A Time of Torment (24 page)

It was Leebone, during Griffin’s third meeting with him, who had first mentioned the Dead King. Leebone and his affiliates had taken over a glorified drug den, in which Leebone was keeping company with a dirty-blond junkie called Makayla – which Griffin wasn’t even sure was a proper name, but what did he know – who was so thin she looked like a needle with tattoos. Leebone said that ‘Dead King’ was the name the Cut gave to their chieftain – not Oberon, not Cassander, but another, one who was never seen. He had it on good authority, he said, and then he’d laughed in a way that made Griffin want to throw up. Leebone had been drinking, and reeked of Chivas. The smell reminded Griffin of his last encounter with hard liquor, as if the pains in his arm, leg, and most of his upper body weren’t enough, even with the plaster removed.

Still, Griffin had briefly considered throwing in his lot with Leebone and his people in the hope of achieving some small measure of revenge on the Cut for what had been done to him. He rapidly dispensed with this notion for two reasons. The first was that he didn’t believe Leebone, even with the possible assistance of the Bandidos, was close to a match for the Cut, which meant that Leebone would very soon find out what it was like to be dead.

The second reason was that, about an hour after mentioning the Dead King, Leebone decided to introduce Griffin to the source of his information: an eighteen-year-old boy tied to a chair with wire, his face bloodied and three fingers missing from his right hand – missing, but not lost, as Leebone was keeping them safely wrapped in an oil-soaked rag. The kid, said Leebone, was a pre-med at the University of Charleston. More to the point, he came from the Cut. According to Leebone, he’d already helped them with the beginnings of a map of the area, although Leebone confessed that he wasn’t convinced of the accuracy of all the routes, or the safety of them, which was why he anticipated removing some more of the boy’s fingers before he was done, after which he intended to burn him alive in true Cut fashion.

It was then that Griffin decided Leebone was well and truly fucked.

Griffin’s performance in the hour that followed was probably worthy of some kind of acting prize. He even managed to swallow a couple of mouthfuls of Chivas, just to be sociable, but all that was really on his mind was getting as far away as possible from Huntington, and Leebone, and that boy in the basement, because sure as night followed day the Cut would find them.

It was four a.m. by the time everyone else was drunk and stoned enough for Griffin to be able to sneak away. He got in his car and started driving, because he did some of his best thinking while driving. Shortly after six a.m., he paused for coffee and breakfast at an IHOP. This was back in the days before every fool had a cell phone, so he broke a five into quarters at the register and made the call from the phone by the men’s room.

Preston Phelps, who was a bartender at Oakey’s, didn’t sound too pleased to be woken at sparrow’s fart by a man who was persona non grata in the entirety of Plassey County and most of its environs, but he quieted down some when Griffin told him about the boy in the basement. Five minutes after he put the phone down, Preston Phelps was on his way to the Cut.

The killings at Huntington were put down to inter-biker violence, although they were carried out silently and efficiently, which wasn’t usually the way with motorcycle gangs. Only Cort Leebone was never found. It was said that he might have managed to escape the carnage, although his bike was still among those outside the house when the police came. Griffin knew better, though, and on the day after the Huntington killings, the wind carried a smell of burning meat from the Cut.

Griffin had been hoping that his assistance in the matter of Leebone and the kid in the basement might have wiped his slate clean, but in his heart he’d known better: they had long memories in the Cut, and harbored grudges. But Jabal, sitting outside the Porterhouse, had led him to believe that the incident of the fractured skull had been forgotten, thanks to his work dealing with Burnel, and Griffin’s debts were now fully paid as far as the Cut was concerned.

As for the other one, Lucius, he didn’t speak much; he just simmered. Griffin had no idea what might be going through his head at any time, and anyway, he wasn’t even sure that Lucius was entirely human. Griffin suspected that a glimpse into the workings of Lucius’s mind would reveal only the bleak, base appetites of a rodent or a hunting mammal – a bat, maybe, or a mink, something capable of an all-consuming viciousness.

Still, there Griffin had been – sitting with a drink in his hand, enjoying the fact that he had some money in his pocket, and a pass from the Cut – when out of a clear fall sky had dropped Charlie Parker with his talk of the Dead King. Griffin had denied to Lucius having ever uttered the name of the Dead King, but Lucius hadn’t believed him, not least because Griffin’s face had revealed the truth as soon as Parker began talking. Lucius had given Griffin one night to think about how to make amends, which Griffin took to mean that Lucius might want Parker killed.

Unfortunately, Harpur Griffin wasn’t a killer, or at least not the kind that might be able to go up against Parker and the men who operated with him. The colored in particular had given Griffin a serious set of the creeps, reminding him of the kind of black boys he used to bait down in Plassey when he had the numbers to back him up, but to whom he gave a wide, careful berth when he was alone.

The Cut folk were the killers, thought Griffin, so let them deal with Parker if they were so concerned about him. He went to his refrigerator, took the last beer from the rack, and used it to add fuel to his growing sense of righteous indignation. All this because one of those inbreeders wasn’t keeping an eye on where he was going at Oakey’s, and then hadn’t been able to take a half-decent punch without breaking like a china vase. And what was it with Parker anyway, nosing around asking questions about some pedophile? To hell with him. To hell with them all.

I could run
, Griffin thought. Some guys he’d met in Warren had offered to hook him up with work if he needed it – well, work in the sense of running pharmaceuticals from Canada, but that certainly beat the job his parole officer had forced on him, which was glorified yard cleanup, and hard grind to boot, rain or shine. He disregarded the possibility of flight almost instantly, though, because he knew the Cut would come after him, and they’d find him without any trouble at all.

Suddenly he put the bottle down, and wondered if he’d been looking at this whole business from the wrong angle. Until now, he’d been regarding Parker as the problem, and himself, or the Cut, as the solution. But this man Parker wasn’t just some PI who made chump change from bail skips and errant husbands. He was a hunter, and a killer. From the little Griffin knew of him, he was also protected: no man got away with what he had done without someone higher up signing off on it.

The Cut would never leave him in peace, Griffin knew. If he ran, they’d kill him. If he failed to come through on Parker, they’d kill him. And even if he did somehow manage to contrive a solution to their problem, they’d almost certainly kill him as soon as it was all done, just for having a big mouth. Whatever way he examined the situation, Griffin believed that he was heading for the grave.

So instead of feeding Parker to the Cut, maybe he should feed the Cut to Parker. A man who was protected could find a way to protect others. If he had federal contacts, then maybe he could get Griffin into one of those safe houses – room, board, cable TV, a PlayStation – while the feds descended on Plassey County with the full force of the taxpayer’s dollar.

Except what did Griffin have to sell? That was the problem. All he could offer Parker was the approach made to him at Warren, and the instruction to torture Jerome Burnel. He could throw in Cort Leebone and his buddies as well, although for it to be worthwhile he’d have to admit to his own involvement in turning the Cut on them. The rest was just rumors, and even added together, it didn’t sound like enough to earn him much more than a cup of bad coffee from Parker or the police.

Unless he agreed to wear a wire.

All Griffin knew about wires was what he’d seen on TV cop shows and in movies, but he figured that the technology must have progressed far enough to allow him to wear a microphone resembling a button or a pin without the necessity of wrapping himself in duct tape. Conspiracy to commit murder had to be worth a lot, and that was what Lucius was suggesting, albeit not in so many words, or not yet. But, if necessary, Griffin could entice him into saying it aloud. He hadn’t entirely exhausted his store of charm left over from early adulthood.

Griffin grabbed his laptop and went searching for Parker’s details. The PI didn’t have a website – who, in this day and age, didn’t have a website to promote his business, Griffin mused, until the answer came to him: someone who didn’t need one – but his details were available on the website of the Maine Licensed Private Investigator’s Association, although they were limited to a P.O. box and a cell phone number. Griffin entered the number on his phone before immediately deleting it: he didn’t want Jabal or Lucius to pick up his phone and find the detective’s details on it. Instead he tore a scrap of paper from a take-out menu and wrote the number on that before folding it and placing it at the bottom of the watch pocket of his jeans, buried beneath his loose change. He wasn’t going to call the detective yet, not until he was sure he had no other option. He’d go out and talk to some people about him first.

Griffin finished his beer, took a leak, and cleaned himself up. He still had a buzz on from drinking steadily all day. He reached for his car keys, briefly debated whether or not he was too drunk to drive, decided that if he was capable of assessing the scale of his inebriation then he probably wasn’t, and headed into Portland.

S
hakey watched Griffin go, then called Parker to tell him that he was on the move again. Despite Parker’s injunction to the contrary, Shakey had gone to Griffin’s place on his own initiative, mostly because he was kind of enjoying having a purpose. Parker told him once again to go home, after first burning his ear for potentially putting himself at risk.

‘I can stay,’ said Shakey. ‘It’s not cold.’

Actually, it was cold, but not by the standards Shakey applied to the weather. He was, after all, a man who had slept rough on Portland’s streets in winter. It had almost killed him, and he wasn’t anxious to repeat the experience, but it had given him a certain sense of perspective.

Parker was briefly tempted to take Shakey up on his offer, then decided against it. The two men who had been with Griffin at the Porterhouse had seen Shakey and were now aware of him. They might not yet have been suspicious of him, but if they glimpsed him again in their vicinity, or that of Griffin, they would hurt him. Of that Parker had no doubt.

So Shakey returned to his apartment. Thanks to the intercession of Parker and his friends in the city, he now lived in subsidized housing off Congress Street, not very far from the block that had briefly housed Jerome Burnel. Shakey’s building had on-site laundry, a library with computers, even blood pressure screening, and there was a bus stop right out front, which made life easier. His ruined foot was already telling him that winter was on its way, and the hours spent trailing Harpur Griffin had caused it to ache. Shakey pulled a piece of candy from his pocket and chewed it all the way to the nearest bus stop, where he took a seat and waited for the bus to bring him back to Portland.

And all the time, Lucius and Jabal regarded him from the front seats of their car, while a third figure sat in the back and mulled over everything he had already learned about the private detective named Charlie Parker.

P
arker left Angel and Louis and returned to Scarborough. Like Shakey, he was feeling the approach of winter. His scalp itched where the shotgun pellets had cut through, a sure sign that a headache was on its way, for he had learned to spot the advance signals sent by his damaged body.

He took a couple of painkillers, then made a cup of coffee and sat out on his porch to drink it, even if the evening was a little more chilly than he might have preferred, and that damned left hand was letting him know it. Nevertheless, in Maine you learned to take your pleasures where you could. The marshes had no shortage of bugs in summer, and if he was fool enough to sit out on his porch once the snow came they’d have to chip the ice from him and break his bones in order to fit him in the casket. He liked October and November. They were his months.

He called Moxie Castin on his cell phone and told him about his encounter with the three men at the Porterhouse, although he withheld some details of their exchanges on the grounds that it was inadvisable to tell anyone everything, especially a lawyer, and he didn’t know Castin as well as Aimee Price, who looked after his own legal affairs.

‘And you believe that these men might have something to do with Burnel’s disappearance?’ asked Castin.

‘They were from out of town, and didn’t look like they were planning a sunset tour of the harbor followed by dinner at DiMillo’s. If this was the Wild West, they’d have been up on a bluff watching for signs of pursuit from a posse.’

‘I never ate at DiMillo’s,’ said Castin.

DiMillo’s was Portland’s floating seafood restaurant, situated in a former car ferry moored at Long Wharf. Whatever its qualities, Parker’s natural aversion to eating anything with more than four legs, or no legs at all, had forced him to give it a miss.

‘Me neither,’ said Parker, while not expressing surprise at Castin being distracted by talk of food. He knew the man’s reputation as a gourmand.

‘You think it’s worth setting the police on them?’ said Castin, once his train of thought found the right rails again.

‘It’s your call, Moxie, but I don’t have anything more than Harpur Griffin’s connection to Burnel, and by now those guys are nowhere near the Porterhouse.’

‘Then we wait.’