Paul Johnston - Maps of Hell

I got to the road that led to the interstate, my lungs straining and my knee beginning to protest. I stuck out my thumb and, to my amazement, the first vehicle slowed and then stopped. It was an eighteen-wheeler carrying a forty-foot container. I stepped up and grabbed the door handle on the nearside.

“’Morning,” said the bearded figure at the wheel. “Cold enough to break a polar bear’s balls.” He grinned at me, running his eyes over me. “You one of those jogger assholes?” He engaged first gear and hauled the load up the incline toward the interstate.

“Uh…no,” I said, putting on an accent that I hoped would pass for Canadian. “Just in a hurry.”

“Where you heading, man?”

I decided to go for broke. “Washington.”

“Well, I can take you as far as Baltimore. That do?”

“Certainly will.” I remembered taking a day trip to the city from D.C. when I was at the crime conference. Joe Greenbaum and I had ended up in a waterside restaurant, eating crab and drinking a ridiculous amount of beer. Which reminded me. I needed to get in touch with Joe.

The driver extended a huge hand and grinned. “Name’s Derek. But you can call me Bo.”

“A perfect ten,” I said, with a laugh, remembering the movie. My memory was behaving more strangely by the minute.

“You got it.”

I decided to play safe in case he tuned into the local radio-station news. “I’m Pete,” I said, suddenly having a glimpse of a completely bald man-my gay friend Peter Satterthwaite.

“You a Canuck?”

“Yeah,” I said, taken aback that my attempt at an accent had hit gold.

“So you gotta like Neil Young.” Bo’s expression had turned grave. There were some things you didn’t joke about.

“Oh, yeah,” I replied.

“Gimme your top five songs.”

This guy was serious about his music. I thought I was going to have to kick-start my memory, but it had things well under control.

“Let’s see. ‘Thrasher,’ ‘Cortez the Killer,’ ‘Ohio,’ ‘Powderfinger’ and ‘Heart of Gold.’”

“Yeah!” Bo shouted, holding up an open hand. “Four out of five ain’t bad.”

I made the high five and grinned. “No points for ‘Heart of Gold,’ eh?”

He grunted. “Middle-of-the-road bullshit.”

I thought of the blonde woman called Karen. “The girlfriend likes it,” I said.

“Oh, that’s all right, then,” Bo said with a grin. “Whatever the little lady wants…”

I swallowed a laugh. If Karen had heard herself described in those terms, the bearded man would have been wondering where his reproductive organs had suddenly gone.

“So,” he said, passing another container truck, “what you got on in D.C.?”

I shrugged. “Meeting up with some friends.”

“What is it you do, Pete?”

I went with what made the real Pete his first million. “Computers.”

Bo glanced at me. “Is that right? I hate the fucking things.”

That was good. He wasn’t going to catch me out on techie particulars. “Yeah, well, I guess you don’t have much call for them in your line of work.”

“True,” he said, almost wistfully. “I just sit here all day driving other people’s stuff, a slave to the machine.”

I looked at him. I hadn’t expected to come across a revolutionary in the cab. He deserved encouragement. “You need to make a stand, Bo. What’s in the box?”

“Lobsters,” he said, shaking his head. “Rich folks’ chow.”

“You could always turn the heating up.”

He laughed bitterly.

I smiled. When he slid a CD into the player, I sat back in the comfortable seat as the unmistakable chords of Neil’s Rust Never Sleeps rang out. In a few seconds, I was miles away. Way across the Atlantic, in fact…

…watching Gavin Burdett as he comes out of the investment bank where he works in the City of London and heads to Bank underground station. He’s wearing one of those deeply untrendy gray coats with a black collar. The heels of his highly polished and doubtlessly ridiculously expensive shoes ring out on the pavement. I take up position about five yards behind him and start the tail.

I’m doing it for two reasons. The first is that effective tailing requires regular practice. Ever since Sara’s first threat, I’ve acquired as many useful skills as I can. The second is that Gavin Burdett is the chief suspect in Karen’s current major case-but she’s run up against the buffers with him, stymied by his lawyers and the care he’s taken to obscure his activities. I’ve been writing articles on transnational financial crime, so I have my own interest in nailing him. But I want to help my lover out, too. She’s confined by the parameters within which the police have to work. I have no such problem. Of course, if I do anything to bring Karen’s case into jeopardy, she’ll tie my intestines round my neck. That adds to the challenge.

Besides, everything I’ve found out about Gavin Burdett suggests that he’s a major-league scumbag. He has a reputation in his company for treating subordinates like dirt; his wife divorced him after she caught him with his dick in the Filipino maid; and one of his former business partners put his head under a train rather than face the charges Burdett had set him up for. Tailing a bastard like that will surely reveal something interesting.

Burdett sits down in the only available seat in the Tube carriage, beating a heavily pregnant woman to it and resolutely avoiding her outraged glare. I raise a newspaper and watch him surreptitiously. He takes a magazine from his briefcase. The multimillionaire investment banker gets down to Big Babes on the Bounce, indifferent to the scandalized looks on other passengers’ faces.

“Pillock,” I say under my breath, then get ready to leave the train when my target stands up.

Burdett comes out on street level at Bethnal Green and looks around. The bastard is handsome in a slightly raddled way, his hook nose, sallow skin and the thick black hair brushed back from his forehead giving the impression of a practiced lothario. I wonder if he is on his way to some woman-maybe he likes a bit of rough, something that wouldn’t be hard to find on the Roman Road. But instead, he starts walking north up Cambridge Heath Road. I keep a discreet distance. Then he slows as he approaches a row of shops. He goes into the second one.

I stop about twenty yards away. This is interesting, but not in any way that I’d have guessed. Gavin Burdett has gone into an establishment called Black As Night. According to the door the shop supplies “Candles, Tarot Cards, Caribbean Herbs and Roots, Occult Books-Everything Wild, Wicked and Witchy.”

Burdett comes out half an hour later with two heavily loaded plastic bags. I’d never have put him down as a devotee of black magic. Then again, he’s about as satanic-looking an individual as I’ve ever come across. And that includes the White Devil and the Soul Collector…

“Hey, Pete, you still alive?”

I came round to the sound of Bo’s voice and blinked away the vision of Gavin Burdett. “Where are we?”

“Between Philly and Baltimore. Some dream you were having, man.” A radio presenter was rattling away in the background.

I nodded, my mouth dry. “Haven’t been sleeping well lately.”

“Not much sleep to be found down in D.C., neither.”

I looked at him. “What do you mean?”

Bo grinned. “You know those occult killings?”

I felt a stab of unease in my gut. “Yeah?”

“Well, there’s been another one.”

At MPDC headquarters, Clem Simmons logged off the Internet and leaned back in his chair. He wasn’t happy with what he’d just found. Joe Greenbaum was right about the Antichurch of Lucifer Triumphant-its ravings had been reported on a site run by an occult enthusiast who called himself The Lord of the Underworld. Earlier, Simmons had got a techie to access the e-mail correspondence on Professor Singer’s laptop. There were no threatening messages in the mail program, but the victim had made a folder for them in his documents file. He had named it “Filth.” Dana Maltravers hadn’t caught it-another disappointment. The virulence of the threats had surprised Simmons-the professor was going to have his throat cut with the jagged lid from a can of pork; the same weapon would be used to mutilate his wife and children; their bodies were to be dumped in acid baths.