The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2012 by Jay Stringer
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Lyrics from “The Ballad of Hollis Wadsworth Mason, Jr.” by Franz Nicolay (c. 2009 Eggshell Armor Music, ASCAP), used with permission.
Published by Thomas & Mercer
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13:9781612183381
ISBN-10: 1612183387
“If the choice is cynicism, rage, or giving in?” Which world would you rather live in?”
—Franz Nicolay
My second body this week.
He’d still be alive if I hadn’t gone looking for him.
How did it get to this?
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
CHAPTER FORTY
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
I’d spent two days looking for Lee Owen.
I found him hiding in a council flat on Mount Pleasant. After I followed him home, I headed to The Robin, a grungy local music venue just across the road. There was no cover charge, so I slipped inside and used the pay phone to call my boss. For a minute I stood there, listening to some local band murder an eighties power ballad. When they got to the guitar solo, I stepped back out into the chilly night air. My boss’s car was already pulling to the curb. I’m not good with cars. I can’t really tell you the makes or models. This one was dark blue, and it looked expensive. Gav Mann was behind the wheel.
“Is he in there?”
That was how Gav greeted me as I slid in next to him, no pretense at friendly banter or introductions. He’s a real charmer. He’s not the biggest or strongest man in town, but he is one of the most feared. And Owen was the idiot who had stolen from him. The youngest son of Indian immigrants, Gav looked like a businessman who’d come up the hard way. He was always dressed in nice suits, but his hands and knuckles were hard, and his eyes made me think of a tiger. His belly hadn’t given way to fat yet, but it looked like it wanted to.
The car smelled of cigarette smoke and air freshener; the smell clung to the seats and closed in around me. There was a small khanda hanging from the rearview mirror. It’s the symbol of the Sikh religion, meant to represent independence and spirituality, but when I was with Gav I only noticed the swords.
“Over there, the blue door,” I said. “You were quick. Business close by?”
Gav didn’t answer me; he just drummed his fingers on the steering wheel.
“It’s a dump,” he said. “Man steals my money, he can afford better than this.”
“He’s in hiding,” I said. “This is a place nobody would think to look for him.”
“Nobody but you,” he said.
I shrugged. I’m good at finding people.
“He have the money with him?”
“As far as I know. He’s probably planning to rabbit in a couple of days. He thinks he’s doing OK.”
“Any idea how much he’s spent?”
“Not much. He’s too clever to splash the cash when everybody’s going to be on the lookout for it.”
“But not clever enough to leave town. I can’t believe he’s still here,” he said. “If you stole from me, what’s the first thing you’d do?”
“Buy a gun.”
“OK. But the second? I’m betting you’d get as far away as possible. You wouldn’t wait in some shitty council flop five minutes down the road.”
I looked down at my feet. There was a dark stain in the upholstery, and I tried not to think about what it could be.
“What are you going to do with him?”
Gav counted out five hundred pounds in fifty-pound notes.
“I don’t pay you to think about that, Gyp,” he said.
I nodded and took the money. He paid me for a lot of things, but mostly to forget. Gav dialed a number into his mobile and started a call. I let myself out of the car and banged on the roof.
I headed back into town, armed with a chip on my shoulder and some cash in my pocket. There were a select few people who I let call me Gyp or Gypo, and I knew the only reason I let Gav do it was fear. Until just over a year before, I’d been in the police force, and even then many people had seen Gypsy before they saw cop. There are some things you can never escape.
I pushed in through the door at Posada and up to the bar. It’s not the most popular pub in town. It’s small and easy to overlook, but some nights it’s close to perfect. As the other pubs had given over to trends and buyouts, Posada had remained untouched. It still looked dark and uninviting, it was still cramped, and the menu wasn’t painted on the walls in pastel colors. Sometimes it felt like the most welcoming place on earth.
I saw Mary for the first time when she pushed past me into a space at the bar. It must have started to rain outside because her coat was wet. She caught the eye of the barman and ordered straight vodka. Her drink came with ice in it and she frowned. She sipped at it for a moment before making eye contact with me. It was only a second, holding my gaze before looking away. Attitude hooks me before looks, but she had just enough of both. I finished my drink at the same time she finished her second, and I ordered one for each of us. She looked at me again, and her green eyes held me just long enough to pull me forward a few inches. She looked back down at her drink and smiled, bittersweet and wounded.
“My name’s Eoin.” I leaned in close enough to be heard above the crowd. “Eoin Miller.”
“OK.”
Her tone said that the conversation was dead. She blew a stray curl of auburn hair out of her eyes, fixed her gaze into the bottom of the glass, and took another sip. I took the hint and left her to it. I talked to the regular faces at the bar for a while. The language of the pub: Music. Films. Football. I coasted through the small talk with a smile, keeping tabs on the woman at the bar as she worked through a hard thirst. It was twenty minutes before closing time when she told me her name.
“Mary,” she said. “You were going to ask my name. It’s Mary.” There was just enough of an Irish flick to her words to make them sound lyrical. “Someone is trying to kill me.”
That just about sealed it.
The staff at Posada always gave me a lot of slack.
When I’d been on the force, my credentials alone had kept trouble from the bar. My new line of work was just as effective, if not more so. I had often been allowed to sit in the back room after hours, with a selection of friends, and drink away the morning.
Of course it wasn’t always friends I invited to stay. It could be anybody really. It could, for instance, be a drunken Irishwoman who thought someone was out to kill her.
So with the pub locked it was just the two of us. Mary was an impressive drunk, a different class of drinker. She never lost her composure or showed anything much in the way of emotion. She sat comfortably in the booth in the small back room and smiled occasionally out of the corner of her mouth while blowing that stray hair up out of her face. She didn’t slur her words, and she wasn’t flirty. She became steadily more intense as the night wore on. Her head tilted to one side when she looked up at me, reminding me of Lauren Bacall.
Her taste in drink never wavered. She stayed with the open bottle of vodka placed on the table between us.
“You’re in trouble, then?” It seemed the best place to start.
“Yes.”
I could tell she had more to say. Worse, I wanted to ask.
“It sounds complicated.”
“Not really,” she said, then finally opened up. “My boyfriend—my ex-boyfriend—well, we had an argument.”
“Lovers’ tiff?”
Her lip curled. “I guess so. It got serious, and he kicked me out. Threw all my stuff into the street.”
“Really, where is it now?”
“Still in the street, probably.”
I wished I could stop asking questions. But I suppose deep down I hate a mystery.
“Well, it was…it’s complicated. See, he thought that I owed him.”
“Money?”
She hesitated. “Yeah.”
It was a lie, and we both knew it. There was something else there. One thing I had learned in the force is that if you keep asking the same question, one of the answers you get will be the truth. The skill is knowing when that happens. If her boyfriend had really wanted to kill her, he could have done it while he was kicking her out. But it was difficult finding a tactful way to explain that.
I gave it my best shot.
“Look, if he really wanted to kill you, he’d have done it while he was kicking you out.”
“He’s always making threats, like he’ll kick me out or he’ll hit me or something. I can tell when he’s bullshitting, but this time he sounded serious.”
“You let him threaten you?”
She gave me that Bacall look again, and somehow everything I’d said seemed foolish.
“Do I look like I’d let someone actually hit me?”
She didn’t.
“I see. So this guy thinks you stole something, and he’s kicked you out for it and threatened to kill you. Crap boyfriend, if you ask me.”
“What are you, an agony aunt?”
I liked her sense of humor; it showed me no respect at all.
“No, just opinionated. Wish I’d thought of that, though. That would have really pissed off my dad.”
“And that’s how you make your career choices?”
“Is there any other way?”
She laughed again, then poured herself a drink from the bottle. She hadn’t touched it for a while now. Things were slowing down. “So what are you working at these days?”
I cleared my throat. I nodded a couple of times, doing that awkward bobbing that men do when they don’t know how to explain something. I didn’t like to say out loud that I was working for the Mann brothers.
“I do favors, find people, things, you know? I’m saving up to move away, follow my blood.”
“Your blood?”
“My dad is Romani. You know”—I paused before saying it—“a Gypsy?”
She blew the hair out of her eyes again, then looked me over again, seeing me in a different way, noticing now my darker features. I can pass for white, but I can also pass for everything else between England and India.
“Yeah, exactly. I’m one of those people who scare the shit out of councils and neighborhood watch schemes. Well, half of me is. My mom was a Gorjer—a settled person.”
“Aren’t Gypsies Irish? I mean that’s what they all are on TV, those programs with the big weddings and all that. I always feel like the shows are making fun of my accent.”
“No, they aren’t Gypsies. We’re a whole other thing.”
I stopped dead. I hadn’t realized just how much I’d opened up here. It was time to pull things back around.
“So this thing that he thinks you stole—”
“The money?”
“The money, whatever it is, a Russian doll for all I care—”
“OK.” She nodded. “Whatever it is.”
“He’s willing to kill you for it?”
She didn’t say yes, but I could see the direct look in her eyes and read the word at the back of her throat. Did I want the truth? Yes. But I was drunk and tired, and I wanted a kiss even more.
“Want to come back to my place?”
“Sure.”
She said it too quick. She’d known the question was coming. There’s always the rational part of my brain that wonders why a woman would go home with me, but there’s also the male part that thinks I look like Sam Rockwell. That part shouts loudest.
We walked back to my house, both feeling the loosening effects of the alcohol even more once we got out into the autumn air, stretching a five-minute walk out to fifteen. My house was too big for me. I’d taken on the mortgage in what felt like a previous life, when I was married and pretending to be happy. I’d told my wife I liked it because of its location opposite a public park and because it was big enough to start a family. I’d told my friends I liked it because it was only two streets over from Molineux, and I’d never have to miss a Wolves game again.
This was back when I cared about things like that, when the world mattered to me. Now the house was just a building that was too big for me to heat and too quiet for me to think.
We both paused for a second before I put the key in the door. I hesitated like a schoolboy, and she laughed. She slipped her hand underneath mine over the key, replacing my grip with her own, and turned the key. She stepped into the dark hallway and turned back to me with her bittersweet grin.
“Would you like to come in?”
She was smiling, teasing, which seemed like a good opening. I stepped inside and leaned in for a kiss, but she sidestepped it with a playful smirk and turned to look around. She stooped after kicking something and came back up with a pile of white envelopes, all identical, all addressed to me, and carrying the same post mark.
“Ignoring someone?”
“Just my doctor.”
I took the letters from her and dropped them back on the floor before waving for her to look around. There’s not a lot of stuff in my house, no unnecessary furniture, no books that I’ve never read or music that I’ve never listened to, no food that I don’t eat. My wife had never allowed any posters on the walls; she liked them bare and painted. The minute she moved out, I covered those pastel colors with film and concert posters.
Punk rock and seventies cinema are the last revenge of the failed husband.
The only part of the house that had always felt like mine was the kitchen. Cooking was one of the few things I still found any pleasure in. Both of my parents had been good cooks. My mother was a domestic encyclopedia, able to make any meal I challenged her with. My father was a mad genius, combining any variety of herbs and spices with recipes he claimed were passed down through his family. They were never more of a couple than when they were together in the kitchen, laughing and teasing each other as they experimented with food. I had a cupboard dedicated to my father’s spices, and in my lowest moments I locked myself away in the kitchen and cooked, throwing in ingredients until I’d invented something new.
“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” she said. “Men in their thirties who manage to ignore popular music and obsess over people who can’t sing.”
“You’ve never heard of any of them, then?”
“I didn’t say that. I dated a musician once, back in Dublin. He didn’t think a band was any good unless they’d had a career of failure and sang about whiskey.”
“Sounds like my kind of guy.”
“He left me to come over to London and find fame and glory in his own band.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know. I assume he failed and sang about whiskey.”
I handed her a full glass of wine and retreated to lean against the doorframe. She seemed like she needed space. She frowned again, but it was barely noticeable this time. She sat on the sofa with one of my Tom Waits CDs. She was staring at the cover and seemed lost in memories for a moment.
“We went to see him play in London once. Cost a bloody fortune, and we got lost afterward. Spent two hours walking the city looking for our hotel.” She snapped out of it and peered at me. “So there’s no girlfriend or wife hiding in any of these rooms?”
I almost coughed into my glass. That was a bit of a jump, but I had known the question would come.
“No, not these days.”
“What was it, a girlfriend or a wife?”
“Wife. We’re still married, but we haven’t been a couple for quite a while.”
I didn’t know anything about this woman, I realized.
Well, that wasn’t true. I knew her name and that she was single. I also knew she liked to drink. I knew she thought someone wanted to kill her. All told, that was more than most first dates, but not enough to shake the apprehension I was feeling. That rational part of my brain was fighting back again, asking why I had a strange woman in my house when she’d said someone was trying to kill her. Then I watched her wiggle to correct her skirt over her legs, the material stretching a little between her thighs, and I decided the rational part of me could shut the hell up.
She stood up and walked over to lean opposite me against the doorframe. She was close enough that I could smell her perfume.
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