Left to Darkness Read online

  “I’m not slow,” said Liebowicz as he threw the small blade he carried everywhere at Johnny. Just a Swiss army knife, and not even open. A small, heavy chunk of metal.

  Johnny did what was natural when someone throws a small, heavy chunk of metal at your face. He flinched, reflexes taking over, and moved his head back, out of the arc of the knife. For less than a second, the barrel of the fat gun shifted upward, away from Liebowicz. Liebowicz slid his left foot forward, driving from the right foot. His left hand knocked the gun higher still, and his right hand, fisted, knocked Johnny—a big man himself—out, and down. Frank’s fist broke Muller’s jaw, then, as his head bounced on the concrete (sideways, not face-first like Lowe) Muller broke his skull, too.

  Liebowicz wasn’t an x-ray machine, and he didn’t know what was broken and what wasn’t. What he did know was that he was in all kinds of shit. He’d fucked up his job and killed the man who was basically his boss. Maybe not his actual boss…more like a kind of line manager.

  Supervisor?

  On that note, Frank figured if he was going to fuck a job properly, there was no point in half-assing the bastard. So, he stamped as hard as he could on Johnny’s prone head, just in case. Big feet, hard boots, and 250 pounds, plus a lot of heart and soul.

  He nodded, looked at the two dead men. Nodded again, picked up the fat gun and didn’t look back. Later, he remembered his little knife. But when you kill two guys hard like that, you don’t go back for a little knife. You don’t look over your shoulder, not even for a second. You pick up what you’ve got and you move.

  Frank moved.

  3

  Way across London town, while Frank was busy killing people, a woman watched television. The woman watching the television (sporadically, at best) was called Dawn Graves. The digital receiver underneath the television was a piece of shit. The picture flickered whenever the weather was bad, and sometimes when it wasn’t.

  She seriously considered getting up and walking across the room to do something about the god-awful reception on the digital receiver. But it was that cheap hardwood flooring everyone thought they wanted, until they lived with it for a while. Cold, slippery, and dusty flooring. Poorly fitted, too, with gaps between the tongue-and-groove slats that would catch bare toes or socks. Dawn’s husband, Robert Graves, wasn’t much use around the house even when he was in.

  Dark had settled in outside and Robert wasn’t home from work. Dawn wondered if he’d be back soon, or if he was working late, or if he’d stopped off to bring her back ice cream (this last thought was her favorite of the three options). If he wasn’t going to be long, she could wait and get him to fiddle with the aerial or smack the digital receiver. If he was going to be really late, she’d have to do something about it herself.

  But it was cold outside the snug little tent she’d built for herself with a blanket and all the cushions from both couches. The floor would be cold, and her feet were finally warm.

  She figured she could wait a little while longer. While she waited, one hand on her big round belly, full of baby, Robert Graves fucked a young, new girl from work in the ladies’ toilets.

  4

  Mr. Graves, Robby to the girl with her knickers around one ankle, Robert to his wife, was trying his hardest to forget he was married with a baby on the way.

  He did a pretty good job.

  The new girl had one high-heeled shoe on the tiled floor, and one bare foot on the rim of the toilet, pushing her ass back against Robby and groaning, head hanging down, hair over her face. Robert’s balls were swinging back and forth merrily in the gap between her legs.

  What the fuck was her name?

  Hillary? Heidi? Something beginning with an H, he thought. He managed to give a shit about her name for a couple of seconds, maybe, before she pulled away from him, leaving his wet cock bobbing in the air.

  “What?”

  She grinned as she turned and grabbed him.

  “Don’t come in me, okay?” she said.

  “Wasn’t going to…” he said. Didn’t want to make a big deal about where he came though, because now she was on her knees and lapping the fat tip of his cock like a dog with a lollipop.

  In her mouth? He’d be happy enough. In her face? On her tits? In her hair?

  Maybe he’d try for all of it. Shoot off like a fucking cowboy.

  Yeehaw, he thought, and…and…

  Fuck…fuck…

  “Oh…”

  She was fucking great…

  She grinned up at him as he came on her tits…and kept coming.

  Impressive, he thought to himself. He tried to smile at her, but she kept tugging his cock. Now that he’d come, it was sensitive, and her hand, milking him, was a little annoying.

  The door to the stall whacked him in the back and he was knocked off balance for a second, thinking, Shit, I just got come on my shirt…

  “Occupied!’ he shouted. Didn’t think about being a guy in the ladies’ toilets, or that he still had his cock out and a young girl on her knees in front of him with bucket loads of come all over her tits.

  “Silvia?”

  Who the fuck is Silvia?

  “Oh, shit. Shit.”

  Oh, he thought. She’s Silvia. He also thought a few other things…

  There was a man in the ladies’ toilets. Big voice. Young, deep. A girl with his come on her. A wife with a baby in her belly.

  Her shoe. Her shoe’s in the toilet bowl.

  He thought this idly as the door hit his back again. More angrily this time.

  Time for a bit of bluster.

  “Fuck off, mate,” he said.

  Which turned out to be entirely the wrong thing to say. The door, which opened inward toward Robert and the girl called Silvia, was wrenched outward, instead, as a big-boned hand grabbed the top of the door and pulled the door off the top hinge.

  The hand belonged to a young man. Big muscles under a short-sleeve shirt. Pocked face, big nose; not necessarily ugly, but not handsome, either. With those muscles, that face, Robert figured steroids were involved somewhere. Plus big heavy weights and a lot of aggression.

  “Fucking hell, Silvia,” said the guy. He sounded angry. He looked angry. He was massive.

  “Look,” said Robert, pretty much figuring out all the important parts of this little story in that instant, “it’s not what you think…”

  Robert wondered at his own intelligence for a second. His cock, flaccid now, was still out of his trousers. Silvia (could’ve sworn she was a Heidi) has her tits out, with added come, and her knickers round one ankle. A shoe in the toilet bowl.

  The big guy didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know that yes, it was exactly how it looked.

  Time to try a different tack.

  “I didn’t know she had a boyfriend. I swear… If I’d known…” Robert tried to keep his voice steady and calm, so calm…but it shook. He shook. Knees, wilting cock and voice.

  “You’re married, right?” said the man, taking Robert off guard.

  He remembered he still wore his wedding ring.

  Robert nodded. He felt like a schoolboy in front of his P.E. teacher, for some reason. He didn’t remember feeling like this since he’d left school.

  You’re a manager, he told himself. Act like one, stop being such a coward. Besides, she asked. She practically begged for it. I…

  “How’d you like it if I go round your house, shoot a load on your wife’s tits?”

  “What? What? No… Wait, look, this is all getting out of hand.”

  “Where do you live?” asked the big man. He didn’t sound angry anymore. His voice was kind of cold and solid, and it felt like an iron bar whacking Robert Graves in the guts. “Tell me where you live and I’ll make her come before I do, just to be polite.”

  The guy sounded sane, sane tone, cadence, not excitable…but Robert felt something slick and slithering coming from the man. The big guy was a lunatic.

  Shit.

  “Silvia, tell him…just a bit of fu
n, right?”

  Silvia, he finally noticed, was still on her knees. She was looking up at the big guy, sucking come slowly off her fingernail with a slight smile and glassy, turned-on eyes.

  What the fuck? Both of them? Some kind of set play?

  Time to get the fuck out. Now. Right fucking now. Never fuck around on Dawn again. Be a dad, be a man.

  “I’m out of here,” he said with as much bluster as he could.

  He headed forward, beginning to button himself up.

  The big guy grabbed Robert’s cock in one fat fist before Robert could tuck it away, and with the other hand, holding a short knife, cut it off.

  He just…my…he…my…

  “Wha…fu…Jesus…”

  Blood pumped, splashed, sprayed…

  Silvia got a face full of hot blood, running to mingle with the come on her tits.

  “Sid,” she said. “That was fucking awesome!”

  She sounded distant to Robert. He heard clapping, maybe, laughter. He wasn’t sure because everything was a…long…way…

  Everything was a long way away. Someone was playing around with the lights in the toilets. It was getting dim.

  Cut off my cock…my little soldier…cut off my cock…

  The big man, Sid, grinned. His trousers were covered in blood, and his short-sleeve shirt that bulged out around his chest, his shoulders, his arms…

  That shirt’s ruined, thought Robert, while he slid around on the tiled floor.

  “That was a fucking riot!” Silvia laughed. “Brother, you’re a sick fucking beauty of a man.”

  “Sister,” he said, unbuckling his trousers, “you ain’t seen nothing.”

  Robert lay gasping and bleeding on the floor. The last thing he saw? Silvia and Sid fucking in his blood like he wasn’t even there.

  The last thing he thought?

  Could’ve sworn she was a Heidi.

  5

  “Can you state your name for the record?”

  “You already know it.”

  “Just say it, please, sir,” said a tired detective by the name of Paul Deacon.

  “James Finley,” said an equally tired well-suited man who sat across the table. Finley was an older man, maybe in his seventies.

  Deacon also figured Finley for a complete cock, and a crooked one, at that.

  “Mr. Finley, would you state for the record what it is you’re missing?”

  “I don’t see why.”

  “Mr. Finley,” said Deacon, with a sigh he didn’t bother to conceal, “you asked that this be recorded. It’s unusual, but the boss said do it. Said you’re a wealthy man. Said you’re an important man. Now, I couldn’t give a monkey’s ass either way…you can tell me what’s in the suitcase, or not. I. Don’t. Care.”

  “Detective, please, there is no call for crudity.”

  “Frankly, Mr. Finley, I don’t give a monkey’s what you think, either. I’m tired, I’ve just been handed a case with a man who had his penis cut off. I had to inform his widow, who is also pregnant, by the way, that her old man died…and how.”

  “That, Detective, is not my problem. My problem is my stolen briefcase.”

  “Now it’s stolen? Not missing?”

  “Missing, stolen, does it matter?”

  “A bit, yes.”

  “Not to me. All that matters is that it is returned, contents intact.”

  “What’s in the briefcase, Mr. Finley?” Deacon sat forward, elbows on the metal table that separated the two men. Like he was interested. He was, a little. But not enough to lose sleep over.

  “I don’t wish to divulge that. It’s a black briefcase, combination lock, titanium casing. I think we’re done?”

  “Why did you want this recorded?” said Deacon. He sat back on his chair. Truth was, he was a little disappointed, and he didn’t know why. “Nothing here you couldn’t have told them at the front desk.”

  “I merely wanted to stress the importance…and value…of my stolen or missing case. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Deacon wasn’t happy. It didn’t sit right, letting a man walk out of the interview room. It went against the grain. That was his job. “You can go,” or, “You’re under arrest.”

  His job was serious crimes. The boss had sent Deacon down to show Finley things were being taken seriously, even though it was a piss-pot crime.

  Deacon didn’t like the old man. That fact, in itself, didn’t mean there was necessarily anything rotten going on…but there was that feeling again. That shift, hunch, tickle…whatever. Something was rotten about the old bastard.

  And he couldn’t do a damn thing about it.

  Not your job, Deacon, he thought to himself. Can’t solve everything.

  He smiled at his thoughts. He was sounding more and more like his mother as he got older—dispensing wisdom and sausage and mash like she used to every Sunday until the day she died. It wasn’t surprising. She’d raised him. Some of that was bound to rub off on a man.

  Deacon stared down at the desk for a second, like he was pissed off. He wasn’t, not really. He was trying to hide his little smile. He was calm enough. Finley didn’t matter, and neither did the old bastard’s posh briefcase.

  Composed, he pushed himself to his feet and entered the code to open the door that led out into the wider world.

  Interview rooms were like little worlds, everything boiled down. Wider worlds, the bigger world, the world that Finley slid through…that wasn’t Deacon’s world. Deacon’s world was down below those lofty echelons where, to his mind, the worst of the crimes were happening.

  Finley’s type weren’t his beat.

  “Good-bye, Mr. Finley,” he said, holding the door open.

  “Detective,” said Finley, and walked away. Deacon thought the old man looked like a snake, slithering through the station toward the street.

  His conscience cried out at him. It hurt him to let the man go.

  Why?

  Because he was a snake. A shifting, slimy bastard.

  “Not my beat,” he said to himself. He closed the door behind him, looking forward to getting home, sipping a big mug of tea, watching some late TV. Getting the nasty taste of a shitty day gone.

  And then? Get up and do it all again tomorrow. Do the big things, like try to catch the bad men. Do the little things, like try to make it so widows with babies in their bellies never found out about husbands dying with come on their shirts and women’s shoes in the bog.

  Relatives, especially expectant, grieving ones, didn’t need to know all the details of a murder.

  Paul Deacon did. That was his job.

  6

  James Finley, O.B.E., folded himself uncomfortably into the backseat of his matte black stretch BMW. His back hurt from sitting in the hard chair in the interview room. A necessary evil, if somewhat trying.

  “Bruce?” he said. The glass between Bruce, his driver, and the backseat did not slide down, as it would have in usual circumstances. Instead, Bruce merely started up the engine (a soft shudder underfoot the only indication the expensive car’s engine was now running) and began to drive.

  Silly bugger, thought Finley. I haven’t even told him where we’re going.

  Oh, thought Finley, hot on the tail of that first thought, realizing that of course Bruce wouldn’t just drive. Not unless he’d been told to by someone else…or if it was someone else in the driver’s seat.

  Which begged two questions: who was in charge of the car, if it wasn’t Bruce, and ultimately Finley, and perhaps less importantly, what had happened to Bruce?

  Finley pressed the button to open the intercom between the front and back.

  “Who is driving the car, please?” he said patiently, without a hint of panic in his voice. He’d been kidnapped before. Lost the top half of an ear, but he was still ticking. He was a careful man of seventy-three. He’d lost most of his ear as a teenager in South America. It didn’t really bother him too much. He wasn’t worried about being handsome.

  But he wasn’t a
ll that interested in dying, either. Plenty of people would want him dead. Did it matter who? All that mattered at this point in time, so close to the culmination of long years of research, was the retrieval of his property.

  A small vial. The only sample of the virus he’d designated 16:17.

  The years, the money…

  Finley shook himself.

  Even that, right now, wasn’t as important as not being killed in his own limousine. If he died, the briefcase and the contents therein might never be found.

  Concentrate on the job at hand.

  He thought about asking a different question, or opening the glass partition himself, but then he changed his mind. If whoever controlled the car wished to maintain the illusion of control, he, too, would wait.

  The windows were tinted on the outside, but Finley could see out perfectly well. There was a slight dullness to the sights outside, but it was better than sitting staring at his old wrinkled hands.

  London passed by—embassies on the right, the park on his left. He stared at the embassies, rather than the park. He had no wish to see people meandering aimlessly, or God forbid, jogging, their breath puffing in the cold, dry air.

  He stared at the majestic buildings, instead. Many, Victorian era or thereabouts, were grand old affairs. The flags hung with only a little flutter in the mostly still air.

  Darkness was setting down for the night, the sky dimming quickly.

  There was a sudden, bright bolt from the sky, and the Japanese embassy exploded into a shower of rubble and fire. Another, and flaming pitch on the road erupted into the air. Another, another. Screaming, now, from the people heading home from work along the road. A double-decker bus on the opposite side of the road to Finley’s BMW blew apart into twisted shards of metal and sparkling glass. Something from the sky, about the size of a fist, hit a person walking his dog. The man and dog both were, in an instant, nothing but blood and bone in a long stain across the pavement…

  The partition slid down.

  Bruce was driving, but beside him was another man. He was calmly smoking a cigarette, despite the carnage outside. He tapped the ash onto Bruce’s shoulder. Bruce didn’t seem to register this, nor the explosions rocking London all around.