Jon Evans - Dark Places

"Good riddance," I said, and spat.

A long silence followed.

"Christ," Lawrence finally said. "I don't know about you lot, but I could use a beer."

That broke the silence, and all four of us laughed.

"Good throw," Hallam said to me.

I smiled back. "Nice catch."

We walked slowly back down the trail to the hotel. Hallam and Nicole clung to each other as if they had been krazy-glued. Lawrence, wonder of wonders, produced a pack of Marquise cigarettes. Locally manufactured filth. We smoked them all on the way back, once we stopped shaking enough to light them. The gorge seemed warm now, warm and welcoming.

Steve was half-mad with anxiety by the time we finally returned and nearly crushed the four of us to death with his welcoming embrace. "Next time," he kept saying, "somebody bloody else can stay behind."

It was past midnight by the time we had all reunited, swapped stories, demolished a six-pack of San Miguel, and soothed ourselves enough to make sleep a possibility. The morning bus left at five-thirty, which didn't leave much time for shut-eye, but better five hours than none. We set our alarms, group-hugged for a full minute, and went off to our respective beds.

We made it onto the morning bus with time to spare. I wasn't at all groggy. A few seconds after I woke up, the memory of the previous night shocked me fully awake. The others seemed pretty sprightly too. Hallam and Nicole sat at the back of the bus with their arms wrapped around each other, Steve took the two seats in front of them, and Lawrence and I sat in front of him. This time I took the aisle seat as I had discovered the hard way on the way to the gorge that the Moroccans do not build near enough legroom into their window seats.

We didn't really talk. But it was a good kind of silence. A comfortable kind. It was an awful thing that had happened but we had come through it all right, and we had come through it together. I thought to myself more than once, on that bus trip, that these were just the people I wanted on my side when push came to shove, and that it was good to be around them. I think maybe they thought the same. I had crazy fantasies of moving to London. Well, the London part wasn't crazy. It was the part about Talena coming with me that didn't seem fully grounded in reality.

In four days Crown Air would fly us from Gibraltar back to London, which meant that even allowing for the inevitable travel delays we had a couple of days to kill. We spent them in Essouaira. A town by a gorgeous windswept beach on the edge of the Atlantic, popular but not too popular with the Lonely Planet crowd. Moroccan kids played soccer on the beach. Hash was cheap and only technically illegal. A chain of old watchtowers that dated back to practically the Roman Empire lay along the beach here, staring down the chain of shipwrecks that littered the ocean, and we spent our days beach-hopping from one tower to another.

It was a good time. Hallam and Nicole barely left one another's side. They weren't distant, exactly, but Steve and Lawrence and I could tell that they were so wrapped up in one another's world that there wasn't really room for anyone else, so we gave them a lot of space. Lawrence made it clear that my brief suspicion of him was forgiven and forgotten, and Steve radiated his usual good cheer, and the three of us ate and drank and smoked and swam and played soccer with the Moroccans. It was a good time. I didn't feel at all bad about Morgan. I don't think any of us did. It was like Hallam said, a lot easier to deal with than we might have expected. He was a monster, and we had rid the world of him. Not so hard to look in the mirror after that.

We weren't worried about the authorities. I strongly doubted that anyone would find Morgan's body anytime soon. The hotel would just keep adding to his tab for another few days before wondering where he had vanished to. We had signed in under false names and could not be traced here. And the Moroccan police were, well, not exactly the sort to strike fear into the heart of evildoers everywhere. And even if they did find the body, and then find us, what evidence did anyone have? We would simply deny everything. I understood how getting away with murder had been so easy for Morgan for so many years.

So easy for Morgan and the others.

"So what about those other four?" Lawrence asked me, our second night in Essouaira, as he and Steve and I sat around a table smoking. Lawrence had become quite a heavy smoker, although he assured us that he'd give it up the moment he set foot back in England, that it was a travel thing only. I even believed him.

"Which other four?" I asked. His question had come out of nowhere.

"Numbers One, Two, Three, and Five."

"Oh, them." I'd nearly forgotten the other Demon Princes. "Not my department."

"Aye," Steve said. "Get some other lot to handle them. I reckon we've done our bloody bit and then some."

"I suppose I'll send out that article," I said. "After I edit out all the Morgan references. Can't hurt. Warn people that they're out there. Maybe make them sweat a little, make Interpol try a little harder to find some way to go after them. But that's the end of the story for me."

"For us," Steve said.

"I'll drink to that," said Lawrence, and we clinked our San Miguels together.

But that conversation spurred an idea. Maybe I wasn't quite finished with The Bull after all. Maybe there was one more thing I could do.

The picture was the hardest part. I'm a programmer, not a graphic designer, and Essouaira's sole Internet cafe was not exactly well equipped with all the latest software. Eventually I tracked down some freeware graphic-editing software called LView and worked out how to put it through its paces. At least the picture itself was a good one, from the archive of Africa pictures I kept on my Unix account. Morgan wearing his shark-tooth hat, in Todra Gorge no less. There were others in the picture, Carmel and Nicole and Michael, but I used LView to cut Morgan's head out and then expand it to passport-picture size. The Swiss Army knife pictures I took straight from Victorinox's web page. A little cutting, pasting, rotating, and reflecting, and voila: two Swiss Army knives, blades extended, crossed in an X over Morgan's smiling and still recognizable face.

I accessed The Bull via Safeweb so they would never be able to track this access back to this Essouaira cafe. I doubted that they had the necessary technical expertise in the first place, but then again when dealing with a group of psychopathic murderers there is no such thing as too paranoid. I went to their registration page and chose "Toreador" as a password. And voila, I was Number Six.

Entry #: 58

Points to date: 0

Entered by: NumberSix

Entry date: 1 Dec 2000

Kill date: 28 Nov 2000

Kill location: Todra Gorge, Morocco

Victim specifications: NumberFour aka Morgan Jackson

Kill description: Capital punishment.

Media files and URLs:

Photo here.

This is your only warning. Stop hunting, or be hunted.

An empty threat, of course. But they didn't know that. I thought it might make a few twisted hearts beat a little faster. It might have the other four killers looking over their shoulders, staying up late at night, blaming one another for the security breach. It might even save a life or two. And that was good enough for me.

On the ferry back to Gibraltar I was unaccountably nervous, fearing that some crack Moroccan detective was about to tap us on the shoulder and ask us a few questions, that we would be sent back to serve life sentences in Tangiers. Visions of Midnight Express floated in my mind. But instead our passports were stamped at Gibraltar customs without so much as a single question and we were waved onwards onto that barren hunk of English rock. We found a hotel, and slept, and at noon the next day I looked out from my window seat on our Airbus A318 and saw London spread all over the landscape like a carpet of civilization. It was a curiously moving sight. No one should ever call London a beautiful city, but it is homey in its own sprawling, awkward way.