A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (19 page)

Stoner had left the raucous environs of the club, the door had swung closed and only city background chatter interfered with the one-sided conversation.

‘It’s a cop this time. Another hotel. You can’t go look yet, so enjoy your evening. It’s someone we know, I think. Not so messy but more personal.’

‘A cop?’ Stoner was surprised. Killing police was usually so counterproductive from any criminal’s perspective that it was a rare event. ‘Who was it? Where?’

‘Near Oxford. Nice of you to be in touch. One question: you keeping this phone switched on or do I need to send someone to collect you?’

Stoner agreed to leave his pocketful of electronics in an active condition, and they both hung up. There was no obvious winner in the hang-up race, either.

A click.

A metallic mechanistic click. A mechanism.

Stoner slipped to the wall. Into shadow. No weaponry to hand. No sense of presence. No clue that he was not alone in the yard. Internal flinching as he recognised that he was not watching. Had not been watching. Caught. Unawares. The light click; a safety catch. He tensed in his shadow. The light click; again. This time the lighter lit and it flared and it lit its target cigarette. In the brief bright flare he saw a tall woman. Blonde, very blonde. Then all he could see was the dim glow of the cigarette.

‘Nice playing, mister music man.’ The blonde voice matched the hair. ‘You do your reputation no harm.’

Shadows shifted and pooled, the haze from the doorway and the scattering of starlight did the view no good at all. None at all.

Stoner was not at ease. He could not have missed her leaving the club to enter the yard behind him. He could not have missed her entering the yard from the silent street. He was neither deaf
nor blind, simply dangerously distracted, which was as bad as a combination of the other two. Or she had been there through the whole of his phone conversation. He silently eased further into shadow. A woman who could move cat-silent was a concern. He could see an outline behind the leading light of the cigarette. Which did not phase in its brightness. It was not being smoked. It was an announcement, then. A marker. Perhaps.

‘Oh. Thanks. OK . . .’

The bar door opened, the dark was damaged and Stoner’s retreat into platitude was shattered by Bili’s eruption from the door and her flight across the yard to its centre, where she stopped. The door closed. Darkness blinded again.

There was no cigarette glow. None.

‘Hey hey, JJ.’ Bili was turning slowly on her feet, arms stretched wide as a tightrope walker. Her eyes gleamed a little with reflected starlight. Stoner wondered how that could be when he had been utterly unaware of the other woman, the blonde woman, the smoking woman. He slid to Bili’s side, tapping her shoulder from behind. She span, and fell against him. He caught her of course. And there they stood. Silent. Motionless. Daring to breathe. Staring. The light in the sky was the light in her eyes. Stoner found her beauty intolerable. She hung from him, turned her face up to his, eyes reflecting the infinity above. He leaned lower, kissed the top of her head. Slowly. For a while.

‘We making more music, babe? You calling me back inside?’

Bili looked silently into him, turned, and with a ‘Yeah. Whatever . . .’ trailed back to the door. Her silent body slouched, displaying whole unspoken chapters of misunderstandings in its own unmistakeable language. Stoner watched her walking away from him.

The blues come from the heart, straight from the heart – sometimes.

19

HELLO DARKNESS . . .

‘The geometry of violence has always been a particular fascination.’

Stoner slipped into the shadows, silent, listening, feeling for the dark.

No outward signs of intrusion. No lights where there should be no lights; no darknesses where darknesses were abnormal; none darker than they should have been. Stoner’s tradecraft was endless, relentless, excellent and plainly inadequate. The clue had been olfactory. No sight, no sound out of place. Until the short speech, delivered with humour. No menace. Stoner sank into a squat beneath the vague haze from the blacked-out window which was leaking a little light for exactly this situation. The shadow was deep, deeper against a faint haze of light than on its own. Contrasts could be killers. He sat in a comfortable squat, easy, relaxed. He knew the voice, was unthreatened by the voice. But unsettled by its presence. Here.

‘People always study the causes, the effects, the reasons, the results, techniques and consequences. Only easterners recognise the potential beauty in the unique opportunities of violence.’

The trigger had been an aroma, the alarm intended to both reassure and unbalance.

Stoner stood up, slipped silently into the shadow at the side of the dim window. Spoke, then squatted once more.

‘You brought your own blend, friend? This is serious stuff. And you even took time to grind it.’ He injected a tone of awe into his voice. Delivery otherwise flat and even. Unhurried and unworried.

A single light clicked. A reading light illuminated Stoner’s favourite reading chair. Shard sat motionless facing him. One hand held palm-out, the other holding a beaker. He was unsmiling as well as unmoving, and he looked exhausted.

‘Pax, JJ. And an apology for the intrusion. The coffee is a gift, and there’s a kilo of beans less a single cup. We need more talking. And we need to reach an understanding.’

‘What was that crap about geometry?’ Stoner stalked grimly into the light. ‘Anyone else here I should know about? Your funny friends with garrottes and the Geronimo approach to relationships? Shouldn’t you have brought a box of almost inedible chocolates?’

Shard remained seated, in as unthreatening a pose as he could manage. Stoner continued; ‘And how did you break in? I’ll need to fix that.’

‘You will. I didn’t break anything, although I am about to. Break something. Break a trust. I entered through the front door, and I used a key.’

‘I do have a problem, then.’ Stoner stalked in thought to the coffee tackle. Measured beans. Ground beans. Boiled water.

‘You do. Do you run to a refill? It is good, and it wasn’t cheap.’ Shard was holding out the beaker. His expression was too serious to be threatening. Stoner walked to him.

‘Care to share? Care to show me something like . . . respect for my place? And your presence in it? Without my invite. Old friend?’

‘Catch.’ Shard threw the empty beaker.

Stoner left it to fall to the carpet.

No splash. No drip. Shard stood, shuffled legs out wide apart, raised arms level with his shoulders; Michelangelo Man made flesh. ‘More than that?’

Stoner nodded. Shard stripped, completely, unhurried and not unhappy. Reached for the beam in the centre of the room and commenced slow, rhythmic pull-ups.

‘No excitement, JJ. No thrills.’

And that much was clear. The prospect of violence, of harm, of physical action had always been an arouser to Shard, and aroused he was not. His body art mocked Stoner; rippling with no life of its own yet appearing amused, inked eyes following him.

‘Do you feel the need for a cavity search, JJ, or can I drop back to earth and sup a little more of my rather splendid coffee?’ Shard appeared heroically unflustered by the idea of a cavity search.

Stoner turned away, returned to the coffee. ‘You started taking milk yet? Cream? Sugar?’ No reply. None needed. He turned back to Shard, now dressed and decent, handed over a fresh beaker of the hot stuff. Both men drank.

‘My problem, then. How bad is it?’ Stoner welcomed the fizz of the caffeine, and was thinking fast. He leaned into a tall chair, set the beaker down on a table and lifted a guitar from its rack. ‘Who? When? And most importantly, why?’ He fingered some chords but sounded no strings. Thinking. Watching. Waiting.

‘I have no secrets from you in this,’ Shard spoke flatly, a monotone intended to conceal nothing, although concealment and revelation were both untruths in hands as expert as his. ‘You are being set up.’ The emphasis was slight but the active verb had it. Stoner nodded.

Shard continued. ‘As am I. We are supposed to be in conflict.
I need to ask this again, JJ. Are we at odds in this? If so, say so, and we’ll resolve it. I will walk away if we agree on that, but I’ll be replaced before I’m out of sight. And I think we would both be targets from that point.’

Stoner nodded his agreement. ‘The key?’

Shard pointed. ‘By the bike’s.’

‘Very good. Where from? More usefully, who from?’

‘My employers gave the key to me, but that’s not what you’re asking. It’s plain that they’ve got others working the case. At least one other. And the finger is aiming at you. They know I know you, maybe suspect that you may trust me and that trust might well be misplaced, displaced in favour of a cash transfer. As is usually the way among thieves, after all. Nothing remarkable in that. But where they acquired the key . . . your key . . . I have no knowledge . . . but we both have ideas. They told me that it was the key to your house near Oxford, that I would know which if I know you as well as he thinks.’

‘At which point you remarked that I have no house near Oxford . . .’

‘I did not. I accepted the key, pocketed it, said OK and left. It was easy to leave quickly as we were in a safely public place, and in any case I have a habit of leaving quickly. There was no point in lying and no point in being honest either. So I did neither. I left, like I said.’

‘And you couldn’t call because they know your numbers, my numbers, everyfuckingbody’s numbers.’

‘Just so. Exactly so. Tangled webs. Spider geometry. Which is where we came in. Actually, we came in less than a half an hour apart, so someone’s surveillance is first-rate. Had you been far away?’

Stoner paused. ‘No. Not far. And not working. Not on this. I’ve done nothing on this. I have . . . things . . . things on my mind. There’s no rush. Not from here.’

Shard walked a little, relaxing a little. ‘Your boss, Cheerful Charlie the laugh-a-minute lad, sees an urgency. That said, that said . . .’ he lapsed into a moment of muse. ‘That said, his name is not coming up. No one has commented on his existence recently. Which in itself is remarkable in a small way. My lot know him well.’

‘But he,’ Stoner looked at Shard; right at him; ‘he
has
mentioned you. He’s warned me of you and of your interest in me. Your interest in taking a hit. On me.’

Quite suddenly and without warning, Shard was holding a blade. A black non-stick twin-edged killing blade. He raised it slowly in front of his face. Pointed it at Stoner, rolled it through his flexing fingers. Balanced its point on his thumb. Caught the killing edge, the serrated edge between thumb and forefinger. Lofted the blade into the air, gently, heading for the arm of the chair in which Stoner sat, unflinching.

‘Catch, JJ. A gift.’

Stoner reached out and caught the falling blade cleanly, turned it and hurled it into the ground between Shard’s feet, as exactly halfway between the feet as could be measured without a tape. ‘Point taken.’

‘No offence, JJ, but you’re getting soft. If I had designs . . .’ the sentence faded.

‘We need to do this every time we meet?’

Shard looked up at the question. Raised an eyebrow and almost smiled. ‘Maybe. I can almost trust you, JJ, because I have the upper hand. I’m fitter and my sources are providing information more effectively and more efficiently than yours appear to be.

‘It’s a good blade. You should keep it. I have several.’

‘Me too.’ A second knife sprouted next to the first. Both men laughed. A nervous and combative humour.

‘How far can you trust Cheery Charlie?’ A serious question. ‘You’re in decently deep with him, JJ; does he feel clean to you, with you? And how many bodies has he told you about? Why
would he even care if I was killing them, anyway? Who are they? My own lords and masters tell me that there’s nothing special about them, the bodies, but it’s kind of hard to believe that. Only nutters hack up other people and play with bits of bodies, and nutters never last long in this line of work. I imagine you still know freaky folk who do freaky things with data? You using them?’

Stoner nodded. ‘They’re on the case, but as I keep telling you, I’m way behind you in this. Way, way. Tasked the techies only recently. Very recently. No reports yet. In a way that’s encouraging. In another way it’s the opposite. They did however speak kindly of you. A welcome reassurance.’

Shard looked long and hard at his companion. ‘You’re detached. It’s still not real to you. What’s the haps, JJ? A lack of focus is too easily fatal. You starting to listen to dem ol’ retirement blues?’

‘Don’t you hear them?’ No banter, just a straight question from Stoner, a momentary whimsy. ‘Don’t you think that this is a power play, and if it’s time to move on . . . again . . . then it’s time to move on? Don’t you get tired with all the pretence? The insincerity? The bullshit? The endless repetition of it all? Don’t you ever want to walk away from it? Just walk on?’ He looked into Shard’s dark eyes, eyes which stared back, flat and calm.

‘No. No. No, I do not. Nor do I want to have a house on a hill, nor a sweet baby in waiting, nor a groovy crowd of best mates. Nor do I want to hand over the hat to some new, young thing. Nor do I want to be plain and straightforward honest Jack Shit. Nor do I want to be poor. It’s not a game we can retire
from
, JJ, just isn’t. We . . . you’ve always known that. Fuck it; you told me exactly that when . . . whenever it was. And you were correct. There’s no getting away with it. There’s no relaxation. Retirement is only hiding. Hiding, hiding, hiding until a debt you thought you’d cancelled comes calling and calls collect. You pay and that’s it. That. Is. It.

‘I’m not ready for the hiding yet. Surprised to even think that you’re even thinking of it. Fuck yes. You’re not a runner. Not a hider. If I’d thought you were about to cut out, to run out . . . fuck it, JJ. If I’d thought that I wouldn’t have come.’ Shard was on his feet. Towering. Mighty. Pacing, restless. ‘Is this a goodnight call for you, with you as head boy on the last list? Are our lords, ladies and gentlemen setting you up for the long fall? Is their scheme that they build a case against you, I take you out or provide entry and exit for some young disposable hero to take care of the head shot? Is he sat outside now waiting for that shot? And if he doesn’t hear that shot will you hear it as I leave, as he blows me away then reloads, re-arms and re-enters to come see you? That would fit.’

Stoner was still. Quiet. The more Shard paced, the more agitated he grew, so Stoner shifted further into silence. He looked up.

‘No.’

Shard stopped, looking at the door. Then at the black Harley-Davidson which dominated the room. Then at the coffee pot. He collected mugs and set a fresh brew in motion. Finally he looked at Stoner.

‘No?’

‘No. There is no one out there. Not unless they followed you, and you would know if they’d tried; not unless they followed me, and no one did that.’

‘They know where you are. Where we are. They gave me a key, for fuck’s saintly sake.’

‘No. They
have
a key. They have no idea which lock it fits. They tried to follow you and you lost them. Did you feel a tail? Did you shake some tail on your way here? Was your route a clean route?’

‘Virginal.’ Shard was pouring, serious, steady and concentrating. ‘No tail. But it always feels like there is a tail, y’know?’

Stoner nodded. ‘Keep the brew hot; back in a minute.’ And
Stoner was gone. Out into the back of the building, down a flight of steps into a vehicle inspection pit, through a not-obvious door and then gone. Shard waiting. Patience. Stoner knew his homeland, needed no one to clutter his security.

Then he was back. The front door opened silently. Shard was in shadow, blades in each hand, but Stoner stepped alone into the light, arms wide, hands open.

‘Nothing. If there’s anyone there then they’re better than I am, better than you are, and we’re dead if that’s what they want. But there is no one. How’s your phone?’

‘Asleep, and as clean as you’d expect.’ He lifted a cheap pay-as-you-go cell phone from a pocket. ‘No battery; never used by me.’

‘Coffee, then, and thinking caps on, my dark friend. Let’s do plotting.’

Shard agreed, nodding. ‘And scheming. Sorry about the paranoia, too.’

‘Paranoia? I heard none. We live by wit, by an instinct for preservation. Ritual. Routine. Recognition of wrongness which most never see, never understand, never even dream of until it’s way way, way too late. We are not amateurs. We are the caffeine cowboys, and we never forget it!’ Stoner ended on a top note of droll melodrama, took a slight bow, and poured yet more coffee. Always fresh, always the same strength. Habit. One less thing to worry about, in a world where everything was a worry.

‘Caffeine cowboys? Shit me, when was that? Back to the old Father Jean, eh, JJ?’

‘Let us hope not. It’s far too long ago, in a distant place, and that was not a good place to be. Not a good place at all. Though we did learn a lot. How many keys?’

Shard looked up. ‘Say again?’

‘How many keys. How many keys to my place were you given?’

‘Why?’

‘Work it out. How many?’

‘Four.’

‘You have them all?’

‘Indeed.’

‘Handover time.’

Shard reached into clothing, passed over three keys. Stoner looked at them carefully. ‘Interesting. How many of them did you try? How many doors did you try them in?’

Shard looked at him, straight. ‘Just this door, this place. The only key which fits that posh lock is the posh lock key. Come along, JJ, why do you ask?’