Available Dark: A Crime Novel (Cass Neary) (12 page)

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Much later I opened my eyes, blinking as I tried to focus on something, anything, in the dark. It was useless. There was a pervasive smell of mold beneath the stench of scorched rubber. I sat up, head aching, and inched across the floor until I bumped a wall. Someone touched my leg. Before I could scream a hand covered my mouth.

“Shhh. Listen…”

I froze. Whoever was beside me didn’t move. After a long moment he exhaled and withdrew his hand. There was a soft click, and I shaded my eyes, dazzled by the glow of a lighter. I could just make out a silhouette in the darkness and braced myself against the wall as he reached toward me. A hand touched my cheek and gently tilted my face to the light.

“Cassie…”

Only two people have ever called me that. One was my mother, dead for almost half a century. My voice broke as I breathed the other’s name.

“Quinn.”

14

The lighter’s glow illumined hollow cheeks and spectral glints within black eye sockets. Only the whispered voice was unmistakably Quinn’s.

“Stay quiet. I wanted to be sure it was you. Wait here.”

The flame went out. I heard him stand, walk a few yards, and stop. With a grunt he tugged open the metal door, just enough to peer out. Then he pushed it up a few more inches and crawled from the trailer, waving me to follow. I scooted across the floor and clambered down. Quinn pulled me to him and slung his arm around my shoulder.

“Just stay with me,” he said curtly, and guided me across the vacant lot.

The pile of tires smoldered beneath a night sky pricked with a few faint stars. A boy tossed rocks into the foul-smelling mass, turning to give us an incurious look.

“Head down,” Quinn murmured.

To any casual onlooker we were a couple huddled together against the cold, hurrying by dreary low-rise apartment buildings and patches of snow-silted turf. Cars passed, pedestrians carrying grocery bags, a haggard woman pushing a stroller. After a while, Quinn dropped his arm. He stopped, lit a cigarette, and turned to me.

It was the first time I got a good look at him. A rangy man in a black leather jacket battered as my own, worn corduroy trousers, heavy work boots; thin but big-boned, with the economical motions of someone who’s spent thirty years poised to turn on a dime and throw a punch. My initial impression of a skull wasn’t far off. Gaunt face, eyes so deep-set I couldn’t catch their color; head shaven to reveal a cross-shaped scar at the crown of his scalp, the result of an accident or maybe a primitive jailhouse scarification.

But there was no doubt about the deliberateness of the tattoo between his eyes—three vertical red lines—or those at the corners of his mouth, twin sets of black horizontal lines that formed a permanent, ghastly grimace.

“Inuit.” He exhaled. “I lived in Barrow for a while.”

“Quinn the Eskimo.” I reached to touch his face. He stiffened, and I dropped my hand. “What do they mean?”

“They mean I killed a man.”

We continued walking until we reached a parking lot. Quinn stepped past several late-model SUVs with ÜTSALA signs stuck beneath their wiper blades, halting beside an old Jeep Cherokee. The driver’s door was dented, the rear fender tied on with a bungee cord. “Get in.”

The car was filled with fast-food wrappers, empty Jolly Cola bottles, crushed cigarette packs. Quinn slid behind the wheel. Once out of town he drove fast, skidding on patches of ice and loose black scree. The long walk had burned off some of the shock of seeing him again, but every time I tried to frame a question, I was put off by that grim, scarred face.

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” I said at last.

He lit a cigarette. “I got to the stall, and Baldur said an American woman had just been asking after me. Tall, kind of blond, black leather jacket and cowboy boots. I ran out looking for you, then saw you were being tailed.”

“Who is he? What the fuck happened back there?”

“You tell me. Guy named Einar Broddursson, I thought maybe you picked his pocket or something.”

“Who the hell is Einar Broddursson?”

“He’s a dick. A high-level banker at Vandlega, which before the crash was the second-biggest bank in Iceland. His father managed a fish processing plant. Einar studied economics here at Bifröst University and got an advanced degree at Wharton. So instead of fishing, he learned to swim with the sharks and use pension plans for chum. He’s one of the guys who put this place in the toilet, then kept flushing till the shit hit London.”

“So why’d you jump me instead of him?”

“Einar’s not a guy you want to mess with unless someone’s got your back. A lot of his business contacts are in Moscow, and I can guarantee you that they did not go to Wharton. Plus I wasn’t sure it was you.”

“What gave it away?”

“Those cowboy boots. And your bag—that’s the same bag you had in high school, right? You still got the same camera? Still seeing the world in black and white?”

“Pretty much.”

“No digital for you, huh?” His mocking laugh hadn’t changed, or his just-north-of-the-Bronx accent. “Same old Cass.”

“This is all just so freaking bizarre.” I touched his face, and this time he didn’t flinch. “I was afraid you were dead.”

“Nope. But not for lack of effort.” One of the wiper blades was frozen. Quinn stuck his hand out the window to free it, and the Cherokee veered into the other lane. “Like that—”

He swerved to avoid a Flybus airport shuttle and laughed again. “I started keeping track once, of how many times I almost died. ODs, a couple times in jail. Getting caught outside in Barrow in January—that’ll do you. After fourteen I lost count.”

“What are you doing here?”

It was a while before he answered. I stared out at the volcanic landscape, serrated black tephra like row upon row of obsidian knives. Now and then a light shone from a house, distant as the stars.

Finally he said, “I was married a long time back, a girl I met in Anchorage. I guess it’s twenty-three years now. She was crazy, and, you know, I’m not the best-adjusted guy on the block. She’s Icelandic—from Höfn, in the east. Fucking beautiful place—glaciers and shit. Woods, which you don’t really find here. And Emma was easy on the eyes, too. Anyway, we split up, but I’d become a legal resident by then, so I stayed. Can’t go back to the old country: I burned all those bridges.”

“How’d you find me?”

“I read about those murders and saw your name. I almost swallowed my gum. Maine, is that where you live now?”

“No. I’m still in the city. Downtown.”

“Yeah? How’s that working for you?”

“Not so good. It’s changed. Rich people with little dogs, assholes from Wall Street. And Brooklyn. I hate it.”

“Same thing happened here, only our assholes are from Borgartún. That’s the quote-unquote ‘financial district,’ which is one—count it—one building where all the banks were. Some prime office space available there these days. Somebody should line all those bankers up and shoot them.” He laughed bitterly. “Can you tell I’m American?”

We talked, and I could feel that same old black energy crackling between us as we parried over who knew more, who’d fucked more people, taken more drugs, lost more blood, forgotten more nights in a haze of hangovers and withdrawal. I watched Quinn’s profile, lit red in the dashboard glow. You could run a blade through those tattooed lines and not draw blood. I thought of prison time, of whatever he’d done back in the States that had made it impossible for him to ever return. I wouldn’t win this particular round. After a while I kept my mouth shut.

*   *   *

After half an hour, Quinn turned off the main highway. We drove down a gravel road to a bleak oasis in lavaland, several warehouselike structures clustered around a cell tower, and pulled up beside a small building with corrugated metal siding painted an industrial blue.

“Heim sætt heim,”
Quinn announced. “Home sweet home.”

Inside reminded me of those subway tunnels where the mole people live, hot and claustrophobic, the air thick with cigarette smoke and sulfur. There was a futon bed, dirty sheepskin rugs and clothes scattered across the floor, magazine photos and old album sleeves tacked on to bare drywall—Chuck Berry, Keith Richards, Aretha Franklin. A bong and empty beer bottles sat on a coffee table made of a piece of glass balanced on a huge tire rim.

“Help yourself.” Quinn retrieved a beer from the fridge and walked into the bathroom. “There’s some Brennivín on the table.”

I passed on the Brennivín and opened plywood cabinets until I found a bottle of Pölstar vodka that smelled like butane. I poured some into a dirty glass and knocked it back, refilled the glass, then explored the rest of Quinn’s place.

There wasn’t much besides the living room and kitchenette and two closed doors, one for the bathroom. I opened the other door, revealing a long room jammed floor to ceiling with cardboard cartons filled with vinyl record albums—hundreds, maybe thousands of them. Also stacks of cardboard mailers, sheaves of Mylar and Bubble Wrap.

I stepped inside, shivering—there was no heat—and picked my way across the room to a metal desk crammed with sound equipment. A laptop and iPod dock, ranks of speakers wired into a gold-standard turntable, Bose headphones, a two-headed cassette deck, a vinyl-to-CD adapter. Beside the desk were more boxes crammed with 45s. A few were mint; most had sleeves the worse for wear, stained and scrawled with the names of previous owners.

But they were all the real thing, original pressings of
Anarchy in the U.K.,
Luke the Drifter’s “On Trial,” The Spades’ “You’re Gonna Miss Me.”

“You know what that one is, right?” I looked over as Quinn crouched beside me. He took a 45 from my hand and delicately removed it from the sleeve. “Roky Erickson before the 13th Floor Elevators. The silver label, that’s what you look for.”

He tilted the 45 to the light, stood, and put it on the turntable. The tonearm might have had a surgical-quality diamond tip, but even that couldn’t dispel the familiar hiss and pop as the needle hit the grooves. I leaned against a pile of boxes, shut my eyes, and listened.

For two minutes and thirty-three seconds we might have been back in Quinn’s bedroom, bound to each other by the echo of a Gibson guitar. I felt his hand rest gently upon my head. It remained there until the song ended. Neither of us spoke; neither of us stirred, until Quinn finally removed the 45. I blinked as though I’d awakened from a deep sleep.

“So. You really do this,” I said. “Sell all this stuff—all this vinyl.”

“Yeah I sell it.” His expression was guarded. “What’d you think?”

“I don’t know. Your friend Einar—is this the kind of business you do with him?”

“Some.” He turned to stare at the box of 45s. “C’mon,” he said at last. “I’m freezing. I have to keep this room cold so the vinyl doesn’t warp.”

Back in the living room I parked myself in a chair, glancing at a square of black window. The glass shuddered with a sound like a series of muffled underground explosions.

“What’s that?” I asked. “Night blasting?”

“The ocean. You can’t see it, but it’s only about a hundred yards away. That’s why I like this place. Also, it’s a lot cheaper than Reykjavík.”

“So you can afford to keep the heat cranked.”

“Everything’s geothermal. Stick a pipe in the ground, you got heat. The AC is what costs.” He got another beer and handed me the vodka bottle. “So what about you? What’ve you been up to for the last thirty years?”

“Not much.” I refilled my glass. “Actually, I haven’t done jack shit.”

“No more photography?”

“I dunno. I tried, but nothing ever took off. I flamed out after my book, and then no one wanted to look me in the face.”

“Try doing seven years in Otisville.”

He lit a cigarette. Time had leached the color from his eyes: They were no longer spring green but a pale, cinereous gray. I waited for him to say something, to laugh or turn away or reach for me. Instead, he balanced the cigarette on the table edge and shucked off his flannel shirt and T-shirt.

My breath caught in my throat. Scars covered his chest, an intricate crosshatch of white and silvery gray that extended below his navel. A ragged gash ran along his right side; a knot of white scar tissue nestled in the hollow of his throat. As he breathed, his silvery flesh caught the light and seemed to shift, as though a net were being drawn across his skin. Tentatively I extended my hand, until my fingers grazed a scar on his left breast. A pattern of three interlocking shapes, like skeletal hands grasping each other, with a strange, masklike face at their center. At my touch, Quinn flinched and turned away.

“What happened to you, Quinn?” I whispered.

“Everything.”

He sat, his gaze fixed on a dark lozenge of window; then he picked up his cigarette, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes. “God, I’m beat. I got up at four to drive down from Húsavik. I should have just let Baldur handle the stall.”

“But then you wouldn’t have found me.”

“Good point.” He opened his eyes and smiled slightly. “Welcome to Reykjavík.”

I took a gulp of vodka. “That guy Einar—why was he chasing me?”

“You tell me, girlfriend. Mostly he just gets dressed like he’s still going to work in Borgartún, then hangs around all day in a bar or some shit. Like me. Like everyone. The entire country’s unemployed and on the verge of a psychotic breakdown.” He pulled his flannel shirt back on. “You still haven’t told me what the hell you’re doing here.”

“I don’t know.” I stared at the floor. “I guess I came to see you. That picture you sent me, with the news clipping. And the photo. I was just so blown away, to hear from you after all this time. I had no idea where you were.”

“You had an idea, Cassie. You thought I was six feet under some boneyard.” His gaze hardened. “Why didn’t you ever write me? I got busted, and that was it: You threw me under a bus. Thirty years later, here you are like nothing happened.”

“You took off with that chick in Harlem.”

“Fuck that. You should’ve answered my letters, Cass.”

I knew better than to argue or try to defend myself. I took another mouthful of vodka. “I thought you wanted me here. You don’t, I’ll split.”