Sanctus (16 page)

Liv nearly wept with relief as she stumbled through the revolving door into the merciful brightness of the terminal building. She limped on, trailing mud and rainwater in her wake, as fearful groups of tourists backed away from her. One of the cops by passport control looked up, alerted by the disturbance. She saw him nudge his partner and nod in her direction. The second recoiled as he locked eyes on the half-mud, half-mad creature heading towards him. He pressed a button on his walkie-talkie and started speaking into it. Both of them dropped their hands to hover near the trigger guards of their automatics.

Great . . .

I make it all this way and now I’m going to be gunned down by these two bozos.

She dug deep into her scant reserves of strength and raised her trembling hands in the internationally recognized sign for surrender. ‘Please,’ she breathed, sinking to her knees in front of them. ‘Call Inspector Arkadian. Ruin City Homicide. I really need to talk to him.’

Rodriguez stood at the baggage check and watched the security guard empty the contents of his holdall on to the steel table and start going through it. An alert crackled through the walkie-talkie clipped to his belt, but he took no notice of it. The message called for back-up to deal with a woman in need of assistance. Rodriguez turned and looked back over the queue on the other side of the walk-through metal detector. His height gave him a clear view to the main concourse, but he couldn’t see the source of the disturbance.

‘Thank you, sir, have a nice flight.’ The guard pushed his canvas holdall to one side and reached for the next bag rattling down the rollers from the X-ray machine.

Rodriguez stepped aside and quickly repacked the passport he never thought he’d need again, the Bible his mother had died holding, the clothes that hung a little baggy on his slender, six-foot-five-inch frame. The last item he folded carefully, as if it were a flag to lay on a soldier’s coffin. It was a red nylon windcheater with a hood, meaningless to most but symbolically important to him.

He pulled the drawstring tight and picked up a small leather-bound volume, given to him by the Abbot, chronicling the history of the rides of the
Tabula Rasa
. He’d written a woman’s name and two addresses inside the cover. The first belonged to the offices of a newspaper in New Jersey. The second was residential.

He swung the bag over his shoulder and headed for the boarding gate. He didn’t look back. Whatever was going on in the terminal building wasn’t his concern. His mission lay elsewhere.

Liv stared at the blank, soundproofed walls and the small mirror she knew from experience concealed an observation room. She wondered if anyone was in there now – watching her. She studied her reflection in the toughened glass, her clothes grimy, her hair plastered to her skull. She raised her hand to smooth down her fringe then gave it up as a waste of time.

To begin with she thought they’d brought her here because interview rooms were the one place in any police station you were still allowed to smoke, but looking at herself now, she wasn’t so sure. Maybe they were just keeping her out of the way because she looked like a crazy woman. She’d felt a little mad as she’d given her statement, describing the sequence of events from her arrival in the terminal building to the moment she’d staggered back after the attempted kidnapping.

It was as if it had all happened to someone else. Her sense of disconnection had increased when the officer taking her statement had gone outside to fetch her another smoke and returned with a subtly different attitude. His quiet sympathy had been replaced by a cool distance. He’d completed the ritual in near silence, got her to read and sign the document then disappeared without a word, the blinds on the outside of the window preventing her from seeing where.

There was no handle on the inside of the door. His change of tack and the silent wait in this stark room, with its table and chairs bolted to the floor, conspired to make Liv feel like she had been arrested.

She picked up the cigarette burning slowly away to nothing in the ashtray and breathed it in. It tasted foreign and unpleasant, but she persevered. Her own crumpled Luckies were still in her holdall in the back of Gabriel’s car, along with her passport, her credit cards, everything except her cell phone. Arkadian was on his way in, apparently. Hopefully he’d be more sympathetic than his colleague. She thought back to her own journey, driving up through the winding road between the dark shapes of mountains, then along bright streets through a city that managed to appear both incredibly old and very modern. She remembered the sights sliding past her exhausted eyes as she stared out of the back of the police car: the familiar logo of Starbucks, and the chrome and glass storefronts of modern banks standing right next to open-fronted shops, carved out of stone, that sold copper goods, and carpets, and souvenirs, as they had done since biblical times.

She took another drag on the foul-tasting cigarette, screwed up her nose and crushed it out in the ashtray with a picture of the Citadel printed on the bottom. She pushed it to one side and laid her head on her arms. The sound of the air-con hummed at the periphery of her senses. She closed her tired eyes against the glare of the strip lights and, despite everything she had just been through, was asleep within seconds.

The Cat, Pet and Canine Clinic sat on the corner of Grace and Absolution in the heart of the Lost Quarter. A vet’s presence in such a sleazy and down-at-heel section of the city was surprising enough, but the fact that a light now burned behind its frosted-glass frontage was even stranger.

In the circles in which Kutlar moved it was generally referred to as the Bitch Clinic – testimony to the work that went on here during the hours of darkness. Most of these procedures, where medical records weren’t required and the bills were paid in cash, were performed on women. There wasn’t a pimp in the city who hadn’t used the clinic at one time or another for anything from a hastily arranged backstreet abortion, to a cut-price sterilization job done under the guise of fitting a contraceptive device. IUDs and slow-release hormone pills were relatively expensive, so it was more economical to sterilize them. Most of the girls didn’t even know about it until years later.

The clinic also offered other, more specialist services; ones that commanded a much higher premium due to the steeper prison sentences that resulted from discovery.

Kutlar had never used the place before. He owned no pets and until recently had been fortunate enough, considering his line of work, not to require any of its under-the-counter arrangements either. This had all changed on the rain-lashed airport service road when the nine millimetre round had flattened on its way through the van door and split in two as it entered his right leg. Part of the slug now lay in a stainless-steel tray. Kutlar looked at it now, felt his stomach lurch and turned away. He caught his reflection in the door of a medicine cabinet. His close-shaved head was varnished with sweat and shone in the overhead lights that made hollow shadows of his deep-set eyes. He realized he looked like a death’s-head, shuddered, and looked away.

He lay on his left side, propped against a raised part of the examination table while a fat man with a white coat and grey skin continued his delicate search for the second half of the round. Occasionally he felt a tugging sensation or heard a wet, tearing sound that made his stomach roll, but he fought back the nausea, forcing himself to breathe steadily – in through the nose, and out through the mouth – while focusing on a picture of a black Labrador slobbering happily from a large poster pinned to the opposite wall.

Kutlar had heard about the clinic from an acquaintance who specialized in the import and export of various items not generally advertised in the classifieds. He’d told him the doctor was generous with the painkillers, provided he hadn’t fallen off the wagon and snarfed them all himself. The clink of metal on metal announced the reunion of the second piece of the slug with its twin.

‘That appears to be most of the hardware accounted for,’ the fat man said in a voice that would not have sounded out of place coming from the mouth of a consultant. ‘I need to irrigate the wound now, flush out any smaller fragments that may still be there. Then I can seal the veins and start closing you up.’

Kutlar nodded and gritted his teeth. The doc picked up a clear plastic bottle with a thin spout and squeezed it with a doughy hand, carefully directing a stream of cold saline into the red chasm of his upper thigh. Kutlar shivered. He was still wet from the rain. His damp clothes, coupled with the blood loss, had started to shake him up a bit, probably with a little post-traumatic stress thrown in as a chaser. He looked back at the poster of the happy dog, realized it was recommending some kind of worm treatment, and felt the nausea rise again.

He thought about the ambush on the road, trying to work out where it had gone wrong. He’d dropped the first two guys at the car-hire place outside the main airport, then headed off to the other airport with his cousin Serko to drop off the skinny Hispanic so he could catch his red-eye to the States.

They’d spotted the dark-haired player in the trench coat just after they’d dropped him off – by the arrivals gate, holding up a sign with the girl’s name on it. He looked like police, but was alone. They’d held back, watching until the girl suddenly appeared on some half-full flight out of London. Kutlar had weighed it up and figured there’d be a nice bonus if he and Serko could jump the guy and come back from the drop-off with the girl in tow, so they’d followed them outside. They almost had a chance to grab her straight off when the chaperone headed for the car while she’d held back for a smoke. Only there’d been some security guys across the road, rousting vagrants from the bus stop. So they’d waited. Followed them in the van. And decided to spring the ambush on the service road.

The plan had been simple. He was to take care of the babysitter while Serko transferred the girl to the van. Nice and easy. Except the driver had come flying out so fast he’d been knocked backwards and dropped his gun. By the time he’d recovered, a shot had been fired. He’d thrown himself at the man, kicked his gun from his hand, then scrambled back to the van and taken off. Except the girl hadn’t been there. Neither had Serko. As he sped away he’d looked in the rear-view mirror and seen something lying in the road. He’d nearly spun round and gone back until bullets started chewing up his side panels and punched out his window. He only realized he’d been hit when he tried to apply the brakes and his leg wouldn’t move. Going back would have been suicide. He’d had no choice. Dead men couldn’t settle scores. Cousin or no cousin.

A phone started ringing in the waiting room. Kutlar knew who it was. Wondered how much time he had before they caught up with him. He’d done odd jobs for the Church in the past, mostly low-level acts of intimidation and delivering messages with menaces. Never anything like this. Never kidnapping. Never anything that required a gun. But the money had been too good to turn down. Even so, as soon as the doctor was done he was out of there, pay-off or no. He didn’t want to go down for this. He listened to the phone ringing and wished he hadn’t told them about the clinic. Not that he’d had much choice. The older guy had specifically asked where they should go if there were any casualties. That was the word he’d used –
casualties
. They should have walked away then. Too late now. Too late for Serko, at least.

‘I’ll give you some antibiotics for the fever,’ the fat man said in the voice he’d salvaged from a previous lifetime. ‘It’ll also act as a prophylactic against infection.’

Kutlar nodded again, felt sweat prickling his scalp and running down his neck and back. Rumour had it that the good doctor had practised proper medicine at one time in his past, before lack of willpower and unfettered access to morphine had been his undoing. ‘You need to go somewhere and rest,’ the doc said. ‘Take it easy until this heals.’

‘How long?’ Kutlar croaked, his mouth dry and woolly from the Novocaine or whatever it was he’d had pumped into him.

The doctor dropped his eyes back to the ragged red hole and examined it like it was some kind of rare orchid. ‘A month, maybe. Couple of weeks at least before you should even try walking on it.’

The voice from the doorway made them both start. ‘He needs to be good to go when we leave.’

Kutlar watched Cornelius walk into the room, the waxy patches on his face glistening under the surgical lights. Johann followed close behind. Their red windcheaters were slick with rain. They looked like they’d been dipped in blood.

‘OK,’ the fat man said. He knew better than to argue with his clients. ‘I’ll strap it up tight and give him some heavy-duty painkillers.’

Cornelius stopped by the table and leaned in to examine the wound with a connoisseur’s eye before the doctor started bandaging it up. He looked up at Kutlar and winked, a smile creasing the corners of his eyes and pulling at the pale patches of skin on his cheek. Somewhere within the cold numbness of his leg, Kutlar felt something stir. His friend had been right, the doc had been generous with the meds; but the walls of Novocaine were beginning to crumble and an army of pain was starting to invade.

The doctor finished dressing the wound and reached for a syringe. ‘I’ll give you some morphine now and some tablets to take with you.’

A blur of red flashed across the room as Johann grabbed the doctor and covered his mouth. Bloodshot eyes went wide and frantic behind greasy spectacles and snot bubbled from his nose as he started to hyperventilate. Cornelius plucked the syringe from his pudgy fingers and jabbed it through the white sleeve and into his arm. He depressed the plunger and the magnified eyes passed from panic to glassy resignation as the opiates flooded his system. Johann dragged him to a chair and dropped him into it while Cornelius found another ampoule and re-filled the syringe. He stuck it in the same area as the first jab, pushing the plunger until it was empty.

‘Tabula Rasa,’ he whispered, glancing over at Kutlar. ‘No witnesses.’

He withdrew the syringe from the fat man’s arm and stepped closer.

Kutlar would have run if his leg had been up to it, but he knew it was futile. He wouldn’t even make it out of the room. He thought of Serko lying on the wet road. Hoped these ruthless bastards, whoever they were, would at least catch up with the guy who’d killed him and return the favour. He watched the syringe coming nearer, dangling loosely between Cornelius’s thick fingers, the tip stained pink with the doctor’s blood.

I hope he’s going to use a different needle,
Kutlar thought, before realizing that it didn’t really matter.

‘We need to get out of here,’ Cornelius said. He reached over and took a paper towel from a box on the side table and wrapped the syringe in it. ‘You good to go?’

Kutlar nodded. Breathed again. Cornelius dropped the syringe in the pocket of his windcheater then grabbed him under the shoulder and helped him to his feet. Kutlar felt the swollen flesh of his leg expanding against the tight bindings. The room began to swim. He tried to take a step but his legs wouldn’t obey him. The last thing he saw before passing out was the image of the dog on the poster, bright-eyed, healthy and ecstatically worm free.