Better Than This (44 page)

Then who killed Brinkman?”

“I don’t know. It probably had nothing to do with any of this.”

But Marcus shook his head in disbelief. “You know that can’t be true. It’s too much of a coincidence. It must have something to do with the program. You were prepared to kill for it. What makes you think somebody else isn’t thinking the same way. Maybe it’s Morgan himself.”

The same thing had occurred to me though somehow I couldn’t see Morgan as a killer. Why take the risk when he could afford not to, apart from anything else. “All I know for sure,” I said. “is that I still have the program and Morgan is going to pay to get his hands on it. Once we have the money Alice and I are going to get as far away from here as we can.”

The idea just came to me, but when I looked at Alice she met my eye and I knew she’d agree. Marcus stared from one to the other of us and understanding dawned.

“You knew about Dexter didn’t you?” he said to Alice. “You helped him.” He sounded as if he could barely take it in. This was something he hadn’t expected. “Don’t you understand? Two people are dead. This has to end. Now.”

He appealed to us both as if we might come to our senses. I

didn’t know what he meant, that it had to end. Then he turned and climbed back down to the dock.

“Where are you going?”

“Where am I going? You didn’t really believe we could go along with this any more did you? I’m going to get Sally and then we’re going to the police. The reason I came here was to find out for sure if you killed Dexter. I suppose I hoped you’d convince me we were wrong, and we could all go to Morello together. You still could. If it really was an accident.”

“The police?” I echoed. “Are you crazy?”

“You’re the one who’s crazy, Nick. Both of you.”

He turned and started walking away. I looked at Alice. I wanted her to tell me he wasn’t serious, but she stared back at me with a stunned expression. Seconds passed, and Marcus was already nearing the end of the dock.

“We have to stop him,” Alice said.

She was right. I leapt down from the boat and ran after him and I caught up with him on the edge of the parking lot. It was darker there away from the light and the trailers threw deep shadowy places.

“Marcus!” I shouted when I was ten feet away. He stopped and turned. I could hear Alice running after us. “I can’t let you do this.”

“Go to the police? How are you going to stop me, Nick? Are you going to kill me as well?”

Alice reached my side and appealed to him. “You can’t do this. You can’t throw away thirty-five million dollars.”

He shook his head. “You don’t get it do you? Either of you. The money doesn’t matter any more.”

He began to turn away.

“Marcus!”

He stopped. My hand went to the gun in the back of my jeans. I gripped the butt, but I didn’t draw it. Alice saw what I was doing, and our eyes met. A second passed. Then another.

“Do it,” she urged quietly.

I didn’t move. I saw something deep in her eyes, the knowledge of what she was capable of. Perhaps it was a reflection of

34i myself. That moment of hesitation was like the beginning of waking from a bad dream. My grip slackened. Marcus didn’t understand what was going on. His brow creased in a puzzled frown. Beyond him I saw his car at the edge of the lot, and then something else registered. In the corner, parked up close to a big launch on a trailer, where it was dark, was another vehicle. The faint light from the lamp in the middle of the lot gleamed off the hood and the darkened windows. I wondered if I was imagining things or if the car really was green.

What happened next seemed to occur in slow motion. Marcus began to turn away as three figures emerged from the shadows where they must have been listening to every word. One of them raised his arm and he was holding something that he pointed at Marcus who suddenly saw them and stopped in surprise. Then there was a popping sound and the back of his head disintegrated.

His head snapped back and as he crumpled I felt wet splashes on my skin. Alice looked down at the glistening pattern of blood and tissue on her white shirt. She opened her mouth to scream but a hand flew from nowhere and gave her a back-handed slap in the face that stifled the sound before it was formed. A singsong voice accompanied the aftermath of silence, managing to sound merry and chilling at the same time.

“Next time you gonna be one dead fuckin’ bitch unnerstan’?”

There were three of them, all Latinos, aged somewhere between their late teens and early twenties. They wore oversized “I-shirts and baggy trousers with the crotch hanging almost to their knees and the bottoms of the legs gathered over their Nike trainers. The eldest of them wore a thick gold chain around his neck and several gold hoops in both ears. His face was baby smooth, and might almost have been handsome when he smiled and flashed white teeth, except for his eyes. His eyes were reptilian. Black and soulless. The glitter in them was drug induced. They were all boosted on something and they acted like high-spirited kids one moment, giggling and hand slapping, full of machismo swagger, the next they were edgy and malevolent, looking for some way to expend some energy. They kept looking at Alice and licking their lips.

They all had guns shoved in the waistbands of their trousers. They made me help them drag Marcus’s body back to the boat, where they dumped him inside the door from the stern deck. Alice was shoved roughly onto a seat in the corner. Her face was white and her eyes kept drifting irresistibly to where Marcus lay. Blood had continued to leak from his ruined head to soak into the carpet.

It took me a while to remember the name of the eldest kid. Pepe. That was what Hoffman had called him the day I paid these three to take care of my car. He was the one who’d shot Marcus, and who now brandished his gun with careless ease in my direction.

“Where’s the disc at, man?” he asked in heavily accented street Hispanic.

“What disc?” I said.

I needed to slow everything down. Pepe appeared to attach about the same significance to killing Marcus as someone else might to putting out a cigarette. I understood that whatever he and his buddies were on made them unpredictable, but I needed time to think, to kick-start my brain again.

His tone changed instantly. “The disc, man, where da fuck’s it at?”

His eyes narrowed to slits and he shoved the gun into my stomach for emphasis. One of the others laughed in a high-pitched nervous giggle, almost like a girl. Abruptly Pepe’s expression slackened into a grin and he removed the gun from my stomach.

“Fuck. I can’t kill you, man. Never getta disc if I do that.” His grin became huge as if this was a terrific joke we were sharing, but I was looking into his eyes and there was nothing funny about what I saw there.

I was starting to think. The .38 was still in the back of my trousers. It hadn’t occurred to them that I might have a gun. “I know where I’ve seen you before,” I said. “It was outside Hoffman’s apartment building.”

I pictured the green car in the lot. I’d seen it before that same day when Marcus and I had gone to San Leandro. The same car I now realized that had followed me when I went to Morgan’s house, that had played chicken with me the night Sally and I drove to Marios. It was these three who must have killed Brinkman though I didn’t know why.

But Pepe wasn’t listening to me. He swaggered over to the galley and started rooting through drawers. I glanced at the other two. They both stood just feet away, their guns held loosely at their sides. I calculated my chances of shooting all three of them if I tried to get my gun, and figured they were about nil. I had never even pointed a gun at another person in my life, in fact I didn’t know if the .38 even worked. It had been lying unused for a long time. But mainly what stopped me was Marcus lying dead on the floor with the back of his head missing. In their drugged state these kids had no fear and I could count on them to react without hesitation if I moved. Even if I got my hand to my gun, if I fumbled for even a fraction of a second I was dead.

My brain was working now, racing at full speed, but my limbs felt leaden and frozen. Pepe found what he was looking for. He turned around and held up a kitchen knife with about a six inch blade and dread plucked at my insides. He tucked his gun inside his trousers and picked up a towel and I knew what was about to happen. The reports of Brinkman’s death came back to me in vivid Technicolor. I doubt that he’d been a particularly brave man. He probably told them what they wanted to know before they ever used the drill on him, but they’d gone ahead anyway. I couldn’t take my eyes off that blade and I knew right then I’d rather be shot than be sliced into pieces.

But it wasn’t me Pepe had in mind. Alice realized at the same time I did that he was looking at her and when he moved towards her she shrank back against the wall and opened her mouth to scream but he was too fast for her. With one hand he slammed her head against the wall.

“Getter arms.”

The two younger kids held her while Pepe stuffed the towel in her mouth. Her eyes bugged and thinking she must be about to choke she struggled violently. It happened in a second.

“Wait!” I yelled.

But it was useless. Pepe wanted to make a point and he ignored me. The blade went up and flashed down again and pierced Alice’s shoulder. Her eyes locked on mine in a silent plea as the initial shock and pain registered. I heard her muffled cry and tears sprang into her eyes.

Pepe looked over at me and remarked, “You got about a second ‘fore I stick her eye and after that I’m gonna cut her fuckin’ tits off, man.”

I didn’t doubt for an instant that he would do it and I pointed to where the concealed cupboard was. “It’s in there.”

They let Alice go and she slumped back ashen faced, her hand going to the wound in her shoulder. Dark red blood welled through her fingers and seeped in a widening stain across her shirt. Pepe didn’t even glance at her. He found the cupboard and when he retrieved the disc he looked at it for a moment, his head cocked to one side as if it intrigued him for some reason. Then he shook his head and clucked his tongue and put it inside one of his voluminous pockets.

“You know howta drive this thing?” he said to me.

Pepe stood beside me with his gun pressed into my ribs as I steered the launch out of the harbour and underneath the Golden Gate. Alice and the others remained below. The last I’d seen of them they were rummaging around for food, one of them complaining that they should have stopped at the McDonald’s they’d passed earlier. I was worried about Alice. She’d been bleeding badly and was in a lot of pain though she’d had the sense to take the towel Pepe had shoved in her mouth and press it against her wound. Before I’d come up top she was slumped across her seat, looking pale and dazed with shock. I knew she needed a doctor, but once we cleared the bridge Pepe told me to head out to sea and I was under no illusion about what our fate would be. He watched how I handled the boat, which he must have figured didn’t look too difficult because after a couple of minutes he grinned.

“Jus’ like a fuckin’ car, man.”

I wondered how far out he would take us, and when he glanced back at the lights in our wake I guessed it wouldn’t be too far. He wouldn’t want to run the risk of losing sight of land and getting lost. I tried to get him talking, hoping to distract him enough to give me a chance to make a move. I thought I had a few minutes at most. Probably the last thing to happen would be he’d tell me to slow down and cut the motor. After that I thought I could count my life in seconds.

“Do you know what’s on that disc in your pocket?” I asked him.

He grinned at me. “Whattya think I am, man? You think I never heard of fuckin’ computers or something? This is what you took from the old guy’s apartment. Some kinda software shit or something he made up.”

“What are you going to do with it?”

“What you think? I’m gonna do the same as you were and sell it to that rich fuck, Morgan.” He leaned back a little, and the gun came out of my ribs and he started waving it around in emphasis. “Think I’m gonna buy me some new wheels, man. Prob’ly gonna get some chicks and fuck my brains out for while first though. Have a party. Maybe I’ll buy me a boat like this fucker some time.”

He was having a good time. It amused him to tell me what a terrific time he’d be having with all the money he was going to get while I was lying on the bottom of the sea feeding the crabs.

I tried to keep him talking. “Why did you kill Brinkman?” I asked.

“That fat lawyer? “Cause I needed him to tell me what the fuck was going down, man. He come aroun’ asking questions after the ol’ guy died, wanted to know if anybody seen anything. Course nobody tol’ him shit, but then he came back with that other dude Dexter, and he wanted to know the same kinda stuff, on’y he was handing out him nerd dollar bills, man. So I figure it’s okay to tell him my sister saw couple guys busting inna the old guy’s place. Dexter, man, he gave me five him nerd so me and my sister go with him in his car and he pulls up outside this office downtown and we wait awhile. Then this guy comes out and Dexter says to me, “That the guy?” and I tol’ him yeah, that’s one of ‘em.” Pepe smirked. “That was you, man.”

“And Dexter paid you to follow me?”

“Tha’s right. On’y I didn’t know what it was all ‘bout, and didn’t give a fuck either, long as he was paying me. Then suddenly I can’t get hold of Dexter no more. He’s just gone, man, and he owes me money so I figger I talk to that fat fuck of a lawyer instead, and he starts cryin’ an shit and talkin’ ‘bout this fuckin’ software shit, man, so then I persuade him to tell me everything.”

“And then you talked to Morgan,” I guessed.

Pepe pulled a face. “Yeah. ‘Cept I couldn’t get near that dude,

man. Jus’ kep’ talkin’ to some fuckin’ bitch on the phone.” His expression became sly. “Then I had a idea. I called back an tol’ her I was you.” He giggled. “This is Nick Weston,” he said, doing a bad imitation of what he imagined I sounded like. It must have worked though, long enough to get him talking to Morgan anyway.

“And tonight? You followed me from my office didn’t you?” I guessed, remembering the car that had swung in behind me which I’d thought was the security guard.