Chapter 22
Teddy's Last Drive
He crossed Hallam Street between a bread van and a cyclist, and opened the passenger door of the Ford, and got in.
Neither of them spoke for a while. The cab smelled of old tobacco and spilled beer and the Pine-Sol that Teddy had sprayed on the dashboard, years ago, to cover the other smells; a hula girl danced on the dash with a chipped grass skirt; the radio, turned very low, was playing a Hank Williams song to an empty street. Teddy sat with both hands on the wheel at ten and two, as he had always sat, upright and heavy, with his eyes fixed on the road ahead. He had not shaved. The swollen lump above his left eye had gone black. A mobile telephone lay on the seat between them, a cheap gray flip, open, with its little green screen lit, and the line live.
Damen looked at it.
It was ticking. A seconds counter, in the corner of the glass. 04:11. 04:12.
"Is he listening?" he said.
"Yes."
"How long?"
"Since you went in. He rang at half past eight. He said, Teddy, your friend's at Fenwick Savings. I'd like you to be on Hallam Street when he comes out." The big voice was dead and flat. "He said I wasn't to speak to you. Only to stay on the line. He said: When he comes out, tell me, and drive away."
"And?"
"And I haven't driven away."
Damen sat quite still.
On the seat between them the telephone lay open, glowing, with the little seconds ticking up. He could hear the faint dry hiss of a distance, and behind it, very quiet, a man breathing. Calm. Interested. Patient. A man who did not mind waiting.
"Hello, Cassian," he said.
"Damen." The voice came out of the tiny speaker tinny and small, but unmistakable. "How was the swim?"
"Cold."
"I imagined. I'm sorry about the girl. She's quite a fighter. She bit a man's ear half off and called me something I can't repeat." A pause. "She's all right. Don't be anxious. She's in a bed, in a warm room, with a doctor. The wound is a clean one. No one will harm her."
"Mr. Strand's word."
"Mr. Strand's word, yes. I know how you feel about it." The smooth voice did not alter. "I'll make this brief. I am looking, at this moment, through a pair of binoculars, at a tall man on Hallam Street. He is wearing a tweed jacket. It's torn. He has a book under his arm, black, about the size of a Bible, which I should like very much to hold." A pause. "I have six cars within two blocks. I have four men on the roof opposite. I have a rifle on the driver's door of Mr. Calloway's truck."
"Then you don't need me to talk."
"No. But I'd like you to hear me say it." The voice softened, almost kindly. "Give the book to Teddy. Get out of the car. Walk to the end of the street. I'll have it brought to me. And at midnight tomorrow, Tuesday, you'll come to the Net Loft, as agreed, and you will hand over the music box and the key, and the girl and your family will go free."
"You haven't got the key."
"No."
"You'd have had the box this morning if you had."
"I'd have had it two days ago," said Mercer, "if I could have made the girl say a number." A faint laugh. "She wouldn't, you know. I'm rather impressed. I had her for four hours. I did nothing, I assure you, that would have hurt a child. But I used the old man's methods. I put her in a chair, with a clock. I asked her a question every hour." A silence. "She counted to nine thousand and then she slept."
Counted, thought Damen.
She did it. She held still.
"She's very like her father," said Cassian Mercer.
"Yes."
"Which brings us to the point. You have the book. You have the box. I should like both. I should like them with the minimum of unpleasantness." The mild voice dropped. "I'll count to five, Damen. It's a habit I've picked up."
He did not wait for the count.
"Teddy," he said.
"Yeah."
"Do you trust me?"
"No."
"Good." He reached out and shut the telephone with one finger. "Drive."
It was a strange thing, afterward, how it came back: the quiet before it. The little dancing hula girl on the dash. The long, still, cold light of a Tuesday morning on a street of banks. A woman with a pram, crossing. A pigeon on the roof of a bus shelter. And in the cab of a rusted Ford, an enormous man with tears on his face, drawing one long breath, and saying in a voice that Damen had not heard from him in nine years, low and cheerful and perfectly level, the voice of a man about to do the one thing that he was born for:
"Hold on to your lunch, Dame."
He put the truck in gear.
The engine roared. It was an old engine with a bad valve on the left bank, and it gave a howl like an animal in a trap; the truck lunged from the curb in a screech of rubber and a stink of burning oil. A horn blared. A taxi swerved. And from the roof across the street there came a flat crack, and a star of glass blossomed on the windshield, a hand's breadth from Teddy's ear.
"They're shooting!"
"I noticed."
"They said they wouldn't—"
"They said a lot of things." Teddy spun the wheel. The Ford slewed round a parked van in a spray of gravel, its rear end swinging wide, and shot into a side street at forty miles an hour with one wheel on the pavement. A newsstand went over. A cloud of magazines rose in the air like startled birds. "Get down! Get your head down! And hold the book!"
Damen got down.
He wedged himself into the footwell with the black ledger in both arms, and the music box inside his shirt, and under the seat, where it had always lived, Teddy's old Colt, which his hand found without looking. Above him the cab rocked. Bullets struck the tailgate in a rolling clatter, like gravel thrown on a tin roof. The Ford flew over a rise, and came down hard, and he heard the springs scream.
"Two behind us!" Teddy was shouting, grinning, gleeful and terrified and alight. "Black Suburbans! They're doing sixty! I'm going to lose them in the Stacks!"
"The what?"
"The container yard! I know every inch! I drove a bloody Chrysler through it once with a customs launch on my tail!" The big hands moved on the wheel, light and exact, like a pianist's. "Hold on, Dame! This is the good bit!"
They went through Port Merrin like a thrown stone.
He saw it in fragments, through the cracks of the windshield: the shopfronts blurring; a woman screaming; a dog. A red light, run. A ramp, the trucks thundering past in a canyon of steel. A smell of oil and brine. The great container yard rose up on either side, wall upon wall of corrugated boxes, red and blue and rust, stacked six high, forming long canyons that ran at right angles in every direction. Cranes stood overhead like gallows. He heard the roar of the Suburbans behind them, two heavy engines, closing.
"Left!"
The Ford went left, in a skid that threw him against the door.
"Right!"
It went right. A black wall of steel sped past, six inches from the mirror, with a scream of metal on metal and a shower of sparks. Teddy was laughing. The sound filled the cab, big and raw and joyous, as it had done on a dozen wet nights in the old days, with a customs launch on their tail and a hold full of cigarettes. This, it said. This is what I'm for.
"Behind you!" he yelled.
"I see him!"
"He's coming alongside!"
"Let him!"
The first Suburban drew level in a narrow aisle between two stacks, so close that he could see the driver's face through the glass: a young man in sunglasses, mouth set, one hand pressing a pistol against the pane. The muzzle flashed. The Ford's side window burst in a spray of fragments, and a line of fire scored the back of Damen's hand. He brought the Colt round, over the dash. He shot the man twice through the glass. The Suburban swerved into a stack of containers with a grinding roar and folded, nose first, in a shriek of metal.
The second one was already on them.
"Dame," said Teddy.
"What?"
"I think I'm hit."
Damen turned his head.
The big man was still at the wheel. His shoulders had not moved. His hands were exact on the rim, and his foot was on the floor. But there was a dark wet patch spreading across the front of the Hawaiian shirt, low down on the right, and it was growing; and as he watched, a thin trickle of red ran from the corner of Teddy's mouth and down into the goatee.
"Teddy—"
"It's all right. It's a good one. It missed the lungs." He coughed, and spat. "I can feel it. It went right through. It's only the liver. I'll live."
"Stop the truck."
"Can't."
"Stop."
"If I stop, we're dead." The voice was a rasp. "I know where I'm going, Dame. I know the whole way. Just let me finish."
"Where?"
"You'll see."
The Suburban was fifty yards back and closing when the Ford burst out of the end of the aisle onto the open quay.
It was the north end of the dock district, a long gray apron of concrete, scarred and rutted, running down to the water between ranks of old warehouses. The tide was out. The harbor glittered, wide and flat, beyond the rusted rail. Seagulls rose off the roofs in a screaming cloud. And at the end of the quay, three hundred yards on, rising from the water's edge like the side of a cliff, stood a vast yellow building with a corrugated roof, a loading ramp, and a faded painted number, ten feet high, on its flank.
6.
"Pier Six," said Damen.
"Yeah."
"Joey's in there."
"I followed them on Sunday." The words came out slowly, each one a labor. "I sat in the truck for four hours. I watched them carry in food. I couldn't go in. I wanted to. I wanted to so much that I—" He coughed again. A dark bubble formed on his lips. "I couldn't tell you. Because they were watching me. Because I'd already—"
"I know."
"I'm sorry, Dame."
"I know."
"I'm going to get you in."
"Teddy—"
"I'm going to get you in there," said Teddy Calloway, "and you're going to get him out. And then you're going to kill every one of those bastards." He stamped on the accelerator. "That's all I ask. That's the only thing I want."
The truck hit the quay at ninety.
He would never forget the last three hundred yards.
The Ford shuddered. The needle was off the dial. The engine was a sheet of noise, a scream, a roar; the whole cab shook like a dry leaf, and the hula girl on the dash flew off and vanished. The yellow wall raced toward them, enormous and sheer. Behind them the Suburban fired. A bullet sang off the roof. Another struck the dashboard and burst it open. Teddy sat hunched over the wheel in a torrent of blood, bellowing, with his face lit in a kind of ecstasy, and as the truck came up on the loading ramp, a pair of steel doors loomed before them, high and wide and padlocked.
"Get down!" he roared.
Damen threw himself into the footwell. He covered the ledger with his body. He heard the engine note rise to a shriek.
The Ford went through the doors like a fist through paper.
The steel tore. The truck bucked, and flew, and came down on the concrete floor of the warehouse in a shower of sparks, skidding, skidding, with its tires howling, spinning broadside across a hundred feet of empty bay, scattering crates, men, a forklift, a table, a man in a white coat with a cup of coffee in his hand. It struck a stack of pallets and slewed round. It hit a pillar, with a sound like the end of the world, and stopped.
The silence was enormous.
Damen lay in the footwell with his head ringing. Slowly, he lifted it. Steam was pouring from the shattered hood. The windshield had gone. A thin white dust floated in the shafts of light that fell from the skylights. Somewhere, on the far side of the bay, a man was screaming. Somewhere else, a gun went off, and another, and a voice said, Jesus Christ, it's him.
He pushed open the door. He rolled out. He came up on one knee with the Colt in his hand.
The bay was a cold-storage hall, as big as a cathedral. It was lined with steel racks, hung with chains, and at the far end stood a row of tall white freezer doors, like the doors of a mausoleum. Nine men stood among the wreckage. They were in black. They were all looking at him. Not one of them moved.
"Hello," said Damen.
He shot the nearest one in the throat.
It was over in forty seconds.
It was not elegant. He had no time for elegance. He took the second man as he turned, with the butt of the pistol; he took the third in the chest. He rolled behind a crate and shot the fourth through the slats. A bullet plucked at his collar. Another burned his thigh. He felt the old rhythm come down on him like a hood, the slow level dreadful calm, the voice in his head saying left, now, down, behind you, and he did exactly as it said, and men fell. A man came at him with a knife, a big bald man with a mustache, and he caught the arm and broke it and turned the blade and drove it up under the ribs. A boy of twenty, wild-eyed, flung down his rifle and ran. He let him go.
When it was done, the hall was quiet.
He stood in the center of it, among the bodies, with the revolver hanging in his hand and blood running down his arm into his fingers. His breath came in heavy gasps. The air stank of cordite and ammonia and burnt rubber. The truck lay against its pillar, steaming, with its doors ajar, and across the bonnet the dead hula girl's grass skirt lay torn, like a flower.
Eleven, he thought.
Eleven today.
Eighteen in three days.
He walked back to the truck.
Teddy was sitting behind the wheel with his hands in his lap.
He was quite calm. He had settled in the seat as though for a long drive. The Hawaiian shirt was black from chest to belt, and a pool of blood had spread on the floor under his boots; his face was the color of candle wax, and his skin was glistening. His cap was gone. The great sunburned dome of his head shone in the dusty light, speckled with glass, and his eyes were half closed. When Damen opened the door, they opened.
"Hey, Dame," he said.
"Hey."
"Did I do it?"
"Yes."
"Did I get you in?"
"You got me in."
"That was a good drive."
"It was the best I've seen."
"Not bad for fifty-two." The ghost of the old grin flickered. "I used to think the Chrysler was my masterpiece. But that Ford. I never gave her credit. Valve's shot. Muffler's held on with a coat hanger." A cough. "Still did ninety through a steel door."
Damen knelt in the blood. He took the big hand in both of his. It was cold already, damp, huge, with a tattoo of an anchor running up the forearm and a name beneath it that he'd forgotten and now remembered: JOEY.
"I'm going to get you out of here," he said.
"No."
"There's a hospital—"
"There's no hospital. I know what this is." The big man's voice was thin and clear and unhurried. "I've seen it. You've seen it. It's a long belly wound with a lot of blood. I give myself ten minutes." The eyes opened wide. They were bright and wet and very blue. "Don't waste them."
"Teddy."
"Listen to me." The hand tightened. "The back. The last door. Number nine. That's where he is. I saw them take him in. He's in the old cold room." The voice dropped to a whisper. "He's nineteen, Dame. He's a good boy. He's stupid, he's an idiot, he owes money to every bookmaker in town. But he's got a good heart. He's like his mother."
"I'll bring him out."
"Tell him..." The words stopped. He seemed to search for them, in a mist, with a baffled look. "Tell him his old man wasn't a coward. Tell him I came through the door. Tell him I did a good drive." A faint laugh. "Don't tell him the other thing. The Strand thing. The dinner. The pie. Tell him I loved him."
"I will."
"Say it."
"I'll tell him you were the bravest man I ever knew."
"That's a lie."
"No."
"I sold you."
"You bought me back," said Damen.
The big man looked at him.
He looked at him for a long time, with those wide, bright, dying eyes; and a change came over his face, very slowly, like light coming into a room. It was not forgiveness, because he had not asked for it. It was something simpler. It was relief. It was the face of a man who has carried a stone for nine years up a long hill and has finally set it down.
"Dame," he said.
"Yes."
"Take the cap."
"What?"
"The cap. It's in the glove box. Harbor Rats." His lips were blue. "I've a spare. You took the other, didn't you? From the motel. It went down with your house, I expect. I want you to have this one. It's... it's the one thing I own that's worth anything."
Damen opened the glove box.
There was a flat cap, a gray one, creased and stained; there was a pack of cigarettes; there was a photograph of a laughing boy on a bicycle. He took out the cap. He held it in both hands. It smelled of sweat and tobacco and old rain. He turned it over, and inside the band, in a sprawling scrawl, in marker, he read a line of capitals that he knew.
PROPERTY OF T. CALLOWAY. IF FOUND, RETURN TO THE DAME.
His eyes blurred.
"I wrote it in 'ninety-six," said Teddy. "After the Milan job. You were so cross. You said, you can't put my name on a hat. I said, I'm not putting your name. I'm putting your title." He smiled. "You've been the Dame since I met you. I never called you Damen."
"I know."
"I always liked it better."
"So did I."
"Good." The great body sagged. His head tipped back against the seat. The blue eyes went to the shattered windshield, to the dust, and the light, and the high gray roof, and his breath came once, twice, very slowly. "I think I'm going to sleep now."
"Teddy."
"Just for a bit."
"Teddy."
"Go on," whispered Teddy Calloway. "Go and get my boy."
He did not speak again.
He sat with his hands in his lap and his chin on his chest, in the sunlight, in the dust, with his eyes half open and his big face smooth and young. It was a few seconds before Damen understood that he had stopped. The breath did not come. A fly landed on the bald scalp, walked a little way, and flew up into a shaft of light.
He knelt in the blood for a long time.
Then he put the cap on his own head, and rose, and walked toward the freezer doors.
Number nine was the last.
It was a heavy steel door, white with frost, with a lever handle and a padlock. A bolt had been shot across the top. He broke the padlock with the butt of the revolver. He threw the bolt. He pulled the door open on a gust of cold that smelled of rust and dust and old meat, and stood in the doorway with his hands trembling, looking into the dark.
"Joey?"
Nothing. Then, from somewhere inside, a small sound. A scrape, a rustle, a harsh in-drawn breath.
"Joey Calloway?"
"Who's there?" It was a boy's voice, cracked and hoarse and frightened to the bone. "Please don't. Please. I told them. I said I don't know anything. I don't know where it is. I haven't got it, I swear to God, my dad—"
"It's Damen."
Silence.
"I'm a friend of your father's," said Damen. He took out the flashlight, and the red lens, and turned it on. A beam of crimson light struck across the frost. "He's outside. He sent me to get you. Can you walk?"
There was a long pause.
Then, out of the shadows at the back of the cold room, a figure rose from the floor.
He was tall. He was thin. He was nineteen years old, with a mop of black curls and his father's wide mouth in a face that was smeared and white and unrecognizably young. He wore a gray T-shirt and jeans. His wrists were raw. He had been crying. He stood with his hands half raised, blinking in the light, and a tremor ran through him from head to foot.
"You're the Dame," he said.
"Yes."
"Dad talks about you. All the time. He said you were, he said you could walk through walls."
"He's exaggerating."
"Where is he?"
Damen looked at the boy.
He looked for a long moment. And in that moment, in the red-lit cold, with the smell of blood in his nostrils and a dead man's cap on his head, he thought of a great many things he might have said. He thought of the speech he had prepared. He thought of the lie that would have been kindest. He thought, absurdly, of a Hawaiian shirt with a rip at the shoulder, and a bottle on the floor of a shed.
Tell him I came through the door.
"He drove me here," he said. "He drove through a steel door at ninety miles an hour."
The boy's face lit up. "Did he?"
"Yes."
"God. That's, that's so like him. That's so like—" He stopped. He looked at Damen's face. Something in it seemed to reach him. The light in his own face went out, slowly, like a lamp being turned down. "Where is he?"
"Joey."
"Where is he?"
"He was hit," said Damen, as gently as he could. "In the chase. He kept driving. He got me in. He asked me to tell you three things." He drew a breath. "He said he wasn't a coward. He said he loved you. And he said it was a good drive."
The boy stood motionless.
Then his knees went. He went down all at once, on the frozen floor, as though his strings had been cut, and put his face in his hands. The sound he made was one that Damen had never heard before and hoped never to hear again. He knelt beside him. After a moment he put his arm round the thin shaking shoulders, and held him, awkwardly, hard, as he had held no one in his adult life but a woman and a child.
"I'm sorry," he said.
"No."
"I'm so sorry."
"He drove," sobbed the boy. "He drove. He said he would. He said, someday I'll do something big." A long ragged breath. "And he did."
"Yes."
"He did."
"He did."
They knelt together on the frosted floor, in the red light, in the cold, and from somewhere across the bay, through the broken doors, they heard the thin rising whine of approaching sirens, and the roar of engines, and the shouts of men.
Damen helped him to his feet.
"Come on," he said. "We have to go."
"Where?"
"I have a woman in Port Merrin who buries people," said Damen. "She'll hide you. And then I'm going to need you."
"For what?"
"I'm going to need a driver."
The boy wiped his face. He looked at the ruined truck, at the dead man in the cab, at the cap on the tall man's head. He drew himself up, thin and shaking and white as chalk, and something moved in his face that was not grief, and not courage, but the first small flicker of the thing that comes after.
"I can drive," said Joey Calloway.
"I know," said Damen. "It's in the blood."