In Your Name, page 10
Silverton nodded and Ramirez stepped away. Mechanic let out a huge sigh as the pain subsided. She gritted her teeth and stared at Ramirez. Her look said it all – I’ll fucking kill you.
‘The little shit!’ Silverton’s voice echoed around the walls. ‘All the things I did for him.’ He’d turned an unhealthy shade of pink.
‘It’s the truth,’ Mechanic said looking up at Silverton. ‘Walker didn’t plan for you to employ me during your visit. He tried to frighten me off. When I didn’t play ball his only option was for his men to take me out.’
‘But you were too good for them.’ Silverton’s colour was receding back to pasty white. ‘So you killed Walker before he had the chance to kill you.’
‘Yes, that’s right. You had to be an idiot not to see it was a botched kidnapping. The carjacking didn’t make sense. To him I was a loose end. I had to strike first.’
‘I didn’t work out it was a kidnapping,’ Silverton said defensively.
‘With all due respect, sir, that’s not your line of work.’
‘Where’s the body?’
‘In a warehouse about an hour’s drive east. It’s burned and concealed in a cavity wall.’
‘You nasty bitch,’ Silverton said with admiration in his voice. ‘Are you going to kill me as well?’
Mechanic looked at him and shook her head. ‘No.’
‘How can I believe you?’ Silverton asked.
‘I have nothing to gain from killing you and if I wanted you dead … you would be.’ Silverton nodded his head in agreement. She had a point. He signalled to Ramirez who stepped forward with a long hunting knife.
‘No I’m telling you the truth, don’t …’ She let out a scream and fought against the restraints binding her to the chair as the blade slashed downwards.
The razor-sharp edge sliced through the rope and she catapulted backwards. She stared up at Ramirez. He placed the knife back in his belt with a look of genuine disappointment. He hadn’t got to play with his toys today.
She looked at her bruised and bloodied finger then sideways at Ramirez. She might not kill Silverton but given half a chance she would not afford his companion the same courtesy.
Mechanic breathed deeply, arched her back and rotated her head. She could feel the bones cracking back into place as she regained her posture. Her hands hurt like hell.
‘I believe you,’ Silverton said as he walked around the room then returned to Mechanic.
She offered him her tied wrists.
‘I presume I passed the test.’
‘You did. Sorry about that.’ He nodded again and Ramirez cut the cord. Blood rushed into her purple hands and pain surged into her damaged finger.
Silverton disappeared from view then returned with an envelope. He removed a further set of black and white photographs.
‘My business interests in Vegas are wide and varied. One of the more lucrative is the trafficking and distribution of class A drugs for from Mexico. I run them through California and then on to Nevada. I have an active network here in Vegas which is exceptionally profitable. Normally things are pretty cool, other dealers are happy to stick to their own piece of the playground. But my operation got hit and no one on the street knows jack shit about it. I will pay you fifteen grand up front, with a twenty grand success fee.’
He placed the pictures in Mechanic’s lap.
‘I want the bastards that did this. I want them to have some quality time with Ramirez and I want to watch.’
She looked at the photos.
The first depicted a tall, lean guy lying on the ground in a pool of blood, his neck slashed wide open. The second showed a short, stocky guy with tattoos on his neck and chest, also lying with a dark halo of blood around his disfigured skull. The third was of a fat guy sitting on the sidewalk against a wall. His head was tilted back, eyeballs bulging at the sky, skewered in place by a giant metal cocktail stick rammed down his throat.
Mechanic rotated her head again and bones cracked in her neck.
‘I got a better idea.’
22
Lucas opened his front door to Harper standing in the rain. The streetlights spilled bouncing pools of yellow light across the sheets of water on the road.
‘Hey, come in.’
Harper wiped his feet on the mat and still succeeded in leaving dirty, wet imprints on the carpet as he entered the house. Lucas watched the trail of footprints disappear into the living room. He shook his head and followed.
Harper removed his coat, dumped it in the corner of the room and made a beeline for the whisky. Any pretence of being on the waggon was long gone.
‘You want one?’ he said over his shoulder as Lucas picked Harper’s dripping coat off the carpet and tossed it into the hall.
‘Yeah, that would be good.’ Lucas was used to his friend helping himself.
Harper handed him a glass with enough liquor in it to kill a horse. He dug into his jacket pocket and gave Lucas a book of tickets.
‘A night flight?’ Lucas said.
‘Yeah, it was cheaper.’
‘The Lucky 6? Never heard of it.’
‘Nor me, I found it on teletext. It’s a new motel on the outskirts of Vegas. They had a deal, so I called and booked us in. It was cheap.’
Lucas read the hotel details.
‘The location is perfect and at twenty dollars a night that will do nicely.’
‘Ten dollars.’
‘What? It says here twenty bucks.’
‘It does but they only had one room. So it’s ten each.’
‘You booked us into one room? I’m not staying with—’
‘Get over yourself,’ Harper interrupted before his friend could protest further. ‘Like you said, it’s in a great place and the room has two queen beds. It’ll be fine.’
‘Oh that’s all right then. Two queen beds with two queens to go in them.’
‘Relax. I said we were brothers.’ Harper slurped his whisky.
Lucas looked at Harper, his mouth dropping open.
‘It might have slipped your notice but I am several shades of skin tone darker than you. How the hell are we brothers?’
‘You always look for the negatives,’ Harper said. ‘They were a bit edgy about letting the room to two guys, so I said we were brothers.’
‘You’re white, I’m black and we have different surnames.’ Lucas threw his hands up and looked to the ceiling.
‘It’ll be fine. And we can pick up some firearms when we’re there.’
‘Oh no, we don’t.’ Lucas said shaking his head. ‘The last time I was in the same room with you and a gun, you shot me.’
‘Will you give it a rest with the “you shot me” routine? It’s pissing me off. It was an accident, okay. You keep bringing it up and making a big thing about it.’
‘Making a big thing about it? You shot me in the fucking head!’
‘You’re overreacting.’
‘You shot me! That’s why I don’t want to be around you when you’re packing a gun.’
‘So what do you think we’re gonna do when we find Mechanic? Attack her with rolled up newspapers?’
Lucas fell silent and sipped his whisky. He knew guns were inevitable.
Harper looked around the room. There were piles of clothes in the corner and dirty dishes lay beside the sofa. Used coffee cups were stacked up on the coffee table and the whole place reeked of day-old fish.
‘Where’s your wife?’ Harper asked craning his head to look into the kitchen. Pots and pans were piled into the sink and cereal packets cluttered the countertops. The burned remnants of a battered fish dinner welded to the grill pan gave away the source of the smell.
‘She’s spending a couple of days with a friend,’ Lucas replied casually.
‘You made a shit load of mess in a couple of days.’
‘Yeah well, maybe.’
‘Sorry man,’ said Harper.
That’s the problem with having a cop for a friend. You tell them the bare minimum and they know everything.
‘We’ll sort it,’ Lucas sighed. ‘So, we got flights and accommodation. How do we find the bitch?’ He got up from the chair and reached for the whisky bottle.
‘I figure we need to keep a low profile, so we split up. Hire a couple of cars and cruise around, not sure there’s much else we can do. If we start flashing around her mug shot she’s bound to find out and then it’s game over. What do you think?’
‘I think that’s the wrong plan.’ Lucas pulled a wad of paper from the sideboard. ‘If we go for Mechanic head on she’ll see us coming a mile off. She’ll either do a runner or kill us both, and that’s if we manage to find her. She’ll have a different identity and a changed appearance, we wouldn’t recognise her if she served us coffee and pancakes for a week. We need to be clever about this.’
‘I’m listening.’
‘The chances are Mechanic has no footprint for us to track. The same cannot be said for her sister Jo. If we’re right then she will be with Mechanic somewhere in Vegas. What did we say? Off the grid but close enough to keep an eye on her.’
Harper scratched his forehead. ‘Are you telling me that Mechanic took her sister all the way to Vegas when she’d just been shot? How the shit would she manage that?’
‘If Jo is alive, Mechanic would never leave her behind and would want to keep her close. If Mechanic has surfaced in Vegas, her sister won’t be far away.’
‘Hell, I don’t know. How would she get her there? Jo took a shot to the head remember. She can’t take a plane or train and it’s a journey of two thousand miles. You couldn’t drive—’
Lucas interrupted, ‘Two thousand and forty-nine to be precise. Why not? We can’t fall into our usual trap of making up convoluted scenarios. What’s the straightforward answer here? Why not hire an RV along with a bent nurse to attend to Jo en route? The nurse gets paid over the odds for her silence and four days later they arrive on the other side of the country. I agree it’s a lot to take in but how many times have we been in this position and we talk ourselves out of the obvious?’
‘Yeah, we sure do a lot of that,’ Harper said.
‘I don’t believe we’ll get anywhere near her, she’s too smart and we’ll get burned, or worse. If we look for Mechanic, it’s needle-in-a-haystack time at best and she might end up killing both of us. If we look for Jo instead, that narrows down the field significantly. Remember, we only tracked her down last time by going fishing – we set up that fake telephone line with the recorded message and Jo did the rest. She led us right to Mechanic.’
‘How do you think we should play it this time?’
‘There are twenty-eight care facilities in Vegas and the surrounding area. If we’re right, then Jo will be in one of them.’ Lucas spread the papers on the floor showing a list of twenty-eight names and addresses. ‘We don’t look for Mechanic. We look for Jo.’
‘Then what?’
‘We go fishing again, using Jo as bait.’
23
The night flight was unremarkable. Lucas set out a detailed schedule of visits, mapping out the most effective route between the nursing homes to maximise their coverage. Harper, on the other hand, snored through the five-hour flight after quenching his late-night thirst from the American Airlines drinks trolley.
Checking into the hotel was a different matter.
While the hotel was expecting them, even at 3am, they were also expecting them to be the same colour. The receptionist took more than a little professional interest in why one of the supposed brothers was white and the other one black.
There were notes on the system to accompany their booking which now looked mighty suspicious. Harper regaled her with a rambling story about a messy divorce and how their white father remarried a black woman. This seemed to do the trick although it was patently obvious to everyone there that Lucas was the product of a black on black encounter.
Lucas conceded afterwards it would have been much easier to say they were a gay couple.
First thing in the morning they hit Lucas’s list of targets. There was no point asking the homes if they had a woman staying with them in her early-thirties who required care as a result of a gunshot wound to the head. That would get them nowhere. So the game plan was simple. Lucas would request a tour of the home and discuss the possibility of placing his sister with them, who had recently suffered head trauma in a road traffic accident. Harper would drift off during the visit and see if he could spot Jo among the patients.
The plan was indeed simple but as always the devil was in the detail. Detail which neither of them had bothered to work out.
The Golden Horizon nursing home was situated in Spring Valley, about four miles south-west of the Las Vegas Strip. It was a modern building with impressive grounds adjacent to Desert Breeze Park. Lucas and Harper were keen to get started.
An officious looking woman in blue scrubs met them at reception, her nametag read Snr Nurse Janet Willow. She welcomed them to the Golden Horizon and took them to a soft seating area behind a set of free-standing dividers. Lucas introduced himself as Steve Christie.
So far, so good.
‘And where is your sister now, Mr Christie?’ she asked in an earnest tone.
‘She’s being cared for at home. We have carers who come in daily to administer to her,’ Lucas said.
‘And where is home, Mr Christie?’
Lucas looked at Harper who helped by raising his eyebrows.
‘Not far. We have a house about a couple of miles from here.’
‘And who is delivering the care at the moment?’ Nurse Willow studied him over the rim of her glasses.
‘Oh, um, it’s a private company that comes in. They come in daily. The private company that is.’
‘And what is the nature of her injuries?’ She seemed to start every sentence with the word ‘and’.
‘My sister suffered severe head trauma which means she needs daily care.’ Lucas tried hard to make it sound convincing.
‘And what condition is she in now?’
Lucas flashed a second glance at Harper, it was clear his friend was not going to bail him out of this one.
‘Oh, not so good.’
Harper’s eyebrows went stratospheric.
‘Can you be a little more specific?’ Janet Willow perched herself on the edge of her seat and pursed her lips.
Lucas wanted to go away and start again.
Harper could take no more of watching Lucas drown. ‘Senior Nurse Willow, my friend is struggling to fully answer your questions because he’s still coming to terms with the tragic events surrounding his sister. We don’t know the medical ins and outs of Chrissie’s needs but we do know the family cannot give her the care and support she requires and that’s why we’re here. We will provide you with the necessary medical information when the time is right but not right now I’m afraid. You must understand, the family are taking baby steps and this is an enormous decision – where is the best place for Chrissie and who should deliver her long-term care. I’m sure you appreciate what they’re going through.’
‘And I do, Mr … er …’
Harper ignored the inferred request for his name. ‘If we could take a look around, it would make a huge difference to the family and help them understand their options. This is a very difficult journey for them. We’re looking for your help. We’re looking for the right place for Chrissie.’
Lucas stared at Harper. Where the hell did that come from?
‘And of course here at Golden Horizons we are always willing to help.’ Nurse Willow led them to a large double door with an oversized keypad on the wall to the left. She punched a series of digits and the doors swung open with a motorised whir. ‘Let me show you around.’
Harper winked at Lucas as they followed Senior Nurse Willow down the corridor.
‘Chrissie Christie, really?’ whispered Lucas.
‘We’re in, aren’t we? Keep a sharp eye.’
Which both of them did, without success, for the next half hour.
24
Mechanic watched Silverton cross the hotel suite to the room service trolley. He came back with two cups of black coffee and a sugar bowl. Ramirez was nowhere to be seen.
She heaped in two spoonsful and stirred. The steam rose from the cup, its strong aroma masking the lingering smell of shit which followed her around wherever she went. Three showers and five bottles of hotel body wash later and the stench was still lodged in her nostrils.
Silverton sat opposite, leaned back and crossed his legs. Mechanic sipped at the coffee and placed the cup onto a side table next to the photographs of Silverton’s dead drug team.
‘Look, Jess, it’s business,’ he said casually.
‘It’s fucking painful, that’s what it is,’ she said holding up her left hand with its bandaged finger.
‘It’s an unfortunate part of what I do – sometimes I have to use methods which are a little severe. You understand, I’m sure.’ Silverton had not yet slipped back into buffoon mode.
‘I get it you needed to know about Walker. You could have asked.’
‘Yes maybe. And maybe you’d have blown me away as well, it was a risk I was not prepared to take. It’s business, Jess, just business.’
‘I have no intention of blowing you away.’ She glared at him across the room. The first chance I get, though, Ramirez is going to be picking those pliers out of his ass.
‘You said you have a better idea?’
‘Yes I do. I understand you want to avenge the death of your men. That’s expected, and it’s about sending a clear message to the others. But there is a bigger opportunity here which you’re missing. You are going to pay me a lot of money to find the people who did this.’ She held up the pictures. ‘That’s fine, but why not take the opportunity to bring a little instability to the competition while we do that? They know you got hit and no one is coming forward with a name. Why don’t you hit your competition using the same MO? Who’s to say it isn’t the same crew who knocked over your team. There’s a golden business case here for a little destabilisation. And you can do it with impunity.’
