False move, p.4
False Move, page 4
‘Object? Not me,’ Megan said. ‘You can kill him dead for all I care, but only after I cut off his fucking balls.’
‘See, I knew we were on the same page.’
As Megan punched in the number for their office, Hayden concentrated on what was going on at the table. Stella had stood and slowly her friend got up, just as Stella moved in for a hug. The shorter blond returned the embrace stiffly. Hayden shifted his attention to the tall guy. He had disappeared.
‘Shit …’
Megan glanced across at him, her hand cupped over her phone.
‘Did you see where the red neck went?’ Hayden asked.
He earned a grimace in response, and a curl of Megan’s eyebrow. OK, so she’d been otherwise engaged, and he was the one supposedly watching. He’d only taken his eyes off him for a moment and the guy had practically dissolved in the puff of blue cigarette smoke he’d left behind. Hayden pursed his lips in thought, returned Megan’s quizzical stare, and said, ‘Maybe you should ask for more than one team to back us up.’
SEVEN
A man with enemies didn’t get to survive a fourteen-year stretch in one of the most violent penitentiaries in the country by trudging around in a neutral gear. If he was anything less than switched on, then he’d be the recipient of a shiv to the gut, or a gang beating, and it would be solely his fault. Po had survived The Farm, although he still bore the scars of his incarceration on his forearms where one determined attacker had tried to rip out his eyes with a piece of sharpened metal. His vision had been spared but at the expense of deep gouges in his arms where he’d first fended off the stabs, then took the improvised blade off him and returned it – fatally – to its wielder. Po valued his eyesight, but equally he prized the sixth sense he’d cultivated that had served him well over the years and saved him from other sneak attacks. When his inner trigger flipped he knew he’d be a fool to ignore the warning. He’d spotted the pair of watchers in the van, knew without seeming to return their perusal that he was under scrutiny. They were also interested in Tess. Keeping them in his peripheral vision he smoked and showed a feigned interest in passers-by, but all the while waiting for the right moment to move. He glanced only occasionally their way, allowing his gaze to slip over their van as if it brought him no concern, and evaluated. He couldn’t make out their features, but from their shapes a man was in the driving position, a woman alongside him. She was the one who brought up a phone and took snapshots of him, then of Tess and Stella. They conversed, and their body language was enough to tell they both ached from subdued frustration. The woman turned back to her phone, and this time began speaking into it, her head tilted down to it; the driver’s gaze was fully on Tess. As a clot of tourists passed between him and his observers, Po dropped his cigarette, exhaled smoke, and slipped away, hidden from view by his escorts. Within a few yards he backed into the entrance of a store and allowed the doors to slide shut on him. Through tinted glass he watched as the driver jolted to attention, his head darting back and forward as he sought Po’s location. He urgently conversed with the woman, who again spoke into her phone.
Who are you? The question required an answer, but all he could say for certain was that those in the van weren’t who he’d been on the lookout for. He’d barely been in Boston more than an hour, and as connected as his enemies were, he doubted they had the resources to locate and set a team on him as soon as this. It was an easy enough conclusion then: Stella Dewildt had picked up a tail. The real questions were whether Stella was aware of or even party to the stakeout, or if she was oblivious to it. He’d lay a stake on the latter. The other important question was whether her watchers meant her harm, or if she was simply a lead to a more pointed target, her father, Aaron Lacey. If Lacey was important enough to attract a search party, then the man hadn’t just upped and disappeared, he’d ran away, and to Po that meant one thing … trouble.
He smiled grimly. He never shied from trouble; in fact, if he had one glaring fault, he was drawn to it. Working with Tess he’d experienced some periods of high adrenalin, but of late their jobs had proven mundane, boring, and he yearned for more. Suddenly, what had begun as yet another drab and procedural missing person case looked as if it could morph into something far more rewarding. If it were down to him, he’d move on the van, challenge those watching him, and demand answers. But this was Tess’s gig. However much he ached for action, he wouldn’t allow his rash nature to jeopardize his partner’s business. Instead he noted the van’s description and license plate number, and waited.
The passenger door slid open and the woman stepped out on the sidewalk, pulling on a baseball cap and using its large bill to shadow her features. She was short, built like a gym-bunny with solid thighs and tight shoulders: ex-military, Po surmised, from her gait as she moved adjacent to whomever she followed. Within seconds Stella Dewildt strode past the shop front, head held high and regal. Her shadow kept one eye on her, while moving through the knots of pedestrians on the opposite sidewalk. Her right hand was tucked inside the front of her jacket. Hopefully Po was right and Stella wasn’t under immediate threat, otherwise he might assume the woman was hiding a gun. The van hadn’t moved, the driver a shadowy figure beyond the tinted glass. They’d been forced to split their resources, which was good and bad. Again, Po was tempted to head on over and haul the guy out of the van and get things over with. Instead, he backed further into the shop, turned and exited through a door into the hotel lobby. It took him less than twenty seconds to reach the main atrium, and had a view out of the front doors to where the van was. In that short period of time, things hadn’t changed: the guy still sat in the driver’s position and, judging by the direction his attention was centred on, he was all eyes for Tess. Po took out his cell phone.
‘Hey,’ he said the instant Tess answered, ‘it’s me.’
‘I was wondering where you’d got to.’
He didn’t waste words. ‘You’ve got a tail.’
‘The blue van on the opposite side?’
Po smiled at her astuteness. ‘You see the woman get out and follow Stella?’
‘Yes. I didn’t make Stella aware, though. I’ll tell you why I kept her in the dark when I see you.’
‘After you hang up, sit awhile, then make things look all natural like and come meet me. I’m inside the lobby of the hotel behind you.’
‘See you in a minute,’ she said, and then laughed uproariously.
He paid no heed to her odd outburst: she was playing a part, as if ending a call with a friend. He moved so he was hidden in shadow to one side of the doorway, watching the van. A short time later Tess entered through the door, but paid him no attention as she continued inside. Only once she’d made her approach to the check-in desk look natural did she turn aside, keep out of line of sight and return to Po’s side. ‘Is he following me inside?’
‘He looks tempted. But no. Still sitting in the van.’
‘So he’s no amateur,’ Tess supposed.
‘Or he hasn’t the confidence to come inside alone.’ Po shook his head at the suggestion. ‘No, we can’t assume anything about him yet.’
‘Did he make you?’
‘F’sure. The woman shot photos of me … and of you. I think it’s safe to assume they made us as a couple and want to know what we’re doing here.’
‘You don’t believe they’ve anything to do with Jimmy Hawkes?’ Hawkes was the criminal who thought he could stroll into Portland and extort money from – among others – Po’s businesses, and who’d rapidly been shown the error of his ways. Po wasn’t concerned by the thought of retribution from Hawkes, but he couldn’t discount the hired muscle he’d brought in: Po had physically injured the men, but worse, he’d injured their reputations and their only way of reasserting themselves in the criminal underworld would be to come back at him, harder next time.
‘It’s too soon for that,’ he said.
‘Unless someone from Portland’s tipped them off we’re in town.’
‘Who? Your mom? Nobody else’s aware we’ve come to Boston.’
‘I never mentioned to her we were coming here. But I’d bet she already realized it was a sure thing the second she handed me Stella’s number.’ Tess pursed her mouth. ‘Actually, I did tell Alex and Emma we’d be out of town for a few days, not exactly where to, but I’m also betting my mom has been on to Alex by now bemoaning my rebellious streak.’
‘Alex and Emma can be trusted to stay quiet,’ Po said. He wasn’t so certain about Barbara: except, the grapevine would’ve had to have been set ablaze for word to reach the wrong ears before now. He was confident this had nothing to do with local criminals. ‘Plus, one or the other could prove helpful. You think you can get ’em to check who that van’s registered to?’
Tess took out her cell. ‘I can do that myself,’ she said – she could access Emma Clancy’s law enforcement databases via an app on her phone. He relayed the license number, and she punched it into the system. ‘Interesting,’ she said when the result was returned.
‘How’s that?’
‘This,’ she said, wagging the phone in her hand, ‘confirms my initial idea. We need to go and speak with Lacey’s employers.’
‘The dude in the van works for the same company?’
‘The van’s registered to them, it’s safe to assume the driver’s on their payroll.’
‘So let’s take things direct to the man and see what he’s got to say for himself.’
Tess clucked her tongue in thought. ‘Ordinarily I’d agree, but I think this time we should show more caution.’
Po squinted briefly. Ordinarily Tess wouldn’t be in agreement of a frontal approach, but he let it go. She glimpsed up at him, clucked her tongue once more.
‘They alerted Stella her dad was missing,’ she added for clarity. ‘They’re taking a lot more interest in the disappearance of a wayward employee than seems normal to me. I’d like to know why.’
‘So let me go over and squeeze an answer outta that dude,’ said Po with a slow smile.
‘Chances are he’s only a working Joe, just like you and me. Let’s draw back a little first, Po, and go speak to his boss and find out if anyone’s throat is in actual need of squeezing.’
‘Party pooper,’ he drawled.
EIGHT
To his patient the doctor looked in need of medical assistance more than he did. His skin was parchment thin, tinged yellow and hung from the bones of his skull in folds. His head was perched atop a scrawny neck that struggled to bear the weight. His hands were bony, the backs knotty with thick blue veins and purple blotches, the fingertips tinged yellow by nicotine, visible through his nitrile gloves. A white coat – a misnomer as it was actually a dull grey, stained at the collar and cuffs with grease – hung on a hook, and it was unlikely it had been worn in years. Instead the doctor was dressed in plaid shirt and jeans, both baggy enough to fit him twice over. He’d suffered extreme weight loss over a short period of time. He hacked and coughed between his administrations, dribbling phlegm into a kidney dish. Despite his apparent ill health, the retired physician maintained a steady hand, and his gaze was sharp and intelligent. If he’d the option, Aaron Lacey would have sought help from a doctor who wasn’t mere weeks from his grave, but Doc Grover was his lot. Besides, Grover had nothing to gain from betraying Lacey.
The gauze pad Grover removed from the wound on his back above Lacey’s hip went into the kidney dish, along with another trickle of thick phlegm. Lacey had seen the worst of humanity and all its depraved ways throughout his years as a cop, but he still hadn’t the stomach for this. He turned his face away, fighting down a surge of revulsion. ‘Jesus, Doc?’ he wheezed. ‘Do you have to do that?’
Grover was oblivious to the reason behind the complaint. ‘Hold still, Lacey, or you’re going to open the wound again.’
‘How are those sutures holding?’ Lacey said, and expelled a sour breath.
‘Fine, but not if you keep writhing around.’
The entry wound on his side had closed, but there was some seepage from the larger exit hole on his back. Thankfully – and despite his penchant for hacking filthy phlegm all over the place – Doc Grover’s early intervention had negated the threat of infection. The through-and-through wound pained him, and his entire side and hip were stiff and lacked manoeuvrability, but Lacey was on the mend. Opening the wound would be a setback he could do without. He lay still, idly touching the stitches over his collarbone, while Grover worked. The sutures were iron hard, stiffened with dried blood, and regularly caught on the material of his shirt or jacket. Already the flesh there had knitted and was healing, and only the itchiness of the stitches reminded him how close he’d come to death: another inch higher and to the left and Ethan Prescott’s blade would have found his carotid artery and that would have been it for Lacey.
Momentary guilt assailed Lacey, as it had on numerous occasions since he’d fought with his ex-colleague in the shallow waters of the Neponset River. He hadn’t wished to kill Ethan, far from it, but the alternative would have been his own death. He’d put every ounce of desperate strength into clubbing the younger man senseless with the butt of his empty revolver. After the first blow, and their tumble down the embankment, Ethan had lost his knife, but his strength never slowed. The older man had thrashed wildly as Ethan forced him under the frothing water. Lacey struck, and struck again, and almost sensed the crushing blow that caved in the side of his opponent’s skull a moment before Ethan’s body went lax, and Lacey surged up from the river, spitting and coughing and hacking phlegm as thick and sticky as any Grover now purged from his lungs. Shivering with adrenalin, and also shock, Lacey could do nothing for Ethan. Blood spread from his submerged head, tainting the water, obscuring the wide-eyed look of accusation Ethan aimed at him.
‘I’m sorry, kid,’ Lacey told him, and he’d meant it. But then he used his feet and knees to shove Ethan’s corpse out into the deeper water, until he was caught by a swifter current and borne away, to come to a final rest on a sandbar, Lacey heard later, downstream at Squantum Point.
He remained maudlin about Ethan’s death. He had personally liked the guy, and the trouble that arose between them was of course by Lacey’s making. And yet he was also conflicted. Ethan had tried to kill him, and Lacey would never apologize for defending his own life first. Ethan came at him with a knife, and he wasn’t aiming to miss his throat, so smashing his head in was just desserts.
Yeah, keep on telling yourself that, Lace, he thought cynically. He hadn’t given Jacob Mathers’s death much thought beyond the fact he was lucky his bullet had found a fatal target, and not the other way around. It was said you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but Mathers was an insufferable asshole when he was alive, and Lacey’s opinion hadn’t changed after the man’s demise. Recalling their brief gun battle brought him back to the present, and he hissed in pain as Doc Grover reapplied a sterile gauze pad to the exit wound and stuck it down with tape.
‘You’ve taken the meds I gave you?’ the retired doctor asked.
Lacey had chugged down the antibiotics and painkillers prescribed to him, and more besides. ‘I’m out, Doc. Could do with something a bit stronger for the pain.’
Without comment, Grover opened a drawer in his desk and dug out an unopened pack of controlled painkillers. ‘On the house,’ he said, and slapped them down.
Lacey sat tentatively, experiencing a pulling sensation in his side. He checked out the pack of morphine-based meds. Another doctor had prescribed them to Herbert George Grover. ‘These are yours, Doc.’
‘They don’t touch my pain anymore, Lace; you may as well get the benefit of them.’
Lacey pulled into his undershirt, buttoned his shirt over it. He delved for his wallet and counted out two hundred dollars. Grover coughed and spluttered, and this time, swallowed what he’d hacked up, while waving off Lacey’s offer of cash. ‘Like I said, they’re on the house. I didn’t agree to help you out because of payment: remember, I owe you. Take them with my gratitude and best wishes.’
‘The cash ain’t for the meds, Doc.’
Grover nodded. Lacey was buying his silence: he picked up the bills and made a cursory count of them. They disappeared in his jeans pocket. ‘I don’t think you need come here again, Lace,’ he said, and it wasn’t a rhetorical statement. He was hinting that two hundred bucks only bought so much silence. ‘If you’re careful and take things easy you should have no complications with your wounds.’
Any number of complications could come from showing his face at the doc’s house again. Neither man was stupid. Lace hadn’t said he was on the run, but it was apparent to both. His wounds should have been treated by a genuine surgeon, not one who’d retired years ago to escape a scandal and possibly criminal charges. Whoever had caused Lacey’s wounds might wish to cause more and could still be seeking him, and Grover had no desire of his enemy turning up on his doorstep. And they would, sooner or later, because a man with gunshot wounds could not go untreated, and his hunters would guess he’d reached out to an old contact. Grover would stay quiet under normal circumstances, but not under threat: two hundred bucks didn’t guarantee silence if the stakes were raised against him.
‘If I’d more I’d give it to you, Doc,’ said Lacey, conscious of the pitiful amount of ready cash he had available.
‘We’re quits, Lace. I don’t want your money.’
Just my continued silence, Lacey thought. Yeah, they both knew things about the other that were best kept under wraps.
The nitrile gloves came off, and Grover dumped them in the kidney dish with the soiled dressings and the purging from his lungs. Lacey shuddered internally: he didn’t want to shake the doc’s hand, as if his ailments would be transmitted through his spidery touch. Lacey clapped him once on his shoulder, and stepped away quickly. He grabbed his jacket and exited the makeshift surgery into an Upper Manhattan street.
NINE
