilde’s animal instincts. He wasn’t walking, he was hunting. He wasn’t breathing, he was feeding his lungs. He wasn’t seeing, he was absorbing.
A bad, bad thought entered his brain.
Raven abducted Nicole this afternoon.
That’s why she never called.
She would be Friday’s kill.
Maybe Raven got a whiff that Alabama had been running down his dark side. Maybe he traced Alabama to Wilde. Maybe taking Nicole was his cute little idea of revenge.
Wilde tightened his grip on the rebar. The rust poisoned his pores and grated his skin. His human instinct was to throw it down and wash his hands. His animal instinct was to embrace it. Raven was a strong man and an ex-Marine. Wilde wasn’t sure he could take him in a fair fight.
The Nash Airflyte got closer and closer.
Wilde approached as invisibly as he could.
Raven wasn’t in the vehicle.
The closest structure was a large, steel pre-fabricated shell with no windows, a man-door and a row of overhead doors on a truck dock. The man-door was locked. None of the dock doors would push up. There was a door on the side and two more on the back. All of them were locked. No sounds came from within.
Strange.
Wouldn’t Raven park in front of the building he’d enter?
Maybe not.
Maybe he didn’t want the car to be a calling card.
Wilde walked to the next building, an abandoned cinderblock structure with sporadic pane windows, most of which were busted out. He stuck his head in, careful to keep his face away from the jags. No sounds, lights or vibrations came from inside. If Nicole was in there, Wilde would be able to feel her.
He moved on.
The third building was more of the same.
So was the next.
And the next.
Then Wilde spotted something.
It was a large, menacing silhouette, blacker than the night around it.
It had an evil edge to it.
Wilde headed towards it with a nervous walk.
Nicole was in there.
He could feel her.
He’d never killed anyone with his bare hands.
Raven would be the first.
Wilde wouldn't worry about it afterwards.
He’d never second-guess what he was about to do.
Four stories, maybe five, that’s how tall the structure was as Wilde got closer to it. The front door was locked but a broken side window was low enough to climb through. Inside, the structure was so absolutely pitch-black that it may as well have been at the bottom of the world’s deepest cave.
He held his breath perfectly quiet and listened.
He heard nothing.
He listened harder.
Still nothing.
That didn’t mean no one was there. Raven could be on another floor, or in a room behind a closed door, plus he might not be making any noise. Nicole might be unconscious. Raven might be cupped against her, silently licking her face or twisting her nipples or sliding his dick in and out of her thighs.
Wilde stuck his arms out, mummy-like, and took one careful step after another, deeper and deeper into the guts of the hellhole.
Suddenly he remembered the matches and checked his pocket.
He had six packs.
If he lit one, it would give him away.
He didn’t care and lit up.
It provided a lot less light than he anticipated, hardly any actually, given the depth of the space. It was enough to let him see something of interest.
The floor was concrete, something he had already figured out.
Two steps in front of him was a large brownish stain.
Blood?
He walked over, squatted down and took a closer look.
A rat ran down the edge of the floor, drawing Wilde’s attention for a second.
The fire inched its way to his flesh.
He tossed it down and lit a fresh one.
Blood.
That’s what the stain was.
Blood.
He’d seen enough in his life to know.
68
Day Two
July 16
Wednesday Night
Durivage stared straight out the windshield as Dawson drove through the Denver nightscape. Neither man talked. In thirty minutes they turned right down a service road next to rail
road tracks. A few miles later Durivage said, “Stop.”
Dawson pulled over but left the engine running and the headlights on.
Both men stepped out.
A rancid odor came from a rotting body next to a rabbit brush.
Dawson made a face and said, “Is that Spencer?”
“It is,” Durivage said. “Take a good look because it’s going to be you too.”
Both men walked to the front of the vehicle where they could see each other in the headlights.
Suddenly a large knife flashed in Dawson’s hand.
“I thought you said bare hands,” Durivage said.
“It looks like I lied.”
The man charged.
Durivage reacted too slowly.
The knife caught him on the ear.
Blood immediately ran down his neck. He put his hand on it to get a feel for the quantity and pulled it back sopping wet. He needed to get this done, right now, before the loss of blood got him weak.
He let out a war cry at the top of his lungs and charged.
Dawson would have been harder to kill than Spencer, except for the fact that Dawson brought a knife to the fight, a knife that got wrestled out of his grip and then got stabbed in his left eye all the way down to the handle.
After the man stopped twitching, Durivage pulled the weapon out and wiped it clean on Dawson’s pants.
A souvenir.
He dragged Dawson’s body over to Spencer’s rotting corpse and threw it on top.
There.
Done.
Rot in hell.
Both of you.
Dawson wanted a fight to the death.
Now he’d been obliged.
Durivage turned the car around and took one last look at the bodies.
“Be careful what you ask for,” he said.
Then he got the hell out of there.
Zongying was free.
Durivage couldn’t wait to tell her.
Free.
Free.
Free.
69
Day Three
July 17
Thursday Morning
A pounding at the door pulled Jina out of a wine-induced, cavern-deep unconsciousness Thursday morning. She opened her eyes just enough to see daylight squirting around the window coverings. Judging by the strength, she’d slept into mid-morning.
