The Unlucky Man (9 page)

Corg let out a long, shaky breath, rubbing a hand over the bald dome of his head in a familiar nervous gesture.

"Zach had already told them about me and about the car, seems he’d thought about his bright idea some time before but never mentioned it. To me, well, it sounded pretty dumb but I felt my hands were tied – Zach was a friend and I held the key to his fix, so what was I going to do?"

So, I agreed to a one off, ferrying a couple of crates of knock off hooch across the City to pay off his debt, then bringing the money back to the right people. When I came back, they were pretty happy with me, offered me another run and I went for it: it was pretty good cash - I mean it was just skim to them I could tell, but it helped me out plenty."

"Weren’t you worried about getting caught?" I asked, curious.

"Sure," he said. "Not as much as I should have been though I guess. I was figuring myself the big man and lauding it over Zach who, they made it pretty clear, wasn’t welcome at their card table anymore. Seems they weren’t very impressed at him getting someone else to pick up his tab."

He stared at the road for a while. "I lost track of Zach in the end, sort of drifted apart. I think he was pissed that he wasn’t allowed in on the outlaw lifestyle as he saw it. But I’ve got no illusions, you know, I’m just an errand boy as far as these people are concerned. I mean they gave me a phone and a number to call in case of a problem but it’s them who set the dates, I’d just show up. Guy called Ray was my original point of contact, I’ve met others too, even the boss, but Ray’s always the one that calls, seems like a good guy, but we aren’t buddies or nothing."

"Is it Ray we’re waiting on to call us back now?" We'd decided as soon as we saw the lie of the land that staying put was not an option, so we circled, waiting for a call we hoped wouldn't be too much longer.

Corg shook his head. "No," he said, "Whoever answered before wasn’t Ray. Said Ray’s dead. Whoever it was, he didn’t sound real pleased."

I looked around at the desolation passing by my window under a dark morning sky.

Somehow, I wasn’t surprised.

"Seems like a lot’s happened in six months," I said.

Corg didn’t say anything as his phone started to ring.

We pulled into an empty two storied car park and made our way to the top level. Like everywhere else it was deserted apart from the odd, abandoned and burned-out husks of old vehicles. In common with everything else I’d seen since our crossing, the place was a mess.

They were waiting for us as we pulled out onto the top level, a small group of figures, serious silhouettes against the darkening skyline. It was cold up here and their breath plumed in little clouds as they waited. The bulky shape of a van was parked off to one side, engine gently idling.

One of the figures detached itself from the others as we killed our engine and got out of the car. He was tall with dark hair swept back from his face and matted with rain. Despite the weather he wore an incongruous pair of expensive looking wraparound shades to counter the growing murkiness of the day.

"Baldman," Corg said, extending a hand to meet the approaching man.

"Corg." They shook briefly as Baldman glanced at me with a look from beneath his glasses that set my nerves jangling. There was a feeling in the air, I was growing to realise, a tension like I’d felt back at Corg’s apartment, an electrically static build up. The body language of the group by the van was all wrong, too stiff, too edgy. I got the distinct feeling that we were not at all welcome.

I cut another look at the group. There was something uniform in their appearance, military in style in a mix of dark olive greens and arid desert browns. All of them wore heavy, serious boots. But their similarity went beyond what they wore, they each had about them a dusty, worn aspect, a greyness to the skin, dark shadows beneath the eyes. This serious group seemed a far cry from Corg’s poker party of old.

"Get in the van," Baldman was saying, all smiles that I’d wager never met his eyes if I could see them behind their shields of tinted metallic glass. His teeth were shockingly white and very even. "Give me the keys and I’ll follow in your car."

Reluctantly, Corg did as he was told, though I could tell it was a wrench as he tossed the keys. That he did it at all spoke volumes to how out of our depths we now were. They sailed through the rain and landed damply in Baldman’s waiting hand. Drops spattered against his sunglasses.

"Is this normal?" I murmured to Corg as Baldman moved away.

"Normal?" Corg shrugged slightly, but I could tell he knew what I meant. "I don’t know. Listen," he held in his voice the air of the confessional, "I’ve never met them like this before. Called
them
before."

That stopped me, despite what he had told me on the ride over.

"What?"

"I mean they always call me, you know, when they have work or need something moving. It’s never been the other way before."

"I’m not sure they’re too keen on it this way round," I whispered.

"Look around," he said. "Everything’s changed out here. Some bad shit has been happening since I was last out here. It was going to hell fast enough then, but this?" He let the sentence trail away.

Ahead of us, one of them swung open the door to the van with a long, rusty groan, the interior looming like a gaping mouth. Everything about this felt wrong, I thought, but I followed Corg as he stepped up into the blackness.

The door slammed shut behind us and, for a second, everything was pitch black. The air, thick and musty, smelled like the inside of a tin can. And then someone flicked on a dull orange portable light and our surroundings swum into a hazy focus. In fact, they looked like the inside of a tin can as well; the walls were a dull grey nothing, the windows covered over with black plastic and taped in place with industrial electric tape.

The only other occupant of the back of the van was a young woman, elegantly dressed in a simple grey two piece suit that fitted her like a glove. Her hair was ash blond, swept back from a round, delicately featured face, her eyes deep and green and flecked with gold.

"Alexander," she said with a perfect smile, gesturing to a wheel arch opposite the one on which she perched. "Have a seat. I’m sorry if this pick up has been a little chilly but your call came at something of a bad time." Her tone was light but there was a tension behind the words.

"Problems, Loess?" Corg asked, sitting as bidden on a curving arch, and affecting an air of nonchalance I knew he did not feel. She laughed then, and it was a warm, honest sound, before waving the question away.

"There’s always problems out here but yes, things have taken a turn for the worse in recent days, as you might have noticed," she said dryly. "But it’s not your problem," she added, changing the subject. "Why do you need to see the boss? You come to confess your undying love?"

To my amazement, Corg actually blushed and she changed the subject again.

"Where are my manners?" she asked, extending her hand to me. As I took it, suddenly acutely conscious of how dirt encrusted my own hands were as I briefly engulfed her own dainty clean one, the van rumbled into life.

"I’m Loess," she said with another smile.

"Hesker," I said, "Jon Hesker. People call me Hesker," I added stupidly. She looked at me for a long moment before releasing my hand and sitting back.

"Pleasure," she said, "So what can we do for you?" Lightening rent the sky above us, followed after a few beats by the drum of thunder.

We rolled along in silence for the most part. I can’t speak for the others but I couldn’t think to talk past the pulsing of my blood in my ears. The stuffy air in the back tasted like old pennies and crackled with unspoken tension. I felt that we’d stumbled into something that it was too late to back out of.

Corg looked on edge too, jaw clamped tight shut, eyes fixed on nothing. I risked a glance at Loess and found her green-gold eyes watching me. I quickly looked away.

"What happened to Ray?" Corg asked her at length.

Loess shrugged, but her face was suddenly very still. "He died," she said.

"I know," Corg said. "I mean-"

"Specifically? His car got rammed by a truck, forcing him off the road. When he tried to extract himself from the wreck, someone put a handful of bullets in him."

Corg pulled a face. "I’m sorry," he said, "He always seemed a good guy."

She shrugged again, mechanically. "He knew the risks," she said but it sounded practiced and more than a little hollow, an ineffective salve for open wounds. "We’ve done as bad."

When we finally rolled to a stop it was a relief. I had the feeling that we had been circling around, taking a winding, inexact route to get to wherever we were going, though whether for our benefit or for some other, more concerning reason, I could not say. As the driver swung open his door and dropped out of sight, Loess quickly leaned forward and spoke to us in low, urgent whisper.

"Listen," she said, "When you see the boss, be wary, he’s been acting odd recently. I’m only telling you this because I like you, Alexander, and because you’ve been good to us. But he’s," she searched for what she was trying to say, "Become intense." She caught Corg’s look, "More intense than usual. Just tread lightly, he may not be in the spirit to help you."

"What’s going on?" Corg whispered back, but she just shook her head.

"No time," she said with a sigh, then shrugged as if to ask what difference her words made. "War."

With another tortured groan the door swung back on its rusted runners.

"Out you pop," Baldman leered, still wearing the shades, "Let’s get this done."

They had brought us to an abandoned building site. Like some kind of barren, lunar landscape it stretched away on all sides in a muddy quagmire, its troughs and pits filling with rain water. It was no man’s land, an unending monochrome monotony. In the distance, abandoned machinery stood empty like great unremembered dinosaur skeletons silhouetted against the clouds, their looming black shapes creating weird, alien patterns against the skyline.

In the middle of the site was a large, half demolished building that, in its prime, must have been an handsome architectural work, now left to rot. It had the air of an institution or an academy of some kind but its original purpose was long since obscured by time.

Now it stood bereft in an empty landscape, crumbling slowly into nothing. Half of the structure, at least, looked to be already gone, the rest kept standing and supported, here and there, by some aged and half robbed-out scaffolding that pointed and stuck out at odd directions lending the whole remaining building a lopsided, nightmare quality.

Awaiting within this skeletal palace, I had been told, was the Make it Happen Man. I’d heard the name before - as something like an urban legend - and was curious to meet this mysterious figure. His name, shortened for convenience to Mr. Happen, was a reflection of his ability and reputation as a fixer: by all accounts he was a man who could find anything, anywhere. My guess was this was how he and Corg had been able to appreciate one another, with Corg eventually becoming a sometimes driver and smuggler of contraband goods on Mr. Happen’s behalf.

Many of the stories about the mysterious figure attributed his ability to influence events to an almost supernatural force, beliefs that were encouraged by Mr. Happen’s anecdotally ethereal, otherworldly nature. Corg had claimed as much as we journeyed over the old bridge and I was eager to see this eccentric occultist with my own eyes.

We followed Baldman across the site, picking our way carefully over debris and filth, and up a wide flight of carved, crumbling steps to a heavy metal and wood door which swung ominously open as we approached.

"Come on in boys," he crowed, beckoning us through the opening with mock gentility. "Come make yourselves at home."

The hallway into which he led us was old and sad, thick with the stink of damp and rot. The walls were stained by fungus, the carpet threadbare and worm-eaten. Everything was green and brown and sticky with decay.

We followed him through more corridors that echoed the first in odor and appearance and up a flight of creaking metal steps to another level. The rain was pouring through gaps in the ceiling here, dripping and burbling steadily onto the mossy carpet with its flowering of cupped brown mushrooms. The smell up here was even headier than it had been below, thickly cloying and choking. I tried not to think about spores flooding my nostrils.

And then, at last, we were through another door and into a large, open chamber decorated with an opulence so out of keeping with the rest of the building it was disconcerting. Thick rugs adorned the floorboards, colourful and expensively decorated; oriental hangings lined the walls whilst thick incense floated in the air, keeping the stink beyond the door mostly, if not entirely, at bay.

A figure was seated at a huge, dark wood desk that curved majestically into the centre of the room, a glass decanter atop it filled with amber spirit.

"Mr. Happen," Baldman said with deference and a strange almost half bow to the figure behind the desk before retreating to stand in the shadows behind him. I was pleased to see him remove his ridiculous sunglasses as he did so.