Chapter 14
The Body Shop
Calloway Auto Body stood at the end of Pier Road, where the pavement gave up and the cobbles began, a long, low, corrugated shed with a faded sign of a smiling wrench and a row of broken windows facing the water.
It had been a good business once. Damen remembered it. He remembered Teddy in his twenties, with a full head of hair and a laugh you could hear across the harbor, pushing a gleaming black Chrysler out of the garage with a cigar in his teeth and a customer's wife on each arm. A car's like a woman, Teddy had liked to say, wiping his hands on a rag. You treat her right, she'll take you anywhere. The shop had had six bays and a paint booth. It had had a waiting room with a coffee machine and a framed photo of Johnny Cash. It had been, in its way, the nearest thing to a home that either of them had ever owned.
Now the paint was peeling off the sign in long gray strips. Two of the bay doors hung off their rails. A pile of tires lay rotting in the lot, and a shopping cart, and a slumped mattress, and in the broken window of the office, where the Johnny Cash had been, there was a square of cardboard with the word CLOSED written across it in marker.
Damen sat in the Buick across the street with the engine off, and watched.
It was eight in the morning on Sunday. The sun was up, red and swollen, behind a bank of low cloud, and the harbor lay gray and flat beyond the rooftops with a few lone gulls turning over it. A garbage truck went by. A man in an orange vest was hosing down the quay. The street was otherwise empty. He had been parked for forty minutes, with his good hand loose on the wheel and the revolver in his waistband, and in that time he had made two circuits in his head: of the building, and of the street.
There was one man.
He was in a blue sedan, parked forty yards up the road, nose out, in the shade of a warehouse wall. A thin, pale, restless man, with a ponytail and a leather jacket, drinking from a cardboard cup. He had a radio on the dash. He looked at the shop every thirty seconds and at his watch every sixty. When Damen had first passed him, rolling down the hill in the borrowed Buick, the man had turned his head and given the beige sedan an idle, incurious glance, and gone back to his cup.
Vance, thought Damen. He called him Vance, in the van.
Mercer's watching the shop. Which means Mercer expects me.
Which means Teddy's still in there.
He got out of the car.
He went in at the back, through the paint booth, over a wall.
It was a thing he could still do. It surprised him, in a faraway way, how little his body had forgotten: the quick light lift of the arms, the roll over the coping, the way his feet found the ground without sound. His shoulder tore as he landed, and the stitches pulled, and a bright warm tide spread under the dressing. He stood in the dark for a moment with his teeth together, and waited for it to ease. It eased. He moved on.
The booth smelled of old lacquer and rat droppings. Through its open door, a long gray bar of light lay across the floor of the main bay, and in it, among the abandoned jacks and trestles and a rusting Dodge up on blocks, he saw the man he had come for.
Teddy Calloway sat on an upturned oil drum in the middle of the concrete, with a bottle between his boots, and a shotgun across his knees, and his enormous back to the door.
He was perfectly still. He was staring at the wall. His head hung forward, and his shoulders were slumped, and the gun lay on his thighs with the muzzle pointing at nothing. On the floor beside the drum was a scatter of cigarette ends and a half-eaten sandwich. The big sunburned scalp was damp, and a fly sat on it. He had not shaved. He wore the same Hawaiian shirt as on Thursday, and it was torn at one shoulder, and stained, and there was a swollen purple lump over his left eye.
Damen stood in the doorway.
He watched him for what seemed a very long time. He had always known him as a large man. He had never known him as an old one. He saw the heavy body shake, once, in a spasm, and heard him draw a long wet whistling breath. He saw him lift the bottle and look at it and put it down untouched.
Then, without turning his head, Teddy said, in a hoarse flat voice, "Come in, Dame. I heard you on the roof."
"You didn't."
"I heard the Buick. The valve's going. You should get that looked at." His voice cracked. "Come in. Please. I've been sitting here since four, waiting for the sound of your feet."
Damen came in.
He walked across the bay in the gray light, past the Dodge and the trestles, and stopped four paces from the oil drum. He did not draw the revolver. He stood with his hands at his sides, very still, and the dust turned slowly in the bar of light between them.
"Put the gun on the floor," he said.
Teddy looked down at it as if he had forgotten it was there.
He lifted it. He held it out, flat across his palms, as a man offers a plate. He bent, with a groan, and laid it on the concrete, and kicked it away; it spun and fetched up under the Dodge. Then he straightened, slowly, and turned his head. And Damen saw his face.
It had been beaten. Not recently, not tonight. A day ago, perhaps two. The lip was split and crusted, the left eye swollen shut, and a bruise the color of an old plum ran down the side of his jaw to the collar. His nose had been broken and badly set. But it was not the injuries that held Damen's eye. It was the look beneath them, the naked, gaping, appalled expression of a man who has done a thing that cannot be undone and has sat for three days watching it grow.
"Go on," said Teddy softly. "Do it. Right here. I won't fight."
"Why would I?"
"Because I sold you." The big face shuddered. "Because they came to the house and I drew them a map. Because I sat in a diner and ate pie while your wife was making a cake."
"Tell me how."
"Dame—"
"Tell me how."
He told it with his hands hanging between his knees.
He told it in a low, exhausted, rambling voice, without excuse, as he might have confessed it to a priest, and he told it from the beginning. A girl had come to the shop in June. A young one, nineteen or twenty, thin, dark-haired, in a gray hooded sweatshirt, who had stood in the doorway of the bay one Friday afternoon with her hands in her pockets and said, Are you Mr. Calloway?
I thought she was selling something, said Teddy. I said, we're closed. She said: no. She said: I want to ask you about a night. A night in the summer of 2016, in the rain. I think you drove a car.
He stopped. His mouth worked. "I knew her eyes," he said. "Dame. I swear to God. I knew them before she said her name. They were Martin Calder's. Exactly. The same shape, the same heavy lids. It was like looking at a ghost."
"What did you say to her?"
"I lied. I said I'd never heard of it. I said I'd been in Florida." The ear. Tug. Tug. "She looked at me a long time. Then she said: I remember a man with a burned arm. He carried me out. He had a smell of rain and cigarettes. I think he's alive. I think you know where he is." A shudder. "I said: kid, I don't know what you're talking about."
"And she left."
"She left. She gave me a number." He lifted his head. "I never called it. I swear. I put it in the drawer. I thought: it's gone. She'll forget. I didn't tell you, and I didn't tell him, and I thought if I never mentioned it, then none of it had happened."
"But she'd been followed."
"I didn't know that." The big man's voice broke. "I found out later. Mercer's boys had been watching the Calder name for years, ever since the thing with the old man. They've got a flag on every database. A girl turns up asking for the driver of a dead man's killer. It was in Mercer's inbox by Monday." A wet laugh. "They came to see me on the Tuesday. Two of them. Vance and a big one, a silent one. They sat in my office with their feet on the desk and asked if I'd had any visitors."
"And you told them."
"I told them nothing. I swear. I said: what girl? They said: the one who was here on Friday. I said: she was lost." His face worked. "They smiled. They said: Mr. Calloway, how's Joey?"
Damen said nothing.
"They had him in a car. Outside. On the street. He was in the back, with a hood on, shaking. They didn't touch him. They only opened the door." The big man's voice dropped to a whisper. "He's nineteen, Dame. He's a kid. He's an idiot. He still sleeps with the light on. And one of them said, quite gently: We'd like to hear about a night in 2016."
"So you told them."
"I told them everything." It came out of him in a howl, and cracked, and fell. "God forgive me. I told them about the lane and the car and the lights off. I told them about the house with the clock. I told them I saw you come out, and you were carrying something. And I told them what I thought it was." He put his face in his hands. "I thought, they already know. They've got the girl. They only want it confirmed. What difference does it make? What does it matter? He walked away. He's got a wife. He's safe."
"I was safe."
"I know."
"I was safe for nine years."
"I know."
The shed was silent. A drip fell from the roof into a bucket. Somewhere beyond the wall a ship's horn lowed, and the corrugated iron shook. Damen stood quite motionless with his hands at his sides and the pain in his shoulder beating like a second heart, and looked at the big, broken, crouching figure on the drum.
He had imagined this moment. All the way down in the car, all through the long gray hours of the night, he had imagined it. He had known, in some detail, what he would do. It had been a clear and simple picture, an old and familiar one, with a short period of silence in it, and the sound of one shot, and a body slumping slowly off a drum. He'd looked at it again and again, coolly, as one looks at a map.
He found that he could not move his hand.
"They beat you," he said.
"Mercer's man did. On Thursday night. After I left you." Teddy touched his face. "I went straight to a pay phone and called. I told them you'd said you'd leave on Sunday. I told them you were suspicious. And I didn't tell them you'd given me the twelve thousand, because you hadn't yet, and I wasn't sure you would." A faint terrible smile. "That's how I knew I was still a man. I wanted to see if you'd come."
"I came to the motel."
"I know. I watched from the truck." He wiped his nose. "You stood in the doorway of room seven and you read my note. And you burned it. And you didn't look round. I thought: he'll find me. He'll find me and I'll let him."
"Where's Joey?"
"I don't know."
"Teddy."
"I don't know, Dame. They let me talk to him on the phone, twice. He's alive. He says they're feeding him. He says he can hear water." The big hands came away from his face. "Mercer calls me every six hours. On that. And I say: nothing yet." A battered mobile lay on the floor beside the bottle. "He wants to know if you've been here. He wants to know who you call. And he told me, if you come, to ring him at once, and keep you talking. And I would. I swear, I would have done it. I'd have rung him the second I saw you through that door."
"But you didn't."
"No."
"Why?"
The big man stared at the wall.
"Because I heard you come in," he said. "I heard you on the roof. Quiet as a cat. I heard you on the booth floor. And I thought: that's the Metronome. That's the old step. That's the man I drove for eleven years." His voice cracked. "And I thought: God help them. They don't know what they've woken."
Damen walked across the floor. He crouched. He picked up the phone and turned it over in his hand, a cheap gray flip, with a cracked screen, and flipped it open, and read the log. Eleven calls in two days, all to the same number. All brief. The last, at five that morning. He closed it, and put it in his pocket.
"Here's what's going to happen," he said.
Teddy looked up.
"You are going to stay in this shed. You'll sit on that drum. When this phone rings, you'll answer, and say: nothing yet. If they ask if I've been, you say no. You say you haven't seen me since Thursday." He kept his voice low and even. "You'll do it as long as you can. When you can't, you'll tell them anything you want. I don't care. But you'll do it for as long as you can."
"They'll kill me."
"Probably."
"And Joey."
"Not if I find him first."
"How?" The word came out in a rasp. "How, Dame? You've got a wrist like a doll's. You've got no money. No friends. Half the city's on his payroll. You're one man in an old suit."
Damen looked at him.
"I'm the Metronome," he said.
It was said without emphasis. It was said as one says a name on a door. And he saw it go into the big man's face like a nail into a plank; saw the red-rimmed eyes widen, and fix, and something change in them, not hope exactly, but a dim, dreadful flicker, like the first light in a house that has been dark for years.
"God help them," whispered Teddy Calloway.
"I'd rather you didn't pray. It's the wrong week for it."
"I'm sorry, Dame."
"I know." He stood. "That's the useless thing about it."
He turned to go. He had reached the door of the booth when Teddy spoke again.
"There's a girl," he said.
"What?"
"The girl. Wren. She came back." The hoarse voice was oddly clear. "Last week. Tuesday. I was in the yard. She was standing by the fence. She'd cut her hair. She looked... she looked like him, Dame. She looked like she was going to do something." A pause. "She asked me one more thing. She said: the man with the burned arm. Does he have children?"
Damen turned.
"I said two."
"What did she say?"
"She didn't say anything. She just looked at me. And then she got into a gray van and drove away." The big man swallowed. "I've thought about it every night since. I think she's decided what to do."
"What?"
"I don't know." Teddy's good eye shone with tears. "But she's got her father's hands, Dame. And I never knew Martin Calder to give up."
He came out into the sun.
The street had not changed. The gulls turned. A freight wagon rumbled over the cobbles, and a cat sat on a wall, and the sky was the color of a pearl. Across the road, the blue sedan stood in the shadow of the warehouse, with its engine off, and Vance sat in it with the cup in his hand and his eyes on the shop door.
Damen walked straight across the street.
He didn't hurry. He walked with his right hand in the pocket of the dead man's coat, and his left, splinted, held a little in front of him, and his head down. He looked like a stooped, shabby, middle-aged man who had been drinking since dawn. At six paces the pale man in the car glanced up, saw nothing worth noticing, and looked down again to his coffee.
At two, he saw the revolver.
He had time to drop the cup. He had time to open his mouth. Damen was already at the window. His left hand came up, with the splint, in a hard flat backhand, and caught the man across the temple; the head snapped sideways against the glass. The right came out of the pocket with the revolver and drove, once, into the soft place under the ear. The pale man's eyes rolled. His body slid sideways across the seat.
Damen opened the door.
He took the radio from the dash. He took the pistol from the man's belt, a small flat automatic, and the knife from his boot, and a phone, a roll of banknotes, and a creased paper map of the harbor with a number of places marked in red ink. Then he sat in the driver's seat for a minute, quietly, breathing, with the unconscious man's head against his knee, and looked at the map.
It was a plan of the dock district. Three crosses. A circle round a building near the water: a low warehouse, marked in a hand he did not know, with a number. 14. Beside it, a name.
VARGA.
He read it twice, and started the car.
The radio on the dash gave a click, and a crackle, and a mild, courteous voice said: "Vance? Report."
He sat with his hand on the key and did not answer.
"Vance," said the voice, pleasantly. "Is he there?"
For a moment he did nothing. Then he reached out and lifted the handset, and pressed the button, and spoke in a low rough monotone, unlike his own, through the splinter of static.
"Nothing yet," he said.
There was a short silence on the line.
"Good boy," said Cassian Mercer. "Keep watching."
And Damen put the radio down, and looked at the map, and slowly, for the first time in nine years, began to smile.