Page 5

5 The Suspicions

Sometime over lunch and my confrontation with Rain, the sun vanished and the clouds raced in to piss on the city. So I was part soaked by the time I darted across the street from the coffee shop to the bank. The wet covered the dishevelment of my appearance enough that only a concerned frown tainted Andie’s features when they saw me.

‘You look a mess,’ they said. Then with a blush and a cheeky smile. ‘Do you want to dry off. There are some towels at the back.’ There was a depth of meaning in that voice. I knew it well, have in the past responded to it. But right now Rain Wild still coated my cock, like some brand of ownership. His scent still lingered in my nostrils, on my tongue, on my clothes.

I looked at Andie and felt a pang of grief at how pale and insubstantial they seemed compared to Rain. ‘I’m … I think I ate something that disagreed with me. Sorry, Andie … I just spent … hell. It’s embarrassing.’

Andie touched my arm in concern. ‘Say no more, I understand.’

They could never understand for I could not understand any of this myself.

I strode to my desk.

It was a wretched afternoon, of tedium, endless array of numbers and an equally endless pile of cheques. All the while, I felt a sense of numb shock, as if something fundamental had once again happened to me.

I will take you apart piece by piece.

He had done just that, taken me apart … except … it was he who had been pinned to the wall whilst I had rammed myself into him. It was he who had taken the brunt of my collapse.

I ran my hand over my face and returned to the endless line of numbers before me. I tried to refocus my mind. The option to use Andie was as distant as it was suddenly distasteful. Rain had infiltrated and imbedded himself into my thoughts, had chained me somehow with his brazen claim on me. It was a chain I had to break.

I’m now merely claiming what is mine.

Hell … I had felt his claim on me the moment I had met his gaze in Fanigan’s office. It riled me, made me fight the hold sever since.

No one has claimed me as theirs before. No one had dared. The moment they tried it was over. I had a few small scars and flinching memories to remind me of that. Except, there was nothing between me and Rain Wild. There was no substance to it, no thread I could cut. It was ethereal and intangible, and yet his claim had been so brutally fierce it branded me and bound us together. He had claimed me in the most primitive way. I had claimed his body, but he had claimed my soul. I shook my head. Fool. My soul had been claimed by the devil long ago. There was no room there for Wild.

‘Do you want to share a taxi, Rock?’ Andie’s voice suddenly cut through my thoughts.

I glanced up and saw that the daylight had gone from the day.

Andie was pulling on their coat. ‘I could drop you off at your place first. You still live on Trainside Alley?’

‘I’ve a bit to catch up on, Andie. You go ahead.’

‘I can wait for you. Here, shall I help.’

I grabbed their wrist before their hand could reach across me to the pile of cheques. ‘Go home to your lifemate, Andie. You don’t need to nurse me here. I’ll be finished quicker with no noise to distract me.’

That was the moment I saw my prediction come true. The heartbreak in their eyes, the moment they realised that I have not changed at all, that I had been playing them the whole day. That my charm was but a facade I used to gain what I wanted. Andie was smart and astute. They saw the way my face just could not bend to form the charming smile I had enticed them with at lunch. That the thrill and promises part of the rotten game I played to fulfil the carnal needs of the moment. I was a bastard. I had never denied it, but suddenly I felt pang of shame that never troubled me before.

Hurt flashed in their eyes. And my mind went to Rain the moment I forced myself into him, the groan, the way he grabbed the wall with both his hands and arched beneath me.

‘Ari …’ An echo of his whisper, a mere breath, a gasp for mercy, a plea, a need that craved as much as I did in that moment. And crave I did, save that I knew not what it was.

‘Then see you tomorrow, Rock,’ Andie said at length.

I nodded.

They walked away, heels clacking on tiled floor, fading into the past I left behind.

The lights dimmed.

‘The last of the overzealous workers left the building.

A couple of clerks remained behind, dutifully typing away at the keys of their typewriter, filling the cavernous hall with the click of the typewriter. A young accountant was still pouring over the ledger, their stooping slim shoulders seemingly tied up in knots. None of them were looking my way. None of them were the type to look up at anything that disturbed their work.

I rose to my feet, now moving with purpose. Following an instinct of years-worth of surreptitious pursuit, I gathered the ledgers I had been working on, and with a purposeful stride made my way to the back of the building. The only sound enveloping me was the heartbeat-like click of my heels on marble floor. Muffled music reached me from the radio the guard was listening to at their desk in the corner whilst they read the gossip magazine.

The door to the records loomed ahead. I pulled out the lockpick from my jacket pocket and with barely a pause, inserted it into the lock, gave a quick wiggle and was rewarded with a click. Pushing softly on the door, I slipped inside.

I found myself in a pitch black windowless room. After probing the nearest wall beside me, I found the fat metal switch that turned on the dim electric bulbs.

The flickering yellow light revealed rows and rows of shelves stacked with account ledgers. A quick inspection told me they were arranged alphabetically. Within short order, I tracked down the accounts ledger belonging to Thomas Grant.

Everything inside me stilled and faded as I held the most personal details of the man who had inflicted the most personal crime against me. I opened the latest page marked with a braided string.

My jaw clenched.

The bastard had more money than any crook had the right to have. Though flicking back through the figures, his exceeding wealth was recent. The deposits that made up the current sum were regular, every two weeks going back twelve months, and to the tune of half a million. Before that, Grant barely had a dollar to spend. Except in bursts of sums that were as irregular in their timing as they were in amounts. I knew enough about the underworld to know what those sums bought you — another person’s life. Grant was a killer for hire.

The revelation seemed to take an eternity to filter through my mind, into a slowly dawning realisation. With a nimble movement of my fingers and mind, I flicked back through the pages to ten years, three months and fifteen days ago. And there, two days before my youth ended, before the bastard broke me so completely that I was now a scarred, patched up quilt work of my former self, there was a deposit of one thousand dollars.

I stared at the sum. All my life I believed it to be a random crime. My ma was a head designer with a clothing firm. It was why they were always dressed in the latest fashion. The investigative file reported it as an opportunistic act of violence. A Gendrian, likely linked with GLF who at the time had waged a large wave of seemingly random attacks around the city. They were very active in those months, and Ma was just another victim.

As I stared at that meagre sum paid to a slimy thug to brutalise and murder Ma, my head began to pound. It was a hit. Ma was targeted. I never did understand why I was not equally abused, why he only left me for dead rather than being thorough about ending me. I thought it might have been my youth. Or perhaps careless indifference. It was none of those. He did not finish me because he was not paid to do it. I was an inconvenience who had chanced upon him. He had dealt with it in his own crude and blasé fashion.

Composing myself, I flicked back to the current day and studied his latest transactions. In the last two weeks his withdrawals had increased, along with the deposits. Something was at play, something more than GLF. Grant was a thug for hire and had clearly moved up in the world. There was no record of where the money was coming from, only that Grant himself made the deposits and withdrawals. The deposits were in the form of a cheque. Having just spent the whole damned day logging cheques, I knew that the origin of the cheque had to be noted. Except in Grant’s case there was no origin, save that the cheque was from an anonymous benefactor. This meant that whoever managed Grant’s account was paid handsomely to alter the records and look the other way when it came to bank protocol regarding deposits.

A thought formed in my mind and quickly took shape. From the regularity of the dates of withdrawals, the next one was due to be tomorrow. I pulled out a pen from my pocket and forging the handwriting of the account manager — another one of those skills I suspected was not in my blasted file at the agency — I added an extra line. With grim satisfaction I examined my work. Nothing like surprises to rattle the underworld scum.

I replaced the ledger in its box, and made my way out, quietly locking the door behind me.

Pulling up my collar against the pelting rain, I strode past the security guard with a brief nod to them, and dashed for the taxi rank.

Jumping into the first car there, I gave the driver directions and watched the city lights flash past.

Ma was targeted. Someone had paid to have them murdered. It was as bewildering as it was obscene. Ma was the gentlest person I had ever known, with a ready smile, and laughter that came with easy abandon, and who was madly in love with Pa. There was no motive I could dredge up from any of my memories of them that would at least hint at why someone would target Ma. Had I not known better, Pa would have been my primary suspect. But I had seen Pa’s grief. Had seen how broken they were then, just as they were now. Though I rose out of those unfathomable depth of grief, Pa never had.

Neither had Pa enemies I knew of, no habits that might insight such rage and vindictiveness. They used to be a clerk in a finance department of a firm specialising in shipping. Pa’s role was dull and unimportant, at least that was what they had always claimed. After Ma’s death they retired and hit the bottle.

The taxi pulled to a stop outside a small house with an overgrown, weedy garden. Only one light shone in the windows. I paid the driver and told them to wait, before I strode to the door and knocked.

Once this crumbling pile of bricks was home, filled with laughter and light and the freshness only a child could truly appreciate. Once the garden was beautiful and the curtains were new. And the smells were sweet with flowers and freshly baked pastries. Pa was very fond of baking in those days.

The door opened.

‘Ari?’ Pa was always surprised to see me. They gave me a hug and urged me inside, with a kind of parental eagerness that made me hate myself for staying away so long.

I hated coming back here, hated what it did to me. Hated even more that Pa had never left after what had happened. Never tried to put everything behind us and start again. Once, when deeply drunk, I had braved the question and asked them why.

Pa’s reply had been teary and broken. ‘Because it is the only thing I have left of Casey. There is no life for me without them. If I leave, I will lose the last of those memories, I will simply stop to be. Your Ma is still here, in everything we shared and touched. I have memories of them in every room, Ari. Take them away and I will follow.’

Their words frightened me, stung me as well. I understood then that Pa only clung to life for my sake. So I never asked them again about it. Accepted the life they now led, accepted the haunting of the ageing house and was grateful that Pa kept breathing still.

Inside the hall, faded echoes of Ma’s laughter haunted this place. At the top of the dark stairs the door to the nursery remained open as if waiting for the old dreams to return and fill the room. I hated that room above all others. It remained partially renovated, the paint stopping on one wall, suspended in time when our lives came to an abrupt halt. It was not just Ma whom Grant had murdered, but our dreams.

Just before Ma’s death, my parents had decided to have another child, one that Pa would bear in their womb and be a Ma to them. Pa’s dream had always been to bear a child one day. I, too, was thrilled to gain a sibling. There’d be an age gap between us, but it did not matter. We would grow close together, go shopping, play games … Silence filled the hall now. The echo of my sibling died with Ma.

I turned away from those ghosts of broken dreams and followed Pa into the lounge. Pa was not an old Herm, having had me in their early twenties, yet they moved like one. They sat in their favourite chair and waved at the drinks cabinet. ‘Help yourself to anything you want, Ari.’

I poured myself a large measure of whisky and sat down in the only other arm chair in the room. It was where Ma had once sat.

‘I can tell something’s wrong,’ Pa said. ‘You are sitting like you’ve a poker up your arse.’

I downed the whisky. ‘His name is Thomas Grant.’

‘Whose name?’

I stared at them, as slowly understanding and pain hit them.

Pa rubbed their eyes, the way they always did when they thought of Ma and needed to dry the tears before anyone else saw them. ‘You sure?’

I nodded. ‘I’m working on the case now. There’s more to it than Ma’s murder. So please don’t speak of this to anyone until I have found the bastard.’

Pa nodded before saying, ‘I don’t like you working on this one, Ari. I don’t want to lose you too. I cannot go through that again.’

I leant forward and placed my hand on theirs. ‘I need to catch him, Pa. I am not alone on this one. Another … a Gendrian is working on the case with me.’

Pa’s gaze sharpened and they stilled. ‘A Gendrian?’

I ran my hand through my hair thinking of Agent Wild, feeling suddenly like a blasted traitor to Ma and Pa. Going hard over a bloody Gendrian then fucking him in the toilet the same day I discovered the name of the bastard who had murdered Ma.

‘Didn’t know they let Gendrians join Secureforce nowadays,’ Pa said carefully, their gaze turning speculative.

‘He’s an external consultant. I’ll tell you everything once this is over. I just wanted you to know that we know who the bastard is, and we will get him soon, Pa.’

Something flickered in Pa’s eyes, before their head fell back against the chair, wearied. ‘Be careful, Ari.’

I rose to my feet, unable to spend any more time in the same room where I came upon Ma’s body. ‘I’ll visit again when I have more to tell you.’ Being careful not to look around, I focused only on reaching the door. There I halted and glanced over my shoulder. ‘Pa, was there any reason, any reason at all you can think of, as to why someone might have wanted to hurt Ma?’

Only because I was watching Pa closely did I see a flash of something in their eyes, something pained and frightened and … guilt-ridden, before they abruptly closed them tightly shut, as if unable to face the world. Then Pa shook their head. ‘No.’

And for the first time in my life, I knew Pa had lied just lied to me. Their face was so taught, so tense with pain, so close to breaking, I knew they was merely waiting for me to go before they released their grief.

‘See you soon, Pa,’ I said quietly and left.