Get Cartwright

by Tom Graham

  Sam squinted and peered. The movement on the road behind slowly resolved from a vague blur to three slightly less vague blurs. Three figures. Three men.

  His throat tightened. Fear gripped him. Even though they were nothing more than blank shapes moving against the golden glow of the road, Sam knew exactly who and what those three men were. And he knew their names.

  Carroll, Walsh, Darby … They’re still hunting me, even here.

  The panicky urge to run rose up in him again, but he fought against it. Gould’s three lackeys were still a long, long way back along the road. If Sam kept up a brisk pace he had every chance of staying ahead of them without wearing his energies out with a wild sprint.

  And how long can I go before I need to rest? How long before I need to sleep?

  He shook these thoughts from his mind. They were bridges he would have to cross when he came to them. For now, his best safety lay in walking.

  He picked up his pace and got moving. Time and again he glanced back, and was somewhat relieved to see that Carroll, Walsh and Darby did not seem to be gaining on him. Their distance remained constant. Sam and the three dead killers were all moving along the road at the same speed.

  Mist rolled in, and Sam found he could see no more than three or four feet in any direction. Losing sight of the monstrosities on his trail did not ease his nerves – if anything, it made him jumpier. His imagination began torturing him with images of skull-faced zombies springing suddenly out of the fog and bringing him down, tearing him limb from limb, gorging on handfuls of his intestines, eating him alive.

  Too many George Romero films, you fool, Sam chided himself. Grow up. Stay focused. Don’t freak yourself out.

  The road narrowed, and the yellow bricks began to lose their lustre, becoming duller and darker as he progressed, until at last he found himself walking what seemed to be tiles of burned, blackened glass.

  Up ahead, just penetrating the mist, lights appeared.

  Is this it? Sam thought. Is this the Emerald City my yellow brick has brought me to?

  He edged forward warily. Getting closer, the lights resolved themselves from a blurry haze of light into letters.

  It’s a sign. And I’ve seen it before.

  It was just as he remembered it, a set of gaudy light bulbs spelling out the words House of Diamonds. Beneath, black and menacing, yawned an open doorway and a set of steep stairs that plunged sharply down, leading to Clive Gould’s private casino. But unlike last time, there was no sign of Perry, no bouncers, no cars parked nearby, no garage with Tony Cartwright hanging upside down from a chain above a drum of oil.

  Sam inched to the top of the stairs and peered down into the inky void. The air was oppressively cold.

  ‘Gould?’ Sam called out. His voice was swallowed by the darkness and the cold. ‘Annie?’

  He knew, of course, that nobody would answer. He had not been brought here to stand on the doorstep, or to turn back and face the three dead men following up behind him. His future really did lie beyond the yellow brick, down there, at the foot of those steps, in the icy heart of that darkness.

  Cautiously, Sam took the first step.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: INTO THE EMERALD CITY

  The tread was so cold that Sam could feel the iciness through the sole of his boot. His breath steamed about him in short-lived billows. He took the second step, then the third, and then he was groping his way down blind, in total darkness, feeling ahead of him with hands already becoming numb.

  He reached something, a solid obstacle, a closed door. Shivering, Sam felt around until he discovered the handle. When his fingers closed around it, he felt the skin sticking to the frozen metal. As he turned the handle, his heart hammered insanely in his chest.

  The door opened, revealing Gould’s casino. The card tables and roulette wheels were all still there just as before, but they were deserted now, and cast in a dim, sickly green light. It took a moment for Sam to realise that everything was frozen. Ice glittered like crystal on the green baize. The plastic chips were coated with frost. Abandoned glasses of champagne sat solidly in their frozen flutes. Hanging down from the ceiling, like the fangs and tusks of some monstrous creature, were stalactites of ice, their sharp points almost reaching the gaming tables, sparkling unhealthily in that horrible green glow.

  The light came from the back of the room, leaking through the half-open door that led to Gould’s private office. Sam remembered it from before, when it had been flanked by the two bald bouncers Lewis and Charlie. Tony Cartwright had gone in there, thinking he was gaining evidence to mount a conviction against Gould – but he was to discover that his true intentions were already known, and that by the time he stepped foot in that office he was nothing more than a dead man walking.

  Sam inched forward uncertainly.

  ‘Come on in,’ said Gould, his voice emerging from the shadows.

  The sound of it did not surprise Sam in the slightest.

  ‘Show yourself,’ Sam said. He glared about at the frozen games tables, at the icy bar, at the murky green light that pervaded the room, at the deep, impenetrable slabs of darkness on all sides. ‘Don’t hide any more. Let’s see you.’

  Gould moved slowly into the light. He was dressed in his razor-sharp Nehru suit, his dark hair slacked back from his high forehead, his cold, narrow eyes glittering. His fat lips were pulled into a grisly smile, revealing a flash of his large, slab-like teeth, like a jumbled heap of nicotine-stained gravestones.

  ‘You look cheap,’ said Sam. ‘Cheap, and out of date. Where’s Annie?’

  ‘In my office,’ said Gould, slipping his hands casually into the pockets of his jacket. His face showed not a flicker of concern at Sam’s insult. ‘She’s in my office, DI Sam Tyler, and that’s where she’s going to be staying. Forever. Just the two of us.’

  ‘No, that’s not the way it’s going to be. I’m going in there now to fetch her out. She’s coming with me.’

  ‘Big words,’ smiled Gould. ‘From such a very small man.’

  His eyes flashed dangerously, like two muddied emeralds caught in a flicker of lightning.

  ‘I’m not here to trade insults with a has-been crook,’ Sam said. ‘You’ve been lurking in the shadows of my nightmares for a long time – but now I see your face properly, you’re nothing to write home about. In fact, you’re like all the other psychopaths I’ve met in my career. You’re lacking.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘You’re short. You’re ugly. You’re probably sexually impotent, or else a repressed homosexual, and you don’t like that. So you make the world pay for your problems.’

  ‘Is that so?’

  ‘I’ll bet your upbringing was a joke. No friends. No role models. No approval from Daddy. Nothing – just emptiness inside, gnawing away at you through your childhood, goading you as an adult to constantly prove what a big man you are.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘A failure,’ Sam said. ‘A loser. A nobody, all dressed up in his showy suit, with his hair greased back like an Essex boy city trader and tacky gold rings sparkling on his blood-stained fingers. How much is your watch worth, Mr Gould? And how much for your shoes? Your house? Your business assets? I’m sure you’d like to tell me. It would make you feel better about yourself. It would make you feel less empty inside, Mr Gould.’

  Gould laughed, and slipping his hands from his pockets, he clapped slowly and sardonically. He did indeed wear tacky gold rings. Three of them, in fact. And a gold bracelet too. And matching gold cufflinks and tie-bar. Sam would not have been surprised if he also wore a gold chain around his neck.

  ‘My ego has been thoroughly whipped and flogged,’ he said, grinning toothily, his confidence undiminished. ‘You win, DI Tyler. Take her. Take my wife away with you, like you did before. Take anything you want, just so long as you don’t subject me to another psychological attack of that ferocity.’

  He laughed.

  Sam hesitated. He kept shooting glances towards the half-open office door, ho
ping to catch sight of Annie within. But all he could see was that horrible green glow and the glittering of icicles.

  Gould took a few steps towards him, working his way carefully between the frozen tables.

  ‘A psychological attack,’ he said, thinking the phrase over for a moment. ‘Some say you can do more hurt to a man’s mind than you ever can to his body. Hurt that really hurts. Hurt that stays. I’m not sure I would have agreed back when I was alive. But things have changed. Haven’t they, DI Tyler?’

  ‘You’re nothing,’ Sam said boldly. ‘I’m here for Annie.’

  ‘Things have changed …’ Gould said again, ignoring Sam. ‘You’ve taken a pop at me, psychologically speaking. Now I’m going to take a pop back.’

  He had positioned himself between Sam and the office doorway. There was no way Sam could rush forward without encountering him physically. If they fought, what would happen? Gould wasn’t a big man, but he was thick set, with boxer’s shoulders and powerful hands, a man used to violence, a man who knew how to take pain and how to dish it out.

  And who was to say he was still a ‘man’ in any real sense of the word? If Sam went for him, what might he turn himself into? Was the face and body of Clive Gould just a mask? Did the monstrous and inhuman Devil in the Dark lurk just behind it?

  ‘I didn't come all this way to trade insults,’ Gould said, his smile vanishing, his eyes narrowing. ‘You will never know what effort it took – what strength – to get myself from that place to here, to cross the divide between where I found myself and where I knew my wife to be.’

  ‘She’s not your wife, she’s mine,’ Sam said hotly. ‘My wife, near as damn it.’

  But still Gould ignored him: ‘Blood, sweat and tears it cost me, and more besides. But I made it. I got there. I got her.’

  ‘No. You didn’t get her. She’s coming with me.’

  ‘And what a naughty little tinker she is …’ Gould went on, his voice becoming hard as steel. ‘Trying to betray me the way she did. Trying to sell me out to CID like a common crook … only to discover, the silly little girl, that I owned CID! Like I owned her. And still do.’

  He turned, and held out one of his gold-ringed hands towards the open office doorway.

  ‘I promised you a psychological attack to better your own, DI Tyler – and here it is.’

  Annie appeared in the doorway. Sam’s heart leapt. He went to rush forward, to throw himself between her and that monster Gould – but as he went to move, he felt his legs give way beneath him, as if all the strength had suddenly drained from them. Sam fell to the floor, his body striking hard ice, and struggled to get to his feet. But he was as weak as a baby. It was all he could do to raise his head and utter Annie’s name in a weak, faltering voice.

  Annie did not look at him, nor did she react. She looked like a sleepwalker, with a blank face, unblinking eyes and stiff, waxy limbs. She shuffled forward a few steps, then stopped. Gould ran his killer’s hand down the side of her face, his thumb lingering over her lips and chin.

  ‘Did you know,’ Gould said, relishing his victory, ‘just what an obstacle your little team has been to me? Mmm? CID. Your CID, DI Tyler, the one with you and your DCI Hunt and those two other idiots whose names escape me. The one my wife joined. Together, the five of you, laughable as you are, form quite a barrier. Like …’ He looked upward for inspiration. ‘Like five chemicals, each one perfectly harmless on its own, but when mixed together, form a lethal poison. A lethal poison to me, DI Tyler. Together, your little A-Division has power enough to keep me out.’

  He ran his fingers lightly over Annie’s bared throat, back and forth over the jugular vein.

  ‘But then …’ Gould mused, and that slow, evil smile spread across his thick lips once again. ‘Then, things changed. My wife was suddenly removed from the department. Dismissed. Fired. And the power that had vexed me so cruelly at once began to fade.’

  Sam struggled to get up, but he was powerless. He could do nothing but sit limply on the frozen floor, watching and listening.

  ‘And after my wife was dismissed, your little team began to fragment. You and your DCI, you went off alone. And we nearly had you, out in those woods! Didn’t we just!’ He laughed as if recalling some humorous old anecdote him and Sam shared. ‘And then later, in the farmhouse, things went from bad to worse. You got together, all of you, but it wasn’t working, was it? It wasn’t a team. My wife was there, but she wasn’t a copper anymore. And those two idiots, they weren’t exactly obeying orders, were they? A-Division was breaking up. It was fragmenting. And as it did, its power to keep me out diminished, more and more, until …’ He shrugged, and indicated the frozen casino about them. ‘... Until in the end, it came to this. I killed your team. I got my wife back. And I lured you here to witness what’s in store for her. And that, DI Tyler – that act of witnessing – is the psychological attack that will hurt you more than any physical pain ever could. It will burn you. It will destroy you. It will make your every moment of existence a torment. And I will know. I will know what you suffer. I will know.’

  Furious, terrified, appalled, Sam fought to find his strength. But all he did was slump feebly against a roulette table. Why the hell was he so weak? Was it like Gould said – that when it was broken up, A-Division was nothing?

  Annie! Sam cried out in his mind, too weak to speak the words. Annie, wake up! Find some scrap of strength in you and run! Forget me and run! Just RUN!

  But she was as powerless to help herself as he was. She stared ahead, Gould’s hands resting on her throat, the fingers brushing the naked skin, and all she could do was stare and wait. She was conscious – Sam sensed it. She was awake and fully aware of what was happening to her. She was terrified. But she could not move any more than Sam could, not even as Gould’s fingers began pressing deep into her neck.

  ‘Just like old times,’ he said, baring his ugly, misshapen teeth. ‘This is how I finished her off when I discovered her treachery. But this time …’ He tightened his grip. Annie choked. Saliva ran from her mouth and tears streamed from her eyes, and both froze almost at once upon her face, crystallized by the ice-cold air. ‘This time, there will be no death to draw a veil over it. There will be no escape. We can keep doing this for a long time. A very, very, very long time. In fact – we need never stop doing this at all.’

  Annie’s eyes were bloodshot. Blood appeared beneath her nose and froze there. Her hands flexed and clawed at her sides, but she was unable to raise them, to prise away the fingers that dug into her throat, to fight back, to save herself. She was a helpless victim, in the clutches of a monster, with an eternity of agony ahead of her.

  And that agony was Sam’s too, just as Gould had promised. His heart broke within him. Tears flowed and froze on his face just as they did on Annie’s. Sam’s mouth fell open. A low, wordless howl, like the cry of an animal, rose up from within him. It was the only sound he could make. It was pitiful.

  Suddenly, Gould let go. Annie stood there, drawing breath noisily into her lungs in a series of rasping sighs.

  ‘There,’ Gould said, satisfied, turning to smile down at Sam. ‘You’ve seen what I wanted you to see. And you won’t forget it. You, the little man who tried to steal my wife, will suffer. Just as my treacherous, murderous bitch of a wife will suffer. And me? I will have the satisfaction of having won. And I will at least not have to spend eternity alone – will I, dear?’

  He patted Annie’s backside. Then, suddenly, he paused, tilted his head, seemed to be preoccupied by private thoughts and memories.

  ‘It’s not as spacious down there as you’d think,’ he said quietly, almost to himself. ‘In fact, it’s tight. Very tight. And noisy. Sometimes, you think it’s the noise that’ll drive you mad rather than the… the other things.’ He turned to Annie and smiled coldly. ‘It’s hard to describe, but you’ll see for yourself. It’s not a nice place, but at least we’ll have each other. Just you and me. Together. And I’ll be concentrating on you, dear – very closely �
� all the time.’

  Gould hooked his arm around Annie’s elbow.

  ‘Can’t hang about any longer,’ he said. ‘They want me back down there. I can feel them pulling in. But that’s okay – at least this time, I won’t be alone.’

  He led Annie carefully towards the green glow emerging from the open office doorway.

  ‘You’ll not be going far, I’m afraid, DI Tyler,’ he said over his shoulder. ‘In fact, you’re likely to be sitting just where you are now for a really quite spectacular length of time. With nothing but your thoughts for company.’ He winked. ‘But don’t give up all hope. Your strength may return. And then you can head off somewhere, and take all your misery and pain with you. Which will be nice.’

  He laughed, and steered Annie towards the sickly green light.

  ‘Goodbye, DI Tyler. One-nil to me, I think. Yes – most definitely one-nil to me.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: THE END

  Sam felt the tears flowing down his face. They half-blinded him, turning the world around him into a distorted blur. His last glimpse of Annie’s face was a green oval set against black, drowned and obscured by gushing salt water.

  But the tears did not freeze. They trickled down his face – just as water was starting to trickle down the jagged icicles hanging from the ceiling. Drips were falling from everywhere, at first sporadically, then like a summer shower, then like hard rain, and suddenly there was a deluge and the whole room was streaming with water. The icicles now looked more like upside-down fountains, pouring themselves onto the floor. Sam’s breath was no longer steaming about him. He felt warm air on his hands and face, and with it, strength seemed to return to his limbs. He stirred, lifted his head, raised his hand and dashed the water from his eyes.

  And then there was a resounding crash, powerful enough to shake the floor like an earthquake, to rattle the gaming chips stacked on the tables, to spin the thawing roulette wheels, and bring down the thick icicles from the ceiling like a rain of falling spears.