‘I’m glad I caught you, Harve. Florida’s probably a dead end. There’s been a change of plan. I’m going to come to Little Rock and reacquaint myself with an old friend.’
Hartlaub and Brigham had dropped me back at the airstrip where the small plane that had brought us from Maine awaited my return. I was predictable in that sense, so it was no surprise to find that the plane had been prepped to take me on to another location. The pilot was your typical ‘ask no questions’ type employed by the CIA and our sole interaction was him telling me to strap in, then he took us west towards Arkansas. Hartlaub and Brigham watched us swoop into a sky the colour of ashes; neither man felt the need to wave goodbye.
As soon as we were in the air, I called Harvey on my phone, after first checking that Rink hadn’t left a reply at the voicemail box I’d used earlier.
‘You’re talking about Sigmund Petoskey?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, recalling the last time I’d seen the sanctimonious piece of shit. Sometimes I regretted not putting a bullet through his skull, but I didn’t have the proof that he had anything to do with the danger John was mixed up in until much later. Occasionally I’d thought about a return trip to Little Rock with the intention of righting that wrong, only I’d been busy with other more urgent tasks in the past year or so. I told Harvey about Walter’s suspicion that the Hendrickson organisation was behind Tubal Cain’s escape and, more than likely, Rink’s sudden disappearance. Sigmund Petoskey was Hendrickson’s man out in Arkansas. ‘I think that Siggy is a good starting point.’
‘I’ll get on it and see if I can locate him. His old haunts have been shut down, and now that he has an impending court case he’s playing at being lily-white for the media. Chances are he’s laying low somewhere the cameras can’t see the sweat on his brow.’
‘That suits me fine.’
When I first met Harvey, he’d been reluctant to help. Siggy Petoskey was the local gangster in his neighbourhood and he’d worried that he’d feel the man’s wrath after Rink and I left town. As it happened, something had thrust him directly into the middle of the war we’d waged against the Hendrickson gang. It culminated in Harvey shooting dead a hit man who was chasing my brother John. The fact that the hit man chose to beat up Louise Blake, my brother’s ex, had snapped something in Harvey and he’d forgotten all about his fear. Since then, Harvey had kind of joined my club. I knew that I could rely on him to back me up all the way.
‘How is Louise?’ I asked.
Having saved her life, Harvey had taken it upon himself to look after Louise. She’d welcomed his company, but in the interim I sensed that they’d drifted apart. Harvey hadn’t mentioned her in the last few months. Their relationship, in part, wasn’t so unlike mine and Imogen’s.
‘You think that she could be in danger?’ Harvey asked.
‘With Cain out and Hendrickson behind him, I don’t want to take the chance. They might get the wrong impression that she’s a direct line to John again.’
‘Soon as you hang up I’ll call her, get her somewhere safe.’
‘You two aren’t an item any more?’
‘No, Hunter. It was a short-lived thing. Louise moved on, has herself a new man, a new job and a new home. Not sure how she’ll react when she hears me on the other end of the phone.’
‘There’s only one way to find out. Speak to you later, Harve.’
I hung up, letting him get on with the job.
Then I settled down to catch a nap while we crossed the country. Sleepless nights were a factor in my life, but like many soldiers I’d developed the skill of catching a few minutes at every opportunity. In my game you didn’t know when next you’d eat, sleep or shit, so you did so whenever you could. Only on this occasion the sleep wouldn’t come. Too many things were playing through my mind, a parade of horrors that wouldn’t let me rest.
Bryce Lang’s face appeared, and I conjured the fear he’d been in when he thought that Luke Rickard was after him. It would have been nothing compared to coming face to face with Tubal Cain. That segued into an image of my brother strung from a wall in Cain’s ossuary in the Mojave, the flesh stripped from his back as Cain had tried to whittle the living bones from his ribcage. I watched in detached horror as John turned his face to mine and let out a bleat of terror, except this time it wasn’t John but Rink who was squirming under the maniac’s ministrations. The sight of my best friend chewing his lips in agony forced my eyes open and I blinked around the cabin of the plane. Beyond the windows the clouds pressed close, huge towers of cumulus as steel-grey as the phantom blade that had dug into Rink’s body.
Maybe I’d let out a moan because the pilot was staring at me over his shoulder. I nodded him back to the controls. As verbose as a brick, he offered a grimace then returned to guiding the plane. I closed my eyes again, scrunched down in the seat and tried to get comfortable. That wasn’t going to happen, of course. My heart was hammering in my chest and the distinctive flutter of an adrenalin spike caused my extremities to shiver.
Growing up on the streets of Manchester in the north of England, I recall nothing remarkable about my early days. My father, Joseph, died when I was young, and shortly after that, my mother, Anita, remarried. Bob Telfer wasn’t the man my dad was, and maybe that was why we never seemed to gel. He was a good enough person, but he wasn’t the ambitious type and was happy as long as there was food on the table and a tin of lager in the fridge. He didn’t deem spending time with a boy a worthwhile pursuit. That was OK by me; I just roamed the streets, or immersed myself in comic books or pulp fiction novels, dreaming of being like the heroes on those dog-eared pages. When my little brother was born I was shoved even further away. I wasn’t jealous of John, but it seemed that he could do no wrong in Bob’s eyes. I distanced myself even more, becoming involved in the skinhead scene that was rife at the time; as a result I ended up in scrapes with other groups. Arrested twice for fighting, I almost got myself a criminal record, but there was one cop who took me to one side and put me straight on a thing or two. He was an old-school copper, the type who’d take you down an alley and smack some sense into you, but on this occasion he only gave me some good advice. You think you’re some sort of tough guy, huh? Well, why don’t you prove it? Go join the army, lad. They’re always looking for tough guys.
His words stayed with me, and as soon as I was old enough I enlisted. To prove something to the cop, I tried for the elite Parachute Regiment and made it through the rigorous selection process, and I stayed with 1 PARA until I was drafted into the specialised unit codenamed Arrowsake. It was round about then that I realised I wasn’t as tough as I thought. The training was hellish, but I thrived on it and came through the other end alive and more or less intact. I’d found direction, and a sense of unity that I’d never known with my own family. Walter Hayes Conrad became a surrogate father figure, but my greatest gain was someone who I truly felt was a brother. Jared Rington.
We were an unlikely pairing, I suppose. I was a northern English grunt, he was a half-Japanese, half-Scottish Canadian raised in the Midwest of the USA, but our differences were outweighed by what we had in common. We formed a bond that was unshakeable, and that bond had only strengthened over the years. I could always rely on Rink to be there to watch my back, as I would always be there to watch his.
That was what was bothering me most. When Rink needed me there, I’d been up in Maine with Imogen. OK, so I deserved a life of my own, but I felt that my selfishness had helped place Rink in mortal danger. Christ, Rink would laugh at that. He was no shrinking violet, in fact he was one of the toughest warriors I’d ever known and not the type to need a chaperone. But still, I couldn’t help feeling that this was my problem and it shouldn’t be Rink who was going through hell… again.
From the front my taciturn pilot made a noise I took to mean that we were going down. Then the plane was buffeted and jostled as he banked it through the clouds. It was dawn over the Midwest, and the storms that were hammering the Eastern Seaboard had been left hundreds of miles behind, so as we broke from the cloud cover the rooftops of Little Rock twinkled back at us under the breaking sun. The Arkansas River snaked through the city, a ribbon of fire, and the pilot followed its course before banking again out towards Adams Field, Little Rock’s airport.
I checked to see if anything looked familiar, tried to pinpoint the area where last I’d assaulted Sigmund Petoskey’s lair, but couldn’t. I didn’t care; he wasn’t going to be in a dilapidated building this time. It wouldn’t matter where, I would find him and make him tell me where Rink was.
Walter had guaranteed John’s safety. It was time for me to look after my other brother.