Killing Ground (2 page)

All the men bent over the still figure on the carpet from Iran laughed and sweated and gasped to soak the air back into their lungs. It was a joke. It was to be laughed at, the way they had fallen on the floor and slid across the wood blocks like kids playing.

And in he laughed at too was the way that the old goat's tongue had come half out of his throat, and his eyes half out of their sockets.

The rain beat on the windows of the apartment. The mist shrouded the mountains above Palermo.

The body of a rival was roped in the old way, the way used to throttle a goat, the way of the incaprettamento, so that when thestiffness of death gripped the body, it would already be small withthe rope tied to the ankles and hooking them up towards the small of the Guest's spine and then reaching up to the back of the Guest's throat No symbol, just convenience. It was convenient to use the old way because then it would be easier to lift the stiffened body into the boot of a car. The body of the Guest would leave the apartment via the service lift from the kitchen to the underground car park beneath the block, and the body of the grandson, and the driver who was tied and bound and gagged and who had the terror in his eyes because he loved life more than respect.

As the lift was called, as the men came from the kitchen to clean the furniture of the borrowed apartment of fingerprints and forensic evidence, and to wipe the vomited tomato dribble from the carpet, and to swab the urine from the marble flooring of the hallway, the Host breathed hard as if the effort required to strangle a man taxed his strength to its limit, and the words came in panted spurts as he repeated what should be done to his Guest's driver. His Guest had been offered, in life and death, respect. The grandson of his Guest was a necessary cadaver, a matter without emotion. The driver of his Guest, strapped and gagged tight, faced a bad death, a bad death for a bad remark made seventeen months before by the driver, a bad remark in a bar about a Man of Honour, a bad remark that had been relayed and was long remembered.

Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were taken in a car and a van from the underground car park, the Host massaged the numbness from his hands.

Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were carried in the wet dusk from the vehicles to a small launch moored to a quayside west of the city, the Host tapped on a Casio calculator the figures and percentages and profit margins for a deal that would send 87 kilos of refined heroin to the United States of America.

Later, when the two bodies and the live prisoner were weighted with crab pots filled with stones and were slipped into the dark waters of the Golfo di Palermo, the Host satisfied himself that the apartment was cleansed of evidence and let himself out of the main door and locked it behind him.

He disappeared into the night that caught the city, was lost in it from view.

'Do we have to have that damn thing on?'

'God, you found a voice. Hey, that's excitement.'

' All I'm saying - do we have to have the damn heater thing on?'

'Just when I was going to get wondering whether the Good Lord had done something violent with your tongue, knotted it - yes, I like to have the heater on.'

It was the last day of March. They'd left the three-lane highway lar behind. They'd turned off the two-lane highway long ago, and a hit after they'd cut through the town of Kingsbridge. When the y,uy driving had dumped the road map on his lap and told him to tai l the navigation bit, they'd left the last bit of decent track. The guy driving used the word 'lane' for what they were on now, and the map called it 'minor road'. The lane, the minor road, seemed in him to coil round the fields that were behind the high hedges that had been brutalized the past autumn by cutting equipment and had not yet taken on the spring's foliage. The high hedges and the fields beyond seemed dead to him. They bent round the angles of the fields, they dropped with the flow of the lane into dips and

. limbed small summits, and when they reached the small summits he could see in the distance the grey-blue of the sea and the white caps where the wind caught it. It was not raining now. It had rained most of the drive out of London, then started to ease when they were just short of Bristol, then stopped when they were east of Exeter. It was four hours since they had left London, and he was quiet because he was already fretting that the guy driving had made a mess of the equation of distance and speed and time. There was a certain time when he wanted to get there, to the end of this goddam track, and he didn't care to be early and he didn't care to be late.

He asked, sour, 'What sort of place is this going to be?'

The man driving looked ahead. 'How the hell should I know?'

'I was just asking.'

'Listen, man, because I work out of London doesn't mean that I know every corner of the country - and the heater stays on.'

There was no rain, and the narrow tarmacadam surface of the lane was dry, but there was wind. The wind that made white caps on the grey-blue sea ahead, tossed at the few trees that had survived the winter gales that came hard at the Devon coastline and blustered the flight of the gulls above. If they hadn't had the heater on, if they'd had the window of the Cherokee Jeep down, then he didn't reckon he'd have been cold. His way of sulking, making his protest, was to wipe with his shirt sleeve the condensation on the inside of the door window beside him and on the inside of the windscreen in front of him. He wiped hard, a small release for his stress, but as a way of clearing the condensation it was lousy work and the window beside him and the windscreen ahead of him were left smeared. He heard the guy who was driving hiss annoyance beside him. He bent his head and studied the map and won no help from it. His finger followed the thin red line of the lane across empty space towards the blue-printed mass of the sea and on the map there were names over the sea like Stoke Point and Bigbury Bay and Bolt Tail. He looked down at his watch. Shit. He looked back at the map, and the page spread across his knee was harder to see because the evening was closing down, and the width of the Cherokee Jeep filled the lane and the cut dark hedges were high above the windows. Shit. Goddam it . . .

The brakes went on hard. He was jolted in his belt. It was his way, whenever he was riding as passenger in a vehicle that went to emergency stop, to drop his right hand to his belt, it was the instinct from long ago, but riding as passenger in a lane in the south of Devon in the west of England meant that his belt was empty, carried no holster. And his way also, and his instinct, at the moment of an emergency stop to swivel his head fast, the pony-tail of his hair flying, to check the scope behind for fast reverse and the J-procedure turn. He grinned, the first time anything of a smile had creased his mouth since they had left London, a rueful twitch of his lips, because he reckoned the guy driving would have seen his right hand drop to his belt and seen the swift glance of his eyes behind. They had come over the summit of a hill, then there had been a hard right turn, then there had been the cattle herd in the lane. The big lights of the Cherokee Jeep speared into the eyes of the lumbering and advancing cows. A small dog, seeming to run on its lstomach, came out from under the cattle's hooves and it was leaping, barking, growling at the radiator grille of the Cherokee Jeep. Behind the dog, behind the cattle, down below them, were the lights of the community that was their destination and beyond the lights and stretching away, limitless, was the sea. The breath hissed in his throat. He wondered what time the letter post came round to a place like this, reached the community down at the end at the lane beside the sea - some time that day, but not early, was the best answer he'd been able to get before they'd left London. And he wondered what time a young woman finished teaching the second year - some time in the middle of the afternoon, but she might stay on to check that day's work and to prepare for the next day's classes, and he had to add on to 'sometime in the middle of the afternoon' how long it would take a young woman to ride a low-power scooter back home along the lanes from the town behind them. It was important, when the letter was delivered, when the young woman came home. He wanted to hit her, meet her, after the letter had been delivered, after she had reached home and read it, but not more than a few minutes after she had read it. It was Important, the timing, and it was down to him, the plan . . . He was stressed. He reckoned he could have killed for a cigarette, and in front of him on the glove box was the 'No Smoking' sticker which was standard these goddam days in any Drug Enforcement

Administration vehicle, back in the States or overseas. The time to hit her was critically important.

The cattle split in front of the Cherokee Jeep. Either side of the radiator and bonnet, and then the side windows, the cattle, a mixed Friesian and Holstein herd, scrambled on the bank below the scalped hedges, slipped, blundered against the vehicle. The driver's-side wing mirror was pressured back. A wet and slobbering tongue squelched against the glass of the window. The Cherokee Jeep shook from the weight of an animal against the body of the vehicle behind him. The lights shone on the face of the man who drove the cattle, unshaven, pinched in the wind, weathered. He could see the agitation of the man as his mouth with the gaps in his teeth flapped in silence, silence because of the noise of the goddam heater. Beside him, the hand was reaching for the gear stick.

'Where the hell are you going?'

'I'm going to back up.'

'How many miles are you going to back up? Stay put.'

'He's telling me to back up.'

'Then tell him to go eat his own shit.'

'You're kind of edgy, aren't you?'

The face of the man driving the cattle was close to the windscreen. The mouth still flapped. There were three teeth missing, he reckoned, and he reckoned that there was a denture set back home at the farm for inserting when the day was done and the evening meal was on the kitchen table. He spited himself, turned the Cherokee Jeep's heater higher so that the blast of dry warm air and the roar of the motor drowned the man's protest. The perspiration ran on his forehead and in his groin and down the small of his back but he could not hear the protest of the man driving the cattle. The man was peering at them through the windscreen, squinting through narrow eyes at them.

'Like we're out of the zoo,' Axel said.

And he should not have said that, no. Should not have said that because Dwight, the driver, was Afro-American. At Quantico, in an Ethics class, they would have gone ape.

A remark such as his last might just have been enough to get a guy busted out of the Training Academy. Axel did not apologize, he seldom made apologies.

The man driving the cattle stared hard at them, at two guys in an American Cherokee Jeep, wrong-side drive, peculiar number- plate, one white with a goddam pony-tail of hair, one black as a dark night.

'I get the feeling we're noticed/ Axel said in bitterness.

Daniel Bent, farmer, sixty-nine years of age, working the land of his father and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, who had maintained the development of the twin Friesian and Holstein herds

10 to championship status, cursed Axel Moen and Dwight Smythe. He cursed them richly, obscenities and blasphemies, because he saw the risk of one of his cows falling from the bank between the road and the hedge, plunging under the body of the four-wheel-drive and breaking a leg. He noticed, too fucking right, the bastards and recognised them for Americans, and wondered what was their business late in the day on the lane to the coast.

When the big vehicle, too big for these roads for sure, going at speed and ignoring the 30 mph limit, came past her, Fanny Carthew saw them.. Mrs Carthew, artist of sea views in oils, eighty-one years old, muttered the protest that in the moment afterwards gave her a tremor of shame and would have shocked her fellow worshippers 11 at the Baptist Hall in Kingsbridge if they had heard her utter such words. The cause of her protest - she had to heave at the leash on which she walked her venerable Pekinese dog right off the lane and into the nettles of the verge. She knew them to be Americans, the scowling white one with his hair ridiculously pulled back

.... and the coloured one who drove. She noticed them and wondered

...... I the business that brought them down the lane that led no wh e r e .

Because the Jeep was slowing, moving as if with hesitation past the houses, Zachary Jones saw them. Zachary Jones, disabled building worker, fifty-three years old, short of a leg, amputated below the knee from a construction-site fall, sat at the window of his cottage. He saw everything that moved in the collection of homes at the end of the lane that was too small to be called a village. With his binoculars he noted every coming and going, every visitor, .every stranger. The binoculars' magnification flitted from the face of the white one to the face of the black one, and he thought they were arguing and thought they disputed their directions, and then down to the tail-end registration plate.

Zachary Jones had worked the building game in London, knew diplomatic plates, before coming home as an amputee to live with his spinster sister. He wondered what brought Americans from their embassy down to this God-forgotten corner of nowhere.

Mrs Daphne Farson saw them from behind her lace curtains, then lost them when her view was obscured by the sign in her front garden that advertised bed-and-breakfast accommodation. She knew Americans.

The retired clergyman, the occasional gardener, the crab fisherman, the retired librarian, the District Nurse, everyone who lived in that community at the end of the lane beside the sea shore saw the big Cherokee Jeep edge down over the last of the tarmacadam, pause in the car park for summer visitors, reverse, turn, come back up the lane and stop just short of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. All of them heard the engine stilled, saw the lights doused.

All eyes on the Cherokee Jeep and all eyes on the front door of David and Flora Parsons' bungalow. The waiting time ... A small collective shiver of excitement held the community.