Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (18 page)

Birmingham International Airport is a mistake. That’s the only sane explanation I’ve ever been able to come up with. Someone was paid a fortune to design and develop the complex, but somehow gave the builders the wrong set of plans. Or perhaps it was all a practical joke.

Whatever happened, what you find when you drive to the airport is a huge, insane maze of concrete, asphalt, and steel dropped into the countryside southeast of the city.

The access roads are a mess of one-way systems and roundabouts, split down the middle by a railway line that leads to the city. If you’re very lucky you can solve the puzzle and get to the airport at the center. If you’re even luckier you can figure out how to get to the Exhibition Center, a large complex of halls, hotels, and restaurants on the other side of the train tracks. It’s here that you’ll come to see American wrestling, Bruce Springsteen, or the ideal home exhibition.

We sat in a car park overlooking the large lake anchoring the Exhibition Center. Gaines wasn’t crying but there were tears in her eyes as she spoke.

“It was Laura,” she said. Her words were slow and measured, thought out. I wondered if she’d rehearsed this moment or had never expected to be called on it. “Back when that Polish guy was trying to move in, when the Mann brothers wanted to go to war with him. That’s when everything changed. I’d just taken over the business, still feeling my way in, and Laura came to the club. She was sitting drinking at the bar, waiting for someone to approach her. I’d seen that before from cops, so I thought I knew her game.”

When I’d tried to imagine how and when Laura had sold out, that’s exactly the scene that had unfolded in my head. Laura sitting where Gaines would notice her, waiting to be approached, ready to sell out but wanting to be asked.

“When I introduced myself, she smiled, like she’d been waiting. I figured I had her number. Comped her drinks and took her to the office to talk, see what deal she was after. This was around the time you turned up at the club, you remember? You didn’t remember me, so I got to mess with your head a little. I got a kick out of it, playing both the husband and wife. You and Laura play the same game in different ways.”

“How do you mean?”

“You’re a lot like each other. Always thinking, overthinking. You wanted to work for me from the moment you met me, but you had to be worked on, wanted to play hard to get.”

“And Laura?”

“There was something else. A strange look, like there was a joke she was keeping to herself. I didn’t care, though. She offered to help me with the Polish guy and the Mann brothers. Said the Pole, what was his name, Tommy? Said Tommy worked for her, but he’d gone missing so now she was looking to offer it to me.” A shrug. “We made a deal. We worked both ways. She’d give me things and I’d give her things, and it worked.”

“Yes.”

“You ever read old spy novels?”

“Just getting into reading, actually.”

“I loved them when I was a teenager. It was the opposite of all those stupid girly books with pink covers and titles in italics. But I didn’t want to read crime books either because I’d seen enough of that growing up. Spy books were fun. There would be scenes where you thought it was going one way, but really it was going another. Like, the old guy would be talking about selling out to the KGB, but really he was getting the KGB agent to sell out to him.”

“Laura turned you?”

“The relationship changed. Or I was just slow to realize what it always had been, I guess. I figured out I was giving her more than she was giving me, and it wasn’t such a two-way street. A cop who gives information to a criminal—well, they’re just dirty. But a criminal who gives information to a cop? There’s no going back up that slope. I called her on it, and she laughed. Said, of course that’s how it was working, what else did I expect? She said I was her criminal informant, started whispering to me about being a witness, about protection, immunity.” She wriggled in her seat to face me. Now she’d started, she wanted to get it all out. A kettle blowing out steam. “You already know I never wanted any of this. I didn’t want to take over the business, none of it.”

“At the time I thought you were loving it.”

“You saw what I wanted you to see. What I wanted everyone to see. I had no choice once Daddy got sick. But Laura was offering me a way out. And we were working on ways of doing it that would still protect certain people. Daddy, Claire, you. The more I worked with the cartel, with other suppliers and families from other parts of the country, the more information I’d have and the more valuable I would be.”

“But this deal you’re working on?”

She nodded. “That changed the plan. The cartel’s offer was too good.” She turned and pointed out her side window, across at a patch of wasteland overlooking us and the lake, a hill on the other side of the dual carriageway. “That’s where the casino complex will be. And if I can just hold out a bit longer, make a few more deals, then I’ll be out. I’ll be legal.”

“And how’s Laura taking this?”

She fidgeted. She didn’t quite bite her lip, but it was close. “I haven’t told her.”

I’d been judging Laura for being corrupt, but the whole time she’d been trying to make a big case. I thought back to last night and how broken she’d looked. I’d had no idea.

“Where does Jelly fit in all this? You mentioned before that he’d filmed something you could use against the Police Commissioner, right?”

“Yeah, I thought I might need some leverage to get the deals done. I’d fronted the cash for Jelly to set up his business, on the condition he do certain favors for me. He’d film people I suspected of corruption or affairs, things I could use. He filmed himself having sex with Commissioner Perry’s son. It was meant to be leverage if and when I needed it.”

“I think it just made you a target. Perry’s got it in for us, he’s behind Becker’s whole operation. Maybe he figured out it was you who set the whole thing up.”

She gave me a tired smile and put on an imitation of her father’s voice. “That’s business, son.”

“So Jelly didn’t stop there. Once you’d got him up and running he kept going for himself, filming more people. He recorded some of your meetings with Laura?”

She looked away and nodded. There was something else there that she hadn’t wanted me to read in her eyes, something that the kettle still didn’t want to give out as steam, but I was fine with that. She’d already said enough to change my worldview. I put myself in Gaines’s shoes and felt trapped. Every choice she’d made had been a betrayal of some person or another, all in a bid to get free of the business.

“Ronny, is there
anybody
that’s not going to be pissed at you over all of this?”

She looked back at me.

“You, I hope.”

I walked Gaines across the car park to the hotel that rose up in a narrow tower beside the lake. She pulled a step ahead of me as we entered the restaurant to the left of the main entrance, and I saw her shoulders raise and straighten, the old mantle of power slipping back in place.

“Wait at the bar. I’ve got this.”

She didn’t have it. She knew nothing about the danger she was in. But I knew if I told her now it might kill whatever strength she was drawing on to keep going. I figured if we could just get through this meeting then I could tell her the rest. I let her walk away from me to a table by the window, overlooking the lake and the proposed building side on the hill beyond it. A small rotund man rose and grinned at her, taking her right hand in both of his, a gesture of both condescension and control.

“Miss Gaines,” I heard him say, his accent the fake kind of London bullshit you hear in Guy Richie films. “Good to see you again.”

She said something I couldn’t hear and he nodded and said, “Ms. Of course. Sorry, I’m old fashioned. You know how it is.”

He waved her to the empty seat opposite and waited until she was seated before he settled in. He glanced at me for a second, long enough to make eye contact. Then his eyes flitted to my right, to where another man was already sitting at the bar, watching me in the mirror that backed the bottles of expensive whisky. He was broad shouldered and shorter than me, with thinning sand-colored hair. I could see his shoulders bulge beneath the fabric of his dark suit, but it seemed more down to an ill fit than serious muscles. He looked more like a friendly bear than a bodyguard, but the gun-shaped bulge at the base of his jacket carried a threat all its own. He stared at me in the mirror as he sipped a tumbler full of amber liquid, nodding when our eyes met.

I walked over and slipped onto the stool next to him, invading his personal space on purpose.

“Force or forces?”

He smiled. “Forces. You?”

“Force.”

“You don’t look like a cop.” He spoke with a warm Scottish accent that said he was already bored by anything I had to offer. “How long were you in?”

“Too long.”

He waved for the barman to pour two fresh drinks and then passed one of them to me, clinking my glass in a toast before we both took an inch off the top. He placed his glass on the bar and then offered me his hand and said, “Green.”

“Miller. Why does fatty over there have an armed guard?”

“He’s not what you’d call the honest face of business. I’m sure you can relate to that, much as I think you work with a better face than I do. Robeson there? He hooks people in and lines them up, walks them right up to the dotted line, then takes a cut and walks away before the legit people do the bits that show up in the papers. You don’t work in that game by meeting with honest people. Always pays to be prepared.”

“You mean he pays you to be prepared.”

“I like that.”

We sat and watched Gaines and Robeson as they carried out a hushed business conversation. I read the back and forth through their body language. Robeson was leaning in, occasionally pointing out the window toward where the casino would be built. He was deep in sales-pitch mode but Gaines was already on the hook, so he was pushing for something else. Gaines was leaning back, shaking her head slightly, not enough to be saying, “No,” but enough to be saying, “I don’t think so.”

“What’s your boss up to?”

Green tapped a ring on his finger against his glass for a second before answering. “I think he’s received an offer from someone else. He’s trying to see if Gaines will up her bid.”

“I thought we were past all that, everything was agreed.”

“Things are never agreed until they’re on paper.” He grinned at his own joke before he told it. “Even then, minds can be changed.”

“Something else you get paid for, no doubt.”

He raised what was left of his drink in another toast before downing it. I pointed at his empty as an offer for another but he waved it away and asked the barman for a glass of water.

“So what does she pay you for, Mr. Miller?”

“Eoin. And that’s a very good question.”

“John.” He mulled something over and then leaned in closer. “I’m hoping she pays you for advice, because she’s going to need some.” I could smell more than two glasses of whiskey on his breath, and almost as much mouthwash. “He doesn’t pay me enough to follow him into hell, and that’s where this deal is going.”

“Why?”

“I took a bullet once in some country I’m not allowed to tell you about, jumping in front of someone I’m not allowed to tell you about. One other time I ran into a building that had a bomb in it, to pull out someone else that I’m not allowed to tell you about.”

“You’re always in the kitchen at parties with chat like that, right?”

“Point is, I’ve done things for Queen and paycheck that fatty over there could never dream of. I’ve stood up to fuckers with machine guns, and I’ve taken bullets for people worth taking bullets for.”

“And he’s not one of them?”

“No, he’s not. And what he doesn’t seem to get, right, is that there’s a huge difference between doing shady deals with people who make dirty money, with a hired beltman covering his back to make him look cool, and getting in over his head with assholes who will cut it off.”

“This other offer?”

He nodded, then shrugged away his previous willpower and waved the barman for another. “This other offer was from—”

“Someone you’re not allowed to tell me about.”

“Like hell. This offer was from some assholes in suits more expensive than what the NASA guys wore for the moon landing. Some cartel from the Middle East. These are guys you’ll see sometimes out in the field, in Fannystan or I-crack. They’ll turn up in shiny cars, in suits, in the middle of a war zone, bullets flying around them, and they won’t bat an eyelid. And you know to get the fuck out, no matter which army is backing you up.”

“And your boss is making the mistake of considering their offer.”

“No, his mistake was taking their call in the first place. They’re due here any minute. Apparently they want to meet with your Ms. Gaines as well. If I were you, I wouldn’t be here by then.”

Green slammed down the empty glass and stood up, headed toward the toilet. Robeson noticed this but carried on with his pitch. I saw—rather than heard—Gaines get angry. She had a cold anger, a temper that burned with ice rather than fire. If you got her mad she would stare you down and wait for the frostbite to get you. She was sitting upright in her chair and speaking in a hushed tone, one I’d heard many times before as she issued threats. She stood and walked toward me, nodding for me to step in beside her. We headed to the door.

“So, that went well, then?”

“Eoin, there are times when your jokes are funny. This would not be one of them.”

“So you do think I’m funny, then?”

She paused as we walked out of the front door, facing me, letting the coldness in her eyes thaw a little. “I was just being polite.”

“Okay, this bit isn’t a joke. The cartel guys are on their way here. They’re coming for you. They’ve used you the same way you used fatty in there, to smoke out the deal. Now they want it for themselves.”

I caught a glint over her shoulder and looked to see the light bounce off a shiny black car that was pulling into the car park. The windows were dark without being tinted.

My stomach flipped over and began to crawl for the hills.

I grabbed Gaines by the arm. “We need to go. Now.”