Lost City (An Eoin Miller Mystery Book 3) (6 page)

We drove back to Wolverhampton in near silence. Neither of us wanted to mention the third body or how it had gotten there. We stopped only when we passed an office building that had a large metal dumpster out front, full of furniture. We moved a few chairs aside and dropped the carpet and clothes into it, hiding them mostly from sight by putting back the furniture. I pulled a newspaper off the backseat of the car, set it alight, and dropped it into the dumpster. The yellow and amber flames were just starting to fight with the furniture in my rear view mirror when I had to turn off the road and lost sight of it.

We passed a twenty-four-hour supermarket, and Laura tapped my hand and told me to stop. She was gone five minutes, and when she came back she had a shopping bag full of cheap men’s clothes and a newspaper.

“Thought you might want to read this.” She showed me the front page of the paper. It was a shot of a burning caravan blocking a road, and the headline read,
War Declared At Hobs Ford
.

Hobs Ford was a Romani settlement in Shropshire that was under an eviction notice. The camp had been barricaded by the settlers and protesters, with police and bailiffs waiting for their chance. I knew I should care, but I’d been trying to ignore it. I tossed the paper into the back.

Back at the hotel things had settled down. The manager was keeping the third floor closed off but it was business as usual in the lobby. We took the stairs back to the now-carpetless room and scanned the area to make sure we hadn’t missed anything obvious. Then I used my master key to let us into one of the other rooms. I stripped down to my underwear and sat on the bed while Laura showered. When she stepped out of the bathroom she was dressed again in her black clothes, but this time her damp hair was tousled like some old-school rock chick’s. My gut tightened in a way it hadn’t for a long time at the sight of her, and I excused myself as quickly as I could.

In the bathroom, I locked the door behind me and let the room fill up with steam. I took a couple pills that I’d lifted from my pocket on the way in. By the time I’d relaxed in the hot water and washed away all the blood splattered on my forearms, a familiar cold feeling was creeping down my spine.

I lost track of time as I floated in there.

Afterward, I dried off as I looked through the clothes that Laura had picked out for me at the supermarket. Nothing special. Black underwear, blue jeans, and a black shirt. She’d bought a pair of cheap imitation leather shoes, which would do until I got home.

When I finally stepped out of the bathroom, I half expected Laura to have gone, but she was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking bored. She didn’t need to mention how long I’d been in there; the empty coffee cup in her hand did it for her. We put our soiled clothes into the supermarket bag. Then Laura said she’d meet me in the car park while I talked to Rich. He didn’t bat an eyelid when I told him that new carpet needed laying in the room. He was more interested in whether he could get the master key back from me and open the floor up for business.

Out in the car park, I found Laura sitting on the front of my car. She stuck out a thumb like a hitchhiker and said, “Drive me home?”

What I wanted to say was,
Where the hell is your car?

What I said was, “Of course.” Followed after a pause by, “But where the hell is your car?”

“When you called, I got a taxi.”

I stewed that over as we drove, wondering again what she’d thought when I’d called her to the hotel. Maybe she’d thought it was for a drink, and she hadn’t wanted to risk driving home drunk. I looked across at her and tried a smile, but caught between pills and the events of the last few hours I had no idea what it looked like.

Laura lived in a modern apartment building on the corner of Key Gardens and Jeremiah Road. It was one of the many housing developments that had sprung up just before the credit crunch, meaning it had been built for people with good money but had sold to people with slightly less. Between her DCI wage and what she made from Gaines, Laura could probably have afforded it even at pre-crunch prices.

I pulled up outside but didn’t kill the engine. We both sat there trying to figure out the best way to say good-bye after all we’d just done. But Laura took a different tack. “You look like you need a drink.”

I tapped the steering wheel. “The cop trying to entrap me?”

“I have a sofa if you don’t feel up to driving.”

My ex-wife offering me her sofa to sleep on felt like we were living through Glasnost all over again. I’d only been in her apartment once before, and that had been the day I found out she was corrupt.

Get.

Out.

Of.

Your.

Own.

Head.

The inside of her flat was nothing like I remembered. Before the walls had been either beige or white, and the whole place had captured the kind of Ikea-catalogue blandness that I associated with our marriage. Now there were actual colors on the walls—soft reds and purples, a deep blue in the kitchen—and black leather furniture. There were framed posters of foreign films on the walls, with Isabelle Adjani, Eva Green, and Juliette Binoche staring down at me in a variety of haircuts from the eighties and nineties. This was news, because when we’d been together I’d been banned from putting film posters on the walls.

I pointed to them as she stepped into the room from the kitchen, carrying two glass tumblers. “More changes.”

She took it in stride, walking past me and handing me one of the tumblers without looking at the posters, saying, “We all change, Eoin.”

I noticed the hospital sign nailed to a door that must have been the bathroom. She bent down to open a cabinet next to her large flat-screen TV and pulled out two bottles: one of Four Roses and one of gin. She handed me the bourbon. Then she thought about it for a minute and put the gin back in the cabinet, motioning at the Four Roses with her empty glass. I poured large measures for both of us, and we eased into the sofa. It felt so good that I wanted to stay put forever. The promise of sleeping on it felt like redemption.

Laura drained half her glass, then pursed her lips together and blew out a long, tense breath. “Let’s never do any of that again, okay?” She looked at me and her eyebrow did the Gaines flick again. And then we both laughed, long and hard. The joke hadn’t been that good, but we’d both needed to let something out.

“Really?” I said between breaths. “I thought we made a good team.”

“Oh, we did. But you know there are easier ways to spend time with me.”

“Like how?”

“I would have thought a mob boss could arrange something more exciting. Aren’t you guys meant to be able to click your fingers in any restaurant and get the best seat in the house?”

I pulled a face and reached for the bottle to top us up. “I’m no mob boss.”

“You’re still playing that game, huh? Get off it, Eoin. It’s never suited you.”

“Not like this very fetching cheap shirt.”

A smirk, and the Gaines look again. “Black shirts always suited you.”

“Not as much as they did you.”

Tension built in the room like the air pressure drop before a storm, and we both felt it. I stared into my glass, swilling the amber liquid around and letting the smell hit me, waiting for the warm glow of whiskey to break through the fading fog of the pills.

Laura shrugged, downed her fresh drink in one go, and put her tongue down my throat. I didn’t have time to do much else than accept before she was leaning across and running one hand through my hair, and the other down my front to my groin, rubbing for a response.

I came to my senses and joined in, pulling her in closer to run my hands over her ass and then up her back, feeling her shiver slightly as I did and her breath intensify in my mouth.

I pushed her away far enough so that I could squeeze her breasts and feel for her nipples with my thumbs, finding them hard already. I started to unbutton her shirt, but it was tricky because she was already moving, heading down to my crotch, where she’d found the exact response she’d been looking for.

She got my jeans and boxers off around the same time I ripped the shirt from her back, but she won the race because I was in her mouth before I could do anything to her.

I melted back into the leather of the sofa as she rolled me around in her mouth and saw how deep she could take me, then pulled off before it went too far. She climbed back up onto the sofa and I made a grab, slipping my hand down into her trousers, finding her wetter than I ever had when we were supposed to do this, and pressed deeper in.

I was used to my mind drifting during sex. For the last few years, when I was with one person my mind was with another. Usually the same person. But by the time I was inside Laura, or whoever this person was, I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. My mind stayed in the room the whole time.

And the time after that.

I woke up as Laura was showering for work, but I pretended to be asleep until she’d left. I didn’t want to have the awkward conversation until I was sure what side of it I would be on. I checked my mobile but the battery had run down overnight, leaving me with a useless piece of plastic.

Good.

I shuffled round the flat in my underwear, pretending I wasn’t searching for traces of another man, someone who had taken my place in the years since the divorce. I even checked the toiletries in the bathroom. Nothing. I took that with a swell of pride and then cursed myself for being a dick. I showered and grinned a little when I was forced to use Laura’s deodorant.

I slipped back into the cheap clothes Laura had picked out for me and drove back into town smelling like a summer meadow.

Before Gaines had promoted me, I’d been renting a flat out in Wednesbury, a fifteen-minute drive outside of the city. I’d been working as a soccer coach at the new local sports facility Gaines had built, and handling whatever odd jobs she’d thrown my way—usually finding people who didn’t want to be found. The promotion had tipped my world upside down. I had a cut of the illegal side of things, and my name was on enough official paperwork that the taxman now thought nothing of me owning a renovated loft apartment on Princess Street, overlooking the city center.

It was all white paint and wood paneling, with glossy laminate flooring. I tried not to think of what the younger version of me would have thought of it. It suited the adult me just fine. Gaines owned the rest of the building and I handled the renting of the flats, which meant I got to pick and choose my neighbors. I had an attractive young lawyer living in the flat below mine, and on the same floor as me was a young footballer who hadn’t yet earned enough to run away to Sutton or Birmingham. It had been the perfect arrangement, right up until Claire Gaines somehow got a key and came and went as she pleased.

She’d started selling drugs to the lawyer and was stringing the footballer along with innuendo and half-promises. The second didn’t bother me, but I wanted the lawyer off the drugs or out of the building. I just hadn’t figured out which. I climbed the stairs and opened my door, bracing myself for a rush of questions from Claire, but she wasn’t there.

I plugged in my phone to charge, and changed into my own clothes before setting about making breakfast in the open kitchen. Both my parents loved cooking, and they had never seemed to relax as well together as when they worked with each other on a meal. It had rubbed off. I found something soothing about pulling down spice jars, throwing random flavors together. Most of my best thinking was done over the soup pot or balti pan. I threw some chopped tomatoes and onions into hot oil and let them start to sizzle before throwing in a large slice of pork.

I could hear my phone buzzing every few seconds to tell me of another missed call or text, but I ignored it until I’d poured my food out onto a flour tortilla and set it on a plate beside the strongest cup of coffee known to mankind. I flicked through the messages as I ate. There were three voice mails from Gaines and four texts:

WTF? Call me.

Where are u?

Fuck Sake. Call.

I’ll try Claire’s number.

That last one sent a wave of ice through my guts. Did Gaines know what had been going on between me and her sister? The voice mails sounded increasingly urgent. Whatever was eating at her was going to be eating at me as soon as I called her back.

There was also a text from Laura:

We’ll talk.

We sure would.

My phone buzzed one more time as a final message was delivered, and it was short and simple from Claire. I read it a couple of times without understanding what it meant.

You Are In The Shit. XXX

I took a deep breath and called Gaines.

She picked up straight away and didn’t bother with pleasantries. “What the fuck?”

I tried to find something to hold on to. “What?”

“What did you do?”

When? What? Was she talking about me and Claire or me and Laura? “What do you—”

“The hotel,” she snapped at me, her voice sounding frayed, even nervous. “I trusted you to deal with it, not put it on the local news.”

“What are you talking about?”

Tightness grabbed me around the throat. I somehow knew what she was going to say a few seconds before she said it, but the words still stung me.

“It burned down last night. You telling me that wasn’t you?”

“No, I got rid of the problem, not the building. What time did this happen?”

“Somewhere in the early hours. You not listened to the news?”

“No, I was, uh—”

She read my tone and cut in. “I don’t want to know who you were with, okay? Listen, if it wasn’t you, then who?”

We both sat in silence for a moment and then said at the same time. “Them.”

“They’re sending you a message,” I said. “Calling you out. They’ve got the stuff and now you’re on their clock, waiting for whatever they want.”

The nerves dropped away from her voice, and it was cold and mean. “Find them, Eoin. No messing. We won’t be fucked with like this.”