Hell's Horizon (21 page)

part four

“the red fingerprints of death”

16

I
could tell, as I returned to consciousness, that I’d been out a long time. I was in a pitch-black room, so I couldn’t check, but according to my body clock it had been anywhere between twelve and eighteen hours.

I ran my fingers over my scalp, assessing the damage. Every touch produced a sting but nothing seemed to be broken. And although my bruised stomach flared agonizingly every time I breathed, I didn’t think any of my ribs had snapped. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse.

Then I remembered Paucar Wami and his familiar face.

I might have called it wrong. I’d only glimpsed the face in the alley, I’d been thinking a lot about my missing father and I wasn’t at my most coherent at the time. Maybe I’d just noticed a similarity and the rest was conjecture. But in my heart I knew that was bullshit.

I got to my feet and almost fell down again as geysers of pain erupted all over. I thrust out an arm, found a wall and propped myself against it, breathing hard, letting my head clear, groaning softly.

“Awake at last,” came a voice from the darkness. “I thought you would sleep forever.”

I stiffened. It was Paucar Wami’s voice but I couldn’t see him. Not even a vague outline.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“Around,” he replied, and now the voice came from another spot. He was circling me, silent, unseen, a shark. “You saw my face in the alley, didn’t you?” He sounded petulant.

I thought about lying but didn’t see the point. “Yes.”

“You know who I am? Who I
was
?”

Again I considered the lie but opted for the truth. “Yes.”

“I thought so.”

The light snapped on.

I had to close my eyes and shield them with a hand. I counted to twenty before opening them again. I was in a small, whitewashed room. Nothing in it apart from the mattress I’d been lying on, me and Paucar Wami.

Or Tom Jeery, as he used to be called.

Now that I saw him up close all doubt evaporated. The years had barely touched him and he was exactly as I remembered, except bald and tattooed. He said nothing while I ran my incredulous eyes over him, taking in the lean, muscular frame, the slender, hooked fingers, the jeans, T-shirt and leather jacket. Spreading his arms, he grinned. “Got a hug for your dear ol’ pappy?”

“This is a nightmare,” I groaned, sliding down the wall. “This has to be a fucking nightmare.”

He tutted and squatted. “Your mother never approved of foul language. She even complained when I swore during sex.”

I stared at him, appalled. How could I be related to this grinning monster? It was like discovering you were the offspring of Adolf Hitler.

“Did my mother know?” I gasped. “Did she know who you—”

“—Really were?” He nodded. “But not right away. I held that back for the first night of our honeymoon.” He laughed with delight at my expression. “That was a joke. It was years before she found out, long after you came along. A neighborhood busybody spotted me without my makeup one night and recognized me from word-of-mouth descriptions. She wasted no time sharing the news with poor, befuddled Mrs. Jeery. Needless to say, I slapped the interfering old bitch’s wrists afterward.” He chuckled. “And some more besides.”

“You wore makeup?”

“Face paint. A wig. Contact lenses to disguise my beautiful green eyes. This is my natural appearance.”

“What did she do when she found out?” It was important to know my mother hadn’t been involved with his crimes. Getting my head around this would be a long, unpleasant process, but far messier if my mother was also implicated.

“She kicked me out,” he laughed, sounding almost human. “She knew what I could do to her but took no notice. Batted me around the head with a frying pan, tore the skin off my shins with her shoes, nearly gouged out an eye with a poker. She was a feisty woman, your mother.”

“Yes,” I said proudly. I stretched my legs and began rubbing the aching flesh around my middle. “Is that when you left us, when you
died
?”

He shook his head. “I kept Tom Jeery on the go for three more years, but stayed out of your way most of the time. I dropped by occasionally to see how you were progressing—as my firstborn, I have always had a soft spot for you—until my position became untenable. Your mother threatened to go into hiding if I did not stop visiting.”

“Why didn’t she do that as soon as she found out?” I asked.

“The same reason she never told anyone the truth about the man she married, not even her son—I vowed to track the pair of you down and kill you if she did.”

“But you just said—”

“—That I had a soft spot for you, yes. But business is business.”

“You’d really have killed me?”

“I never lie about the important things, as your mother knew. That is why, even if she had lived to be a senile old woman, given to spurting out her darkest secrets to all and sundry, she would never have told about me.” He tapped the floor. “Fear is a great silencer, Al m’boy, especially if it is fear for one you love.”

He got up and offered me his hand. I refused it and struggled to my feet by myself. He smiled, asked if I could walk, opened the door when I said I could and gestured me through to a long corridor.

“Where are we?” I asked, glancing up at the flickering tubes overhead.

“A building,” he answered vaguely. “One of my many places of work. You do not need to know more.”

As we walked, Wami in front, me struggling to keep up, something he’d said struck me and I stopped. Wami looked back.

“You said I was your firstborn.”

His face split into an approving smile. “You are slow but not entirely witless.”

“You have other children?”

“Many. By many different women.”

“I have brothers? Sisters?”

“Forty-plus at the last count. Quite a few nephews and nieces too.”

The news left me reeling. I’d always believed I was alone in the world.

“Where are they?” I asked. “Here in the city?”

“Some, yes, but I have also sown my oats in the ports of strange and distant lands. You even have an Eskimo sister.” It was hard to tell if he was joking or not.

“Do you keep in contact with them?”

“I keep tabs on them. I do not have time for personal relationships.”

“Is that why you were following me? Why you were outside the Red Throat when I was attacked?”

He pondered his answer, then turned and beckoned me to follow, deciding on silence.

“What happened to the pair who jumped me?” I asked, shuffling after him.

“They await our pleasure.”

“They’re
here
?”

“I told you this was a place of work.”

We passed several doors before he stopped at one and entered. It was another dark room. He didn’t turn on the light until the door was closed. When he did, I wished he’d left it off.

The two men from the alley hung by chains from the ceiling, one upside down, the other horizontally. The latter had been disemboweled and his guts trailed over his sides like some long, pink mess that had been dumped there. His eyes had been gouged out and nailed to his nipples so he looked like an obscene alien from a cheap sci-fi movie. Most of the other’s face had been sliced away and a pin had been driven through his genitals, which stretched upwards tightly, suspended by a shorter chain, so that every time he moved he was in agony.

Both were still alive.

I turned aside and retched. Wami laughed and warned me not to vomit on his shoes. When I’d recovered, I asked who they were.

“That was my first question too,” he replied. “Tell me, did you
really
escort a white woman to the Ku Klux Klub?”

I nodded warily. “Yeah. So?”

“
So
these two fine, Caucasian queers were there and took it as a personal insult. By chance they noticed you in the Red Throat yesterday and decided to—as one so poetically phrased it before I removed his tongue—‘teach that fucking nigger some goddamn respect for his betters.’ ”

“They had nothing to do with Nic or the Fursts?” I asked, examining the face of the man who still had one.

“Nothing,” Wami said, sounding as disappointed as I felt. “Still, I thought it too good to be true. Life is rarely that simple.”

The man with no face groaned and twitched on his chains. Something—it may have been the remains of his nose—slipped from his forehead and landed in a pool of blood with a gentle plop.

“Will you for Christ’s sake make an end of those two?” I moaned.

“I have grown rather fond of them. I was thinking of keeping them on.”

“Just kill them!” I shouted.

Wami regarded me coolly. “Do not adopt such tones when addressing your father, Albert. You are not too old for a spanking.”

“Please,” I said sickly. “They can’t tell us anything and I can’t stand looking at them like that.”

Wami produced a knife and held it out. “Care to do the honors?” I stared at the knife, then the men, and shook my head. “You have killed before. Why shy away from these two?”

“I killed when ordered, when there was a reason.”

“You will be putting them out of their misery. Is that not reason enough?”

“They were a pair of fools but they didn’t deserve to be—”

Wami spun the knife around and reholstered it in the twinkling of an eye. “Then make no further entreaties of me. If you are incapable of dealing the final blow, I shall do so in my own good time. One must never expect another to extend the hand of mercy on his behalf.”

He strolled past the stricken pair—they sensed his presence and started groaning and writhing anew—toward a door set in the far wall of the room. I followed, steering as far clear of the anguished captives as I could. I found myself in a room with a mahogany desk and two leather chairs, one on either side. There was a computer in the corner and shelves filled with books behind the desk. I glanced over them, expecting tomes on torture and sadism, but they were mostly computer manuals, the odd thriller strewn among them.

“Sit,” Wami instructed, taking his place on the far side of the desk. I was glad to rest, but my sense of relief vanished when Wami produced a gun and aimed it at me. “I
will
use this if provoked. I will not shoot to kill—it should be obvious by now that I have no wish to harm you—but I will disable you without a second’s hesitation.”

“I’ll be still as a mouse,” I promised, stomach clenching in anticipation.

“You asked why I was at the Red Throat. It was not because you are my son. I was there in search of answers, hoping to trace a client through you.”

“What client?” I frowned.

He paused a second, then said, “The one who hired me to eliminate the Fursts.”

I came dangerously close to disregarding his warning and going for his throat. If I’d had a weapon of my own, I might have.

“You bastard,” I muttered, feeling tears prick my eyes as I thought of the boy I’d held in my arms. “He was a child. Little more than a baby. How could you—”

“Please,” Wami yawned, “spare me the sermon. You have killed in the past. The men you murdered were also children once.”

“It’s not the same.”

“Of course it is. Age is irrelevant.”

“A man who’d kill a child…” I glared at him contemptuously, remembering my vow to murder the one responsible. Wami must have seen something of that in my eyes because his expression darkened.

“I am not the villain you want,” he said. “If I had not killed them, somebody else would have. If you seek vengeance, seek the architect, not the hired gun. Do not waste your hatred on a mere messenger boy, which is all I was.”

“Why them?” I snarled. “Why Breton Furst?”

He shrugged. “That is what I hope to find out. I had no direct contact with my employer. I received a cryptic message—to shadow the Fursts but only kill them when ‘the one I would know’ appeared. My curiosity was piqued, so I set up camp and waited. Then you turned up.”

“Somebody knew I’d go after Breton?”

“It appears so.”

“And they didn’t want me talking to him.”

“Apparently not.”

“But they didn’t want you to kill him before I met him.”

“If you continue stating the obvious, I shall have to administer a slapping.”

“They wanted me to witness the execution,” I went on, ignoring him. “We were both set up.” I stared at the killer. “Why?”

“If I knew, I would not have been trailing you around the city.”

I thought about it in silence. Whoever it was must have known Wami and I had met, or else they couldn’t be sure that Wami would recognize me. They knew that Breton Furst was connected to Allegro Jinks, and that I would find out and go after Furst. I didn’t know how anybody could be that clued in to what was going on, but more worrying was what else the puller-of-strings might be arranging. Wami was right—he wasn’t the man I wanted. Someone had to pay for the death of the boy, but it should be the one who ordered the hit, not the triggerman.