A Cross to Bear: A Jack Sheridan Mystery

by Vogel, Vince

  “The cross was different,” Jack muttered out loud, squinting his eyes from the cigarette smoke.

  “Sorry, sarge?”

  Jack turned and looked at Lange as though this particular statement had never been meant for him. But, seeing that the DC had heard it now, he went on.

  “The crosses on the previous two bodies had rounded edges, and this one didn’t.”

  “Maybe he’s changing styles.”

  “A fashion-conscious killer? Perhaps.”

  Jack returned his gaze to the pouring rain that draped the windscreen. More thoughts of John Dorring’s bloodied body lying spread out on the pavement, his wife’s screams echoing off into the endless black sky, his two children gazing at their fallen father with wide eyes, the boy trying to stay strong for his little sister. He would be the man of the house now, Jack had thought.

  He shook his head, threw his cigarette butt out the window, and signaled to Lange that they were leaving. However, no sooner had the detective constable started the engine than there was a rapping at Jack’s window.

  He wound it down and swore as he saw the pink face of Jonny Cockburn. He immediately began winding it back up, but the journalist placed his hand on it.

  “Just a few words, Jack,” Cockburn pleaded.

  Cockburn was in his late forties and had worked for the London Evening Standard since his square face had been coated in acne, rather than the puckered scars that sat there now. He’d always looked a boy to Jack, even if the boy now sported a podgy gut and several more wrinkles trailed like ripples across the forehead.

  Jack stopped putting the window up and replied, “Fuck off, Jonny. There: a few words.”

  Cockburn grimaced a smile.

  “I can’t quote that in the Standard,” he smirked.

  “You can’t quote anything I say in the Standard, Jonny.”

  “It’s him, isn’t it, Jack?” Jonny stated, cutting to the chase.

  “You’ll have to wait for the press briefing like the rest of the flies.” Then turning to Lange, he added, “George, we’re leaving.”

  Lange put the car into reverse, and they made their way unsteadily out of the flooded car park. It wasn’t long before the journalists, police cars, and murdered girl were all behind them. Traveling back toward the city, Jack continued to smoke and think while Lange drove. He couldn’t get the sight of John Dorring out of his mind—the yawning chasm of his screaming throat, the wounded animal cries of his destroyed wife, the two sad children shivering and staring out at the ruins of their future.

  “Take me home, George,” Jack said weakly as they reentered the rusted metal and chipped concrete.

  “You not coming to the station to fill in the report?”

  “I can do that tomorrow. Today is my day off. I want to go home, drink, and listen to my record collection.”

  4

  The monstrous flames resembled a demonic titan rising up from the land as the firestorm raged out of the black remains of the city, its crimson fingers reaching up into the smog-choked night sky. From where Alex sat, far away on some sort of overlooking ridge, he could see the whole of London sinking in a lake of fire.

  “Isn’t it beautiful?” a female’s voice asked from beside him.

  Turning sideways, Alex found a young blonde woman sitting next to him on the ridge, the rippling flames reflecting in her eyes. Though he’d not seen her for seven years, he instinctively recognized his little sister. She smiled and scooted over, placing her head on his shoulder like she always used to when they would spend hours watching television together as youngsters. Alex continued to look at her for a little while, amazed that she was really there, until both their eyes returned to the blazing phantom.

  “They burned it down once,” his sister commented.

  “They did,” Alex replied blankly.

  “Burned it down and started all over again.”

  “It was toward the end of the great plague.”

  “The black death still haunts that place,” she stated despondently. “They should burn it down again.”

  There was a hopeless despair in her tone that made Alex sad to hear. He said nothing, though, choosing instead to be silent, his gaze fixed upon the flames dancing away among the ruins and licking the empty void sky.

  “When was the last time you saw London?” she asked.

  “You know the answer to that.”

  She sighed heavily and her face dissolved into further sadness.

  “You should wake up, Alex,” she said to him as the tears began to fall. “Wake up.”

  His eyes shot open, and Alex realized he was back in the dilapidated hotel room of yellow-stained walls, cigarette-scarred furniture, and musky stench of damp, sitting in a threadbare easy chair that stank of tobacco, his fingers wrapped around a silenced Walther PPK that rested on his lap. A blade of blue light shone in through a gap in the tattered curtains, dimly lighting the drab room of bare floorboards, single bed, pockmarked bedside table, and shadeless lamp. On the wall outside the cracked window, a neon sign advertising cheap rooms in English and Arabic hung on the wall, and it was this that supplied the light. Gradually the cacophonous sounds of the narrow streets outside began to invade his wakened ears: the sounds of honking horns, street sellers yelling their wares, shouted words that could just as well be interpreted as vitriol as they could adulation. Essentially, the sound of a restless night in the Libyan capital of Tripoli.

  He was drenched in a shroud of shadow, positioned in the farthest corner of the room from the door. Sat at the edge of the light like a spider in a hole. From here, he was hidden from the window and the door but could see both clearly. It was a worthwhile precaution for a man in position.

  Glancing at his watch, he realized that it was time.

  Alex got up from the chair and packed everything into his rucksack. The room was paid up until the next day, and he had to get out no matter what. Leaving the dusty foyer of the dank hotel, he stepped out into the bustling street. Keeping his head down and ignoring the sellers, he stomped through the thronging mass of people.

  The pungent aroma of animal feces stung the warm night air, and Alex steadily made his way through the rubbish-strewn boulevard, past a fishmonger’s that stood in front of a pile of street cats writhing over a mound of fish guts. He turned off into a tight alleyway teeming with more bodies making their ways slowly along, the edges lined with neon-lit shops selling metalware and other junk.

  The car was parked up in a quiet street off the main bazaar, and when he reached it, Alex opened the trunk and threw his bag inside. Dashing a quick look around, he removed his jacket and began unfastening his gun belt. Where he was going, it couldn’t come.

  Once everything was in the trunk, Alex climbed in and drove out of there. Crawling along in the thick traffic, he eventually made it to the spot he would leave the car. It had been days before when surveying the area that he had picked it as the best location. Having parked, he got out with nothing but his wallet and car keys and began making his way along the uneven pavement.

  A block over, he reached the guarded entrance of the place he wanted. From outside it looked like any other building in the quiet Arab neighborhood: crumbling stone facade, five stories high, tall shuttered windows, nothing alluding it to anything other than an average apartment block. But this was no typical city habitat. No, this was a place of debauchery for the city’s elite to come and play out their base fantasies. It was a club whose chief requirements were a fat wallet and a sense of discretion. This innocuous concrete tombstone was a brothel.

  Alex walked up to the bulky wooden double doors and rang the bell. A few seconds passed by while someone on the other side checked him out through a spy hole. Then the sound of the bolts creaking, and one half of the doors opened outward. A Libyan with thick black hair and trimmed goatee, his bulging physique wrapped tightly in a burgundy suit, ushered Alex into an anteroom. The man closed the door behind them and they were shut inside the small room together, the guts o
f the brothel existing behind two even more unwelcoming metal doors.

  “Can I help you?” the man asked in heavily accented English.

  “I want a girl for the night.”

  “Don’t we all, my English friend.”

  “I’m not new. I’ve been here before.”

  “Yes, but not on a night like this when we have a special visitor in attendance.”

  “I don’t wish to bother your visitor. I merely wish to be one myself. As I’ve just stated, I’ve been here before. You can ask your madam. I make no trouble and pay my bill.”

  The man exhaled heavily, and Alex could smell the cheap cigarettes on his breath.

  “I guess we could come to an arrangement,” the man said as he strung his goatee. “But tonight will cost an entrance fee.”

  Alex gave a disappointed sigh and replied, “A little rich, but I guess that arrangement could be seen as amicable.”

  The man eventually led Alex through the metal doors, having taken over a hundred dollars in Libyan currency from him. In the cool of the air-conditioned inner sanctum of the dimly lit brothel, Alex was met by the madam, a transvestite who liked to be called Dolly. She would prance around the place smoking cheap Arab cigarettes through an outrageously long black holder, dressed in a silk nightgown, audacious wig, powdered face, great green painted eyes, rosy cheeks, and bright red lipstick, stinking to high heaven of cheap perfume. Tonight she wore a russet curly wig with a long copper-colored silk dressing grown draped over her bony frame, conjuring to Alex’s mind the image of a large cockroach standing on its hind legs.

  “Dolly, my darling,” Alex said with affected verve.

  He kissed the large proffered hand, the fingers draped in rings, and smiled when he rose from it.

  “Did Mahmoud explain the situation at the door?” she asked, her vacant eyes displaying the signs of her opium addiction.

  “He explained you had a visitor of some importance and that a fee was required.”

  At that moment a door swung open down the corridor behind Dolly, and loud, bombastic shouting could be heard from within. It was the sound of drunken men having their fill.

  “The fee is very much appreciated, Mr. Watts,” Dolly stated blankly, puffing on the cigarette holder and letting the smoke out through her teeth as she talked. “However, I must explain that most of our rooms are unavailable, as are most of our girls.”

  “The room I had before will do.”

  This appeared to appease the madam, and she gave a lazy little smile.

  “Then we come to the question of girls. If you wait here, I can bring out what we still have.”

  “No.”

  “No!?”

  “No, I’ll just have the same girl as last time. Unless she’s busy with your party.”

  “The same girl,” Dolly mused aloud, looking Alex up and down with a lascivious smile. “Lucky girl.”

  “Is she available?”

  “Yes. Sonya is available. You may wait here. Would you like a drink?”

  “Scotch.”

  “Scotch it is.”

  Dolly clapped her hands and a young girl briskly emerged through some beaded curtains. The old transvestite clacked her tongue in Arabic at the girl, and the latter disappeared back through the beads. Dolly then went off up some narrow red-carpeted stairs to fetch Sonya, and two minutes later, Alex was seated in a cherry leather easy chair, drinking a Scotch on the rocks, surrounded by gaudy furnishings of marble statues in various sexual poses, gold plastic candelabras with little oval light bulbs attached, curvaceous ironwork tables with glass tops, bright colored tapestries of camels and oval-eyed Arabian women, and everything else you’d expect to find in a North African brothel.

  “I bring you Sonya,” Dolly said as she reappeared.

  Through the gap in the wall that led up the stairway, as though appearing out of the darkness itself, came a girl no older than thirteen dressed in the clothes of her mother. On her flat chest, she wore a small basque that gave off the impression it were made for a doll. This ended at the base of her small ribs so that the whole of her midriff was on display. Covering her hips was a tight leather mini skirt, and her legs were draped to the knees in red fishnet stockings. Her height, although still short, was accentuated by the pair of black stilettos that held her small feet. On her young face someone had painted a woman, and her long black hair partially washed over it, as if it were attempting to hide her shame at the horror of it all.

  Alex felt his hands tighten upon the arms of the chair. The girl gave him a faint smile of recollection when their eyes met, and it was Alex’s turn to feel the burning touch of shame.

  Inside the squalid room of peeling red wallpaper, Sonya sat upon the bed playing with her hair. She was relaxed now. More relaxed than she’d been all night. That old freak, Dolly, hadn’t told her that it was Mr. Watts waiting downstairs for her when she’d come to get her, and Sonya had been glad when she’d spotted him there, gripping the armrests of his chair. No, tonight she would earn plenty of money with minimal effort. So she simply sat there lacing her fingers through her flowing hair, of which she was very proud, and waited for Mr. Watts to finish in the lavatory.

  Though the Arabic toilets were generally clean in this place, you still didn’t want to get too close to them. Alex had to hold his breath from the stench of ammonia that floated up and stung his eyes while he knelt beside the hole in the floor, his arm up to the elbow. His fingers felt around the pipe and finally succeeded in locating the wire hook, glad that it was still anchored there. Having grasped it, he pulled the wire up out the hole and began fishing something from the waste pipe. Doing so, he felt a sudden presence enter the room, which made him stop.

  Looking to the side, he saw the frail face of a blonde-haired girl no older than five, her dread-ridden eyes staring out at Alex. Upon her forehead, she wore a mark no larger than a thumbprint, and from it seeped a thick, black liquid that continually dripped from her face onto the dirty tiles of the floor, where it evaporated immediately.

  “Go back to Mother, Katya,” Alex gently ushered her. “There’s a good girl.”

  Two female arms spread slowly out from behind a small wall that shielded the toilet from a shower compartment. The little girl turned to face the arms and wandered toward them, glancing over her shoulder at Alex as she did. They took her and pulled her into the compartment, shielding both woman and child from Alex. For several seconds, he continued to gaze upon the spot the girl and the arms had disappeared from.

  Sighing an inner tremor out of him, Alex returned to pulling up the wire, until its end appeared from the porcelain hole, a crud-encrusted bag the size of a man’s head. Alex laid the bag out on the floor, rinsed it off under a rusted tap that stuck out from the wall, and ripped open the thick plastic. Inside were two disassembled Walther PPKs, two silencers, and two double magazines.

  Sonya was staring into the mirror and playing with her silky hair when Alex returned from the bathroom. Her eyes never left her own reflection as he sat down heavily upon the bed a few feet to her side. He never got close, Mr. Watts. At least not on any of the previous nights she had sat with him.

  “How’s life, Sonya?” he asked her in Arabic.

  The girl smiled at her reflection. This was one of the things she loved about Mr. Watts. He spoke perfect Arabic. She knew very little English, though she wished to learn, and it was a great release to be able to talk to someone outside of her own world of dusty rooms locked inside a brothel.

  “It is what it is,” she replied as though she were twice her age. “Terrible.”

  She had gotten very comfortable with Mr. Watts these past weeks and felt no need to saturate her speech in obsequious unrealities.

  “Then I hope you’ll like what I have to suggest to you, then.”

  “And what is that?” she asked, turning for the first time from her reflection and eyeing Mr. Watts carefully.

  “I want you to go home to your family in Massa.”

  She smiled.
Even at thirteen she had come to expect very little from life and took every proposal of hope with an old woman’s cynicism.

  “My family would beat me for sure. It is because I send them money that they live. If I come home, they will starve.”

  “If you stay here, you will die.”

  She looked him straight in the eyes and said, “Sometimes I wish it.”

  “Then you understand.”

  The two went silent, Alex thinking over something and Sonya feeling suddenly depressed, wondering if her earlier thoughts on tonight had been a little premature. Though she had always found him a sullen man, Mr. Watts had still entertained her these past weeks with his stories. He’d told her that he was a traveling man, and she had inundated him with questions about the world. It seemed to her that he had covered every inch of the globe, and she had delighted in having her very own human encyclopedia. But tonight he appeared to be more sullen than usual, and she didn’t very much like this talk of her family and of dying.

  While she sat there glumly, Sonya felt something drop onto her lap. She instantly looked down and saw a bundle of American dollars tied with a rubber band.

  “With this you can go home to Massa,” Alex said gently. “You can feed your family. You can be free.”

  She picked up the wad of notes and played with them in her hand, expecting them to drift into mirage and float away from her fingers at any moment.

  “You tell no one of this money,” Alex went on. “Not even your family. You give them enough to appease their fury and their curiosity. You tell no friend as you wouldn’t tell an enemy. This is your money. You’ve earned it. Every penny.”

  “But I can’t just leave,” she muttered, her eyes as focused on the money in her hand as she had previously been on her own image. “They’ll stop me.”