The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (30 page)

“Do you like ballet, Mr Rourke?” Rutherford asked as we cut across town.

“I’ve never been.”

“You should, I think. The precision of the routines. The grace and elegance despite the physical hardships. The sacrifice the dancers make for the sake of art. It’s beautiful, yet tragic, as even the best have only a few short years at the peak of the profession, and their reward could be a lifetime of pain.”

“You sound like a serious fan.” Stating the obvious, but there wasn’t much else to say to that.

Rutherford nodded. “You could say that. If you get the chance, the Kirov Ballet is performing
Sleeping Beauty
at the Wang Theater for the next month.”

“It’s good?”

“Breathtaking, Mr Rourke. Breathtaking.”

“I’ll check it out if I get the chance,” I said.

The car lapsed into silence for a while. Squeezed in the back between the two twins, I was in no mood to try starting a conversation of my own. I was trying to watch the streets, see where we’re going. Somewhere between plotting an escape route and sampling as much of what might be my final journey as I could.
 

Eventually, we swung into a narrow alleyway and pulled up next to a set of red loading bay doors. We got out in formation, and Twin Number Two rolled them open. Rutherford gestured for me to step inside. The car pulled away as I walked into the concrete cavern of the garage beyond. The three of them showed me through a side door into a small storeroom with a single chair in it.

“Take a seat, Mr Rourke,” Rutherford said. “Mr Heller is a busy man, so I suspect you’ll be waiting here a while. Lawrence will be outside should you need anything.”

I looked at him and the twins, once more weighing up the odds and my chances of making a break for it. I didn’t see it happening. Rutherford was back out of reach and the other two were built like wrestlers. So I did as they said and stepped into the storeroom. The door thudded shut behind me and the lock ratcheted into place.

46.

The place had to be a club of some kind. Not Metro’s — this was a different building — but after the first three hours alone in the storeroom, I could definitely hear bass thrumming through the walls. Either Heller was busy, or he liked making his ‘guests’ sweat a little before he saw them. Or maybe he was just deciding what to do with my body after they put a bullet through my skull.

The door was heavy steel and the only other opening was a tiny grate-covered drain in one corner. I tried testing Lawrence by asking to go to the bathroom, but he just told me to hold it or piss myself. No budging.

It was gone nine in the evening by the time I heard voices outside and the lock shucked back. Both twins there, and Rutherford standing between them. “Mr Heller will see you upstairs,” he said.

They led me up a couple of floors by a back staircase, out of the way of the club’s patrons and regular staff, and out behind a bar in what looked like a private function room of some kind. Lamplit tables in shallow alcoves, all painted up to look like some kind of tropical ocean scene. Coral reefs and kelp. It looked hideous. A balcony to the right, running across the roof of the floor below, had a view of the harbor. The French windows leading onto it were closed and probably locked, but I kept it in mind. Along with Rutherford and the twins, there were three other guys in the room. Two of them in position near another set of doors, which I guessed led down to the club proper, and one heavy-set guy maybe a year or two older than me in a very expensive suit, sitting at a table by the side of the room.

A TV set above the bar was playing the evening news on mute. I had no idea what the anchor was saying, but they were showing Rob’s picture on the screen.

Behind me, Rutherford said, “In you go, Mr Rourke.”

I ignored him, kept staring at the screen. Cut to the outside of a hospital. Cut again to shots of emergency vehicles outside Rob’s house. Police, paramedics. Someone putting up crime scene tape. I saw the words ‘critical’ and ‘brutal assault’ on the news ticker before Lawrence pushed me forwards.

The guy at the table stood up.
 

Heller. I recognized him from old news stories. His expression was unreadable, but he didn’t look too friendly. He waggled two fingers at me, waving me over. I felt my temper rising. The son of a bitch had put Rob in intensive care and he was acting like I was here to arrange a fucking car loan.

“I bet you wish you’d never got involved with all this,” he said. A thick New York accent untouched by his years in Boston. Robert De Niro with a bad throat and a couple of Valium. “You’re in seven kinds of shit, Rourke. Sit down.”

I took a seat and he nodded at my escorts. Rutherford and the twins walked away to join the rest of the gorillas.

“Mr Heller,” I said, fighting the urge to jump over the table and squeeze his throat until his eyes popped for what he’d done to Rob.
 

“You have any idea what you’re into?” He kept his voice low, hard to hear over the bass from downstairs. “You must do, smart guy like you, else you wouldn’t be asking about me.”

“You tried to frame me for murder, Mr Heller. Until then, I had nothing to do with you.”

“And if things’d worked out like they should’ve, you wouldn’t have nothing to do with me now. You’re a resourceful man, Rourke. You’ve dodged the cops so far, and I had a buncha guys watching you and they all vanished.”

Thought: fuck you, you piece of shit. Said, “Everyone wants a vacation this time of year. They probably went to get some sun.”

“I’ll bet.”

“So you set the cops on me, and had people after me, and now you want to talk to me, Mr Heller. Why the change in tack?”

“When it became clear how resourceful you are, it struck me that you might not be just some dumb jerkwad who fell into something that didn’t concern him. I want to know what you know.”

“Couldn’t get any information out of my partner, you fat sack of crap? That why you’re asking me?”

I must have said this just a little too loudly because I heard Rutherford or one of the gorillas move at the back of the room. Heller waved them back into position and fixed me with eyes like a shark. “What the fuck are you talking about? Fuck would I want with your partner?”

“Rob’s in hospital right now with God knows what done to him by your guys. I saw it on the news coming in here.”

“My guys?”

“Your guys went to the office to talk to him the other day. He told me. He didn’t give them what they wanted to know, so you had them come back later and beat the shit out of him until he talked.”

“
My
guys haven’t been near your goddamn office,” he said, jabbing his finger at me. “Fuck would I need anything from him? Only time we talked to him was to set up your meeting with Mr Rutherford, and that was a phone call.”

“Harvey and Andrew. One big, one little. Little one’s got a scar on his cheek. Your guys.”

Heller looked past me and called out, “Rutherford! Two guys, Harvey and Andrew, little and large. One with a scar on his cheek. They ours?”

“No, Mr Heller. We have an Andrew, but he’s currently out of town. We don’t have anyone by the name of Harvey working for us.”

“There you go, Rourke. Not my guys.” His voice dropped again. From the look on his face, like I’d offended him by even mentioning it, instinct told me to believe him. Instinct had a habit of being wrong, of course. And if it wasn’t Heller’s people looking for me, and Heller was the one tied to Goddard, who the hell were they?
 

“If they did whatever to your friend because of you,” Heller said, “then maybe you’re in even worse shit. You got a lot of enemies, seems.”

“Yeah. Seems.”

He let me digest the information for a while. “So you want to talk to me, Mr Heller, and find out what I know about…”

“Who it is whose affairs you’ve interfered with. Everything you know about him.”

I nodded. “Which is interesting, because I want to ask you the same thing. And I’m guessing that what I know is right, or else you wouldn’t have your goon squad way over there where they can’t hear what we’re saying.”

“Is that so?”

“I guess it’s the same in the real world as it is in prison,” I said with a grim smile. “No one wants people to know they’ve got a thing for little kids.”

For a moment, I thought he was going to snap and kill me on the spot. His eyes bulged, his nostrils flared and he seemed to be biting his tongue like it was a piece of prime rib.

“Your guys wouldn’t like it if they found out, would they, Mr Heller? I bet some of them have families of their own. Shit, I expect you like to act like a respectable family businessman yourself. They’d turn on you real quick if they knew what you like to do to children.”

His expression was stony enough to mine it for granite. “What do you know about him?”

“Anderson, or whatever his real name is? You know his real name?”

“If I did, he’d be dead by now.”

“He had a couple of little boys he kept at his house when he lived in New York. One of them was a scrawny kid called Cody Williams. You and him and a bunch of other guys used to get together to take turns fucking them.”
 

He showed no reaction this time. Said, “Continue.”

“And then one of them escaped and you boys all went your separate ways. Anderson moved, you came to Boston to become part of whatever operation this is, and you never saw him or the kids ever again. Not until we busted Cody for snatching little girls.”

“Williams told you all this? Little fucking loudmouth. We should’ve shut him up years ago.”

I didn’t correct him. “You used to know Billy Perry too, right? I imagine you must have been tempted to ask him about what Cody talked about.”

“Haven’t seen him in ages either. Not since he shacked up with one of my girls in Roxbury. Hey, Rutherford,” he called out. “Who was the piece of ass quit working to start a family or some shit with Billy Perry?”

“Di Marco, Mr Heller. Gwen Di Marco.”

“Was she cute?”

“I honestly can’t remember, Mr Heller.”

Heller looked back at me with a smirk and lowered his voice again. “That’s all that Billy Perry means to me. He never said anything about Cody, and I never asked. If he’d have known something I’d have killed him. And you don’t need to find him to find me, because I found you first, Rourke.”

I shrugged. “If you were worried about me finding you through Perry, you'd just have killed him. You wouldn't have tried to frame me, and you wouldn't have known this had anything to do with Anderson.”

“I hadn’t thought about that son of a bitch in years, until a few days ago I got a phone call. The voice at the other end told me that you’d been sticking your nose in business of his and how you should disappear and the whole thing should be forgotten. And if I didn’t there were photos of me that would reach the wrong hands. So I decided to deal with you. Get you put away for murder. Discredited and disgraced. Then I could go after Anderson to stop that shit happening ever again.
No one
blackmails
me
.”

“You guys took
photographs
?” Kris had been right; they really had treated it like being golfing buddies. Christ.

Heller shrugged, changed the subject. “So what’d you know, Rourke? Where’s Anderson?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

I shook my head. “I thought you might. All I know is he’s calling himself Richard Goddard, at least to some people, and he’s out there. Probably living in New York State, but I’m not sure.”

“Why’re you looking for him?”

“I’m putting something right I should have fixed when I busted Cody Williams.”

Heller’s eyes bored into mine. “And that’s all you can tell me about him?”

“Yeah.”

He glanced past me, said, “Then we’re through here. Rutherford! I’m done with him.”

I turned to see Rutherford and the twins walking towards the table while the other two gorillas watched on. Rutherford reached inside his jacket without any sign of emotion whatsoever and leveled a pistol at my head. The barrel was a deep black pit in front of me and I felt myself slipping inside right up until the point where Kris’s first bullet blew a hole in Rutherford’s skull the size of a squash ball.

47.

He came through the door running and killed Rutherford before anyone even knew he was there. A taut smoothness and efficiency in his movements. Face blank like a poker player.

The two gorillas near the door dropped before they’d finished turning. Then time seemed to slam back up to full speed like a kick to the face and all hell broke loose. The twins grabbed for their weapons and dived for opposite sides of the room, firing, as the air filled with noise, dust, and the
spack
of brass hitting the floor.
 

Heller slumped in his seat and I thought for a moment that he’d been hit, but then I realized it was just disbelief at what he was watching. I hit the boards and rolled for cover. Saw Lawrence collapse like a marionette with all its strings suddenly cut as a bullet punched out the back of his spine. I saw the other twin as a dark shape in the haze and dust, and then the firing cut out just as suddenly as it had begun.