Simon Toyne - Solomon Creed

‘What’s your name, sir?’ She switched the light to his other eye.

She was so close he could feel her breath on his skin and it made him want to reach out and touch her to see what she felt like and make gentle rather than violent contact with someone. ‘I don’t remember,’ he said. ‘I don’t remember anything.’

‘How about Solomon?’ a new voice answered for him, a man’s voice, high-pitched but with a touch of gravel in it. ‘Solomon Creed, that ring any bells?’

Gloria leaned down to write some notes on a clipboard and he saw the cop who had nearly run him down perched on the gurney behind her.

‘Solomon,’ he repeated, and it felt comfortable, like boots he had walked long miles wearing. ‘Solomon Creed.’ He stared at the cop, hoping he might know more than his name. ‘Do you know me?’

The cop shook his head and held up a small book. ‘Found this in your pocket, personally inscribed to a Solomon Creed, so I assume that’s you. Name’s in your jacket too.’ He nodded at the folded grey jacket lying on the gurney next to him. ‘Stitched right on the label in gold thread and written in French.’ He said French like he was spitting out something bitter.

Solomon studied the book. There was a stern, sepia-tinted photograph of a man on the cover and old-fashioned block type that spelled out the title:

RICHES AND REDEMPTION

THE MAKING OF A TOWN

A Memoir

by the Reverend Jack ‘King’ Cassidy

Founder and first citizen

He wanted to snatch the book away from the cop and see what else it contained. He didn’t recognize it. No memory of it at all. No memory of anything, but it had to be important. Frustrating. Maddening. And why had the cop been through his pockets? The thought of it made his hands clench into fists.

‘So, Mr Creed,’ the cop continued, ‘any idea why you were running away from that burning plane?’

‘I can’t remember,’ Solomon said. A badge on the cop’s shirt identified him as Chief Garth B. Morgan, hinting at Welsh ancestry and explaining why his skin was pink and freckled and clearly unsuited to this climate – like his own.

What the hell was he doing here?

‘You think maybe you were a passenger?’ Morgan asked.

‘No.’

Morgan frowned. ‘How can you be sure if you can’t remember?’

Solomon looked out of the rear window at the burning plane and a fresh torrent of information cascaded through his head and crystallized into an explanation. ‘Because of the way the wings are folded.’

Morgan followed Solomon’s gaze. One wing still stood at the centre of the blaze, folded up towards the sky. ‘What about it?’

‘They show that the aircraft flew straight into the ground. Any passengers would have been thrown downwards, not outwards – and with lethal force. A crash like that would also have caused the fuel tanks to rupture and the fuel to ignite. Aviation fuel in an open-air burn reaches between five hundred and seven hundred degrees Fahrenheit, hot enough to burn flesh from bone in seconds. So, taking that into account, I could not possibly have been on that plane and still be talking to you now.’

Morgan twitched like his nose had been flicked. ‘So where did you come from, if not the plane?’

‘All I can remember is the road and the fire,’ Solomon said, rubbing at his shoulder where the pain had now settled into a steady ache.

‘Let me take a look at that,’ Gloria said, stepping closer and blocking his view of Morgan.

Solomon started undoing his buttons, watching his fingers moving, the skin as white as his shirt.

‘Back there you said something about the fire being here because of you,’ Morgan said. ‘Any idea what you meant by that?’

Solomon remembered the feeling of total fear and panic and his overpowering desire to get away from it. ‘It’s a feeling more than a memory,’ he said. ‘Like the fire is connected to me. I can’t explain it.’ He unbuttoned his cuffs, slipped his arms out of his shirt and became aware of a shift in the atmosphere.

Gloria leaned in, staring hard at Solomon’s shoulder. Morgan was staring too. Solomon followed their gaze and saw the angry red origin of his recurring pain.

‘What is that?’ Gloria whispered.

Solomon had no answer for that either.

‘Crashed? What do you mean crashed?’

The Cherokee was kicking up dust, Mulcahy at the wheel, eyeing the smoke rising fast to the west as they drove away from the airfield. ‘Planes crash,’ he said. ‘You know that, right? They’re kind of famous for it.’

Javier was staring out at the smoke, the obscene cushions of his lips hanging wet and open as he tried to get his head round what was happening. Carlos was in the back, hunkered down and saying nothing. His eyes were wide open and unfocused and Mulcahy knew why. Papa Tío had a reputation for making examples of people who messed things up. If the package had been lost in the crash, this package in particular, then the shit was going to hit the fan like it had been fired from a cannon. No one would be safe, not Carlos, not him, probably not even cousin Lips in the passenger seat.

‘Don’t panic,’ he said, trying to convince himself as much as anyone. ‘All we know is that a plane has crashed. We don’t know if it’s our plane or how bad it is.’

‘Looks pretty fuckin’ bad from where I’m sitting!’ Javier said, staring at the rapidly widening column of smoke.

Mulcahy’s fingers ached from gripping the wheel too tight and he forced himself to let go a little and ease off the gas. ‘Let’s wait and see what shakes out,’ he said, forcing calm into his voice. ‘For now, we follow the plan. The plane didn’t show, so we relocate to the safe house to regroup, report, and await further instructions.’

Mulcahy’s instinct was to run, put a bullet in his passengers, dump them in the desert and take off to give himself a good head start. He knew it didn’t matter that the plane crash wasn’t his fault – Papa Tío would most likely kill everyone involved anyway to send one of his famous messages. So if he killed Javier and Carlos right now then disappeared, Papa Tío would definitely think he was behind the crash, and he would never stop looking for him. Not ever. And despite his less than honourable résumé, Mulcahy didn’t especially like killing people, and he didn’t like being on the run either. He had a nice enough life, a nice enough house and a couple of women with kids and ex-husbands who weren’t looking for anything more than he could offer, and who didn’t seem to care what he did or ask how he had come by all the scars on his body. It wasn’t much in the grand scheme of things, and it was only now, when faced with the prospect of walking away from it all, that he realized how badly he wanted to keep it.

‘We stick to the plan,’ he said. ‘Anyone unhappy with that can get out of the car.’

‘And who put you in charge, pendejo ?’

‘Tío did, OK? Tío called me up himself and asked me to collect this package as a personal favour to him. He also asked me to bring you two along, and like the dickhead that I am, I said “fine”. If you want to take over so all this becomes your responsibility then be my guest, otherwise shut your fat mouth and let me think.’

Javier slumped back in his seat like a teenager who’d been grounded.