Judgement and Wrath jh-2

by Matt Hilton

  His face was flecked with blood, and his pale eyes rolled up at me from swelling eyelids. His mouth opened in a grin and I saw tusk-like teeth. 'You're wasting your time, Hunter. I can't die. But you can.'

  Peripherally, I caught the blur of movement. Men shouted and over the top of them all, I heard Rink's warning. My brain wasn't so clouded by drugs that it hindered my natural response.

  I caught Dantalion's right wrist in my left hand. He continued to push, and he was surprisingly strong. The blade pressed against the flesh below my ribs. I felt the prickle of steel, but that only served my determination. Squeezing with all my might, I felt his bones grating together. The pale-faced bastard must have had something wrong with his bones, because I heard them snapping like green twigs.

  Dantalion screamed. The knife fell from his nerveless hand.

  'You can't die, huh? Let's see about that.'

  I snatched at the book trailing like an abnormal appendage between his legs. It was attached to him by a silver chain and I wrenched it from him. He was stunned by the pain of his broken arm, but when he saw me holding his book, strength flared. He bucked upwards, grabbing at the book with both hands.

  'Give it back!'

  Hooking my heels under his kidneys, I rode him like a rodeo bronco. Then I slammed the book against the side of his head and jammed his face against the floor. He squirmed beneath me, spittle shooting from his mouth as he cursed me. His hands clawed towards my face again, so I grabbed his broken wrist and gave it an extra squeeze. He shrieked in agony. Both hands dropped on to the book and touched it spasmodically. I wrenched it from him.

  'What's so fucking important about this damn thing?' I demanded. I flicked it open and saw nothing but row upon row of numbers written in a scratchy style.

  The numbers meant nothing to me.

  Evidently they meant everything to the killer.

  'You want it back, do you? Well, here you are! Have it!'

  I tore pages from the book, crumpled them in my fist, then as he shouted in alarm I jammed the wad of paper into his open mouth. He gagged, but I forced the wad further in. Then I held his mouth shut and placed my other hand over his sealed lips and nostrils. Adding to the pressure, I threw my weight on top of him and stared into his eyes. We were inches apart and I saw his pupils dilate in realisation that he was wrong. He could die.

  There were shouts of consternation from behind me. A rush of bodies. Hands clawing at me. But I trusted Rink to keep the FBI off me long enough for it to be finished. Dantalion thrashed under me in one final attempt to break free but there was nothing he could do to stop me now.

  It didn't take long.

  I wasn't sure he was dead until I felt a hand on my shoulder.

  'He's dead, Hunter,' Rink said. 'You can relax.'

  I looked down at the man beneath me. Marianne and Bradley would be safe now. The old lady was avenged.

  His eyes were bugged wide, pale and milky in death.

  The flesh round his mouth was blackened, lips blue. Blood vessels had erupted all along his jawline.

  'That put a little colour in his cheeks.'

  45

  Rink and I made an unscheduled visit to the local FBI field office. We were in cuffs and treated like we were the ones responsible for slaughtering upward of two dozen people. But then Walter Hayes Conrad IV arrived and a few asses were metaphorically kicked. When we walked out of the FBI building it was with handshakes all round and congratulations on a job well done, even if the plaudits weren't reflected in the faces of the men doing the congratulating. Maybe the way in which I'd killed Dantalion had something to do with it.

  Not that anyone lamented Jean-Paul St Pierre's passing. He was a psychopath with delusions of grandeur. He was responsible for murder from a very young age. He'd murdered his mother, an uncle and a school friend when he was only thirteen years old and had spent the next eight years incarcerated in a high-security hospital. At age twenty-one, he'd been released into an unsuspecting world. He had enrolled in a school for performing arts where he'd learned all about theatrical make-up and the assuming of other personas. Later he'd trained to be a stuntman and studied driving, guns and unarmed combat. He should have stuck to the fantasy world of movies. His training was all make-believe. All fake skills when it came to the very real, very serious world of a contract killer. He thought he was a professional, but he wasn't. He was simply crazy. But that was what had made him so dangerous.

  Walter didn't hang around.

  He stayed only long enough to remind me that his debt to me was cleared.

  'Nothing like this can happen ever again. I can't keep on advocating murder, Hunter.'

  'Won't ever come to that again,' I promised him. But we both knew our words were hollow.

  Violence follows me around like stink on a mangy dog.

  Anyway, my treatment of Dantalion wasn't murder. The fact I'd stopped a maniac who'd murdered dozens outweighed my 'drug-clouded' actions and I wouldn't be facing any charges.

  Rink took a flight out of Miami International, headed across the country chasing the setting sun. I promised him that I'd follow in a day or so, as soon as I'd finished up here. I told him to give his mom a kiss for me.

  'Kiss her yourself when you get there,' Rink told me. 'She isn't going anywhere. She's getting stronger all the time.'

  I called Richard Dean.

  We met at a diner a whole lot nicer than Shuggie's Shack. The food must have been good judging by the clatter of cutlery on plates. People talked and laughed with each other. Patsy Cline was playing on the jukebox.

  It wasn't the kind of atmosphere I wanted, so I led him round the back into a service alley. The smell of garbage rotting in a dumpster was more conducive to setting the scene. It kind of fitted my mood.

  I felt like smashing him in the face there and then. But I didn't. For all that Marianne had been an inconsequential pawn in his scheme, his daughter still loved him. I wasn't going to hurt her by hurting her father.

  Plus, he was a pathetic man when all was said and done. Beating him wouldn't have proved anything.

  'When we first met I told you I wasn't the man you were looking for,' I said to him. 'I told you I wasn't a hit man. But that's what you wanted.'

  'I only wanted my daughter back,' he said, but his eyes told the lie.

  'No, Dean. You wanted your son back. But you knew that couldn't happen. So you wanted the person you blamed for his death to die also. Sending me after your daughter was just an excuse. It was a way to get at Bradley Jorgenson.'

  'Bradley Jorgenson killed my boy.'

  'You're wrong.'

  I explained to him how Bradley opposed the military contracts, how he was working hard to make amends for the mistakes made by his predecessors. I explained how Marianne had brought all this about. How ultimately Stephen's death had brought about the change. How he should be proud of all that his children had done. But my words fell on deaf ears.

  He remained a bitter, twisted man who refused to see the truth.

  'You lied to me, Dean.' I pulled out the photographs he'd falsely used to build his case against Bradley. Then I jammed them into his jacket. All but the one lifted from the police file. I pushed that under his nose. 'I don't know how you managed to get a hold of this — it doesn't really matter — but I want you to take a good look at it. This girl loves you, Dean. And you did that to her.'

  His eyes clouded as he looked at the photograph. I thought he'd accepted that his anger had been misguided. Of all the people in the world, Marianne should have been the last one he should strike out at.

  'She won't be coming home,' I told him. 'But it was never really about getting Marianne back. You didn't care what happened to her. All you cared about was that Bradley got hurt along the way.'

  'How do you expect me to feel? She was in bed with the man who killed my son,' Dean said. 'Marianne betrayed Stephen's memory. She betrayed me.'

  'No, Dean, you betrayed her. I sympathise with the loss of your son. You blamed t
he Jorgensons for that, but losing your daughter I don't sympathise with. That is all down to you.'

  Dean blinked up at me, and I could see that his tears weren't of shame; they were too bitter for that.

  'I paid you,' he said. 'You have to bring her back.'

  Pulling an envelope from my pocket, I slapped it against his chest.

  'It's all there. Every stinking cent of it.' When he didn't reach for it, I allowed the twenty thousand dollars to fall at his feet. 'Take that as notice of my resignation,' I said. 'Effective immediately.'

  'You can't back out. You gave your word.' He set his jaw angrily. 'You have to finish what you started.'

  'I just quit, Dean.'

  'Suit yourself,' Dean hissed. He stooped quickly, grabbed the envelope and waved it in front of me. 'I'll send someone else?…'

  Grasping him by his jacket, I pushed him up against the alley wall.

  I stared into his eyes. 'A short time ago I killed a man who was trying to hurt Marianne. An old friend of mine told me he couldn't advocate murder. I promised him it wouldn't happen again. But, do you know something, Dean? I'm not sure I can keep that promise.'

  Releasing him, I smoothed out his jacket. I fixed his tie. 'Let it go, Dean. Let it all go.'

  Then I left him to consider what would happen if he raised a finger to Marianne again. Or to Bradley.

  I was twenty grand down, but it didn't hurt too badly. While I'd been smoothing down Richard Dean's jacket I took payment in another kind.

  46

  I found Marianne at Bradley Jorgenson's hospital bedside. Bradley was sedated, his leg in splints and raised on some sort of pulley contraption. Marianne leaned close and kissed him on the forehead before she came to me.

  We stepped out of Bradley's private room and I looked down at her uptilted face. She was beautiful. But there was still a shadow of fear behind her eyes.

  'It's over.'

  'How can you be so sure?'

  'Trust me.'

  'I do.'

  I told her that the FBI was going to launch an investigation into the attempts on their lives. It was apparent that Petre Jorgenson had been the force behind the plot to have them murdered. He had also ordered the death of Caitlin Moore just because she had been instrumental in influencing Marianne, who had in turn influenced Bradley to cancel his involvement in military contracts. Petre Jorgenson couldn't stand to lose his share of the billions of dollars those contracts meant. He'd preferred to lose family members instead. What no one was sure of was to what depths the plot had gone, and who else among the Jorgenson family had been involved. Jack and Simon were currently answering serious questions.

  'Any sniff of trouble, you let me know, OK?'

  'I will,' she promised. 'But what about?…?'

  'Your father? He knows you won't be coming home.'

  'He was happy with that?'

  'He sends his love,' I lied. 'He also sent you this.'

  She held out her hand and I slipped her mother's crucifix into her palm. It was looped on a silver chain.

  Marianne studied the chain.

  'This isn't mine.'

  'Souvenir for you,' I said.

  It was elegant and expensive. An antique piece of jewellery. It had once held the weight of a book containing thirty-six legions of spirits. The weight of the cross would easily balance that out.

  Marianne looped it round her neck and lifted the cross between her fingers. She kissed it, and I saw the fear recede. Then she stood on tiptoes and pressed her lips to my cheek.

  'Thanks, Joe.'

  All the gratitude I required. She turned away and re-entered Bradley's room. I leaned against the wall next to the door. I could hear her humming something under her breath, the same song she'd been humming in the garden on Baker Island. Only this time it didn't sound so sad.

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