A Last Act of Charity (Killing Sisters Book 1) (26 page)

He unbolted the Harley’s transmission drains, after positioning a plastic tray beneath them to catch the released lube, and while the cold, thick, golden oil drained down he sat back to think. Watching oil drain slowly is more relaxing than playing an instrument. An instrument demands much of its player, and playing while thinking and dreaming produces solos as exciting as music for the funerals of the deaf, possibly less exciting than that. He sat back on a stool and watched the oil drain away as the daylight did the same. And he pondered.

The victims were employees of organisations unfamiliar to him, with the exception of the policeman. Stoner was familiar with the police. He enjoyed a decent relationship with most of their officers most of the time. OK: some of them, some of the time. Mallis had provided job titles for them all, but again they meant little. ‘Chief Operating Officer’ could mean anything. It depended on what the business did to turn its shilling. ‘General Executive Manager’ likewise.

The Tasmanian Devil did however include details of their bank accounts and the sums which flowed into and ebbed out of those accounts. They made interesting reading, as is so often the case.
‘
Cherchez les dollars
’, as a sage may once have suggested, and you could certainly find many things, although those things were not always obvious. A common feature of all the accounts was that as well as the regular, presumably salary payments, each of the dead men – and they were indeed all men – received a steady and substantial quarterly payment, which accrued through each of the three years the accounts revealed and were then paid to another account. The same account for them all. Mallis was not usually one to offer suggestions unless invited, but in the case of that account he’d appended a note suggesting that it did not exist. At any rate, it plainly did exist but he and his partner could activate it in no way at all. That account even aggressively refused to allow them to deposit funds into it. Stoner wondered what ‘aggressive’ implied in this context. How can a bank account – a series of numbers controlling other series of numbers – be aggressive about anything? As he watched the last drips of draining oil he decided that he most certainly did need an aggressive bank account. Whatever it was. The Bank Of Aggression. The Mutual Unfriendly Aggression Bank. Great idea. Can’t fail. No one would even attempt to rob it, surely?

So the dead men were all conduits of some kind.

Mallis had entrusted the Tasmanian Devil with no suggestions about what kind of organisation was involved, so Stoner sent a message to ask. The reply was swift: the techno prisoners could find out, but it would take a considerable amount of time and involve a considerable level of risk, which is translatable as meaning that the cost of such a seeking would be high . . . higher than usual.

Stoner was sufficiently intrigued to dig further into the soupy mass of stats and facts encoded within the Tasmanian Devil. The mysterious account was certainly not based in the UK. This was no surprise, underhand banking was a global business and the fact that the prisoners considered it to be non-UK based made
Stoner’s criminal mind decide at once that it most likely was in fact UK based. Deceptions inside deceptions. Enough to make the brain hurt.

The last of the motorcycle’s oil drained into a stationary pool. Stoner dimmed the lights and evening descended, as evenings do.

26

FIRST LIGHT, LAST CALL

No response from the Hard Man. No reply from Shard. Nothing new from the techno prisoners and not a single bleat from the dirty blonde. Stoner sat neglected, frustrated and a little confused. Irritated, also, although he would have denied that.

Times of tension were always opportunities for enjoyment, either to ride down the road on one of the motorcycles, or stretch a set of six bright strings in the company of friends. In both cases, preparation is the key to delight. He had already and unnecessarily changed some inoffensive oils on the motorcycle he currently favoured for road use, so he turned his attention to his small collection of guitars. The Fender whose strings he preferred to bend was at the Blue Cube, so there was no opportunity for displacement behaviour with that fine instrument. Undaunted, Stoner fetched a guitar case from a steel cupboard. He paused.

He kept his guitars in flight cases to protect them from the hard knocks of long-term storage. Damage sustained while in use, while actually being played, that was OK in his musician’s world; damage caused by clumsiness while the guitar was resting between stages was unacceptable. The patina of regular and hard
work was valued by electric guitar players to such an extent that the mighty Fender guitar company produced brand new guitars which were factory scratched, scraped and sanded to make them appear worn and played out. This was a mystery to Stoner. His preferred Fender guitar was actually worn and played out. It had been refretted a number of times; three or four, he was unsure. Its once lustrous sunburst finish was scarred on the back by generations of belt buckles. Its tuners were occasionally prone to a little slippage, its control pots to a little electrical leakage, its frets to a little buzzing and its rosewood fingerboard had built up drifts of muck which were a mute to both the strings’ accuracy and to any claims he might have made to being a safe pair of hands for such a rare and valuable – or simply old, depending on your viewpoint – instrument.

Stoner loved the cantankerous old machine . . . if loving an assembly of woods, wires and plastics is sane. And if ‘love’ is indeed the wrong emotion, then he certainly valued the thing, not least because others ascribed such a mysterious value to guitars like this one that they sold for large amounts of money when they appeared on the market. He suspected that those who paid the high figures rarely played the old instruments, but respected the fact that these high prices made the guitars eminently stealable. He considered it unlikely that anyone either could or would break into Parkside looking for elderly American guitars, but stored them in steel cabinets in case they did.

The cabinets were fireproof, too, which had seemed like a good idea until he thought about it during another unwelcome period of inaction. If the tasty combination of motor oils, fuels, wood and plastics which packed the buildings did indeed go up in flames, would it not be good to know that the prized guitars were safely stored in flameproof steel cabinets? Superficially, perhaps, but if the temperatures rose high enough to wipe out the buildings, the guitars would surely suffer. It would most likely
be a challenge to extract the most rudimentary of blue notes from large lumps of charcoal.

Procrastination is an undervalued virtue in men whose nature is to react suddenly and often with violence. There are plenty of times when action itself is probably the least sensible course of action. But men of action are notoriously and properly admired for their ability to leap feet-first into risky situations, caring not a damn for the dangers which might be involved. This is how they die. Or, worse, how they become seriously injured and cause the deaths of others, sometimes innocent others. Stoner’s experience of life had confirmed this truth to him, hence his tendency, when all about him were losing their heads, to immerse himself in the subtleties of his music or in the delights of maintaining and riding his motorcycles. Others of his acquaintance in similar occupations indulged in recreational pharmacy to calm their nerves, which were then so dulled that they failed at their tasks, often fatally, when the need for action became suddenly imperative.

He removed the guitar from its case. This particular instrument was a Gibson, a model obscure, which he had purchased only because it shared its model name with a motorcycle he had ridden once, hated and returned to its owner with flattering protestations of delight and a silent understanding that he would much rather walk over broken glass than ride another.

The Gibson was much the same. Beautifully made and handsome in its deep lacquer and expensive woods, it impressed everyone who saw it, who remarked upon its rarity. A justifiable rarity in Stoner’s view, given that it was much better to look at than to play. It sounded wonderful, though, as indeed did the eponymous motorcycle, but his Fender-familiar fingers found the fretting experience to be more of a challenge than a reward. However, when he had decided to attempt the bottleneck approach to playing his blues, where the fingers fretting individual notes to play tunes or to form chords are replaced by a
cylindrical slide worn over a finger to perform that duty, he had retuned the Gibson and discovered that it was perfectly suited to the task.

This conversion came after staring with disbelief and with ears whistling from the power of the world’s top slide guitarist. ‘I can do that,’ Stoner had declared – but only to himself, fortunately – and had launched into a concentrated study of the technique. Bili the Bass had, after hearing his early efforts, suggested that he take up the triangle, coining a shared joke which had now lasted for several years.

Stoner fingered the strings on the Gibson. They were tuned to an open-G chord and familiar finger fencing produced unfamiliar tunes. He gazed again at his phones and at the screen of his laptop. None of them seemed likely to save him from the dreaded practice. He performed the perfected coffee ritual. That dark, almost black brew hissed, bubbled and wheezed into his mug. He picked up a blue glass slide and slid it over the ring finger of his left hand. It felt unfamiliar. He removed it, powered up a Marshall amplifier, connected the Gibson. As it was an efficient Gibson and not an elderly Fender, there were no buzzes and clicks, no pops nor crackles, just an amplified mains hum. He wound up the volume until the air quivered around the speakers and the strings of the guitar attempted to sound themselves, aching for the screaming release of feedback. Rested the glass slide on the strings and rocked it gently; the strings chimed in chorus.

He leaned back on his stool, sharing the weight of the instrument between his left knee and the shoulder strap, and began at the beginning. The scale of G-major; one, two, three. The first scale, the first octave was perfect. He was as pleased as he was surprised. The second octave likewise.

He was encouraged.

Three of his phones lit up.

*

Shard again, all three messages the same.

‘Outside. Company. North.’

Interior lights left as they were, Stoner, wrapped in black and with a mood to match, armed himself, unobtrusively exited the Transportation Station and merged with the evening. Stood in the cooling air, breathing it in and listening to the chorus. Footsteps, quiet and confident. A confidence misplaced, hopefully.

One set of clever steps, near-silent steps, heading for him. He wondered whether he could hear a second set following the first, but decided that it was unimportant. What was important was that he intercepted the incoming intruder. The only reason for a stealthy approach like this was malicious intent. He hoped so. He stood still and silent as two sets of steps approached. Two. Definite. A team. Quite suddenly, Stoner felt himself wake up. As if a switch had been thrown, he was spoiling for it. Movement, maybe; contact, maybe; progress, answers . . .

A slight figure, moving in the shadows of the unkempt roadside shrubs. Indistinct in the failing light, excellent tradecraft and casual camouflage; hiking gear rather than military; innocently effective, always deniable.

The figure drifted past Stoner’s stationary post. He was no longer aware of the second intruder. All senses focused upon the target. In sight now, but not for long. The edge of evening; a perfect time to intrude . . . and to defend against that intrusion.

No time for genial introductions. Stoner announced his presence with a stunning sideways blow to the back right side of the intruder’s head. Glancing success – maybe the slight sound of the air parting before the blow or the movement of that air; maybe the second sense all stealth fighters learn as an essential survival tool – the target was alert and moved to avoid the strike, twisting left and away from the initial blow . . .

. . . directly into the path of the main assault, the rapidly closing left fist, the heel of which landed hard against the intruder’s left ear, snapping his head sideways and back into Stoner’s right fist. Ears seriously boxed, the figure paused; Stoner stamped the deeply cleated sole of the weighty Caterpillar boot of his left foot hard and accurately into the back of the right knee of his opponent.

The effect was exactly as the manuals suggest; the intruder fell, stunned and unbalanced, to Stoner’s right. Arms thrown out for balance. The correct reaction would have been to relax and roll, but the dual head strikes had – as intended – delayed the brain’s higher functions and instinct attempted to preserve balance.

Stoner caught the rising left arm, twisted it higher, pulled it back, and down, and hard, and followed the figure to the ground as it fell, landing a precise elbow directly and with maximum force into the intruder’s left temple at the exact moment the right side of his head made contract with the exhausted, worn concrete of the old roadway. The impact was as loud and as violent as a gunshot. The body fell limp. Stoner stepped back, stood tall, turned to face the second figure as it closed in rapidly.

And stopped, well short, well out of range.

‘Wow, JJ. That was neat.’ Shard. Inevitably. ‘Did you need to kill him? It would have been good to get an answer or two first.’

Stoner paused. Accepted Shard’s presence and turned back to the fallen. A calm descended upon him. A familiar calm. Acceptance and a little denial. ‘He’ll be OK. A bit tender and in need of a little joint repair . . .’ His voice tailed away. He reached for a pulse.

‘Fuck. Sorry about that. He’s gone. To somewhere better, let’s hope for that.’ Stoner stepped back, while Shard moved in close and rolled the body over, face up.

‘Anyone you know?’

‘No. You?’ Stoner focused on Shard’s face in the failing light. Shard re-checked the pulse, rocked back, sitting on his ankles.

‘Yes. But a long long time back. 2 Para. Maybe a Hereford squaddie. I’m not sure.’

‘Do you have a name for him?’ Stoner, practical, calm.

‘Nope. But we can print him. That should be simple enough. Why d’you kill him? He would have talked to us. More use alive than dead.’

Shard looked up. Stoner stood silent, darkness settling around them.

Shard tried again. ‘Why d’you kill him?’

No reply.

‘He could simply have been coming to listen, to watch, to warn, to . . . oh I don’t know, just to talk about Transporters and Harleys, fuck’s sake.’ Shard wrestled with the dead man’s clothing. The long, dark, sound-muffling coat fell open to reveal a sawn-off shotgun hanging from a lanyard around the neck.

‘No loss. There are plenty more. The world is full of assholes. You’d bring a neat killing thing like that if you wanted a chat? Hmmm?’ Stoner scanned the increasing dark.

Shard stood, gazed from motionless body to impassive killer. ‘You want someone else to come after us? You can be strange. Damn fast though. For an old man. Impressed. Any thoughts about how to dispose of the evidence?’

‘This was a message. Everything’s a message of some kind.’ Stoner massaged the elbow which had delivered the killing strike. ‘Snag is I have no idea who sent it, what it means, who this guy was or who he worked for. I just knew that his job was to deliver a killing shot or to die trying. That was his job . . . his function. I doubt he knew about the dying trying thing, though. If whoever sent him knew he was sending him up against me . . . against
us
, then they also knew he would fail. Which is a message in itself. On the other hand, he could simply have accepted a hit contract
without knowing the target. That’s usually the best way, no? Saves on the jitters. So, if someone was sending a message, the best message in reply is always a return-to-sender. Except we don’t know who the sender is, which is unhelpful.’ Stoner paused. He was icy calm, calculating a response. Shard displayed none of the sudden fear he felt.

‘So . . .’ Stoner thought aloud. ‘It’ll be another unexplained accident, messy enough to make the media sit up, and public enough for our late compadre’s employer to work out what happened. I can do that. See what comes out of the woodwork as a result. If anything. It may of course be unrelated.’ His tone made it plain that he felt this to be unlikely. ‘Stick him in the van. I’ll take him for a drive and drop him off somewhere. Big road or a railway track so he can get a bit messed up, confuse the issue for the plods.’

‘Christ, JJ, do you always think this much?’ Shard stood over the body, lifted the shotgun and its lanyard from it, trawled the pockets for other weapons, found only a knife. ‘You going to help me carry Mister Happy?’

But Stoner was gone.