Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

But I couldn’t, not now. It all had led to this. I had to see him in person, that was the only way. I had to. Why? What would I do when we met? Kill him? I didn’t know. But I had to bring things to a head. I had to see the fucker. Had to. A compulsion. A madness.

Pat raged, fumed.

He told me to take the weekend to think it over before I did something so dumb. And Pat was a wise person and I would be a fool to ignore his advice and I did think it over, but I knew I was going to do it.

I told him.

Again Pat begged me to reconsider, but he knew it was too late and once he’d heard my plan, he resigned himself and decided that he should help, so at the very least I wouldn’t get topped as easily as John.

“Sit tight,” Pat said, “I’ll be on the next bus up.”

I met Pat off the bus. The ride had been rough on him, he was pale, sick. I cooked him Campbell’s cream of mushroom soup. He ate some of it. Opened his overnight bag. Removed a bottle of gin and a.45 automatic Colt pistol.

“This is for you,” he said, giving me the gun. “It was my dad’s. Army issue. He was a lieutenant in World War Two. I’ve checked it, I shot it at the range. Works good. Anything closer than fifty feet. Blow their fucking head off.”

“Thanks,” I said. I felt better about it, I had a gun and a Kevlar jacket. I’d be safe. We went onto Pat’s narrow fire escape, looked at the graveyard and the river, and talked.

“What makes you think he’ll come alone?” Pat asked, pouring gin into a coffee mug.

“Oh, he has to. This whole thing has been about blackmail. He can’t involve anyone else. He’ll come alone, it wouldn’t make sense for him to bring in other people now,” I said with confidence.

“Take the gun, and wear that Kevlar vest, he’ll try to kill you,” Pat said.

“I know,” I said.

A bright hot plains — Colorado afternoon. Blue sky. We walked together to the pay phone outside Walgreen’s. Pat accompanying me at a snail’s pace, but insisting on going in a last ditch effort to dissuade me. I dialed the number. I got through to the Mulhollands’ answer phone. Read from my piece of paper:

“I want to meet. This is a one-time-only offer. You didn’t kill me. I am not dead. You fucked up. You know who this is. I want to meet on my turf. Alone. Tomorrow night, midnight, the cemetery in Fort Morgan, Colorado, the shelter in the center of the graveyard. Alone.”

I hung up the phone.

The next day. A thunderstorm came in about ten o’clock. Thunder and sheet lightning that shook the whole building. It began to hail, golf-ball size.

“Nasty,” I said, looking out the window, just for something to say.

“Yup,” Pat said. “On the radio they said it would be freezing rain and hail. Whoever heard of such a thing in July? It’s El Niño, that’s what it is. Won’t do any good, though, we need six months of sweet Jesus rain, need it bad.”

“I know,” I said.

“But look at that. Can’t see for shit out that window. I won’t be able to check the cemetery. Dumb-ass plan. I knew it. I bloody told you. You’ll be on your own,” Pat said grimly.

“I’ll be ok.”

Pat muttered and made some coffee. We watched the clock. Midnight crept around.

“Well, I better go,” I said.

“Can I just say one thing?” Pat asked.

“Aye.”

“This won’t solve anything,” Pat said, his melancholy eyes teary, sad.

“Pat, I’m going to get this fucker, he killed my best friend, I have to do this, I have to bring things to a head.”

“You don’t have to do anything, Alex,” Pat pleaded.

“I do,” I said.

“Why not just go home,” Pat said.

“No.”

“What do you possibly think you can get from this?”

I thought for a moment. What did I want? I wanted to confront him, I wanted to yell at him, I wanted him to confess, I wanted him to go to the police, to turn himself in, I wanted to see his face, I wanted closure, I wanted him dead. I wanted a million things.

I put on a sweater, a coat, the Kevlar vest, and a wool hat to keep out the rain.

“Are you sure he’ll be alone?” Pat asked.

“He has to come alone. This is all about blackmail. They can’t involve anyone else. You’ll see,” I reassured him.

“Be careful,” Pat said.

“I will.”

I left the apartment, walked downstairs. I crossed the street to the main graveyard entrance. Went in. My plan was to skirt the tree-lined stone cemetery wall on the river side. It rose to a dense woody embankment overlooking the graves and from there I could see everything, yet because of the trees I couldn’t be seen. Charles wouldn’t know that. He wouldn’t know Fort Morgan. He’d show up, go to the shelter in the center of the graveyard, wait for me, but I’d already be there watching him.

I inched along the wall. The hail had become freezing rain. Pitch black. I couldn’t see ten feet in front of me. I stopped in the trees fifty feet behind the shelter.

Midnight. A few minutes after.

A figure in a white coat. Too small to be Charles. Who? Amber? He sent you to do the dirty work? He sent you to clean up his mess?

I watched her. I waited. She came closer.

Amber. Is that really you? I kept behind the trees. Had to be her. I smiled. I moved nearer, still hidden by the undergrowth. I slithered down the embankment until I was only twenty feet away, cloaked by the trees and the night.

“Amber,” I said.

She didn’t hear. She leaned on a hooped pillar, provided for people to tie up their horses.

I said it louder: “Amber.”

She spun around, looking at the graves, and then she peered into the thickets of dense wood, staring right at me, not seeing me. The hood on her coat up, but definitely Amber. No one else had that poise. That deep embodiment of sex. One of the main weapons in her arsenal. And as I stood there looking at her, thinking of that, gazing at her, it came to me and I knew what the mistake had been. What a naive boy I was. From Ireland. From the sticks.

“Amber.”

“Alex?” she said. It was her.

“Amber, I know now what I did wrong,” I said.

“Come out, come down here and talk to me like a civilized person,” she said with self-assurance.

“It was that remark, that joke. Wasn’t it?”

No reply.

“That Kama Sutra twenty-one joke. Goddamnit. You froze up after that. And you told Charles. And he came to kill me.”

“Come out of there and talk to me face-to-face,” she said. Cool, icy. I liked that.

“Kama Sutra twenty-one. Victoria said that to me once. Victoria Patawasti. She said that as a joke to make me laugh. To relax me. A joke against herself. You know, because she’s Indian. But she said it to you, too, didn’t she? You slept with her, didn’t you? You fucked her to get her to tell you her password. Or if not to tell you, to give you information to work it out? I’m right, tell me I’m right, Amber.”

“Come over here and I’ll talk to you, I can barely hear you,” she said, quiet and calm. Of course she wasn’t going to confirm or deny anything in case I had a tape recorder. I knew that.

“‘Carrickfergus,’ you kept saying. Was that it? Does that ring a bell? Was that her password? Maybe, maybe not. Who cares. It doesn’t matter. You got it somehow. Seduced her, got her to trust you. You were Charles’s whore. And it was more than just the password, he wanted to know if she could be bought.”

“You must be drunk or something, Alexander, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I want to help you, I think you might be mentally unbalanced, you’re talking nonsense, come down here, come out of there, I can help you,” she said.

I barely contained my anger.