The Darkness Inside: Writer's Cut (33 page)

No mention of anything to do with abusing children. As far as the NYPD was concerned, he’d been a senior officer and a good cop. His murder hadn’t been solved, but that just confirmed what I knew.

What I didn’t know is who Kris Lane was.

But I could find out. I doubted the cops would keep tabs on the accounts the agency held with various background check services and records databases. If they were, I’d trip every alarm they had.

I started tracing the lines of Kris’s past. Following the little strands left by his passing. The stray records, the notations, names, dates, places. The where and when of it all. There was very little from his childhood.

Nothing in the news about a child by that name going missing.

Nothing about an abduction.

By itself, maybe not surprising. Old story, so it was less likely to be in the available archives. No cause for doubting his story by itself.

The reasons he’d taken his time going after the Gang of Six were more worrying. For a period of nine years, right up until the summer before last, Kris had been in and out of asylums. I didn’t know what he’d been in for, but it must have been something serious to require such regular treatment.

For most of this time, he seemed to have had no permanent address and no employment either. Wandering here and there, either as part of whatever work he’d had — I guessed petty crime from the way he acted — or else tracing the other members of the Gang.

So I was relying on a revenge-obsessed killer with a history of mental health problems and an amphetamine habit for help. Relying on him for information and to understand who Goddard was, or had been. I didn’t know how much trouble any lies he’d told me would get me into, and I didn’t know whether or not I could trust him not to turn on me once his private vendetta was over.

I returned to his apartment, watching my back every step of the way.

“You look like shit,” he said when I got in. “No luck with whatever it was?”

“Not really.” I noticed that the baggy on top of the fridge had gone.

“It happens. We’ll get him tomorrow.”
 

I sat down and tried to hide the fact that I was feeling less than keen on getting Goddard at all with him around. That I might have to find a way of ditching him in order to
 
strike out on my own again.

An email I received in the morning blew all my plans to tatters.

51.

“Did it say who they were?”

I shook my head, lit a cigarette. “No. Heller’s guys, maybe, or the ones who beat up Rob. Shit. From the time it was sent, I guess they grabbed her yesterday evening.”

WE HAVE YOUR GIRL SOPHIE, the message said.

YOU WANT HER TO LIVE, COME TO TRENT CHEMICALS, KING’S ROW.

ANY SIGN OF THE COPS, SHE DIES.

YOU’VE GOT THREE DAYS.

The apartment was wreathed in cigarette smoke and stale air. Kris was perched on the edge of the couch, fingers nervously playing with each other. I glared through the window, as though a solution would appear on the glass if I concentrated on it hard enough.

So far all I knew was that if these sons of bitches had hurt Sophie in any way, I’d kill them.

“They’re going to be waiting for us,” Kris said.

“No shit. Wait.” I held up a hand to cut him off before he could object to me snapping at him. “They’re going to be waiting for
me
. They probably don’t know about you.”

“You sure?”

“If they’re playing it this way, they don’t know where I am now and they weren’t able to find me before, otherwise they’d have done the same to me as they did to Rob. They’d have dealt with me days ago.”

“
If
they’re the ones who attacked him,” Kris said. “If they’re Heller’s guys out for revenge, they’ll know you had help.”

“We’ll have to hope they’re not.”

He shrugged. “Even if they’re not, the surprise won’t last long. You got a gun?”

“Yeah,” I said. Kris looked like he was ready to dive out the door and go to war with these guys without a second thought. “But let’s see if we can get a look at this place first, find out what we’re up against.”

Trent Chemicals was a derelict refining plant that had only been half-finished when its owner went bankrupt. The site was in the middle of dead industrial wasteland overlooking the Atlantic south of Boston, an elephants’ graveyard for steel dreams turned to rust. The area was flat and deserted; Sophie’s captors would be able to hear any approaching vehicle well before it reached the factory. We left the car a half mile away and finished the journey on foot.

We found a good view of Trent from the collapsing canning plant next door. Most of whatever processing machinery was originally on the site seemed to have been stripped away, probably to pay its creditors, but a couple of huge concrete factory buildings, dark and blocky, remained. The nearest of them had a raised sub-section at one end lined with broken windows. The old plant offices, I guessed.

“That’s where they’ll be,” Kris said.

“Yeah.”

“High view, watch the road coming in. About as good as they’re going to get on that site.”

He handed me a pair of binoculars bought on the way out here and I scanned the shattered building for signs of life. Most of the windows were empty and much of the place appeared to be open plan, but on the top floor, far northern end, I saw a drift of pale white smoke. A cigarette. Just visible beyond, a man sitting a few feet inside the window, looking out over the approach to the plant. I couldn’t see what he was wearing or what he was carrying, but he was slouched, trying to get comfortable.

I pointed him out to Kris.

“Can’t see anyone else.”

“Any lights would show up for miles here; these places don’t have electricity. If they’re holed up inside for the nights, they must have to stay somewhere out of sight of the windows.”

“Keep watching. They must change shifts at some point.”

For nearly three hours we waited, staring across a couple of hundred yards of dead ground in the rain. Then, at long last, Kris said, “We’ve got movement.”

“Where?”

“A second guy’s come to take over the watch. I didn’t see where from, but I guess the first guy’s going to go back that way.”

He passed me the binoculars in time for me to catch a glimpse of the two men together in the gloom. The newcomer was a foot taller than the first, and much heavier set.
 

Little and large. The guys who’d attacked Rob.

The conversation finished, and the short one walked out of the room and vanished from view. He eventually reappeared in a stairwell two floors down by one of the open plan offices and made his way through a door into a back room. He didn’t come back out.

“Got them,” I said. “And I think there’s only two of them.”

“Where?”

“Two floors down, room on the far side. Best guess, that’ll be where they’re keeping Sophie.”

“If they’re keeping her at all. If she’s alive,” Kris said.

I almost hit him. The urge was there, the sudden flush of rage and sheer bloody-minded unwillingness to consider the possibility that he was right. Which he was.

“Doesn’t matter,” he continued, oblivious. “Either way, we go in and get them. If there are only two of them, they can’t be watching the back of the building. They must be expecting a car.”

“Maybe. Maybe there’s no back way in.”

“Maybe. Only one way to find out.”

I conceded him that. “So we try to sneak round there without the guy upstairs seeing us, and then…”

“Then I suggest we split. I’ll go upstairs, maybe over the factory roof, and nail the watchman before he knows we’re there. You go for the downstairs and take out the other guy. That way we don’t have one of them free to do whatever to your friend as soon as they know we’re in the building.”

“It’ll be tricky without knowing the layout of the place. Timing could be a problem.” I shrugged. “But then we’ve got no way of communicating and the whole thing’s guesswork anyway. Hell with it.”

Kris nodded. “It’s as good as we’ll get. Wait until night?”

“Blundering around an unfamiliar factory in the dark? When they could have night vision equipment, and we definitely don’t? No, I don’t like that idea. Let’s just give them an hour or so to get comfortable and dozy, get round the back, and go for it.”

The downpour didn’t let up at all. I was soaked in the time it took to scuttle across the southern side of the canning plant lot, keeping its bulk between us and the watching eyes in the Trent offices.
 

The chain-link that marked the southern border of these derelict units was peppered with climbing weeds and windblown trash. Maybe two feet of solid vertical cover, and better than nothing above that. I hunkered down and moved as quickly as I could in a half-crouch along the periphery, checking through the weeds every now and then to see where we were in relation to the offices. Once we were within sight of the back of the building, I examined its crumbling face for any sign that they were also watching the rear.

Nothing. No one.

Only the top two floors of offices were visible above the factory roof, and they were almost windowless on this side. Maybe the view wasn’t great with all the refining pipework in place. There was a huge sliding door on the ground floor that was open maybe a few feet. Inside it was dark, but I could make out the front of what looked like a pickup truck. No movement there.

“Looks clear,” I said to Kris.

“There’s a ladder leading to the roof on the rear wall past the gas tank. Keep to what’s left of the piping and head for it. We can get upstairs that way.”

“How do we know the roof’s in any condition to support our weight?”

“We don’t. There’s a gantry up there. Otherwise, stick close to the walls. It’ll be strongest there.”

I swung up and over the fence, feeling the blood pounding through my system. I was expecting a mistake. That there’d be someone watching us after all. A shout of alarm. A rifle bullet through the spine. Sophie dead upstairs.

What I got was a shoe full of muddy water on the other side and a twenty yard dash to the nearest cover. We followed a low concrete enclosure as far as we could, then broke across another ten yard stretch to some rusting pipes. I kept scanning the factory, but nothing had changed. No sign that they knew we were coming.

From the pipes to a pile of brick rubble, and from there to the back wall of the factory and the ladder up. Kris tapped me on the shoulder and whispered, “Hope you have a head for heights.”

I didn’t answer, just climbed. The rungs were greasy with the rain and the drab olive paint on them was cracked and crumbling, revealing the rust underneath, but the ladder seemed sound. I made it to the top, a little out of breath, and glanced down at the lot below.

I guessed it was around seventy feet, but I wasn't sure. All I knew was that it was far enough to kill me if I fell. The wind up here tugged at my hair and pressed my freezing cold, wet jeans against my legs.

The maintenance gantry running across the roof was in a worse state than the ladder, but it held. I dashed along as fast as I dared, then down to where the top couple of floors of offices jutted from the corner of the building. Popped my head up to the nearest window long enough to see a bare room beyond the empty frame, then back down again.

I pointed at Kris, then gestured upwards and nodded.
Remember: you go after the guy upstairs
.

He nodded and gave me the thumbs up.

We hauled ourselves in through the window. I drew my Colt and flicked the safety off. I wished I had a silencer like Kris. Waited by the door, listening for movement inside, then opened it and checked the view.

A short corridor dividing two open office spaces, other rooms like ours dotted along the back wall, and there, the stairwell. The place smelled of mildew and the only sounds were the wind howling through a dozen shattered holes in the structure and the rain pelting it outside.

We split at the stairs. Kris crept up to the top floor, and I edged my way down a level, watching the turns. The door below was missing, giving me a clear view across to the room the little guy had vanished into earlier.

Still no sounds and no sign of movement.

With the wind outside whipping itself into a frenzy, I crept to the door, gun out in front of me.

Still nothing.

I held my breath, counted to three, calm and steady, then threw open the door and swung into the room. Swept the corners, finger taut on the trigger, ready to drop the smaller guy before he could even blink.

Sophie was handcuffed to a radiator at the back of the room and had a strip of duct tape over her mouth. She looked roughed around, but not badly hurt.

The little guy wasn’t there.

From upstairs came the sudden roar of a shotgun blast and a moment later Kris started screaming.

52.

I ran across the room, trying to keep one eye on the door behind me. Tugged the tape from Sophie’s mouth — to her credit she didn’t cry out — as a second blast from the shotgun split the air. I bunched the chain on the cuffs up as high as possible, away from her hands, and shot through it, aiming out the window so I didn’t end up killing us both with a stray ricochet even if the shrapnel from the chain didn’t blind us both.