The Touch Of Ghosts: Writer's Cut (Alex Rourke) (19 page)

I blinked hard a couple of times, tried to regain my composure. Murmured, “What the hell?”
 

“Easy, easy,” he repeated. “We need to talk. I'm not going to cause trouble.”

I laughed openly at that. “You've already—” I started, but my throat clamped shut again. I felt close to tears. “What the fuck do we need to talk about after what you did?”

“Steady,” Randy said, still keeping his hands out. “Look, I can help you.”

“Help me?” Another laugh threatened.

“I can give you the guy who told me to shoot the doctor. I swear. You know who I'm talking about, right? I mean, you must be getting close.”

“Flint?”

“That's right.” Randy dropped, very slowly, back into the armchair. “I used the name Delaney when I worked for him; maybe you know that. He must be shitting bricks about you by now.”

I didn't shift my aim at all, but I slowly maneuvered on to the couch opposite Randy. “You mean you can get evidence that'll see him arrested, convicted, all that? Or do you mean you can just set him up to go someplace I can kill him?”

“Whatever you want, man. They're both as good as each other. You want to take police along, or you want to do it yourself. I can do that, yeah.”

“Why?”

Randy sighed and slumped a little in his seat. He seemed to know that I wasn’t about to kill him. “Look, I'm fucked right now. The cops are looking for me, they'll know I've stolen another car and probably have its license number, and I can't touch my credit cards or my cell phone in case they trace them. The only friends I've got here are all people I've met through him. If I go to them for help, he's going to find out, and I can't ask people I knew before.”

“Why not?”

“There's a guy in San Francisco I worked for a few years ago. He's big. I mean, Karl Flint's operation is nothing to what this guy has going. I had to leave, and he's wanted me dead ever since.”

“Curtis Marshall. The way I heard it, you shot his nephew so you could escape from the cops during a raid.”

Randy scowled and ran a hand through his hair. “Whatever. Point is, I can't ask anyone I know from California to help me get out of the state, and I can't ask anyone here either. Except you. If I help you get Flint, you can get me away. Give me a ticket to Miami — I've got a cousin who lives down there — and a ride to an airport outside Vermont and I'll repay the favor. I've got good reason for wanting to see that son of a bitch Flint get what's coming to him. He’s sold me out, probably would’ve had me suicided-by-cop.”

“OK,” I said, keeping the pistol pointed at him. “But before I decide whether or not I'll help you, I want a few things. First, you carrying a weapon?”

“In my coat pocket.”

“Pull it out very, very slowly and place it gently on the floor over here by the coffee table.”

“Sure,” he said. “I’m not here to shoot you. Take it.”

Randy did exactly as instructed. I waited until he’d sat back down and then reached for his pistol. “Now talk. I want to know how your operation works, who else you've killed to keep it covered up and what you did with them afterwards, and I want to know why the hell Gemma died. Then we'll see about whether or not we can do a deal. And I want to know how you came to be here in Vermont in the first place.”

Randy pinched the bridge of his nose. “You must know most of that already.”

“You run dope over the border.”

“Flint does. I just work for him, man. He's a delivery service, like UPS.”

“The two of you bring heroin down from Canada. You’re ‘Delaney’. There's people who ship it that way rather than through the Caribbean or the East Coast. Your people to smuggle it safely across the border. They work as couples, hiking down to North Bleakwater where they stash their deliveries under the tub on the top floor. They pick up their cash and they leave before the buyer comes to collect. I guess you use a dead-drop system and no one ever sees each other, just to keep it all secure. Every so often, someone sees something or hears something and you have to silence them. What I don't know is why anyone pays you to be delivery middlemen when they could do it themselves.”

“Stuff that comes south is purer than what gets up here from New York,” Randy said. “It's been through fewer hands. Buyers make more of a profit on it, but they can't afford to lose any shipments. Flint's a cop and he says he's got a friend in the Border Patrol, so he can pretty much guarantee it makes it. Plus his system's solid. Even I've never met him face to face, and I'm the one does most of the work. It’s all blind.”

“And this has been going on for, what, a few years? How come you never met?”

Randy shrugged. “He's careful. He’s a
cop
, so he’s gotta be. Sometimes we talk over the phone. Urgent stuff mostly. And even then he talks weird, fakes a voice, y’know? Other times we use email. Anonymized and all that shit. No way anyone could trace it to us even if they did manage to get a look at it. It's a tight system. If I didn’t know his name, he could be anyone — man, woman, black, white.
Anyone
. The whole thing’s in
layers
. Everything buried two steps back. Solid.”

“So what about when someone finds out what's happening despite all that? What do you do with them? Who were they? My guess is there was a couple called the Haleys, a girl called Stephanie Markham and then Gemma. You also shot one of your couriers, a guy called Adam Webb, because he tried stealing from you.”

Randy couldn't maintain eye contact and looked down at his feet. For a pro he didn't seem especially proud of his work. I guessed he’d been used to killing other people in the business when he started out, not just those who walked into the wrong place at the wrong time. When he answered, he didn't hold back. “The first time, just over three years ago, it was this pair of old folks who must have been here for hiking in the fall — what do they call it, foliage season? I got a call from two of our couriers saying there was a couple joined up with them, heading in the same direction. The couriers were shitting themselves in case they were undercover cops or something. I would have let it be — it seemed harmless — but Flint said no. So I had to go and intercept everyone on the trail. I told the two couriers they should just clear out and I'd deal with the people tagging along with them. And I did; I killed them, stabbed them right there, hid the bodies. The guy was dead before he knew what was happening and his wife, she just stood there looking couldn't believe what the fuck she was seeing. Blood all over the place, man. I called Flint and he said to get their corpses away from the trail. Stick them in my trunk and take them to Lake Champlain. He'd have a boat ready. So I ditched them.”

“That would be the Haleys.”

“Fuck knows,” He shrugged. “I just killed them, I didn't get introductions.”

“Who was next?”

“The next summer we were expecting a delivery. I went inside the old hotel in the ghost town across the lake to leave the cash for the pair carrying the dope. I was just on my way upstairs when I turned the corner and there was a girl wandering down the hallway towards me. She saw me clear as day, and she saw I had a gun. So I told her I was a cop and she should clear the building. Nothing to see here. She walked away a little, but must’ve known that was bullshit because she ran. Didn't make a sound. Just ran. And I took off after her.”

“Red shirt, dark hair, early twenties?”

Randy nodded and kept looking at the floor. “She was quick — I didn't think I could keep up with her — but I caught her in the end. Smashed her in the jaw as she ran. I did the same to her as I did to them other two, with my knife.”

“Why didn't you just shoot her?”

“The noise, man. I didn't know if there was anyone else nearby. It was broad daylight in the middle of summer, for Christ's sake. Flint told me to do the same with her body as he'd done with the first two — wrap it up in tarp and chicken wire to weigh it down and stop it ever surfacing again, and drop it into the lake. But this time he said to leave the knife and the shirt I was wearing for him to deal with. I didn’t want to, but I didn’t think I had much choice. Then you gotta figure he had me by the balls once he had those.”

“Flint doesn't help you dispose of anyone?”

“No. Guess he don't like to get his hands dirty. Plus this girl was mostly my fault and he was pissed at me.”

“But he makes sure there's no serious investigation afterwards.”

“Sure. He says he's untouchable. He says it’s like this is his kingdom and he can get away with anything he wants. He told me once about this time he killed some hooker in Burlington, said no one even thought to touch him for it. I reckon he enjoys it. Until you showed up.”

“You broke into the house we’re in a few nights back, right?”

He nodded.

“So why didn't you kill me then?”

“Flint hadn't told me to, was all. I was just supposed to make sure she hadn't left behind anything that could tie back to us, and to maybe scare you away. You hadn't been enough trouble to kill you by then, and two murders is a lot harder to cover than one.”
 

“If it hadn't been me, someone would have investigated him sooner or later. He's not well-liked. What happened at the farm?"

“I knew he must've set me up when I saw tire marks on the track. I don't often have to meet with anyone and when I do, I make sure I'm there ahead of time. No fucking way they could’ve beaten me to the farm. So it wasn't a big surprise when I came about through the woods and saw you and a bunch of cops. I figured I'd get a little payback before I split.”

“So why shoot at me and not Flint if he set you up?”

“Like I said, we've never met. There were a couple of detectives, but I didn't know if Flint would have had the guts to show up himself. And if you shoot a cop they
really
fucking hunt you down. So you seemed easier, and I knew you were the one who'd turned everything to shit in the first place, so you had it coming. I would've had you first time but you moved just when I fired.”

“Aren’t I lucky. Who came next after the girl in the hotel?”

“Things were quiet for ages. But a couple of months ago, that courier, Webb, got greedy and tried to steal a shipment. We found out as soon as the buyer collected their dope that he'd switched it for powder. He might have got away, but the seller had a transmitter in the packages — like a LoJack — and the buyer knew what to look for. We knew where that dumbass was before he did himself.”

“So you went up there with someone, shot him and buried him.”

“Some guy called Wallace, worked for the buyer. Making sure both sides were happy. We caught up with him in some woods about ten miles north of here. No boat this time, so we had to bury the guy where he was. Wallace took a couple of photos to show them we'd done it. Next one was the doctor.” He paused, studied the floor real hard. “I guess you know about that.”

I leaned forward again, a fresh spike of anger rushing through me, and said, “Explain it to me, you son of a bitch. Why and how.”

When he started talking again, Randy’s voice had sunk even lower. The words came in a continuous stream as though he was afraid I’d kill him when he finished. And maybe I would. “I got up in the rocks looking down on the road. I've got a hunting rifle with a starlight scope. The rifle's only small caliber, but it was all I could afford. Same one I shot at you at the farm. I waited until I saw the car Flint said I should look for. She was driving slowly, trying to stay safe on the ice, I guess. I aimed just above the steering column where I figured she'd be sitting, and fired. The car carried on a little way and I thought I might have missed, but then it coasted off the road and into the trees. I went down there to check she was dead and to find the bullet. Flint said I should make it look like it had passed all the way through and out the back, so that's what I did. The slug was lodged in the seat. Then I made sure I hadn't left anything behind and got the fuck out of there, covering my tracks as well as I could.”

“Did you use a silencer, anything like that? There didn't seem to be much noise when you fired.” I smiled with intense distaste. “She was on the phone when you killed her. I listened to the whole thing.”

“Shit, man, I'm sorry. I never wanted to get—”

“Who gives a fuck what you wanted. Did you use a silencer?”

“No. The rifle's quiet because it's low caliber, like I said, not very powerful. I don't have any kind of silencer.”

“I had you pegged as some kind of ex-military hired killer type,” I said. “All the best equipment, proper training. Shows how wrong you can be.”

“I didn't plan to end up doing this kind of thing,” he said, self-pity shading into sorrow. Dropping back into a kid who got sucked into violence and killing, just because that's the way it goes. A guy bullied into doing other people's dirty work because he was too scared to say no and found himself stuck with it. Not much different from Adam Webb. Whatever; I found I didn’t care. “It just happened that way. Even working for Flint, I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do shit like that, I thought maybe I'd left that all behind in California. Most of the time, all I did was pretend to be ‘Mr Delaney’ to recruit new couriers and make sure the dope turned up smoothly. Shit.”

“Why did Flint want Gemma killed?”

“A few days before, Flint had someone whack a dealer who'd told him to go fuck himself. Made it look like a hit and run. When Flint called me, he said the doctor was doing the autopsy. Apparently, whoever killed the guy didn't check the body too well because the doctor found a note with the name ‘Delaney’ on it. Flint had sent him the note with a photo of that guy Webb — with his face blanked out, of course. The photo was missing and Flint thought the doctor took it because she'd already been asking questions about Webb, sending out pictures and stuff. Flint was fucking furious. He hates problems, and now he thought she'd recognized the picture and knew everything. He said that was enough and he'd kill me if we didn't silence her.”

I rested my forehead on top of the pistol and closed my eyes. Gemma's dad was right when he’d said I got her killed. If I hadn't asked her to help with the Webb case, she'd still be alive.