Blood Of Angels (32 page)

'Women are capable of bad things too.'

'No,' she said, and for the first time looked heated, dislocated. 'Retaliation is a ricochet. Doesn't count.'

'So who are you getting back at?'

'I was talking on a larger scale. Nothing personal.'

'Really? It sounded that way.'

She was calm again. 'Nothing's personal with me, handsome. I have no personal skills. Ask my boss. Comes up time and again in appraisals. Good little worker but you wouldn't want to have to sit next to her at a dinner party. Yada yada yada.'

'Mark Kroeger evidently did. He dated you, right? A few times?'

'He did, yes.'

'He walked down to the woods with you. At your suggestion, but he went.'

'That's correct.'

'Julia, are you protecting somebody?'

'Why would you think that?'

'Because I'm not sure you killed these people. I think maybe somebody else did, and it's something to do with this third body. I wonder whether for reasons of your own you're covering up for him.'

'Well you're wrong.'

'Wrong about what?'

'Everything.'

'Really? I hate that.' Even over the intercom John sounded genuinely irritated. 'I don't mind being a little dumb. But wrong about everything? That can't be good.'

'I know something about you,' she said, smiling down at the table. 'You should be able to look at me and tell the same thing.'

'And what's that?'

She said nothing for a moment, and then turned her head to look John directly in the eyes. 'You've watched.'

'Excuse me?'

'They seep, and then they stop. Only when it dries do you know they've gone.'

'What are you talking about?'

She slowly raised one hand and pointed at him. 'Killer,' she said. 'You're a killing man.'

Monroe and I looked at each other.

Back in the room, John seemed unperturbed. 'What makes you think I've killed people?'

'Are you denying it?'

'I'm asking you a question.'

'It's obvious. It never washes off.'

John leaned his elbows on the table, friendly and open. 'You're obviously trying to tell me something, Julia. I want to know what. But I have to get it right. I don't want to misunderstand you, and so you're going to have to make it a little easier for me. Will you do that?'

'Okay,' she said, and then spoke very clearly. 'I killed them.'

John blinked. 'Say again?'

'I killed Larry in the wood. Took him for a walk and got my tiny tits out for long enough for him to think he'd got it made. He wasn't thinking straight because I dosed him with a potion I got from an online pharmacy. Not Viagra, I should add.'

'If you killed him in Raynor's Wood, how come the body was clean of blood?'

'I killed him at the stream. He fell straight down into it. I thought he would look better washed off. Don't you think?'

'Why did you take his clothes?'

'To embarrass him. He was a prick. I saw him drop some other woman to come over and hit on me. I have no idea who the other guy was, sorry. I picked him up from the bus station in Owensville two weeks ago. He was a practice run and just too… fucking…
heavy,
in retrospect. Larry was a little more manageable.'

John was trying not to look as surprised as Monroe and I felt, and largely succeeding. 'Something about the other victim has not been released to the media,' he said. 'Perhaps you'd like to tell me what that is?'

'Hard for me to be sure because it's been a while since I saw a newspaper, but would it be to do with him missing large parts of his body? Really horrible job, but I couldn't have got him out there otherwise. I'm sure there must be a more efficient method, but I couldn't find a single tip on the subject in
Real Simple.'

'You realize there are witnesses to this conversation?'

'I assumed so.' She looked up at the glass and waved. 'Hi, guys.'

'You're confessing to the murders of these two men?'

'I'd prefer "telling". I have nothing to feel bad about. Apart from the fact I just wasn't very good at it. Two is a crappy score. Especially when you consider all the dead ladies everywhere, at all times, all around us. That pisses me off.'

'So why are you telling me all this?'

'Because you're so damned cute. Plus you really got to me with that whole good cop/bad cop all rolled into one.'

'Really?'

'Oh yeah. And you smell just like me.'

'Julia, it would help me a lot if you'd just stick to simple, declarative sentences.'

'No,' she said. 'No, no, no.'

'You
want
to talk about it. I think talking about it is all you want to do right now. At least explain the deal with the hands.'

'Fuck you.' She sounded hurt, angry. 'I don't know. You tell me. You work out why.'

John looked levelly at her. 'What if I don't care?'

She leapt at him.

She had about twenty seconds before the two cops from the corridor burst into the room and restrained her, and she made the most of it. Considered, focused, silent. Fists, elbows, nails.

John just sat there under the onslaught, not even raising his hands. He knew no mark could be left on her — not in here, not by him: accidentally or otherwise, even in self-defence.

When the deputies got hold of her she finally seemed to lose it. She started making a sound I would find difficult to describe, something between a shriek and howling laughter, and three big men found it hard to get her out of the room.

Monroe stayed in the station, setting in motion the next three days of incarceration for Julia Gulicks, now officially charged with double homicide. John and I walked outside and stood on the pavement. I gave him a cigarette. We lit them and smoked in silence for a while.

'So where the hell does this leave us?' I asked, in the end.

John rubbed his forehead, accidentally smudging the blood still seeping from a long gouge there. He pulled his hand away and looked at it.

'I have no idea,' he said.

Lee drove. Brad's head ached too much to consider it, and now the moment had passed, it was always Lee who led and it was always Lee who drove. The streets seemed oddly empty, as if they had been cleared to take them where they had to go. Both boys had shiny welts on their faces where the other's fists had connected. Hudek was trying to conceal it but he thought Brad had cracked at least a couple of his ribs, and he wasn't hearing too great out of one ear either. Brad had washed the gunpower residue off his face and the blood from under his nose. He still looked like he had been through a threshing machine.

They didn't talk. Nothing had been said since Lee made the call to set up where they were going. There was little that could be discussed. Hudek had told Brad in every way he knew that it had not been his intention that these people would harm Karen. He had apologized for his other comments. Brad had offered nothing in return. Brad's head was like a wide open space. His phone started to ring after a while but caller ID said it was his parents and he turned it off. He would have to deal with them eventually, as he had already dealt with the Luchses: would have to find it within himself to keep faith with the pretence that Karen's death had been a random piece of hit-and-run hell, fate tragically cutting short a blah blah blah. Could he do that? Could he speak false to her memory, turn his back on her and walk further away with every lie? He didn't know. Time would tell.

Right now, there were other things to attend to.

There were people who had to learn that these two Valley boys did not take shit lying down. They had to learn that wealthy and privileged did not mean stupid or weak, and that young did not mean without power or will. They were going to learn that the strength of purpose which had made the class of 2003 frankly unbeatable in any sport could be translated out of school and into the real world: transmuted into a sharp tool for use in adult situations, and brought to bear with decisive force.

Lee and Brad were going to teach them these things. They were going to a meeting and they had the gun, and this time the bullets inside it were real. Brad had loaded them himself.

===OO=OOO=OO===

They pulled straight around into the lot behind the building at the junction of Roscoe and Sennoa. Parked close to where the tarp had been lying the last time, the one under which Pete and Steve had been stashed, tied and gagged.

'Should have known it then,' Brad muttered, speaking around the end of another cigarette. 'What kind of people would do that?' They got out of the car. 'I still don't like meeting him here.'

'It's the only place he would see us.' Lee breathed out heavily. 'Are we really going to do this?'

For a second the world shivered, as Brad remembered asking something similar the first time they came here, an evening that didn't seem that long ago. He thought about a little K swinging round someone's neck, about the fact he would probably have to withstand being given that necklace back, at some point.

'Yeah. We are.'

'But if there's a bunch of them we play it cool and bide our time and act like we know shit. Tell me you're going to stick to that.'

'Lee, let's just get in there. I don't want to die any more than you do. I just want to hear what this asshole has to say.'

They walked across to the door on the side of the building. Lee grabbed the handle and pulled. It was unlocked.

Brad followed him into the building. Walked quietly through a big room and down a corridor and then into a space that was larger yet.

Unlike the last time Lee had been there, this room was well-lit by a set of strip lights. Now you could see the space properly, it looked less like an abandoned storeroom and more like a high-tech office. There was a line of desks along one wall with a rack of computers and flat-screen monitors, something that looked like it might be an internet web server, a couple televisions, a suspicious number of cell phones. All the TVs and computers were turned off, and cables were trailing all over the place.

Somebody was moving out.

Standing in front of one of the desks was the man they had come to see. He didn't look up at first, but continued with what he was doing, which was putting data CDs into a bulky shoulder bag.

Lee and Brad walked as far as they had to, and then stopped.

Paul looked up. 'Hey, boys,' he said. 'What's the problem?'

Brad had thought maybe when he saw him he would just go at him, the way he had with Lee. He knew straight away this was not the way it was going to be. There was something about this person's presence which made the idea of attack seem invalid.

'You here alone?' Lee asked.

'Just me,' the man said. 'There's work to do. So I'm going to have to ask you to get right to bottom line.'

Brad wasn't going to wait any longer. 'Why did you do it?'

'Do what, Brad?'

'Kill her.'

'Kill who? You're going to have to narrow it down for me.'

'Don't fuck with us, man,' Lee said, and went into what they'd agreed. 'Look, we want things to be cool here. We understand you got some plan going on. She's no big deal. Just tell us what's going on. We just need to understand.'

The man finished up putting things in the bag, zipped it, and set it on the floor. He folded his arms and looked at them.

'Tell me what's on your mind, Lee.'

'I told you this morning that Brad's girlfriend had been saying some stuff, could make things difficult for us. You said it wasn't a problem. Then a couple hours later, when she's on the way to talk to the cops, she gets slam-sided in broad daylight and killed.'

'I'm sorry to hear that,' Paul said, looking at Brad. 'You must be bereft.'

'Fuck you,' Brad said. He started to tremble, and thought he might just go ahead and go at him after all. 'Fuck…'

'Hang on,' Lee said, grabbing his friend's shoulder. He turned back to Paul. 'And so Brad and I get in a big fight because he thinks I turned her in deliberately, which I did not. It gets out of hand and…'

He put his hand in his jacket and pulled out the gun. He held it so Paul could see it. 'Recognize this?'

The man shrugged. 'I see so many, you know?'

'This is the gun Hernandez gave me the night Pete got killed. When I got back home that night I hid it away. I fired it this afternoon, I fired it twice, and guess what happens?'

'I'm agog, Lee.'

'The gun is full of blanks.'

'How strange. I wonder why Hernandez would do that.'

'Bull
shit.
I don't believe he ever did anything you didn't tell him to do.'

'So what's your theory? I want you to put it together yourself, Lee. I think you already have.'

'This was a set-up from the minute Pete died,' Brad said, flatly. 'You sent us on a whacked-out deal but didn't trust us enough to give us a gun that worked. Pete got killed and then Hernandez took advantage of the situation and deliberately put us in a position where we were guilty for hiding his body. After that, we're your bitches.'

Paul just nodded. 'Very good.'

Hudek was staring at the man with an odd expression on his face, and Brad realized — with something approaching joy — that for once in his life, Lee was furious.

'Is that true?'

Paul smiled vaguely. 'Yes,' he said. 'It is.'

There was a long pause.

'You are so history,' Lee said. He held the gun up slowly, pointing it directly at the man's head. 'You… are… gone.'

'You're going to shoot me?'

'That's exactly what I'm going to do.'

'Despite the fact there are people who know who you are and where you live and who will have no compunction about killing everyone you've ever even spoken to?'

'I don't care. You fucked with us, man. Pete died because of you and you got Karen killed. You're screwing with our heads and you've been doing it from minute one. So I'm going to kill you.'

'Excellent,' Paul said. 'I knew you could do it.'

Lee's face was flushed. 'Don't fucking patronize me, you fuck.'

'I'm really not, Lee. I'm genuinely delighted.'

Lee glanced at Brad and Brad saw in his eyes that Paul had finally managed to pry a trapdoor in Lee's mind, opening a gate that maybe might otherwise have forever remained closed. Lee's eyes were glittering and dark, and Brad knew him well enough to be convinced that Paul's last seconds of life would be all about discovering that when Lee said he was going to do something, it was going to get done.