Legacy of Lies - Evan Buckley Series 12 (2021), page 1
Legacy Of Lies
An Evan Buckley Thriller
James Harper
James Harper Books
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Notes for the ARC team
1
Kieran, the manager of the Jerusalem Tavern, gave Evan a curious look as he sat on his favorite stool up at the bar.
‘On your own?’
Evan nodded, told a bare-faced lie.
‘Yeah. Kate’s working.’
Feeling slightly guilty about the lie. And very apprehensive about the consequences of it when Kate Guillory found out. Their earlier phone conversation came to mind, and with it the difficulty he’d had identifying the dominant emotion behind her words—the disbelief or the total absence of sympathy.
‘You’ve got a cold?’
Like he’d said he’d caught leprosy from a toilet seat.
He’d squeezed his nose tighter, croaked something pathetic about man flu. Another flood of non-sympathy had come gushing down the line.
‘Aw. Poor baby.’
‘Thank you for your concern. You don’t need to come around and rub it better.’
‘You can’t rub a cold better, Evan.’
‘No? I thought if—’
‘Enough! Besides, isn’t beer supposed to be the answer to all of life’s problems, great and small.’
‘It is. Just not man flu.’
And now, here he was sitting up at the bar in the Jerusalem Tavern waiting for Kieran to put a cold one down in front of him. Kieran gave a weary headshake as he did so.
‘I’d have thought she’d want to be here under the circumstances.’
Evan shrugged, that’s women for you. Kieran had the sense not to push it. It was Evan’s neck, after all.
The previous evening Evan had taken a call from him.
‘That guy was in here again. The one who bought Kate and you a drink.’
‘You’re sure it was him?’
‘Definitely. I’ve got a good memory for faces. Especially anyone who wants to buy you a beer.’
Evan had laughed with him, both of them knowing it wasn’t him the stranger had been interested in. He just happened to have been with Guillory at the time.
She was being stalked.
Or so she thought.
In a rash moment he’d suggested something along those lines. That perhaps she was imagining it. He hadn’t suggested it a second time.
According to her, a man had sat beside her on a park bench when all the other benches were unoccupied. He’d been sneaking glances at her. Then she’d seen him in a diner trying to be inconspicuous—a difficult trick to pull off when you’re holding the menu upside down. A couple days after that, she’d spotted him in the Jerusalem Tavern. She’d chased after him, but was too slow. Then Kieran had put two beers down on the bar in front of them, told them the stalker had paid for them.
It was an escalation, if only a small one. The stalker wanted them to be aware of his presence.
And now he’d come back again. The question was, would a further escalation ensue?
‘Did he say anything?’ Evan said.
‘Nope. Didn’t even buy a drink. He had a look around, then left when he saw you and Kate weren’t here.’
‘And he didn’t leave any money for drinks this time?’
It was worth a try. It got him a roll of the eyes but that was all.
‘I’ll point him out if he comes in again. You can ask him yourself. I still think Kate would want to be here.’
Evan ignored the excellent advice, carried his beer over to a table where the lighting was dimmer—what Kieran would describe as having more mood or atmosphere—and settled in to wait.
He’d only just sat down when his phone beeped at him. He pulled it out. A text from Guillory.
How’s the patient?
He groaned inwardly, knowing where this was going. He composed a totally inadequate reply.
Asleep.
The reply didn’t take long to arrive. One that he could’ve put everything he owned on.
I was thinking about rubbing things better.
I’m asleep. And infectious.
I think you’ve got another woman there.
Two, actually. I’ll call you tomorrow.
He kept the phone in his hand, but the message had been received loud and clear: go away. It wouldn’t have surprised him if she’d sent one last cutting reply.
Don’t bother.
After a minute he dropped the phone in his pocket, feeling like something unpleasant on the bottom of somebody’s shoe.
He told himself it was for all the right reasons, wasn’t sure who was going to tell her.
In front of him the beer sat untouched on the table. He wasn’t tempted to drink it. Barely even saw it, staring instead at his left hand resting on the table beside it. Feeling a twinge in the little finger. Echoed by the queasy churning in his gut.
Time passed slowly. A steady flow of people entered and left the bar. He got into a rhythm. The door opened, somebody walked in. His head came up as if it was attached to the door handle by a piece of string. Glance at the newcomer, no recognition. Look at Kieran, get a small headshake back.
The same thing, over and over.
Until it wasn’t.
The door opened. Nobody came in. There was a direct line of sight from the open door to the end of the bar where he and Guillory habitually sat. Somebody was watching from outside. Or they didn’t like the look of the place. A man walked in. Evan glanced at him. He’d never seen him before. He looked away, towards the bar. Kieran was nowhere in sight.
The man stopped just inside the door. Looked around the room. Like any normal customer might, scanning the bar for his friends. Except Evan didn’t think so. There was something predatory about him, a hunger clinging to him. He dipped his head as the man’s gaze swept over him. He’d have sworn he felt it catch, linger on him a little longer than on the people seated at the other tables. He sipped at his beer, glanced up from under his eyebrows at the bar.
Still no sign of Kieran.
Then a movement registered in his peripheral vision. Kieran collecting empty glasses from the tables on the far side of the bar, his back to him.
That was when his phone rang.
He jumped at the sudden noise. It felt like everybody else did too, all eyes on him at the intrusive ringtone. It was the default tone, but it might as well have been called The Guillory Song as far as he was concerned. He ignored it. Half expected the man to shout at him to answer it, let him talk to her.
On the other side of the room Kieran was in full flow, talking to the customers whose table he was clearing. If it hadn’t been full of beer, Evan would’ve thrown his glass at the back of his head.
The stranger was already turning towards the door. Maybe he hadn’t seen his friends. Perhaps he’d strayed into the wrong bar. Evan knew better.
And Kieran was still talking.
Time to shake it up.
He swept his hand across the table, sent his glass flying. Warm beer went everywhere, then a loud crash as the glass shattered on the floor. Conversations stopped. People jumped sideways to avoid the splashes. Kieran spun around to see which idiot had made a mess on his clean floor. And the stranger turned away from the door, an instinctive reaction to the sudden noise behind him. Staring directly at Kieran across the empty space where people had been a moment before.
Evan kept his eyes on Kieran’s face. Saw the small jolt of recognition on it, the sort of reaction you experience when you see something you didn’t really think would ever happen.
Then Kieran ruined everything. His head snapped towards Evan’s table as if he’d climbed on it and started singing. The stranger followed his gaze, saw Evan’s face full-on.
With that, he was off running.
Evan came out of his seat like the whole place was on fire, went after him. The stalker pulled over a table by the door as he went past, blew through the door as a couple of guys were coming in, both of them heads down, phones in their hands. The stalker slammed into the nearest one. Shoved him hard into a car parked at the curb, set the alarm off. He grabbed the other one by the arm, spun him around, threw him through the open door, smack-bang into the guy who’d been sitting at the table he’d overturned, now on his feet yelling at the stalker’s back while his girlfriend shrieked in dismay at the red wine soaking into her white dress while the car alarm added its insistent maddening screech to the mix.
The two men stumbled backwards into Evan as fate choreographed the chaos perfectly, all of them off balance as they tried to avoid the up-turned table and broken glass on the floor. Suddenly everyone was on their ass, Evan on the bottom, a writhing tangle of arms and legs and wet butts and angry shouts. He heaved the two men off him, rolling away in the glass and spilled beer. One hand on a table leg, the other on the boyfriend’s head, pushing himself to his feet, tearing after the stalker.
He stopped on the sidewalk. Head snapping back and forth. Heart going like a trip hammer. Nothing. It had felt like forever, but the confusion inside hadn’t cost him more than fifteen seconds.
The guy who’d been thrown into the car staggered in front of him like he’d spent too long inside the bar already, eyes fixed on the gutter as if he’d come outside to be sick.
Evan shouted at him over the noise of the alarm.
‘Which way did he go?’
‘I’ve lost my phone.’ Sounding like the world had come to a premature end.
Evan resisted the temptation to yell at him again, tell him he’d help him find it and stick it somewhere he’d never lose it again if he didn’t answer the damn question. He gripped his arm, shook him violently.
‘Which way?’
The guy pulled his arm free. Then waved it, an angry dismissive gesture that took in the whole street, the buildings opposite, half of the night sky.
‘That way. Or the other way. I don’t know. I’ve lost my phone.’
Evan looked both ways. To the right there was nowhere to hide, not unless the guy was crouching between the parked cars.
He went left.
A block from the Jerusalem there was a boarded-up storefront. The door got busted down by local kids as fast as the landlord fixed it, the building used for casual sex and taking drugs.
Not so long ago, he’d been jumped by a man with a grudge hiding in the doorway as he passed. Tonight, it was a young woman leaning there, half-hidden in the shadows as he crept up, sucking hard on a cigarette. In her middle twenties, she was twice as old as the kids who hung out there. If she’d been wearing a short skirt and high heels with more bare flesh on show instead of jeans and sneakers and a hoodie, he’d have said she was taking a break between servicing clients.
The door behind her was ajar, the kids currently one step ahead of the landlord. The boards that had been pried loose were stacked neatly in the corner behind her.
He leaned in, got a waft of cigarette smoke as he got up close, dropped his voice.
‘Did you see a man run past?’
She nodded, mouthed something at him.
He went inside.
‘Anyone else in there?’
She shook her head, then stepped out of the doorway. Dropped the cigarette butt on the sidewalk.
‘I’ve gotta go. You want me to call the police?’
‘No, it’s okay.’
He picked through the boards leaning in the corner until he found a solid piece of lumber two and a half feet long. He hefted it in his hands, then eased the door slowly open. Stepped inside. Dusty shelves lined both side walls, the back wall bare apart from a door in the middle. The room was full of junk. Broken chairs and packing crates, crumpled beer cans and squashed fast food containers. Other things he didn’t want to inspect too closely. On one side of the room, an old mattress he could smell from six feet away. A couple of full-size female-body dress mannequins were arranged suggestively on it. The last store had sold women’s designer clothes.
He waited, listening, the sound of the car alarm that everybody was ignoring still audible in the distance. Then crept across the room to the mattress, wishing he had the head cold he’d told Guillory he was suffering from. He leaned the makeshift club against the wall, disentangled the two mannequins. Somebody had added the anatomical details that the manufacturer had omitted with a whiteboard marker, then appended helpful written instructions with arrows in strategic places. He pulled off his coat, draped it around the mannequin’s shoulders.
Back to the wall, he edged up to the open door to the storeroom. Standing to the side of the doorway he waited, pictured the stalker on the other side of the wall, their backs no more than a foot apart. Each waiting for the other man to make a move, poke his head into the opening.
He stepped sideways, a short fast movement, scraping his foot along the floor to create maximum noise. Thrust the mannequin’s upper torso through the dark doorway. Heard a whistling rush of air and a resounding thud. The mannequin came alive in his hands, jerked violently as a metal bar bounced off the wooden ball on top of its neck.
He dumped the mannequin, grabbed the bar. Yanked hard. The stalker stumbled forwards into the open doorway. Exposed. Off-balance. Evan stepped in, buried his fist up to the wrist in his gut. Hands on top of his head as he doubled over, pushed him down onto the floor, twisting his arm up between his shoulder blades, a knee on his spine pinning him to the floor.
Guillory would’ve given him a grudging round of applause.
The guy hissed in pain. Tried to squirm out from under Evan’s knee. Evan bent his arm up tighter, bearing down harder on him until finally the struggles let up.
‘Who are you?’
Not great, but he had to start somewhere. It didn’t impress the guy much either. He spat something into the floorboards between the rasping suck of air as he tried to breathe.
‘Fuck you.’
Evan squashed his nose into the floor. Increased the pressure on his arm to concentrate his mind and improve his manners, tried again.
‘Why are you following Kate Guillory?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘So, why’d you run?’
The guy heaved air into his empty lungs, coughed it back out again. Shook his head.
‘Get off me. I can’t breathe.’
Evan bounced on his back to show him what not being able to breathe really felt like.
‘What do you want?’
Later, he’d blame the sound of the car alarm that was still going off outside the Jerusalem. Or the attacker was naturally light on their feet. Whatever it was, the first he knew about it was the smell of cigarette smoke over the top of the fast food leftovers and the sour odor of the mattress.
Then a soft whoosh from behind him as the second-best piece of lumber from the pile in the doorway cut through the stale air and knocked him into oblivion.
2
Evan became aware of a rhythmic jabbing sensation in his hip. As if somebody was kicking him. Then a woman’s voice coming from somewhere far above him, as bereft of sympathy as the last time he’d heard it. But filled with a lot more irritation. He almost wished somebody would hit him again.
‘How’s your cold?’
He slowly pushed himself into a sitting position. Very careful to ensure that not the slightest moan or groan slipped through his lips, lest he invite comments along the lines of only having himself to blame. In the semi-darkness he didn’t see the heavy metal rod that he’d yanked out of the stalker’s grip sitting on the floor beside him. He rested his hand on it as he pushed himself up, sent it rolling away.
Guillory stepped on it to stop it.
