The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (25 page)

A young couple walked past. Hair still damp. His clothes a little more creased than hers, an extra day’s wear. Hands clasped together as they leaned into each other. Smiling with the unfamiliarity of it all, still adjusting to each other. Going for coffee, breakfast, a ride home, or not.

I watched it all with a sense of dislocation. As if there was more than just a simple pane of glass between me and the city. A physical disconnect separating us, knowing I’d crossed some invisible, intangible line. Crossed into another land where there was no law to rely on, no safety net to catch me if I fell. Where I was alone in a sense I found hard to quantify. On the run.

First order of business was coffee. I tugged my baseball cap down, collar up, just another guy trying to stay warm on a cold morning, and headed for the nearest Starbucks clone. Bought a bland coffee and a muffin from the equally bland store and took it back to the car.

Next was a place to stay. I waited for the morning rush to burn itself out, then went to find a hotel. Cheap, inattentive staff, cash rates. Little chance of anyone calling the cops for anything short of a dead body showing up in reception. Somewhere even the slightest police presence would probably cause its residents to vanish into the night like rats.
 

The Heart Of The Fens Hotel fitted the bill nicely. The name was an outright lie — the place sat on Bridlington Street, right on the boundary between the Fens and Roxbury. From the outside it looked like someone moved an old Soviet apartment block to Boston, gave it a crumbling brick façade and hung a non-functioning neon sign from the corner near the manager’s office. The inside lived up to the expectations set by the outside. Peeling boiled cabbage-green paint speckled with dark spots of mildew, old carpet, terrifying furnishings and the smell of air that hadn’t seen an open window in a long, long time.
 

If I’d had to pick a place to die from a heroin overdose, this would have been it.

It was ideal. I paid for the next few days up front and by the time the manager had finished telling me where the parking lot was, his eyes had already glazed over with the haze of disinterest and selective amnesia that came with the job. Dropped my stuff in my room, checked to make sure I could get out in a hurry if the need arose. The building was pretty quiet — at the moment anyway. With luck, if someone came for me, I’d hear it. Then, in the tiny en-suite bathroom, I shaved my head with my electric razor; no use looking like my description when the cops released it, which they would.

On Milton Avenue there was a blocky brick building whose high, empty windows stared out darkly over the street like glassy tombstones. In the early 1900s it was a linen factory. One day a fire broke out in the stacks of dry cloth and twenty-three workers trapped inside were burned alive.
 

Now the shell of the old building was a pool hall for lowlifes to play games in dead women’s ashes. A petty crook and sometime coke-head called Angie told me she didn’t know where Heller was. “Saw him once,” she said as she tried to justify my fifty bucks. “At Metro’s, way back. Think he probably sold after that thing with the cops. Dunno where he hangs out now.”

Tom Booth thought he was talking to Rob. Tom used to be a delivery driver with a sideline in hauling things over state lines without bothering with taxes and paperwork. Our agency had done some work for his lawyer when one of his employers tried to charge him with theft. He didn’t know where Heller was, either. “But shit, Mr Garrett,” he said over a crackling phone connection, “you don’t want to get involved with him. Gabriel Heller’s a mean son of a bitch. Paranoid too. He thinks you’re messing with his business and he’ll… well, you see what I’m getting at.”

“Why you asking me abou’ Heller?” said a youngish pimp and pusher called Thierry that Tom recommended I speak to. We were in a fearsomely trendy coffee shop near the river, a maze of bright orange couches and a haze of mochaccino steam. He was sitting with a couple of guys who were either hangers-on or minders. I wasn't sure which, but they didn’t look like much. “Why would I say anything to you? I don’ care if you are a frien’ of Tom’s. That gets you nothing. Even if I could tell you anything, which I can’, I wouldn’. You get away from here.”

That was how it went with just about everyone I could think of who might have been able to help. Two days playing deadbeats and dead-ends. After that, I figured I might as well have a look at Metro’s; even if Heller had sold the place after his arrest, as Angie said, the management might have kept a number for him. Nothing else seemed to be working.

Heller’s old nightclub was a windowless concrete block squatting on an unwelcoming street corner. Walls painted all black, starting to crack and crumble, with double steel-bound doors. Like the sacrificial temple of some long-lost cyclopean civilization thrust up through Boston’s crust.

No flyers were posted on the walls, and only a bare minimum of graffiti — both good signs; either it was well-cleaned, or people knew not to mess with the owner. No answer to my hammering on the door — not such a good sign; no use finding the place if they wouldn’t talk to me. I gave it one more try, then circled the building, looking for a service entrance. The back doors were almost identical, and just as shut.

Another minute’s battering at the main entrance was eventually rewarded. One door opened a crack and a bald guy with a face like a grizzly with a sore ass said, “Yeah? What?”

“I’m looking for Gabriel Heller.”

“Never heard of him.”

“He used to own this place. Maybe still does.”

The door opened further so the guy could loom properly. He had a body to match his face. Punching him would probably have been like hitting a sack full of lead. “Dorian Robertson’s the manager here,” he said. “He runs this club. Who the fuck are you?”

He didn’t look like the sort of guy to follow the news. “Brian Tucker,” I said. “Mr Heller and I have a matter we need to urgently discuss.”

“Told you, I never heard of him.”

“Maybe you could ask your manager if he has a number I could call Mr Heller on. I’m sure
he’ll
have heard of him.”

“Maybe you could get lost.”

“Maybe Mr Heller would appreciate it if you’d be more helpful. I’m sure he wouldn’t want our business together delayed.”

The guy glared at me for a second, then vanished back inside, letting the door thump closed behind him. I stood on the street corner in the cold. There was some passing traffic at the next intersection along, but this dead block might as well have been something out of a Western, emptied before the gunfight at High Noon.

“What can I do for you, Mr Tucker?”

A blonde guy in a good suit, no tie, was in the doorway. About my age, an inch or two taller, wiry. Eyes like chipped marbles, sizing me up. I figured this was the grizzly’s handler. If he recognized Tucker’s name, he didn’t show it.

“Mr Robertson?”

“That’s right.”

“I need to speak to Gabriel Heller.”

“So Jerry tells me.”

“I was hoping you could help me.”

He shifted his balance, moved the weight onto his back foot. “Mr Heller no longer runs this establishment.”

“But he used to. Maybe you have a phone number for him, or the name of one of the places he still runs.”

“What’s your business with him?”

“He wants to talk to me. We have some urgent things to discuss.”

Dorian shrugged. “If he wants to talk to you, why hasn’t he contacted you?”

“He tried a couple of days ago. But his messengers left before they could tell me where to reach him.”

“How careless.”

I smiled. “Quite.”

“Well, Mr Tucker, I’m busy right now, but I’ll have a look see if I can find some contact details for him later today. Where can I reach you when I have them?”

“I’m a busy man too, Mr Robertson. How about I give you a call later, see if you have anything for me.”

He nodded, handed me a card. “Of course. If I find anything I can’t give you over the phone, maybe you could drop by again and pick it up.”

“Sure. Whatever.” I stopped smiling. “Speak to you later, Mr Robertson.”

I heard the door close behind me as I walked away.

38.

“Police have released details of a man they wish to question in connection with a murder in Worcester two days ago. Brian Tucker, fifty-two, was killed at his home late on Monday night. Police want to speak to Alex Rourke, a former FBI agent, in connection with the murder.”

Cut to the same footage of me and Downes walking into MCI-Ashworth on that first blustery morning. The anchorwoman continued speaking in voiceover as it replayed twice and froze on my face. “Rourke was in the news recently when the FBI brought him in to speak to convicted killer Cody Williams in jail at the request of the families of his suspected victims. Rourke’s efforts – controversial in some quarters,” she said as the picture cut to shots of the protesters outside the jail, “failed, however. Detective Perigo from Worcester Police Department said that Rourke may still be in the Boston metropolitan area or elsewhere in eastern New England.”

Cut to a still photo. Tucker. The picture looked a few years out of date. Professional job, probably one he’d used for the office, something like that. “Brian Tucker was a successful and respected property developer who had lived in Worcester for over twenty years. Police do not yet know why he was murdered.”

She turned to her fellow anchor with a broad smile. “Mike,” she said.

I stopped paying attention. Lay back on the bed with my stomach a cold, hollow pit. Nothing made you feel more like a wanted man than being plastered all over the news. And knowing that anyone or everyone you met might have seen it as well. A city full of hungry eyes. Remembering, reporting.

And somewhere out there was Goddard. Had he put Heller on to me? Have they been following me? How did the two of them tie together? Knowing that Goddard had paid such direct attention to me, and to removing me from his path, I felt like I should be able to touch him. But I couldn’t picture the guy at all. He was formless, intangible. A ghost. A creature of smoke. An illusion.

Two days of being on the run. Two days of keeping to the hotel except to talk to lowlifes in shitholes or on the phone. The rest of the time spent gnawing on my nerves and jumping whenever I heard a police siren in the streets nearby. No wonder most crooks on the run got caught when they did something stupid, let their guard slip to go out drinking or take in a movie, some other normal social activity, and someone recognized them. Just because they’d wanted to feel like part of the human race again.
 

Cabin fever set in quickly. All you heard at night was the sound of your own thoughts scratching at the inside of your skull and your own heart pounding with fear. You were utterly alone, and there was no one that you could trust not to turn on you. No support. No one to turn to. No one to care what happened to you, and the entire world against you. And everything I did, everyone I spoke to on Heller’s trail, only ratcheted the risk of discovery up another notch.

I tried to shake off that feeling before it set in hard. I had time to kill anyway before I called Robertson. He should have had a chance to speak to Heller; with the way he’d acted there was no way they weren’t connected. So I went for a walk in the rough direction of the city centre and the harbor beyond, to find a payphone, make arrangements.

I used to love this city at night.

The curious mix of old and new as you near the financial district and the Common. The winding streets of the old core of Boston. Weathered brickwork, iron railings. That feeling of age, solidity, continuity. Like returning to the house you’d grown up in, it had a sense of permanence and comfort, even when you were bitching about its faults or cursing your fellow inhabitants.

Now it smelled of cold water and empty air, and felt so delicate and fragile that I could have sent the whole thing crashing down with one wrong glance. As if the cracks in the paving and between each brick of each building were widening like fault lines, slowly tearing themselves to pieces before my eyes. And behind them was just rust and rot and blood.

Four women spilled out of a bar on Chambers Street, mid-joke, faces raised in laughter. The air momentarily flushed warm and carried the scent of beer casks from inside and perfume from the quartet. The girl at the back, quieter than her companions, glanced at me as we passed, her eyes still smiling from the joke. That brief meeting of gazes, the same primal judging and measuring trick our animal ancestors were pulling millions of years before. That tiny fraction of time between one footstep and the next, enough to meet, fall in love, fade, and part before we vanished from each other forever.

I cut myself off from more of those moments. Lowered my gaze, not making contact with anyone. Imagining the dark glittering of dozens of eyes on me everywhere I go. Picturing every passer-by stopping behind me, thinking, “Don’t I know him from somewhere? Didn’t I see him on TV earlier?”

Waiting for someone to shout my name.
 

Waiting for the sounds of pursuit.

This feeling grew far worse on the couple of occasions a police cruiser rolled past. I
knew
I was just another night-time pedestrian and they weren’t even looking at me, but I still felt the urge to dive into the shadows. At one intersection I saw two beat cops standing on the street corner. I crossed over rather than walk past them.