part0050

KATE GUILLORY SHIFTED DOWN into second, put her foot to the floor. Evan’s ‘69 Corvette Stingray surged as the big V8 engine responded instantly, catapulting her forwards to pass an ageing hippy in a vintage VW camper van. His pride pricked, the old fart stomped on the gas.

Normally it wouldn’t have made a blind bit of difference as she blew him into the weeds. Except that’s when her phone rang. She glanced at it on the passenger seat, concentration wavering momentarily, her foot inadvertently coming off the gas when she saw who was calling. A long blare on the horn from the camper van alongside snapped her eyes front. Straight into the strobe-like glare of an approaching eighteen-wheeler’s lights.

On her right the old fart grinned, gave her the finger.

She jumped on the brakes. Wrenched the wheel to the right, cut back in behind him. The truck steamed past, the air pushed in front of it slamming into her like a horse kicked her in the chest, plucking at her hair and clothes.

She wouldn’t be telling Evan about that one. He’d asked her to pick it up from the shop, not trash it. He’d been complaining that it wasn’t running properly. The mechanic had said it was a problem with the gas pedal—it wasn’t being pushed hard or often enough. He hadn’t actually said that. But that’s what she was going to tell him.

The phone was still ringing.

Great. With her hair still in her eyes from the truck’s side draft and her heartbeat at one-twenty, she didn’t need another reminder of her own mortality.

‘Hello Lydia. Are you calling to give me Liverman’s real name?’

A lot had happened since they’d last spoken. On that occasion—in the diner with Evan there too—Lydia said she needed time to think about it. Translation: time to figure out how to make it work for herself.

Guillory guessed she’d done that now. And seeing as since that meeting she’d learned that Lydia did indeed have a Vanquish sniper’s rifle—courtesy of Evan himself—she approached the conversation with caution.

It wasn’t just the gun. Lydia had followed her from the Jerusalem Tavern before changing her mind and running off. She’d seen her with Ryder. Would know she hadn’t confessed her sins to him, her presence in the house where Garfield was murdered, as she’d told her she was going to do.

So Lydia would be as suspicious as she was.

The conversation would be an exercise in reading between the lines. If she’d asked him—and she never would—Evan would have said it was just two women having a conversation.

‘No,’ Lydia said. ‘I’ve got something better.’

‘Really? What’s that?’

‘I can give you Liverman himself.’

It wasn’t what she was expecting. Even so, it was easy enough to see through.

It wasn’t the time to ask difficult questions, questions that might make Lydia end the call. Like why did you follow me? And what made you back off?

Up ahead the VW camper van had gotten stuck behind a bus. The road ahead was clear. She shifted down again, blew past both of them. Gave the old fart his finger back. With the roar of the engine and the wind in her face she missed what Lydia said next, got her to repeat it.

‘I’ve set up a meeting with him.’

‘Who? Liverman?’

Lydia stifled a laugh, then continued, the amusement still in her voice.

‘To discuss what to do about you.’ She said it as if she was telling a friend how she’d just made an appointment for the pest control guys to come around, see what they could do about the ants in the kitchen. ‘Someone gave him the impression I wanted to finish the job he paid my brother to do. I thought you might want to go in my place.’

Guillory listened to the oh-so-pleased-with-myself sound of her voice, her mind doing the translation, filtering out the facts. It was obvious that Lydia had told Liverman a similar story, had promised to deliver her to him. But why?

‘Where will you be if I take your place.’

‘Doesn’t matter.’

It does if it’s on a roof with the sniper’s rifle, Guillory thought. Then she asked a question as if she was interested in taking things forward despite the lack of an answer.

‘Where is the meeting?’

Lydia didn’t bother to stifle the laugh that bubbled up from deep inside her.

‘It’s somewhere you’ve been before. Except you don’t know where it is.’

A cold hand gripped Guillory’s heart, her chest suddenly tight, as if she was back there already. The feel of a rough hood over her head, men’s fists coming at her from all directions. And the smell. She couldn’t ever get it out of her nose. Of dried blood and sweat and vomit. Her foot, her whole leg, was rigid now, locked on the gas pedal. Knuckles white on the wheel as the speed climbed, roadside trees a blur of green and brown. Grit and wind and water in her eyes, streaming back across her face. Drawing the air deep inside her body, cleansing her, if only for a minute before the wheel bucked in her hands, nearside wheels clipping the shoulder, a cloud of dust and debris billowing out behind the car.

On the other end of the line Lydia’s sick, sing-song voice.

‘I can tell you’ve guessed already.’

And Guillory wondered if that big eighteen-wheeler was coming at her now whether she’d pull in behind the camper van like before or just push her foot harder to the floor and put an end to it all.

‘It’s where they had you before.’

Then the moment passed. She eased off the gas, let out the first breath for five miles. Bit back the words on her lips—the place your brother picked me up from, to take me for a one-way trip out to the woods—said something less inflammatory instead.

‘You’re a sick bastard.’

Lydia giggled like a boy she had her eye on had just said how nice her hair looked.

‘Not me. It was Liverman’s idea.’

Guillory didn’t believe a word of it, asked her the question she couldn’t hold in any longer.

‘Why would you do this?’

There was something different about the pause that followed. If one silence can be different to another. Guillory felt in her gut that Lydia wasn’t about to come out with more of the same lies and half-truths. That instead she was making a decision about how much to say. How much of herself to reveal. In the words that she said next, Guillory would feel a bond of some sort develop between them.

Those are dangerous feelings.

‘You know what Liverman is,’ Lydia said. It was a statement, not a question.

‘Of course I do.’

‘Of course you do,’ Lydia mimicked. ‘You almost threw away your career because you attacked one of his kind. You’ve just jeopardized it again breaking into his house in the middle of the night. The night he was killed.’ The mocking tone was gone now, replaced by a cold venom, a touch of hysteria behind it. ‘And you ask me why I would hate a man like Liverman enough to want him dead? Or worse. Why should you be the only one?’

The flavor of Lydia’s words—why wouldn’t anybody hate a disgusting pervert of a pedophile?—was just a smoke screen. Something to hide behind as she worked her way towards her personal truth. So Guillory held her tongue, let her talk. She sure as hell wasn’t expecting what she said next.

‘Tell me about your father.’

An image instantly flashed across Guillory’s mind. The closed door to her father’s study, the door that was always open. Then it was gone, as fast as it came, left her asking the same question as she always did.

Had it been closed? Or had her mind closed it retrospectively, a trick of the subconscious to protect her from the memories of what lay behind it?

She didn’t share that with Lydia, kept it simple.

The curtness of her reply, spat out like a bad taste, elicited a surprised giggle from Lydia. Like Guillory had made an inappropriate remark and Lydia had been unable to catch herself before it was out.

‘Why not? Did he abuse you? Is that why you attacked Garfield?’

Guillory threw back her head, looked up at the sky. How far off-base can a person be? But the questions, asked as if they were the logical sequitur to not wanting to share your family history with a homicidal maniac who may well be planning to kill you, gave her an insight into Lydia’s motivations.

‘No. To all your questions. Why, did your father abuse you?’

She hadn’t expected to hear a barely-controlled sob climb from Lydia’s throat or to feel the phone shake in her hand as she launched into a vitriolic diatribe. But she didn’t expect the response she did get, one which matched hers for close-mouthed brevity.

‘But he would have. If he’d gotten the chance.’ The tone of her voice made it clear that there was a great deal of satisfaction, pleasure even, in preventing him from getting that chance. ‘If my brother hadn’t killed him first.’

Guillory couldn’t deny it was the best reason—if the word best has any place in such circumstance—for Lydia to have turned out the way she had. Her brother too, starting his career of cold-blooded murder for hire with a very different killing. One with sufficient emotions—of fear and rage and disgust and relief—to more than compensate for all the perfunctory deaths that came after.

What it didn’t do—and this was the important part—was explain why, if Lydia was on a personal crusade against the perverts and the abusers, she didn’t simply kill Liverman without all the elaborate fuss of the meeting she had set up.

The answer was obvious. One that Guillory pushed from her mind because nothing could be gained by dwelling on it.

Lydia was after more than just Liverman.

The whole situation was unreal. It made her feel as if her head was on the block and the blade of the guillotine had failed to fall. And now she was in earnest conversation with the executioner, pointing at whatever obstruction had jammed the blade, a triumphant there’s the problem right there on her lips.

‘What’s it going to be?’ Lydia said. ‘You want to do this or not?’

They both knew she didn’t have a choice. If she wanted a chance at getting to Liverman, this was the only way to go. She’d been unable to find any trace of him on her own. The stupid, irrational act of breaking into Garfield’s house had at least produced one positive outcome. She now understood how much her ordeal had affected her judgement. How much it had blinded her to the consequences of her actions, sent her spiraling down a bottomless self-destructive hole.

If you wanted the Lone Ranger, call Evan, not her.

A wave of relief washed through her, left her legs weak and her head light, the moment she made the decision. A huge weight had been lifted. Because however things played out, it had to be better than her life at the moment, watching her obsession eat away at everything good in it. She’d never have a moment’s peace until she put Liverman behind her. Whether that happened as a result of his incarceration for the rest of his unnatural life, or as a result of a high-powered round blowing her head apart, it had to be better than this.

If Evan or Ryder had been there, Ryder’s words would have been particularly apt.

Because she knew that the self-destructive hole that she was spiraling down wasn’t bottomless at all. Nor was the bottom very far away. And it had the taste of a gun barrel in her mouth.

Like father, like daughter.

She stomped her foot down, pedal to the metal. Kept it there as the car hurtled down the road, the feral grin on her lips at one with the throaty growl of the engine. And it matched Lydia’s on the other end of the line in every way, but most of all in the way that it proclaimed that things were drawing to a close.